Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Like being different and having to lie about it your entire life was easy.
It wasn’t. Secrets were a burden no matter their size. For some people, it might be easier, but it was never easy.
“It doesn’t burn anything when he’s calm,” I went on about Duncan’s tail. “He caught a few things on fire at first, but we haven’t had an incident in almost two weeks.” I thought I could still smell burnt hair if I tried hard enough. It brought back memories of the time when Matti and I had tried to start a bonfire when we were eleven because our families hadn’t wanted to take us camping. We had gotten into so much trouble, especially when our parents had seen our eyebrows. Matti’s right one had never grown back in the same.
“When you said you had something you wanted to show us, I thought you’d gotten a tattoo or bought a new trailer, Nina,” Sienna admitted while staring at Duncan’s flame.
It wasn’t that I wished that were the case, but it would have made life a hell of a lot less complicated than it’d been lately.
Less dangerous too.
My sore neck silently agreed as I snorted, getting more comfortable on the couch we were sitting on in their living room. Unlike the small, rural town where I’d met them both, they now lived in Chicago. In an apartment. On the tenth floor.
They were the least werewolfy werewolves I’d ever met, I swear. But that was one of the many reasons how and why they had ended up together—their own small pack of two, though Duncan and I were honorary members by default.
I pressed the little button that held his collar together and watched them both take deep inhales.
There was no recognition on either of their faces, but there was even more surprise on them. I clicked the snap back on. No way was I leaving it off.
“How?” Sienna leaned forward a little more. “You woke up, and he was….” She waved her hand up and down.
“I don’t know how,” I told them honestly with another shrug. “We went to bed, and the next morning, he was on my chest, his head right there, looking at me. His eyes were red, and then he started wagging, and I thought his butt was on fire.” I had tried to put it out with water, sand, and dirt, but nothing happened. It had been pure luck that we’d been at a mostly empty RV park, and that I hadn’t started yelling like I had the time he’d carried a rat into our travel trailer. “It hasn’t gone away. His flame changed when he got scared right after it appeared, and it got even brighter.” That was when he’d lit things on fire. I’d tested it out with my fingers first.
RIP to my favorite hoodie and some of my hair.
And then there’d been the times he’d experienced a different kind of fear, but I’d share that tidbit with them later. We had to focus on the big stuff before we could get there.
“I had really hoped he had a little wolf DNA in him to explain all of this, but you’re both looking at him like he’s an alien, so that’s not it, huh?” I kept going, still hung up on that dream.
They stared at me.
Matti and Sienna should have known about Duncan, of course. We had just figured that Duncan had been too young to express any of the noticeable traits that came with their kind of mythological being. They had both been five years old when they had gone from normal children to being able to turn into a puppy. On the other hand, my own nature… magic, whatever you wanted to call it… hadn’t made an appearance until I’d been a teenager. But that was like comparing steak to chicken breast. They were both proteins, but not really the same at all.
In the end though, that was exactly what had happened. Duncan’s true nature had revealed itself, at least in the form of his tail and eyes, right after his second birthday. Days later to be exact. Except his changes weren’t of the werewolf-kind. But to be fair, my friends’ lives, like mine, had started with us as normal, human babies.
My donut’s had not.
“Yeah, yeah, I know you said he wasn’t, but I still hoped,” I grumbled. I was an optimist, and they knew it. I still held out hope that my favorite boyband would get back together, and the McRib would come back. “I thought maybe we were all wrong and he was some kind of werewolf hybrid.”
The snicker that came out of Matti’s nose…. “A werewolf hybrid?” He made a smug face.
He didn’t need to make it sound like I was dumb. “You thought Santa was real until we were thirteen,” I reminded him. “Maybe you aren’t the best person to make fun of me for dreaming. Weirder crap has happened.”