Chapter 1 Excerpt
Sebastian took an angry stance squarely on my torso and began meowing furiously. I pulled my pillow over my face, hoping he would give up and go back to sleep. But that was wishful thinking; I knew from experience that he wouldn’t be quiet until I got out of bed and fed him, even if it was the middle of the night.
My head was in a twilight, light and starry, like a waking dream. As I came out of my stupor, I fought to make out my surroundings; a desk and chair, a Mondrian-style print on the wall, a shallow window barely large enough to stick my head out. Not even the faintest light came through it; it was still night under a new moon.
I sat up on my bed and planted my feet flat on the Berber floor. Sebastian’s warm, soft body rubbed against my bare leg. He was a little orange and white tabby with ears too big for his head, and he was the most ornery cat I’d ever met. I scooped him up in my arms and carried him into the common room of our quad, and half-laughed when I realized I was still wearing part of my Devil costume from the night before–a red polyester slip with a soft tail attached to my rear.
When I entered the common room, Sebastian wriggled out of my hold and bounded softly to the floor and darted toward the entry door. He leapt over something lying a couple feet inside the doorway. It was the size and shape of a human body, and it wasn’t moving.
A practical joke on Halloween, or maybe just one of my roommates, passed out on the floor. But as I drew closer, I saw the body was much too large to belong to one of my petite roommates, and at a closer look, I saw its head wasn’t that of a human at all; it was a wolf, masking the stranger from my eyes.
I nudged it with my foot, but it didn’t make a sound.
I was disoriented; the dark was playing tricks on my mind. I flicked on the light of the room and squinted through the fluorescent beams that blinded me from overhead.
I collapsed to my knees, nauseated. The body on the floor was crooked, broken, bloody. It was a boy— a man—easily six feet tall. He wore a black leather jacket, but from this angle, I could easily see the stickiness of blood that seeped through it. And in the middle of his back, a knife stuck up straight; a white flag marking his surrender.
“Meeeoooowww,” Sebastian demanded, irately cocking his ears forward. It took me a moment to realize his white paws were stained red, just like the floor we stood on.
My body trembled both from the cold and uncertainty that befell me. I approached the rubber wolf head and knelt down, stretching out my hands, to see if I could feel any heat coming off of his body. There was nothing. No heat, no movement, no gentle sound of breath.
I leaned over him, and with shaking hands, I pinched the edge of the mask between my thumb and my index finger. The weight of his head prevented me from just slipping the rubber mask off with ease, and I had to leverage my left hand to lift his head and yank the mask off. I fell backwards, clutching the plastic wolf head in my right hand, and landing on my backside. Sebastian meowed softly, to ask if I was okay.
In that instant, my heart had climbed into my throat. It pushed against my trachea and scratched so hard I swear my throat was bleeding. I could taste the blood as it gathered there, blocking the air from getting into my lungs. It stopped flowing to my fingertips and they went tingly and numb. I fought hard for air, swallowing the blood, gasping, but it wouldn’t come.
I was staring directly into the open eyes of my boyfriend, Jason Holt.