“I could come up with jackass pie on my own,” she insisted, then mulled that statement over. “No. No, I couldn’t.”
“By the way, what are your plans for Christmas?” I asked.
“Pretending my parents haven’t disowned me, watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and drinking a few bottles of merlot. How about you?”
I chewed my lip. “I’m thinking of throwing together a little party for us disenfranchised monsters.”
“You’re using us as an excuse not to spend time with your family?”
“No, I’m choosing to spend time with my dearest friends,” I retorted. “Fine, it’s eighty percent spending time with you guys and twenty percent avoiding my family.”
Andrea shot me her best doubtful glare.
“Seventy/thirty,” I said as the doorbell tinkled. I was confronted with the sight of a weeping werewolf, clutching a bear trap in one hand and a wedding planner in the other.
There’s something you don’t see every day.
A curious Mr. Wainwright poked his head out of the office, illogically thrilled at the sight of a tearful werewolf in his shop. “This is the most traffic the shop has had in years,” he said, smiling brightly. “Jane, would your friends like a cup of tea?”
“Why don’t you put the kettle on?” I suggested in a voice as calm and soothing as I could muster. “Andrea Byrne, Jolene McClaine,” I said, eyeing Jolene and the bear trap warily. “Jolene, honey, what’s wrong?”
“Zeb!” she wailed plaintively.
“What about Zeb? Is he OK?” I demanded, sniffing the trap but finding no scent of blood.
“He’s fine.” Her deeply backwoods accent stretched the word out into “faaaaaaahhhnnnn” before she wailed, “He’s called off the wedding!”
Visions of an unworn, unreturnable peach sateen bridesmaid’s dress lurking in the back of my closet flashed before my eyes. I shuddered. “I thought we agreed that you guys weren’t going to come to me anymore with your problems.”
“But this time is different!” Jolene wailed. “This time I need help!”
“OK, OK.” I took the trap out of her hands and wrapped my arms around her. She sniffled into my shirt, leaving a spreading wet stain on my shoulder. “Are you sure about that he called off the wedding, Jolene? Sometimes Zeb misspells stuff in e-mails, and it comes across badly.”
“Of course I’m sure!” Jolene howled, drawing a sharp wince from Andrea, who was more accustomed to the slightly more sedate antics of vampires. “I’m not stupid!”
“OK,” I said, scratching behind her ears. It may sound condescending, but sometimes that calmed her down.
“Do you have anythin’ to eat?” Jolene asked, sniffing the air. “I can’t talk like this on an empty stomach.”
Jolene couldn’t do anything on an empty stomach.
Mr. Wainwright helped me scavenge leftover pizza, canned stew, and some Chef Boyardee from his apartment and then made himself scarce. Even his fascination with were-creatures wasn’t enough to keep him around a hysterical female. Note to self: Bring pot pies and bagged salad to the shop for Mr. Wainwright. This kind of diet could not be good for him.
“What happened?” I asked as she gorged herself on cold pepperoni. It was always oddly compelling to watch Jolene eat, with the stark contrast between the beautiful, trim girl and the huge amounts of food she shoveled into her face. If you didn’t know about her werewolf metabolism, you’d wonder where she put it all.
I tried to reach out to her mind, but the jumble of images—confused, pained, and frenetic—made me dizzy.
“My cousins played a little joke on Zeb, and he got so upset,” she said, gnawing on reheated crust. “I told him he was overreactin’ and he should be glad that my cousins were tryin’ to make him part of the pack. And then he said something about ‘not wantin’ to live on the farm with the Jerry Springer family’ and how we were going to lose our house thanks to them. I asked what the hell he meant by that. He said he was sure I knew all about it. I told him he sounded like a paranoid jerk. He said that if I really felt that way, then he wasn’t gonna to be able to marry me.” Her eyes welled up again. “How could he do that? How could he just break it off without even looking upset about it? How could he just leave me?”
I waited for the yowl of “meeee” to end. “What kind of joke did your cousins play on Zeb?”
“They put a bear trap between his usual parkin’ spot by the front door to Mama and Daddy’s place. It was just a joke,” Jolene insisted. “We do it to each other all the time.”
“Wolves set bear traps for each other? Isn’t that sort of, I don’t know, culturally insensitive or something?”
Jolene seemed befuddled by the question. “No, it doesn’t hurt that bad.”
“You heal ten times faster than the average human,” I told her. “That bear trap could have cost Zeb a foot. He’s already lost a pinkie toe to your family’s little jokes.”
“They’re just bein’ playful.”
“He lost an appendage, Jolene. That’s not playful, that’s wanton endangerment.”
Jolene sniffed. “Don’t! Don’t use the ‘talkin’ down the crazy person’ voice. And don’t act like you’re sad this happened. You probably set this whole thing up to get out of wearing the bridesmaid dress.”
“What is wrong with you?” I asked. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know!” Jolene cried. “He proposed to me! I was a normal person before this. He made me go crazy! I know my family is screwed up, OK? I know it’s not normal for your cousin to want to marry you or for your parents to make you move in less than a hundred yards away from them.
“I know it’s not normal to be so loud and in each other’s business all the time. I know they’re passive-aggressive and just plain aggressive and they pay no attention to boundaries. They know they could have hurt Zeb with these pranks, and that’s half of the fun for them. But what am I supposed to do? This is my pack. This is thousands of years of breedin’ and instinct. I can’t stop that.”
She sobbed and wiped at her eyes. “And that’s what I told him. Then I said he wouldn’t be so tense if maybe his parents were more supportive of us instead of torpedoin’ the wedding every chance they got. He asked me what I meant by that, and I said that it was obvious his mama would be a lot happier if he was marrying you instead of me. And when he told me that was crazy, I told him to take his ring and shove it where the sun don’t shine, and I stormed off, and now I’m sittin’ here, miserable, and with no idea whether I’m gettin’ married.”
Andrea goggled. “That was a Jane-worthy tirade. Really, very impressive.”
“Please don’t help,” I said, turning to Jolene. “And you, you’ve got to draw a line somewhere. You’re marrying Zeb. His safety and happiness have to be your priority, no matter what your family does. Stand up for him, if not to show your family that you’re going to be the first McClaine to break this weird-ass cycle of human abuse, then to show Zeb that you’re on his side.
“Apologize,” I said. “And then go perform some physical favors for him that I never have to think about. And both of you have to stop coming to me when you have relationship problems. I barely have time for my own problems, and yours are, well, weird.”
“You’re a really good friend, Jane,” she said, shoving the remains of pizza into her mouth.
I patted her arm. “I know. I was serious about that last part.”
Gabriel’s home on Silver Ridge Road would have been the crown jewel in any historical home tour … if anyone in town knew about it. Gabriel had worked for years to erase the house, with its white clapboard, big wraparound porch, and Corinthian columns, from public memory. The house was cozy and way less intimidating than you would expect inside. The rooms I’d seen were done in subtle, muted colors, soft fabrics, little knickknacks that spoke of Gabriel’s years of travel, the kind of rooms where you wouldn’t expect to find your boyfriend plying your best friend with liquor.
Poor Zeb looked absolutely miserable, splayed on the maroon leather couch with a glass in one hand and his head in the other.
When he looked up, I saw he was wearing an eye patch. This could not be good.
“OK, I heard about the bear trap. Did something happen to your eye?”
“No, I’m considering a career as a pirate,” Zeb snarked as he gingerly adjusted the patch strap. He winced when it snapped back into place over his eye. The elastic had given him a quailish cowlick in the middle of his dark blond crown. “Some of the boys out at the farm were shooting off bottle rockets a few days ago. Jolene’s cousin Vance wanted to show them how to use them to knock cans off the fence, and somehow one of the rockets went astray.”
“You got hit in the eye with a bottle rocket?”
“No, I got hit in the eye with the bottle. Vance wasn’t watching where he tossed it when they were running from the bottle rocket.”
“So, that combined with bear trap is why you’re doing the full-on Dean Martin routine?” I asked, looking at the bottle between them.
“I’ve been evicted,” Zeb said, turning away two fingers of very nice bourbon.
Gabriel huffed and slugged it back himself. Considering the average vintage in his wine cellar, I wasn’t surprised he wouldn’t let it go to waste.
“This has not been your day, huh?”
“My landlord left me a notice today,” Zeb said, making a face when Gabriel held up a bottle of vodka with a Cyrillic label. “I was supposed to renew my lease next week.”
“He can’t do that! Jolene worked so hard to leave her mark on that place,” I exclaimed. Gabriel gave me a cringing, questioning look. “With throw pillows and paint, I mean. Nothing gross.”
“I went to sign the papers with Mr. Dugger, but he’s decided to rent to another family,” Zeb said, his pale face stretched in tight, miserable lines. “He said Jolene’s fixed the place up so nicely he can charge more than we can afford. And somehow, Jolene’s uncle Deke just happened to call today to remind her that her plot of land on the pack compound is still available. He even offered us a brand-newish trailer as a wedding gift.” Zeb sighed, planting his face in his hands as Gabriel stood to pour him a scotch. “I don’t know how they did it, but they got to Mr. Dugger.”
“I think you might be giving them a little too much—yeah, you’re probably right,” I agreed, slipping an arm around his shoulders. “What are you going to do? Starting with, will you please pry the crying werewolf out of my shop? She’s starting to disturb the customer. Emphasis on customer; we only have one.”
“You saw Jolene?” Zeb grimaced. “She was crying?”
“Um, you kind of broke off your engagement. That can bring out the emotion in a gal.”
“I know, I need to apologize,” Zeb said. “But I’d like to have a home to offer her when I beg and plead.” He took a sip of Gabriel’s liquor, blanched, and coughed. “Seriously, that’s what it tastes like?”
“Zeb can only drink stuff that tastes a little like alcohol and a lot like fruit punch,” I told Gabriel.
“I’ll start keeping some around,” Gabriel said. “Until then, try to finish the expensive single-malt I just poured for you. Peasant.”
“I would insult you back, but you seem to own or know about all of the good rental properties around town.” Zeb snorted.
Giving new meaning to the words “saved by the bell,” Gabriel’s cell phone began singing. His face when he saw the caller ID stopped me from making a joke about voice mail, which Gabriel didn’t know how to use. Without a word, he left the room and said hello quietly into the receiver as he walked out onto the back porch.
For lack of something better to say, I told Zeb, “I wish I could help.”
“Aw, I appreciate that,” he said, leaning his head against mine. “But you’re, you know, broke.”
My jaw dropped. “You know about that?”
“I’m your best friend,” he said. “And you haven’t had a full-time job in months. I can do math above the kindergarten level. Besides, I would never take money from you. We’ve never mixed money into our friendship before.”
“We never had money before,” I pointed out.
“And so far, that’s worked out for us,” he said. “Besides, if we’re not going to take that kind of ‘help’—emphasis on the sarcastic invisible quotation marks—from Jolene’s family, it would be hard to justify taking help from you.”
“You have a well-thought-out and emotionally mature argument,” I admitted. “Dang it. On an unrelated note, here’s an interesting tidbit: Your mama kept trying to get me to eat at the funeral, which would have ended in my vomiting publicly. She does know that I’ve been turned, right? I assumed she has just refused to mention it because it interferes with her version of reality. But you did tell her, right?”
Zeb winced. “Every time I try, she repeats something stupid she hears on talk radio, like vampires should be rounded up and forced to live in communities far away from humans.”
“Still, you’re marrying into a werewolf clan, and you’re worried about telling her there’s a vampire bridesmaid? If anything, you could use me to take the heat off Jolene and Company.” I gasped as realization slowly dawned. “She still doesn’t know you’re marrying into a werewolf clan, does she?”