(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 63; heartbeat

Ice crusted the ground beneath Jaylin's feet and his breath rolled through the air like smoke, but despite the below-freezing temperatures, he hardly felt cold anymore. If anything, he'd been running hotter than normal since the Bad Moon.

December had come on quickly, laying a brutal frost across the Western side of the state. Harshest winter since Reagan, the news had said. But there was something in his blood now that made the cold almost too comfortable. He did feel it when the chill hit his skin, but it was like a furnace burned in his belly and heat consumed him within minutes.

It reminded him of his dreams. Of walking in a snowy wonderland but feeling none of its frosty bite. But Jaylin was not so accustomed to the ice as he was to the cold and he slipped on the slick cement as he ran to meet Alex on the curb of the road.

He'd been digging around in the back seat since he pulled up, shuffling around cardboard boxes and mounds of dresses and jackets. And from his mountain of contents, he retrieved the box of Anna's videos—the VHS tapes filmed in dust and worn to a nearly gray complexion from all those years in front of the attic window.

"Are you sure it's okay if I take these?" Jaylin asked, balancing the box on his leg while he thumbed through the tapes.

"She'd want someone to enjoy them. I'm sure there are some tapes of her old ballerina recitals somewhere in there. Probably a few of me. There were too many and I couldn't look through them all, so—"

"I'll let you know if I find any home videos." Jaylin plucked a tape from the top, snorting at the peeling label for Mr. Nanny. "Thanks, Alex. It'll be a while until we can afford internet. This should keep me occupied."

"No problem," Alex grunted, clapping the door shut. He rounded the front of the car and spun on the slushy ice to offer Jaylin one last look at that boyish smile. "I think that's why I like you, Jaylin. You have the same awful taste my sister did."

Jaylin gave a grin of his own in return. It didn't feel so much like an insult anymore, to be compared to Anna. Instead, somehow, it warmed him.

"Where are you taking the rest of her stuff?"

Alex glanced to the back seat, where heaps of Anna's belongings blocked the back window. His shoulders jumped in a slight shrug. "The church. Mostly clothes and furniture. We kept what really matters, but—this is good. For mom, for all of us. For Anna too, I think. Kinda felt like we were imprisoning her in a way. The idea of her at least."

There were a dozen things Jaylin could have said to try and comfort him, but not a million condolences could bring his sister back. Only time could help the Sigvards now. Instead, Jaylin looked to the road, glistening with frost and the skids of wayward tires. "Drive careful. It's slick."

Alex nodded with that sweet smile of his, and he slipped into the driver seat. Salted ice crunched under the chains of his tires.

Jaylin carried the box back into the house, where Tisper was balancing on a stool and whipping the cobwebs from the ceiling with a kitchen rag. They'd spent the last week gutting the place of all its useless fillings. It took living in the riches for a while to realize their home had been a pit of dreary squalor all this time. That it wasn't normal to live in a house that was splintering at the foundation—a home where most of the windows had been buried beneath decades of garbage. A home that hadn't seen the sun in ten years.

Still, it was his home and he loved it but knowing the clean, comfortable luxury of the upper-class made this place feel like decay, so Jaylin tossed the things that didn't matter. First and foremost, his father's belongings. They'd loaded up Matt's wrangler and dropped off old clothes and furniture and dusty knick-knacks at the second-hand shop, where his mother had made off with most of the treasured garbage to begin with.