After a hard sell I sent Sigyn and Knives back to the Covenant and I climbed into Percy’s truck. Holding the family’s puppy in hand, a rottie too young to properly speak past emotions, I sat in the passenger seat held at gunpoint while the man drove.

  A relatively short drive, I thought the area felt familiar until Percy pulled to the side of the road and had me climb in the back of the truck. A camper shell actually set up for camping, it had a thin mattress, a small and thin trunk next to that, and was all on a wooden frame I knew had a secret compartment for weapons. Not one to complain though, I laid down as he instructed and pulled the quilt there over me.

  Curled tight, I waited there even after the truck stopped and Percy excused himself, laying in silence for a few minutes until he opened the back.

  I looked up, and Percy stood gesturing me out as he announced, “no one’s home, safe for you to come out now.”

  “What, not sneaking me in through the basement?” I asked, exactly how we’d used to sneak in or out ourselves at night.

  Realizing my mistake a moment later, I watched Percy roll his eyes as he asked, “are there any secrets you’re not privy to?”

  “I’m sure there’s a few,” I said a little hesitantly, trying to force a nervous smile as Percy helped pull me out.

  Adjusting my shirt a moment, I looked up to where we’d arrived and felt a lump form in my chest. The house, two stories and pale blue, a good hundred feet between the neighbors on either side, a poor excuse of a shed behind it and another attached to the home. A small staircase led to a basement and a series of curtained windows stared down at us.

  I was fucking home.

  This was the last place I needed to be.

  I was going to get killed if I was here.

  I needed to stay calm.

  “Look like you’ve seen a ghost there, werewolf,” Percy said with a sigh, even as I pulled a box of cigarettes from my pocket. He watched me light a cigarette, and when I offered one he shook his head and told me, “please don’t smoke.”

  “Martin smokes, he’s not going to notice.”

  “He quit,” Percy countered, and I sighed as I made a show of tossing it on the ground and crushing it out. Percy watched me for a long moment and, with a huff, led me inside as he announced, “we need to work fast, I called Martin and he said he’s grocery shopping, back in a little less than an hour. I sat the puppy in the laundry room, Martin was talking about getting a guard dog and seems good as any.”

  “Right,” I muttered, gulping as I followed the man slowly to the door, which he hastily unlocked for me, “just, show me the stuff I guess and I’ll need you to drop me off.”

  Percy led me inside, into a kitchen that was now unfamiliar and through to a living room that was just as much so as much everything had been switched out. For a moment he told me to wait and, after another moment’s hesitation, had me follow him upstairs. A hall of four doors, my father’s room, my room, a guest room, and a bathroom, with a shitty carpeting on the floor. The walls, a cream color, still devoid of picture as they’d always been, the only difference four deep gouges of unpainted plaster.

  My fingers traced the marks, remembering having made them, and Percy asked, “that your work?”

  “You could say that,” I admitted hesitantly.

  “Man refused to paint over the fix until he killed whoever did it you know,” Percy told me, sighing as he went towards the guest room, “you wait here, I’ll change my shirt real quick then show you the video.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine with me,” I said, watching him go into the guest room as I was left waiting, a small gap remaining in the door to obviously keep an ear out for me.

  I watched my former friend through the crack in the door, a sense of sadness as I watched him pulling off his shirt and tossing it aside. Not something I hadn’t been used to seeing, having grown up around him, he nonetheless looked much different from what I remembered. He’d grown muscular, the sort you got from working and running constantly and not just lifting weights, and he now carried more scars than he should have. Cuts, slashes, burns, and a dozen other marks. For having only been six years it looked like he’d gain four each year that passed, a marking of his life as a hunter. Something almost impressive about it, a sign of strength, a-

  Oh Wolf Gods what the fuck was wrong with me.

  With a shake of my head I pulled my eyes away, feeling a little sick as I stepped back from the guest room. The thoughts had felt out of nowhere, like something I shouldn’t have been able to fucking thing about him. The fucker had been my best friend, now kinda wanted to kill me, I shouldn’t have been thinking about him like that

  Right, The Shadow was going to make me kiss him and my brain was over thinking that . I was going to learn how to kill a spirit when this was all over.

  Trying to ignore the feeling, I went to the door I’d once called my own and pushed in with a held breath. My eyes closed, almost an instinct as if I’d be killed for looking inside, and opened once more to a snapshot of my old life.

  A room that had never been actually lived in, there was no real character or personality to it. A full sized bed, tucked with military precision, an old box TV and DVD player, a dresser clean and with no decorations, a small bookshelf with nothing I’d actually liked, an open closet of more formal clothes I’d hated. The carpet had been cleaned, my eyes the only ones likely to see the discoloration that blood and vomit had created, and the whole room smelled like dust. A few unfolded cardboard boxes sat on one wall near the door, and I had to wonder how long they’d been waiting for use.

  Quickly glancing behind me to make sure Percy wasn’t out yet, I walked to the closet and sat on the floor with a strange sense of nostalgia. Pulling at the carpet, a loose section I’d made so long ago, I pulled it up and moved a loose board to reveal a space in the floor. Four DVDs there, I pulled them out and leaned against the wall as I flipped through them.

  American Werewolf in London, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lost Boys, and Blair Witch Project. All in shitty used DVD cases, faded colors, now with a deep layer of dust on top and feeling almost humorous to have.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  We’d not been allowed to watch horror movies, those were all things that were real and out there and we couldn’t trivialize it. We couldn’t fuck up and get the wrong idea of how to fight the supernatural, what it was capable of, or worst potentially come to want to seek it out. This had been a simple solution to getting around it, and Percy and I had stayed up more than once watching one or more.

  I was still looking over them when Percy’s voice tore me from my thought, asking, “he wants you to fetch those for him?”

  I jumped, looking up to see him now wearing a black tank top and holding a laptop open, and shook my head quickly as I tried to say, “no,” before realizing that sounded suspicious and I added on, “he mentioned them, I thought I’d, you know, see if any…you know, wanted to do something nice for him.”

  I was being a fucking idiot, I was just digging a hole for when I did fucking tell him who I was in a couple days. We kept this up and I was going to end up dead, and they were going to never feel like they knew the truth.

  It was a bit too late to think about that now.

  Percy sat on my old bed, and I joined him as he went about pulling up a news article and explained, “I saw this while trolling the news sites for anything connected to the college, thought there might have been something. I saw this on local news, police are investigating it but they’re pretty sure it’s a fucked up prank.”

  He clicked play, and I saw a blurry security camera footage from outside some building, light pouring onto the street. The sidewalk empty, I watched as the camera glitched and a moment later Phillip stood talking to something, that section of the screen a black void. Pulsing, glitching, continuing for several seconds. The screen was slowly covered in what might as well have been static, and after several seconds showed an empty street. The video cut to another camera, Phillip running, static forming, and the cycle repeating until the footage stopped.

  “I need to call The Lady about this,” I muttered, rubbing my mouth at the sight, “this is the sort of thing she needs to get under wraps, before anyone looks at it too hard.”

  “Before you do that, I noticed something else,” Percy explained, clicking over on his laptop to another video. Opening the file, he kept it paused as he explained, “the time stamp on the video looked familiar, and I recognized the cafe. Martin had asked if I could be out of the house for a while, I was there all night fucking with webcams and stream overlays.”

  “Why were you doing that?”

  “I have a channel, I review horror novels, sometimes play games,” the man brushed off, looking a little embarrassed before quickly adding on, “it was for a class a couple semesters ago, I decided to keep doing it, that’s really not important. The point is I checked my webcam tests, where I was playing with some filters, and picked this up during one of them. At first I thought something was just wrong with the footage, but after seeing that security footage…”

  He clicked play, and I was greeted by a video of Percy sitting at a table, sipping a cup of coffee as he looked at the camera with some filter obviously put over it, the window visible behind him. Holding up a couple books, mocking gestures and pretending to talk as the steady music of the cafe went in the background. The video started to glitch, and behind him I saw two figures, only visible in small portions and quarter seconds at a time until the video ended.

  “I know it’s not much, but I’ve been going through frame by frame and I think I might be able to piece together a picture of whoever he was with,” Percy said, sounding a little hopeful as he nodded to the laptop.

  I nodded, clicking my tongue a few times, and told him, “I think The Lady might know someone who can pull this apart faster. Do it better than we could have. Can you like, text it to me?”

  “I, no, you don’t text something this big,” Percy said, looking at me in confusion for a long moment, “you have an email?”

  “I think so?” I said, frowning as I pulled out my phone. The Lady had largely worked in physical files, and every time I’d needed Allie to send me something she’d brought it over physically. This was a bit embarrassing, and flipping through the apps I opened the email and confirmed it had my name on it as I tilted it for him to see. “This work?”

  “Mary Jameson,” Percy read out, making a brief face of disgust as he typed the address in, “does that mean you two are…you know…together, together? You…there’s a kid as your screensaver, can you explain that please?”

  Oh, wait no yeah that was a bad look. Jameson had been my human last name, something I hadn’t felt weird about taking on when I had to pick a new human name. I’d also not been planning to ever be put in this fucking position though, so that was sort of on me. Fuck how was I supposed to explain a kid? They were going to question that when they found out…

  “It’s complicated,” I admitted, perhaps making it more complicated than needed, “I…things are complicated. I wish I could explain, but…”

  “Better to have everyone there,” Percy agreed, setting the laptop aside with a small sigh. We sat in silence for a moment, and he shook his head as he asked me, “does he ever…does he miss us?”

  I nodded, a bolt of pain shooting through my chest as I tried to not wonder what life had been like without me. I’d left them behind, abandoned everything I’d ever known, and what fucking for? Years in the Purists, a life wasted, no fucking idea how to ever be human again and now hiding who I was.

  I was going to need to tell them who I was, and they were going to learn what I was.

  I shook my head, “it’s complicated. He…you’re missed, but a lot happened after what you know, a lot happened with what you know. None of this should have happened, but…in some ways it needed to.”

  Percy chuckled at that, he fucking chuckled, and shook his head as he told me, “weirdly comforting, even if you’re refusing to say much.”

  “How about you?” I asked, getting a confused look as I tried to explain it the best I could, “why are you living here? I…Hawk said you were like a brother, not actually one?”

  “After the bastard disappeared his dad was in a bad place,” Percy sighed, rising to his feet as he paced in place for a moment, “me and Leila spent a lot of time here, taking turns spending time with him keeping him on his feet. Worked out pretty well for both of us you could say, I moved into the old guest room and spent weekends here and stuff. His place was closer to the college, he needed a bit more help around the place with…well, I’ll hold off telling you that. I think that needs to all come out at once. I don’t trust Purists, current or former, and I don’t trust you haven’t brainwashed him or something, but…well, I owe hearing you out, for his sake.”

  I hated how ominous that sounded, but nonetheless I nodded and told him, “I look forward to it. I…I want us all to have a proper meeting. I wasn’t a Purist long, I want you to know that.”

  “You were still one.”

  It was a slap in the face, and with a nod I rose to my feet and told him, “we should be on our way.”

  “Don’t forget these,” the man stopped me, and I turned back with a suspicious glare before I saw what he held. The movies, stacked neatly on top of eachother and offered as he explained, “they belonged to him anyway, might as well have some reminder of home.”

  I nodded, stepping forward as I took them from him, looking up to him as I tried to think of what to say. Who I was, how I felt, what I wanted to do to help, that there was nothing to fear, none of it felt right. Nothing that could be said, I decided to rip off the band-aid and at least leave here having gotten part of my deal paid for.

  Stepping forward I leaned up and kissed the man, my former friend immediately tensing at the reaction even as I felt like throwing up. I was kissing someone who was like a fucking brother to me once, I was kissing a fucking half-one, and it was taking everything in me to not gag. I held it for a second just to make sure the kiss counted, and the moment I pulled away I heard a revolver cock.

  A barrel pressed into my stomach, and Percy asked, “why the fuck did you do that? I thought you and-”

  “It’s a long story,” I muttered, looking away as I took a step back, not sure how much I could explain with the shadows instructions as I did have the sudden urge to brush my teeth. “just…never mind. Can we please pretend this never happened?”

  “Right,” Percy muttered, slowly uncocking the revolver, “you try that again I shoot you.”

  “Please do,” I agreed.

  Percy nodded, and the two of us walked back down the stairs and went outside, getting back into the man’s truck. I leaned against the window, looking forward to the mouthwash in my bathroom, and Percy started driving as he asked, “where should I drop you off?”