Page 21 of Welcome to Blackbird Hollow
“How do you know?” Alice breathes.
Fallon’s eyes slide to mine. “Hellhounds in the woods today.”
I push a hand through my hair, closing my eyes. “Well, fuck. That’s gonna ruin trick-or-treating.”
Chapter 11
Alice
Idon’t need my master’s in folklore to see that the Wild Hunt is dangerous—that They’rereal, They’re here, and They’re just as deadly as I always suspected.
I should probably be scared as I sit at the table, listening to Fallon and Wyatt trade information back and forth that I only partly understand. But it’s like there’s this big ball of warmth inside of me, tingling across my skin, and it won’t let me be properly afraid. Like maybe I’m finally where I belong, finally with the people I belong to—have always belonged to and just never realized it.
Or maybe it’s just the four—five?—glasses of wine I’ve had.
“Hellhounds,” Wyatt echoes again, his voice dropping down into something serious and a little unsettling. His gaze goes far away for a second, and it makes my heart pang.
“What does this mean, exactly?” I ask, folding my hands on the table so I don’t reach out for Wyatt, which would be absurd. “I mean, I have a folkloric understanding of the Wild Hunt. But what’s it actually like?”
Fallon and Wyatt exchange a long look. Fallon mutters something under her breath and twists in her chair, poppingopen the enormous, battered hutch hulking against the kitchen’s shadowy wall. When she retrieves a bottle of something molasses-dark and definitely stronger than wine, my heart climbs into my throat.
“Well,” Wyatt offers, folding his hands in a mirror of my movement. He looks like he’s carefully considering his words, picking the ones that’ll help me understand best. I appreciate that. I appreciate it so much, apparently, that my face decides to blush. “It’s nothing pretty.”
“They don’t usually come through these parts,” Fallon adds, pouring a concerning amount of whisky—I think—into her empty tumbler. I don’t know her very well, but she seems completely sober, her big, dark eyes still clear, no flush creeping across her tanned skin.
Fallon’s the kind of pretty that normally intimidates me. The kind that just doesn’t even have to try, putting the rest of us to shame in worn jeans and an oversized sweater. But we just…clicked. Easy. I don’t know the last time I felt anything like that.
My eyes slide to Wyatt, who’s watching his sister, the crow’s feet around his eyes crinkling. I guess I felt something like that with him, too. But…different. I want to drink wine and talk shit with Fallon for the rest of my life. There’s this instant sweep of comfort with her, cozy as a worn blanket—because I’m pretty sure she’s just as insane as me. Actually, crazier. Feral, even. And there’s something so soothing about that when everyone you’ve ever loved thinks you’ve completely lost your marbles.
Wyatt, though? I force myself to look away from him, back to Fallon as she chugs whisky, apparently some kind of preparation for telling the uninitiated about the Wild Hunt. With Wyatt, it’s…I want a lot more than wine and shit-talk.
I stop myself from considering that train of thought further. Fallon speaks up just in time. “The Wild Hunt is kind of fucked,” she says with a shrug. “They’ll come straight through the town,taking anyone They can get a hold of. And Main Street’s right on the ley line…” She pauses, her mouth screwing into a frown. “Alice, if you stay…”
“You’re gonna see some unholy shit,” Wyatt finishes for his sister, leaning back in his chair to consider me with those nebula-brown eyes.
“Alright,” I say with a shrug. “I mean, if you think I’m a liability?—”
“Definitely not,” Wyatt says with unusual fervor, leaning toward me, his forearms coming to rest on the table. In my peripheral vision, I see Fallon smile into her glass. As if he knows what his older sister is going to say before she even opens her mouth, he whirls toward her. “I just mean, it sure would be nice to cut out those drives up to the university, yeah? And with Cade…going through it, it’d be good to have someone around with his kind of knowledge.”
“Sure thing,” Fallon agrees, grinning wildly, though there’s nothing malicious in her expression—not as far as I can tell. She downs the rest of her whisky and pushes up to her feet, not even swaying a little bit. “You’re down at the Stardust, I imagine?”
“Yep,” I say, reaching to gather up my dirty dishes, but Wyatt tucks my empty bowl into his before I can do so.
“You can stay here,” Fallon says, letting her brother pick up her dishes, too. He looks at her pointedly as he does it, and I have the strong sense the bowl and spoon might sit there for a day or two if he weren’t cleaning up after her. “In Wyatt’s old room.”
Wyatt freezes and turns a color I didn’t even think him capable of: a deep, dark red, his entire face overtaken by the hue. Fallon takes one look at him and lets out a cackle, sashaying toward the fridge, her stockinged feet gliding across the antique wood floors.
“Why’re you so godsdamn red?” she demands, digging her arm into the freezer, her expression obscured by the fridge door. “You think she’s gonna find your dirty magazines stuffed underneath the mattress? Worried she’s gonna think you’re a little perv?”
Even though I’m sure my face has flushed to a shade that rivals Wyatt’s, I can’t help but laugh at the sibling ribbing—the kind I never had and always sort of wanted. Someone to call my own, someone who had to put up with my rants and theories. Somebody who couldn’t leave, I guess.
“You two can’t be herealone,” Wyatt sputters as though there’s absolutely nothing more insane in the entire world. He’s frozen to the spot, the cool, calm, and self-assured man I met this morning reduced to pure panic.
Overme. Over me sleeping in his old bed, poking around in his childhood room. My heart does a somersault in my chest, and an absurd number of butterflies takes flight in my belly.
“Why not?” Fallon demands, a shit-eating grin spread wide across her face. She closes the freezer, one arm curled around a giant tub of ice cream. “We’ll have a girls’ night! You’re always telling me to make more friends.”
Wyatt lets out a long huff, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yeah, but not?—”
