Hands shaking, I found Poo-stank’s leash and dragged him down the path, where we located the other three dogs huddling near a clump of some thick, evergreen bushes. I gathered their leashes, and they were much subdued on our walk back to the rescue.
Chapter Seventeen
The dogs didn't hide their jumpiness. Stroodle bit Krista when she went to remove his sweater. We joked that it was because he was fond of fashion, but Krista kept glancing over at me, giving me a startled smile whenever I caught her. But she didn't ask if anything happened, and I offered nothing.
The moment Sanadzi relieved me I dashed upstairs. I pulled my phone from the couch cushions and checked for a response from Morgan. I’d texted him at lunch, but he either hadn’t had time to respond, or hadn’t been able to.
I clamped my mind shut against the barrage of imagined tortures. Directionless energy soaked into my arms and legs. I wanted to change the situation, whether by hunting down Gwydian—if he was even still alive—or bashing in some Sorcerer faces.
I shivered, partly from the cold, and partly because of how much my way of doing things had changed since that night on the boat. My life had always required a run-first, fight if necessary strategy, but watching mom gunned down apparently changed my tactics.
Feet sounded on the stairs—Krista’s, judging by the timing. Not in any mood to talk, I hustled up to the third floor shower. The tile was cold, though the steam that filled the air curled in against my skin in warm eddies. I made it a long shower, scrubbing as if I could wash away the anxiety.
When I emerged in a cloud of steam, three voices bounced around downstairs. Even if I was grumpy, at least now I was clean and somewhat calmer. On my way downstairs, I caught the end of Sanadzi’s remark.
“… don’t think another bar is where we should—hey, baby!”
At the sight of me, Sanadzi’s face lit up and Krista, looking slightly panicked, twisted around on her barstool.
“Maybe Hel should choose,” Jaesung said. He sprawled in the window seat where I’d been that morning, looking sly and smirky. I didn’t want to be glad to see him, but if anyone would read my mood and adjust for it, it was Jae. Peacemaker, my Mom called it. Once, I might have said pushover. Now, I understood what Mom meant.
“Choose what?” I said, stepping off the last stair and sinking onto the arm of a chair.
Sanadzi shot Jaesung a dirty look. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
I crinkled my brow. “For….”
Another dirty look. Jaesung held up his hands in defense. “I’m just saying, maybe she’d like to have a say, considering.”
Considering? Considering what? They seemed too happy to be booting me into the cold.
Sanadzi leaned against the bar. “Your birthday. We were trying to decide if you'd rather go out somewhere to eat or celebrate here, just us and Gene.”
“You want to go out, right?” Krista said. “You’ve barely been anywhere since you got here, except Rinkenburger’s, and that wasn’t a typical example of Henard’s nightlife.”
“Henard doesn’t have a nightlife,” Jaesung said.
“Shut up, city-boy.”
I realized my jaw was loose. “But… how did you even know?”
“Baby girl, you handed me your driver’s license when you agreed to volunteer. I know I ain’t old and white enough to be Miss Marple, but I can figure out your birthday.”
I decided not to tell her I had no idea who Miss Marple was. Instead, I winced. I’d handed over the only of my five licenses with my real name on it. It was old—one I’d gotten at fifteen because I’d needed it to take the SAT and finish school. And the only one that was legal.
“Don’t you dare tell me you’re one of those abominations who hates birthdays?” Krista whined. “You like them starting now, right?”
My wince deepened to a grimace. “Just don’t sing,” I said. “Or get me anything.”
Sanadzi put a fist on her hip. “There’s a cake on the way and we’re not taking it back. In this house, we birthday.”
I groaned and pressed my palms to my burning face. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but shocks of guilt and helplessness coursed down my back. How was I supposed to celebrate when everyone I loved was captured, running, or dead?
Krista laughed and came over. She tried to pry my hands from my face.
“You’re so red. Oh my God, fine, we won’t sing to you. Sanadzi, look.”
“Well I want to sing, so I guess we could sing to one of the dogs.”
“Sully’s not getting any younger,” Jaesung suggested. “And I bet she’d love to wear a hat and get sung to. Especially if she got cake.”
They took pity. Eugene showed up with a cake, and Krista led an aged Giant Schnauzer up the stairs. The bearded canine accepted a party hat and barked along to her birthday song, wagging her stump of a tail. The slice of carrot cake shut her up.
“Now that the scary singing is over,” Sanadzi teased, wiggling her fingers at me. “You can’t get out of presents. They won’t work for Sully.”
I swallowed a too-big bite of cake, so my response came out a little strangled.
“I… didn’t—”
“We know, we know,” Eugene said, tossing an arm around my shoulders. “We shouldn’t have. But, silly us, we did!”
Sanadzi and Eugene had gotten me a beautiful fair-isle sweater and Krista, a hardback sketchbook and pack of charcoal pencils. I was bright red and already overwhelmed when two hands slapped the counter in front of me.
I jumped and looked up. Jaesung stood on the other side of the breakfast bar, leaning in.
"My present isn't a thing," he said. "It's..." he glanced at Krista for help. "An experience?"
Krista snorted. "The Jaesung Park Experience."
He rolled his eyes. "We'll have to wait a few hours, though."
I quirked an eyebrow, baffled but grateful that he hadn't gotten me anything. I liked the sweater and the sketchbook. A lot, actually. But it felt weird to accept presents from people I'd met only a month ago, and who I'd leave any day, especially when they were all stretched so thin by the approaching wedding.
We played board games until Eugene and Sanadzi could no longer restrain their yawns. They left with hugs for everyone—Sanadzi hugged me twice—and Krista dashed upstairs to grab coats.
We piled into the truck, which heated fast with us all in ski jackets, and drove through an alien terrain of black and white. The sky had cleared since the storm that morning, gauzy clouds lingering over a partial moon, but leaving the rest of the sky deep and dark. Not that I could see much of it beyond the trees and buildings in Henard, but it wasn't long before we broke from the trees and into a full sheet of white-iced farmland.
I leaned forward in the middle seat. Moonlight glowed on the snow and dark streaks of asphalt peeked through the packed road, making sketchy lines ahead of us. Twenty minutes outside town, we turned down a service road between two fields, which looked so much like every other field that I wondered how Jaesung remembered the right one.
We bumped slowly along and halfway down the lane he killed the headlights.
"This is creepy," Krista whispered. She sounded happy about it.
Jaesung leaned forward, squinting down the road ahead. As far as I could tell, it ended just past the field, where a grain elevator stood flanked by a pair of silos. Just as we passed it, Jaesung slowed, put the car in reverse, and backed right up next to the metal scaffold beside the grain elevator.
"What are we doing?" I asked. "Is this some weird midwestern ritual? Are we cow-tipping?"
Krista and Jaesung both laughed. "We'd need cows for that," Krista said. "But I'll let you tip me, if it'll help."
I shook my head, but Jaesung had already turned off the engine and hopped out. He put one foot on the back tire and swung himself into the truck bed. "Come on!" he hissed.
Krista winked at me and got out. I followed and eased the door shut. The silo was at least four stories high and covered in sc
affolding. The ladder beside us went straight up to what looked like a crow’s nest far above. I had an inkling why Jaesung had backed up to it.
I pulled myself into the bed, where three backpacks awaited us. Jaesung retrieved his tower-climbing gear from one. He glanced up at the top of the silo, where the grain elevator's main set of scaffolding stretched across.
"Okay, so, this isn't exactly legal," he said. "But...I know the guy who owns the farm and I've been up this ladder a few times before, so I know it's at least safe-ish."
"Ish," Krista said.
"Ish. Which is why I brought this." He held out the harness to Krista. "I'm going up first to make sure it’s not icy."
With that, he performed some sort of wizardry with a pair of lanyards until they made a makeshift harness around his chest, and hauled himself up the ladder like freaking Spiderman. Krista made a face at me and strapped herself into the harness. I followed behind with lanyards of my own.
It was slow going, clipping and unclipping myself every few feet, and the metal rungs were frigid, even through my gloves. I pulled myself onto the black metal catwalk with a grunt, over-warm and breathing fast. The catwalk stretched out above the silos, ending at the huge concrete tower of the grain elevator itself. Another ladder led up there, but that wasn't our destination. Krista had unrolled a sleeping bag next to the concrete wall.
Jaesung glanced up from his gear.
“Take a look.” He nodded toward a spot behind me. I turned, then grabbed a rail as the vertigo of extreme height drew me off balance. From up here… God. I could see everything. The fields stretched out in endless rolls of white, etched with the sparse lines of dark road and trees. The moonlight glowed off pristine snow, and a chill wind blew the remaining clouds into streamers across the sky, as if Sanadzi had called them up too, demanding decoration.
While Jaesung unfastened the clips at my waist, I gazed out over miles of snow-covered land.
“The snow was a lucky bonus,” Jaesung said. “I was afraid the clouds would ruin it.”
“Ruin what?”
He snagged his bag and nodded back toward Krista. “Come see.”
The backpack I’d carried up also contained a sleeping bag, along with a large quantity of fancy cookies and two thermoses of ‘special’ hot chocolate.
We settled on one sleeping bag, Jae situating himself in the middle and holding up the second sleeping bag like a cape. He draped his arms, and the blanket, around our shoulders, and pulled us both back against the concrete wall.
“Okay, they should be here soon. Over that way,” he pointed east with the arm that was around my shoulder. The movement tugged me closer under his arm, which was… not uncomfortable.
I gazed up at the stars, found Orion at once, then Taurus and the Pleiades. My gaze wandered then, just out of a strange sense of irony, to Canis Major. I found the brightest star in the pattern, Sirius, the Dog Star, and gave it a little mental salute.
“You’ll have to tell me what constellations those are,” Jaesung said, breaking the silence. “All I know is Orion.”
“Yeah. And is that really a sword belt?” Krista added. “It looks like Orion Jr.” Everyone giggled, and I pointed a cookie just above the top star of Orion’s bow.
“Look up from him,” I said. “See the sort of skewed W?”
“Uhuh.”
“That’s Cassiopeia, mother of Andromeda. Andromeda’s below her on the right but it’s hard to describe. Anyway, the five stars above Cassiopeia? The ones that make a house kind of shape? That’s Cephus, and right next to him is Polaris—the north star.”
“Dude, I thought that was a satellite,” Jaesung said.
Krista gave a soft laugh. “I believe you now, Jae.”
Smirking, he took his arm from around her to reach for a thermos.
A small part of me was glad he had let go of her instead of me. It was hard to accept physical contact from people outside my pack, and though Jaesung wasn't an exception, he held himself in a way that was friendly and undemanding. So undemanding, maybe, that I wanted to lean in. I accepted the canister of spiked hot chocolate instead.
On my third sip, a small streak, flashed across the sky, light as a pencil stroke. Jaesung’s whole body tensed. Krista slapped at his leg.
"Did you see it, did you-"
I straightened up so fast it knocked Jaesung’s arm off my shoulders. It settled lower down my back.
"The Leonids!" I said. "What? I used to watch them with….” I trailed off, shaking my head as if it could erase the memory of a different birthday.
I turned thirteen on my dad’s boat, way down in the Keys, where November was still windbreaker-weather. I hadn’t expected presents or cake—sailing without twenty desperate, frightened illegals packed in the hold was gift enough. I could work the boat with Dad, worry about nothing but the scrutiny of the men Gwydian had watching us.
Near midnight, hours after we’d dropped anchor in a sandy cove, Dad had stretched out with me on the deck. We’d squinted past rigging and furled sails, me watching where Dad pointed, until the first of the meteor shower started.
It had felt like a stolen moment, even then. I’d wanted to preserve it, a little snow-globe of wonder and happiness. But Dad never made it to another birthday, and I’d forgotten about the Leonids.
The mix of disbelief and excitement sent a rush of heat to my chest. I twisted around to look at Jaesung. He grinned. In the bluish moonlight, his features stood out in contrast—everything black against everything tan, like he was drawn in bold, expert brush strokes.
“How did you even….”
“You said you knew a bunch of constellations,” he said, shrugging. “I figured you liked stars so I looked up the next meteor shower and, well, the timing was good.”
Krista held out a cookie. “Lay back, sweetie. You’re missing it.”
I did, and this time I let myself lean, my bent knees tilting slightly against Jaesung’s extended thighs. We watched the sky come to life above us. Little needles of light rained toward the southern horizon, toward Miami and all the heartache I’d left behind.
Maybe it was the memory—that perfect little globe of peace, which I never thought I'd feel again—but I caught myself memorizing. It would be something for the next snow-globe. Instead of a boat, there would be a grain elevator. Instead of Dad, there would be Jaesung and Krista.
The burgeoning warmth in my chest begged me to come to harbor, drop anchor, reef the sails. It whispered of a safe place to wait out the storm.
Don’t make yourself too at home, I thought, hearing my mother’s voice, as if she still coached me. You’re leaving as soon as Morgan gets in touch.
But my fingers curled tighter around the thermos, and when Jaesung’s wrist settled across my shoulder, I leaned a little more. Maybe, if she’d met them, Mom would understand.
The meteor shower was still in full force when we called it a night. Krista, dancing with the need to pee, strapped on the harness and started down. Jaesung gestured for me to go next, but I hesitated. He couldn’t have known about my dad’s desire to share the meteor shower with me, or the serenity of that moment. But still, I wanted to thank him for dusting off that memory, and for giving me a new one.
The rest of me wanted to let the moment pass. In a few days, Morgan would come and I’d be gone and it wouldn’t matter. But it seemed wrong to be so grateful then leave as if it meant nothing.
“I’m… not good at saying thank you,” I managed.
A meteor flashed, reflecting off his glasses. He glanced away from me and shrugged. “Nah,” he said. “It’s cool—I get that.”
“No, what I mean is…” My gaze flicked to the grain elevator, to the sky behind him, to his shoulder. I wanted to give him something in return. The truth seemed like the only thing heavy enough. “I just… it’s hard right now. A lot of things are hard, and I don’t want you guys to think I’m not grateful—”
“We get it, Hel.”
“No. I mean, I’m s
ure you do, kind of but….” I struggled to dredge up the words that would ease me into the truth, blunt its sharpness for human consumption, but found none. “Right before I met you guys—days before—my Mom died. She... ” my lungs squeezed. “She was shot.”
That was all I said—more than I should have. I couldn’t look up at Jaesung’s face. Getting shot wasn’t something that happened to normal mothers.
At last, he released a breath, the fog of it creeping into the space between us. “God…” he murmured.
“So, anyway,” I said. “It's still hard to feel the good things.” A finger touched my elbow. I tensed, but didn’t shrug it off.
“Yeah, of course,” he said. “God, I had no idea… none of us did.”
“I didn’t want you to. It just provokes more questions. Could you not tell Sanadzi and Kris?”
“Yeah,” he said, and his hand slid up my arm. I could tell he wanted to hug me, and I leaned away. “Sure. I mean, if you need… If you’re in more trouble—how do I say this?”
“I’m good. Better than I'd hoped.”
I heard his jacket shift as he nodded. “Thanks,” he said. I looked up. “For trusting me. Telling me that wasn’t easy for you.”
I shrugged, trying to displace the weird, tingling discomfort those words caused. “You trusted me first, so…”
“Well, you know.” Another pause. “Talk if you need to.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us looked at each other, and his hand dropped from my arm. After a moment of fiddling with my lanyards, I gestured to the ladder and started my climb down. Despite the lingering awkwardness, there was a warm, thick sensation in my chest, like the brightness of my magic had turned from turquoise to amber, from flame to something slower and softer that responded to my heartbeat.
I should have left that alone. It was new, weird. Attached to the dog rescue, and Krista, and Sanadzi, and probably more than anything to Jaesung. Something about him made me want to feel it, and whether that was the scars on his back, his arm around my shoulders, or the way his voice vibrated in my chest, I had no way of knowing. The warmth should have frightened me more.
Unleash (Spellhounds Book 1) Page 15
