Magic Stars (Grey Wolf #1)(9)

“It is.” She put a world into those two words.

“But creepy or not, you know Kate won’t do what Roland is doing to Hugh. Roland doesn’t love Hugh. She loves you. You’re her child.”

She sighed. “I know she loves me. That’s why I’m worried. Derek, she still hasn’t told me that I can’t refuse her orders.”

Alarm dashed down his spine. He hadn’t realized she knew. “How long?”

“Roland told me months ago,” she said.

“She hasn’t told you because it’s hard.”

“I know,” she said. “She tries not to order me around. She’ll start to say some Mom thing and then stop, and you know she’s rephrasing it in her head. It’s kind of funny. Instead of ‘Stop stealing Curran’s beer out of the fridge and wash the dishes’ it’s all ‘It would make me a lot happier if you stopped stealing Curran’s beer’ and ‘It would be great if you did the dishes.’ She probably thinks she’s subtle about it. She isn’t.”

He didn’t see anything funny about it. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s not a problem now,” she said.

“And if it becomes a problem?”

“I’ll do something about it.”

He didn’t like the sound of that. “Still, you should stop talking to Roland.”

She sat up straighter. “Will you stop bossing me around?”

“Stop doing stupid crap, and I’ll stop.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Eat my horse’s ass.”

Ugh. No thanks. “What, was Desandra at the house recently?”

“I don’t need Desandra to teach me insults. And what the hell is it with all the comments about what I’m wearing? There’s nothing wrong with these shorts.”

“Don’t you own any jeans?”

“I do.”

“You should wear them.”

“Why? Is the sight of my legs disturbing you, Derek?” She stopped Peanut and stuck her left leg out in front of him. “Is there something wrong with my legs?”

There was nothing wrong with her legs. They were pale and muscular, and men who should know better noticed them. He was not going to notice them for a list of reasons a mile long, starting with the fact that she was sixteen, and he was twenty. He sidestepped her leg. “The more protection between your skin and other people’s claws, the better.”

“I took down a werejackal. I’m not the one bleeding.”

“I’m not bleeding.”

“You were. And there is a rip in your hoodie where he got your shoulder.”

He looked at her.

“Was I not supposed to mention it?” She put her hand to her chest. “So sorry, Sir Wolf.”

“In a few hours I’ll heal. You wouldn’t. If you got cut up by a cat’s claws, you would bleed unless we treated the wound. It would make you weak. Hours later you could reopen your wound if you turned the wrong way. Cats are filthy animals, and they carry all sorts of shit on their claws. You could die from an infection.”

They made a right onto Birch Road. To the left the ruin of the mall spread out. During the mall’s life, a narrow strip of lawn had ringed it, dotted by ornamental trees. Now the trees had grown, and thorny bushes sprouted between the trunks, forming nature’s answer to a barbed wire fence and offering only glimpses of the mall beyond. Most of its buildings had long since crumbled into dust. The rains had washed it away, and an occasional sign was all that remained of the shopping center. He read the names—Burlington Coat Factory, PayLess Shoe Store, Ross . . . They meant nothing to him.

“Did you share this cat view with Curran?” Julie asked. “Or are werelions slightly less filthy than other cats?”

He refused to take the bait. “A wound that’s a minor inconvenience to me could be a death sentence for you.”

Julie sighed. “Do you really think that if a wereleopard attacks me, jeans would stop him? Clothes don’t have magic powers, Derek. They don’t mystically protect you from three-inch claws, rapists, or murderers. If someone decides to hurt you, they will do so whether or not you have a thin layer of denim over your skin. Lighten up.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes, looking sly. He braced himself.

“I saw a picture of Hugh when he was your age,” she said.

“Mhm.”

“Hugh was a hottie.”

His reaction must’ve shown on his face, because she threw her head back and laughed.



THE ROAD CURVED GENTLY. They kept going around the bend, to the mouth of Orion Drive. Here no trees hid the mall, and the view was wide open. He stopped. Next to him Julie jumped off her horse, tied Peanut to a tree, and took a cloth backpack from among the saddlebags, hanging it over her left shoulder.

The parking lot unrolled before them, about fifteen hundred feet wide and probably two thousand feet long. Irregular holes pockmarked the asphalt, each filled with mud-colored opaque water. No way to tell how deep they were. A thin fog hung above the water, and in its translucent depths tiny green lights floated, their weak light witchy and eerie. In the center of it all, a spire of dark grey rock jutted out at a forty-degree angle, like a needle that had been carelessly thrust into the fabric of the parking lot. Rough and dark, twenty feet wide at the base and tapering to a narrow end, it rose about thirty feet above the parking lot. Pillar Rock. They would have to clear the parking lot to get to it. The three idiot shapeshifters had been told to meet their contact there.