Page 35 of Another Damned Storm
I watched her move, trying to take in everything about her at once. She was about an inch shorter than me, with warm brown hair that fell to the middle of her back. The family resemblance was undeniable, but my brain was in full-on struggle bus mode.
My little brother is a dad?
I could barely wrap my head around the fact that he was in his forties. Now this?
“No one else knows who she is, Ang. I would like to keep it that way,” Matty said quietly. “At least for now,” he added, turning his attention to me.
“I mean, yeah. That makes total sense,” I muttered. What the hell else was I supposed to say?
“But… I thought she was your older sister.”
Matty and I shared a look. “I am, I guess. Technically,” I said.
She shrugged her backpack off and set it down by the door. “You get how that doesn’t make sense, right?”
“What if I told you I was trapped in another realm where time doesn’t move the same as it does here?”
Angie cast me a skeptical look that quickly turned to acceptance. “Sure. Why not? Demons are real. Shifters and witches and magic are all real. A timey-wimey realm isn’t that much of a stretch when you think about it.”
I arched a brow. She was surprisingly cool about it, but I would get to that in a second. “You know about Doctor Who?”
A beaming smile broke across her face, and all at once I was transported back in time. Matty used to smile like that when he was younger. “Hell, um, I mean, heck yeah! Dad loves the classics.”
I turned my focus to my brother. “The black and white version?” That didn’t sound like him.
He shook his head solemnly. “She’s talking about the version we used to watch.”
And she called it a classic? Oof.
I was just going to let that go. “So, you know about shifters?”
“Yeah. Obviously,” she scoffed. “Aunt Lily is, like, Boss Bitch of the Shifters across the park.”
“Ang,” Matty said, the warning clear in his voice.
She rolled her eyes and huffed out an exasperated breath. In that moment, she was so much like my brother—the teenage version of him, anyway—that I had to hold my breath against the pinch in my chest.
Twenty-six fucking years. I’d missed so much.
“Calling her a Boss B is a compliment, Dad.”
“You know the rules.”
She ground her teeth, then she turned to me. “Was he like this when he was my age?”
I rubbed my lips together to smother the smile trying tobreak through. “It’s probably best if I don’t answer that question.”
“Aunt Never and I have some things we need to talk about.” Matty pointed to the kitchen table. “Homework first. Then dinner. The recipe is on the fridge.”
“Hey, it’s your night to cook.” She folded her arms over her chest.
He shook his head. “Not tonight, Ang. Please.”
She let her arms fall to her sides, her expression shifting from annoyed to concerned. “Yeah. Okay.” She snagged her backpack off the floor, hauled it over to the table, and then hustled back over and gave him a big hug. “Sorry.”
He hugged her back. “No need to apologize, kiddo.”
“I’d be happy to help you cook, if that’s okay,” I offered. I couldn’t remember a single moment in my past when I’d felt like an outsider in my brother’s life, but I sure as hell felt it now, and I didn’t like it one bit. “Unless your mom…”
