“Seems about right for this place.” She heard the door slam and went to look out the doorway. Her landlord’s truck, emblazoned with Harriss & Son on the side, had just pulled in. “So I do. Harriss is here, prob’ly about the screen door.”
“Screen door?”
Oh, very nice. Macropi did an excellent “golly, I only now noticed that incredibly obvious thing in the room” routine. “Yeah, must’ve happened while I was staying downtown last night.”
“—oh.”
The expected follow-up (something along the lines of “why in the world did you sleep somewhere besides your new home last night”) didn’t come, and Lila was pretty sure she knew why. But by now, Harriss had given a cursory knock on the sagging, swinging screen door, then poked his head inside, also doing an impersonation of a man who has seen nothing strange and isn’t being inconvenienced in the slightest. “Morning!”
“It is,” Lila agreed. “Do you want some edible confetti? I’d offer you the fairy bread, but it’s possible I gobbled it all down.”
Harriss wrinkled up his nose, which was broad and almost flat. His small dark eyes peered up at Macropi, as the diminutive fairy bread peddler topped him by two inches. “You still handing that stuff around, Mama Mac? Think I still got some sprinkles in my beard from the last time.”
“It’s hardly my fault your kind are sloppy eaters,” Macropi retorted.
Harriss let out a cheerful hoot. “My kind wipes the floor with your kind and has for, oh, as long as the planet’s had life? So, millions and millions of years? Yeah.” Harriss was short but powerfully built, like a bearded fire hydrant. He was close to bald; the only hair on his head was scattered clumps almost the exact texture of his full black beard.
“Utter nonsense.”
Lila let out a discreet cough to refocus the chat. “Caw-CHAWWWW! So, the door,” she prompted.
“No worries, no worries,” he assured her. “I’ll have it fixed for you real quick. My son’s here to help me.”
“How is Harry?” Macropi asked with bright-eyed curiosity.
Harriss’s friendly expression sagged. “Still living at home.”
“Ah. Well. It’s…it’s nice to have your son so close! He won’t always be there, you know.”
“Don’t tease,” he sighed.
“I thought you were going to bribe—” Macropi coughed. “I thought you were going to encourage him to leave home once he got his pilot’s license?”
“That was Plan D. We’re deeper into the alphabet now.”
Lila decided it was time to jump back in. “Well, that’s swell. Sorry to inconvenience you first thing in the morning.”
Harriss shrugged. “No problem.”
“And take you away from the rest of your family.”
Harriss shrugged again. “They’re sick of my face anyway.”
“Understandable,” Macropi said with a sniff, then ruined it with a smile.
“It’s true!” a male voice, presumably Harry Harriss, bellowed from outside.
“Anything else?” the elder Harriss asked, clearly dying to fix the hell out of anything Lila might name: the door, random cabinets, her juvie record. “Any problems?”
“Aside from my screen door yanked off its hinges my first night?” She paused and realized they were both staring her down, waiting wide-eyed for…what? A confession? A loan? A declaration of intent to vacate the premises? “Nope.”
“Oh.”
“Great!” This from Harriss, who beamed like someone had just handed him a check instead of a repair bill. He still had that odd odor about him, which she had noticed when he showed her the house. It wasn’t unpleasant, just…tangy? Like a pickle. A clean pickle. “I’ll get to it, then.”
“So you had a…quiet night? Before you left?”
“Soooooo quiet,” Lila assured her.
“You didn’t see anything unusual?” Macropi persisted.
“Not a thing,” she lied with a bland smile. No one—no one on this fucking earth—could lie like Lila. She’d done it to save lives—not just her own—and once she understood the power of conviction paired with conventional good looks paired with a high stress threshold, that was fucking that. There was a time and place for the truth. This wasn’t it. “I feel like I could stay here for-ev-er.”
Take note, friendly weirdos.
Chapter 7
When trouble returned, Lila was ready.
“Finally,” she told the cub–girl. “Been waiting half the day.” For the other one—the scruffy hunk she’d booted into the basement—but she wasn’t about to tell the kid that. And she certainly wouldn’t let the kid know how disappointed she was. Lila figured that was the worst emotion to show a runaway.
She wasn’t just disappointed, she realized. She was actually crushed that it was the kid and not the green-eyed stranger. She couldn’t get him or the wolf out of her head. If she wasn’t so confused, she’d be terrified. He broke in. He’s after a child. You shouldn’t be intrigued, you should be scared and disgusted. And then, the voice of her mother: Get your head straight.
“You remember I have a front door, right? And a back door? The screen door’s been fixed and everything.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I only ask because you’re hung up in my basement window.”
The child grunted and wriggled forward another inch. “I’m mostly all. The way. Through,” she gasped.
“Is it possible that you were a bear cub a minute earlier and changed back at the worst possible time?”
“I couldn’t help it!”
“Couldn’t help it? So that…” Lila gestured at her. “That just happens? Anytime? Or during a full moon?”
“What’s the moon gotta do with it? Usually I mean for it to happen,” she mumbled. “But sometimes I slip.”
“Might as well slip down here, then.” Lila reached up, caught the kid–cub under her armpits, and pulled with careful pressure.
“Careful!”
“I am,” she almost-but-not-quite snapped, then carefully lowered the kiddo to the cement floor.
The child blinked up at her in the basement’s poor light. “D’you have pizza? Last night you talked about pizza.”