Page 60 of Chaos At Second Sight

I sniffed the air and started around him. Instantly, two strong arms scooped me up. “Hey!”

“Come on.” He turned to the pub. “I’m starving.”

“No, Logan.”

“Oh, tired?” He adjusted me against his chest. “I’ll carry you. But don’t get used to it. My transportation services are paid in kisses and it’s not cheap.”

I tugged at his T-shirt. “Put me down! Now!”

His lips tightened as he stopped. “Must you always be this difficult? Just leave it.”

I bit the side of his neck. Not hard enough to break the skin, but it had its intended effect. Logan moaned, shutting his eyes. “Yvaine…”

Smiling to myself, I wriggled free of my lycan cage, landed lightly, and bolted around the corner.

I stopped like I’d walked into a murder scene. Which I basically did.

My hand flew over my mouth.

Three of the McDougal boys lay sprawled across the asphalt. Motionless. Limbs at unnatural angles, eyes disappearing into swollen faces.

The fourth one, Paul, was mysteriously missing.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

YVAINE

You’re grown up when you no longer want the window seat on a flight, so I supposed I wasn’t.

Ever since I could remember, I’d loved flying and everything associated with it—the sun peeking through those tiny windows, the catwalk of strangers united by a shared destination, the detachment from reality forced by the thirty-five thousand feet separating us from everything down below.

And, of course, the view. Just you and the clouds building giant floating castles out of imaginary fluffy bricks.

Some people still called flying a miracle. Thanks to many sleepless nights buried in my first-year physics book, I knew better. Bernoulli explained how airplanes stayed in the sky—flying was a physical equation where magic had little to do with it.

What was magical was what the flight awakened in us…if only we remembered to look out the window.

And I would, if two hundred and fifty pounds of giant lycan wasn’t blocking it.

Wedged in the middle seat, I was missing my favorite part of flying. And missing both my armrests.

Lachlan had claimed the aisle. “I have an easy escape if I can’t endure the Dark Diamond stench for thirteen hours.”

If my twin’s frown could technically be considered a trench with how deep it was, Logan scratched his shoulders, neck, and arms so hard our entire row shook.

“We had showers at the packhouse,” Lachlan huffed, glaring over my head. The werewolf barrier—me—was proving remarkably ineffective.

“I’m sure my socks would look just as good in your mouth if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Logan shot back, cracking his big, shoeless toes.

“Sis, we should move. I think the lice have returned to their ancestral homeland.”

My elbows ached from nudging the two overgrown pups.

“Twelve more hours,” I muttered, rubbing my face before returning to the book on my lap. Jane Eyre. I never studied on flights, another personal rule. Jane…I wish I could go for a walk with you right now.

Unfortunately, my eyes skimmed the page without absorbing a single word of Mr. Rochester telling Jane how he thought of fairy tales when they met and asking if she was waiting for the men in green.

I was distracted. Disappointed. Sad.