Page 17 of The Lunatics

“We should keep talking. Distract ourselves.”

He nodded.

“You were going to tell me about the trouble we might face in Boston?”

“Mostly I’m worried about my mother. This bond of ours will spoil a lot of her plans for me.”

“You think she might try to off me?”

He looked over at me sharply. This close, there were lighter flecks of ocher in his dark eyes.

I shrugged. “I’ve heard stories about her. Plus, the only way out of this is through death.”

“How frustratingly old-fashioned. You’re sure there isn’t another spell locked away in some ancient tome that might undo this?”

“Nope. Others have looked.”

“Has anyone asked the witches?”

“Asked the witches. Good one.” I chuckled. He didn’t, and I started to worry he was serious. “Michael, no. No one has asked the witches. Why would they?”

He frowned at me like I should know the answer to that. Then he shook his head like he’d thought better about arguing the point. “Aside from my mother, there are the other factions to worry about. Boston is split into three territories between the wolves, vampires, and witches. The vampires are forever pushing at our boundaries in their fight to expand and diversify their food source, while the witches move to pit us against them as a way of using us as a shield. There are hundreds of petty attacks that take place between us each year due to miscommunication and distrust. And then there are the humans, of course.”

“Sounds like a ton of fun.”

He squeezed my hand in what might have been reassurance, and the bond flared again.Painfully.We let each other go.

“Apologies,” he said.

“It’s fine. Want to leave it at that for today? Even before the hand squeeze, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle.”

“Yes. It was the same for me,” he said.

At least I wasn’t the only one affected.

CHAPTER 5

The first thing I thought about when I woke up the next morning washim. Michael.

I reached across the covers, searching, though I knew from the distant feel of him in my mind that he wasn’t in the bed. My hand came to rest atop a lingering warmth. He couldn’t have gotten up that long ago.

Still half asleep, I cracked my eyes open. The covers were rumpled where he’d been sprawled out beside me. I pressed my nose to his abandoned pillow and breathed deeply, bunching the fabric in my hands so I could drink down my fill of him. I felt slightly debauched, but for the life of me I couldn’t stop myself from rolling over and dragging the covers with me, marking myself with our combined scents.

Before last night, smells were just smells. Ways to identify what kind of food my parents were cooking or what mood Gia was in. Everything was different now. That feeling of home I’d experienced when the bond snapped into place was here in these sheets,in this scent that was so much wilder and more primitive than the man himself appeared to be.

I was half tempted to burrow down in them and fall back asleep. We’d stayed up late, talking over the days to come and what I should expect from a city with three factions perpetually on the brink of war. He’d fallen asleep first, hands clasped together over his chest, his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose corded forearms. Gia was right. Relaxed like that, it was easy to see how handsome he was.

The smell of my own breath finally forced me upright. I hadn’t brushed my teeth last night, and the whiskey wasn’t doing me any favors right now. It was cool and humid when I stepped outside, the barometric pressure so low that I could feel its weight against my skin like a warning. Rain was coming.

I paused to straighten my faded shorts and T-shirt, then ambled toward the house. My parents bustled about the kitchen making breakfast. Dad whipped up batter for pancakes, and I smelled flour and sugar and water. A hint of vanilla and cinnamon. Because of the early-morning gloom, the lights were on. Michael sat at the island, and their soft glow bathed him in a nimbus of gold. The sight hit me like a battering ram. Here was my mate, sitting in my parents’ small kitchen, taking up way more space in the room than physics should allow. He sipped a cup of coffee. The morning paper was spread out in front of him, open to the stock section. The sheer normalcy of the sight seemed wrong somehow, because it didn’t at all match up with the monumental derailment in our lives that preceded it.

He glanced up as I came into the room and looked me over clinically, like a doctor checking on the welfare of a patient.

“Good morning,” I said, still half asleep.

He lifted his chin in greeting and then went back to his paper.

“Morning, Layla,” Mom said from over by the stove. “Go shower. Breakfast will be ready in ten.”