BLACKTOP MOON

CHAPTER 5 :HOUSE RULES

Word does not travel fast in a clubhouse. It travels instantly, apparently, because by the next morning three separate members had found excuses to walk past me with expressions ranging from curious to openly hostile, and I understood, without anyone saying it, that Ronan had told somebody something, even if it was not everything.

Otis cornered me at the workbench first, arms folded, grease still under his nails, standing close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.

Heard you're sticking around a while, he said, in a tone that suggested this was not universally popular news.

I go where the work is, I said, which was at least fifty percent true.

He studied me a long moment, the same reading weather look Ronan did, like it ran in whatever family these men had built for themselves out of leather and loyalty and whatever else bound them together that I was only starting to understand. Ronan doesn't bring outsiders in close, he said finally. Not since the Kestrel business.

I did not know what the Kestrel business was and filed it away with the growing list of things nobody would explain to me directly, right below the bullet hole in a jacket that belonged to my brother, right above the question of why an entire clubhouse full of dangerous men seemed to be waiting for me to do something they had not yet figured out.

That afternoon I finally understood exactly what kind of world I had walked into, and it happened loud enough that pretending was no longer an option.

Two members came in through the garage bay dragging a third between them, blood down his shirt, shouting something about the Hollow Fangs crossing a boundary line I had never heard of. The garage went from lazy afternoon to controlled chaos in four seconds flat, tools abandoned mid task, someone barking orders I could not follow, and I flattened myself against the workbench trying to become furniture, trying to disappear into the background the way I had disappeared into a dozen rooms before this one.

Then the man doing the shouting turned, and his face did something a face is not supposed to do. It elongated. Fur pushed through skin in a ripple that looked less like a monster movie and more like something horribly, mechanically real, joints cracking into a different architecture, bones rearranging themselves with wet audible sounds I felt in my own teeth, and where a man had been standing there was, for three full seconds, something enormous and grey eyed and entirely wolf, before Ronan's voice cut across the garage like a whipcrack.

Stand down. Now.

The wolf shape shuddered, folded, and became a man again, gasping on the concrete, curled around himself like the change had cost him something physical and permanent, and nobody in that garage looked remotely surprised except me, standing there with my hand over my mouth and my entire worldview lying in pieces on the oil stained floor.

Ronan found me five minutes later, still frozen in the same spot, staring at a patch of concrete like it might explain itself if I looked hard enough.

First full shift you've seen, he said. It's a lot.

That is a fantastic understatement, I managed, my voice coming out smaller than I wanted it to.

He almost smiled again, and I hated, hated, how much I had started looking forward to that almost, how much comfort I found in a single small movement of a stranger's mouth in the middle of the worst week of my life. Then his face went serious in a way I had not seen yet, something guarded settling behind his eyes, and he glanced toward the office, toward the back hallway, toward a door I had noticed but never dared open, always closed, always faintly lit from underneath.

There's someone who's going to want to see you, he said. Mabel doesn't come out for just anybody, and she asked for you by name before you'd even told me yours.

Ice went down my spine slow and total, settling somewhere behind my ribs. Nobody in this clubhouse should know my real name except the man standing in front of me, and yet here he was telling me some woman I had never met had known it first.

Who's Mabel, I asked, already knowing I would not like the answer.

The pack's seer, Ronan said. And apparently she's been waiting on you a lot longer than you've been waiting on us.

He turned toward that back hallway, and I found my feet moving before my sense did, following him down a corridor lined with old photographs and closed doors toward a room that was about to tell me my brother's death was never the beginning of this story at all, only the part where I finally started paying attention.