‘Jane’s coming with me. We’re leaving in the morning.’
I sent the text to Minnie, as soon as I’d confirmed with Jane that she was coming with. And shortly after, I got a response.
‘Sounds good. I’ll be there late in the morning of the 15th. We’ll straighten out the details then.’
As I packed a few things into a bag with my phone open to the texts from Minnie, Jane hanging around as she packed too, I beckoned her to come over. Given the fact that Minnie was going to mention Myrus, and Jane had met the guy’s crazy son, who also hurt both her and Lee and his parents… it felt wrong not to mention it to her now, before we left.
Our parents were out of the house for pack business and Will, Jane’s younger brother, was working late as per the usual recently, so I felt I didn’t need to keep as quiet as I might’ve with them around.
“Hm? What is it Kat? Why so serious all of a sudden?”
“Minnie… mentioned something with Myrus.”
Jane froze, but her face didn’t change much. There wasn’t anger. There wasn’t sadness. No confusion. There just wasn’t anything in her expression as she stared at me, unblinking.
“What about him?” She muttered.
I sighed, “She said she might be able to help with the Myrus situation. I’m not sure what it entails, but she might know something that can help us.”
Those words seemed to break Jane out of her frozen state and she moved to sit on the bed next to me, dropping her bag on the floor gently.
“Something to help us?”
“Yeah.”
After a moment, something dawned on her. “Minnie’s a witch,” she enlightened me with the information that every single one of us had known our whole lives.
Yes. Captain Obvious. She’s a witch. We all know that.
I stared at her, dumbfounded.
“What?”
It wasn’t a question meant literally. It was more of a rhetorical expression for my complete lack of understanding as to what was going on in her head as she said that. I knew it wasn’t empty up there, but sometimes… things like this made me question that.
She laughed before she elaborated, “She can use spells. She might’ve learned a new one to help us track him down or something.”
“Ah.”
So that was what she meant. And it surprised me that I hadn’t thought of it at all. I was suddenly glad I kept the Captain Obvious comment within my head.
Then she bolted upright, smile and humor gone. As I opened my mouth to ask what was wrong, she waved a hand my way as she left the room. That meant I wasn’t going to find out what was going on.
Alright.
I went back to my bag, double-checking the contents.
She returned shortly, her jaw and shoulders tense as she held a small box. I looked between her and the box as she shoved it in her bag. Looks like she forgot something she needed to pack, I told myself as I tried to ignore her tension. And just like that, it was gone again.
“Did you figure out where we’re going to stay?”
My brain short circuited.
Well that was a problem.
I flopped back on my mattress with my hands over my face.
“Noooooo…?”
Jane laughed. She was practically cackling at my lack of preparedness. Through the cracks of light between my fingers, I saw her pull out her phone.
“How about a nice place next to the beach?”
I pulled my hands away and they immediately landed on the sheets next to me. Leaning on my forearms, I propped myself up.
“That sounds good. And…”
Expensive.
Very expensive.
Jane smirked at me as if she knew precisely what was going through my mind. Knowing her, she probably did.
And in the next second, when she turned her phone around so I could see it, far quicker than I could get a response out to her that we needed a place cheaper, I saw the little two-bedroom house she had up.
My first thought betrayed me.
The place was so pretty, so perfect. I wanted to scream that yes this was exactly the place we should stay at while at a coast.
And then my gaze drifted to the price of a few nights.
My heart might’ve stopped or thudded painfully in my chest. Either way, and I couldn’t tell which one it was, it was terrible.
Expensive my ass.
Though, if my actual ass had been that expensive, I’d be alarmed.
This was too expensive.
“Jane! That’s too much! We can just get a hotel room nearby, okay?”
“No-kay.” She brought the picture of the little house on the beach closer to me with a smile, like she was trying to have it convince me instead of her. We’d both noticed my reaction to it, obviously. “My treat?”
I sighed heavily and closed my eyes, cutting off that pretty picture.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Hotel?”
“I am not sleeping in a hotel. I get terrible sleep in hotels because–”
“Because our intense levels of hearing make it a nightmare when we can hear someone snoring all the way at the end of the hall due to the thin walls?” I finished for her, finally cracking my eyelids open a bit to look at her.
She grinned.
“Exactly.”
I threw my head back, flopping back onto the mattress with a groan.
We’d taken a trip early in our teenage years, and we’d made the terrible choice to get hotel rooms… because of the pools there. From then on, it had become a ‘never again’ type of thing, but it was cheaper…
Jane put on her puppy-dog eyes and pouted.
Goodness. She was older than me, by a whole year. It shouldn’t work on me… I narrowed my eyes at her for a moment, our gazes meeting.
“Fiiiiiiiiine,” I groaned, throwing my head back.
“Yes!”
She celebrated quietly, pressing her finger to her phone several times, making me certain she was already sending money their way to rent that perfect pretty little house.
I turned on the bed and buried my face in the sheets. I would not think about how expensive it was. I would not think about how much we were already spending on this little trip. I would not think about money…
I sighed.
Oh, it better be worth it, I thought to myself, it better be the best place I’ve seen. It better be phenomenal and bypass the awesomeness within the pictures with flying colors.
In what seemed like no time at all, morning came and we were packed up in a car, headed east, jamming to the songs on the radio.
Jane was driving the second half, so it was up to me to drive the first.
It was fun, singing and belting out songs like nobody could hear us, even though I was sure some of the quiet towns we passed through… could definitely hear us.
We stopped to eat, we caught up on everything, not that there was much to catch up on, except with her and Lee and their plans for the future. We talked about how it would be nice to have our whole group together again sometime, with all of us and our mates… when or if we got them – hoping more for when than if.
She and I talked a bit about her brother, about how strange he’d been acting lately. How she was afraid he was overworking himself. But, what Will wanted, Will was going to do. There was no stopping him. And if he wanted to work his life away with no social life, we could only help him so much.
Then she mentioned something a bit more surprising, hesitantly. She told me that Will, her little brother, and an honorary little brother to me, just a year behind me in age, had run into his True Mate recently.
I was ashamed to say, my food was momentarily forgotten, in its entirety. My fork hit the plate, and I just stared in shock at Jane. She didn’t laugh at my expression, just nodded.
That was why he was acting weird?
True Mates were like the craziest thing. A fated or destined partner… someone that should be easy for you to love and fall in love with. And… the hardest thing to find. Despite thinking it, I wanted to groan aloud. Hardest, yes. Yet, for all of our parents, somehow it was really dang easy. They all found theirs. Not to mention, Jane and Lee were true mates. They were the first in our group of friends to find their True Mate. And they had both been in our group. Like some kind of crazy luck.
Nobody else had found theirs yet.
And now Will had.
But the part that I wasn’t getting was why he was working so much. If he’d found them, why wasn’t he spending time with them? I heard it was really hard to stay away from your True Mate. Jane had confirmed that for me after she’d come clean about her and Lee.
“Okay…?” I hesitantly said, hoping Jane would fill in a gap. And she did.
“She bolted.”
Just as I’d discovered my food again. It was lost on me. Again. The fork was back on my plate. My poor pancakes were suffering.
“What? Bolted?”
“Yeah. He said he bumped into her on a run, was drawn right to where she was. They saw each other, and then she just up and ran in the opposite direction.”
“But he caught her, right?”
Will was seriously fast. None of us could outrun him. The man worked like nobody else, and it was all labor-intensive work. He was fit. Incredibly so. His abs were likely to each have their own abs at this point.
Jane had to try and hide a smile this time.
“Oh, he didn’t.”
“What?!”
Someone who could outrun Will?! They existed?! And nearby at that!
“He followed her. She turned a corner and he was just a few steps behind her, but he got there and she was gone. Couldn’t smell her anymore either.”
“…” I stared at Jane. “You’re kidding.”
She laughed and ate some food. “Nope.”
“And that’s why he’s been acting weird? He hasn’t seen her since, has he?”
“You mean, he’s torturing himself because he decided not to look for her.”
“WHAT?!” I nearly shouted in the small diner. It drew several nearby gazes and my own automatically snapped down to the pancakes again, my cheeks on fire. Alright. That was embarrassing. No more shouting in random diners. It wasn’t in my mind long though, as Jane’s words flew back in.
He wasn’t even going to look?! He had his True Mate dangling right in front of him, and he wasn’t going to look for her. Why? It was the only question running through my mind. If she was in the area, if she was at a pack that we knew… why not spend a little effort in finding her? If it were me, and I had found my True Mate, I would do everything I could to find them again.
“That’s what he told me.”
Eventually, we got around to talking of other things, of her wanting me to paint some mural on her wall when her new home was finished. I loved painting. So, without hesitation, I agreed. It would be fun, and the pictures she showed me of what kind of style she was thinking of were perfect.
Back on the road, we alternated between silence and singing, eating snacks and talking. It was peaceful. It truly felt like we were on vacation. And when we spotted the coast, and shortly after, spotted the house, we were both excited beyond belief, practically bouncing in our seats.
Jane found the key to the house, which was even better in person – the picture didn’t do it any justice – with directions from the person renting it to us, and we let ourselves in. The first thing Jane did was find herself a room upstairs. Since both of the bedrooms were on the second level, along with a large balcony and a bathroom, she just picked whichever one she liked better. I took a chance to walk around and admire the living room that extended along one side of the house and the large kitchen with an island, and a small gaming room next to it.
It was like a dream.
It was perfect.
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