Prologue
Declan McKenna
4 Years Ago
This is just me luck!
It’s my very first day of high school in a country I’ve known for only a couple of weeks, unpacking boxes and crying about my da’, my family, my dog, my cat, and everything I had to leave behind in Ireland.
I’m just a 13-year-old foreigner sitting in my homeroom class far, far away from the green hills of Ireland. I’m too effin’ skinny and weak to have the school thug grunting and muttering at the desk next to mine. Around me, other kids are finding their seats, chattering happily about surfing, camping, shopping trips, and other fun things they got up to during their holliers.
Nobody seems to care that there’s a storm brewing at the desk beside mine.
The dark-haired boy has a brilliant shiner, and he’s growling at his pen like he’s thinking of biting its head off. What if he decides that the ginger sitting beside him, feeling as out of place as a piece of Lego in a pile of shite, has just the right-sized head to bite off?!
I already have three stitches in my left eyebrow from where my brother’s book bag hit me last night when he tossed it across our bedroom in an explosion of grief and frustration. I don’t need more.
Galen’s a pure class lad, but he misses our da’ and their ice hockey time so much, he can barely breathe. When my brother is sad, he gets angry, and when he gets angry, he suddenly has the temper any demon from middle hell would be jealous of.
He’s always up to 90 these days.
I miss him. I miss his manky jokes and his smile. I miss hearing him laugh like an eejit about things that make no sense to me.
He’s always right beside me, but I miss him.
Sure, look, he’s not beside me right now. He’s not even in the same class!
Naw, there’s a guy beside me with fierce muscles flexing in his arm while he scratches on the bottom of his shoe with a pen that’s brave or dumb enough to quit on him. I wouldn’t mess with a boy with muscles like that. The yoke must be a gobshite who repeated a year or six. No 13-year-old has savage muscles like his.
‘Tis effin’ mental!
The cut in my eyebrow is not as blue and swollen as this boy’s eye, but I guess I kinda look like a thug too. A fierce skinny one, but still… I hope he doesn’t see my busted eye as an invitation to hop on!
I canno’ fight me way outa a box!
I’m shaking in my boots, pissin’ myself with anxiety because I dunno if I’m ever gonna fit in here. It’s too hot in this country in comparison with Ireland, and I don’t even understand half the things the people say to me. Some of them become impatient when I answer wrong or ask them to repeat what they said.
And most of them dunno what I’m sayin’.
My mam and my aul fella ate each other’s heads off day and night for weeks, yelling and swearing, and then one day my mam took Gan and me and went to Dublin to live with my aunt. A couple of weeks later, she decided that leaving our barley farm wasn’t good enough. She had to leave Ireland.
I always thought that despite their effin’ and blindin’, me parents loved each other.
Mam brought us all the way to Briar Cove to live with her mam, who was born and raised here and returned here a couple of years ago because the air is good for her struggling lungs. We’d barely been in town a week when our mam married a man she had dated when her family lived here for a short time while she was in high school.
Just like that!
Dinna even know she divorced our da’!
Now, she’s plugged, and we’ll soon have a wean in the house. I don’t understand any of this. Mam loves my da! I know she does. She still cries for him!
’Tis all wrong!
I miss the smell of peat smoke! I miss the misty rain, and I miss hearing people calling out howya to passers-by. Most of all, I miss my aul fella!
I hate him a wee bit for just lettin’ us go like that.
I thought he loved us!
I also hate that Gan is not in my class. He might be lost right now, but he’s still my best friend. He always was and always will be. Since other kids don’t understand the way we work, he’s often my only friend.
He just needs to find his way back.
How am I supposed to help him find me again if we’re not in the same class? Will he be okay in his class, or does he have a thug sitting beside him too? The problem is that right now, Gan is in the kinda mind where he’ll try to fight a big lad sitting beside him, growling at his pen.
Gan can take a hockey hit like ‘tis nothin’… Dunno if he can take an actual punch.
Oh, bugger! I’m gonna cry now, and then the meat pie beside me is gonna reef me!
Since Year Eight and Nine students don’t have subject choices yet, we don’t change class groups. I’ll be going from class to class with the same kids, so I’ll be stuck in this muscly yoke’s class all day!
I wish I had his muscles…
And his tan!
If I weren’t the colour of sour milk with some sunburn turning me into a speckled egg, I would fit in more. I’m like the Olympic flame trapped on a snowbank with my blazing hair and pale skin. At least Mam shaved our heads to help us deal with the heat, so I now have a buzz cut and not a mop of red curls to make me stand out even more.
Shyly peeking at the grumbling boy, I can see that he’s probably a clean on lad when he doesn’t have a black eye and a scowl that he can trap a fly in. My eyes widen in horror when I see him change the position of his hand on the pen into a grip perfect for stabbing. I don’t think he’s ready to stab me yet, but he’s definitely ready to attack his desk with it.
Swallowing nervously, I dig through my pencil bag, grab an extra pen and, leaning over, I shove it under the boy’s nose. He pauses in his preparations for a table attack and turns his head to glare at me instead. Now I really have to hang on not to piss my pants.
I offered him one of my two precious pens because I thought that if I didn’t, I was gonna get his offensive pen stuck in my eye, and now I think I’m gonna get my own pen stuck in there.
This pretty thug is so gonna kick me pale Irish arse!
I just hope he’ll launch me in the direction of Mallow—a town in County Cork, near my dad’s farm.
I freeze, wide-eyed, when, instead of yelling or stabbing me with his pen, he suddenly grins at me. The smile changes his face so much that I’m unexpectedly looking at a cheerful craic monkey, not a thug.
“Thanks, bro!” he says, and then his chocolate brown eyes narrow as they run over my face and what’s left of my bright hair, registering that I’m not his bro and he doesn’t know me from Adam.
“What’s your name?”
“D-Dex… Declan McKenna.”
“I’m Hunter Drake.”
As if knowing each other’s names flipped a switch in the guy’s head, Hunter suddenly launches a rake of questions at me. It’s like a bleedin’ interrogation! Where are you from? Where do you live now? Do you like gaming? What’s your favourite movie?
On and on and on, and I answer as if my life depends on it… and it probably does because he frowns at some of my answers, making him look like a bully again, but then he just says things like: “The what? Who? Where?” He’s struggling to keep up with my accent just as much as I’m struggling with his.
He’s not gettin’ impatient!
He even laughs when we keep repeating ourselves, trying to figure out what the other one’s saying!
“Want some?” he suddenly asks, pulling a big, open bag of M&Ms from his schoolbag and secretly holding it out to me. “It’s got nuts, though. You allergic?”
“Naw,” I say, and it’s the truth. I’m not just denying a deadly allergy because I’m afraid that the yoke will see allergies as a sign of weakness or something and reject me. It will be best to make friends with a rough guy like him… or even better… the guy who gave him the black eye!
Still, sweets is an accent we have in common—no interpreter needed for this fun activity.
“Cheers, mate,” I grin, taking one of his M&Ms.
Frowning like I managed to offend him anyway, Hunter grabs a handful of the sweets from the bag and gestures with his closed fist for me to hold out my hand so he can drop it into my cupped palm. If he’s willing to stealthily share sweets with me under the teacher’s nose, he’ll probably not beat me up and take my lunch.
Right?
Sharing the sweets and starting to understand each other’s accents, I’m finally able to relax, because a guy who can laugh that happily about the weird—according to him—expressions I use cannot be all bad.
“Peanut M&Ms are the best,” he declares when we’ve nearly emptied the bag, with him constantly topping up my stash. “It’s fun crunching them with my teeth.”
“To be sure, to be sure, ‘tis deadly. I’m suckin’ diesel,” I agree, and there he goes, laughing again.
“I like the weird things you say,” he tells me. “It feels like when I got smacked in the face by Tan and saw stars.” I glance at the bruise he points at. “And fell over my feet and landed face first in Asher’s lap.”
“Huh?” There’s not much else I can say to that.
“Yeah, that faceplant wasn’t really fun for either of us… Bad example,” Hunter laughs, and the boy on his other side, whom he stabbed a thumb at when he said the name, Asher, nods solemnly, muttering, “Nooope, didn’t enjoy that at all.”
He’s a smallish kid, even smaller than me, and he looks like someone who cries himself to sleep each night, maybe even more than me. His dark hair and eyes, and rumpled school shirt don’t make him look tough; they just make him look even more like he lost his puppy and now he’s standing with a bowl of dog pellets with nothing to feed.
Poor yoke!
Maybe he was torn from his family too.
“Your words are fun,” Hunter tries explaining again, holding the M&M bag out to Asher. I like it when he explains things to me because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody talk so much shite in one go… not even my brother, and I thought he had a mouth you could park a car in. “It’s like listening to someone reading a list of Pokémon names and telling me what they mean.”
I should probably be offended, but looking at the kid’s earnest eyes and sincere smile, I cannot help but smile back.
“Ye’re one quare muppet, boyo,” I tell him before I can stop myself, and once again, instead of getting mad or being insulted, Hunter bursts out laughing.
I still think he might be a wee bit thick, but I’m startin’ to like the bloke.
For a thug, the lad is kinda well-behaved. Well, he doesn’t brawl with anybody, and when someone other than me and Asher puts their hand out for some of his sweets, he gives them some without even blinking an eye.
Real generous!
We look up with a start when the teacher gasps near our desks, watching in dismay as many of the printed sheets she was about to hand out so we could answer some questions about ourselves for her to get to know us escape from her pile and float to the ground.
“Yup!” Hunter exclaims loudly. “Gravity still works!”
Before our teacher can react to his cheekiness, he jumps to his feet and runs over to help her gather the sheets. He nearly knocks over his desk in his haste, and I watch as his pencil bag and all the comics he pulled from his bag and his lunch box go flying. I get up too—much more carefully—and crouch at his desk. While he helps the teacher, Asher and I pick up his shite!
Effin’ melter!
I’m laughing so hard right now, and I dunno when I last laughed like this.
Hunter—with Asher quietly in the background—sticks to my side in each class we move to, making sure to sit beside me, and I’m glad because I was hoping to sit near them in all our classes. I was afraid that they would think it was weird if I followed them; instead, Hunter keeps calling me.
The bell just rang for break time, and Hunter and Asher aren’t here. The teacher asked them and a couple of other kids to help him take some boxes to a storeroom. I guess he didn’t ask me, because I look like a box might break me… it might break Asher too, but I think he’s super glued to Hunter.
Everybody is leaving the classroom, so I take my lunch box from my bag and leave too. We’ll be in this same room again after break. I’ll just find a quiet corner to eat in, not too far away. I have no idea where to find Galen. Most of the buildings in this school look the same, and there are so many sections of gardens between them with big plants making it hard to see beyond them.
I’ll lose me classroom if I go too far away.
Still, I need to see my brother. I want to know if he’s alright. Besides, I miss him now that Hunter is not around, saying weird shite and laughing at the completely normal things I say.
I’m no more than ten steps away from our classroom door when I’m suddenly grabbed and dragged around a corner. While my back slams into a wall hard enough to make me hiccup, the shreds of hope I was gathering around me all morning fall apart. I expect to see Hunter’s face on the other side of the strong hand holding me in place. For a split second I think that his friendliness had just been bait so he could catch me off guard.
“Now you can say it to my flippin’ face, you bloody arsewipe! Go on!”
’Tis not Hunter!
I have no idea what I’m supposed to say, and the face I’m supposed to say it to doesn’t fit with the swear words and the aggression directed at me. I’m being held by Clíodhna, the goddess of beauty in the Irish mythology book I’m reading.
Except… that voice… and the strength of the dragging and the throwing against the wall make it very clear that the person threatening me is no girl.
This is not a feek with thick sun-bleached brown hair falling over her forehead and grey eyes with lashes so long they look painted.
This is a boy!
I watch the boy’s eyes turn almost black because the pupils are swallowing the irises in anger.
Shocked as I am, I cannot stop myself from openly staring at his teeth. He has magnificent teeth. They’re even and white behind lips as red as strawberries.
I can’t see any, but I so hope he has fangs!
I swear, if this were a girl, I would’ve lost my heart right here, but now it’s a boy with his fist in my face, and his anger is terrifying.
“S-say what?” I finally manage to make myself speak, and now I’m sure the kid’s gonna blow an artery. His anger is making him even more beautiful, and I swallow thickly, bracing myself for getting killed by the prettiest person on the planet.
It doesn’t seem right.
This guy would be perfect for the vampire in the story I’m writing. He has the scary-pretty look, the husky voice, and pure class eyes—grey with light shining behind them.
Writing has always helped me escape from things that hurt or scare me, and lately I’m writing a very complicated vampire story, and I’ve been searching online for the perfect face to fit my vampire, and here it is now, glaring at me… And I’m not gonna live long enough to write about him.
I’m not seeing my life flash before my eyes; I’m seeing my stories… all the unwritten ones I’ll never get to finish. Usually, I feel better when I think about my stories, but now, I’m just sad.
“Tan! Take it easy. Let him go.”
Tan? The guy who gave Hunter the shiner?
I tear my eyes away from the vampire boy and see another kid behind him with thick dark hair. He’s carrying a book and is calmly pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He’s a very brave dork to take on someone just boiling with passion and as stupidly strong as the god of beauty pinning me against the wall.
Like me, the new bloke doesn’t look like much of a fighter.
He should run!
“No, Cuz! I don’t care if I get suspended or expelled! This bastard has been asking to get his ass kicked all morning, and I’ve had it!” Ransford Slaverty—the vampire in the book I’m writing—shouts at Cuz before glaring at me again, clenching his teeth. “Now say it to my face!”
I have no idea what to say to his face, and I’m pretty sure that ”ye’re pretty" is probably not what he wants to hear.
“Tanner! What the heck are you doing, bro?!”
I know that voice!
Hearing it makes me so relieved that I feel like I’m gonna faint. I’m not a very trusting kid, which is one of the many reasons why Gan is my best friend, but I can feel real trust in my heart right now, and it’s giving me hope that I might survive whatever this weird welcoming ceremony is.
I’ve never just clicked with someone other than Gan the way I did with Hunter this morning… and he’s a stranger!
“This bloody ahole’s been blowing smoke up my butt all morning, calling me princess and blowing me kisses,” Tan growls. “I want him to repeat his last words straight to my face and then watch while I knock his teeth to the back of his head!”
I glance at Hunter, and I can see that he’s horrified to hear that.
“That’s really messed up, Tan. I get why you’re mad, bro, but it’s not possible,” he says calmly, putting a hand on the arm Tanner is using to brace me against the wall. “There’s no way he did that—”
Tan’s grip on me slackens a little, and suddenly, I can breathe again because he’s not glaring at me anymore. He’s glaring at Hunter, and the expression on his face is oddly hurt more than angry.
“Why are you taking his side?” he asks.
“Because I know that what you’re accusing him of is not possible,” Hunter shrugs. “He’s a really cool guy. He’s fun. You’ll like him.”
Tanner lets me go completely so suddenly, I almost fall, and I use my stumble to pick up the lunchbox I dropped during all that furious dragging that went on here. I clutch it protectively to my chest as if it could somehow protect me from the boy’s anger.
Tanner looks ready to knock Hunter’s teeth out or blacken his other eye too, but Hunter’s not intimidated. I’m a wee bit sad that the new friend I made this morning is apparently as sharp as a beach ball. Maybe he doesn’t realise that Tanner is a fierce vampire who could rip off his head, spit in his lungs, and drink his blood.
My new buddy just stands his ground, glaring back defiantly.
I’m having visions of a vampire-werewolf war. If this weren’t all my fault, I would’ve enjoyed watching the drama... If it weren’t real life and they weren’t real boys.
I still like Hunter; even if he’s an eejit. If we become friends, I’ll just have to help him think. I want them to stop… I just have to figure out how to make them stop.
It’s fierce how Hunter knows me as a good sort after knowing me for only a few hours. I don’t remember anybody but my brother ever calling me a cool guy or fun. Hunter’s kind words didn’t do his standing with Tanner any good, though.
“Really?!” Tanner snaps. “How long have you known me, and exactly how long have you known him? I can’t believe you’re calling me a liar and taking the side of some bloody stranger!”
“I’m not calling you a liar, shithead!” Hunter says, looking the way he did when he was about to murder his dead pen. “I’m saying you’ve got the wrong guy! I’d never just take someone’s side against you unless I’m sure that you’re making a mistake that you will regret. You know that!”
“Yeah? And how do you know that he’s fun and that I’m making a mistake?” Tanner demands to know. “You weren’t there, you friggin’ blue-arsed fly!”
“Why the heck am I now a blue-arsed fly?!” Hunter exclaims, looking upset. Yes, that’s what’s bothering him about the whole argument.
“Because you’re always buzzing around my head like a blowfly around shit!” Tanner explains aggressively.
“Well, obviously! I just told you that you’re a shithead!”
“So, you’re admitting that you’re a fly?!”
“Yes, I must be because you’re full of shit, and I’m still here!”
I am so confused!
If I didn’t regularly have banjaxed arguments like this with my brother, I would think the two were enemies. I’m pretty sure they’re friends, though, even if Tanner gave Hunter a black eye.
As scared as I am, I’m struggling not to laugh, but I reckon that if I laugh it might be the last laugh of my entire short life.
These yokes are clearly mental.
Though Hunter’s help took Tanner’s anger away from me, so he’s now angry at Hunter, and things are getting worse, not better, there’s still a subtle shift in Tanner’s attitude. I think I’m not the only person who trusts Hunter Drake. Tanner keeps tossing glances my way, looking like he’s now doubting his eyes.
I think he met me brother!
“Seriously, will you two shut up for five seconds!” the guy named Cuz snaps, exasperated by the two eejits glaring at each other.
“No!” they bellow in unison, and now I really think the lad is quare brave. I wouldn’t want to have both those boys glaring at me as a team. Cuz just sighs and smiles at Asher when he casually forces his small body between the two boys on the verge of hitting each other.
Now, that is real courage!
Asher is such a quiet kid; I would never have thought that he would be someone who would just stand between two bigger boys that look ready to hop on.
“I agree with Drake, Tan,” Cuz says. “It wasn’t this guy.”
Tanner’s shoulders sag a bit as he turns away from Hunter and Asher to frown at Cuz. I think his trust in his friends is making him second-guess his own judgment, but if he did have a clash with my brother, I don’t blame him for not being able to just accept that he might be trying to kill the wrong boy.
Gan looks just like me!
I should probably interrupt and tell them that I have a twin brother, but then they might go looking for Gan, and I can’t have them kill him. Besides, I’m struggling to find my voice because I’m trapped in a terrifying fantasy starring a werewolf, a vampire, a wizard, and a wraith!
“What?!” Tanner growls. “I can’t believe this! Did you also take just one look at this stranger and decide that he is too cool a guy to have mocked me like that? You were there, Jake! You heard him! You saw him!”
Jake… Cuz? These two are cousins?
Yeah, I can kinda see it. One’s dark, one’s lighter. One looks like a boy, and the other one looks like the boy’s sister…
“No,” Jake says matter-of-factly and calmly lifts a hand to point a finger past Tanner’s head, dragging his attention to my eyebrow. “Stitches.”
Tanner’s eyes follow the path from Jake’s confident face along his arm to the tip of his extended finger, and from there, they jump to my face. He frowns, squinting at me, and then his eyes clear up. They’re not black anymore. Instead, their irises are a shocking smoky grey trapped inside bluish-black rings.
He glares at my stitches as if they’d suddenly appeared from nowhere just to piss him off, and after about a minute, he blinks and tilts his head. It’s like I can see the math happening in his head. The idea of twins might not be unfamiliar to him, because understanding swoops onto his face.
“What the f—”
“He was with me all morning,” Hunter finally says what I actually thought he was going to say right off the bat. It would’ve made so much more sense for him to lead with that rather than a glowing recommendation, no matter how much hearing that endorsement meant to me. “He couldn’t have been the one messing with you, Tan.”
The look Tanner and Jake give him pretty much echoes my thoughts exactly.
“I asked what yer doin’ wearin’ yer boyfriend’s uniform when ye would look so much better wearin’ a pretty dress, princess.”
A part of me dies hearing that cocky voice and turning my head to see Galen standing a few feet away, arms crossed, smirking. Trouble-on-legs, looking for a fight. Trouble with a stitch-free version of my face.
That’s not the only difference between us. My hair—when I have more than a couple of millimetres—curls rowdily, and I tend to forget to tuck in my shirt and clean my school shoes. My school tie is also no longer perfectly tied.
I’m a wee mess!
Gan is the opposite. Shirt neatly tucked in. Tie in its correct place. No curls flying in their own directions; even when he has longer hair—that’s just luck because his hair isn’t quite as curly as mine. Today, that doesn’t help, because his hair is as short as mine.
Hunter and Asher literally jump when they see Galen. It had clearly not occurred to them yet that I have a twin. They only met me so far, and Jake and Tanner already saw the stitch-free version of my face.
I would’ve laughed at their comical reaction if I wasn’t feeling so effin’ miserable.
Today I made a friend (almost), and today I lost that friend because me brother is bein’ a shitehawk.
I want to defend Galen and tell the boys that he’s just acting out because he’s not coping with all the changes forced on us, but I don’t think it would make much difference. Besides, to say things like that to Tanner was just too much. Gan and I don’t normally go around mocking people. Right now, Gan has no sense at all, but that was too low.
Gan is not a mean boy.
I can see that for some reason those words are cutting Tanner apart even more than they logically should. I don’t know why, but seeing a tanned boy’s face go that pale cannot be good.
Seeing the real pain on his face, and the cold look taking his eyes, I just know that this beautiful boy is more than just the main vampire in my story. He’s hurting every bit as much as we are—if not more.
Gan is so much more sensitive than I am. He must’ve seen it the first time he mocked the boy. I don’t understand why he would keep pushing. That’s not like him at all.
I now know, without any doubt, that by the end of the lunch break, I’ll no longer be one half of a set of twins. I’m about to lose the brother I love more than anything in this world. At least I won’t suffer for long because, since we’re brothers and twins, these four seething, angry boys are gonna kill me too.
“I’m so sorry!” I finally find my voice, jolted to speech by visions of the werewolf, the vampire, the wizard, and the wraith ripping my brother apart. “Please don’t listen to that. I’m so sorry! He doesn’t mean it. Honest. He’s just… dunno… I’m really sorry.”
Tanner suddenly turns to face me again, and I step back in fright, smacking my back into the wall behind me. I brace myself, clenching my teeth, getting ready for the first punch to connect with my face. I’m not braced and ready to see him frown at me and ask, “Why the hell are you apologising? He’s the one talking crap, not you, or are you a ventriloquist, and he’s your dummy?”
“Naw... but...” People always call us the twins and treat us like a unit. Very few people ever try to get to know us as individuals. If one does something, it’s assumed that we both did it. It’s mostly our fault, because we don’t really let outsiders in. We stick together and live in our own world where we need no words to communicate.
At least, we used to. The last couple of months, Gan’s been somewhere else mentally, leaving me alone.
“You couldn’t just say that you were with this idiot all morning, could ya?” Tanner yells. “You had to say that he’s a cool guy that wouldn’t act like that ass over there, that he’s fun and I’ll like him and crap like that!”
Instead of punching me or charging at Galen and ripping him to shreds, as I expected, he’s glaring at Hunter again.
“Well, it’s true,” Hunter shrugs. Poor eejit still doesn’t get that giving me an alibi would’ve been a way better way to get to the truth. “He’s nothing like that butthead.”
“Did you know of that guy’s existence?” Tanner asks, stretching out his arm, indicating Galen.
“No, I didn’t, but—”
“Then there’s nothing logical about you acting as a flippin’ character witness for the friggin’ opposition, you moron! He’s a stranger!”
“He is not the friggin’ opposition, dipshit! And he’s not a stranger. His name is Dex, and I’ve been with him all morning!”
“Then you should’ve said that!”
“I just did!”
“Are you two lassies actually mental?” Galen says what I’m thinking, but in a much ruder way. I’m also questioning Tanner and Hunter’s mental health.
“You shut the heck up, or I’ll shut you up! We’ll get to you in a minute!” Hunter suddenly turns on my brother, giving him the scowl that had me petrified in class. This time he means it, and I can now tell the difference.
I don’t like the difference!
“Nobody, and I mean nobody, says garbage like that to Tan and gets to say things ever again!”
Though I’m impressed by the steel in Hunter’s backbone and the unwavering way he’s sticking up for his mate, I really don’t want that steel and backbone to be aimed at my brother. I’m also very confused because wasn’t he just about to have a full-on brawl with that same friend, calling him shithead and dipshit and all kinds of other shite?
“Are ye his boyfriend?” Galen’s doing a pretty good job of hiding the fact that he’s also impressed and confused. I can also see that he’s terrified, but he wants a fight, and he’s gonna make sure that it happens.
I get it now!
’Tis me stitches.
He’s been feeling like a right git since his bag hit me in the head, and he saw blood running from my eyebrow. He thought I’d lost my eye. He was screaming louder than I was, putting on a holy show. When Mam came running, she first thought he was the one who got hurt.
He didn’t throw the bag at me. He just threw it without thinking, and I happened to walk into the room at the wrong moment. It was an accident, but he still wants to be punished, so he’s picking a fight with boys who are clearly more than able to destroy him.
“Yes,” Hunter answers flatly, leaving me gobsmacked that he’s still not running over there and pummelling my brother into the ground. I would’ve believed that plain statement, if there weren’t blowflies in their conversation only seconds ago.
“I don’t want you to be my boyfriend!” Tanner snaps, giving Hunter a disgusted look. “You’re a moron! If I wanted a boyfriend, I’d go for a genius like Jakes.”
“I don’t wanna be your boyfriend,” Jake says with a long-suffering sigh. “I’ll just stick to being your cousin.”
“I said like you, not that it would be you, fart-face!” Tanner turns his head, his eyes falling on the wee boy standing between Hunter and Jake. He’s clearly reconsidering his options. “Or maybe someone nice, like Ash.”
“Why the hell do you suddenly want a bloomin’ boyfriend?” Asher asks, putting out a hand to keep Tanner at least an arm’s length away from himself.
“I really don’t,” Tanner shrugs, apparently giving up on having a boyfriend, and I’m glad, because he was turning speculative eyes on me just before Asher spoke.
I have no idea what’s happening, but I’ve seen enough stories where people have crazy conversations like this one just before they pull out tons of weapons and have some massacre fun.
I’ve finally calmed down enough to find my backbone too. I want to live a bit longer, and I want Galen to live longer too, so I push past Tanner and take position in the open space between the four weirdos and my brother.
My heart is beating so fast right now! It’s like an unbroken foal looking for a gap in a fence! It’s got more sense than I do because it wants to bolt, while I’m planning on standing my ground while shaking in my boots.
I’m hoping that my brother doesn’t want me to die either and that seeing me standing in the middle of his war will make him apologise and take off.
“I’m super sorry,” I say, getting ready to plead again.
“Whatcha doin’, ye feckin’ melter?!” Galen exclaims behind me, clearly not happy that I’m making myself a target.
“Wind yer neck in, Gan,” I snap, half turning to look at him. “Do I no’ have enough stitches fer ye? Ye want me to get more?”
That was a low blow! I know it was, but I’m desperate here. He’s got to back off, and I’m fine with hurting him a little if it will make him quit this shite. I turn away from the hurt look on his face to look at Tanner again.
“I’m sorry! Me brother is half a bubble off true,” I tell Tanner, relieved to see Hunter laugh, while Tanner tries to figure out what I’d just said. “He’s just lookin’ fer a fight, and ye seem grand fierce. That’s why he’s claimin’ ye.”
“He’s claiming me? I don’t want a friggin’ boyfriend!”
“Huh? Naw… to fight…”
Shite, me slang is gonna get us killed.
“Pick!” I shout louder than I have to, happy to find the word. “He’s pickin’ a fight!”
I think it’s working, because Tanner’s jaw is unclenching. He’s still frowning, but I think he gets what I’m saying.
“He dinna mean the things he said. He knows, and I know that ye would look like a tool wearin’ a dress. Ye should have a wolf by yer side, and some fangs because yer no effin’ princess, yer the Knight of Slaughta… ver… ty...”
I just had to pick up a spade and dig me own grave.
“Oh, bollox...” I trail off, wishing I could kick myself in the bake.
“I’m a knight?” Tanner asks.
“Slaughter... what?” Hunter wants to know.
“It’s a… uhm… a story I’m writin’,” I confess, since I cannot un-dig the hole I dug. “About a vampire…”
“I’d like to be a vampire...” Tanner murmurs as if I just made him a real offer. He no longer looks like he has any desire for homicide. I think he forgot about Galen’s existence now that he’s facing the possibility of becoming a scary blood-sucker.
I’m too busy glaring over my shoulder at my brother in a mixture of anger, despair, and regret to be happy that Tanner’s embracing his possible transition into a knight of... well... the night... instead of mocking me about it.
Everybody else is just blinking at the boy in confusion.
“I think ye found yerself a box of frogs ye fit into,” Galen tells me, and turning on his heel, he strides away, disappearing around the corner and leaving me behind.
