Chapter Fifteen
Don't Come Home
When I wake up, it feels like my bones have melded themselves together, prepared to let me lie in bed for eternity.
It takes me another half an hour after I've woken up to actually get out of bed. I pull my fingers through my hair and try to comb out the knots. Eventually, I give up and just tie it up into a bun atop my head. My clothes are rumpled by sleep and my breath smells like something dead.
When I open the door, Blue brushes up against my legs with a hello meow.
I search Avery's bathroom for some toothpaste but manage to find mouthwash instead. I splash warm water on my face but it does nothing to wipe away the fog clouding my brain.
My hand aches. But not just uncomfortably, like I've been lying on it for too long. There are rivet's of pain shooting through the center of my bones in time with my heartbeat. I cradle it against my chest and make my way downstairs.
Outside the lounge room windows I'm surprised to see that it's still dark. I mustn't have been asleep for long.
I pad into the kitchen, take a seat at the table in the center and prop my face up on my one good hand.
"Sleeping beauty finally awakes."
I smack my knee's against the table when I jump and spin around to glare at Rhys.
"Give a girl a warning before you sneak up on her." I snap.
"I was here first." He says nonchalantly.
I roll my eyes and look back down at the table. "Have you guys got any Panadol?"
Rhys opens a cupboard and tosses a small white and orange box on the table in front of me. The rattle of pills inside confirms he's found what I've asked for. I swallow the pills dry and lean back in my chair.
"What time is it?" I ask.
He sips at the glass he's holding and glances at the wall behind me. "Eight thirty."
I nod and close my eyes again.
Then he adds; "Tuesday night."
My eyes snap open. "Tuesday!" I leap out of my chair. "I have to go to work! I can't just not show up for my shifts! I'll get fired! God dammit why didn't you wake me up?"
"It's not my job." He says. "And anyway, your Hound was guarding the bedroom door. It's not like I could get close even if I tried."
I prevent myself from snapping at him again and instead hurry towards the front door.
"Calm down." Rhys laughs from behind me and then turns back towards the kitchen. "Avery called them and said you had the flu."
I freeze in the door frame and sigh in relief. Well, that's one problem I won't have to deal with.
I trudge back in after him, slightly embarrassed. "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place?"
"I thought it'd be fun to watch you freak out." He smirks. "It was."
I groan and sit back in my chair. "Where's Avery?"
"She's gone out." He says.
"Yeah, where?"
"Do you really need to know?"
"Yes," I snap. "I do."
"She's gone to get groceries."
I give him a sweet smile. "Was that so hard?"
He rolls his eyes and walks out of the kitchen. I get up and follow him.
"Where are you going?" I ask, just to annoy him.
"None of your business." He huffs and walks down the hall towards a part of the house I haven't seen yet.
"Maybe I'll join you."
He turns around so fast that I bump into his chest. I stumble back and glare up at him.
"When are you leaving?" He frowns down at me.
"Never." I tease.
He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, turns around and walks inside the room we've stopped in front. Before I can follow him, he slams the door closed.
"Rude!" I yell through the wood.
I smile to myself and walk back down the hall.
Avery wouldn't mind if I had a look around at the house. After all, she had invited me to live with her.
After wandering around for a good twenty minutes, I discover that the entire house has four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a spacey storage cupboard. I don't go snooping inside the occupied bedrooms, I only open the doors wide enough to see the corner of a bed and then close it shut again.
It's not long before I find myself standing in front of two tall glass doors, gazing out into the backyard.
There's a wooden deck like mine that leads down into a grassy backyard and then further onto the Westershade forest. But unlike my house, there isn't a plain wooden fence on either side separating my yard from my neighbors. There's only more trees, just as wild and beautiful as the others.
I lay down in the grass with my arms crossed behind my head.
Surprisingly I find I'm not afraid of what I've just so recently learnt. It feels better to know things, even if those things seem just a little bit crazy.
Blue pounces onto my stomach and swats at a butterfly fluttering around his ears.
It's strange to think that all this time I've been living with a cat that doesn't even come from the same world as me. When I picture Blue's home, I don't see him cowering in corners or hiding from living shadows or avoiding burning pits of fire. I imagine him standing strong and proud, at peace in the place that so many humans fear.
Almost as if he's hearing my thoughts, Blue looks over at me, flicks his ears and bound's off after his butterfly.
"He can sense your emotions, you know." Rhys calls from behind me.
I look over my shoulder. "What?"
He drops off the deck and begins walking towards me. "It's how he knows if you're in trouble or if you need his protection. He senses how you're feeling."
He sits down beside me, leans back on his elbows.
"It's also how he found you here." He continues. "He sensed your fear, your panic, and he came looking for you." He glances back at the house almost as if he can see the torn apart front door hanging off it's hinges. "Didn't take him long."
We look back out at the forest. Barely any time passes before my gaze starts to wander.
I follow the line of his jaw, the short stubble that wasn't there before I went to sleep. I look at his hair, a soft shade of brown that look's so different from Avery's striking blonde. But it's his eyes that catch me. I've never noticed them until now. When I had first met him, they had appeared to me to be a hazel colour. But now I see that they're a stunning steel grey, beautiful in their simplicity. He smiles and they seem to sparkle with light and then he frowns and they deepen to the darkest cloud hanging low in the middle of a winter storm.
Even though their different to Avery's, they still remind me of hers. Like their two eye colors are mirroring each other, reflecting back two opposite views of an open sky.
He see's me staring, cocks his head to the side in question. I quickly look away.
"Hey you two!"
We turn around to see Avery standing on the back deck, smiling with her hands on her hips.
I'm suddenly aware of how close we're sitting. I instantly leap to my feet.
"Lunch!" She calls.
-
-
"So," Avery says and take's a bite out of her ham sandwich. "What were you and Rhys doing outside?"
I pick at the crust of my own sandwich; ham and cheese. "He was just telling me some more stuff about Blue." I say. "He told me that he can sense my emotions."
Avery's brow creases in interest. "I didn't know that."
"Neither did I."
We eat away at our sandwiches, me pushing the carrots around my plate and trying to ignore the throbbing pain in my hand. Apparently carrots are good for eye sight, but at the moment I wish they were good at healing broken bones.
I'd have to call into work myself and tell them I wouldn't be able to do my shifts until my hand was healed. Paul probably wasn't going to be happy about that, especially since Avery just called in sick for me. He'd probably think I was making up excuses so I could have more days off, but if he really wanted I could prove it to him. Maybe I'll go in there and wave my puffed up hand in his face, or attempt to pick up a plate with it.
He'd ask how I'd broken it and I'll tell him some pathetic reason like I'd tripped over at home and landed on it wrong. But even if I do, he'll still get that same glazed over look in his eyes that I always use to see when I talked about home, almost like he knew what was happening but didn't think he had the right to say anything about it.
When I'm finished eating, I excuse myself from the table and put my plate in the sink. I run upstairs and sit on the edge of the double spare bed, where I cautiously poke the red and blotchy skin of my left hand.
Pain shoots through my bones and I let out a low groan. Looks like it really is broken. I guess that's what I get for having no idea how to throw a punch and still doing it anyway.
It's only seconds later that Blue slips in through the gap in the door and saunters over to sit at my feet. He leans up and flicks his hot, wet tongue across my swollen knuckles.
"Ack!" I cringe. But I don't pull away.
Because beneath my skin, I can feel this strange, unnatural tingling. My skin shifts and then there's a hollow click!
I realize it's the sound of bones realigning, moving back into the places they belong. The discoloring in my skin seems to fade as Blue's rough tongue drags across it again. I watch in awe as the swelling subsides right before my eyes and my hand sits perfectly healed like there had been nothing wrong in the first place.
I slowly curl my fingers into a fist, ready to stop if I even feel a pinch of pain. But nothing comes. I flex my fingers back and forth, my wrist up and down. It's completely fine.
I grin at Blue and sweep him into my arms.
"You smart little kitty!" I laugh and roll back onto the bed.
I let Blue swat at my hair and playfully scratch at my arms whilst I clean the saliva off my hand. I guess that's another thing Rhys forgot to tell me. Or maybe he just didn't know it was something Blue could do.
Ten minute's later I walk down the stairs with Blue trailing behind me. Avery's laying on the couch flicking through a magazine. When she hears me come in she lays it down to look at me.
"I'm gonna head home." I say. "Take care of some things back there."
Avery nods and smiles, waves a goodbye as she looks back at her magazine.
Rhys emerges from the kitchen behind me munching on a sandwich. He jerks his head the slightest bit in goodbye and I head towards the door.
Something he said a couple nights ago suddenly comes to mind and I swing back around to face him.
"You said Blue was a shapeshifting guardian." I say. He nods and takes another bite of his sandwich. "What kind of things can he shapeshift into?"
"They call it Morphing." He corrects. "And for what he can turn into, well, just about anything."
"Is that why you're afraid of him?" I ask and Rhys brow creases in disagreement.
"I'm not afraid of him-"
"Yeah, yeah." I roll my eyes. "You're a big, tough man. But seriously?"
"That is pretty much the reason though." Avery says, joining the conversation. "Obviously you've seen what he can turn into. He can take any form he want's and reflect everything about them. Appearance, strength, speed. The only form he's restricted from is that of a humans."
I want to ask why that is but I can already tell that it's going to need a pretty lengthy explanation, so for now I let it go.
"If he saw necessary, he could turn into something much larger and more ferocious then a wolf. He could kill us both in a matter of seconds." Avery fills in, gesturing between Rhys and her. "And to pick a fight with them, or to get on their bad side practically means certain death."
My eyes go wide. Blue's stronger and apparently bigger than even a Werewolf. And I had seen Avery in wolf form. Despite her average female height and weight, she was twice as big as any wolf I'd ever seen. She looked lethal.
"Are there any weaknesses I should know about?" I ask and Blue casts me an almost insulted look. "Anything Hound's in particular are allergic to?"
Rhys thinks about that for a moment. "It hasn't mentioned anything like that in the books I've read." He shrugs. "I don't think they have any weaknesses."
Blue lifts his chin in an almost proud gesture and prances out the broken door frame into the front yard. With another wave goodbye, I follow him.
Several weeks pass by.
I spend more and more time at Avery's house, learning a few new things about her kind and the life she lived before she came back to Westershade. But mostly we just hang out together. It feels normal to lounge around on the couch and spend our nights watching movies on her plasma TV. It feels human.
Rhys slowly grows less hostile and tense in my presence, which seems to be a good thing. He no longer glares at me when I walk into a room and he seems almost comfortable with my pitiful attempts at humor.
He still disappears into his mystery room at the end of the house every so often, sometimes not coming out again for hours at a time. I asked Avery once what he did in there but she just shrugged and we both forgot I'd ever asked.
I still do my shifts at the diner, I still get paid, I still go home and wash clothes and leave food in the fridge for dad in case he gets hungry. But I'm worrying less. About school, about Dad, about what he'll do while I'm gone. So far he's remained in his room, only coming out to grunt a few words my way and refill his empty glass. A majority of the time I let him go without speaking a single word to him.
I'd be a liar if I said I didn't feel like he had abandoned me, given up on the life he had the moment something bad happened. I guess somewhere deep, deep down I resented him for not caring enough to move on, to keep living a good life with me.
Avery asks me again to move in with her and a second time I deny her offer. Home was still home.
We're both sitting at the table in her kitchen playing cards when she says; "I was thinking maybe you'd like to meet some of our other friends."
By 'other friends' she meant the Werewolves she and Rhys had met together over the years. When she had told me, I wasn't surprised to find out there were more like them. I guess it was just one of those things I generally expected.
"Sure." I smile as I toss five cards to her side of the table. "Sounds fun."
Any other human probably wouldn't have adjusted to the idea of Werewolves living in the same world as them as quickly as I have. But I think it's because I've known Avery for so long, spent so many countless days with her, that I've kind of just accepted it. I know what she's like and I know she isn't a monster, inside or out.
Rhys pads into the room from behind me, emerging for the first time in four hours from his secret man cave.
"Wanna play?" I ask and hold up the cards for him to see. He shakes his head so I deal myself out five cards and lay the rest of the pack in the center of the table.
"I'm going to introduce Parker to Jennifer and the others." Avery says as she sorts through her own cards.
Rhys chokes on his juice, wackes his chest once and quickly wipes a dribble off his chin. He stares into the bottom of his glass. "Sure. Okay."
I'm staring at him, confused to whether I should laugh or not. I look at Avery and raise an eyebrow. She smiles and shakes her head, don't worry.
"When?" Rhys mumbles from beside the sink.
"Tomorrow." Avery says and flips a red king onto the table. I grimace and drop a red jack.
Rhys nods and walks down the hall, back to his room.
Avery grins at me. "You lose!"