Page 11 of Full Moon Frenzy

The place. A place didn’t need to have sentimental value. A place wasn’t the setting of one’s every childhood memory, four walls and a roof that represented security . . . a place was simply wherever one rested their head for the moment. Where they stayed without accumulating too much. Transience.

“The place is . . . nice. Really nice, Ma. Maybe you can make it out for a visit once I’m settled in.”

“Nice how?”

She understood the question. The instinct that had shaped every woman in her pack. Nice for people like us? Nice for the pack on the fringes, who made do with what they could? Nice like a used car one inherited from a relative, that might juuust make it through winter? . . . Or nice for people who took pictures for their Christmas cards wearing coordinated sweaters? Nice enough for her pack, or nice for the wolves?

Adriana suspected this whole damned town was of the matching sweater variety, regardless of species.

“Nice nice. I really like it here. It seems like a good community.”

Her mother let her go shortly after to be up early for the movers, but the call had done enough. Too nice for someone like you?

She was collapsing under the weight of the emergency department’s stress. It would break her if she stayed, had already broken her, and the thought terrified her . . . but it was all she knew. The thought of saying goodbye to the adrenaline rush and constant pace was terrifying in a completely different way. Who would she be, if she wasn’t Dr. Brunelli, fast and accurate, meticulous and thorough in the face of calamity?

Someone brand new.

Someone people liked. Someone with a life outside of work. Maybe even someone in a relationship. This was a nice place, and she was going to figure out how to make it feel like home, even if she didn’t know how to act like a person who was meant to live in a town like this. She’d not let her humble beginnings or lack of connections get in her way in med school, hadn’t let it slow her down at the hospital. She had always excelled professionally, and she would figure it out. She always had. Fake it till you fucking make it. No matter what.

Trapp

Grayson’s house stood at the rear of a snaking development, rising above most of the neighbors like a slate-grey wall of scaled roof and wide windows. Despite the absurdity of being a five-bed/five-bath layout for a singular part-time occupant — at least, at the time of its construction — the house was saved from ugly McMansion status by the classical lines of its architecture and the nearly full walls of glass, preventing its aura-suffering owner from ever needing to tolerate artificial light.

Trapp tapped in the security code, letting himself in through the side gate that evening, as he’d done a million times before, neither calling ahead nor knocking to announce his presence. He knew where his brother would be.

That, in and of itself, was an anomaly to which he’d not quite acclimated.

Once, Grayson had been entirely dependable. He was always working, was always up, entirely fueled by cocaine and ambition and an IV drip of coffee, always on, always reliable.

It had been that way since they were in school, hours apart. Grayson, at university; Trapp, the star of the local high school. Grayson at law school, Trapp in pre-med. Trapp in med school, Grayson chewing his way up the ladder at the biggest law firm in the unification on the other side of the country — always up, always reliable.

And then, once Trapp had come home, already retconning the previous decade of his life into something more palatable in Cambric Creek, Grayson had relocated to Bridgeton. Still always up, always on, his name above the door of his firm, something to prove. Reachable, reliable, closer than he’d been in years. Weekly drinks, monthly brunch. Always just a phone call away.

Trapp hadn’t realized just how much he had come to depend on that phone call.

Not until Grayson left the city, moving back to Cambric Creek full-time. They hadn’t lived in such close physical proximity to each other since they’d dwelled beneath their parents’ roof in side-by-side bedrooms. Grayson’s office at the Werewolf Defense League was right there in town, a stone’s throw from the firehouse, practically within walking distance to the Pickled Pig. They still met for drinks every Thursday, still had the monthly post-moon brunch at their parents’ house, but his brother was no longer plugged in twenty-four hours a day, always available.

Now, Trapp found that his calls sometimes went unanswered and his texts received responses hours after sending.

Gray’s new position came with stable, unbilled hours, and rather than showing his new non-profit overlords why he’d been a rainmaker at his previous firms, he seemed determined to prove the opposite point. He left his office at a set time each day and sometimes ignored his phone for hours after that, no longer invested in making his job his entire personality.

It’s called healthy boundaries, Trapp. Julia’s words rankled in his mind. He didn’t like the implication, said as if he had no understanding of “healthy boundaries.” As if being friendly and helpful were obligations that were unwelcomingly foisted upon him, when the opposite was true.

Her words were similar to what Grayson had said a few months earlier, when Trapp had challenged his new foreign attitude, shrugging unapologetically over his phone being on the dresser of the upstairs bedroom while he was down by the pool, forcing Trapp to trespass through the gate if he wanted his brother’s attention, which he had.

“This job is a stepping stone, not my endgame. They don’t like me. They don’t bother trying to hide it. And that’s fine, because the feeling is entirely mutual. They don’t have to like me. But I don’t have to run myself into the ground to prove anything, either. I’m putting in the same amount of hours as my predecessor, and he quit because of burnout. I can do this shit in my sleep, but they don’t need to know that. It’s good to have boundaries. You should try it sometime.”

Trapp couldn’t fathom any possible scenario in which he’d be so cavalier about being disliked. It was unthinkable. Disliked by his boss, by his co-workers . . . by anyone, really. The mere thought was untenable, and boundaries had nothing to do with it.

But Grayson had remained steadfast. When he returned to his giant house after leaving his office each evening, his phone was often left indoors while he retreated to his spa-like backyard. Trapp knew that was where he’d find Gray that night. It was a new sort of reliability, he supposed, one he sorely needed.

It had been two days.

Two days since the night of the Senior Send-off, two days since Julia had told him she was leaving. Quitting her job, quitting their relationship, quitting Cambric Creek. Quitting him.

Two days in which he hadn't been on at the firehouse, two days when he’d only seen his own bed for fleeting hours. Two alcohol-soaked days he barely remembered, only knowing he’d left the town square with one of the selkies the night of the fair and that it had been a steep slide into the gutter from there.

He vaguely remembered being at the Pickled Pig the following night. He remembered leaving with a dryad, one who wasn’t the same dryad he’d wound up with in the back parking lot later that same night at the Man-o-War, neither of whom was the huldra whose condo he’d slipped from as the sun was rising that morning. He’d woken beneath photographs of a family he did not know, beside a sleeping form whose name he could not remember, deciding that leaving quietly was the most generous contribution he could make to everyone’s morning.