

Copyright

eBooks are not transferable.

They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Autumn

Copyright © 2013 by Ashley MacLennan

ISBN: 978-1-939291-00-4

Edited by Sasha Knight

Cover by Kanaxa

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Sierra Dean. electronic publication Smashwords Edition: June 2013

www.sierradean.com
Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

About the Author

Coming Soon

Autumn

Dog Days - Book 1

Sierra Dean

For Adeline Leia Cote

My dearest Addie, I haven't been able to dedicate any books to you because you're much too young to read Auntie's other work. This one is for you. You are my favorite person in the world, my dear. Please know that you can and will achieve greatness in your life.

Love you always.

**Chapter One  
**

If Eloise Whittaker had to narrow down the worst things ever in her life to a list, the top three would go as follows:

3) Uncooked chicken. When it's all, like, pink in the middle? Gross.

2) Her father dying. Which was really tied for number one with...

1) Moving because her dad died.

She'd honestly rather eat a thousand raw chickens than be stuck in the front of a stupid U-Haul, driving for a million miles with her mom from Fresno to Texas. Texas. It was like moving to Jupiter. She was going from having a life that involved sun and easy access to Starbucks, to living in a town called Poisonfoot.

Poisonfoot.

Seriously, what kind of name was that? It sure sounded like a red-carpet, welcome-wagon kind of place. Welcome to Poisonfoot, Texas. Get out.

Lou propped her bare feet up on the dash of the car and pushed her pink Wayfarer sunglasses onto the top of her head. She'd been struggling for hours to find a comfortable position but was finding it impossible to get into a groove. The seat of the rental moving truck was lumpy, and the air conditioning didn't work, making her sweaty and miserable.

More miserable than the move alone.

They were barely halfway through Nevada, and already she was missing things. Their house, her used RAV4 they'd had to sell before the move, and all the friends she'd grown up with who would be moving on to their junior year next week without her.

Who was going to veto Priss's texts when she wanted to tell Bobby Fletcher his hair smelled good? Who would Kel and Anthony turn to for insight into the female mind? And who would Parker Davenport take to junior prom now that she wouldn't be there?

Everyone promised to keep in touch with texts and Facebook, but Lou knew the reality of her situation. Out of sight, out of mind. Soon enough they'd be saying, "Remember Lou?" and not long after that, "Lou who?"

She sighed, bumping her head against the seat.

"You okay, sweetie?" her mom asked, not looking away from the dusty highway in front of them.

"Real answer or smiley answer?"

"Real answer, of course."

"This sucks."

Her mother frowned and tightened her grip on the wheel. "Eloise, we've talked about this."

"I know, but you said real answer."

"I suppose I did. But you know we had to do this. We couldn't afford that house, not without your dad's income, and especially not after the hospital bills."

Lou didn't know all the details. She was only sixteen, which was old enough to drive but not old enough to decide if she got to keep her car. From what she'd gathered listening to her mother's tense phone conversations with lawyers, her father's six-month stay in the hospital had very nearly bankrupted them. At least badly enough they'd had to sell the house and didn't make enough money from it to buy another one.

It wasn't bad enough her dad had died, she'd had to lose her home and everyone she knew, too.

She was grateful to still have her mom, but sometimes she resented everyone involved with this stupid move. Why didn't her mom have a real job? Why didn't they have better insurance—wasn't that the whole point of insurance? And more than anything, why had some stupid, idiotic, pointless higher power decided to give her dad cancer and not provide him the strength to beat it?

The world sucked.

And now they were moving to Poisonfoot to live with Lou's grandmother—her father's mother—who had been "kind enough" to invite Lou and her mother to live with her. "Kind enough" was her mom's phrase for it.

Sounded more like perpetual punishment to Lou.

She hadn't been to Poisonfoot since she was six. Ten years was a long enough absence she had only the foggiest memories of the place. She recalled sweet tea with lemon and her grandmother making grits—not a fond memory, that one—and the dark, musty staircase she hadn't been allowed to explore. Everything else was snippets—blue-and-white china wallpaper in the dining room and a stuffed owl over the fireplace—things that didn't paint a whole picture.

Lou had better memories of Granny Elle—the Eloise she'd been named after—from the visits she'd made out to Fresno. But Granny Elle, like Lou's memories of Texas, sometimes felt more like a dream than a real thing.

She wasn't the kind of warm and cuddly grandmother who snuck candies and dollar bills into Lou's hands while no one was looking. That's how Grandma J—her mom's mom—had been before she got Alzheimer's.

Both her grandfathers had died long before she had a chance to remember anything about them, even fragments. She had a picture of Grandpa Chuck—her mom's dad—holding her as a baby, but that was it. Granny Elle's husband, Ronald, was rarely discussed and usually in hushed tones.

Sure, all families were supposed to be crazy in their own way, but Lou got the feeling her dad's family had been extra nuts. Why else would he have bailed after high school?

Oh, right. Because he'd lived in Poisonfoot.

Lou adjusted again, sitting in a cross-legged yoga pose on the seat, and pulled the elastic out of her hair, untangling the messy bun she'd made that morning. Her hair was getting long—maybe a bit too long now that it fell halfway down her back—and not for the first time she debated the merits of chopping it all off for some bold, edgy pixie cut. Maybe she'd dye it blue or something.

But her father had loved her hair, always doing it in long braids for her as a child and telling her it made her look like an elf from Lord of the Rings. Whenever she considered cutting it, she thought of his last attempts to braid it, when he was so weak he could barely lift his hands off the hospital mattress, and she chickened out.

Like cutting it off would strip away those memories.

Her hair was still damp—both from the morning's shower and the sweat beading on the back of her neck—so she finger combed it then pulled a Dodgers baseball cap out of her bag and plopped it on her head, cramming a messy ponytail through the hole at the back.

The hat was another link to her father. He'd been a big baseball fan, which was how she wound up with her slightly too boyish nickname. Lou Whittaker had apparently been some impressive, famous baseball player a thousand years earlier, and her father had taken to calling her Lou as a kid. It stuck, and she liked it better than Eloise, so she began using it on herself, and after sixteen years the only people who regularly called her Eloise were her mother and her grandparents.

"Can we stop? I'm dying for a Coke."

Her mother started to sigh, then stopped mid-breath, perhaps thinking better of it. "I saw a sign for a rest stop. We can pull in there for a break and to check the GPS, make sure we're on track."

Ten minutes later they pulled into a dusty gas station on the side of the road with honest-to-God tumbleweeds bumping up against a rusted old truck.

"I feel like we're about to drive into a bad sequel for The Hills Have Eyes," Lou muttered, kicking her feet into well-worn flip-flops before climbing out of the U-Haul.

"Which one was that?"

"Mutants who kidnapped tourists to make them into, like, baby-making machines."

"Eloise. Who let you watch that?"

"Auntie Roan." Lou smiled, knowing her mother shouldn't be shocked. Auntie Roan was Lou's only aunt and her mother's younger sister. She had a bad habit of treating Lou more like a buddy than a child, so it should have come as no surprise she'd let teenage Lou watch horror movies.

The stuff she watched by herself on Netflix was ten times worse, but she didn't bother pointing that out to her mom, lest the parental controls be enabled.

"I need to pee, I'll be right back."

"Don't go too far," her mother warned. "I'll gas up and get us some drinks. Coke?"

"Diet Coke. And Twizzlers. Oh, and maybe a magazine?" Lou was already halfway around the back of the building, so she didn't hear any of her mother's protests.

Blessedly, the women's washroom was unlocked, but the space within was the most dismal, disgusting restroom she'd encountered yet on their trip. Discarded wads of toilet paper stuck to the filthy floor tiles, and the two sinks were stained reddish brown with rust from the leaky faucets. An overhead fluorescent bulb flickered on and off like a strobe light, swinging faintly from two chains on the ceiling.

"Ugh."

At times like this she was jealous of boys and their ability to pee standing up. If the outer area was any indication, the toilets weren't going to be terribly inviting to sit on.

She tiptoed over the mess, her feet sticking to the floor in places, causing loud squelching noises when she tried to move forward.

Pee fast and get out, she told herself, angling into one of the stalls. As expected it was disgusting, with broken white tiles on the back wall and a large dent on the inside of the metal door like someone had kicked it with a lot of force.

Weird.

Lou did her business in a hurry and got out of the stall, touching as few things as possible. As she was washing her hands, the overhead light began to flicker more erratically before shutting off completely. Lou froze, the water in her sink still running, and wasn't sure if she should keep washing or just get the hell out.

The metallic shriek of the stall door swinging settled it for her. There was no breeze or air conditioning in the bathroom, so the only thing that could set the doors swinging was someone else.

Since she'd been alone the whole time, she didn't want to know who—or what—could have snuck in without her noticing.

Lou pivoted to grab the outside door, but when her hand touched the metal knob, the overhead fluorescents snapped back on, flooding the room with light. This time they were brighter than ever, painting the walls in a sickly green hue.

Unable to resist the pull of her curiosity, Lou looked back.

Empty.

"You're being ridiculous," she scolded herself.

She stepped back to the sink to finish washing her hands, making a mental promise she'd run like hell if the lights went off again, and splashed some cold water on her face.

Maybe she'd been stuck in the car too long and was starting to get a bit stir crazy. That was a thing, right?

She looked up and screamed.

Her father—her very, very dead father—was standing right behind her.

**Chapter Two  
**

Lou jerked her head around, but the space behind her was empty, and when she turned back to the mirror, he had vanished there as well.

Her heart was hammering, and her hands trembled violently. She took one last look over her shoulder, but he was gone. A figment of her imagination, perhaps, but a cruel one.

She knew for a fact her father was dead. She'd been sitting next to him at the hospital when the machine that monitored his heartbeats had stopped making its sad mechanical beeps and settled into a flat line.

Flatline.

One green measure that signified the distance between life and death, and she'd seen her father succumb to it. She'd been holding his hand when he simply ceased to be.

So there was no doubt in her mind he'd passed. She didn't harbor any fantasies that he'd be walking back into her life. Yet she'd just seen him standing with her, and that had felt as real to her as his passing had.

She staggered out of the bathroom and into the too-bright sunshine of the Nevada afternoon, blinking away her tears by staring right at the sun. Her hands were still damp because she'd been in too much of a hurry to flee to bother with a paper towel.

Wiping her hands on her pants, she turned back to look at the unassuming wood door with a Ladies sign on the outside, half-expecting her father's ghost to burst out and start howling at her.

Nothing happened.

This had to be a sure sign she was losing her mind. Leaving Fresno had been the last straw, and her fragile psyche had decided to abandon ship. That was a totally valid explanation.

"I was starting to worry you'd fallen in," her mother called out, leaning against the hood of the U-Haul and inspecting their new GPS.

Lou plodded towards her, still too shaken up to manage a quippy retort. "Sorry."

"Can you read this thing? The only thing I managed to do was change the voice setting so now it's William Shatner." Her mother grinned, squinting at the small screen as if it was written in a different language. For all Lou knew it was, since her mother had once accidentally switched it to Mandarin.

Taking the small box from her mother, she tapped the screen to zoom out so they could have a better look at the road ahead.

"Another sixty miles, then we start going south," Lou translated.

"Thanks, baby." Her mother placed a kiss on Lou's cheek and climbed back into the truck, reattaching the GPS to the dashboard mount. Captain Kirk told them to turn right as soon as possible.

When she opened the door, a plastic bag was waiting on Lou's seat containing a bottle of Diet Coke, a big bag of Twizzlers, some sugar-free gummy bears and a new issue of National Geographic. Normally Lou might have sneered at the magazine and asked why her mother hadn't gotten her Cosmo, but she took it gladly, without argument. There was an article on a lost tribe of villagers in Borneo that sounded like just the thing to distract her from what had happened in the bathroom.

She kicked off her shoes, propped her feet on the dash then tore into the plastic package with the Twizzlers, handing her mother one before popping a second in her own mouth and gnawing on the artificial strawberry sweetness.

"You good?"

Lou wondered if her shaky fear was evident on her face, and tried to focus harder on the magazine. "Sure, why wouldn't I be?"

"Well...you didn't complain about the reading material, and you offered me candy without my having to ask. Since you are still a teenager—last I checked—this might be a sign of serious head trauma. So again, are you okay?"

Lou shifted uncomfortably under the new scrutiny. She hadn't argued about the magazine because she hadn't wanted to talk. Now that plan had backfired by arousing her mother's suspicions.

"I'm fine. Just stir crazy, I guess."

"I hope you had a decent stretch. I want to get a good long way before we take another break." Her mom started up the U-Haul and made a big show of carefully backing away from the pumps, still not all that comfortable with the giant vehicle.

"I've got this now." Lou waved the yellow magazine and continued to chew on her licorice. She rifled through her messenger bag and wrestled her iPod out, untangling the veritable string theory her headphones had transformed into. Popping the white buds into her ears before her mother had an opportunity to complain, she cranked the volume up just loud enough she could claim to be ignorant of anything said around her.

Before she'd moved, Priss had made her a playlist with enough songs to last the whole trip. Everything from sixties-era pop songs to eighties hair metal, with a bit of Jack Johnson and sad-boy-with-guitar songs mixed in to create a perfect sort of chaos.

As they pulled onto the highway, Motley Crue sang "Kickstart My Heart", but Lou didn't think she needed any extra assistance getting her blood pumping.

She closed her eyes and saw her father's face in the mirror, his cheeks hollowed from the ravages of disease and his skin an ashen shade that marked him somewhere between the living and the dead. It was how she remembered seeing him last when he'd still been alive.

In the bathroom his mouth had opened as if to speak, a black gaping hole that might well contain the answers to all the questions plaguing her.

Why did he die? Why were they moving to Texas? Why hadn't he fought harder?

But she hadn't stayed long enough to hear what he might tell her.

If he had been real and not a sign she was losing her mind, then she'd missed possibly her only chance to say whatever it was she needed to say, and to hear what he had to offer. Instead of listening, she ran.

Maybe that's what her life was going to be now, a long series of events she was simply going to flee from.

She turned the volume up and let Vince Neil's high-pitched voice distract her as she counted telephone poles and tried to imagine what hell was waiting for her at the end of the road.

**Chapter Three  
**

Earthquake.

It was the first semi-rational thought to come into Cooper Reynolds's mind when his bed began to bounce violently. Instead of getting up to hide in a doorframe or protect himself in any logical manner, he threw his pillow over his head and closed his eyes, hoping the trembling earth would respect his five more minutes policy.

"Get up, you lazy jerk. Up, up, up." His sister Mia's voice was distinctive even through the muffled mass of fabric and feathers blocking his ears. She was only fifteen but had the husky tone of a sixty-year-old jazz singer, all raspy and a bit too deep for her tiny frame.

"Screw off, Mia, I'm sleeping."

She continued to bounce, and her bare feet against his calf were freezing. Cooper sat up and whacked her with his pillow.

"I said, screw off, Mia."

"You're up now, may as well come have breakfast." She hopped down, sticking the landing nimbly, and dashed into the hall before he could hit her again.

For a moment Cooper considered rolling over and going back to bed, but he was upright, and he did smell a little foul. Maybe a shower and a good breakfast wasn't such a bad idea.

Once he was clean-ish and his dark brown hair wasn't in such a state of disarray, he lumbered down to the kitchen and pulled up a chair at the island. Saturday was one of the rare days his mom didn't have to work, so it was nice to look forward to a breakfast that wasn't cold cereal.

Mia was scrounging through the fridge, her nearly black hair pulled away from her face in a messy bun, and she was still wearing her penguin-print pajama pants and her volleyball shirt from the previous season. She handed their mother a bottle of milk and a carton of eggs.

"Pancakes?" Cooper asked hopefully, rubbing some stubborn sleep from his eyes.

"French toast." His mom smiled at him over her shoulder, her short dark hair perfectly styled in spite of the early hour. "Is that okay?"

He shrugged. "All tastes the same with syrup on it."

"Your enthusiasm is touching." She laid strips of bacon onto a cookie sheet and put it in the oven, trading it for another sheet of already crispy meat. When the oven door opened, the kitchen was filled with the salty, delicious fragrance of bacon, and Cooper's stomach growled audibly

"Here." She dabbed the tops of the strips with a paper towel then dumped them onto a plate, placing it in front of him. "You two dig in."

He saw the way her mouth curved into a frown when she said two and knew without a doubt she was thinking about Jeremy. He didn't mention his brother's name because it had become second nature to pretend Jer hadn't existed, but seeing the way her face momentarily let the pain show through, Cooper knew she hadn't forgotten.

Mia snatched the first piece of bacon off the plate and climbed up on the kitchen counter, reaching into the spice cupboard to hand their mother cinnamon and the family French toast secret—cardamom.

The other guys on the team might tease him for knowing what went into baking, but that would have required them to spend any time with him outside school.

When the first piece of soggy bread hit the skillet, a satisfying hiss swam through the air and with it the sweet, satisfying scent of bread. Since Mia was up on the counter, Cooper moved to the fridge to find the syrup and grabbed a half-full carton of OJ while he was at it.

Extra pulp.

Gross.

He put it back on the shelf and closed the door, plunking the syrup down next to the bacon plate.

"Are you guys getting excited for school next week?"

Cooper's gaze wandered to the family calendar on the fridge door where First Day of School was written in big red marker on September third. He wasn't sure if Mom had written it that big because she was excited to be rid of them, or so she wouldn't forget. It could have gone either way.

"Meh," Mia said, her fifteen-year-old grasp on linguistics managing to summarize both their feelings in one syllable.

Technically, Cooper had already been back for a couple of weeks. Team practices started in the height of August heat because the football team had to be ready for games when school began. If there was one thing his school took seriously, it was the pride of their athletics department.

A football season in Texas was no laughing matter.

Cooper crunched on his bacon until he realized his mother was staring at him, waiting for his response. "Oh. Yeah, sure. I guess."

She turned back to the skillet, sighing, "My son, the wordsmith."

It was Cooper's senior year, so perhaps she was expecting more jubilance, but it was hard to be psyched about going to school when no one really talked to him.

He'd done what he could to fit in, joined the right teams, did well in class—but not so well he'd be branded a nerd—and avoided stepping on toes, but sometimes he felt his mere presence was a problem for those around him.

Mia had taken a different route. After Jeremy left, she'd dyed her hair black, gotten rid of any color in her wardrobe and started spending her time with Max Dawson and his clan of weirdo goth kids. It seemed to work okay for her. She had people to sit with at lunch, and Max always had spare eyeliner for her to borrow.

They ate breakfast in relative silence, since Mom seemed to understand she wasn't going to get too much out of them as far as chitchat went. She was out of practice with them, considering they only saw her once or twice a week when there wasn't some emergency situation at the Poisonfoot Sheriff's office.

"Oh," she exclaimed, taken by a sudden thought. "Do you guys need school supplies?"

"Mom, we're not seven," Mia said. "We don't need new colored pencils."

"But new binders? I don't even know what you might need. Pens?"

"We have pens," Cooper assured her.

It didn't matter. She was on her feet and looking in her purse before they could convince her they were fine using last year's binders and calculators. When she returned to the table, she was holding her wallet. "Cooper, take your sister shopping."

"Mom," Mia protested, clearly horrified by the idea of being at the mall with her brother. For Cooper, his only complaint was missing an afternoon watching baseball when the Rangers were playing the Yankees. He didn't much care who saw him out shopping with Mia.

Their mother handed Cooper her credit card. "Don't go too crazy, but get some new notebooks, and pick out some new clothes. Something with a little color," she added pointedly to Mia.

"Black is a color."

"Black is the absence of color," Cooper corrected. "Don't they teach you anything in science anymore?"

Mia stuck out her tongue. "Why does he get the credit card?"

"Because he won't spend it getting something pierced," their mother replied

Mall was a polite term for what Poisonfoot had. The closest real shopping was in Laredo, and that was too much of a drive on a normal day, let alone one Cooper hoped to salvage in some way. He so rarely got a break from practice, all he wanted to do was sit on the couch, snarf Doritos and watch baseball.

The mall had a Walmart—quite a scandalous addition when it had moved in three years earlier—a hair salon, a grocery store, and a handful of specialty clothing and goods stores. The local video rental place had closed earlier that summer, meaning if Cooper wanted any new Xbox games, he now had to part with allowance money to buy them.

He'd wanted to get a job, but his football schedule didn't leave enough time for one.

Mia had her phone out the whole drive over and didn't let up texting once they were inside.

"Who are you talking to?" he asked, not bothering to mask his annoyance.

"Max."

"Is he telling you what kind of nail polish would look best with your complexion?" Cooper teased.

Mia didn't look amused. "Gay jokes? Could you be more Texas cliché, Coop? Next thing I know you'll be joining the NRA and voting Republican." She slipped her phone into her purse and shook her head so her long black bangs covered her eyes.

"Jesus, Mia. I was joking. And besides, it wasn't a gay joke. It was an observation that your boyfriend wears more makeup than you do."

She huffed.

"What's wrong with the NRA? I remember you shooting guns with me and Dad when you were little."

He knew he'd made a mistake the second the D word left his mouth. Much like the Reynolds family's ban against discussing Jer, they also didn't bring up their absentee patriarch.

The men in their family had a long-standing tradition of bailing, and the ones left behind were well-practiced in the art of pretending it never happened.

Cooper quickly covered his ass by adding, "And shouldn't your Democrats be happy there's a society that labels gun owners?"

"Your Democrats?" Mia snapped, and Cooper let out a sigh of relief. Playing the political card had been a good call. "How can you be so ignorant?"

Politics was a hot-button issue for Mia. At fifteen she fancied herself quite liberal, and by extension determined anyone who wasn't had to be a Republican. Being Republican, in Mia's opinion, was about as evil as being a Satanist. Cooper reminded her, "I'm seventeen, Mia. I don't vote."

"And in a year, when you can? Are you still going to be stupid about it?"

Cooper wanted to point out it would be at least three years before he'd have to vote in a major national election, but he'd probably get a list of all local elections he'd be expected to participate in before then.

Mia would need a bigger purse if she was going to carry her soapbox with her wherever she went.

"I'm not trying to pick a fight with you," he said, trying to take the high road. "Look, why don't we go to Walmart and get some new school stuff, and when we're done there, I'll take you to that thrift store in Collinwood you like."

Mia stared at him thoughtfully. He knew it wasn't in her nature to back down from an argument, but he also knew she had no way to drive to Collinwood to buy flowy skirts and black tops that made her look like a witch or a reject from a Fleetwood Mac album cover.

"You're not going to make me buy notebooks with flowers or dolphins on the cover, are you?"

"What the hell do I care what kind of notebooks you buy? I'm not mom. And do you think she cares if your binder is girlie? She carries a gun, for crying out loud."

"But she does have pink handcuffs."

Cooper rolled his eyes. "Let's just get the stuff and go. It's a twenty-minute drive to Collinwood. I'll be lucky to catch the last four innings, and that's if you don't try on a million things."

They worked their way down to the Walmart with only a brief sidetrack to the Orange Julius counter so Mia could get an enormous mocha-something smoothie, and Cooper purchased a bottle of Coke. Mia held the shopping basket when they got to the store and surprise, surprise, loaded it up with all-black goodies. Cooper was pretty sure most of his stuff from the previous year was still in passable shape, but the presence of his mother's credit card in his wallet made him feel obligated to buy something.

The sports-themed notebooks he used to favor seemed a little juvenile for his senior year of high school, so he opted for a few basic colored ones and some fancy pens he'd probably lose by Homecoming.

He was investigating a graphing calculator when a familiar voice asked, "Hey, Reynolds."

Twisting his neck, he peered over his shoulder to see the football team's starting defenseman, Lyndon Fletcher, staring at him. Lyndon looked as if he'd just staggered out of the stone ages. He was a big guy for any age, well over Cooper's six-foot height, and pushing three hundred pounds. He had a broad, flat nose and a Cro-Magnon sloped forehead that made him look permanently puzzled. Which was pretty accurate, all things considered. His hair was shoulder length and stringy, and he always smelled like Slim Jims.

"Lyndon," Cooper replied. He didn't feel like chatting with the other guy for too long, but it would have been rude to just walk away. Not that Lyndon was too big on social graces.

"You getting your school shit?"

Cooper glanced down at the calculator in his hands. Mia had wandered off down one of the other aisles—which probably meant she was actually in cosmetics—leaving him no easy escape route from the conversation.

"Yeah, helping my sister get some stuff, figured I'd grab a few things. You?"

Lyndon stared into the basket in his hands as if he'd only then realized he was carrying it. A case of Red Bull and a bag of sour cream and onion chips were partially covered by a single spiral-bound notebook.

"Sure." Ever the scintillating conversationalist.

"Well, good to see you." Cooper turned back to the shelf and replaced the calculator, then pretended to study another one.

"Hey, you hear the news?"

For a moment Cooper considered acting as if he hadn't heard the question, but it seemed unlikely to deter the course Lyndon was on, so instead Cooper asked, "What news?"

"Libby took a summer job at the school office to add some sort of, like, volunteer bullshit to her college applications or whatever." Libby Tanner was Lyndon's on-and-off-and-on-and-off girlfriend. Last Cooper had heard they were off, but apparently that didn't stop Libby from talking to her ex. "Anyway, she said yesterday they got a new transcript."

"Okay." Cooper had no idea what the point of this was, and it hardly qualified as news.

"New transcript means new student," Lyndon explained, like Cooper was the slow one of the two of them.

That was news. "Did Libby get a name?" The last time they'd had a new student had been in middle school, and in spite of four years passing since Malik had come to them from Pittsburgh, he was still called the new kid. That was how rarely new students came to Poisonfoot.

"Eloise something."

"Eloise?" Cooper wrinkled up his nose, conjuring a mental image of a chubby girl with pigtails and Coke-bottle glasses. For some reason his mental Eloise also had a French beret. He blamed Mia's childhood storybooks for that one. "That doesn't sound too promising."

Lyndon shrugged. "I dunno, man. It's just a name. Doesn't mean she can't be a hottie."

There were scarce pickings at their school to begin with, and those girls were ones Cooper had spent his whole life around. It barely mattered that he'd known them almost since the womb, because none of them spoke more than five words a week to him.

If there was a new girl, it might not make a difference if she had six eyes and a mustache. If she was willing to talk to him, she'd already be an improvement.

"She's a junior. Coming from California."

California? Why in God's name would someone leave California to come to Poisonfoot? "Why?" was all Cooper managed to verbalize.

"Libby said there was something in the transcript about counseling for bereve...um, ber...you know. When someone croaks?"

"Bereavement?" Cooper offered.

"Yeah, that."

So this mystery Eloise was coming here because someone she knew had died. Awesome. A broken chick with an ugly name.

At least Malik wouldn't have to be the new kid anymore.

**Chapter Four  
**

The sun seemed to vanish the moment Lou and her mom crossed into Texas. It was still midafternoon, but a wall of clouds met them at the border and kept following them the whole way through the state. They'd spent the night in a dive motel just off the highway, and Lou's body was still aching from the lumpy mattress. She might not be thrilled about moving, but at least tonight she'd get to sleep in a real bed.

"Hon, before we get there, I need to tell you something about your grandma."

"I already know not to play my music loud and to be polite."

Her mother gave a thin smile. "And while I appreciate that, it isn't what I meant."

Lou pivoted in her seat, pulling both ear buds out. Her mother's grim expression brought a wave of anxiety crashing over Lou that made it difficult for her to breathe.

"Is she dying?" It was now Lou's greatest fear that the people in her life were suddenly going to expire. Hadn't her father seemed healthy enough until the cancer took him? Granny Elle was old. What if she was about to find out her grandmother's days were numbered?

"What? No. Oh, honey, no." Her mom took her hand and gave it a squeeze. "I'm sorry. Nothing like that. It's just your grandma, is...well, she's a bit weird."

"Aren't most old people?"

Mom laughed. "Yes, that's true. But Elle...she has some strange superstitions, and she was raised a lot differently than you or me. If she says anything that seems crazy to you, just go with it, okay?"

"Like what?" Now that death was no longer a concern, Lou wanted to know what kind of kooky madness she was moving in with. Plus she got a kick out of adults gossiping about each other.

"Oh, I don't know. She thought we ought to have moved home when your dad got sick. She was convinced coming to Poisonfoot would save him." She shrugged. "Power of prayer or something? Anyway, I just wanted to warn you about it so she wouldn't upset you if she brought it up. She's quite into the herbal healing and holistic stuff."

"Are you calling Granny Elle a witch?"

Her mom snorted and held her hand out for a handful of Cheetos. "Pretend I didn't laugh at that."

"Then I'll pretend you didn't imply it."

When they finally pulled into Granny Elle's driveway, it was near sundown on Saturday night. The house was situated on the outskirts of town and set back in the woods, so it was impossible to see the road from the house and vice versa. When they wound up the gravel path, Lou was sure there should be flashes of lightning in the background and a howling, moody soundtrack on the radio.

The place looked like it had fallen out of a Gothic horror novel and been transplanted into West Texas.

It was Victorian in style with a big wraparound porch that was at complete odds with the two turrets on either side of the house's front wall. The turrets rose to points, with pristine green shingles blending into the color of the surrounding trees. One roof had a weather vane shaped like a howling wolf, and the other had a tall spire sticking up into the air.

Juxtaposed with the old architecture was the satellite dish mounted under a window on the turret wall.

The white paint had faded to a gray shade over the years, but it didn't appear to be peeling. Considering the house was owned by a woman in her eighties it was in remarkably good shape.

Lou swung her messenger bag over her shoulder and tucked her hair into her Dodgers cap. She followed her mom from the truck up to the front porch, but before either of them could knock, the screen door swung open and the familiar figure of Granny Elle filled the frame.

"Well ahn't you two dahlings a sight for sore eyes," she drawled, drawing them in for a tight hug, showing surprising might for someone of her stature. Granny Elle was short and plump, her white hair framing her face in quintessential grandma curls. She hadn't yet started using glasses, claiming her eyesight was still perfect. But otherwise she might as well have been the photo in the dictionary next to grandmother.

Dress her in red and white fur and she could have easily passed for Mrs. Claus.

"Are y'all hungry? I wasn't sure when you'd arrive, so I've just been cooking all day." She chuckled and wiped her spotless hands on the apron she had strung around her waist. "Oh my, Miss Eloise. Take off that nasty cap and let Granny Elle have a good look at you."

Lou obliged, removing the hat and shaking her hair loose so it tumbled around her shoulders.

"My my my." Granny Elle looked her over, pinching her chin so Lou was forced to turn her head side to side. She felt like one of the dogs at those silly exhibitions on TV. Like she was a pug whose full name was Lady Princess Whittington Rosebud Arabesque the Fifth or something. She smiled politely at her grandma. "Well, you've become a beautiful young woman, you know." She said beautiful as bee-oooo-tiful.

"Thank you, Granny Elle."

The smell of fresh bread wafted out from the kitchen, and Lou's stomach growled.

"Mary Anne, haven't you been feeding this girl?" Granny Elle scolded.

"More often than you could possibly imagine," Lou's mother countered, mirroring Lou's patient smile.

"Well come on in, ladies. Food's ready. We'll unload you once we've eaten. I asked some of the gents in town to stop by in the morning to help with the furniture. It simply wouldn't do to have us girls doing heavy lifting." She clucked her tongue at the very idea. "And Miss Eloise, don't you worry. I called that new school of yours to make sure your records came through, and they ahh just so excited to have you. I made sure the nurse knew what to expect."

Lou frowned. She knew Granny Elle meant well, but she didn't like the idea of her grandmother discussing her health with a total stranger. Provided she took good care of herself, the nurse never needed to be involved in the situation, so why was Granny Elle making such a big deal out of it?

"Elle, you didn't need to do that. I'd already confirmed the transfer weeks ago, and I spoke to the nurse about her medical needs." Lou's mom was trying to keep her composure—Lou recognized the strain around her mouth—but if Granny Elle noticed the annoyance, she didn't acknowledge it.

"Thanks," Lou said again, hoping to diffuse the pressure brewing between her mother and grandma.

After Granny Elle had stuffed them with homemade buttermilk biscuits and pulled pork—and her grandma had applauded her for not being one of those vegetarian hippies—they started hauling bags and small boxes off the U-Haul. Or, more specifically, Lou and her mom unloaded bags and boxes while Granny Elle offered them suggestions on how to best use their knees when lifting.

Since it was already getting dark, they focused primarily on boxes labeled Necessity, and the rest could wait until Granny Elle's manly assistants arrived in the morning.

The big house was three stories tall and contained dozens of rooms, so Lou was grateful to learn she and her mother wouldn't be staying in side-by-side bedrooms. Her mother's suite was on the second floor at the top of the stairs and had its own small bathroom. She helped her mom dump some duffle bags and small boxes inside the door but was too anxious to see her own space for her to focus on what the décor looked like.

"Eloise, I thought—seeing as you're a teenager and all—you might want a little privacy from us silly old ladies." Granny Elle was redeeming herself by the minute. "I had Russell put up some drywall in the attic. Made sort of a loft space. That's still hip, right?" Her grandmother winked and started up the stairs. At the back of the main hall on the third floor was a small, narrow wooden door. Granny Elle cracked it open to reveal a wrought-iron spiral staircase.

She stepped back and let Lou go up first.

Lou jogged up the steps, each footfall ringing against the metal, until she emerged in the attic. The stairs were built into one of the two turrets, and someone had done a remarkable job remodeling the space to keep it from looking too much like an attic.

The walls were newly painted in an off-white color that reminded Lou of the inside of fresh bread, and along the inner the curve of the turret, a window seat had been built with a bookshelf underneath it and a stunning view of the woods surrounding Granny Elle's home.

"Oh, Elle, are you sure this space isn't too big for her?" Mom asked, surveying the room.

"Nonsense. I have so much room, and she deserves a space of her own. Besides, I had Russell install an intercom system, so we can holler on up whenever we need her."

Easily half of the existing attic had been used, meaning the room ran the entire front length of the house, giving Lou not one but two turret views—the second had a big, overstuffed armchair in it facing out to focus on the woods. There were built-in shelves and dressers, and in the center of the room, under a bank of windows, was a brand-new queen-size bed in a wrought-iron frame, just like the stairs.

For someone who had spent her entire life sleeping on a twin, the bed was the most inviting thing in the whole room. Lou had no idea how someone had gotten a mattress that size up here, but she didn't care. It was hers now.

Lou flopped facedown on the bed, breathing in the smell of line-dried cotton sheets, and for the first time this trip she thought, Maybe this will all be okay.

The next day while her mom and grandmother caught up over coffee, Lou started hauling more of her boxes from the truck up the three flights of stairs to her new room. By the time Granny Elle left for church at noon—giving them a pass just this once—Lou was already dirty, sweaty and winded.

She was also seeing things. Whenever she passed the mirror in the stairwell up to her bedroom she swore she caught a glimpse of someone in the glass. Every time it happened, her heart leapt to her throat and scared the crap out of her. But when she stopped to check, it was just her own dust-smeared face.

After her encounter in the rest stop bathroom, she was probably letting her already overactive imagination get the best of her. But all the same, she figured it couldn't hurt to take the mirror down.

Lou hid the mirror in her grandmother's craft room and spent another hour dragging most of her clothing boxes upstairs. She got the majority of it into drawers before her grandmother arrived home with a group of big men still in their Sunday best from church.

Granny Elle introduced Lou and her mother to several of the "nicest, most respected men in Poisonfoot" and showed the men to the U-Haul. She explained that Mary Anne's items would go in the green bedroom while anything marked Lou belonged in the attic. She gave Lou a scornful look when she saw the nickname scrawled over half the boxes.

As far as Lou was concerned it was still better than Wheezy, which was what her middle-school crush Brian Fowler had called her when he learned her real first name. Needless to say she didn't have a crush on him for long after that.

To make her grandmother tone down the evil eye she quietly said, "Lou was what Dad called me."

Granny Elle's expression softened immediately. "It's not terribly ladylike," she commented, but said nothing else. Granny Elle wouldn't be calling her Lou any time soon, but perhaps now she wouldn't look like she was sucking on a lemon whenever someone else said it.

Several hours later the U-Haul was empty and the boxes had all been stowed in their designated spaces. Lou's bedroom looked like a cardboard fort, and she marveled at how she'd managed to accumulate so much stuff in only sixteen years of living.

She stared at the piles of boxes and felt all her motivation from earlier vanish. Just so she could claim she did something, she dragged a box of books over to the window seat and started sorting them onto the shelves below.

Outside, the early evening sky had clouded over, and a light rain pattered against the windows. So much for her idea to walk into town. When the last book was out of the box, she climbed into the seat, loving the squishy cushions Granny Elle had chosen, and looked into the surrounding woods.

Lou was half lost in her absent thoughts of Fresno—she would need to email Priss photos of her new room—when something on the ground outside caught her eye.

At first she thought she was imagining it because of the way the raindrops were sliding down the pane. She didn't think any larger animals would wander so close to the yard. Lou leaned nearer to the window until she fogged the glass with her breath. Frustrated, she unlatched the lock and opened the window, letting the frame swing in towards her.

Raindrops dampened her face and hair, plopping loudly on the cushions. She squinted to see through the sheets of raindrops pummeling the dirt with increasing ferocity. Lou was almost willing to admit she'd imagined the whole thing, when a small brownish-gray creature emerged from the tree line and glanced upwards.

A wolf, she thought first.

But this animal was too small to be a wolf. It was more slight of build, looking a lot more like a pet dog gone wild.

Coyote, her brain offered.

Yes, that seemed more accurate, though she couldn't recall ever seeing one in person before. The coyote looked up at her, and for a second Lou was positive it was staring at her, judging her, if such a thing were possible.

"Get," bellowed Granny Elle from the porch. "You know you ain't allowed here."

The coyote shifted its attention from Lou to her grandmother, and raised its lip in a sort of half-threatening dismissive sneer. Lou had never seen an animal act so human before.

The sound of a rifle being loaded made the animal's ears flatten, and once again Granny Elle warned, "You go on now. Get out of here and don't you come back." She fired a shot into the ground near its feet, showing it she meant business.

Growling at her, the coyote took off running into the woods.

Lou watched it go, her face wet with rain. She waited until she heard Granny Elle retreat from the porch and shut the door, waited until the last traces of the coyote were gone and Lou was just staring at the swaying trees.

She'd heard people yell at wild animals before, but never with such anger. And why had her grandmother said the coyote wasn't allowed here?

What the hell was going on?

A dark path unfolded before her, and Lou followed it without much thought. Her bare feet sank into the spongy moss and peat along the forest floor as she wandered along beneath the moonlight. The forest gave way to a small clearing, and Lou stopped in her tracks.

There in the tall grass was a woman wearing an old-fashioned purple dress, her dark brown hair wound in a crown around her head. Her eyes shone with tears, and cradled in her arms was a young boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, his pale face still and the front of his shirt coated in blood.

The woman was sobbing, shaking the boy gently, and he lolled in her arms but made no sign of responding.

He was very clearly dead.

Lou sucked in a breath, the cool dew of the grass feeling like shards of ice under the pads of her feet.

The woman buried her face against the boy. When she sat back, wailing, her cheeks were smeared with the child's blood, giving her a feral, inhuman look.

When Lou jerked awake in the safety of her bedroom, she could still see that wild, half-mad expression like a hazy memory imprinted on the inside of her eyelids.

**Chapter Five  
**

It won't be so bad, Lou told herself, parked in front of the brick edifice of Poisonfoot High School. Students were milling around on the front lawn. Granny Elle had explain that PSH served as the main high school for several surrounding small towns, so some of the students might not have seen each other for months.

Lou shifted nervously in the front seat of her grandmother's Oldsmobile. They weren't sure when she or her mother would get a car, and the Cutlass was in pristine condition since Granny Elle rarely used it. For the time being it would serve as a family car.

A very short time being, Lou hoped.

She wanted her own car again. She knew it was selfish, and she understood why she'd had to give it up, but she missed the freedom of being able to move around on her own.

Though Poisonfoot was so small, a bike would probably serve that purpose just as well.

It wasn't like she had any friends to pick up.

Her mom patted her knee for comfort. "You have your insulin?" she asked.

Lou rolled her eyes. "Yes."

"And test strips?"

"Mom."

"I wouldn't be a very good mother if I didn't ask, Eloise."

"You're a very good mother," Lou replied. "And yes, insulin, test strips, and even a granola bar. I'm good, I promise."

Her mom kissed her cheek. "That's my girl. Have fun today."

"That's highly improbable."

"Well, at least try."

Lou climbed out of the car, hugging her messenger bag to her stomach. She'd tried leaving the house with her Dodgers cap on, but Granny Elle had put a kibosh on that plan before she was through the kitchen.

"Young ladies don't wear ball caps. And they most certainly don't wear ball caps for non-Texas teams," she'd scolded.

Lou would root for the Astros or Rangers over her dead body, so she'd left the hat at home and allowed her grandmother to remove her ponytail holder as well. Her hair hung down to her lower back in waves, and she felt the urge to tie it up. Or braid it. Anything to make it less obvious.

But Lou was pretty sure no matter what she did with her hair, she was going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Her mom had just pulled away from the curb when the first person noticed her. She saw the awareness spread like a ripple until the entire population of the school currently on the lawn was staring at her and doing a poor job of pretending they weren't.

She was about ready to lower her head and make a dash for the entrance when a tall girl—really tall, like pushing six feet in flats—emerged from the group and blocked her path.

"New girl," the giantess commented, as though this was Lou's new name. "You're Elle Whittaker's granddaughter, right?"

"Yeah."

The girl offered her a hand, which was something Lou was more accustomed to adults doing when they introduced themselves. "I'm Marnie Jackson."

"Oh." Lou shook her hand firmly, remembering her father's wisdom to never give a limp handshake. "I think your dad helped move some of my boxes on Sunday."

Marnie nodded enthusiastically. "The implausibly named Jackson Jackson. He probably said his name was Jake."

"And I'd thought Jake Jackson was bad," Lou replied, hoping it wasn't the wrong thing to say.

Marnie was pretty in a nonstandard way, and looked more like an athlete than a typical Texas pageant girl. Or at least what Lou had imagined a pageant girl to look like. Admittedly most of Lou's notions about Texas were from TV and movies, so she wasn't sure what to expect from anyone.

With straight, white-blonde hair and big blue eyes, the only thing that kept Marnie from being stereotypical were her hard features. She had broad shoulders and a strong nose and chin, making her look tough instead of dainty.

Her handshake would have done Lou's dad proud.

"Do you have a name, New Girl?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry. I'm Lou."

"Lou?"

"It's short for Eloise."

"Ahhh, now Lou makes more sense. Well, Lou Whittaker. Welcome to your new school. Don't mind the gawkers, they should get used to you at some point before graduation."

Lou noticed with Marnie's arrival people had stopped staring so boldly and were now casting surreptitious glances at her while whispering.

Marnie looped an arm around Lou's shoulder and guided them both towards the entrance of the school, waving to the group she'd been standing with prior to this surreal interaction.

"Tell me about yourself, Lou-not-Eloise."

"Um, I'm a junior?"

"Samesies!" Marnie said with an over-exaggerated wink. Lou still couldn't decide if the girl was trying to be her friend or was setting her up for some horrible first-day initiation prank.

Lou really didn't know what to tell Marnie about herself. She didn't want to lead with the diabetes thing. It came up in due course whenever she had to jab herself with a needle at lunch, but she'd rather not start by listing her weaknesses.

This was high school, after all—people would figure out her flaws soon enough.

"Play any sports?" Marnie asked.

"Not really. I was on the swim team back in California, but I wasn't that amazing."

"No swim team here, sadly. That would imply the school was willing to divert funding from football to pay for a pool. I play volleyball." As if that was a surprise given her height.

"Cool."

"Let's see your class schedule." Marnie held out her hand, and Lou passed over the folded sheet of paper she'd received in the mail via Granny Elle. Marnie reviewed it, then stared at Lou. "Are you a super genius?"

"No?" Lou wasn't sure why her schedule would imply that.

"You're taking, like, all advanced classes."

"Yeah, I guess I am."

"So, you're a super genius."

"No, I'm just... I dunno." She took her schedule back and looked at it again, trying to see it as Marnie had. AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP English, Spanish, Gym, Home Ec and regular math. "I'm not good at math," Lou offered.

"If you were, we couldn't be friends." Marnie laughed and continued to walk with Lou down the hall. "This is the office. Mrs. Downes will tell you where to find your locker. We're in the same Spanish class, and it's right before lunch. Maybe by then you'll have figured out some fun Lou facts to tell me about yourself, deal?"

"Deal," Lou replied, and then Hurricane Marnie was gone, leaving Lou alone at the entrance of the office.

After getting her welcome lecture from the school's secretary Mrs. Downes, Lou got a small photocopied map of the school and a slip of paper with her locker number and combo on it. Mrs. Downes also gave her a note to pass along to her first-period teacher since she'd be arriving in class a few minutes late and no one would know who she was.

Bypassing her locker entirely—there was nothing in it and she'd have time to fight with a combination later—she followed the map to the second floor where her chemistry class was located. Upon entering the lab, the entire room fell silent.

Her new teacher, a bespectacled middle-aged man with a tidy beard, stopped his lecture and stared at her. Everyone was staring at her.

"Sorry," Lou mumbled, and handed the teacher Mrs. Downes's note. "I'm new."

"You're also late." On the whiteboard behind him in severe red marker was that name Mr. Price. Mr. Price was not a fan of tardiness, apparently.

He looked at the note and his glower lessened but didn't fade entirely. Judging by the deep crease between his eyebrows, Lou was pretty sure frowning was a default for him.

"Class, this is El—"

"Lou," she interrupted hastily. "Just Lou."

"This is Just Lou Whittaker. Can someone kindly tell Lou what the punishment in my classroom is for being late?"

A few people snickered and whispered amongst themselves, and one girl with short black hair and eyes so big they overwhelmed the rest of her face raised a hand.

"She has to wear the goggles."

"The...what?" Lou asked. "I didn't mean to be late. It's my first day." She pointed at the note he was holding, hoping to remind him she was supposed to get a free pass on her first day.

"I don't accept excuses, Miss Whittaker. Any excuses. And after today you'll never be late again." Mr. Price walked to a large metal cabinet beside the door and withdrew a slightly yellowing pair of plastic lab goggles, tossing them to Lou.

"You expect me to wear these?"

"You will wear them if you plan to stay in this class."

"For how long?"

"Until the bell goes. Now take a seat next to Cooper, please."

Before she could ask who Cooper was, a tall boy with broad shoulders and a crop of unruly brown hair raised his hand from the back of the room and gave her a little wave. She shouldered her backpack and slipped on the goggles as Mr. Price watched. She wondered if it was too late to ask about homeschooling.

"Hey," she greeted as she climbed onto the rickety metal stool next to her new lab partner.

"Hey." He looked down at his notebook, barely meeting her gaze. She wasn't sure if he was trying to pretend she wasn't there, or if this was the only way he could keep from laughing at her.

"I want everyone to look beside them," Mr. Price directed. "Say hello to your lab partners for the remainder of this year." Some people clapped and high-fived, a few others groaned with disappointment. "Nobody moves, nobody complains. I will not accept any changes to these partnerships, so get used to it."

Lou could already tell Mr. Price was going to be her favorite teacher.

"I'm Lou," she said, trying to lure her now-partner into a conversation.

"Cooper." He flipped open a blank notebook and wrote the date in the top right corner.

"Just Cooper?"

"Aren't you just Lou?" he reminded her.

"Touché."

Finally he looked at her, propping his chin on one balled fist. "So you're the new girl, then."

"Unless there's another one. If so, I hope her day started better."

"I was expecting something...different. You don't look like an Eloise."

Lou grimaced. "How did you know my name?"

"I've got friends in high places," he replied with a coy smile. "Namely, one who works in the student records office."

"So much for maintaining my anonymity."

"Yeah, good luck with that in this town."

"Awesome."

"So, you're not hideous. I was expecting you to be hideous."

Lou stared at him, her mouth hanging slightly open. "I beg your pardon?"

"I mean, the goggles aren't helping. Especially with your mouth open like that. You kind of look like a fish."

Her mouth snapped shut.

"Yeah, there you go. Not hideous at all."

"Why would you think I was hideous?" she asked.

"Eloise is not an attractive girl name. At least not in this century."

"Cooper is a dog's name."

Cooper smiled and pointed across the room to another big guy, whose dark hair was much neater than Cooper's. "Rex." He pivoted and pointed to a thin, shorter guy with dark glasses and dyed black hair. "Max." Then to the acne-scarred kid with long blond hair. "Duke." His wandering finger settled on a girl with curly red hair and freckles. "And Princess."

"No." Lou stifled a laugh. "You made that up."

"I did not."

As if to confirm his story, Mr. Price asked, "Princess Collins, who is your partner?"

"Libby Antonelli."

"No." Lou's mouth hung open.

"So don't go telling me I have a dog name."

Lou mimed zipping her lips, then immediately ruined the image by asking, "Has anyone ever told you that people in Texas are insane?"

Cooper stuck his pen in the corner of his mouth and smiled. "Lady, you ain't seen nothing yet."

**Chapter Six  
**

Cooper wasn't exactly sure what he'd expected Eloise Whittaker to be, but a pretty, pert-nosed, adorable girl had not been it. He also hadn't expected her to talk to him.

Apparently no one had gotten to her yet, otherwise she wouldn't be wasting her breath.

Popularity was a precarious thing in high school. It was hard to come by but easy to lose, and he didn't want Lou to be labeled a social pariah just because she was ignorant enough to talk to him. Yet he wasn't quite ready to tell her associating with him was popularity suicide.

It was nice having someone—especially a girl—talk to him willingly. The guys on the team talked to him because he was a good running back and they needed him to win games. Mia's friends talked to him because they didn't care about popularity to begin with. Teachers talked to him because that was their job.

Sure, Lou was only talking to him because Mr. Price had made them lab partners, but he would take a nice conversation where he could get it. Talking to solely his mother and sister wore thin after awhile.

When class ended, Lou removed the Goggles of Shame, the deep red creases around her eyes making her look like an unmasked Lone Ranger.

Realizing she was about to leave and he might soon lose any chance to keep talking with her, he caught up to her at the door. "What class do you have next?"

"AP Bio."

"Do you know where it is?"

She held up a flimsy piece of paper showing a map of the school. "Somewhere on here? If I'm late for that one, do I have to wear a dead frog on my head?"

Cooper laughed. "No. Miss Olson will be a breath of fresh air after Mr. Price, I promise. She's really nice. I took that class last year, I'll walk you."

Lou appeared visibly relieved. "Thank you."

"So, Libby said you're a junior, but you're taking senior-level chem?" He phrased his observation like a question.

"I did pretty well in it at my old school. Guess they figured I was at the same level as the seniors."

"But not smart enough to skip to senior Bio?" he teased.

"And miss this thrilling journey of dissecting a frog?"

"In senior Bio we get fetal pigs," Cooper boasted.

"Wow. Color me impressed."

"Do you need to stop at your locker?" he asked.

She looked down at her new chemistry textbook, a hefty tome that promised to cripple someone in the class before the end of the year. "I'll manage okay until lunch."

"Brave."

"I'll consider it my warm-up before gym."

Cooper stopped them at his locker and tossed his chem text inside. He almost offered to keep hers there as well, but thought better of it. Things might get awkward when someone explained she shouldn't be talking to him. She might end up abandoning her textbook rather than bothering to ask for it back.

Perhaps he was letting his imagination get the best of him, but he had a feeling Lou wasn't going to be psyched to get walks to class with him after the day was over.

As he led them down the stairs and towards the biology classroom, he noticed a few people staring, sharing hushed discussions. Even if he hadn't been present, people would have been talking about Lou's arrival, but he was pretty sure they wouldn't have the same I guess no one told her expressions.

Lou was quiet, playing with the strap of her bag and trying to balance the big textbook.

"Here, give me that," Cooper said without thinking, and collected the chemistry book from her.

"Thanks." She dug in her bag and pulled out a granola bar, tearing open the foil and taking a big bite. It was one of those cookie-themed ones with mini chocolate chips and tiny artificial marshmallows in it.

"Did you skip breakfast?"

She shook her head and finished chewing before explaining, "I have to eat a lot during the day." Her small, shy smile indicated there was more to the story, but he figured she would have shared the rest if she'd wanted to.

"This is you." He nodded to a wood door with a small window.

"Thanks for the escort." She held out her hand, and for a second he thought maybe she was going to touch him, but instead she reclaimed her textbook.

"You planning to butt in on any other senior classes today?" He tried to play down his hopefulness, but it managed to creep in anyway.

"Sadly, no. I think if I could have gotten into middle school math I would have, but it's all eleventh grade stuff from here on out."

"Well, Lou Whittaker, it's been a pleasure. I hope those lines around your eyes fade by lunch."

He replayed their conversation in his mind a hundred times between first period and lunch. Since it was the only real interaction he had with another human being he wasn't related to, it didn't seem too pathetic to let it be the highlight of his morning.

In algebra, people moved desks to avoid him, leaving him at a two-seater by himself. During gym, one of the basketball players pretended not to see him during their warm-up run and tripped him, sending Cooper sprawling face-first to the ground. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd been in the gymnasium, but Mr. Lyons had opted for an outdoor track run. Cooper's elbows got the worst of the road rash, but he did manage to get a big scrape on his cheek. Mr. Lyons told Cooper to pay more attention while he was running. In English he avoided any issues by taking the seat right in front of the teacher's desk so he didn't have to see if people were dodging him or not. This resulted in someone calling him a brown noser, but it was hardly the end of the world.

The truth of the matter was, up until meeting Lou, he'd been totally okay with the idea of coasting through his last year of high school with blinders on. His family had never been popular, but things had gotten worse since the whole situation with Jer. Before that, people had at least feigned politeness around Cooper, being pleasant to his face but talking about his family when he wasn't around. Now, the hostility had gotten more aggressive as if people needed him to know he wasn't liked.

He'd gotten the message loud and clear. Reminders weren't necessary.

Flipping open his agenda, he scanned the calendar. His eighteenth birthday was in just over eleven months.

When he turned eighteen, nothing was going to matter at all.

He'd seen what happened to Jeremy. Any hopes he'd had of a normal future went out the window on Jer's eighteenth.

Now it was all a countdown to August 6 and the inevitable.

**Chapter Seven  
**

As promised, Marnie found Lou in Spanish and insisted they sit side by side. Lou didn't argue. If this girl wanted to adopt her as a friend, she wasn't going to turn down the companionship. She didn't know anyone in Poisonfoot, so Marnie and Cooper's easy acceptance of her went a long way towards making her feel a tiny bit more at home.

"Soooo," Marnie said, leaning across the aisle. "How was your first morning? What's the news, the gossip? Who do you like, who do you hate? Tell me everything."

"Well, I'm not a fan of Mr. Price," Lou admitted.

"God, isn't he awful? He's been a nightmare since his divorce. That man needs to get laid in a powerful way." Marnie flipped her hair over her shoulders. "That said, he's pretty hot in an old-dude way. Maybe I'll ease his suffering." She winked.

In that moment Lou decided Marnie wasn't out to get her. It wasn't the bad joke, so much, but her willingness to say something so potentially scandalous to someone she barely knew made Lou like her. Marnie reminded her a lot of Priss—bold and carefree. The exact kind of girl a quiet loner like Lou needed to balance her out.

"I met a boy," Lou said shyly.

"Ohhhh, Miss Lou, you must tell me everything. I know them all. Who is it? Tell me so I can start planning the wedding."

"He's in my chem class."

"A senior. You dirty girl."

"Says the woman who just offered to mercy boink a teacher?"

"Ahh, you were paying attention." Marnie gave a big grin.

Lou went on, "His name is Cooper."

Marnie's giddy, cheerful expression vanished. The color drained from her face, and she shook her head as if trying to chase off Lou's words. "Cooper Reynolds?"

"I don't know, he never told me his last name."

"Oh, sweetie. Cooper Reynolds is so off limits he's like Area 51."

"He has a girlfriend?" Lou was struck with the horrible notion he might be dating Marnie herself and Lou had committed the ultimate girl no-no before lunch on her first day.

Marnie snorted. "No. No one in their right mind would date a Reynolds."

"There are more of them?"

"Just Cooper and his whackadoodle sister Mia now. But they had an older brother."

The emphasis on the word had was a loaded implication that something dreadful had happened to Cooper's older brother. Lou didn't really want to know, her own loss still fresh in her mind. She was worried she might empathize too much with someone else's pain.

"So... I'm sorry, I don't get it. He's really cute."

"A bear cub is cute, New Girl, it doesn't mean you should cuddle with it." Marnie continued her story while Señor McDougal wrote his name on the board. "Look, I don't want to dissuade you from meeting new people, just the opposite. I want you to fit in. And you can't fit in if you're friends with Cooper Reynolds. You sure as hell won't fit in if you tell anyone else you like him."

Lou was crestfallen. Aside from Marnie herself, Cooper was the only other person who'd said two words to her that day. He'd carried her book, for crying out loud. It was the cutest thing to happen to her since someone had requested to dance a slow song with her in the ninth grade. Cute things didn't happen to Lou often. She'd wanted to savor this.

"What's wrong with the Reynoldses?" she asked, hoping the answer was good enough to convince her to steer clear. From what she'd seen of Cooper during their forty-five minute acquaintance, nothing had screamed psychopath to her.

"Their mom is the town sheriff."

"Okay...that's bad?"

"Well, no. I mean, she does a good job, otherwise we wouldn't keep electing her, but still."

Lou wasn't sure what the but still part meant, so she just nodded politely.

"Like, I don't want to tell you who to be friends with, Lulu, but don't be friends with him."

"Miss Jackson, am I interrupting something?"

"No, Señor McDougal, lo siento." Marnie sat back in her desk and gave Lou a sly grin.

Such rigid social strata had never been an issue for Lou before. At her old school there were popular kids, unpopular kids, and kids no one thought about—just like every high school ever—but she'd never believed she'd lose friends if she talked to the unpopular ones. She tried to imagine Priss giving her a warning like Marnie had, telling her social suicide hung in the balance if she so much as talked to a boy in the hallway.

What the hell was wrong with this town?

Lou gave Marnie a careful smile. She liked her new friend, she really did. But a four-hour friendship didn't mean she was going to pick Marnie and a bunch of strangers over Cooper.

And it didn't mean she was going to pick Cooper over them.

It was about time she figured out why everyone in the town hated Cooper and his family so much, and decide for herself if she was going to join them or ignore them.

Forty minutes later the lunch bell chimed and everyone made a mad dash out of the classroom.

"Shall we?" Marnie asked. "I have soooo many people for you to meet."

"I need to go to my locker first." Lou pointed out the stack of textbooks she'd been adding to throughout the morning. She also wanted to hit the ladies room so she could test her sugars and take some insulin without everyone staring at her. Jabbing yourself in the hip with a needle was a surefire way to make sure no one liked you on your first day. The kids back home had grown up with her illness since she'd been diagnosed at the age of ten, and they'd learned not to stare. These people were new, and they wouldn't be so polite.

"Well hurry up, and then meet us in Building 2. It's where the cafeteria is, and I can show you the gym so you're not late."

Lou found her locker and managed to get her combination to work after only three failed attempts. It wasn't easy to get the numbers right while holding a half dozen different books that each weighed twenty pounds.

She crammed the textbooks in, promising herself she'd make an attempt at organization before she left at the end of the day. The hallways were mostly empty except for a few students sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of their lockers, sharing bags of chips and peering into their Wonder Bread sandwiches.

Granny Elle had insisted on making Lou's lunch, so she was pretty sure she'd have enough food to share with the entire group when she found Marnie's table. In true grandmother fashion, Elle thought Lou was wasting away, so she'd made two different sandwiches and thrown in an assortment of fruit, chips, and cookies. Lou had put the cookies aside for later, knowing a sugar boost might come in handy after gym.

Making a quick stop in the bathroom, Lou checked her sugar and took her shot. She found herself checking the mirrors, not sure if she was hoping to see something, or was relieved to find them containing only her reflection. After she stopped checking for apparitions, she left the main school building through the back door and crossed the big field between Building 1 and Building 2.

Dozens of students were having makeshift picnics on the lawn. A few girls had rolled up their tops to get some sun on their already brown midriffs, and a small group was playing soccer near a bank of picnic tables.

At one table, sitting by himself, was Cooper the Pariah.

Lou stopped walking and shifted her glance from the doors into the cafeteria and back to Cooper. He was reading a book, one hand propped up to shield the sun from his eyes. She could keep walking and he'd never notice, but Lou knew she'd feel terrible for charging ahead now that she'd seen him.

She trotted across the lawn and plopped down across from him at the table.

"You're not a very popular guy, Mr. Reynolds."

He kept his hand over his eyes and glanced up at her, then looked beyond her as if checking for anyone else she might have brought to the party.

"The Welcome Committee got to you?"

"I've been told you're no good. I should steer clear."

He smiled, but she wasn't buying it. It was the same way people had smiled at her when they said Everything will be all right during her dad's stay in the hospital. It was a lie of a gesture, and she knew it.

"So if they said to avoid me, why are you here?" Cooper turned the book facedown on the picnic table and cocked his head slightly, regarding her with open curiosity.

"Since I got here I've spoken to two people. You and Marnie Jackson."

"Ahhh," Cooper said, as if Marnie's name was all he'd needed to hear.

"Look, I know you about as well as I know her. I like her, but I also like you." She felt her cheeks flush when she said the words. "I mean, you're my lab partner, after all."

"Many a lifelong friendship has been formed over noxious gases."

"Right. My point is, before I believe what Marnie says, I thought I'd give you a chance to state your case. Seems only fair."

Cooper lowered his hand, instantly squinting when the sunlight hit his eyes. He fiddled with the corner of the book's cover, not looking up at Lou. "What exactly did Marnie say?"

"She compared you to Area 51. And a bear cub."

Cooper glanced up, his brow wrinkled in confusion or amusement. "I don't know what to say to that."

"Why would she say you were bad news?"

He shrugged. "Why does anyone hate anyone?"

"Usually there's a good reason."

"My family has never been all that popular in this town. My dad left us when we were really young." Lou started to say she was sorry, but Cooper plowed ahead. "It's fine, I just think he got tired of what people said. They believe a lot of crazy things about us, and because of that they like to keep their distance."

"Crazy stuff like what?" Lou picked up his book so she didn't have to stare right at him. The hurt was a little too apparent in his eyes for her. It was a sci-fi novel he'd either bought used or read a thousand times. The cover was battered and the spine had been worn through in places so she could see the yellowing pages.

"Just that we're no good, that's all. Maybe they're onto something. I mean, Jer..." He stopped dead. "Never mind."

"Jer is your older brother?"

"Was."

"Oh."

"Look, Lou... I think you're nice, but Marnie is right. If you want a chance in hell of fitting in here, you shouldn't be hanging out with me." He took the book from her hand and snapped it closed as he got to his feet.

"Why?" It was like he was trying to get rid of her, which made no sense. He'd been so nice to her only that morning, and now he couldn't escape her fast enough.

He brushed his hair off his forehead, big brown eyes turning towards her.

"There's no point. I just don't... I don't have time."

"Time for what?" Lou asked, but Cooper was already jogging across the lawn.

**Chapter Eight  
**

Rather than being dissuaded by Cooper, Lou was more determined than ever to figure out what his deal was. It wasn't normal for everyone in a town to hate a whole family without reason. Granny Elle knew everyone and everything about Poisonfoot, so if anyone could tell Lou about the deep dark Reynolds family secret, it would be her.

She just had to figure out how to ask without sounding like she cared. Her grandmother had a preternatural thirst for gossip, something Lou had realized after mere days living under her roof. If Granny Elle suspected anything other than curiosity was behind the questioning, it would only result in Lou becoming the interrogated rather than the interrogator.

With the first day of class blessedly behind her, Lou dumped her school bag on the kitchen table and rummaged around in the fridge for a snack. She settled on a wedge of cheese and a jar of homemade pickles. Back at home she would have sat on the kitchen counter and munched happily over the sink, but she had a feeling if Granny Elle caught her mid-snack, she might induce a heart attack.

Putting things on a plate, she sat at the table and cracked open her first English assignment, Pride and Prejudice. She'd read it before, but a refresher couldn't hurt if she was going to be tested on the material. A pop quiz had been threatened, so she needed to be able to tell the Misters Bennet, Bingley, Collins and Darcy apart.

She was barely into the first chapter when her mind started to wander.

"Good book?" Granny Elle toddled into the kitchen with her garden apron on. Lou jumped, startled by her grandmother's sudden arrival. "My goodness, must be something else if you're so focused."

Lou forced a smile and closed the book. "Granny Elle, can I ask you something?"

"Of course, dahlin'. Anything at all."

"There's this boy at school..."

"Gracious, Miss Eloise. First day and already you're twitterpated. That didn't take long." She pulled a glass vase down from the cupboard and filled it with tap water, neatly arranging the roses she'd finished cutting.

"No, it's not like that." Lou thought of Cooper's messy brown hair and those giant eyes, and wasn't sure if she was trying to convince Granny Elle or herself. "I'm just curious about what people were saying about him."

Her grandmother stopped arranging roses and stared at her. "What were people saying?"

"They told me to stay away from him, but I don't understand why. I thought you might know what the deal was."

"The deal? My dear, what were the schools in California teaching you?"

"Sorry. What's the story?"

Granny Elle sighed, clearly not thrilled with Lou's adjustment, but she removed her apron and hung it by the back door. Late-afternoon light dappled the floor through the windows, giving the room a warm yellow glow. "What's this boy's name?"

"Cooper Reynolds."

The vase exploded on the counter, sending water and roses spreading across the linoleum floor as if they were the debris of a small tornado. Shards of glass picked up the light, glinting like tiny stars.

Granny Elle stared at the mess, her hands braced on the counter. Lou was on her feet, shocked by the suddenness of the glass breaking for seemingly no reason. She looked at her grandmother, expecting the older woman's hands to be cut up, but aside from the white-knuckled grip, they seemed fine.

"You stay away from Cooper Reynolds," Granny Elle said, her voice low and angry. "I should have said something sooner. I don't want you anywhere near the Reynoldses. Especially not that boy."

"But why?" It was the question that nagged her the most, and one that most defied answering.

"Don't question me, Eloise Whittaker. I said stay away from Cooper Reynolds and I mean it. No good can come from that association. Now stop asking silly questions and help me clean this up."

She got the dustpan from under the sink and helped Granny Elle sweep up the glass shards and rose petals. When all the debris was gone, Lou used the dishtowel to mop up the water. Still crouched by the sink, she looked up at her grandmother and asked, "Can you at least explain why?"

"Baby, can't you trust me?"

Abashed, Lou wiped her hands on her pants and stood, giving her grandmother an apologetic hug. The gesture felt forced since Lou barely knew her grandmother, apart from a few visits.

"I do trust you. I just wish people would tell me why."

"He'll leave. He might come across as charming and sweet, but he won't stick around, dahlin'. The Reynolds men, they were born to leave. They always leave. Every single one of them. I want you to trust me, stay away from him, don't get attached. Save yourself a lot of trouble because he ain't nothing but trouble."

Her grandmother appeared to be keenly aware of the personal history of the Reynolds family. Maybe it was true what people said about small towns, that there was no such thing as privacy. Yet, with a secret everyone seemed to know, no one was willing to tell her anything.

Granny Elle patted her cheek and reclaimed her apron from the back door. "Tell Mary Anne dinner is at seven. That should be plenty of time for you to finish your homework."

There were no overhead lights in Lou's new bedroom because so much natural light was let in during the day. She'd been outfitted with almost a dozen lamps to keep things bright in the evening. She was sitting in the window seat under the light of an old stained-glass lamp when she heard the first howl.

It was high-pitched and eerie, almost like a human scream at first. But the longer it rang out, the deeper notes of melancholy came through, followed by short yips. The sound was close, reminding her of the coyote she'd seen in the yard days earlier.

Lou clicked off the lamp and blinked away the haze from the light, trying to see something in the darkness. When she couldn't get a good look through the glass, she unlatched the window. Cool night air assaulted her, making the hairs on her arms rise up.

First there was only silence, and Lou thought she might have imagined the animal wailing, but then it rang out again, loud and crisp, convincing her the creature had to be nearby. Noises might carry, but this sounded so close she was amazed the coyote wasn't standing in the room with her.

She leaned halfway out the open window, chilly air stinging her face, and scoured the landscape for a sign of her vocal new neighbor. It howled again, and Lou started. The porch light flicked on, and a pair of eyes was illuminated in the darkness, cutting off the howl in the middle.

The coyote yipped and dashed into the woods.

Lou felt a slow chill creep up her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature outside.

Back in the woods, Lou was running. She cleared the tree line and tumbled forward into a dirty town square where a group of men and women had gathered, carrying lanterns and forming a tight circle.

Lou moved forward, strangely certain she wouldn't be seen. When she reached the edge of the crowd, they parted before her, giving her a clear view of what they were all gawking at.

The woman with a braid wrapped around her head like a crown was standing in their midst, holding the bloodied boy, her face stained with the red from his skin. She shook his limp body, her voice high and shrill.

"Look what has become of him," she shrieked.

A man came forward, holding his hands up as if to soothe or comfort her. She took a step backwards, and the crowd moved to accommodate the gesture.

"He has been murdered."

"Morena, calm yourself," the man said, his voice soft and low, the way one might talk to a wild animal it was trying to coax.

"Would you allow yourself to be calmed if your boy was dead?" Tears streamed down her face, and in the light of the lanterns, Lou could see the woman's eyes were a startling honeyed shade of yellow.

"Look at his wounds. He has been attacked by wild dogs. It is tragic, yes, but we cannot go around shouting out accusations."

"This is murder. Why won't you do anything?"

"We will send a hunting party in the morning to find the animals."

"The animal who did this is here. Among us." She clutched the child against her and wept anew. "Don't you see that?"

"Let us take the child, Morena. We will find the animals."

"Find the killer."

"There is no human killer."

The air crackled around Morena the way a building storm might, and the townspeople all took several steps backwards. Her yellow eyes appeared lit from within, as the lanterns around her were. She crouched low and laid the child on the ground.

"I will ask you one last time. Help me find my child's killer."

"Morena..." The man seemed to be losing his patience. He cast a glance from her to the men standing at his side who held ancient-looking rifles along with their lanterns. "I cannot give you what you're asking for."

When she spoke again, her voice was different, low and rumbling like a growl. "If I am not to see my son become a man, then neither shall you. If I am to believe my son was devoured by wild dogs, then so shall your sons be."

"What are you saying?" The man's voice was thick with fear, and those around him took a step away, as if he was somehow tainted now.

"So long as my son's killer goes without being named, your sons will spend their adult lives from manhood to death living as the animal you claim killed him."

As she spoke those final words, a rumble of thunder rocked the clearing.

Lou's eyes opened, her own pulse shuddering as loud as the thunder in her dream had.

What the hell?

**Chapter Nine  
**

Lyndon slammed into Cooper with the entirety of his considerable weight, laying him out on the field. With the wind momentarily knocked out of him, Cooper wheezed, staring at the swirling stars dancing around his head.

"Reynolds, if you want to take a nap, find somewhere else to do it. This here is a football field, not a Mattresses and More." Coach's voice boomed from the sidelines, amplified by a megaphone.

Cooper rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself up on his knees. His head still felt foggy, like his brain was wrapped in gauze, but that was par for the course when it came to a tackle by Lyndon.

Cooper hopped up and rejoined the line, getting set up for another drill. It was Saturday afternoon, and the sun beat down hot and merciless. The midafternoon heat was oppressive, smothering him in a blanket of breath-stealing humidity.

But still the drills had to be run.

As Coach was fond of saying, a winning team couldn't rest on its laurels. So they practiced. And practiced. They'd practice until they puked, and then they'd line up and do it over.

"All right, you lazy crybabies, let's do this again, and if one of you so much as bobbles that ball, you'll be running bleachers for an hour. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," all the boys chanted as one, as if the coach were an Army drill sergeant—a job he'd have excelled at in another life.

"Then let's do this thing." He blew his whistle.

The ball snapped to the quarterback, and Cooper took off towards the end zone. Running brought a cool breeze across his face, temporarily chasing off the heat. For a moment the thrill of it swept him up, and he looked beyond the wall of the stadium to the cloudless blue sky and the tops of the pine trees beyond.

Run, a voice within said, urging him to keep going, to clear the end zone and never stop.

A different, older instinct kicked in, making him pivot his head back in time to see the ball sailing at him. He snagged it out of the air, tucking the ball into his chest and lowering his head. If he focused, he could feel the rumble of feet through the ground as he was chased.

Cooper closed his eyes. He could find the end zone blindfolded, so he let his other senses take over. Someone dove at him, and he sidestepped, easily avoiding the tackle. Another player tried to assault him from the opposite side, and Cooper ducked, the big body sailing over his back and hitting the turf with a thud and a loud swear.

Eyes still closed, Cooper picked up his pace and plowed forward to his finish line. At the last second someone grabbed him around the knees, sending him sprawling down, but still he held the ball, squirming his way forward even as he was falling.

He fell half across the line, scoring the touchdown.

In an active game, the crowd would have ignored the name on his jersey and broken out in cheers. It was one of the only times the Reynolds name didn't count against him. If he was playing, and playing well, who he was didn't matter, because what he was doing mattered much more.

Football trumped everything else in Poisonfoot.

If Hitler could score touchdowns, someone would be around to make excuses for him to be on the team. No one in town liked Cooper, but he could score at least one touchdown a game, which made him first string. And it was the only time he mattered to anyone outside his family.

That was why he kept showing up. It was why he'd spent three years sharing a locker room with people who hated him and otherwise ignored him.

Because once every other week he was important, and it gave him something to look forward to.

But this wasn't a game. It was practice. And no one here was rooting for his success. During practice games the points didn't matter. It was just whether or not you were screwing things up.

"All right. Good job, Reynolds. Don't let it get to your head. Let's set this up again."

No one helped Cooper to his feet, and no one cheered. The points didn't count for anything here, so his effort went unrewarded. He dusted himself off, fresh grass stuck in his yellow vest, and rejoined the rest of the team on the line of scrimmage. He was falling into formation when his gaze landed on the bleachers.

Lou Whittaker was sitting on the bottom step, wearing a black shirt with an undistinguishable art print on the front that was falling off one shoulder, her light brown hair in a messy ponytail. And she was staring right at him.

When she noticed she'd captured his attention, she lifted her hand and waved. He could see her blush, obviously self-conscious of the scrutiny she was now under.

An elated thrill rushed through him, his pulse hopping as a shy smile crossed her lips. He was happy to see her, bizarrely overjoyed she had found her way here, regardless of the reason.

A part of him hoped like hell she was there for him, as improbable as that might be.

Then the logical half of his mind told him not to be stupid, and that same part grew bitter, wondering why she had to show up and interrupt the one bit of his life she wasn't meant to be a part of. It was bad enough he saw her every morning in chemistry, but now she was sneaking into his weekends, mocking him with her very presence.

He sighed and looked away.

The rest of the practice went as well as could be expected—meaning he scored another touchdown, withstood several tackles, and managed to only get screamed at by Coach seven more times.

As the players jogged off the field, Lou got to her feet to meet whoever she'd come to watch. The guys ran past her with a few curious glances, but none stopped. Cooper was last off the field, and when he approached the bleachers, she waved again.

He looked behind him.

Nope, she was definitely waving at him.

"Hey," she said, putting her hands in her pockets. The knees of her jeans were worn through, giving him a glimpse of her tanned legs. He glanced back at her face, trying not to imagine her in a skirt.

"Hi," he muttered in return. He was sure to woo her with his linguistic prowess.

"Good game."

"That was just practice."

She raised a brow that clearly said, Do I look stupid? "I know. I'm just saying...you're good."

"Thanks."

They stared at each other.

"Do you have to be so weird?" she asked suddenly.

"I'm weird? You came to my game."

"Your practice."

He laughed, his own self-imposed stony façade crumbling. "Has anyone ever told you you're really annoying?" He tucked his helmet under his arm.

"I prefer to think of myself as charmingly persistent," Lou corrected. "Anyway, what are you doing right now?"

Cooper checked himself before he could do another glance over his shoulder to make sure she meant to address the question to him. Or to decide if this was some kind of prank.

"Why?"

"I thought guys in the South were supposed to be gentlemen. I want you to show me around."

"Lou, I thought we already talked about this. You spent all week eating with Marnie and her friends. You know you can't keep doing that if you hang out with me."

"Look, I don't see Marnie here, and I honestly don't know why everyone is so anti-Cooper. Since no one is willing to give me a good reason—or any reason—why I should steer clear of you, I'm throwing caution to the wind. Now go hose your stink off and give me the ten-cent tour of this town of yours. Deal?"

Cooper hesitated. She was nice, and she clearly didn't appreciate how bad things could get for her if she was nice to the wrong people. But his loneliness overwhelmed his sense of common decency. The right thing to do would be to blow Lou off and give her a reason to avoid him. If he was mean to her, she'd stop trying to be his friend and she'd be better for it.

He wasn't that kind, though.

He wanted a friend so badly it ached inside him like a disease, and here she was offering him exactly what he most craved. Naturally he was suspicious of a pretty girl demanding to spend time with him—what boy in his right mind wouldn't be?—but in that moment he didn't care what her motives were.

"Okay," he said. "I'll be back in ten. But just so you know, it's more of a five-cent tour. There's not a hell of a lot of town to see."

"I'm sure you'll find a way to make it interesting."

Was she...flirting with him?

He regarded her carefully, trying to figure her out, but Lou just smiled.

Cooper didn't need a lot of experience with women to know Lou Whittaker was going to be trouble for him.

**Chapter Ten  
**

It was evident where all the money went at Poisonfoot High School. Lou's old school hadn't been poor by any means, but football wasn't nearly as big a deal there as it was in Texas. The benches in the stadium back home had been old and made of wood, and she'd gotten more than her fair share of splinters in the butt from nights spent on those bleachers.

Here the seats were sleek metal, and in the early September sunshine they were warm to the touch. She couldn't imagine sitting on them during the height of summer.

Lou fiddled with her cell while she waited for Cooper, an anxious hum bubbling through her. She thought at first it was because she was doing something everyone had warned her against, but the longer she waited, the more she realized the truth. Lou was just excited to spend one-on-one time with Cooper. It had nothing to do with the forbidden aspect.

She liked him.

As much as she could like a person she barely knew who usually refused to speak to her.

A shadow fell over her, blotting out the sun. "That was fast," she said, looking up.

A boy who wasn't Cooper was staring back down at her. He had the vague familiarity of someone she knew she'd seen before, but she had no idea who he was. A surprising number of students attended Poisonfoot High, and she was still working on figuring out the names of people she shared classes with.

"Oh, sorry, I thought you were someone else."

He smiled at her, the white-toothed, too-broad grin of someone who had a lot of confidence in himself. "You're the new girl, right? I saw you sitting over here alone, figured I'd come say hi."

The boy was handsome in a way that made her uneasy. He seemed too relaxed to be real. No teenager she'd ever met was as self-possessed as this guy. He had blond hair so light it was almost white, and blue eyes that rivaled the Texas sky in their hue.

When he smiled, dimples showed on his cheeks.

He looked like the after photo in an orthodontist's office.

He was also the walking personification of what she imagined a boy in Texas should look like. His voice had a masculine, honeyed drawl, and he wore a plain red shirt tucked into his well-fit Levi's. Lou gave him a once-over. He was wearing cowboy boots.

She wanted to find this hilarious, but something about him was oddly charming.

"Hi," she said, belatedly returning his greeting. "I'm Lou."

"Elle Whittaker's granddaughter, right? My family goes to church with your grandma. Haven't had the pleasure of seeing you there, though." Coming from anyone else she'd have taken this as an accusation of her morality. This guy just seemed to be making an observation.

"No. Not yet." And not ever if she could help it, but Granny Elle was already threatening to wake her at the ass crack of dawn the next morning to make her go. Lou was worried her grandmother might have the upper hand.

"I'm Archer." He held out his hand. "Archer Wyatt."

She got to her feet and shook his hand, since it seemed to be the thing kids at this school did, and was impressed he didn't hold back on his strength because she was a girl. "Nice to meet you, Archer. What brings you to the school on a nice, sunny Saturday?"

Archer pointed to the field. "I'm on the team. You tellin' me you watched that whole practice and didn't notice me out there at all?" He winked. "I must be losing my skills."

Lou decided not to tell him she'd been otherwise distracted. "It's sort of hard to tell who's who. You know, with the helmets and everything."

"Ah, true. Well, I'm the captain. And the quarterback. Easy to remember that."

What little Lou knew about football told her that this information was Archer's way of bragging. Again, she wanted to be put off by his bravado, but he was so damned charming.

"Noted."

"You need a ride home?" He put a hand on her shoulder and applied a small amount pressure, as though he was trying to move her in the direction of the parking lot. It was subtle, but Lou caught it.

"I'm actually waiting for someone." She pulled her shoulder back and reclined on the metal bench, not wanting to be rude but wanting to let him know she wasn't leaving with him.

Archer either missed the hint or chose to ignore it, because he sat next to her, kicking his long legs out in front of him and leaning against the bench behind them. He looked like the freaking Marlboro Man. Someone needed to take his picture and put it in the dictionary beside All-American.

His perfection made Lou all too aware of her own flaws. Suddenly her tangled hair and ripped jeans were taunting her, and she felt self-conscious in a way she didn't when she was around Cooper. Archer, for his part, seemed blithely unaware of his effect on her and had tilted his face up to the sun, basking in the warmth like a cat.

"Tell me about yourself, Lou. There's no need to be a stranger. Your grandma told my mom you weren't meeting any new people in your first week."

Lou bristled. Granny Elle was so dead set on keeping Lou away from Cooper she'd started trying to find her friends? It might have been a nice gesture, except Lou was certain it wasn't meant as a simple kindness. Archer was talking to her because her own grandmother was trying to force friendships on her. What the heck was up with that?

"I've made friends," Lou protested. "I've been spending time with Marnie Jackson."

Archer nodded, still not opening his eyes. "I don't think you're here waiting for Marnie, though."

"I wasn't waiting for you either, but you seem to have invited yourself to stay." Lou was inwardly appalled at her own rudeness, but she wanted to get rid of Archer before Cooper came back. It wasn't that she was embarrassed of being seen with her lab partner, but she had a feeling Cooper spooked easily. He'd been hesitant to agree to hang out with her in the first place, and if he saw Archer lounging around, he might reconsider their plans.

Archer cracked his eyelids and looked at her. Rather than being offended by her response, he appeared downright amused. "You're sparky," he told her. "I like that."

Lou had never in her life been referred to as sparky.

"I am waiting for someone," she reminded him.

"I know. I'm being a gentleman. It's not nice to make a lady wait alone." He covered his brow with one hand and met her gaze, grinning boldly. "Be honest now, Lou. Do you really mind the company?"

She squirmed uncomfortably under his attention. "I guess not."

"Good."

Cooper stopped next to the bottom of the bleacher and cleared his throat. Archer turned his focus from Lou to the new arrival, and his expression changed instantly. Instead of being calm and relaxed, his jaw tensed and a stormy look clouded his eyes.

"Reynolds."

"Wyatt."

"Don't tell me you're who this lovely young lady is waiting for."

Lou tried to express her apologies to Cooper with only a glance, but he was too busy staring at Archer to see her.

"I thought I was."

"He is," Lou announced. "You are." She got to her feet and put some distance between herself and Archer, moving closer to Cooper as if to prove her point.

"You think that's a good idea, Reynolds? Lou here is new."

Cooper's face mirrored Archer's, jaw tight, expression serious. "I think Lou is capable of making her own decisions."

"Lou is also standing right here," she said.

Neither of them looked at her, they were too busy glowering at each other. The tension between the two of them was so tangible, Lou thought she might be able to reach out and touch it.

"All right." After a loaded silence, Archer hopped up. "Lou, it was a pleasure to meet you. Hope to see you at church tomorrow. You let me know if there's anything at all you need, okay?" He tipped an imaginary cap at her and strode off the field without so much as a backwards glance.

"Maybe I should just take you home," Cooper said once Archer was out of sight. "This was a bad idea."

But with Archer gone, Lou only had eyes for Cooper. He wore a long-sleeved gray Henley over a pair of dark jeans, favoring Chuck Taylors to cowboy boots. His brown hair—freshly washed—was a tousled mess and still a little wet. He smelled like soap.

"I don't want to go home."

A small smile flickered, gone so abruptly she thought she might have imagined it, but the thrill it sent through her was like liquid fire, making her pulse quicken and causing something inside her belly to fizz like Mentos in Diet Coke.

"Okay, you don't want to go home." He hiked his gym bag up on his shoulder. "What do you want to do?"

"Show me all the glorious sights, Cooper Reynolds. Give me the grand tour."

"And what do you want to do after those five minutes are over?"

Lou laughed, jumping off the bleachers to stand beside him, feeling small but safe next to his tall frame. "Do you have a car?"

"Yes."

"Then we'll find a way to kill some time." She was impressed by her own boldness. But where Archer had made her nervous, Cooper brought out a fearlessness she hadn't known she possessed. It made her silly and brave, and more willing to say things she never would have before.

She liked it.

Cooper made her feel like she could do anything.

He hadn't been kidding when he'd told her the tour of Poisonfoot would be a brief one. After leaving the high school parking lot in Cooper's beat-up Ford pickup, they went down Mulberry—a quiet, idyllic residential street—and met up with Main. Lou hadn't had much of a chance to see the shops on Main Street yet since her walking path home took her in the opposite direction.

The storefronts looked straight out of a 1950s movie set, with white gables and shutters, all painted in cute shades of teal, cream, and barn red. Cooper pointed out the barbershop, the post office, a few small clothing stores, and the doctor's office. As they continued down the street, the surroundings became more modern, with a squat brick apartment complex, a McDonald's and then the Poisonfoot shopping center.

The mall wasn't much to look at, just a low concrete structure with a giant blue-and-white Walmart stuck on the end, but at least Lou knew she'd have a place to find five-dollar nail polish and trashy magazines. A Walmart meant she was still somewhat connected to the real world.

A block past the Walmart the streets became more quaint and peaceful again, though the houses weren't as classic as the ones nearer the school. These ones were seventies-style bungalows with large swaths of front lawn, all being watered in unison by sprinklers sending arches of water droplets into the air, which caught the afternoon light in a way that made them look like sequins.

Lou had her window rolled down, and the wind smelled like fresh-cut grass and dust.

After the houses was a long span of bare horizon, then before the woods picked up was a tall, ominous building with a wide, empty parking lot. Cooper pulled into the lot and stopped the car.

"This is the paper mill," he told her, glancing up at the building through the windshield. "Employs about seventy percent of the adult population in town. Behold the majesty of our economic overlord." He leaned on the steering wheel, and Lou followed his gaze up, staring at the big emission stacks and seeing absolutely no beauty in the hulking structure.

"It's...great."

Cooper smiled. "It's a hideous monstrosity. Uglier than the Walmart, even. But it keeps the town alive." He started the truck again and backed out of the lot. Turning down the first side road they met, he went one block over until they were on Starling, and started back in the direction they'd come from. They passed the elementary school, where a few kids were making use of the outdoor play structure even on a Saturday, and beyond that was a red brick fire station, side by side with a brown brick building labeled Sheriff's Department.

"That's where my mom works." Cooper pointed to the row of patrol cars parked out front.

Lou wasn't sure if she was supposed to say anything, so she just nodded. Her own mother hadn't begun to search for work in town, making it impossible to compare notes on parental jobs. Sounded like the paper mill was looking likely, which was a heartbreaking idea since her mom was more the creative type than the worker-drone type.

Cooper didn't stop at the station, continuing their brief tour of her new hometown. They drove past an outdoor basketball court, a library and a small, sad-looking bar, then last but not least was the big white church. Aside from the school, it was the most impressive building she'd seen in Poisonfoot. The paint was brilliant and white, and the flowerbeds were neatly organized with red and white petunias.

The truck turned away from the church and back towards Main Street. Cooper glanced at her and gave a small shrug. "I told you it wasn't very impressive."

"It's nice," she said. "I think I might like it."

He laughed, a bright, warm sound. "You think?"

"Maybe."

"Well, it's a start. What do you want to do now?"

Lou shrugged, her flirtatious bluster lessened by his closeness to her. "What do kids do for fun around here?"

"Leave."

She chuckled at him, but his serious expression stopped her. "Leave where?"

"If you're not old enough to vanish completely? There's a little lake about twenty minutes from here."

"Is it, like...the parking spot?" She put some extra emphasis on parking, hoping he wouldn't make her spell out what she meant.

"Yeah, I guess. But it's a lot of things. Swimming hole, picnic place. There's a nice gazebo. In the summer you can rent canoes and stuff, but they shut that down the last week of August."

"Oh, so it's an actual hangout."

"Did you think I was going to drive you up to the make-out spot after knowing you less than a week?"

She hoped he was too focused on the road to notice the slight choking sound she made when she forgot how to swallow. Her cheeks felt hot, so she leaned towards the window to let the fresh air waft over her. "No, of course not."

Cooper turned off the main street and onto a dirt access road leading into a stand of trees. She figured he was going to take her to the lake in spite of no official plan being made. She liked that he was decisive and didn't wait for her to ask outright.

"So you were talking to Archer," Cooper said after a long pause. Since it wasn't exactly a question, Lou wasn't sure if he wanted her to respond.

"Yes?" She turned from the window back to him. "What's up with him? He seems like the All-American cowboy prototype. Like...too perfect."

Cooper laughed. "Too perfect? I think you might be the first person to ever say the word too in front of it. Usually he's the poster child. Other parents say stuff like can't you be more like Archer?"

"Your mom says that?"

"No. I think she's the only parent in town who isn't madly in love with him."

"Isn't that a bit weird? The sheriff not liking the town's golden boy?"

"Maybe it's a women's intuition thing?" He smiled at her and turned the car down a second, smaller road. "I tend to think my mom is a bit too judgmental, but she's usually right. I don't know what Archer ever did to make her not like him, but she's not a fan."

The truck bobbled along, rattling on the dirt and gravel as they bumped their way towards the lake.

"You didn't answer my question though. What's his deal?"

"What do you mean?"

"His story. Like...who is Archer?"

"Senior. Captain of just about every sports team." Cooper's grip on the steering wheel tightened as he spoke, and Lou watched as his knuckles turned white. "You could say he's a popular guy."

"Just not with you."

Cooper cast a glance in her direction then returned his attention to the bumpy road. "No one really cares what I think."

"I do."

He slowed the car down, making the jostling sensation harsher, and Lou bounced in her seat as they progressed towards the lake. The trees around them were thicker, blocking out most of the sunlight and turning what made it through a bright green color.

"I don't like him," Cooper confided.

"No kidding? I really thought you guys were BFFs for sure."

He snorted and held up his crossed fingers. "Oh yeah, we're like this."

"I could te—" Her sentence was cut short when Cooper slammed on the brakes, sending her forward in her seat, the old seat belt digging into her shoulder and stealing her breath.

When Lou shook off her stupor, she looked at the road in front of them to see what had caused Cooper to stop so suddenly. A slim, reddish-brown coyote stood in the middle of the dirt road, staring directly at them.

She turned to Cooper to say something, but the words died on her lips when she saw his face. He wasn't scared or nervous. There was a look of recognition in his eyes, and his lips were pursed in a sad grimace.

It looked like he recognized the animal.

Like he knew it.

**Chapter Eleven  
**

The coyote stared at him.

Cooper stared right back.

The coyote sat on his haunches and fixated on the truck, effectively blocking their path. He nipped at his own leg, satisfying an itch, then looked at Cooper again.

"Cooper?" Lou placed her hand on his arm, and he jerked away involuntarily. She pulled her hand back, and he could feel her gaze on him. "What's going on?"

"It's a coyote."

"I can see that. Is it normal for them to just sit there like that?"

The animal looked from Cooper to Lou and cocked his head to the side, observing her carefully.

"I'm not sure."

She trembled, her shiver vibrating through the bench in the truck. He wasn't sure if he was imagining her heartbeat pounding or if he was hearing his own throbbing in his ear.

Without thinking, he reached out and took her hand. "It's okay," he assured her. "We'll back up. He's not going to hurt you."

"What's with the coyotes here?" she asked, her breath light, voice high. She seemed to be calm, but her tone gave him a glimpse at what she was really feeling. Fear.

"What do you mean?" He pulled his hand free to shift the truck into reverse. The road was too narrow to turn around, so he would need to back out the entire way. Once he was in gear, he took Lou's hand again, her fingers cold against his sweaty palm.

The coyote was still staring at them, even as they backed away from him. When he was nearly out of sight, he got back on all fours and plodded off the road, disappearing into the brush. Cooper stepped down on the brake and looked at Lou, who was still focused on the empty spot where the animal had been.

"Lou?"

She started as if waking from a dream, then turned her attention back to him. "What?"

"What did you mean? What you said about coyotes? Have you seen him before this?"

"Him?" Her eyes widened, and a pallor cooled her skin tone from sun-kissed to ashen.

"One. Have you seen one before this?"

"Oh. Yeah. There's been one coming into my yard sometimes. My grandma yells at it like it understands her or something, but it just keeps coming around. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. Until this." She pointed at the vacant road. "Are people feeding them? They don't seem afraid at all."

"I don't know what to say." He eased up on the brake and continued reversing until they reached the dirt highway and he was able to turn them back towards the main road. He had a few ideas about the coyote in Lou's yard, but none of them would help him explain things in a way she'd understand.

He barely understood.

"I'll take you home." He angled his truck onto the real highway and turned in the direction of her house.

Lou didn't argue.

Once Cooper had dropped Lou at the foot of her driveway, he went back the way he'd come. The sun was dipping low on the horizon by the time he arrived at the patch of road where he'd seen the coyote. Through the twined boughs of the trees overhead the light was dim, making it seem darker on the road than it had been in town.

He pulled over as far as he could, his truck tipping towards the ditch but still planted firmly on the road. There was enough room for a small compact to pass but little else. Cooper didn't expect to see anyone else on the road though.

He got out and stumbled, slipping halfway down the slope and ending up with his shoes full of stagnant water. After climbing up the opposite side, he found himself standing between two thin-trunked trees whose bark was covered in damp, spongy moss.

Ducking under a branch, he made his way deeper into the woods, soon losing sight of the road and his truck and lapsing further into darkness.

"I know you're here," he bellowed, once he was certain no one else was around. Anyone overhearing him would go from thinking he was a waste of space to assuming he was out of his mind. Maybe he was crazy, considering he was out in the middle of nowhere yelling into the trees.

Creeping forward quietly a few steps, he took several short breaths through his nose, sniffing the air. He froze on the spot when he realized what he was doing, his whole body going cold, and not from the temperature in the air.

He'd just smelled for a sign of the coyote.

The tree behind him served as a suitable rest to hold him up when he slumped backwards, bracing his hands on his knees and taking several deep breaths to calm himself.

"I'm supposed to have more time," he whispered, this time speaking to no one but himself. The wind muttered soothing, meaningless words into his ear, and he matched his breath to its tempo, urging himself to calm.

When he righted himself, the coyote was there, standing in the woody duff, staring at him with shining brown eyes. It yipped, a short, high sound that was similar to a dog's bark yet totally unique. It wasn't sitting like it had on the road, but it stood in place, regarding him like an old friend.

Cooper straightened, and where a normal animal would have run off at the sudden movement, the coyote only tracked him, keeping a watchful eye on the motions without budging an inch itself.

"You shouldn't be here," Cooper said.

The coyote shook his head and made a huffing sound like a sneeze. Then he sat back on his haunches and his tongue lolled out as if he were nothing more than a wiry, happy dog.

Cooper wanted to move forward. He wanted to embrace that stupid furry beast as if he were still the person Cooper once knew. It wasn't until that moment, meeting the warm brown eyes he would recognize anywhere, that he was really willing to admit that his own fate was sealed.

He slid back down the tree until he was sitting in the damp leaves, and resisted the urge to cup his face in his hands. He didn't want to look away, didn't want to risk the coyote vanishing. It had been a long time, and Cooper had given up any hope of ever seeing him again.

"Oh, Jer," he said, his voice loaded with sadness.

The coyote yipped.

His brother was saying hello.

**Chapter Twelve  
**

Once Lou saw Cooper's taillights vanish around the bend, she reversed her track and walked away from the house, back towards the road. It wasn't as bright as it had been when she'd made her way to the football field earlier that day, but town wasn't far, and the late-summer light would linger a bit longer.

She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder and plugged her iPod headphones into her ears, turning up the volume on Priss's mix tape. The Cars started singing "Just What I Needed", and Lou couldn't help but let her mind wander to Cooper. What was that boy doing to her? The more people who told her to stay away from him—himself included—the more she wanted to get closer.

When he'd taken her hand in the front seat of his truck, she thought she was going to choke on her own heart. It would have been easier to blame the nerves on that stupid coyote, but the truth of the matter was it was Cooper. He made her dizzy and lightheaded and so nervous she sometimes wanted to throw up. But at the same time she'd never felt so at ease around another person in her life.

He was making her crazy, and she liked it.

But she couldn't figure him out. The way he willingly backed away from her, how he seemed to accept his fate being loathed by the whole town. And what was up with that anyway? As far as Lou could tell he was a good guy, he respected his mother, and nothing she'd seen of him so far had given her any indication of why people disliked him so vehemently.

She picked up her pace to match the tempo of the song, wanting to be out from the cover of the woods. Another thing bugging her was the way Cooper had looked at the coyote on the road. And she hadn't misheard when he'd said him in regards to the animal, as if he knew the thing personally.

Maybe the coyotes in Poisonfoot were really friendly, but it was still bizarre for someone to use a human pronoun to describe one. That sort of familiarity was reserved for pets that functioned as an extension of the family.

The trees gave way to bright, wide-open sky, and Lou's pulse slowed along with her speed. Something about being in the woods made her uneasy with the sensation she was constantly being watched.

The highway rounded a bend, and a sidewalk appeared out of nowhere. One step there was nothing but gravel shoulder, the next there was a paved sidewalk. Lou continued her journey back to Second Street, where she'd noticed a small library on Cooper's tour of the town. She would have missed it entirely if she'd glanced away, the building was so tiny, but she'd spotted it nestled between the elementary school and the outdoor basketball court.

If no one was willing to tell her what was going on with Cooper Reynolds, she was going to have to find out herself. Granny Elle still lived in a world that predated the Internet, and Lou figured it was going to take at least another month of coaxing before her aging grandmother agreed to get high speed installed in the old Victorian house. They were far enough out her cell's data connection was spotty at best, which meant if she wanted to Google anything, she'd have to do it at school or somewhere else with a free Internet connection.

The library seemed like a safer bet than the high school. The last thing she needed was someone snooping over her shoulder while she searched Cooper's name. She didn't know why she cared so much if people knew what she was doing, but given how crazy people were about the Reynoldses, she thought it was best she kept her searching on the DL.

She'd really hoped Cooper might give her some insight into himself during their drive that afternoon, but the most Lou had gotten was more questions.

It took her almost half an hour to walk from Granny Elle's house back to the library, and in that time she'd listened to everything from eighties pop to early aughts boy bands. Priss had no attention span whatsoever, but the tempo of the songs had kept Lou moving at a good clip.

She arrived at the library with the sun still hanging low over the horizon, a big orange ball on the pinkish backdrop of the sky. The dim lights of the building gave her pause, and she realized she should have looked up the hours before walking all this way. She didn't even know if the place would be open on a Saturday, let alone so late. But when she got to the door, a small, hand-drawn sign listing the hours said it was open until nine, giving her several hours before she needed to worry.

Lou sent her mother a quick text, telling her where she was and that she'd be home later. Her mom was a born worrier, but it was hard for a parent to fret too much about their child spending time with a bunch of old books.

A reply asked, Do you have your kit?

Lou rolled her eyes at the message. She'd been diabetic since she was ten. In those six years she'd learned the hard way to never leave her house without her meds. Now that she was practically an adult, she'd have figured her mom would start letting up, but a mother was still a mother, and apparently moms never stopped fretting.

Yes, don't worry.

As she was opening the door her phone buzzed again. Have fun. I love you.

Lou wanted to find the affection smothering, but she appreciated that her mom took the time to say it, even in a text.

The door creaked shut behind her, blotting out the dying light of the afternoon and leaving Lou in a dimly lit corridor, blinking to adjust to the sudden brightness shift. The room came into focus slowly, rows and rows of old brown bookshelves, some sagging beneath the weight of literally hundreds of books. Motes of dust floated in the air, caught in narrow light shafts from the tiny windows at the top of the walls.

Three heavy wooden tables sat in the center of the room with the bookshelves fanning out around them like the petals of a flower. On one table were two relatively new-looking computers with flat-screen monitors, and a small printer. The other two tables were empty but for two green lamps on each, like the ones Lou had seen in old movies.

Compared to the chatter of birds and insects outside, the silence in the library was nearly deafening. She took a step forward, and a loud groan from the floorboards accompanied the movement.

A man popped up from behind the circulation desk, and Lou let out a yelp. It had been so quiet, for a moment she'd believed she was alone. The man was younger than she'd expected, with wild black curls almost long enough to cover his ears and a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a tweed blazer, but underneath was a Flaming Lips T-shirt.

"Hey," he said, and peered past her as if he was expecting someone else to follow her in. When she proved to be alone, his scrutiny shifted back, and he narrowed his eyes at her, giving her a once-over. After finding her either nonthreatening or in some other way satisfactory, he nodded.

"Do I need a library card to use the computer?" Lou asked.

"Yes."

She walked up to the counter and folded her hands on the rough-hewn surface, smiling up at him with her best impression of a sweet and innocent girl. "Then may I please have a library card?"

"Do you live here?"

"I do now." She let her bag drop to the floor. The shift in temperature from outside to the cool interior of the library had brought on a chill, and she wished she'd thought to bring a sweater.

The man passed her a sheet and a pen. "Fill this out."

The form was basic, only a few lines asking for her name, address, and phone number. She was grateful to have memorized her new mailing address because the rural road and box number were necessary if she was going to get access to her online salvation. Once she'd completed it—with the weirdo librarian watching her the entire time—she slid it back across the desk to him.

"ID?"

Lou showed him her California driver's license and added, "I don't have a Texas one yet. I just got here a week ago."

He stared at the ID, then back to her form. "Whittaker?"

"Yes."

"Are you related to Devon Whittaker?"

Lou's heart seized and her hands began to tremble, so she removed them from the counter and stuffed them in her pockets. "He was my dad."

"Was?" He held out her card for her, and she took it, fumbling to get it back in her wallet.

"He died."

The man drummed his fingers on the counter, and a look somewhere between confusion and sadness flickered across his face. "I hadn't heard that." Then after another beat he added, "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

Something in the way he said it made Lou think the man expected to know and was hurt by discovering it so late. She frowned, not sure what to make of his crestfallen features. "It just happened last month." Saying the words made her realize a month had passed now without her father being in her life.

The weight of that knowledge bore down on her like a fist, threatening to flatten her into the earth. She took a ragged breath and forced a smile, albeit not nearly as bright as the original one she'd offered him.

"My name is Nigel." He held out his hand to her, an errant curl falling in front of his eye. "Nigel Farrell."

If ever someone did not look like a Nigel, it was this Nigel. First, Lou thought anyone with a name like that had to be eighty—there needed to be some sort of law stipulating that. No one as young as this librarian—who was thirty at the most—should ever be named something as old and weird as Nigel.

"Nigel." The name even sounded funny rolling off her tongue.

"You're Lou."

Her driver's license and the form were both filled out with Eloise, so when he used her nickname so easily, Lou went rigid. "How do you know that?"

"He told me a lot about you."

"My dad?" Suddenly this guy wasn't just a weirdo, he was someone who had known her father. Though how her dad might have come into contact with a strange grad-school type like Nigel was beyond Lou's comprehension. Her father had been forty-two when he died, far too old to be a school friend.

"Yes." Nigel was not the biggest conversationalist.

"How did you know my dad?" Lou prodded, not so concerned with her original mission anymore.

"Our families ran in similar circles." Nigel dusted imaginary dirt from his blazer and turned away from her to collect a blank library card. He filled it out silently while she stared at him with an intensity she typically reserved for elimination night on American Idol. If he could feel the weight of her gaze, he showed no sign of it. Once the card was laminated, he handed it to her, still warm from the machine.

"You're welcome to use either computer. There's a half-hour limit, and the printer is ten cents a page. Twenty-five for color."

When Nigel turned his back on her, a swell of emotion overcame her and spilled over like a toddler's temper tantrum. She opened her mouth and found the words falling out without any hope of her keeping them in check.

"How do you know him? You can't just say something like that and then, boom, end the conversation like it never happened. I mean, you can't say my dad told you about me and then just leave it. What did he say?" She slapped the countertop once, ashamed of herself for the outburst but unable to stop it.

Nigel seemed surprised, arching both brows when he pivoted to face her and looking down at her hand on the counter. When she didn't move, he picked up her hand and dropped it off. "I was out of line speaking so casually. Please carry on with whatever you came to do."

"Not until you tell me how you knew my father." She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to come across as someone not to be messed with. In actuality she probably looked like a pouting child, but right then it didn't matter. She just wanted someone to give her answers.

Nigel glanced around the room as if to make sure they were really alone, then whispered, "I can't tell you anything. But I will say you're not going to find what you're looking for on the computer."

"What?"

"You're here because you want some...insight, yes?"

"Y-yes."

Nigel hopped up on the old wooden counter and swung his legs over, forcing her to take several steps back to keep him from kicking her. He jumped down, his loafers landing softly on the well-worn floor, and he waved for her to follow him like what he'd just done hadn't been totally insane.

Lou hesitated, but when he disappeared down one of the rows, she scuttled after him, not wanting to lose his trail. Nigel was waiting for her at the back of the library next to an unremarkable-looking plywood door that had a small Periodicals sign affixed to it.

"There hasn't been much of a budget to digitize old copies of the newspaper in town. I've been trying to do some of it myself, but..." He let his voice drift off and shrugged one shoulder. "Anyway. I think there will be more of interest to you in here." Nigel tapped the door once, then turned the handle, letting it swing inwards to a completely dark room.

When Nigel flipped on the light switch, Lou was stunned.

She had expected one of those old microfiche viewing boxes and perhaps rolls of old paper on film. Instead she was greeted to a second library, this one containing dozens of shelves burdened under heavy collections of print newspapers.

"Are you sure the Internet won't be helpful?" Lou eyed the stacks with nervous apprehension. Searching through those would take eons, and that was supposing she knew where to start. Which she didn't.

"August. 1984." Nigel smiled and turned on his heel, vanishing from the room.

1984? Neither she nor Cooper had been alive then. How was that going to help her find out more about her mysterious new friend? But still, it was a lead, and it gave her a place to start. She dumped her bag on the table in the middle of the room and began to scan the shelves, hoping to figure out their system quickly. It didn't take long for her to decipher the shelving code and find the volume for August 1984. When she withdrew the book from its place, she almost toppled over under its weight.

She'd never considered newspapers to be heavy before, but when an entire month's worth was compiled in one place, the weight was shocking. After hauling the book back to her table, she put it down with a loud thump and settled in to flip through the pages.

Blessedly, the Poisonfoot Gazette was not burdened with an overabundance of news. Each issue was only about ten pages long, and the bulk of those pages was made up of world news, sports, and classified ads. Lou was able to skim those and focus mainly on the local news coverage in the first two pages of each issue.

In 1984 there'd been a lot of discussion about local elections, a great deal of editorial commentary on a new Chinese food restaurant being constructed, and plenty of articles on a blistering heat wave. In other news, there was no other news. Poisonfoot had been as boring thirty years earlier as it was now.

She thumbed through the old brittle pages, getting a kick out of photos of townspeople in giant Coke-bottle glasses and huge shoulder pads, but not finding anything relevant to her interests.

Lou was about to go in search of Nigel and demand some real answers when she flipped to the front page for August 29.

Local Boy—12—Saves Baby from Brutal Attack.

And there, smiling out of the pages at her, was her father.

**Chapter Thirteen  
**

"You are in so much trouble," Mia sang out as Cooper dragged himself through the back door.

He looked up at the clock in the kitchen, and it was only eight. His curfew wasn't until eleven on weekends.

"What are you talking about?"

Mia was sitting on the kitchen counter eating pudding, her black skirt swishing as she kicked out her legs. Her artificially black hair hung over her eyes in an attempt to make her appear moody and mysterious, but the way she was grinning at him made it difficult to take her seriously as a child of darkness.

Cooper left his gym bag on the floor next to the washing machine on the back porch and glanced around the kitchen, half expecting his mother to come lunging out screaming at him over some unknown offense.

It was impossible for her to know he'd gone searching for Jer. So unless he'd managed to get in trouble some other way, his wrongdoing was still a mystery to him.

When his mother didn't show up, the reality of his offense hit him like a linebacker on a mission.

"Shit," he spat out, kicking the frame of the back door. "How mad is she?"

Mia's face got solemn, and she did a spot-on impression of their mother's voice. "Cooper... She's not mad. She's just disappointed."

He'd been so distracted—first by Lou, then by seeing Jer—that he'd completely forgotten he was meant to pick up his mother after her shift ended. Her car was in the shop for the weekend, and she didn't like bringing one of the cruisers home. The fleet was limited, and she preferred the on-duty staff all had access if need be.

If it was after eight now, he was a half hour late. By the time he got to the station he'd be pushing forty-five minutes, which might as well have been an hour as far as his mother was concerned. Cooper turned and went back the way he came before Mia could get in another barb.

The truth of the matter was their mother could have walked home. She could have gotten a deputy to drive her. There were a half-dozen different ways she might have made her way back to their house, but because she was the way she was, she was going to wait for him at the station.

All the better to lecture him about responsibility if he had to go to her.

Cooper made the short trip from their house to the sheriff's station and pulled up out front, making sure he was in a legal parking zone. The last thing he wanted was to give his mother more ammunition than she already had.

When it was obvious she wasn't going to come rushing out the doors to greet him, he turned off the engine and went inside.

The Poisonfoot Sheriff's Department was about as stereotypical as a small-town police force could get. The interior of the station was still something straight out of a 1970s television series, with ancient wood paneling and a dusty American flag in one corner. The only thing that brought it into the right century were the state-of-the-art computers his mother had insisted on, replacing the massive older models that had been around since the first Bush was President.

The chairs in the lobby were cracked orange plastic, and the tile on the floor was an ugly green, making Cooper wonder what sort of colorblind maniac had been responsible for decorating.

His mother was leaned over a desk, pointing to something on a deputy's monitor. She'd changed out of her beige uniform but still wore an air of authority. It didn't matter that people didn't like them because there was no doubt about them respecting her. She had a way of making people trust her, and not a single person could dispute she was good for the town.

She kept everyone safe, and when you could protect others, it didn't matter if they liked you.

Cooper often wondered if it was hard for her to want to help them when she knew they were always whispering about the Reynoldses behind her back. Or to her face. But if she had issues with the people of Poisonfoot, she never let it get in the way of doing her job.

Without looking up she said, "I was starting to think I'd still be here when my shift on Monday started."

Instead of making excuses he lowered his head and muttered, "I'm really sorry."

She straightened up, patted the deputy on his shoulder, and picked up her purse. "I'm sure you'll tell me all about what was so important while we're driving home. Have you eaten?"

Cooper shook his head.

"Okay, we'll stop at the Dairy Queen on our way back. Is your sister still pretending to be a vegetarian to impress that silly boy?" She ducked under the counter and came to stand beside him, looking surprisingly short. When had he gotten so much taller than her?

"I saw her eating chicken fingers at lunch yesterday."

"Thank God. The hair is one thing, but no right-minded Texan girl should ever stop eating meat to impress a man." She touched Cooper's back, and they left the building, walking to his unlocked truck.

As they drove, she rolled down the window and pulled a cigarette out of her purse. She held it between her teeth and looked at him as if waiting for a lecture. When he didn't say a word, she lit the smoke and exhaled a puff out the open window.

For as long as he could remember, she'd always kept a pack of cigarettes in her purse, but she almost never smoked them. He recognized the brand as being those his father had preferred, and he had a funny feeling the pack she smoked from was one Dad had left behind. Given how rare it was for her to light them, it wouldn't have surprised him to learn she was slowly burning through the last remaining relics of her husband one puff at a time.

Since she didn't make a habit of smoking, he didn't think he had any right to tell her not to. Sure, it was terrible for her, and he hated the idea of the smell lingering in his truck, but she was the parent, not him. People needed their vices, and he wasn't going to deny her this one. If she started buying new packs and smoking in the house, he'd reconsider his stance, but until then he'd let it be.

"So why were you late?" she asked once she'd finished.

He debated using Lou as his excuse. It had been a long time since he'd shown any interest in a girl, and he thought his mom might be excited by the prospect of him meeting someone. But then he thought of the real reason he'd been delayed and knew a girl wasn't going to make his mom happy.

"I saw Jer."

She went rigid, and her focus narrowed on him as she turned in her seat to face him directly.

"What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about, Mom. I saw him."

His mother was quiet, staring at him. Cooper kept his eyes on the road and continued driving them towards the Dairy Queen on the edge of the city.

"Tell me," she said after a long, aching silence.

"It was out on the road by the lake. I was...I was with a girl, and he stepped out in the middle of the road and blocked the truck."

"You were with a girl? What girl?"

"Lou Whittaker."

His mother's hand clamped down on his wrist, and the shock of her cool skin on his made him jerk, causing the truck to swerve. He pulled over and put the truck into park, then met her wide-eyed gaze.

"Whittaker?" she asked, her voice trembling. The last time he'd seen his mother so scared had been... Well, it had been on Jeremy's birthday.

"Yes."

"Did she see him?"

"He was sitting right in the middle of the road, Mom. Yes, she saw him. And she said he's been coming around to Elle Whittaker's regularly. She didn't know it was him specifically, but she was awfully curious about why the coyotes in Poisonfoot were so damned friendly."

"Did you...?" Her hand tightened on his wrist. "You didn't tell her anything, did you?"

Cooper snorted. "Do I look nuts to you? Hey, Lou, that coyote is actually my brother. Even if I had told her, she wouldn't have believed me."

"Don't be so sure about that."

Cooper regarded his mother carefully. "Why do you say that?"

She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. Not anymore. Because you're never going to see that girl again."

"What?" This was sounding all too familiar, except he was used to people telling Lou to stay away from him.

"She's a Whittaker. You can't spend any more time with her, Cooper, it's not safe."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Language," she scolded. "And don't question me. Just listen. You aren't safe with her."

Cooper conjured up an image of Lou in his mind, her small frame and messy, waving hair. There was nothing about her that screamed threatening.

"But I—"

"No buts. She's dangerous. And what's more, I won't have you spending what time we have left with some girl. Especially not that girl." When she finished speaking, there was finality to her words that told Cooper she wouldn't hear any further arguments.

So his mom wanted him away from Lou as badly as Lou's family wanted her away from him.

He started the truck, but the gears in his brain were already going full speed. He had never planned to tell Lou the truth about Jer or himself, but the way his mom was reacting made him wonder.

What was it about this new girl?

**Chapter Fourteen  
**

Cooper was waiting for her before the first bell rang on Monday morning. At the sight of him leaning against the row of metal lockers scanning the halls, Lou's heart leapt with excitement. Until she saw the serious expression on his face.

He spotted her, his gaze locking on her eyes, and he watched silently as she weaved through the crowded hall towards him.

"Hi." Her anxiety ramped high as she waited for whatever inevitable bad news he was about to tell her. They'd had a good time on Saturday until he'd taken her home. Was he here to tell her their friendship was a mistake?

"Hey." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How was, uh... How was the rest of your weekend?"

Small talk? Okay...she could do small talk.

"Pretty boring. I mean, unless you think doing calculus homework is a profound and exciting weekend task. If you do, I don't think we can be friends."

At those last words Cooper grimaced, and Lou kicked herself internally. What a stupid thing to say.

They regarded each other in awkward silence. Since she wasn't sure what he was doing waiting for her, she didn't want to be overly cheerful and flirty. If he'd shown up to blow her off, she'd feel stupid for having been so bubbly. But it felt so weird to not be herself with Cooper. He was the only person in the whole school who reminded her what it felt like to be happy.

"So, um..." He had his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, and he wasn't looking at her. His dark brown hair was especially messy today, and Lou fought the urge to run her fingers through it, wondering if it could possibly be as soft as it appeared.

"What are you doing after school today?" she blurted, unable to keep the words from slipping out.

"Nothing?" he replied uncertainly.

"Do you...?" She glanced into her locker, suddenly shy, and wished she hadn't spoken so abruptly. "I mean... I never got to see the lake on Saturday. Did you maybe want to go? With me?" When he didn't speak right away she added, "Together."

He stared at her, and she wasn't sure if she'd surprised him or if he just thought she was nuts for asking. She felt nuts for asking.

"Sure," he said finally. "I think that sounds great. But, uh... Okay this is going to sound really silly, but...do you mind if maybe we listen to the game?"

"Game?"

"Yeah. The Rangers are playing the White Sox, and I—"

"Say no more. Yeah, that's totally fine." She smiled and tugged the Dodgers cap out of her bag, waving it so he could see it. "I'm not anti-baseball by any means."

Cooper seemed to debate saying something about her team of choice but must have thought better of it because he smiled tightly and said, "Good. Awesome." He took the cap out of her hands and set it on her head, pulling it low over her eyes. For a moment he stood there, inches away from her, and as he stepped away, his hand grazed her bare shoulder. Lou shivered.

"Well, isn't this sweet?"

Lou tipped her cap up and turned towards the new voice. Archer stood nearby, still every bit as handsome as she'd tried to convince herself he wasn't. He smiled at her in a way that might have made her heart beat faster if she wasn't standing with Cooper. And if Archer didn't give her the creeps.

She couldn't figure out what it was about him that bothered her so much. He seemed like a nice, normal, charming guy. But all the same, she didn't think she'd be comfortable being alone with him. He was like a shark—beautiful, but that toothy grin made her think he was more dangerous than he let on.

"Hi, Archer," she greeted, trying to be polite. There was no sense in making unnecessary enemies. Archer hadn't done anything except be nice to her, so she had no good reason to dismiss him.

Cooper, on the other hand, said nothing and just glared at the other boy.

"I'm glad I found you two together, actually." Archer nodded to Cooper, and Cooper continued to glower, his frown deepening.

"Oh?" Lou shifted her attention from Cooper back to Archer. Archer ignored his teammate and addressed Lou like she was the only one there.

"I'm having a party Friday night after the game. The whole team will be there." He placed extra emphasis on the word whole and stared at Cooper. "I wanted to invite you to come along."

"What kind of party?"

Archer laughed, and Lou instantly felt stupid for asking. "Oh you know, the usual. Beer. Chips. Music. We'll be celebrating a win, naturally."

Lou nodded. It had been awhile since she'd gone to a good party. She'd attended them often back home until her dad got sick, then they'd stopped seeming important. A lot of things that once mattered suddenly became silly and pointless. But this was a new start for her, and she hated to admit how badly she wanted to do something normal and fun.

"If Cooper goes, I'll be there."

"Cooper will be there," Archer insisted. "Right, Coop?"

Cooper grumbled something unintelligible, hiking his bag up on his shoulder. "We need to get to class."

"See you at practice tomorrow. And that party on Friday."

"Uh-huh."

Cooper's dark mood hung over him like a cloud as they walked towards Chemistry. He didn't speak again until halfway through class, and only then to ask her to pass a beaker.

But he'd agreed to go, and as grouchy as he was being, Lou had a weird sense of elation to know that she was the reason he'd said yes.

The school day dragged on, and each minute felt like an hour. She barely processed anything in her classes but managed to answer a few questions correctly in Biology, making it at least seem like she had her head in the game.

In Spanish class Marnie wouldn't stop talking about Archer's party. It was starting to sound like the biggest social event of the year, not counting the Homecoming Dance, the Winter Formal and a handful of other dances. But Archer's party would have the added bonus of illicit underage drinking.

From what Lou gathered, Archer's family owned a large ranch on the outskirts of town, a section of land that shared the same chunk of forest as her grandmother's house. It sounded like most of Archer's parties took place in a makeshift party area in the trees on his property. If it was as close to her place as she suspected, Lou could probably cut through the woods to get home faster.

The thought of the coyotes she'd been seeing made her question whether or not a tipsy jaunt through the woods was such a wise idea, but she put the notion out of her mind.

By the time the last bell sounded, Lou had heard about the party in no less than five of her classes. All the girls she knew through Marnie were abuzz with the news of an Archer Wyatt rager. When she met Cooper at her locker, he didn't seem to be in any better of a mood than when she'd left him in Chemistry.

"You don't have to go," she said, reading his downtrodden expression as a sign he begrudged having to attend the party.

"Sure I do. You don't say no to Archer. Trust me, it's just easier if I show up. Besides, if I can hang out with you, maybe it won't be so bad. At least someone will talk to me." He forced a smile.

"You still want to hang out?" She was terrified he'd say no, but she thought it was only fair to ask considering how bummed he looked.

"Of course. The leaves are just starting to turn. It's a really nice time to see the lake. Plus, it'll be the only place in Poisonfoot I don't have to hear about the party."

"You're assuming I'm not going to talk your ear off about it." She dumped her books in her locker, taking only what she'd need for that night's homework.

Cooper smiled, and this time the expression felt more genuine. "You're willing to listen to a baseball game with me. That alone will earn you a lot of forgiveness."

He picked her bag up off the floor before she had a chance to grab it herself, and hoisted it onto his shoulder.

"Besides," he added, his voice gaining a new, serious edge. "I think there's something else for us to talk about that will make the party seem less interesting."

"Oh?" Her heart thudded, and a giddy nervousness bubbled in her stomach. "What's that?"

"I want to know why my mother is just as adamant I stay away from you as everyone else is that you stay away from me."

"What?"

"Yeah. This town seems hell-bent on keeping us apart, Lou. And I want to find out why."

**Chapter Fifteen  
**

If someone had told Cooper a month earlier he'd be lying in his truck bed on a blanket, listening to baseball with a totally adorable girl, he'd have called that person a liar.

Had that same person told him they'd be sharing an awkward silence and not looking at each other, he'd be a bit more willing to listen. Awkward might as well replace Eugene as his middle name.

He wanted to know what the deal was between his family and Lou's. His mother and Elle Whittaker had never been best buddies, but he hadn't thought there was more to it than that. When people told Lou to steer clear of him, he'd assumed they were looking out for her new social standing, nothing more.

It wasn't until his mother told him in no uncertain terms that he was forbidden to spend time with Lou that he started thinking there might be more to it than he'd originally suspected.

He had to figure out what was going on, but in a way that would keep his secret protected. Lou was clever and had a level head on her shoulders, but he couldn't exactly say, "My brother turned into a coyote, and on my eighteenth birthday, I will too. What do you have to do with that?"

There was no evidence Lou had anything to do with it, so to spill the beans seemed reckless. Unless she did something to prove she needed to know, he wasn't going to tell her anything.

But they still had a weird Hatfields vs. McCoys thing going on with their families, and since neither side was interested in sharing details, they needed to figure it out for themselves.

During a lull in the bottom of the fourth inning, Cooper finally broke the ice. "What did your grandmother tell you when she said you shouldn't hang out with me?"

She sat up, resting on her elbows, and looked at him. "Pretty much the same thing everyone else in town said. You're bad news. I think she implied that Reynolds men had a bad habit of bailing and you wouldn't be any different."

Cooper covered his eyes so he could glance at her without being blinded. She had no idea how right she was. "I guess that's true."

"What, that you'll run away?"

He shrugged. "That men in my family have a history of doing that." It didn't matter than most of them ran away on four legs instead of two. The truth didn't need to be so well defined.

Of course, his dad had left for more old-fashioned reasons. Nothing turned him furry, but he sure had run off with his tail between his legs.

"What I don't get is what your mom could possibly have against me." Lou sounded more hurt than she was offended. "I've never even met her. And I've only been in town for like two weeks. I haven't exactly been stirring up trouble in all that time."

Cooper sat up and crossed his legs, turning to face her. "She got weird about your last name. So I'm guessing it has more to do with your grandmother than it does you personally."

"What's with this town? I've never known a group of grown adults to behave like they're all in high school cliques. It's bizarre."

"I know. My mom is in her forties, but she spazzed out on me like she was a member of Archer's fan club. She's never forbidden me to do anything, but you should have seen how serious she was about you. I was hoping your grandmother might have said something to tip you off as to why."

Lou shook her head solemnly, then a thought came over her, showing almost as visibly as a light bulb over her head. "You said your mom is in her forties, right?"

"Don't tell her I told you that."

"Has she always lived here?"

"Yeah."

"So, there's a good chance she went to high school with my dad. Maybe that has something to do with it. Like, maybe our parents dated. Maybe that's why they both have issues with each other still."

"That would have to have been one hell of a breakup." It also didn't offer any explanation as to why the whole town treated his family like pariahs, but it was more of a lead than they'd had five minutes earlier.

"Maybe the school library has old copies of the yearbooks. We could check it out tomorrow and see what shows up."

"I don't want to pin all our hopes on that. It's pretty..." He trailed off and gave a shrug, not sure what word he was looking for.

"I know, it's not exactly a smoking gun on the grassy knoll, but people in small towns hold grudges over the stupidest things. Maybe this really is just because your mom broke my dad's heart or something."

"Or vice versa."

Lou rolled her eyes. "Sure, or vice versa. Point being, if we can figure out why our families want to keep us apart, we have a better chance of proving to them how silly they're being. Right?"

"Right. I mean...it's not like anything is even going on between us." He threw the words out like a floater on a fish lure, bobbing them in front of her to see what she'd do. She stared at him, and he saw the briefest flicker of disappointment on her face before she lay back down on the blanket and looked up at the blue sky.

"Right. Nothing at all," she said quietly.

Cooper lay down as well, resisting the urge to say anything else. He'd already proven how stupid he was, he didn't need to hammer the case home.

**Chapter Sixteen  
**

When Cooper dropped her off later that evening, Lou debated walking back into town to spend an hour at the library before it closed. She hadn't made a lot of headway through the periodicals, but her limited research had explained to her how her father knew Nigel.

The article from August 1984 detailed the story of how her twelve-year-old father had rescued an eight-month-old baby when a coyote had tried to run off with the child during a town picnic. The baby had been left briefly unattended on a blanket in the sun when the animal had come out of the woods and grabbed the child.

Lou's father, acting quickly, had chased after the coyote, and since the animal was burdened with the extra weight of the baby, her dad was able to retrieve the kid relatively unharmed.

That baby had been Nigel.

She hadn't spoken to the oddball librarian about her discovery, but his name was right there in print. From what she gathered, her father had stayed close with young Nigel, forming a generation-defying friendship, and it sounded like they'd stayed in touch even after her dad had left Poisonfoot.

So she had one question answered, and a new respect for her father. Turned out even as a child he'd been an awesome guy. It made her uneasy to research her dad's history with Cooper's mom. One article had reminded her what a great guy he was, but what if he had broken someone's heart? And done it so brutally it left a twenty-year grudge in its wake? He'd been a teenager, and teenagers did stupid stuff all the time—she was living proof of that—but she didn't want to know any bad things about him. She wanted his memory untainted.

Yet, if it was as simple as a bad romance, she wouldn't need to spend any more time in the public library digging for clues.

Instead of going to the library, she decided to take a night off from her new quest for answers and spend a few hours doing actual homework.

When she kicked her shoes off at the front door, the house was oddly still. The sounds of The Bachelor hummed from Granny Elle's den, but it was the kind of white noise that did nothing to add any life to the space around it. Lou wandered down the main hall to the kitchen where her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, a newspaper opened to the classified section. She was chewing on the end of a red marker, scouring the page for job listings.

Financially they weren't hurting for money with their new rent-free digs, but Lou knew their family savings was empty. More than that, though, her mother had always had a job. She was probably getting a little stir crazy sitting around the house with Granny Elle.

"Anything?" Lou asked.

"Paper mill. Paper mill. Walmart. Paper mill." Her mom sighed and set the marker down. "Slim pickings for stuff with benefits."

Lou felt a familiar snarl of guilt in her belly. If it wasn't for her, they wouldn't need the benefits. Her mother never got sick and had perfect teeth and vision. Lou, on the other hand, needed insulin. She needed test strips. She needed a vast number of very expensive medical supplies, and having health benefits made those things more affordable. She'd seen the price on her insulin last week when they'd gone to the pharmacy in town. She knew what she was costing her mom.

She didn't want to feel bad about it—she hadn't asked for diabetes after all—but she worried about what it meant for them. Certainly Granny Elle would offer to pay. She likely already had. But Lou's mom was stubborn, and she seemed dead set on proving she was capable of taking care of their needs on her own.

"Where were you?" her mom asked.

Lou debated lying, but Mom seemed like one of the few people in town who wouldn't care who her daughter spent time with. "I was hanging out with Cooper."

"Who's Cooper?" Her mom waggled her eyebrows, wearing a suggestive grin.

Lou blushed tellingly. "He's just a boy."

"Just a boy. Suuuuure, sure." Attention returning to the paper, her mom chuckled quietly to herself. "Are you going upstairs?"

"Yeah."

"Can you take that box up to the attic for me? Just some papers from the sale of the old house and some... It's some papers. Your grandma said there's plenty of space up there, even after remodeling for your room, so we might as well make use of it."

Lou hadn't seen the attic yet in all her explorations of the house to date. In spite of the fact it was literally on the other side of the drywall from her, there was no direct access from her room to the storage half of the top floor.

The box she was meant to take sat next to an interior door on the back wall of the kitchen. It was a tattered cardboard banker's box, torn and ratty on the side like it might fall apart at any moment. Lou hoisted the box up, balancing it on her hip and opening the door. The stairwell was dark, with a minimal patch of yellow light from the top of the stairs guiding her way.

The kitchen door swung closed behind her, making the space around her even darker, and Lou staggered on a step halfway up. She held tight to the box, bashing her knee against the wooden riser, unable to brace her fall.

"You okay?" Her mother's voice was muffled from the kitchen. Lou must have made a louder noise than she'd expected.

"I'm fine," she called back, though her knee called her a liar, throbbing in dull pain. "Just tripped."

She made her way up the remaining stairs, her injured knee thumping its own tiny heartbeat, and when she got to the top, she immediately dropped the box so she could rub the wound. There was no scrape, but it would definitely be bruised in the morning.

The lid of the box had come off when it had fallen, and a quick glance inside showed her the mortgage documents her mom had promised, but a few folders also bore the logo of the hospital where her father had died. Lou had no interest in seeing how much money it had cost her family to see him slip away, so she repositioned the lid on the box and kicked it into a corner.

Without her burden, Lou was able to get a good look of the attic. It was a fair bit smaller than her side of the upper floor, making her silently thankful to her grandmother for being so gracious to her. Unlike the light, airy feeling of her bedroom, the beams and ceiling were all aged dark wood, and most of the windows were covered with brown paper, giving the room its dim yellow glow.

Several old steamer trunks were lined under the wall with neat stacks of cardboard boxes piled on top of them. An old sewing mannequin was covered in dust in one corner with an ancient velvet coat draped over it. There were moth holes chewed through the material, making it look older than it probably was.

Curiosity overcame her when she saw a trunk with its lock popped and no boxes on top of it. There didn't seem to be any harm in doing a quick investigation of the trunk's contents, and she wouldn't disturb anything.

Lou knelt in front of the trunk and opened the top. The hinges squealed, rusted from disuse. For a moment she held her breath, waiting for someone to come in and tell her she shouldn't be snooping, but the room remained quiet. She could hear the muffled voices of people talking on Granny Elle's TV, but otherwise there was no sound in the house.

On the top insert of the trunk was a small khaki uniform with a sash covered in multicolored patches. Each badge was decorated to represent some skill—canoeing, hiking, archery—and they were neatly sewn onto the sash with perfectly even spaces between them. Obviously the work of a proud parent and not the child himself. It reminded Lou of her own Girl Scouts sash, though she'd sewn those badges on herself in order to earn the sewing award.

She fingered the prizes on her father's sash reverently, then put the miniature uniform to the side, careful not to ruin the folding job. She didn't want the shirt or sash to end up wrinkled.

Underneath was a collection of toys, and Lou's heart leapt. It was like finding a secret time capsule dedicated solely to her father. A beaten, brown leather baseball glove was next in the pile. An elastic was wrapped around the outside, keeping an aging Rawlings baseball trapped inside.

She took the elastic off, and the ball rolled out. Inside the pocket of the glove, the leather was worn so smooth it shined. Lou imagined her father using oil to condition the leather and the ball to mold the glove to the proper size. It smelled sweet and slightly like lemon. She placed the ball next to her hip, sure no one would notice it going missing, and added the glove to the pile of other goods.

The trunk contained old Hardy Boys paperbacks, dog-eared sci-fi novels—Lou took a few of these, the ones that looked the most well-loved—and at the bottom of the trunk was a stack of papers.

A few were old class papers, some scribbled notes, and the very last sheet was from a sketchpad. When Lou looked at it, everything else she'd been holding in her lap tumbled to the floor.

There was the woman with the tangled braid, the one Lou had been seeing in her dreams, and cowering at the woman's feet was a coyote.

**Chapter Seventeen  
**

Cooper hated game days.

On the Friday of games all players were required to "be presentable." As the coach put it, he wanted them to "look like goddamn gentlemen."

Cooper didn't have a dress shirt of his own, so he had to wear one of Jer's, but his mom had splurged on his only tie, a green-and-bronze-striped number that he thought looked pretty damned good on him.

A blazer was optional, and Cooper didn't feel like it would help his image any, so he went with the basic shirt/tie/slacks combo. All in all it made him feel like he was volunteering at a funeral parlor.

Lou sat on her stool beside him in chemistry and gave him a once-over. He couldn't decide if the smirk playing on her lips was because she liked what she saw or she was resisting the urge to make fun of him.

"What?" he asked, smoothing his tie self-consciously.

"You clean up real nice, Cooper Reynolds."

He dipped his head, trying not to show her how the compliment made him grin but failing miserably.

It was nice to have a normal discussion for once. The past week had been strained, and between his mom and her grandmother, they had only been able to meet at school. Practice for the upcoming game had eaten up the rest of his spare time, putting their already limited research efforts to a halt.

On Tuesday she'd seemed uneasy about something, but when he'd asked, she brushed him off, telling him it was nothing.

To have her back to her sweet, smiling self was a treat. Even more so was knowing he'd get to spend real time with her at Archer's party later that evening. It was the only thing motivating him to go, knowing they'd get to have a good one-on-one.

If he was being honest with himself, what he was really looking forward to was asking her to go for a walk in the woods with him.

If he grew a pair by then.

"You coming to the game tonight?" He knew she was going to the party but hadn't thought to ask if she'd be coming to see him play. The idea thrilled and terrified him in equal turn. The only person who ever routinely watched him play was Mia. His sister even dragged her bizarro goth boyfriend out to games with her. She'd never missed one.

His mother had only been able to come once.

"Yeah. Marnie has been making a huge deal of it. There's apparently a whole routine I get to be a part of. Dinner at the Dairy Queen. Game. Sounds like there are plans to go to Marnie's after the game to 'change' and 'put on our game faces.'" Lou made little air quotes around these words and rolled her eyes.

She spoke fondly of Marnie most days, so Cooper knew she considered the other girl a friend, in spite of any warnings Marnie had issued against Cooper. It was hard for Cooper to be bitter about it. Marnie had never been outwardly malicious towards him, and she'd welcomed Lou with open arms.

He would have liked it better if Lou came to the game on her own, but he wasn't going to begrudge her for having other friends. He didn't want her to experience his own friendless existence.

Friendless except for her.

She snapped her goggles on and turned her attention to Mr. Price when he entered the room, but Cooper kept his gaze locked on her. Where had this crazy girl come from? This girl who managed to look beautiful even in plastic protective goggles covering half her face. Who actually wanted to spend time with him.

Clearly she was insane.

But that made two of them, because he was crazy about her.

Two months earlier he would have rolled his eyes just for thinking something so stupid and cheesy, but there it was.

And what was worse, he wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her everything. Maybe that's what had his mom so spooked. They hadn't figured out the connection between Lou's father and his own mom, but what if she'd told Lou's dad something and he'd freaked out? Perhaps his mom's fear had more to do with her own history and not Lou in particular.

They needed to determine how their parents were connected, and maybe then they'd have a better shot at sorting things out.

He knew he couldn't tell her about what had happened to Jer, though. The secret had been kept so long, and in mere months it wouldn't matter anymore. The point would be moot. And would it help her to know what really happened to him, or would she be off thinking he was exactly what people had claimed he was?

Someone who left.

He was going to end up leaving her, and knowing that put a damper on all his warm, fuzzy feelings. Didn't she have a right to know what he was going to put her through? If she stuck around, it was inevitable.

"Mister Reynolds." Mr. Price tapped a yardstick on the counter impatiently. "I'm sure whatever has you off in la-la land is incredibly important, but do you think you could spare a moment of time to answer the question?"

A few giggles rippled through the classroom, and Cooper looked around nervously. Lou dipped her head, not meeting his eyes, but she furiously scribbled something in her notebook and dropped it on the counter.

Huge letters read: COMBUSTION REACTION.

"I, uh... A combustion reaction?" He sounded unsure because he hadn't heard the question, but the tittering amongst his classmates stopped.

Mr. Price seemed disappointed that he couldn't humiliate Cooper for getting the answer wrong.

"Miss Whittaker, if I'd wanted an answer from you, I'd have directed my question to you, is that understood?"

Lou looked up and smiled. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean, sir."

A few more snickers rang out. Mr. Price looked unimpressed.

"Since everyone finds this so humorous, I'd like to see how funny it is in detention. Mr. Reynolds, I'll see you at lunch, lest you try to play the football card on me. Miss Whittaker, I'll see you after school, as you have no such excuses."

"But—" Lou began to protest.

"I think I said no excuses."

Cooper gave Lou a sympathetic look when she tossed her pen down on the counter in disgust. Turned out Mr. Price could get worse.

Mr. Price went on to explain the experiment they'd be doing that day and what defined a combustion reaction, but Cooper drifted off in thought.

He was going to tell Lou.

That night, he'd tell her everything.

If there was any benefit to serving after-school detention instead of an in-class lunch hour like poor Cooper had to, was that Lou got to avoid Mr. Price. Lou made her way into the detention hall and forfeited her cell to the supervising teacher, who tossed it into her desk drawer with about a dozen others and a few handheld video game systems.

She surveyed the room and spotted a familiar face in the back row. Archer looked up from his textbook and gave a wave, so any hope Lou had of pretending she hadn't seen him went out the window. She briefly debated sitting by herself under the guise of being a good little detainee, but a small group of girls were chatting quietly, and the teacher didn't seem to care. Archer nodded at her and raised a quizzical brow.

How could she argue with a brow raise?

After weaving her way through the desks, she took the empty spot next to him. He grinned broadly and shut his book, no longer maintaining the pretense of studying.

"Hello, Miss Eloise."

"Ugh, please. Lou."

"Right. Pretty girl with a boy's name."

"I'm not sure if you just complimented me or insulted me."

"Just stating facts, that's all. Lou is a boy's name."

"At least I'm not named after Target's in-store brand."

"Ahh, nicely played." He winked at her and turned in his seat so he was facing her. Lou looked at the teacher, expecting her to separate them at any minute. But Ms. Evans seemed deeply engrossed in a tattered Harlequin and wasn't paying any attention to the students.

"So, what did you do to get yourself in here? Shouldn't you have gotten a free pass since you're on the football team?"

"Nah, I'll be out of here with loads of time before the game. Plus, who says I'm not here to enjoy some peace and quiet and get a little studying done?"

"Um, because that would be insane."

"Valid point. What did you do?"

"Shared my notes with Cooper in Chemistry."

"And you got stuck in here, but he didn't? That seems unfair."

"No, no. Mr. Price figured if we were in here together we'd just talk the entire time, so he made us serve our time separately. Now I'm starting to see the logic in that." She gave him a pointed look.

"Oh, no, this is totally different. See, I'm irresistible."

"You need to work on your confidence issues." Lou dug into her backpack so she could hide her smile. Archer had a way of making annoyance charming, and she didn't want him to know it was working on her. Plus, she didn't want to admit he looked extra good in his game-day suit and tie. Not as good as Cooper, but still.

"I've been told that before."

She tossed her chemistry textbook onto the desk and found her notebook, pretending to focus on acids and bases instead of Archer. This proved to be difficult, since hydrochloric acid wasn't staring at her from two feet away. The harder she looked at her book, the more apparent it became that Archer wasn't looking at his.

A slight tingling crept up her spine, and she did her best to ignore it, but when the shivery sensation evolved into a fingerlike crawl, she shuddered and shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

"Cold?"

She glanced over at him, and the feeling got more intense. She wanted to look around and see if anyone else was getting the same creepy, chilly vibe she was. But when she tried to turn away, she found herself unable to move. When Lou met Archer's eyes, the unsettling buzz on her skin grew to a fever pitch, and she wanted to shake herself off like a wet dog.

"I—I, what's going on?"

"Nothing is going on." He tilted his head to one side and watched her. "Are you sure you're not just cold?"

Lou wanted to deny it, but she was cold. And she was having a hard time remembering his question. Archer reached out and put his hand over hers, and all the sensitivity radiated to one point, where his skin touched hers. In that moment her mind went fully blank, like a white sheet had been pulled over her thoughts and there was nothing to think about, wonder over, or cause her to worry.

There was only Archer and those cool, blue eyes of his.

He smiled, and her stomach bottomed out, but it wasn't the fun, floaty, butterfly excitement she felt with...

With...

There was someone who she was trying to think of, but the film over everything made a name and face impossible to grasp. Archer's smile was lovely, but the longer she struggled to find her own memories, the more his grin lost its charm and became menacing.

She wrenched her hand away, and once she was free of his grasp, the veil was lifted.

Cooper.

When Archer touched her, every thought of Cooper had been spirited out of her mind.

**Chapter Eighteen  
**

Nobody took football more seriously than small towns in Texas did.

Lou had always assumed those giant crowd scenes in Friday Night Lights had been exaggerated for dramatic impact, but when she sat down next to Marnie in the jam-packed Poisonfoot stadium, she knew this was beyond anything television could have imagined.

The crowd was roaring, chanting, "Let's go Padres, Let's go!" and stamping their feet in rowdy unison, so much so the benches rumbled like an earthquake. Back in Fresno there'd been one or two occasions Lou recalled an actual earthquake causing the seats shake, but even those experiences paled compared to this.

Everyone, literally everyone, was wearing the burgundy-and-gray colors of the team, and Lou was eternally grateful to Marnie for warning her this would be a requirement. She was wearing a burgundy tank top—borrowed from Marnie—underneath a lightweight gray cardigan. At least she didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

Most of the crowd was dressed in official Padres T-shirts and hoodies, making Lou wonder if there was a merch stand somewhere selling overpriced American Apparel paraphernalia. More likely there was some hive mind welcome basket she had yet to receive which included her Padres gear, cowboy boots, and a handful of dirt to artfully smear on her jeans.

She was squished between Marnie and Maisie—one of the other girls from their lunch table—and flanking them down the row were Ainslie, Haylie, Melodie, and Annie. Lou was the only one of the girls without an ie in her name. To be fair she was also the only one who preferred a boy's nickname. During the first week the girls had tried to concoct a different nickname for Eloise, but the best they'd been able to suggest was Ellie, and frankly Lou liked being a Lou.

Marnie, not content to stick with that, had started calling her Lulu, but it was close enough.

The cheerleaders—a few of the missing ie girls from their group—were bouncing on the sidelines, getting the crowd foaming at the mouth for the game to start. Meanwhile the marching band was midfield doing a stirring rendition of Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night". It was a testament to their skill that Lou was able to discern which song it was through all the clashing cymbals and heavy trumpet line.

When the band hit the chorus, the cheerleaders chanted along until it all reached a fever pitch and the crowd was on their feet stomping in time. Lou was equal parts excited and freaked out by the town's intense devotion to high school football.

It all served as a great distraction to the weird incident earlier with Archer.

When the team took to the field, the spectators cried out with the vigor of bystanders at Roman gladiator matches. Lou snickered until she saw the name Reynolds printed on the back of a jersey as he sprinted out, and then she joined the crowd, clapping and cheering right along with them. At least here she wouldn't have to explain cheering for him. She was cheering for the team as far as any of the other girls were concerned. Later, when she was hanging out with him at Archer's party, she was sure she'd catch hell from Marnie, but she'd just shrug it off.

She'd been warned about him, but she was choosing to ignore them.

The rules and game play of football weren't something Lou really had a good grasp on. If quizzed on the finer points of baseball, she could have talked for hour about bloops, lollipops, and hit-and-runs. Football, on the other hand, was a total mystery. Marnie tried her best to keep Lou up to speed, using phrases like "sack," "scramble," and "Hail Mary", but Lou finally gave up trying to learn. She'd look at the Wikipedia page for it later that weekend and maybe re-watch Varsity Blues.

All she knew was Cooper was good.

She was no expert on these things, obviously, but it seemed whenever he got the ball, he was untouchable. It was the only time she'd seen people pay attention to him or even speak his name. To the crowd he wasn't Cooper, he was Reynolds or "Number Forty". But they were rooting for him. They were going crazy for him. And it made a weird sense of pride bloom inside her.

For once, and maybe the only time, they were seeing him the way she did.

Two and a half hours later the Padres had crushed the competition and the players had left the field. Fans started milling out of their seats, clapping each other on the back, shaking hands and giving high-fives as if they'd somehow been personally responsible for the victory.

Lou followed the rest of the girls to the parking lot, all the while scanning the crowd to see if she could catch sight of Cooper amongst the throngs of fans. Sure, she'd see him in a half hour at the party, but she had an overwhelming desire to congratulate him now. The urgency she felt to be near him flickered as they reached the lot with no sign of his tall, wiry frame.

She got into Marnie's Hyundai Sonata, and three others piled into the backseat. Everyone else was wedged into Annie's mom's minivan, borrowed that evening specifically for its human cargo capacity. The girls spent about forty minutes at Marnie's place in her enormous bedroom swapping dresses and applying makeup. When Marnie suggested Lou might want to change, it was said politely, but the hint lingered that she should change, lest she make them all look bad.

Again she was in a position where she had to borrow something from her much taller friend, but in this instance it worked in her favor. Marnie tended to opt for shorter skirts than Lou ever would have considered on her own, but because of their height difference the hems came much closer to Lou's knees.

She opted for a plain green dress with a flirty hemline that swished when she spun around. Marnie tried to get her into heels, but Lou pictured the group of them hobbling across the lawn to the party in the woods, their heels buried in the grass, and she decided to stick with her Converse low tops. She might not look the sexiest of the lot of them, but she also wouldn't be the first person to do a face plant into the grass.

They arrived fashionably late to the party, Marnie cursing their parking spot on the gravel road leading up to Archer's house.

House was a reserved term for the Wyatt estate. It was a sprawling ranch home that looked like it had been transplanted from the pages of Architectural Digest, with beautifully manicured lawns and giant windows showing the impressive interior of the home. It appeared that the Wyatts had left every light on just to give their visitors a glimpse of the wonderment inside.

Before Marnie could lead them down the path towards the party, the door to the Wyatt house opened and a woman came out onto the front step.

"You ladies aren't running off without saying hello, are you? Marnie Jackson, what would your mother say?" There was a lightness to the woman's voice that suggested she was teasing, but Marnie changed directions all the same.

"Come on, we'll just go say hello quickly." She grabbed Lou's hand and tugged her in the direction of the main house.

Lou looked wistfully towards the party, hoping this side trek wouldn't delay them too long. She wanted to see Cooper, not some lady she'd never met before. But if the woman was—as logic implied—Archer's mother, it was only polite she thank Mrs. Wyatt for having them over. Or, more accurately, for letting Archer throw an insane backyard rager.

Mrs. Wyatt was smoking a cigarette and held a martini between two fingers. She was wearing a lilac cardigan over a white blouse, her khakis were ironed with crisp pleats, and she had a set of pearls on to round out her overall Stepford-wife look. With hair the same downy blonde color as her son, she was beautiful, polished, and generally perfect.

Lou was suddenly very happy she'd borrowed a dress from Marnie, otherwise she would have felt woefully inadequate. As it was she wasn't sure how the woman looked so good. Her own mother sat around in battered jeans and an old NFL T-shirt with holes in the neck when she had nowhere to go. Sweater sets and pearls weren't the Whittaker idea of relaxed casual.

"Who's your little friend?" Mrs. Wyatt held her martini in Lou's general direction. "I don't think we've met."

Marnie ushered Lou forward, presenting her like a cat with a dead mouse. "This is Lou Whittaker. Elle's granddaughter."

"Lou?" Mrs. Wyatt wrinkled her nose. "What a...peculiar moniker."

"It's short for Eloise. I'm named after my grandma." She gave a shrug, trying not to be annoyed with everyone's opinion on her nickname. She didn't like to point out that no one made fun of a girl named Princess, so they might want to tone it down about a nickname like Lou.

"Lovely. Well any friend of Marnie's..." She lifted her martini glass and cheers'd them before taking a sip. "My name is Ariel. You know my son, I take it?"

"Archer? Oh, yeah. We've met."

"Hmm." Ariel licked the rim of her glass and stared over to the party site, regarding the fire thoughtfully. When she looked back, the reflection of the flames held in her eyes. She blinked once and the flames were gone.

Lou stared at her, waiting to see if the light would return, but it was just the normal glimmer of blue eyes under porch lights. Maybe Lou had been imagining things.

Funny how overactive her imagination had become since she'd moved to Poisonfoot.

"Well, you girls have fun." Ariel continued to look at Lou as though Marnie wasn't there. "Tell Archer to be a good boy."

"Oh, he's always good," Marnie said with a giggle, taking Lou's hand again and pulling her towards the party.

The farther they walked from where they'd parked, the louder the noise got, until the chorus from the rowdy partygoers drowned out the cheerful giggles of her own group. They rounded a bend in the road, and an enormous fire pit lit the rest of their way, flames towering eight feet high and a massive gathering of people sitting on built-in benches, assorted camp chairs, or blankets in the grass.

Lou's fears over high heels had been mostly for nothing, considering the paved path brought them directly to the fire pit area, but when the girls started wandering out into the grass, she saw a few of them bobbling like baby giraffes learning how to walk for the first time. Marnie slipped her own heels off and made a beeline for Archer, dragging Lou behind her.

"Archer Wyatt, look who I brought," Marnie squealed and presented Lou like she was a prize.

"Well, be still my heart. Is this the same Lou Whittaker I saw in detention?"

Lou hated how good her name sounded coming out of his mouth. She fought against the warm swell of giddy enjoyment that bubbled up inside her, making her blush like...well, like a teenage girl.

He certainly wasn't making her feel uneasy anymore.

"Hi, Archer." Lou hated how high her voice came out.

"Can I get the two prettiest girls at my party a drink?" he asked, all twang and Southern charm. He was like a junior Matthew McConaughey, before the actor got all greasy and weird.

Okay...more greasy and weird.

Marnie giggled like a beverage offer was the funniest thing Archer could have said right then and slapped him playfully on the arm. "Oh, you."

She seriously said, Oh, you.

"Yeah, a drink would be awesome," Lou interjected, hoping to save Marnie from doing anything else completely clichéd and insane. If she liked Archer, that was cool, but she didn't need to lay it on thick for Lou's benefit.

"All right, girls. Don't you go anywhere." He tipped his imaginary cap to them and wandered off.

"He likes you," Marnie hissed, pinching Lou's arm.

"Ow. And what?"

"Archer likes you, stupid. Be nicer to him."

Lou was dazed. "Uh...I said hi."

Marnie rolled her eyes. "Do you seriously not know that he's cuckoo for Lulu?"

"Oh my God, Marnie. I am begging you to never say that sentence again as long as you live. And no, he's not."

"Then why has he asked me like forty-five times this week if you're coming?"

"Maybe he was using it as an excuse to talk to you." Lou hoped an appeal to Marnie's vanity might help.

"Yeah. Right. Anyway, I'm going to find an excuse to leave when he comes back. Don't blow it."

"Blow...what?"

Marnie giggled so hard she snorted, then covered her mouth. "Well, I guess you could blow it."

"Omigod, Marnie," Lou squeaked, slapping her friend's arm. "No."

"Shush, here he comes."

Archer returned with two beers, their bottles dewy from cooler ice, making small amber gems glimmer on the surface of the glass. He handed them each a beer, and cool as a cucumber Marnie said, "Oh. I forgot to...not be here." She turned and skipped off in the opposite direction.

"I...uh..." Lou wanted to say, Well that was awkward, but knew nothing made a situation more awkward than drawing attention to it. She sipped the beer, the flavor bitter on her tongue, and smiled politely at him. "Thanks for inviting me," she said finally.

"Of course. I wanted you here."

She tried not to think of the weirdness from earlier, when being with Archer had chased away her thoughts of Cooper. Instead she stayed out of arm's reach and tried to think of anything else.

He likes you. Marnie's words bounced around in her skull like the little silver balls in a pinball machine. She was unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of male affection, so she wasn't sure what a crush looked like, only what they felt like. She tried to measure Archer's actions against the feelings she had for Cooper. Did it seem like he had a flock of butterflies in his belly? Did he blush constantly when he spoke? Did it look like he might vomit at any moment?

No. He looked cool, calm, and collected. The very picture of composure. Of course, that didn't mean Marnie was wrong, it just meant Lou sucked at telling if people liked her.

She wasn't even a hundred percent sure Cooper liked her, and he was defying the direct order of his mother by seeing her. Perhaps he was just the rebellious sort.

Speaking of Cooper...

She scanned the crowd, but given how close she and Archer were to the fire, it was hard to see anything in the darker reaches of the party area. Cooper had said he'd come, and she believed him, but there was no sign of him anywhere.

Archer had been saying something Lou had missed entirely because of her eager search for Cooper, and when she returned her attention to her host, he was looking at her expectantly, waiting for a response.

"I'm sorry, what?" she asked, not even pretending she'd heard him.

"I asked how you were liking Poisonfoot so far. I didn't get a chance to ask when we talked earlier."

"Oh." She sipped her beer again to give herself a little extra time to think, then bit her lip.

"Don't answer all at once, now." He laughed.

"I like it," Lou blurted. "I mean...it's so different from what I'm used to. It's just...it's taking some time to get adjusted." She shrugged, hoping he understood what she meant. "But I do like it. And the people are really nice." If all went well, he'd listen only to the compliment and ignore the length of time it had taken her to come up with it.

"You're from California, right?"

"Fresno, yeah."

"This has got to be quite the change of scenery from Fresno."

A breath of relief whooshed out of her, and she was grateful to Archer for letting her conversational faux pas go without comment. "Yeah. No easy access to the ocean. No California weather. Even the light is different. I don't know how to explain it, but in California the light has this pretty, buttery-yellow quality. It's amazing. I miss that."

"Well, one day you should come out here, and I'll take you into the cow field for a proper Texas sunset. I think you'll find there are a lot of things here to like, too." He winked, and there was no mistaking it. Archer Wyatt was flirting with her.

"That sounds really nice." It did sound really nice. She didn't have any expectations of such an evening ever happening, but the thought of seeing the sun set across a big field did have a certain appeal to it. Except she wanted to share that moment with Cooper, not Archer.

Lou looked for him again, trying to be subtle about it.

This time she spotted him hanging back from the group. He'd changed from his dress clothes to a more casual look—jeans and a maroon T-shirt—and his expression told her he couldn't be more miserable. One of the guys from the team walked up and gave him a pat on the shoulder but didn't linger to talk. From what Lou had seen, the Cooper-Archer combo had been responsible for winning the game, yet no one was treating Cooper like a celebrity.

During her brief conversation with Archer, no fewer than five people had come up to tell him what an awesome game he'd had. She hadn't been able to see Cooper for most of that time, but she had a feeling he'd received far fewer congratulations.

What the heck was wrong with the people in this town? Cooper was a total sweetheart, and they treated him like he was one of the creatures from Swamp Thing. It was like he carried a disease and people were afraid to catch it. Lou couldn't wrap her head around how a guy as cute, nice, and genuinely cool as Cooper could be treated like the dirt underfoot.

Weren't bad boys supposed to be appealing? If rumor had it Cooper was no good, why didn't that make him more popular?

"Excuse me," she told Archer. "Thanks again for the beer." He'd gotten closer while they'd been talking and was near enough he might have touched her. She took a step away.

"Sure. Don't be a stranger."

She didn't reply, making a beeline across the clearing, out of the warm circle of light from the fire, and into the dark ring around the edge. Cooper watched her the whole way, his eyes unreadable in the shadows. When she was standing in front of him, he finally smiled.

"Making friends?" His voice was tight, like it hurt him to ask her that.

"People are nice." She repeated the words she'd used with Archer.

"Be careful around him."

"I've been told the same about you."

This time he didn't force a smile, he just nodded. "You were."

"If I made the same snap judgments about Archer other people make about you, that would be pretty shitty of me, don't you think?"

Cooper seemed to contemplate this, then nodded. "I guess I didn't look at it that way."

"I'm not saying you're wrong." Archer did make her nervous, after all. "But people were wrong about you, and I'm glad I didn't listen. I think I'll stick to making personality calls about people on my own." She gave him a smile so he'd know she wasn't trying to make him feel bad, then a surge of boldness made her ask, "Out of curiosity, are you asking me to steer clear of Archer because you're jealous?"

Cooper sputtered. "Jealous?"

"Yeah."

"Of Archer?"

Answering a question with a question. Classic deflection. Her mom used to call her dad out on it all the time, especially when he'd been busted eating food he wasn't supposed to. "Cookies, what cookies?" he'd ask, the front of his shirt bearing the telltale evidence of chocolate chip crumbs.

There were no crumbs on Cooper, but the way he was dodging her question made her think she was right to assume he did like her. The thought buoyed her, making her feel giddy and weightless.

"Should I be jealous?" he asked.

"Only if you want all the high-fives he's getting. He's nice enough, but he's not my type."

Back in California, Archer would have been her exact type. In fact he bore a remarkable resemblance to the last crush she'd had—tall, blond, athletic—but things had changed.

"What's your type?" A grin settled over his lips.

"Tall. Handsome. Obnoxiously incapable of answering questions. Prone to spacing out in chemistry class. Preferably drives an ugly truck."

"My truck isn't ugly."

"Man, you're full of yourself. Out of that whole list the thing you latched on to was ugly truck?" Lou laughed and took a sip of her beer, still not sure if she was ever going to like the taste of it. She could never drink more than one, and afterwards her teeth felt like they were coated in little beer sweaters.

"I know I'm handsome," he replied, preening. "My mom tells me so all the time."

"You are."

"So are you saying you like me, Lou?"

"Are you admitting you were jealous?"

"Maybe a little."

"Then maybe a little right back at you." She was proud of herself for remaining quick-witted and flirty when inside all she wanted to do was jump up and down and tell him how much she liked him. She wanted him to scoop her up in a big hug so she could see if he smelled as good as he seemed to across their stools in chemistry.

She wanted... She wanted... She wanted.

But his flirty expression vanished. "Come for a walk with me."

Oh. "Okay."

What did it mean? What was this Texas-code for? She was sure he didn't just want to walk, but she didn't know what he was expecting to get out of this little jaunt. A stolen kiss? Something...else?

She liked him, but she hoped he wasn't going to make her regret that. Cooper didn't seem like the kind of guy to push. He'd been a perfect gentleman with her whenever they were alone. But in the back of her mind was that nagging warning everyone had offered her.

He's bad news.

Did they all know something they weren't telling her? Was there a secret in Cooper's past that made everyone warn her off him? A sudden thrill of fear shuddered through her, and though she continued to follow him, she wondered if she wasn't a lamb being led to the slaughter.

He walked into the trees, leading her farther and farther from the party until the revelry was nothing more than white noise in the background and they couldn't see the light of the fire. In the darkness, alone with him and out of earshot, she wondered if she hadn't made a terrible mistake.

She was little, after all. Almost a foot shorter than him. And he played football.

Stop being so stupid, she scolded herself. This isn't some random boy who can't be trusted. This is Cooper. Cooper is safe. Cooper is Cooper.

And with that the fear fled, scattered like grease from a drop of soap.

Her body relaxed, and she reached out her hand to touch his back, fearful she'd lose him in the darkness.

He stopped walking and pivoted to face her. She hadn't withdrawn her hand, so now she was braced against his chest, looking up at him. His heart throbbed under her palm wildly, like he was as nervous as she was.

He's going to kiss you, her brain suggested.

Lou closed her eyes, waiting for it, which was kind of silly since it was so dark she could have kept her eyes open and the result would have been the same.

Cooper stepped closer, his hand on her shoulder, near her neck, fingers catching in her hair. He was practically pressed against her, Lou's hand sandwiched between them, and their hearts beat in the same frenzied rhythm. The air was cool around them, but in the Cooper-and-Lou bubble it was as hot as midafternoon in July.

Her pulse kicked, thrumming in her ears to further drown out any noise from the party. They were on their own little island out here, removed from the world. Out here they could escape the opinions of everyone else, and nothing mattered except remembering to breathe and hoping this moment could last forever.

"Lou..." he whispered, his face close enough that the words felt warm across her lips. He ran his hands down her bare arms, making a path of goose bumps follow, a response that had nothing to do with being cold.

"Hi," she replied.

"Hi."

Cooper rested his forehead against hers, and she leaned into him, dropping her hand so there was nothing between them. She smiled, finding the smell of him to be better than she'd ever imagined. It was laundry detergent, fresh grass, and sunlight. He smelled like all the good parts of their town, and she basked in it, looping her arms around his waist so she could breathe even deeper.

He pushed her hair back off her shoulders and ran his thumbs down each side of her neck, teasing the fine hairs.

Just when she thought he might toy with her forever but never actually kiss her, his lips grazed hers. She jolted, like being shocked by static, but the kiss was perfect. His mouth was hot and tasted like peppermint gum, and when he pulled her tight against him, she felt sure she would kiss him like this forever and not care if they turned to dust in the woods, as long as she died feeling this good.

When he broke away, she let out an airy oh, and he pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose.

"I had to do that," he said.

"I'm glad you did," she replied, amazed her mouth was able to form full words.

"I wanted to do it at least once. In case I didn't get the chance again."

"What do you...?" Her voice trailed off when she looked over his shoulder, all words frozen on her lips when she saw the glint of eyes low to the ground.

It materialized out of the shadows like it was made from the night, and when Cooper turned, he didn't seem surprised to see the coyote standing there.

"Lou. I want you to meet my brother."

**Chapter Nineteen  
**

He gave her a million mental bonus points for not screaming and running back to the party.

Her hand fisted in his T-shirt, and she stepped in the opposite direction of the coyote, but she didn't run. She did stare up at him like he'd spoken in a foreign language, but he could work around that. He knew confessing wouldn't be easy, so he'd take what he could get.

"Do you want to sit down?" He eased her towards a fallen tree. She let him guide her, but her attention was locked on Jer. Her whole body trembled. "He's not going to hurt you."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I know."

She sat on the tree, holding tightly to his arm as if he might run off and leave her alone.

Jer padded into the small clearing and eyed them both like he wanted to bolt.

"Don't get shy now," Cooper scolded him. "I know you've been watching her."

Jer huffed, a snorting sound somewhere between a sneeze and a growl. Cooper couldn't be positive, but he thought the animal rolled its eyes. Instead of bolting, Jer sat back on his haunches and yawned, his pink tongue lolling. At least he was playing up the harmless aspect Cooper was trying to pitch to Lou.

"Cooper?" She clutched at him, her hand still on the sleeve of his shirt.

"Yeah?"

"What do you mean, your brother?"

Ah, she'd finally processed that part. He sat beside her, and Jer got bored of watching them so he lay down and put his head on crossed paws. He looked like a pet dog. Cooper was grateful to him for going light on the menace. He knew full well a coyote—however small—could still be terrifying when it bared its teeth.

This would be much easier to explain if Lou wasn't scared out of her mind.

"You know how I told you my brother Jeremy split?"

"Yeah?"

Cooper pointed to the coyote's prone form. "He didn't so much run away, as he...changed."

"Are you saying your brother is a werewolf?" Lou stared at him, openly incredulous. He couldn't blame her for being doubtful, especially if she was thinking of this as a weird horror-movie creature feature.

"No. He's a coyote. He doesn't change back. He'll never be human again. This is how he is from now on."

Cooper wondered how much Jer understood of what they were saying. What part of the animal was still his brother? How much humanity stuck around? Would there come a point his brother vanished entirely, and all that remained was animal instinct?

He didn't want to imagine a time he had to be afraid of what his brother had become.

"I don't understand."

How could she? He'd barely been able to grasp the truth of it, and he'd had over a year to process things. Maybe it was because he'd seen Jer go through it and knew what was in store for him, but he had come to a certain weird peace with the whole thing. You can't fight inevitability. It was like trying to challenge gravity.

The world kept right on spinning, whether you wanted it to or not.

Cooper took Lou's hand into his lap and gave her a squeeze, hoping to offer her a bit of comfort before he dropped his next bomb.

"There's something wrong with the men in my family. Just the men. When a male in the Reynolds family turns eighteen, something happens to him, and he ends up like...that."

"Is that what happened to your dad?"

Cooper shook his head, though he could understand her confusion, given the vanishing act his dad had pulled. "No, my dad was a Charles, not a Reynolds."

"You have your mom's last name?"

"Yeah, it's a weird thing in the Reynolds family. For generations the women have kept their names. My mom was actually a pretty rare case since she got married at all. Apparently Reynolds women aren't considered very eligible as wives."

The hatred towards his family wasn't new to this generation. Years and years of residents had hated them. Though his mother's negative reaction to Lou's family was a new twist.

"So...I'm sorry, Cooper, I really have no idea what's happening."

"I wish I could explain it better. My mom didn't believe it either, she thought it was all a family urban legend when her mom told her she shouldn't get married. Warned her never to have kids. She said the family was cursed, but my mom thought her uncles had just split. She didn't have a brother, but my grandma knew the score. She must have seen it happen to her own brothers. To her nephews. I don't know."

Lou's hand was cold in his, but she didn't let go. Finally she stopped staring at Jer and looked at him instead.

"So when this happened..."

"My grandma was still alive when Jer turned. I think if she hadn't been, my mom would have gone crazy. I mean, who wouldn't when there oldest son wakes up one morning on four legs, covered in fur?"

"Is it a disease?"

He could see her trying to mentally Google any kind of illness that resulted in a human being turning into a coyote. Good luck with that. They'd done their research. There was no logical answer to Jer's condition. The only explanation had to be supernatural, but that kind of answer was even harder to accept.

His brother had turned into an animal.

How do you find any logic in that?

"It's not a disease. It's something else. Something we don't understand."

"What did you grandma say?"

"She told my mom it was a curse."

"A curse?" Her voice rose to a much higher pitch, and he wasn't sure if it was because of fear or because she was now convinced he was insane. A few minutes earlier they'd been sharing a perfect, beautiful moment, and now he was just hoping she wouldn't run for the hills and tell everyone he was a maniac who believed in magic.

"I'm going to tell you what my grandmother told us, and I don't want you to accept it as gospel, because I honestly don't know the truth. There aren't any other Reynolds left for me to ask, and my grandma is dead now. All I know is this is real." He pointed to Jer again. "That is my brother, and the only answer anyone had for what happened to him is what I'm about to tell you, okay?"

"You know how crazy this sounds?" she asked before he could begin.

"About as crazy as it was to hear the first time. But probably not as crazy as waking up one morning expecting to see your brother and finding a wild animal instead." He didn't mean to sound cold, but she had to understand the reality he'd been living for over a year.

It was hard to believe, yes. But it was true.

"What was your grandmother's theory?"

"She told us that years ago...like hundreds of years ago, when settlers were first finding their way to Texas, there was a small settlement here. Apparently even back then the people in my family gravitated towards careers in law, because my, like...great, great, great, great to the power of whatever grandfather was the sheriff. And back then it was probably a much harder job than it is now, because people were constantly committing crimes and killing each other.

"Anyway, a little boy was killed. According to my grandmother it was no accident, it was murder without a doubt, but no one could figure out who killed him. His mother was devastated. She blamed my uber-great-grandfather, claiming it was his responsibility to keep her son safe, and now it was his responsibility to bring the child's killer to justice. I guess my ancestor had a wife who was a bit feisty...kind of like the Reynolds women are now. She told this boy's mother if she'd taken better care of her son, he wouldn't have been killed."

"Oh..." Lou said. To Cooper it looked as if she was playing the scene out in her mind as he told the story. But something on her face perplexed him. She seemed to...recognize what he was talking about, as if she'd heard the tale before.

Cooper went on, trying not to read too much into it. "The dead boy's mom was a local healer—she had a bit of reputation as a witch, I guess—and according to my grandma that reputation was well deserved. She lashed out at my ancestor's wife and said that until a Reynolds brought the guilty party to justice, they would be cursed to lose their sons the same as she had. Cursed to never see them reach adulthood."

"Their eighteenth birthday..."

"Yeah."

Lou looked lost in thought, her focus now far away.

"I know it sounds pretty crazy, but—"

"I need to show you something," she said. "It's not crazy. Well, I mean, it is crazy. But I think your grandmother knew something. I think she was right."

Cooper hadn't been expecting her to accept the tale so readily, if at all. He wasn't even sure he believed it himself, in spite of having no other options available to him.

"You do." Then he asked, "Why?"

She gnawed on her lips, clearly debating whether or not she wanted to say what was on her mind.

"Lou, I just told you my biggest secret."

"I've been having dreams. Really weird, vivid dreams since I got here. And...I thought they were just dreams until you told me that story."

"What kind of dreams?"

"I...I dreamed I was that woman. The witch. I saw her. Heard her make that curse. I felt her pain when she lost her son. I saw it all, exactly as you described it. And more."

"More?"

"It wasn't just the time she cursed. In my dreams she says, If you behave as dogs, you will lay with dogs, and your sons will lay with you, but you'll never see them reach adulthood. They tried to tell her coyotes killed her son, but she knew it was a man. She was so broken..."

Cooper stared at her, shocked by the empathy she felt towards a woman who might very well be fictional. But if this woman was real, she was the reason he only had ten months left to live among the civilized world.

"You dreamed her?"

"And I don't think I was the only one."

"What are you talking about?"

She sighed and looked him right in the eyes. "I think my father saw it too. And I think it's why he left Poisonfoot."

**Chapter Twenty  
**

It was Lou's turn to guide Cooper through the darkness.

To avoid any unnecessary drama, she sent Marnie a quick text saying she wasn't feeling well and she was going to walk home. She promised to text again when she arrived safely. Lou was pretty sure Marnie would be secretly grateful she'd left, giving Marnie a chance to monopolize Archer.

She was welcome to him. Lou had bigger things on her mind now than worrying about which football player she wanted to date. It turned out the boy she liked was going to become a coyote by next summer, if she believed what he was saying. Trouble was, Lou did believe. She believed every weird, impossible word of it.

When he'd started telling her the story of the curse, it had been like someone taking a page out of her diary and reading it back to her. Everything he described was exactly as she'd dreamt it, only his version was like a charcoal sketch, and she'd seen the Technicolor movie.

She didn't know how to explain those dreams to Cooper, how every moment had felt like something she'd experienced firsthand. But hearing him tell her his grandma's theories, she knew there was truth in the story, no matter how crazy it seemed.

Curses?

A month ago Lou would have sworn up and down there was no such thing as a curse, unless dropping an f-bomb counted. But now she wasn't so sure. Things like magic and the supernatural had once seemed like premises for good TV shows and little else.

If she wasn't living in a world of madness herself, she would think Cooper was off-the-wall crazy.

But she'd been seeing ghosts, hadn't she?

And she'd been having visceral dreams about memories that weren't hers.

How farfetched was it to believe Cooper might be living under a curse?

As they moved through the woods in the direction of Granny Elle's house, she couldn't help but notice the coyote—or should she start thinking of him as Jeremy?—was leading the way like he'd memorized it. Of course, she'd seen him in her yard, staring up at the house. And Granny Elle had cursed at him, You shouldn't be here.

Her grandmother knew something.

There was more to this story than either of their families was letting on.

They spent a good twenty minutes stumbling blindly through the dark with a coyote and Lou's questionable sense of direction as their guides. When Lou finally saw the dim lights coming from Granny Elle's porch, she let out a sigh of relief.

It was one thing to think you were going the right way, quite another to actually get there.

When they reached the edge of the tree line, Lou hesitated. She looked at Jeremy, and for the first time since Cooper had confessed the truth, she addressed the coyote directly. "Look, you can't come in. I know it sucks, but you have to stay here. I think Granny Elle has a shotgun."

Jeremy sat down, still obscured by the trees, and yawned. She didn't know how he managed to make the gesture sarcastic, but she got that distinct sense from him. A coyote was giving her attitude.

She stuck out her tongue at him, and he raised one side of his lip to show her his formidable teeth.

"You win," she acquiesced, taking a step away from him.

Cooper stuck to her side like a conjoined twin, so close he bumped into her when she stopped at the corner of the house. His shoes skinned the bare backs of her heels, making her wince.

"Cripes, Cooper, watch the feet." Under normal circumstances she wouldn't have said anything, but she was prone to worry about her feet more than the rest of her. For a diabetic, foot injuries could be bad news. Like...amputation bad.

"Sorry," he replied, sounding guilty.

Lou could live without a lot of things, but she didn't think she'd do too well without her feet.

They edged around the rear of the house, up the rickety back steps and through the screen door outside the kitchen.

"You need to be so quiet. Like a scream-in-space quiet, okay? My grandma sleeps so lightly a mouse fart could wake her up." Lou held a finger to her lips, driving home the point they couldn't be heard.

Cooper snorted, then covered his mouth.

"Cooper."

"Sorry. Soooorry. But...mouse fart?"

"Not the point," she whispered.

"Sorry."

Lou opened the inner kitchen door, grateful for the silent hinges. The inside of the house was dark, and all the noise inside was dulled. Somewhere upstairs was the hushed sound of Granny Elle's snoring. This time Cooper stayed a half step behind, so when she stopped walking, he had a chance to avoid slamming into her.

As it turned out, Cooper wasn't what she had to worry about.

Her phone vibrated once, then started playing James Brown's "Get Up Offa That Thing". She fumbled for her purse and managed to get the phone answered before the chorus could begin.

"Bitch, are you alllliiiive?" Marnie shouted with the din of the party loud in the background.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Lou stage whispered into the mouthpiece.

"WHAT?"

"I'm fine." She was trying desperately to get her point across without being heard. She felt a pang of guilt for being so noisy, especially since she'd just been lecturing Cooper to stay quiet. At least if Granny Elle heard Lou talking in the kitchen, it wouldn't seem as strange as a young man's voice. Male voices were distinctly out of place in the Whittaker house, so Cooper's warm rumble was likely to cause trouble.

"You're missing a great paaaarty. Archer was—"

"I'll talk to you tomorrow. I gotta go." Lou hung up before she could hear the rest of what Marnie was going to say. Her friend was talking so loud there was no doubt Cooper could hear every word, and the last thing she needed was him thinking something was up with her and Archer.

Okay...well, maybe that was pretty low on the worst-case scenario list now. Worrying if the boy she liked was threatened by someone else didn't hold a candle to finding out Cooper's brother was a coyote. Or that she'd had vivid dreams about the curse that was responsible for his transformation.

Worst of all was the looming knowledge that Cooper himself might end up like Jeremy had.

Lou was still trying to wrap her head around Jeremy being a coyote. It didn't seem possible. Cooper obviously hadn't expected her to accept the story so readily, and normally she wouldn't have. Except those dreams. They'd been too real to ignore. Cooper would have needed to be inside her head to describe them so identically. Lou didn't think she had much choice but to believe.

But that didn't make it easy.

Accepting that Jeremy was a coyote and accepting that Cooper might become one were as far removed from one another as she could get. She wouldn't let it happen.

Once the phone was crammed back in her purse, she and Cooper stood side by side in the kitchen, holding their breaths, trying to hear if there were any signs of Granny Elle or Lou's mother stirring.

Silence reigned, and Lou released a sigh of relief. She eased open the door to the attic and led Cooper upstairs slowly, not risking turning on the stairwell light. It was easier to creep up now without a big box in her hands, and she got to the top without another knee-skinning incident.

When Cooper joined her, Lou flicked on a small lamp in one corner next to the dress mannequin. The light was dim and didn't cast its glow on the entirety of the space, but it was still better than fumbling around in the dark.

The small pile of goodies she'd been planning to claim from her father's trunk was still stacked at its side. She hadn't taken them with her when she abandoned the drawing. She'd simply put as much as she could back in the trunk in case Granny Elle came up, and left everything else easily accessible.

Lou plopped down beside the trunk and beckoned for Cooper to join her. He shuffled over, seemingly concerned about making too much noise with his shoes, and settled in next to her. Their thighs touched, a line of warm from knee to hip, reminding Lou the evening hadn't been entirely unpleasant.

She tried to push the memory of their kiss out of her mind, but the second she started thinking about it she couldn't stop. It wasn't her fault, really. It had been the kind of kiss to knock anyone in their right mind a little senseless.

"I found this in with my dad's stuff. These are things from when he was a kid, our age, or maybe younger. I'm not sure, he didn't date it." She held out the paper, its frayed edges tickling the inside of her palm.

Cooper took the paper from her and stared at the drawing. Lou leaned closer, trying to see it as he might. The woman was dark and fierce, her hair braided like a crown around her head. Since the sketch wasn't in color it was hard to tell what the woman was meant to look like, but Lou filled in the blanks from her memory.

The woman's hair was dark brown, her eyes amber, like rich honey. She knew the way the woman's voice sounded, and even knew her name.

"That's Morena."

"How do you know that?" Judging by his expression he wasn't looking at the woman anymore, his attention now on the coyote trembling at her feet. It was amazing how much fear was evident in a mere drawing. Knowing now the coyote was once a man, and the woman looming over him was responsible for his furry enslavement, well...the look made a lot more sense.

Lou explained her dream in detail, filling in the gaps from his narrative. By the time she finished she felt physically drained, and Cooper was white as a sheet.

He held the paper out like it might burn him, and she reclaimed the page, placing it facedown on the trunk. For a long time they sat quietly, nothing but the sound of their breathing filling the space between them.

"What does this mean?" Cooper asked, finding a voice for the question they were both contemplating. "I feel like this is supposed to be our answer, but I...I don't know. All we know is maybe my grandma's version was right, but I don't know what to do with that information."

Lou sighed, irritated with herself for thinking this would be a simple solution. She picked up her father's baseball and rolled it between her palms. "You know, this would be a lot easier if we could ask your mom."

"Or your dad," he countered, as if a dead man would be about as willing as his mother to talk.

Maybe it is, a nagging voice told her.

Hadn't she seen her father?

What if that encounter had been his way of trying to tell her something? And what if she hadn't been seeing things in that hallway mirror? Instead of replying with a snarky shoot-down about it being impossible to ask her dad anything, she said, "What if we could?"

"Could...?"

"Ask my dad."

"Lou, your dad is dead."

"And your brother is a coyote. Are we really going to argue about what's possible?"

"Point taken." He gnawed on his fingernail, his gaze drifting towards the paper on the trunk. "Do you think he had the same dreams you did?"

"He must have. I don't see how else he would have been able to draw her exactly as I saw her. And it has to be related to your ancestors somehow. I mean, that coyote is a bit too specific to just be a coincidence."

"So, what? We get in touch with your dad's ghost, ask him what the deal is, and while we're at it we find out why my mom is so anti-Lou?"

"Do you have a better idea?"

"I don't have any ideas. If I did, I wouldn't spend my days counting down to turning furry."

"So let's try it."

"There's only one problem."

"If there's only one problem, we're doing a lot better than we were an hour ago. What's the new problem?"

"We have to figure out how to get my dead dad to talk to us."

**Chapter Twenty-One  
**

Lou exiled Cooper to the cool night after deciding it would be best if she tried to contact her dad solo the first time. They stood on the back stoop, the wood groaning lightly under their combined weight. They gravitated towards each other, then away, as if they were compatible magnets who couldn't decide whether or not to touch.

Finally she leaned in close, bracing her hands on his chest, and brushed her nose against his, like the Eskimo kisses her mother used to give her when she was a child. The smell of him was now gloriously familiar, and she felt safe inside the shroud of his scent. Cooper angled his head, and their lips met in an almost chaste kiss.

She leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his neck so he was supporting her weight and she was half off the back step, balanced only on her tiptoes. Lou gave in to the kiss and allowed herself to fall headlong into the warm, fizzy sensation of being so close to him. Her mind got foggy, the real world blotted out by the perfect, hazy wonderment of getting to kiss Cooper Reynolds.

His hands tightened at her back, arms looped around her waist. She felt so sure of him, so certain she would never fall as long as he was there to catch her.

A heat warmed her belly and fanned to her cheeks, making her dizzy in the most perfect way. When the kiss deepened, she thought she might have died and gone to heaven. It was so different from any kiss she'd ever had—not that she was an expert by any means—but if more kisses were as good as this, it was a wonder people didn't walk around lip-locked all day.

Her hands began to tingle, as if they'd been asleep and had only then started coming back into feeling. But the tingle soon felt more like an itchy burn, almost distracting her from the kiss.

Cooper's hands tensed on her, drawing her in close until she was pressed tight against him. He growled into her mouth when he seemed to realize she couldn't get any closer to him. He backed them both up until her body bumped into the door and he was leaning into her, taking up all her personal space.

Her cheeks flushed, and she raked her fingers through his hair, trying from her end to bring him closer. They were getting carried away, and for once she couldn't have been happier about letting go of her inhibitions.

She came up for air, gasping, and it took all her willpower not to dive back in. Cooper's cheeks looked as flushed as hers felt, glowing pink under the dim light of the moon.

"We should stop doing that," Lou whispered.

"We should never stop doing that."

"You're too distracting. We're never going to figure out what's going on if you keep kissing the smarts out of me."

Cooper kissed her forehead, then the tip of her nose. "Lou, you can ask me to do just about anything for you and I'll walk over broken glass to do it. But don't ever ask me to stop kissing you."

She feigned annoyance with his demand, but placed one last kiss on his lips, trying to memorize the way he tasted. If they didn't figure things out, she might run out of chances, and she didn't want to forget every little piece of what it felt like to kiss him.

"If there's a way to fix this, we're going to find it. I promise."

"You can't promise that, Lou."

"Let me make whatever promises I want."

Cooper brushed her hair back from her face and smiled sadly. "I believe that if anyone had a way to save me, it would be you. Though why you want to save someone like me is a mystery."

"It's not that weird. You're one of a kind. Who cares what anyone else thinks? I know the world would be less amazing without you."

"Are you saying having me around makes the world amazing?"

"Don't let your head get too fat. I just don't want to lose a good lab partner. Mr. Price will end up pairing me with Max. Or Princess. In either case I don't wear enough eyeliner to make things work."

Before Cooper could respond with whatever clever rejoinder he had in mind, Jeremy appeared out of the darkness and began pacing in the backyard. He evidently had little interest in watching them make out because he was making his impatience known. Jeremy yipped and gave a low growl, and Cooper propped Lou back up on the stairs, taking a step back.

"I guess I should go."

"I'll let you know what I find out. If I can make it work."

"Be careful."

"I ain't afraid of no ghost," she replied, giving him a self-assured wink that belied how terrified she was to try communicating with her dead father. She wasn't afraid of her father, but the idea of calling up a ghost left her unsettled. When she reached out into the void, there was a chance someone else would answer her call.

Or worse yet, no one would answer at all.

She was grasping at straws with this idea, and had no way of knowing if it was even going to work.

But as Cooper had implied earlier, he had plenty of worries to fill his own mind without her adding to the list by telling him her fears. This was one thing she'd have to do on her own, a scary reality she'd face because it meant helping him.

She got the feeling it had been an awfully long time since anyone had offered to help Cooper. Maybe they didn't know how, but it was far more likely that no one would have cared even if they'd known. And his mother had been willing to ignore the warnings and was now suffering the consequences by losing one son at a time to a curse she hadn't believed in.

Lou wasn't sure if Cooper's mom had given up hope, but it was obvious she wasn't actively doing anything to save her son. Lou couldn't sit idly by, though. If there was something, anything, that could be done, she was going to figure it out.

Cooper squeezed her hand one last time, then he and Jeremy disappeared into the woods. If she didn't find a way to reverse Morena's curse, next summer she'd be watching two coyotes run off together, and the boy she knew would be gone.

She closed the back door, locking it behind her, and wandered up the main staircase to the second floor. Her father's old room was next to where her mother now slept, and Lou crept inside, trying to stay as quiet as possible. Her mother was a heavy sleeper, but Lou no longer had the added buffer of being in the attic. It was going to be hard to speak to a ghost when her mother was on the other side of the wall.

The room had changed drastically since her father's youth. Gone were the boy-appropriate wallpaper and the posters of athletes and rock stars. Granny Elle had redone the room as a craft space, so instead of a bed and dresser there was a folding card table covered in scrapbook paper and several plastic bins holding yarn.

Leaning against the wall farthest from the door was the full-length mirror Lou had taken down their first full day in the house. It wasn't fancy, just a cheap wood frame, something Granny Elle might have found at IKEA if the Swedish furniture mecca existed anywhere near Poisonfoot.

Which it didn't. Lou had checked.

But the sketchy bathroom mirror in Nevada hadn't exactly been fancy either, and it had been suitable enough to bring her father around. And she was now more certain than ever she hadn't been imagining things in this mirror before she'd put it away. She'd brought her dad's baseball down from the attic, thinking a tether to his life might help summon him. It didn't occur to her until she stood in front of the mirror that maybe she was a tether. What attached someone to the living world more than their own flesh and blood?

Not a baseball.

She'd never done anything like this, though, and she was willing to try anything if she thought it might work.

Lou turned the mirror around to face the room and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, holding the ball close to her stomach. She went over the last visitation from her father in her mind, trying to think of how she might bring him out now. Last time she'd just been washing her hands. She couldn't exactly repeat that scenario here.

There'd literally been nothing special about that gas station, nothing that had bound him there or would have called to him except for her.

"Dad?" she whispered, leaning close to look into the mirror. In the darkness of the room it was hard to see herself, let alone tell if anyone was there with her. And what if he just showed up like last time? So close to the mirror, she was liable to scream when he appeared.

She stood back so she could see a wedge of the room behind her, and cast a glance over her shoulder, in case he showed up in the room instead of the mirror. She wasn't entirely sure how this whole incorporeal messaging system worked, but she didn't want any surprises.

This is never going to work, she chided herself.

But it had to work.

"Daddy, it's Lou. If you can hear me, can you give me some kind of...I don't know, a sign or something?" God this was so stupid. She was standing in a craft room, talking to a mirror. Lou rolled the ball nervously and held her breath, hoping to push away the uncertainty and wait for any sign her father had heard her.

"I need you."

She was almost ready to admit she looked and felt like a fool, trying to communicate with the ghost of her dead father, when a jar of jewelry beads fell over on the card table. Lou jumped but managed not to scream, covering her mouth with her free hand in case a yelp attempted to get out.

One point for her.

"Dad?"

The beads rattled, rolling slowly over the table and moving of their own free will. Lou edged closer and stared down, shocked to see the beads had formed the word Look.

She'd asked for a sign, but she hadn't expected him to be so literal about it. Knocking pipes or shutters was more what she'd been thinking, so for him to actually spell it out for her was a bonus.

"Look?"

The beads rolled again, this time spelling Mirror.

Lou wanted to point out she had been looking in the mirror, but her father hadn't been a fan of backtalk during his life, and death likely hadn't made him any more patient.

She pivoted back to the mirror. In spite of him telling her to go there, she still started when she saw his reflection next to her. He was grim, showing no sign of joy at seeing her. In fact, in spite of his open eyes, he maintained an appearance of death. He still resembled the plastic, phony version of her father she'd seen in his casket. Shouldn't death make him fresher, healthier looking? What point was an afterlife if you had to float around as the animated corpse of a cancer patient?

"Hi," she said, not sure how she was supposed to greet a dead parent. What was the Miss Manners take on ghostly encounters?

He said nothing.

But he was there. Her father was in the room with her, even if he wasn't really standing beside her. Last time she'd run away, but this time she wasn't going to let him go so hastily. She touched the glass.

"Oh, Dad. I miss you." Her eyes brimmed with tears which she swiped away with the back of her hand. "Mom misses you. We don't work right without you." More tears slipped through, and she didn't bother trying to stop them this time.

Her father nodded solemnly. "Miss you... love... you."

"Are you...are you okay? Wherever you are?" Her fingernails clawed at the glass as if she might be able to free him and bring him into the world with her.

"There is...no...here. There is...nothing..."

Her heart ached, and she wasn't sure she wanted to ask anything else for fear of what the answers might be.

"Did it hurt?"

He shrugged his boney shoulders, looking so brittle she worried he might turn to dust. "No...pain."

His form faded, and Lou suddenly remembered her reason for being there.

"I know about the dreams."

His image wavered again, like ripples on the surface of a pond. Once he solidified, his stern expression was gone, replaced by a sad one. He was wearing the suit he'd been buried in, a charcoal-gray number that he had considered too fancy for regular wear. Now he was going to wear it forever.

His feet were bare, making her wonder if the funeral director had stolen his shoes.

"I found your drawing," Lou explained.

"Morena."

"You dreamed about her too, didn't you?"

"Yes." His voice was distant, a tinny echo heard through six walls. She strained to make sense of the raspy whisper, hanging on every syllable. She wanted to ask him a thousand more questions. She ached to know what it had been like to leave her, and how it was he found himself in the mirrors. Did he feel pain now? Should she wake her mom up so he had another chance to say goodbye?

Anything she could have possibly imagined asking him flitted through her mind, and every word pushed her mouth to speak, but she bit her tongue, nervous she might only get so many questions.

She still scarcely believed he was here.

"Why am I dreaming about her?"

"Whit...taker."

Lou felt like she'd been punched in the chest. "She's a Whittaker?"

"Was," he rasped.

"Why did she curse Cooper's family?"

"Rey...nolds?"

"Yes."

"They...failed."

"Failed how?"

"Killer...lost."

"So this really is all about her son's killer?"

"Yesss."

"And what does that have to do with us?"

"Someone...must...wait."

"Wait for what?"

His form thinned, fading away to near nothingness and making her heart skip a beat as she waited for him to reappear.

"Wait for what?" she asked again.

"Justice." The word was as sharp and clear as if he'd whispered it right in her ear.

Justice? It was a loaded concept because it implied a wrongdoing on the part of the Reynolds family. But it had been centuries since Morena's son had been killed. How long could a grudge last? Morena was dead, so what was keeping the rage alive now that she was long gone?

Then the meaning of someone must wait sank in.

"We keep the curse alive."

"Yesss."

"As long as there are Whittakers, the curse lives on."

"Yesss."

Which meant as long as Lou was alive, Cooper would be cursed.

"Can't I do anything to undo it?"

"Justice," her father scolded. "Only justice."

His figure turned to static, like an old analog TV set, all black-and-white hissing dots of noise. He became lines of meaningless energy without form or features.

Then he vanished.

Lou was left alone in the room with only the nagging silence of the house and the pounding of her heart. She didn't have to ask him why Cooper's mother hated her. Or why Granny Elle hated Cooper. He was a Reynolds, she was a Whittaker. Their animosity for each other was born in their blood because her ancestor had cursed his. And that curse lived on in each of them.

If Cooper was shackled, she was the ball and chain.

Or more specifically her family was the key to his humanity, and the only way to keep him in human form was solving a murder that was over two hundred years old.

"Yeah." Her hand was still pressed to the mirror, but now it only showed her solitary reflection. "No big deal."

But it was something. It was something they hadn't had a day before, and it gave her somewhere to start.

**Chapter Twenty-Two  
**

Lou arrived at the library on Saturday morning before it opened and sat on the front steps, gorging on a Snickers, waiting for Nigel to show up. The place she'd bumped her knee climbing up the stairs had formed a bruise, and she prodded the purple-black edges of it through the hole in her jeans.

A small Honda hatchback that was older than Lou rounded the corner and sputtered its way around back. A few moments later Nigel appeared, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt over a long-sleeved gray shirt, his jeans looking as battered as hers.

"Lou?"

"Hi."

"Are you desperate to do some research, or did you just miss me?"

"My dad saved your life," she blurted out.

"He did." Nigel stepped around her and unlocked the front door, holding it open wide for her. She got to her feet, embarrassed to look at him, and walked into the dark interior of the library, breathing in the musty smell of old books.

Lou wanted to see what, if anything, Nigel knew about the curse. It seemed impossible that his near death by coyote had been mere coincidence. For all Lou knew, every coyote in the Poisonfoot area had once been a Reynolds boy.

What an unsettling notion.

Lou imagined them like a pack of lost boys straight out of Peter Pan, except instead of wearing furs and ensembles made of leaves and twigs, they'd gone fully native, turning into true animals. Would they recognize each other as family? She hoped at least out there they got to be a family.

She decided not to ask Nigel anything. There was a good chance he didn't know about the curse, seeing as he'd only been a baby when the coyote had tried to take him. But maybe his family was involved like hers. And that was what had brought her to the library. Not to quiz him directly, but rather to take advantage of his librarian prowess.

"Where do you keep the local history?"

"How historic are we talking?"

"Like, settlement of Poisonfoot? The early frontier days, I guess."

"Frontier days? If you're hoping for some Deadwood-style, shoot-'em-up, showdown-type stuff, I think you're going to be sorely disappointed by the lack of excitement in Poisonfoot's history."

"I'm actually looking for more of my family history from that time. I've heard the Whittakers have been here since the town was founded. I guess I just wanted to learn more about them." She avoided mentioning Morena specifically, but something in Nigel's demeanor shifted anyway. His jovial grin was gone, replaced with something dark and unmistakably unhappy.

"Why do you want to know about that?"

"Curiosity."

"Maybe you should talk to Elle."

"I don't want to bother her with something like that when I can find it on my own." She narrowed her eyes at him, not sure she liked his sudden change. "This is a library, isn't it?"

"Of course."

"Then I'd like to look at some books, please."

Nigel hesitated, glancing at the front door as if he might make a break for it. Why was he getting so cagey about her checking local history books unless he knew there was something there she shouldn't read? He huffed a sigh and walked down one of the aisles to a door at the back wall. This one was opposite the periodical room and was marked Private.

"Because of the rarity of books dating back that far, we have to keep them out of general circulation. A lot of them are private journals from the Civil War, or family Bibles, that sort of thing. One-of-a-kind items I don't want everyone getting their hands on, you understand?" Nigel stood outside the door, shuffling uneasily. "I must insist you be incredibly careful with the items you find in there."

Was he going to check her hands to make sure they were clean?

He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door, hands trembling. The inside was dimly lit with a low desk along the back wall, and several hip-height shelves with slim leather books and sheaves of paper in plastic folios.

"Go ahead," Nigel offered, extending an arm into the room. "Ladies first."

Lou hesitated outside the door, a warning voice in her brain shouting, Don't do it! But she'd been alone in the library with Nigel before, and nothing terrible had happened to her, so why were the alarm bells going off now? Maybe it had something to do with the sudden influx of weirdo paranormal drama in her life.

Being forced to believe that human boys could turn into animals, and she was able to speak to her dead father through mirrors...well, it had been enough to make her uneasy. If those sorts of things were possible, what else was possible? If someone told her vampires were real, she was just going to call it quits on the world and go live in a cabin in Bora Bora or something.

She shook off the warning sensation and stepped into the room ahead of Nigel. A moment later the room went dark, and Lou briefly thought he'd shut off the lights. Then she registered a sharp point of pain at the back of her head that fanned outwards until her entire skull was throbbing.

"Oh." Why would Nigel have whacked her in the head? She should have trusted her gut when it had warned her something was wrong. Her mouth moved to form additional words, but they faded out as she stumbled to her knees and pitched forward onto the floor.

Before she passed out, she saw Nigel duck out of the room, and all the light from the library vanished. The last thing Lou heard was the heavy bolt of the lock tumbling closed behind him.

**Chapter Twenty-Three  
**

Cooper awoke on Saturday morning in an unapologetically foul mood with a ferocious headache pulsing behind his eyes. He stumbled his way into the kitchen and scraped the chair out from under the table, staring at the laminate surface like breakfast would magically appear there. Mia must have followed the sound of his motions because she arrived a moment later and sat across from him.

"You got in late last night," she observed.

"So? Just because Mom's not here doesn't make you a default parent. So lay off."

Mia blinked, at a momentary loss for words which was rare for her. She pushed her long bangs back from her face, revealing her startlingly blue eyes, and her stunned silence vanished.

"I'd ask who pissed in your cornflakes, but you're too much of a lazy asshole to even make breakfast for yourself." She got up, kicking her chair backwards into the cabinets behind her. Instead of storming off, she grabbed a bowl and spoon, a box of Lucky Charms and the milk out of the fridge and slapped each item down in front of him with an obnoxious thunk that made his temples throb.

He growled at her.

Mia froze.

"Did you just growl at me?" Her voice dropped to a near whisper. When he didn't answer, she crouched in front of him and placed one hand on each of his forearms. "Cooper. Did you growl at me?"

"Yes," he admitted finally.

Mia slapped him.

"You can't do this, Coop. You need to get a grip on yourself."

His cheek stung, but so did his pride. Mia was right. They'd both seen what Jer had gone through before his transformation, and Cooper was honestly surprised the symptoms hadn't begun to show sooner. It had been hard to see the signs with Jer at first. Sullen, surly mood swings were hardly abnormal in a seventeen-year-old boy. But then he'd started snapping—literally. He'd bared his teeth and growled like a dog. He'd sniff the air around him.

Hadn't Cooper used his sense of smell just the previous week?

The marks of his change were already setting in.

"I'm sorry."

Her fingertips twitched against his arms, and she smiled in the sad way she'd learned to over the last year. "I want you to stay the way you are." Her voice had lost its edge and taken on a softer, more confessional tone.

"That's what I want, too."

"There has to be a way..."

"Mia." He shook himself free of her and got to his feet, not sure he could deal with the look in her eyes when he said what he was about to. "With Jer, we were unprepared. We never thought that was going to happen. We all thought...well, we all thought grandma was nuts, didn't we?" He laughed lightly, trying to add some cheer to the dark atmosphere of the room.

Mia took the chair he'd been sitting on and poured some of the cereal into his bowl. She didn't say anything.

"It's different this time," Cooper went on. "We know it's coming. Instead of thinking there's a way out of it, maybe we should just be happy for the time we have."

"No."

Cooper stopped pacing and looked at her. Her lips formed a thin line, and the tension in her jaw was evident from across the room.

"No?"

"No," she repeated, her voice more forceful this time. "I won't just sit here twiddling my thumbs and thinking about how to spend my last months with you. I won't wake up one morning and deal with a dog being in your bedroom. Or are you going to run away instead? Go hide out in the woods or something to, like, spare mom and me from dealing with it? No, you stupid idiotic dumbass. If you think you can say anything that's going to make me stop trying to find a way to fix this, you're out of your mind. Got it?"

She got to her feet, sliding the cereal bowl towards him. He picked it up, and she opened the milk, pouring some into the bowl until the little marshmallow treats were bobbing up and down in the white sea.

He'd been so caught up in his own feelings about his transformation, he hadn't stopped to think about what it was doing to his family. He'd dealt with Jer's loss right alongside Mia, and he'd seen the changes in her. More than the dyed hair and strange boyfriend, he'd seen a lot of his sunny, sweet sister leach away since Jer had changed.

Cooper was an idiot for not understanding that losing him was going to suck twice as much because this time she knew it was coming. This time Mia and his mother had a countdown clock running, same as he did. Only once he changed, there would be no one there to comfort the women in his life. Mia and his mom weren't exactly buddy-buddy. They didn't communicate the same way Cooper and Mia could. How were they going to make it work without him there?

"I want to find a way, too, you know."

"Maybe you should spend less time being a grouchy prick and more time researching or something."

"I told Lou Whittaker the truth." Those words hung between them, even more shocking when spoken aloud. He could hardly believe they were true and that he'd been so willing to share something that big with a girl he barely knew.

"Are you crazy?"

"No, and more importantly, she doesn't seem to think so either. She believed me."

"Cooper..."

"No, Mia, just hear me out for a second. Jer has been following her, she told me so herself. Why would he be tracking her if there wasn't a reason? And when I told her the story Grandma told us, she knew it. She said..." He stopped himself. It wasn't his place to share Lou's secrets, not if he expected her to keep his. "She believed me."

"You're leaving stuff out." That was Mia. Always too smart for her own damned good.

"Just trust me when I say I trust her, okay?"

Mia furrowed her brow and picked one of the marshmallows out of his bowl, chewing it thoughtfully. "Didn't Mom forbid you from spending any time with Lou?"

"How do you know about that?"

"She told me to rat you out if I saw the two of you together at school."

Considering Cooper and Lou were together daily at school, Mia wasn't doing a very good job of playing spy for their mother. "What's your point?"

"Mom isn't very big on social rules like that."

"Yeah, I know."

"You think maybe there's a reason she doesn't want you hanging out with a Whittaker?"

"Lou and I thought about that."

"And what did you come up with?"

"Nothing yet, but we're working on it."

Mia stole another marshmallow. "Well, work a little faster, okay? We don't have all the time in the world, here."

**Chapter Twenty-Four  
**

When Lou awoke she felt a pang of nausea in her gut, like a fist cinching around her stomach and squeezing tight. She rolled over, and her head hit the floor, reminding her of the pain that had brought her to the rough carpet in the first place. She found a large knot on the base of her skull, and when she pulled her fingers away, they were tacky.

She didn't need to see blood to know what it was.

What the hell had happened?

Lou sat up, then doubled over, her head swimming and her body wracked with the urge to vomit. Her mouth was dry and her throat begged for water, while the stabbing discomfort in her belly slid deeper, making her scan the room for any sign of a bathroom.

She pawed the floor around her, groping for her bag. How long had she been out? And why had she been so stupid to eat all that candy and not immediately take her insulin?

When she couldn't find her bag, she scrambled close to one of the nearby shelves to help prop herself up. Panting, she brushed her hair back from her face and tried to come to grips with what was going on.

Nigel had knocked her out and locked her in a room. She'd been out for God knows how long, and she hadn't had any of her insulin since taking her pre-bed meds the night prior.

The high blood sugars hitting her now were more than a little concerning. Without knowing how long she was out there was no way to determine how long her body had been processing all that sugar without any medicinal assistance. But based on how she was currently feeling, it had been awhile.

Worst-case scenario, she was in the early stages of ketoacidosis. As worst-case scenarios went, it was a scary, bad possibility.

When Lou had been thirteen and still new to her life as a diabetic, she had behaved a bit recklessly with her insulin, testing the limits of her illness. She'd found the boundary by going a half-day after Halloween without taking any insulin. She'd ended up in the hospital for several days while the doctors worked to correct the damage she'd done.

Since then, she'd been good. Well, if not good, she'd been a lot better. Taking her insulin regularly, not pushing things too far. But she hadn't known she was going to be knocked out and locked up, so she had assumed she'd be able to take a shot with plenty of time to spare.

Apparently she'd been wrong.

The symptoms were there, and knowing what they meant made her feel even sicker. She needed her insulin and she needed it now before things went beyond just requiring a shot.

She got to her feet, feeling woozy and sick, and fumbled her way along the bookshelves by touch until she reached the door. For the moment she wasn't focused on why Nigel had locked her up, or what he planned to do. As far as worries went, she had enough to deal with, fearing her body might be on the verge of a self-destruct sequence. It was difficult to be afraid of a potentially violent librarian, when her own kidneys were working on finishing her off from the inside.

If she could get insulin, then she'd worry about Nigel.

Tapping on the door, she called out, "Hello? Nigel?"

Nothing.

"Nigel, I don't know what's going on, but I really, really need my backpack. Not even my whole backpack, just the case with the purple flowers on it."

Nada.

She slapped her palm against the rough wood a few times, but it barely made a sound. Resting her head against the door, she took a few deep breaths through her nose, trying to ignore her bladder's insistent nagging and her stomach's equally demanding urge to vomit. She was in bad shape.

"Nigel. I'm really sick. I have diabetes, and my insulin is in my bag." Lou knocked again. "I'm not kidding around. If your plan is to kill me, then by all means leave me—"

The knob rattled. "Step back from the door."

Lou did as she was told. She'd be totally useless in a fight. Even a scrawny guy like Nigel could best her most days, and right then a four-year-old could have knocked her out. She waited in the center of the room as the door opened, letting in a thin crack of light. Something was placed on the floor, and he shoved it towards her then quickly shut the door again.

She'd have loved a bottle of water and a bathroom break, but she would take what she could get.

Besides, if she had to pee in the corner of the office, she wasn't going to feel bad about it. She was locked in against her will, after all. It would be the best form of revenge she was capable of enacting.

Lou collected her kit and ran through the process of checking her sugars. Her shaky hands didn't make collecting blood easy, but once she got enough for the test strip, she waited in the cold blue glow of the glucometer, waiting for the verdict.

She was at 475.

Considering a healthy, normal level for her was 135, she was appalled to see such a high number in her reader. She adjusted her dosage accordingly and lifted the hem of her shirt to inject the insulin into her stomach.

When she was done, she packed her kit up and let her head loll back against the shelf she was seated in front of. She would be okay. The insulin wasn't a magic wand, and it would take a little while for her to get back to normal, but she was out of the woods.

Or, more accurately, she was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Things could get bad again if she was trapped long enough for her sugar to go from high to low. If it dipped in the opposite direction, no medication would help her. She'd need to eat something, and unless books suddenly had enough carbs to keep her balanced, she was going to be royally screwed.

Whatever higher power came up with diabetes was a dick. It was the ultimate high wire balancing act, and there were times she didn't think she knew how to walk in a straight line.

She got up again, still wobbly, and fumbled around the room until she found a small lamp on one of the bookshelves. The light wasn't much, but it was better than sitting around in the pitch dark. Once she could see, she scanned the room for an escape route.

The vent at the top of the wall would have been great if she had a five-inch waist and no shoulders. Without windows or a different door, she was trapped like a spider under a glass.

And was she going to just wait for someone to put her out under the sun and fry her?

Hell no.

Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike and show her how to MacGyver a way out using lint and paper clips, she started looking for something to use as a weapon. The most promising option was all the heavy books, but she didn't think she had the strength to swing one with enough force to make it worthwhile.

She stared at her kit on the floor and stooped to pick it up, unzipping it to get a look at the contents. There were two pens, one for her short-term insulin and the other for her overnight. She popped the cap on the one she'd just used and inspected the needle. It wasn't long, not like a standard syringe. But if she jammed it into someone's face or neck, she could probably take them by surprise. She wouldn't do any serious damage, but she might stun Nigel long enough to make a break for it.

The library wasn't far from the sheriff's office. If she could make it to the front door, that was all she needed. She was amazed Nigel had been bold enough to lock her up in the middle of the day, but she didn't think he'd chase her out into the street.

She went back to the door, feeling braver than before but still not very strong. She knocked on the door again and called out, "Nigel? I need to pee." It was the truth, so she hoped it didn't sound like she was bluffing.

No reply.

"Nigel, I really need to pee. And unless you want to clean up the carpet in here, can you please let me go to the bathroom?" That ought to get the urgency across.

She listened through the door and heard soft footfalls on the carpet outside. Straightening, she held the pen in one hand, primed to strike out at face height when he came in.

The knob rattled again, and the door opened. Lou waited for him to push it open wider, then dove towards the crack of light, jabbing the pen in the general direction of where she anticipated Nigel's eyes would be. A voice yelped, but Lou missed her mark entirely, stumbling down on her knees. She scuttled forward, adrenaline pumping as she crawled blindly towards the library's entrance.

She could see the glass rectangle of the front door, still bright with golden daylight, and it was the only thing she needed. Passing the end of the bookshelves, she got to her feet and bolted headlong for the exit.

"Stop," Nigel shouted, collecting himself and chasing after her, the thuds of his shoes softened by the carpeting. His fingertips grazed the back of her T-shirt, and she banked left, out of his reach.

And face-first into a woman she hadn't known was there.

**Chapter Twenty-Five  
**

After the fourteenth unanswered text message, Cooper knew something was wrong. Six hours was longer than it took to charge a phone, or watch an entire movie marathon—not that there was a theatre in town she could go to—and yet she still hadn't responded to any of his messages.

Before the previous night's events he might have assumed she was avoiding him, but considering all they'd been through and everything they'd discussed, it seemed impossible she could just shut him out like everyone else.

He parked his truck at the bottom of her grandmother's driveway and turned the engine off. He dialed her number and kept an eye on the gravel path winding up towards the house. He could barely see Elle Whittaker's home, with the exception of the peaked rooftops from the two turrets, which he now knew were a part of Lou's room.

The phone rang and rang, indicating it hadn't been shut off, but after the seventh ring the familiar sound of Lou's voicemail clicked in. Hey, you've reached Lou, leave me a message.

He didn't. He'd already left three.

Cooper chucked his phone on the passenger seat and took a deep, steadying breath. When he thought he might be able to survive the expedition, he got out of the truck and jogged up the driveway until the house came into view. Once he saw the butter-yellow front door, he had a change of heart.

He stopped running and stared up at the house. Last night it had been dark, like a haunted mansion, but in the light of day it was ten times scarier. At night he'd been with Lou, and on the back porch not thirty feet from where he was standing, she'd kissed him and made him feel like they were the calm eye at the center of a hurricane.

But here in front of him was the full fury of that storm just waiting to knock him off his feet.

He sucked in a breath and reminded himself Elle Whittaker was pushing eighty and couldn't hurt a fly. It didn't make him any less scared of her. Especially considering what Lou had told him about the old woman shouting at Jer in the woods. Why would she tell a coyote he wasn't allowed there if she didn't know what he was?

Cooper mounted the stairs to the front door, and before he could reconsider, he knocked three times. He paced the welcome mat like a caged animal until the interior door opened and a familiar, chubby, white-haired woman peered out at him from behind the screen.

"What do you want?" She didn't feign any of the traditional Southern hospitality the women in Texas were known for.

"Where is Lou?" If she didn't need to be polite, neither did he. Nothing he said or did was going to make Elle like him, so he wasn't going to put out the energy to convince her he was a good person.

"I don't see how that's any of your business, Cooper Reynolds. I've asked her to stay away from you, and I'd like to request you do the same. You're no good for that girl."

"What do you know about me and how good or bad I am for Lou?" Anger snuck into his words in spite of his attempt to keep calm. Terse was one thing, outright rage wasn't going to get him anywhere.

"We both know what you are."

His body went rigid, and he stared at her. "What am I, Mrs. Whittaker?"

"Bad."

"I'm no worse than you."

They stared at each other through the screen, her wrinkled eyelids narrowing until he could barely see her irises. "That might be true. But it doesn't mean I want you near my granddaughter."

"She's not answering my calls."

"Good. Perhaps she has a bit of good taste and common sense. Good afternoon." She started to close the door, and Cooper had to think fast.

"I know what's going on," he said, though he hadn't the faintest damned idea.

His bluff worked. She opened the door a little wider and stared at him.

"What precisely is it you think you know?"

"You think I'm a danger to her. But I'm not going to hurt her. I won't ever hurt her."

"Oh you silly boy. You'll hurt her without ever knowing you've done it, that's the worst part. Pain is in your bones, it's part of you. Your destiny is just injury waiting to happen. I wanted to protect her from that."

"I don't think you can."

Elle looked at him, casting a withering glance from head to toe. He thought she might close the door anyway, but instead she said, "Eloise has gone to the library."

She shut him out after that, but she'd given him the only thing he needed.

Cooper made his way back to the main road, thinking about what Elle had said. He knew his fate, but he hadn't thought of it as being a destiny of pain to others. What a miserable existence. When he reached the road, he noticed a small, impractical Mazda sports car parked behind his truck. As he approached, the driver-side window rolled down, and Archer dangled an arm out. He reclined casually in his seat as though he didn't have a care in the world.

Must be nice.

Hell-bent on ignoring his teammate, Cooper beelined for his truck, acting as if it were perfectly normal for Archer to be stopped out in the middle of nowhere.

"Don't ignore me, Coop."

Cooper stopped at the driver's door of his truck with his fingers brushing the handle, and turned towards Archer. "So it's okay if you guys do it all day to me, but God forbid I deign to ignore the mighty Archer Wyatt. I don't have time for whatever crap you have planned right now."

He was halfway into his seat when he heard Archer's door open and close, and was just about to start his engine when the quarterback appeared outside his window.

"What do you want?" Cooper grumbled, not meeting Archer's gaze.

"You have somewhere you need to be?"

"Would it matter?"

"No."

"Then tell me what you want so I can leave."

"I want to know what you're doing here."

Cooper stuck his keys in the ignition but didn't start the car. If this was going to be another stay away from Lou discussion, he didn't have the patience for it. Certainly not from Archer. If he didn't listen to his own mother's warning, it was highly unlikely he'd take advice from a dude his didn't even like.

"I was bringing a muffin basket to Elle Whittaker."

"Your mother doesn't strike me as the kind of woman who makes muffin baskets."

"Who said anything about my mother?" Cooper's fingers fiddled with the keys, itching to start the truck and drive away, leaving Archer in his literal dust. But he waited. Something about Archer's presence there made him uneasy but left him wanting to hear whatever message the other boy had come to deliver.

"You're playing a dangerous game here, I hope you know that." Suddenly any friendly pretense was gone, and Archer's tone became that of a much older, more mature individual. "You know what they say about people who play with fire, don't you?"

"That someone will get burned." Cooper stared at him meaningfully, hoping his message was conveyed.

"You and Lou...you can't be together."

There it was.

"I've had enough of this." He started the truck, but Archer's arm darted through the window and latched on to his wrist. Cooper felt as if Archer's touch carried a shock.

Cooper's gaze trailed from the hand on his arm, across his body, to where Archer was leaned halfway through his window. "I need you to listen to me," Archer insisted.

"Take your hand off me before I ruin any shot in hell you have of a scholarship." Cooper gave himself props for sounding calm. All he wanted to do was punch Archer in the head or break all his fingers. He took a deep breath through his nose then said again, "Get your hand off me, Archer."

The other boy complied hesitantly, and as soon as his fingers were gone so was the uncomfortable electric tingling. "I'm not trying to be a dick here."

"Could have fooled me."

"You are running out of time. Just like your brother did."

That was it. Those words were like a dousing of ice-cold water poured over Cooper, sobering his rage and replacing it with a tangible fear he thought he might choke on.

"I've got your attention now, don't I?"

"Yes."

"I'm not telling you to stay away from Lou because I like her. Don't get me wrong, I do like her. But you two can't be together. Not shouldn't. Can't."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." He also wanted to know what Archer knew about Jer, and what any of it had to do with Cooper's relationship with Lou. People were out of their minds with the need to keep the two of them apart, and for what? They weren't Romeo and Juliet. They were two people who liked each other, and it was the twenty-first century, for crying out loud.

"You'll hurt her. Or she'll hurt you."

"That should be up to us." Frankly he was sick of hearing about it, especially from people who had no goddamn place meddling in any aspect of his personal life, like Archer.

"Have you kissed her?"

Cooper went rigid. "That's none of your business."

"You have, haven't you? Was there anything weird about it?"

Aside from the fact that Cooper had lost almost all gentlemanly decorum and had wanted to literally shred Lou's clothes off? He'd rather not be reminded about that little lapse.

"No," he lied.

The look on Archer's face said he wasn't buying it. "I can help you."

"Help me? Help me?" Cooper snorted and reached for the keys again. "I'd rather lay down in the middle of the highway and ask a passing semi to help me up." He started the truck, and this time Archer didn't stop him.

"One way or another, it's going to end. When it does, don't forget I tried to make it easier on you."

"Do me a favor, Archer. Don't do me any favors."

As he pulled away he heard Archer say, "You asked for it."

**Chapter Twenty-Six  
**

She'd run smack into Ariel Wyatt.

Lou's immediate thought was to beg the woman for help.

Then her brain caught up with her gut instinct, and she realized Nigel would never have allowed a regular patron into the library with Lou locked up. Ariel must have known Lou was there.

The complete lack of surprise in Ariel's expression confirmed Lou's fears, and instead of asking for help, Lou turned to flee. This time, though, she found herself caged between Nigel and Ariel.

Lou backed herself against the nearest bookshelf, hoping to keep from getting bashed in the head again. She was still holding her insulin pen in one hand, but the element of surprise was shot. And she definitely couldn't get by both of them.

"What do you want?"

"Nigel, she's terrified, what did you do?" Ariel looked past Lou as if she wasn't there to address her nutjob librarian captor.

"You told me to hold her here."

"I meant keep her occupied, not take her prisoner."

"You said I shouldn't let her leave."

The woman sighed and rolled her eyes at him. "Couldn't you have given her a book to read? Honestly, Nigel, I didn't think it was possible for you to be more of a screwup, but apparently I vastly underestimated your abilities in the idiot department."

Nigel looked abashed, but Lou was having a hard time feeling sorry for him. She was still wobbly on her feet, nowhere near recovered from her high blood sugar episode, and likely wouldn't be feeling fully herself for several hours.

"Who are you people?" Lou snapped, keeping her back up against the bookshelf should any more surprise guests decide to arrive and make the odds even worse for her.

"That will all be clear very shortly." Ariel's gaze wandered towards the front doors, where as if on cue, someone rapped lightly on the glass. As Lou had predicted, Nigel had locked them inside and the rest of the world out.

Nigel gave Lou and Ariel a once-over, then deciding it was safe to leave his prisoner with only one guardian, he went to the door and unlocked it.

Archer Wyatt stepped in, and in that moment Lou was sure she must have slipped into a diabetic coma and was dreaming the whole thing, because there was just no way this scenario could have been real. Her palms began to feel itchy as her adrenaline hitched higher. The last time she'd felt this was in Cooper's embrace, and she still didn't quite understand what had happened to her then.

"Archer?"

"Miss Whittaker." He nodded to her, as though it was perfectly normal to find her locked in a library, clutching a tiny insulin needle, quivering with fear and adrenaline because she had been kidnapped.

"What the hell?" she demanded. Maybe because he knew her he'd be more apt to tell her something instead of leaving her in the dark both literally and figuratively.

"I bet you want some answers. I'm sorry, but we're a bit short on time, so I'll make it as simple as I can, then we'll work on filling in the blanks when it better suits, okay?"

Lou wanted to tell him if he didn't give her something, she was going to jab him with the needle anyway, but she was handily outnumbered and didn't feel like testing their patience.

"I see you've met my mother." He jutted his chin towards the blonde woman.

"We've met before," Lou said tartly. "Though last time I wasn't in captivity."

"This is a mess, I'm afraid. Archer, your cousin has made a tremendous catastrophe of this whole situation. He locked her up in the reading room, and I'm fairly certain there's blood in the poor girl's hair. Eloise, can you show me the back of your head?"

"Why, so you can hit me with something again? Thanks, but no thanks." She pressed her back harder against the shelf, feeling it wobble under her weight.

Ariel ignored her accusations and held out a delicate, tanned hand festooned with a variety of enormous diamonds. Lou recoiled from her. "I have to apologize for what's happened to you here. You see, I asked Nigel that if you should return, Archer and I needed to speak with you. He took my insistence you not leave a little too literally, as you can tell, and now I'm worried you'll be...reluctant to listen to what we need to tell you." When it became clear Lou wasn't going to shake her hand, Ariel extended it outward in the direction of a nearby table. "Please, let's sit."

"No."

"Eloise, I must insist."

"You don't get to terrorize me then invite me to have a nice friendly chat. I don't care what your original intentions were. I'm not listening to you."

"I'm afraid you have to, as the very fate of this town depends on you hearing me out."

Dramatic much?

But she had Lou's attention.

"Are you being serious right now, or is everyone in this stupid town prone to intense bouts of hyperbole?"

Archer snorted. "Well, that's not untrue, but you really oughta listen to what she has to say." He turned his attention towards Nigel. "Can you put a sign up on the door or something?"

Nigel was playing with the cuff on his jacket, trying to blend into the background. Lou almost felt sympathetic to him because of how they were treating him, but then the knot at the back of her skull whined in protest and any empathy she had for Nigel vanished. He left to find a sign, and Lou had to wonder what was so pressing that Archer wanted it done now. Was someone looking for her? He had said they didn't have much time. But why?

"Sit down, Lou," Archer directed, coming in close to invade her personal bubble. He smelled nice, like lemon and sunshine, reminding her of being outside—a place she wondered if she'd be allowed to see again.

"I want to go home," she whispered.

Archer placed a hand on her shoulder, his touch so soft and gentle she would've thought she was imagining it if she couldn't see his hand. A familiar tingling sensation crept over her.

"Let's just have a chat, then when it's all over, I'll drive you home myself, okay?"

She didn't want to be anywhere near Archer or his crazy family. But if sitting down and having a chat with him and his mother was her best shot of getting out, she'd take it. She jerked her shoulder free of his touch and backed away from him, sliding herself along the shelf until she was near the table.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

"You'll have to excuse me if I think your word is about as good as runny oatmeal at a dinner party."

Archer looked hurt, but his expression changed after a moment, and the cool exterior returned. "You'll learn to trust me."

Why did that sound like a threat?

"Don't hold your breath."

"I don't have to. You and I are going to be old friends before you know it, and today is going to seem like nothing more than a bad dream." He kept his gaze locked on her as he spoke, and with each new word she felt a calmness begin to creep over her. She fought against it, trying to keep her guard up, but by the time he'd said bad dream, her shoulders had lost their tension, and she lowered the insulin needle to her side.

"Why don't you give me that?" He held his hand out for the needle, and for some stupid reason, she gave it to him.

"Let's go sit down," he added.

Proving she wasn't a complete fool, she kept her back against the shelf, but she still followed him towards the table where his mother was already sitting. He offered her a chair near the wall where it was nearly impossible for anyone to sneak up behind her, and when he realized she had no intention of letting him hold the chair out for her, he raised his hands up in false submission and let her seat herself.

Lou's palms were still itching, giving her the strangest sensation, as if dozens of fire ants were crawling about just below the surface of her skin. She rubbed her damp palms on her jeans, doing her best to chase the sensation away, but when she crossed her arms, it was back full force.

"We tried to make this easy on you." Archer took the seat next to Ariel. "Everyone warned you. It wasn't like you weren't told."

"You're talking about Cooper," Lou said, when the realization dawned on her. "This is all about him."

Ariel shook her head and placed a hand gently on Archer's arm. "Let me explain it to her. Maybe she'll be better able to accept it from an adult."

Fat chance.

"You can't be serious. This can't all be about some stupid vendetta you idiots have against the Reynolds family." Lou wanted to get up and storm out but reminded herself that righteous indignation wasn't a luxury she was being granted right then.

"It's much more complicated than a mere dislike."

"I didn't say dislike. I said vendetta."

"You have a flair for the dramatic. You must get that from your mother," Ariel observed.

Lou fell silent. Her mother was hardly a flight-of-fancy drama queen. If anything, it had been her father who was apt to exaggerate things—usually for the sake of humor. But for Ariel to make a statement one way or the other implied an existing knowledge of Lou's father.

Taking Lou's new quiet repose as an invitation, Ariel continued. "We weren't trying to be malicious by warning you off the Reynolds boy, Eloise. I assure you, we aren't as coldhearted as you'd like to think we are."

"Sure." Honestly, she didn't know where this was going, so she bit her tongue against the urge to say anything more.

"You and Cooper are chemistry lab partners, if what Archer tells me is accurate."

"Yes."

"Then I'll put it to you in familiar terms. You are hydrogen and he is the match."

"If you're trying to tell me Cooper and I have combustible chemistry, I should probably tell you to mind your own business."

Ariel leaned across the table, extending her hand towards Lou's. When the older woman touched Lou the itching sensation became a white-hot burn, and a spark visibly cracked between them. She jerked her hand back at the same time Ariel did, shocked by what had happened.

Faint vapors of smoke curled off her skin, but where she expected to feel pain, there was only a cool release. For a moment the itching was quieted. Ariel didn't look relieved. She stared at the place on Lou's hand she'd touched as if it were a viper rather than the limb of a human girl.

Archer cast a glance between them, his eyes wide with surprise. "Is that what—?"

With a flick of her wrist, Ariel silenced him. He didn't ask her any more questions, but he continued to stare at Lou with a cross between fear and wonder. She could almost see her own stunned expression reflected in his eyes.

What the hell was happening to her?

In California she'd just been a normal girl. Then her dad died and everything went to hell. Now she was seeing his ghost, falling for a coyote boy, and was related to the witch who'd cursed him.

"How are you involved?" Lou's hands trembled in her lap.

"Do you know about Cooper's brother, Jeremy?"

Lou hesitated but didn't think answering would give too much away if they didn't know about the curse. "Yes."

"And what did Cooper tell you about that?"

Raising her eyebrow, Lou gave the older woman a look that asked, Do I look stupid to you?

"All right." Ariel lifted her hands in mock surrender. "How about I assume you know what we both know you know? How about we stop playing games and just get to the point?"

"And what is it you think I know?"

"I think you know Jeremy Reynolds is wandering around the Poisonfoot woods on four legs instead of two. I think you know Cooper Reynolds will be joining him next summer. And I think you know your family is responsible for that."

So Ariel wasn't playing games. Lou didn't know how to respond to the information. Obviously Ariel hadn't told her anything she didn't know, but she was having it all confirmed for her by an adult. An adult who seemed reasonably sane. Somehow knowing there were people aside from her and Cooper who believed in the curse made it feel more real.

And once it stopped being a thing she shared only with him, she let the weight of it become something she could feel rather than something she was merely imagining. It was real. She wasn't crazy or letting herself be lured in by the charming lies of the town's bad boy.

By Ariel laying her cards out on the table, Lou was allowed to fully, honestly believe everything Cooper had told her. She'd wanted to, and to an extent she already had believed, but this was the final shove she needed to really accept it.

"Okay," was all Lou said, not adding anything to the conversation but confirming for Ariel that she was in the loop.

"Did your father ever talk to you about his life here before he died?"

Lou didn't think Ariel was talking about fun childhood memories, so she shook her head.

"So everything you know has come from Cooper?"

"If you're going to imply he's lying or something, save your breath." She also didn't want to tell Ariel about information she'd gleaned from her father after he died.

Ariel looked sideways at Archer while Nigel paced the aisle, not truly a part of the conversation but observing it from the fringes. During the silent interval there was a quiet tap on the glass.

"Hello?" came a voice through the door. "Is anyone in there?"

Cooper.

Lou wanted to shout for him, but when she looked across the table, Ariel was holding a finger to her lips in a shush gesture, and her cool glare was enough to keep Lou silent. She didn't think the Wyatts were going to hurt her—not any worse than Nigel already had—but something told her it would be in her best interest not to call for help.

They waited in a quiet so perfect she could hear the gravel crunch under Cooper's truck tires when he pulled out of the parking lot behind the library.

She let out a shaky breath.

"Archer, can you continue explaining things to Eloise, please? I need to call your brother and tell him what's going on." She squeezed his shoulder and retrieved her cellphone, brushing past Nigel to where she could have some privacy.

Lou glowered at Archer, letting him know she wasn't going to be anywhere near as polite to him as she'd been with his mother.

"I'm not the bad guy here," he reminded her.

"How do I know that?"

"You can't stop the curse, Lou."

"I can if I'm responsible for it."

"No. You can't stop it. What do you know about magic?"

The tingling in her fingers became more pronounced when he asked the question. "Nothing," she admitted.

"Magic isn't just hocus-pocus and sleight of hand. It's a manipulation of energy." He placed his hands on the table with his palms facing up. As he spoke, a spark of blue light formed in one hand, flicking up like a small, cerulean flame.

Lou's pulse quickened as she watched, totally stunned by what she was seeing. Ghosts and coyotes were one thing, but Archer was creating something from nothing. No matter what else she'd seen, it was still really cool. She was having a hard time accepting that her mind wasn't playing tricks on her.

The flame got a little bigger, and with the slightest wiggle of his fingers it changed color from blue, to green, to orange.

"All around us there's energy. It has a natural flow—the molecules like to function in a certain way. When we use magic, we disrupt the natural flow. The longer we disrupt the flow, the more volatile and...intense the magic becomes."

"Intense how?" She was still staring at the flame in his palm.

"It takes on a mind of its own, in a manner of speaking." The flame expanded, forming into a ball and hissing angrily. Lou had a feeling Archer was manipulating it to make a point, but it was effective.

"Not that this isn't, admittedly, the coolest thing I've ever seen, but what does this have to do with me? And Cooper?"

"A curse is applied magic," Archer explained. "You basically tag someone as being the focal point for your magic. The longer that curse exists, and the more people you apply it to...well, it can get a bit wild."

Lou nodded, but she didn't really grasp the point he was trying to make.

"Normally a curse dies when the main purpose of the curse is fulfilled. But if that doesn't happen, it will usually die along with the person who cast it." Archer's little ball of flame was now the size of a grapefruit, crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies.

So a normal curse would have died with Morena. But almost two hundred years had passed, and it was still going as strong as ever.

"What if the curse doesn't die with the person who cast it?"

Archer smiled and nodded, as if she'd finally understood.

"Sometimes a curse is so powerful it embeds itself into the very core of a person's being. Or a family."

"Okay."

"A curse like the one cast on the Reynolds family has burned so long and so deep, it stops just being about the people. That curse is engrained in every part of this town."

"What does that have to do with you and your mother?"

"Some people have a natural ability to make order of chaos. Like a grounded plug or a lightning rod." He lifted his empty hand and held it above the ball of flame, touching the orange sphere with one finger. It vanished instantly, leaving only a puff of smoke behind.

"So..."

"You're fire. He's dynamite. And I..." he pointed to himself, "...I'm the glass wall that keeps it all from blowing up in our faces."

"Not you specifically, dear," Ariel interrupted. "But I think you summarized the points very nicely."

"What happens if I find a way to end the curse?" Lou asked. "I mean, if it's attached to me the same way it's attached to Cooper, what happens if I can figure out how to stop it?" She didn't want to be so dependent on them for answers, but so far the Wyatts were the only ones willing to give her any insight.

Ariel sat down across from her again and made to reach for her, but Lou didn't miss the way she paled slightly and withdrew her hand. Ariel was afraid to touch her.

"Like Archer said, the depth and breadth of this curse is beyond the scope of the normal, everyday negative oath or bad thought. It's rewritten the energy of the whole town. Our family came here a hundred years ago to keep it in check, and we haven't been able to leave since."

"So you're what...hall monitors for the curse?"

"We're Watchers. We keep order."

"And now you're trying to keep order by keeping me away from Cooper." The tingling sensation in her hands built to a new intensity as a renewed anger overcame her. She understood they were just doing what they thought was right, but how could anyone believe keeping her away from Cooper was the only way to save the town?

"You don't understand the power you're messing with here." Ariel wasn't playing around anymore. Her face was cruel and serious. "You are going to stay away from that boy."

"No. I'm not." Lou got to her feet, rubbing her anxious palms on the back of her jeans and looking at the door. "I've listened to what you have to say. I watched your little light show. Now I'm going to go." When she moved in the direction of the exit, Ariel got to her feet and blocked the path.

"Do you think you have an option here?" Ariel snarled, no longer a sweet Southern mother. Now she was as vicious as the animal Cooper's brother had become. "I don't want to make this ugly, but I will. You are going to stay away from Cooper. If I have to threaten you and him, I will. This isn't a game. This isn't puppy love. You have to stay away from him. It's not a request."

"I don't care." Lou side-stepped, the light coming from the door mocking her. The longer she was kept from escaping, the angrier she got. The fire ants under her skin had become bees and were well on their way to becoming a full-fledged lightning storm.

"You don't understand."

"I don't care," Lou repeated.

"Your father tried to ignore the curse. He ran away, and it killed him."

The words were like a slap in the face. "What?"

"I told you," Archer interrupted. "It becomes a part of the family. Part of the town. He left the town."

"My dad died of cancer."

"No." Ariel shook her head. "He died because the energy of the curse was a part of him. He died because he ignored the nature of magic, and it destroyed him from the inside out. If you ignore it, it will consume you and everything you love."

Lou felt cold. Her pulse throbbed in her ears, and she stared at Ariel, no longer processing the words the woman was saying. She had to be lying. Her father had died of cancer. She'd seen him waste away. She'd been in the oncology wing when the doctors told her mother there was nothing they could do to fight the tumors. Cancer wasn't magic.

"Get out of my way."

"You need to listen to me." Ariel ignored the tremor in Lou's voice. "I can make this easier for you."

"Get out of my way." Lou moved to get past Ariel, but the older woman grabbed for her. Ariel's hand was glowing silvery white, and when she touched Lou's arm, the world froze in place as if time itself had stopped.

The buzzing sensation in her hands grew to a fever pitch, and Lou heard nothing but a static wail when Ariel touched her. Lou's efforts to wrench herself free of Ariel were useless because the older woman clung to her, fingernails digging into her skin.

"Let me help you."

But this wasn't help. Pain shot through Lou's body, and she desperately tried to shake Ariel off.

She was reminded, briefly, of being in detention with Archer, when his touch had felt like creeping hands and with each passing second of contact he'd robbed her of something precious.

At the time she'd passed it off as imagination, but too much had happened in the days since for her to be so foolish anymore. It wasn't a coincidence that Cooper's memories had been leached from her. That had been the goal all along.

As Ariel held her, she forgot his smell. She forgot the taste of his kisses. The softness of his hair and the rough skin of his palms. Now that she knew these memories were being stolen, she could feel each one being snatched from her like it was a physical thing.

"Don't do this," she pleaded.

"You left us no choice."

The tingling grew stronger within her, like her body was trying to reject what Ariel was doing. Lou focused on the buzzing, not sure what she was expecting, but if any part of her might be able to reverse Ariel's magic, she was willing to try.

She closed her eyes and pictured the place where her hand met Ariel's like it was the conduit between a plug and a socket, and she imagined all the hot, uncomfortable energy zinging through her was instead focused at that point.

The pressure built, and Lou winced, shutting her eyes tighter as Ariel clawed to hold on.

Then the energy spilled over.

And that's when all hell broke loose.

**Chapter Twenty-Seven  
**

Cooper was parked in front of the basketball court when the library exploded.

It rattled the road, and a huge rift cut a line through the sidewalk, dividing the street into two jagged halves. The top windows bordering the entire library shattered, spewing glass fragments like shrapnel. Small chunks of glass and bits of brick rained down on the windshield, pinging like hail.

Cooper was too shocked to move. He watched one of the exterior walls of the library crumble as if it had been built of sand. Loose book pages caught in the breeze, skittering into the road.

After a moment, Nigel the librarian stumbled out through the frame of the front door which no longer contained any glass. He made an awkward attempt to run across the street but caught his dragging feet on the ravaged concrete and fell face-first to the ground.

He didn't get up.

Smoke billowed from the building, but it was a purple-red color, unlike any smoke Cooper had ever seen.

Seeing that dark, ashy cloud was what told Cooper this was no normal explosion. Not that any explosion was normal, but this was no gas leak.

He opened the door of his truck and got out, the ground still vibrating under his feet. A few people had emerged onto their porches or crowded at the end of the block to see what was happening. The police station only a few doors down had emptied, and all the officers were running down the street.

The wail of sirens sounded from the fire station as volunteer firefighters rallied to get to the scene.

Cooper reached the edge of the chasm that now bisected the whole street. It wasn't so large a person could fall in, but it would still make driving on the street impossible. He hopped over it and moved towards the library as another wall collapsed. Without two support walls, the roof on one side caved in, sending a new wave of dust and debris into the air.

He shielded his eyes and looked into the exposed skeleton of the library.

Archer Wyatt was standing next to his mother, Ariel, who had a large gash on her forehead. Archer held her upright and guided her towards the front lawn, where they both sat down, seemingly too stunned to make it any farther.

"Cooper Reynolds, you get the hell away from there." His own mother's voice was crisp and commanding, even through the din of chaos surrounding the building.

Several officers had crossed the gap and were crowding around Ariel and Archer, applying basic first aid. The fire truck had come to a stop at the edge of the crevice. There was no fire, in spite of the smoke, so the volunteer firefighters were looking confused as to their next course of action. Several were helping the officers with Nigel and the Wyatts, but they didn't seem to know what to do with the building.

"Everyone stay clear, it's not safe," his mother boomed, her voice forceful and serious.

Cooper kept walking forward, the purple smoke furling around his ankles.

His mother caught up, grabbing him by the arm. He tried to jerk free but was surprised by her strength.

"I said stay back." She had the mixed authority of a mother and a sheriff, yet Cooper still wanted to ignore her and climb through the hole in the wall.

He wrenched himself loose in the same moment Lou staggered out of the rubble, her hair tangled and her face streaked with ash.

She looked bleary and lost when she got to the grass, taking one step on solid ground before she collapsed. Cooper ran for her, practically tripping over her when he crouched down, his fingers flying over her face and arms, trying to assess the damage. Her wrist was burned, and there was a knot on the back of her head, sticky with fresh blood. She winced when he touched it.

"Stop." She batted his hand away.

He listened to her but continued to scan her, attempting to see if there was anything seriously wrong with her aside from the burn.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"The library exploded, Lou."

Her eyes narrowed, and she gave him a serious, cold expression. "Why are you calling me that?"

"Lou? That's your name."

She searched his face, the anger fading into confusion. "That's a name friends call me. I have no idea who you are, so why are you calling me that?"

Cooper sat back on his heels, not sure how to reply. He looked up at his mother, but the moment he did, she glanced away. He followed her gaze across the lawn to Ariel Wyatt.

He didn't miss the nod Ariel gave his mother.

Nor did he miss the sly, knowing smile on Archer's face.

"Did you plan this?" he asked his mother.

Her gaze flicked up to the library, incredulous. "I would never plan something like this."

Lou rubbed her temples, then attempted to get to her feet. Whether or not she trusted Cooper—which she obviously no longer did—she still accepted his help to stand.

"You really don't know who I am, do you?" He stared at her, unable to keep himself from smoothing her hair back off her forehead and letting his hand rest on her cheek briefly. His heart shrank like a deflated balloon to see the lack of recognition in her eyes.

She was struggling, reaching for some memory but coming up blank. Her confusion and frustration was evident in her expression.

"Should I?" she asked, when it became obvious she couldn't put a name to his face.

Finally he dropped his hand.

"No. No, you shouldn't."

About the Author

Sierra Dean is the kind of adult who forgot she was supposed to grow up. She spends most of her days making up stories, and most of her evenings watching baseball or playing video games. She lives in Winnipeg, Canada with two temperamental cats and one sweet tempered dog.

When not building new worlds, she can be found making cupcakes and checking Twitter.

Sierra can be found online at www.sierradean.com

On Twitter at @sierradean

And via email at sierra@sierradean.com

Coming Soon:

Winter (Dog Days #2)

Coming November 2013
