Wyatt’s jaw ticked, the way it did when he was trying not to look angry—not to grind his teeth or wrinkle his nose or narrow his dark eyes.
He was tired beyond belief. Just about everyone over twenty in the Eaton house was. They were weighed by a secret. Most Eaton secrets were benign, ancient things kept for the joy of keeping. Wyatt often thought of his family a legacy of hoarders. No one noticed, because what they horded was valuable and that made it acceptable. They horded wealthy, treasures, antiques, memories, histories, truths and lies. They kept their dead in the mausoleums out back, white structures of marble in the dark green of the woods, sealed away from anything that might reach out from the dark for their bones. They kept every book, every journal, every scrap of paper scribbled on by an Eaton logged away in the library. The halls draped in the portraits of their relatives. Nothing and no one escaped their family.
But this new secret, it was heavy in a way few others still were. It weighed them down every day, leaving circles to be covered up under their eyes and a tense quiet in the manor house.
“Let him go,” Wyatt said quietly, because no one else would. No one else had mentioned the idea since that first night, when they found Caleb in the woods—not the woods of this world, but the woods of another—and brought him home.
His father glared at him from across the breakfast table. The kids had all left to pile into the cars for school, leaving only a handful of them still at the table.
“Wyatt,” his aunt tried to soothe, setting her napkin beside her plate.
He stared at his father, an older version of himself and his brother. The old man had been so pleased to have two mirrors of himself. Even more so when they grew and he could pit them against one another—making them stronger in that endless competition. It was over now. Wyatt had won…and lost. “You know the rules—”
Henry rose to his feet. The table flinched, everyone but Wyatt looking away with chins high as though they could pretend to be elsewhere—too good for this dark conversation. “We make the rules,” he snapped.
Vivian wrinkled her nose but her face was turned away from her brother, so Henry may not have noticed. But Wyatt did. Eatons were prideful and bold, but they were not stupid and words like that were asking for trouble.
“You think we can not save him? We made this town. We protect it in a forest of madness and monsters. We made wolves into men. We push demons back into the dark. We have averted the apocalypse countless times,” Henry ground out each word.
Wyatt stared back at him, waiting until he was done before replying, “But we did not do any of those things alone.”
Henry stared, face as still as stone.
“Perhaps we could ask the mud witches to resurrect his soul?” Claudette suggested, his cousin taking another sip of her coffee before putting it down into the saucer with a final clank. She rose to her feet, buttoning her jacket. “Or kill the monster in him.”
Henry shifted his onyx gaze on the pale haired woman. “Say it again, little girl, and I’ll have your tongue.”
The air in the room thinned and not even Wyatt could guess who had done it. His father? Claudette? Her mother Vivian? Or one of the other cousins? The human relations cringed in their seats, chins down while the magic blooded pushed their chins high.
Claudette stared back at his father, her lacquered black nails clicking against the metal buttons of her jacket, hugging her waist and matching her slacks. “Try,” she urged.
Vivian rolled her eyes and stood. “Well, that’s enough of that. I have a meeting with the town committee to finalize the plans for the Autumn Festival. Which means, Claud has a meeting with me.” Vivian said, Claudette being the chairperson for the committee. His aunt rounded the table as she spoke, pausing beside Henry to place a hand on her brother’s shoulder. “We will recover your son and these times will be but a moment of darkness.”
Henry eased back, sinking into his seat. He was just as tired as the rest of them, but with more heartache.
Wyatt was relieved when his aunt asked him to drive her into town. It wasn’t really a request. Almost nothing an Eaton asked ever was.
Claudette took her own car, the white Ferrari 458. It was a stupid car to own in a small town, with only the road in and out of town other than dirt paths to the lumber yard. But Claud had wanted it and, like a true Eaton, she got what she wanted. Sometimes she drove it down the highway, as though she might leave the woods and her life behind. She drove it as fast as it could go, breaking before the edge of the trees and turning back. Wyatt wouldn’t be surprised if she just didn’t come back one day.
He drove one of the trucks into Helter proper, his aunt sitting beside him. They both watched Claudette’s white car vanish ahead of them.
“He’s not wrong,” Vivian spoke first. “We have done extraordinary things. Why not this?”
“Because we have never been able to do this. Because you taught us not to try,” he continued. Because if it had been me, he would have put me in the mausoleum without a fuss, he thought. “If we don’t bury him, we won’t be able to keep it a secret. The vipers deal in fortune telling. The wolves will know as soon as they see him. And the mud witches… Jesus, if we’re lucky they’re too distracted by their dying girl to notice.”
His aunt laughed shortly. “You’ve been playing Caleb too much. You worry like him now,” she said, the smile dying on her lips as the words escaped. It was easy to pretend he wasn’t dead yet, when they kept playing this game. Wyatt and Caleb were identical twins. So, Wyatt had played his brother for the investor video calls and at the lumber yard a handful of times since he first went missing—all to keep up appearances. “We’ll deal with things as they come up. Have hope, boy. We win often enough to bet on ourselves.”
Wyatt huffed and held his tongue rather than explain odds to her. He parked along the main street.
She leveled him with a serious stare. “You want to end this nightmare?” She was in her late fifties but no one would guess at her being any older than forty-nine. She had his father’s eyes, dark and cold at their depths. “Save your brother.” She held his gaze a second longer before looking away, waiting for him to get out of the truck and walk around it, opening her door.
They both wore different faces as soon as they were out of the car, soft expressions with easy smiles—like the whole world was a gentle place because they had made it so.
“Don’t go far,” Vivian Eaton said before walking up the steps of the townhall building.
“As you wish, madam Mayor,” Wyatt replied under his breath, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets and crossing the street. He spotted a wolf nearby. Vester. He had bloomed late—after his girlfriend skipped town on him. Wyatt tipped his head at the man before ducking into the Carver shop, hoping to catch Connie and not her mother. He didn’t imagine his family would like him playing too close to the fortune readers right now—but maybe that was exactly what they needed? Save his brother. That was all he had to do. What no one had ever done before. And yes, they had done impossible things in Helter Close before—but never alone.
-
Noel never walked hurriedly and the farther she got from her family property, the less attached she became to her surroundings. It was easy to know when someone came onto the property, to reach out in her mind and know who they were, but once she was elsewhere, she was just another person lost in the fog. She wondered if that was why the Aunties had stopped leaving home. It was unnerving to be lost.
Her fingers twisted in her hair, tying a tight, slender braid inside the waves and tangles. Her gray eyes slid over the morning market absently and for the most part no one noticed her. She could blame it on the fog or on their focus setting up, but it had never been common for townsfolk not to take notice of Sentinel Families. No. It wasn’t their fault. Maybe she had finally faded? Was that what it meant? Would she fade away?
She stopped when she inhaled the tangled scent of sugar and blood. She was at the edge of the market and could see the shopfronts on the main street ahead. Her pale nails slid out of her hair, hand dropping to her side when she turned to look at the Medici. Tears stung her eyes and she tried not to look at the shadow of a woman behind him—what was left of her anyway. Death whispered in her ear and it made her head hurt. Why did it whisper at her? She couldn’t understand those backwards words anyway.
“Morning,” she said, not yet sure if it was good or if they were on speaking terms. He hadn’t been to the Laurent house since the night it happened. No one talked about it. But Bellamy hadn’t left the property since. He played it off easily to the others, but Noel knew he was guarding the Aunties. Was the Medici a danger to them now? They had liked him so much before. They would never have done it for him otherwise—and they may not have done it if they had known it would work so well.