(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 30; NDA

Jaylin hadn't sat at a dining table so awkward since the night his mother had told him that his father wasn't coming home.

She'd said it so nonchalantly like it wasn't a huge deal. It wasn't a defining factor. It was just another part of her day, no different than running into their neighbor Marsha at the produce market.

She told him that too. She told him how she'd talked about growing a strawberry garden on the property line. One both houses could pick from in the summer. How nice it would be to bake fresh shortcake like she used to, then in the same breath, she told him that David had left. Packed his things at the break of dawn, took the cash from the vacation fund that sat in a jar atop the fridge and walked through the front door thinking no one had heard him go. And Jaylin was stuck on the plane between now and then, wondering what to say. How to acknowledge that the very person he was to look up to in life had just diminished to nothing but an old shoe print on the kitchen floor.

Instead he looked her in her withered face and said, "Can I help with the garden?"

It was the quietest meal of his life, but somehow this triumphed it. Sadie, Tisper and Matt all seated in front of a plate of eclairs with lifeless looks on their faces. It was like they'd seen a ghost, as the idiom goes. Or maybe it was the wolf, curled beneath the table, licking her chomps in her sleep.

Jaylin had picked a chair across from the others, tapping his fingers anxiously against the corner of the table while a maid hurried over with four glasses between her fingers, large and round like fishbowls. She set them down and went on her way and Jaylin filled each glass with a generous amount of wine. Then he dealt them around the table.

Tisper was the first to take a drink. One long, gluttonous swig and half the glass was gone. In the awkward silence, Jaylin searched for eye-contact, but there was none. After what they'd just witnessed, he couldn't blame them.

Imani, eager to help them understand, had turned from woman to wolf before their very eyes. Since then, the room had been so silent Jaylin could hear the wind creaking the manor's bones.

After a long time in the agonizing silence, Sadie poured out a breath. "Okay, I can't stand this anymore. This is weird, this is weird. This is so fucking weird."

"It's not weird." Tisper's voice sounded raw, like rickety a drive over rough gravel. "It's just... well, it's going to take a moment to settle in."

"Not weird?" Matt exclaimed. He looked paler than the others and he was the only one who hadn't touched his batch of eclairs. "We just—we just watched a woman turn into a—"

"Yeah, but,"—Tisper tipped back her wine and swallowed down another ample gulp—"it was kind of..."

"Amazing," Sadie fawned. "It was amazing."

Matthew looked to her incredulously, and then swung his head back to Jaylin. "This can't be possible. It's a prank or somethin', right?"

"Were you not standing there with us when she changed?" Tisper asked, and though her voice held steady, her fingers trembled as she extended her glass to Jaylin. "More, please."

"I don't know—I don't know," Matthew struggled. "Maybe I'm dreaming? Maybe this is all some weird subconscious bull."

"It's not," Sadie said, holding his eyes with her own wide gaze. "It's not bull, Matt. I told you something weird was going on, I told you I saw a wolf outside the window that night. The weird flashes in my dreams."

"Again, Sadie," Matt barked. "It was a dream."

"Then what about the library? Was that a dream too? Jay would know better than anyone if that was a dream, seeing as he was there."