Page 75 of Misfit Monsters
A prickle of self-consciousness makes me duck my head. Is it really so odd that Raze would care about me?
I guess they’re not used to seeing him even touch any of the other shadowkind, let alone kiss them.
Jonah jerks his attention to Hail with a nod. “Yes, it’s just over the bridge. There’s a convenience store and a café I thought we could stop in to grab lunch. We want to talk with the locals casually, but do your best to find out if they’ve seen unusual people coming through or if there’ve been any ‘animal’ attacks lately.”
Hail ends up hanging back to let our sorcerer take the lead. The winter fae slips his hands into the pockets of his slacks in a careless pose, but I catch a whiff of tartly metallic anxiety.
I push my shorter legs faster to keep pace. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. You’re good at talking to people. Everyone at the school wants to hang out with you.”
Hail’s head ticks toward me with a scattered burst of emotion he quickly stifles. “I didn’t ask for your advice,” hesays, but his tone is more stiff than cutting. And he doesn’t call me “pipsqueak,” which I’ll take as progress.
The town is a small one, with several shops surrounded by a cluster of a few dozen homes. Nothing about it looks particularly remarkable to me.
Rollick took all the information from our report and mapped it out with whatever details he’s gathered from his past investigations. He marked this area of the province as the likely center of the strange activity. There are only a few human settlements within it.
If no one here can give us a hint about where to go next, we’ve got a lot more combing the wilderness ahead of us.
In the convenience store, Jonah ambles over to the counter and strikes up a conversation with the cashier by asking for directions. As he veers from that subject into a comment about how few other tourists we’ve run into up here, I scan the shelves for new snacks I might want to try and notice a teenager in a bright, off-the-shoulder sweater and dark jeans. She picks up a magazine and flips through it with a dissatisfied expression.
I stroll over to join her. “Hi! Any good articles in there?”
It seemed like a decent opening, but the girl’s eyes dart to me and narrow. She shoves the magazine back into the rack. “I dunno.”
Her scowl contradicts the trickle of emotion flowing off her—all fishy insecurity and chalky determination. How can I cater to those feelings?
I motion to her outfit. “I love your shirt! It looks great on you.”
To my delight, her posture straightens up, a flash of a smile she tries to suppress crossing her lips. Pride washes away her uncertainties. “Thanks. Your hair is pretty awesome too. Are you just passing through?”
Imagine if she saw it glow.
I nod. “We’re stopping to get snacks. It seems like a pretty quiet town. Do you have to worry much about wild animals with so much forest all around?”
Her laugh is a bit scoffing, but it gets me an answer. “Wedon’t. They don’t bug people usually. But my neighbor stupidly lets her cats go roaming outside. One of them got snapped up by a coyote or something last week.”
Or something. She doesn’t know for sure what did it.
She turns away from me, disinterested in continuing the conversation. I file away the tidbit of information I got.
I pick out a couple of candy bars, and Jonah rings those up along with some spicy chips Hail grabbed.
As we head across the street, Jonah frowns. “It doesn’t sound as if anyone’s passed through who’s drawn people’s attention.”
“The shadowkind creatures might have,” I say, and tell him about the poor cat.
Hail shrugs. “Itcouldhave been a coyote. Humans should take better care of the animals they claim they’re going to look after.”
I taste genuine frustration in his comment. He doesn’t like that an innocent animal was killed—the same way it bothered him to kill the shadowkind creatures that attacked us.
I touch his arm. “You’re right. They should.”
Hail’s gaze flicks to me with a flex of his jaw, and then we’re walking into the café. He shifts his attention to the patrons sitting at the tables that fill most of the room.
We end up seated between a couple of affable local families. In the space of a quick lunch, we find out that they haven’t seen any notable tourists either—but someone else in town had their dog go missing from their yard a few days ago.
“Hopefully it wasn’t taken by the same thing that tore upthose wild rabbits in Mr. Johnson’s field,” one of the kids pipes up before his mother shushes him.
Some creatures have been on the hunt around here lately, more than the town is used to. Jonah and I exchange a knowing glance—for an instant before he jerks his gaze away.
