(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 32: bad love

Jaylin dreamt once more of his wonderland atop a snowy mountain in the embrace of frozen fern trees. He laid in the ice, watching the stars cluster the sky and meeting the gaze of the moon as it laid judgment on the bitter cold and all it had done to the nature beneath it.

And then Jaylin woke to the same steely chill and found his window had been opened in the night, his bed empty but the sheets still warm from where Tisper laid. Rain poured down on the shingles of the roof below his window, some drops bouncing off again, frozen to hail. The first ice of the season.

He left his room, rushed first by the piercing artificial light of the garish chandelier, overhead the grand foyer where half a dozen bodies mingled on the floor below. He searched each face until he found Izzy's, then Jaylin pulled himself down the banister, his legs somehow weaker than the night before.

"Hey, Jay!" Izzy chirped when she saw him, fluffing up the collar of her leather jacket and lifting her hair from beneath. She ran her fingers through the ginger threads, plating the strands into one thick braid. "How ya feelin'?"

"Fine." He ran a hand through his fluffy bed hair and relaxed the words in his throat, still raw and hoarse with sleep. "Are you guys leaving?"

"Yeah," Izzy said, working up the buttons of her jacket. The others behind her were collecting their belongings and filling up on the scraps left from breakfast. "Quentin wants us posted along the Montana border while he's gone."

"I've been meaning to ask," Jaylin began, "how are you so sure they won't just fly in? I mean, you guys can get on a plane, right?"

"We can. But no one's stupid enough to try. Maybe before you'd entered your chrysalis, but now that the entire coast is essentially on guard, you'd be lucky to step foot out of the airport. The scouts will keep coming, but they'll come in entire packs—not groups of two or three like before."

Jaylin felt along the edge of the dining table and inserted himself into the first chair he found. His feet were beginning to numb so much, he could hardly feel the wood beneath them.

"How long do you think it'll be? Until they come for me?"

"A few days, maybe," Izzy said. "Don't worry though, we'll have plenty of sentinels left on the West side. Plus you have Felix."

Jaylin took a gander across the room and into the next, where the dirty, scruffy, probably-drunk Scottish man was splayed out in front of the television with a pillow over his face and a bottle of beer somehow still hanging between two curled fingers. Jaylin couldn't tell if he was asleep, or just too smashed to move, but little comfort resonated in the sight of him.

Izzy laughed at his expression. "Don't worry, Jay. Felix can handle himself."

"Mmn.. But Felix isn't a dark and enticing Italian man with tragic past and a drinking problem, now is he?" Imani was floating down the steps, one long bare leg at a time—still dressed in the T-shirt Jaylin had started to despise her for wearing.

"Aye," Felix grunted in sudden resurrection, peeling the pillow from his face. "Not true. I do too have a drinking problem."

"It's to be expected when you dress like a haggard old street tramp, Felix."

"Surprising words for someone who puts her ass on display like a fat hog at a pig show." Felix sucked down a swig of his beer, and pushed himself onto his feet with a surly grunt to escape the room so long as Imani existed in it.

Jaylin understood. He had the same urge to escape. There was something intrusive about Imani that left him chafed. Maybe the way she seemed to know everything without being there, without witnessing it for herself. The way she looked into Jaylin's head without permit and spilled out all his thoughts out on the table for the world to indulge in. And yet, there was something about her he envied.