(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 21; prophecy

When Jaylin woke, it was not to the face of a different Tyler, but the sound of Oasis's Don't Look Back in Anger, hush through the sound of a distant car radio. His back was sticky with sweat, his stomach heavy and hollow. Sitting up from his bed was an effort he couldn't fathom.

The room he found himself in was but the bare bones of a queen size bed and an oak dresser, where Lisa Sigvard was folding clothing into the proper drawers. When she heard his rustling, she turned to him with a pleasant smile and a half-folded shirt in her hands. "Good evening," she said lightly, dropping the shirt into an open drawer. "I thought you'd never wake up." She started on a new one. "Do you remember anything?"

Jaylin remembered the mud, the wolf. Those orange eyes, that bloody mane. The man who looked like Tyler.

He wiped the sweat from his face and lingered on the scent of the soap film on his skin. He furrowed. "Did someone bathe me?"

"Ah, yes," said Lisa. "You were filthy. Covered in mud and tree sap." When she caught the look on his face, Lisa guffawed. "Child, please. I've had two babies of my own and all the practice in the world cleaning drunken vomit off of a teenage boy. A bit of dirt on a young man doesn't hold a candle to those horrors."

Then Jaylin noticed the shirt he was wearing. A t-shirt from a band he'd never heard of. A pair of sweats with a word up the side in a different language.

"They're Alexander's," Lisa explained. "There's pot roast downstairs. Go have yourself a bite."

The famine he felt was beyond words, so Jaylin decided the questions were best left for after the gnawing in his stomach had been satisfied. But as he stood from his bed, his knees went weak. He gripped at the nightstand as he found his legs again, carefully rounding the bed toward the open window where Oasis whispered. Outside, a story below, Quentin and Felix stood before an idling engine, deciphering a problem in the Mustang.

Before he even made it to the foyer, Jaylin could smell the pot roast. He put that gnawing in his stomach aside and stepped out on the veranda, where the man that looked like Tyler stood, arms crossed and back pressed against a wooden post. In this light, he looked nothing like Tyler at all. He was a gangling boy with hair that looked cut by a pocket knife, and a slender shape to his face that made him seem like he was glaring, even if he probably wasn't. He turned his attention to the car and Jaylin followed to the sight of Quentin and Felix, both hunched over the hood.

"It's not the fuckin' coolant pump," Felix grumbled. "Look, ye' can see the liquid move."

"Maybe there's a leak," said Quentin.

Felix rubbed his face with filthy hands. "Quen, if there was a leak, there wouldn't be any coolant in the tank."

"Fine," Quentin conceded. "Then what about this—"

"Don't touch that. For god's sake, lad. Just let me do it. Ye' don't know shit about cars."

"I know enough," Quentin said. He reached inside and ripped his hand away with a hiss.

"I told ye' not to touch it. The engine's hot, dickhead."

"Fine, what can I touch?"

"Don't touch any of it."

"How can I fix it if I can't touch it?"

"You can't fix it!" Felix gave the hood a slam to keep Quentin's hands away. "I need a goddamn beer."

Jaylin swerved out of the way of his oncoming aggression, watching Felix take extraordinarily loud steps up the veranda.

That was when Quentin finally noticed him. His hands were covered in grease and he let them hang by his sides as Jaylin approached, bare feet on cobble stones. "Jaylin." He said it like he wasn't expecting him awake so soon. Like he wasn't really expecting him at all.