35
NOT ENOUGH SHEEP
Rafe’s words play on a loop in my mind as I bring a steaming mug of tea to Kate. She sits at my kitchen table with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. We came here, to the carriage house, knowing we’d have privacy. Even though it’s the weekend, Dad has a full day of work ahead—something involving trees and drainage on the north end of the estate.
Twig stands at the sink, washing blood off his hands and his face while Kate hugs the mug between her palms and stares blankly at nothing in particular. She hasn’t spoken since we left St. Fortuna’s which would concern me more if I weren’t so distracted myself.
I pour some tea for Twig, and a mug for me, too.
But I can’t sit at the table.
I’m too revved up.
Don’t look at me like that, Selah. I am not a hero.
And yet, he saved my life.
That demon bird was coming for my head.
Instead, it lost its own.
“What were those things?” Kate finally asks in a hollow voice.
Twig dries his glasses with a towel and sits across from his sister. “From what I could tell, some sort of predatory bird.”
“Those weren’t birds, Spencer,” Kate replies, her inflection rising. “They looked like pterodactyls.”
I exchange a look with my friend.
Honestly? It’s an apt description.
Kate exhales a trembling breath. “But pterodactyls are extinct. Things like that aren’t supposed to exist.”
“They don’t in our world,” Twig says. “But in the Overlay?”
“The Overlay,” she repeats faintly.
“It’s what we call the alternate dimension.”
Kate stares into her mug. “Why were they inourdimension?”
I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “I sort ofopened a rift on Thanksgiving night and they got out.”
She releases another one of those reedy laughs.
“Just the two of them. But now they’re dead, so we should be good.”
It’s a lie, of course.
We are so far from good it’s not even funny.
“You killed them with shadow,” she says, her attention straying from me to the pearl and the onyx on the counter beside me, right in front of our Christmas Yeti—a figurine of the Abominable Snowman wearing a Santa hat. A gift from Twig two years ago.
“Technically, I didn’t kill anything. That was all Twig.” I look at my friend who went full-fledged superhero with an impromptu stake like a bonafide vampire hunter. If Kate weren’t here on the verge of unraveling, we’d both be pretty pumped right now.
But sheishere. And while I didn’t kill anything with shadow, Rafe did with ease. I scoop up the onyx and squeeze it in my palm.
My lacerations tingle.
