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I gave him a look. “We both know that isn’t true. In the first few days of us meeting up again, you found out pretty much everything new about me. And that’s including the fact that I’m a goddamn vampire now. I’ve heard plenty about Mason, and that’s great, because I like hearin’ about Mason, but I want to talk about you—.”
My rant was cut short as Dean rather unceremoniously pulled the buckshot out of its snug little spot. I let out a very sharp curse and knocked my head against the table, holding it with my palm until the stinging eased. There was the clatter of metal behind me and I looked up in time to see Dean wiping his tools down and setting them on the table, his face turned away.
“The bullet is out!” He announced as he pulled out his phone from his back pocket.
“It is?”
He nodded, his attention on his phone. “It is.” Then he looked up at me with a quick smile. “You can probably patch yourself up?”
“Yeah,” I started.
“I just got a text from the station, so I gotta go.” He quickly walked to the sofa where he’d left his sheriff’s jacket and didn’t even look behind him as he opened the front door, just offering me a quick “see you, and hope you feel better soon” before he walked out.
I stood there for a moment, shocked and a little hurt by his abrupt exit. I’d clearly hit a nerve when I’d asked about his past. But I wasn’t sure why I’d hit that nerve. It seemed there was something the good sheriff was hiding.
Chapter Three
As expected, the buckshot wound healed over the next few days.
It hardly ached any longer, but no one wanted me to move too much in case it tore itself open, so when the time came for the Christmas decorations to be put up, I was ordered to be on supervisor duty and nothing else.
Every year, the parents of Windy Ridge worked together to make the rickety old town look as festive as possible. Being in the mountains, the atmosphere was perfect for holiday times, with the biting air that blew through the trees which were turning beautiful autumnal shades before they lost their leaves altogether. This year it felt even more festive than normal, but that was just because most of the people helping decorate looked like decorations themselves. To be honest, this place always looked like Halloween to me, but I wasn’t about to kill the fun. Christmas was Sicily’s favorite holiday, after all. There was no point in squashing the small amount of normalcy she could get—even if Christmas in Windy Ridge looked more like something fromThe Nightmare Before Christmasset.
I watched as Sicily and Hannah, the high-school werefox who worked at the diner, hooked up the electric pump for the plastic inflatables. They’d all been kind about what had happened to me, but ever since my little gunshot hadn’t killed me, the investigative squad had wasted no time in teasing me about it. In the most literal sense, I’d become the ‘butt’ of their jokes, and frankly, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with it.
Currently, they were over in Slim Jim’s trailer, trying to find where the bat-man had gone, and it was no accident that I’d made no attempt to join them.
“Hey, Twila!” I heard Hannah call from around the front of my trailer.
I stood up with a grunt, slowly walking until I could peek my head around the front door. The inflatables were growing under the hum of their motors, and the two girls had grins of hardly held-back laughter as they pointed to the werewolf blow-up which was sporting a Santa hat, apparently designating it as a Christmas decoration.
“You think Bud’ll be upset if we put this outside his trailer?” Sicily asked.
I snorted. “Nah, he’ll appreciate the joke,” I replied. Then nodded to the second blow-up—this one a large Godzilla wearing a snowman vest. “Don’t put that near Ol’ Ned, though, unless you want a deflated Godzilla on your hands.”
“Ol’ Ned’s such a grump,” Sicily sighed, waving to Hannah as she dragged the werewolf off. “I figured he would’ve developed a better sense of humor by now, notlostit entirely.”
“Well, keep your eyes peeled for a muskrat inflatable and I’m sure Slim Jim will happily let you put it in front of his trailer,” I answered.
“It’s not like they make muskrat inflatables, Mama,” Sicily moaned.
“Well, I’m sure you could put up something scary in Ol’ Ned’s yard that has nothing to do with Godzilla… or Christmas,” I answered as I looked at their current decorations and just shook my head.
Sicily snapped and pointed at me. “That’s a good idea. Hey, Josh!”
Josh, a fourteen-year-old boy who’d developed scales and a snake tail instead of legs with the coming of the Fog, looked over from the neighboring yard. “Yeah?”
“Go get some rope, we’re gonna snare up Ol’ Ned’s yard with some scarecrows.” She looked over at me. “We’ll give them Christmassy hats.”
I just shrugged.
“Can’t do scarecrows.” Josh rubbed his nose and flicked his serpentine tail. “Julia’s dad turned into one’a those, ‘member?”
“Oh, right.” Sicily frowned. “Then we’ll just use mannequins, I guess.”
“Got it!” He called and slithered off. Sicily started to follow, but before she could go, I pushed open the screen door and hobbled onto my porch.
“Hey, honey, before you go.” I stepped up to the railing and looked down at her, where she stood on the street below me. “I wanna talk to you.”
