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"You have an entire voice. It's the one you use on Sid."
He uses a better voice on me.
"Not now."
Gage's eyes cut to the cat, then back to me. "Is he talking to you?"
"He's editorializing."
I told you he was a wolf.
I stop with my hand on the back door. "You said wolf. In my kitchen. Two days ago."
Yes.
"I thought you were commenting on his personality."
He’s also attractive. These facts are not mutually exclusive.
"I'm getting a dog."
You're getting salt. Move.
Gage does the salt at my kitchen table with my heel braced on his thigh, the quilt knotted at his hip. My grandmother's quilt is never going to look the same to me again.
The salt hurts worse than the bite did. I hold the seat of the chair and don't make a sound.
"What were they?"
"Hollow things. Made, not born. Someone built them out of smoke and pointed them at your house."
"Someone?"
"The same someone that's been circling since the mirror."
His thumb passes once across the arch of my foot, and my whole body forgets the list of grievances it spent all evening writing. A shiver goes up my spine and my panties are wet again.
I hate that I'm sitting barefoot in my own kitchen nine days before Halloween, having just watched him kill something with his teeth, and fear is nowhere near the loudest thing in me right now.
That's the part that scares me.
He tips his head. Waiting again.
"I counted the candles," I say.
He goes still.
"Thirty-seven. Twice. The first night, and again the next morning, because I thought if I was exact enough there'd be a boring reason. I wrote the number on the back of a receipt." My voice stays very level. "I looked things up at two in the morning. Early-onset things. I made a list of my own symptoms and hid it in a drawer so Lila wouldn't find it."
"Maren."
"You're not even human." I take my foot off his leg. "You knew what was happening to me. You knew there was a word for it. And you sat there and let me build a case that I was losing my mind."
He doesn't argue. He doesn't explain.
"Yes," he says.
"Don't do that."
