Page 9 of Crave

Just saying.

“I just thought with all the chatter about strange things going on in our area, it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.”

The oven timer dinged. Pushing away from the wall, I stuffed my hands into two floppy cotton-candy-pink Blair’s oven mitts and started sliding pies onto cooling racks. My mother steered the conversation effortlessly from werewolf venom extraction to crossbows that fired ash stakes (okay, those were seriously awesome), but by the time five minutes had passed and she was still on the topic of the new internet site she’d found that proposed tracking suspected shifters by raw meat purchases, my hands had started to shake.

Attempts to change the subject never worked with her. Telling her all the talk of vampires freaked me out had resulted in a call to my landlord about the need for extra floodlights around the property’s perimeter. Which, okay. Also awesome. But beside the point. Sometimes she got fifteen minutes before the side effects set in. Sometimes it was closer to five. Cruelly, the phases of the moon seemed to affect her as much as they did me.

And we had a full moon tonight.

Rubbing my temples, I leaned back against the stainless-steel prep counter. We couldn’t keep doing this.

“Mom,” I said gently.

“—can track them using—”

“Are you still in touch with that recruiter?”

And finally, she fell silent.

“Why?”

My stomach bottomed out. But there was no going back now. “Because I think we should go down to Austin next weekend and look at apartments.”

Picture a gingerbread cottage that’s been set out in front of a fire hydrant and bedazzled with cupcakes and you’d pretty much have Blair’s Bakery. You wanted to eat it? We baked it, from rich artisan breads and fresh-made sandwiches, to seasonal pies made with homegrown Texas pecans and Hill Country peaches. But what put Blair’s on the map was our cupcakes.

Tourists lined up down the block in the summers to get a taste of whatever cupcake flavors we were debuting that week. Red velvet with white chocolate frosting topped with blueberries for the Fourth of July. Praline crunch, which last month sold out before my best friend Dallas got to taste one, and had caused him to sulk the rest of the afternoon.

When I’d first started working at Blair’s back in high school, we sold cupcakes, of course, but they were your standard chocolate and vanilla sort of fare. It wasn’t until an unfortunate werewolf bite left me with a lot of sleepless nights and too much energy to burn off that we expanded into over two dozen daily varieties and a social media following that went into zombie horde mode if I forgot to tweet out a picture of our daily menu board every morning.

The last thing I wanted was to leave Blood Moon. But the year I’d been gone had changed me and my mom in ways large and small. Her fears for my safety now attached themselves to anything and everything. Mass shootings. Global pandemics. Food shortages. I couldn’t leave the house without receiving three texts wanting to make sure I was okay. Like a trip to the local HEB was fraught with zombies and ghouls instead of just my next door neighbor who never remembered his reusable shopping bags and had to finger every cantaloupe out on display before remembering he only ever bought beer and bean dip.

Then vampires outed themselves to the human world and my mom’s anxiety switched into an obsession that paranormals were coming to kill us all in our sleep. To her credit, she wasn’t the only one who went full-on prepper. For a while there, vampires had pretty much all of mankind carrying around holy water and rewatching old episodes of Buffy for slaying tips. If West sent me one more link to garlic supplements or extra moisturizing silver lotion (guaranteed to repel werewolves!) complete with a string of emojis I had no hope of deciphering, I was so going to block him. And spoiler alert: my mom had already gotten both of them for me as a stocking stuffer. Because, fuck my life.

There were moments I wanted to scream. I’d spent more nights crying alone on the floor of my shower than I could count. Except I could never show any of it to my mom. Because the paranoia, the anxiety, the delusions?

I was the one who’d done this to her.

“Okay, can I say something and if you totally hate me afterward, just remember that I love you and I totally forgave you for eating all the samosas last week?” my mom began.

“Um, that was so you.”

“And Dean and Rory are endgame.”

I rolled my eyes. We both knew I was so #TeamJess.

My mom and I had two addictions: Gilmore Girls and Indian takeout. We hung out every Friday night and binge-watched Rory and Lorelai trying to figure out their man troubles over split cartons of vegetable tikka masala, spicy lamb vindaloo and warm garlic naan. I told my mom everything. Well… almost everything. Which was how I knew exactly what was coming next.

“What if this is a chance for you to branch out, spread your wings? You’ve stayed here in Blood Moon all these years because you wanted to help out your aunt, but if we moved to Austin, you could finally open your own cupcake trailer, eventually your own shop like you’ve always talked about.” She hesitated. “Maybe even meet someone.”

“Wow, um.” A shiver raced up the back of my neck, the wolf rising in my blood. Since the night I’d been changed, I’d struggled to maintain control of my feral side. It was always harder for Bittens than for Borns, those of us who were human first and changed later versus having been born werewolves.

I blinked, vision graying out, my mother’s voice fading to a blur as the wolf sank its claws deeper into my mind. This past year I’d started a popular series of Saturday morning baking classes for kids. I’d increased Blair’s social media presence. I’d even led an initiative with other restaurant owners and community leaders in the downtown district, including The Rusty Spoke and Dark, where our leftover food was collected each day by volunteers from local church groups and distributed to communities experiencing food insecurity. I practically ran Blair’s as it was. I’d been a part of shaping it into what it was today in every way that counted. Austin? Austin was pretty much the coolest city ever. Unless you wanted to be living exactly where you were, in the town you’d spent ten years making your own.

And besides. We both knew that wasn’t her real argument. Her real argument was currently loping across the road in frayed jeans, a white tee that fit snug across his cut chest, and the same flip-flops he’d refused to throw away since high school.

Picture every mistake you wished you could take back rolled into a lanky six-foot-three-inches of trouble. Dirty blond hair that just scraped an annoyingly chiseled jaw. A panty-dropping smirk that had been the source of more than one girl in town egging your car when all you wanted to do was scream that they could all have him. That best friends didn’t equal together. Even if he was pretty much David Beckham’s younger, hotter cousin.

His words, not mine.