Page 45 of Cost of Courting

With a quick look around the kitchen, I grab my keys, shove a flick knife in my boot, and jog out of the house. I’m already late.

I ignore the house across the road, especially the dark silhouette in the window.

The park isn’t anything special; it has some grass, a ring of trees, and a couple of picnic tables that have had graffiti added in so many layers that you can’t tell what its original colour was.

A group of kids are running around on the lawn with a soccer ball. They range from five all the way up to sixteen. The groups are roughly, depending on the day, evenly split between male and female.

At the picnic tables, a couple of parents, grandparents, and older siblings sit and talk. I walk over to the adults first and drop the cash on the table.

“Pizza today?”

Clark turns with a smile. “Morning, Selene.”

Her smile is expectant and knowing. She reaches up and brushes her snowy white hair behind her ear. Despite the colour, she’s not a day over forty.

“I swear you gossip more than the kids,” I grouse. I elbow Dave, who has his taped up glasses on and a too big t-shirt. “Tell me you don’t believe this shit?”

“Iunno, it’s a thing of beauty to see Pack Dread back together again,” he teases.

“Not you, too! I’m not Pack Dread!” I growl.

Mary snorts a laugh, her green eyes glimmering. “It’s so romantic.”

“They are not my pack!” I stress.

“Who is Pack Dread?” Peta asks, looking between us. She only moved to the neighbourhood a few years back. She’s got long blond hair and looks far too fragile for this life.

“Well, back in the day of yonder year, this here girlie we love so much was a teeny, tiny, little hellion. She was every inch as brave as the bravest kid, every skill she needed to survive this neighbourhood mastered. Selene was the infamous fourth member of Pack Dread, the four toughest, strongest kids this neighbourhood ever birthed,” Cindy says with a hoot. She’s a loud-mouthed pain in my ass who calls me on all my bullshit. Cindy is also a pseudo caretaker for all the kids with working or absent parents. She brushes her brown hair over her shoulder and winks at me.

“There was a neighborhood pack?” Peta asks in awe.

“We weren’t a pack!” I protest, but it falls on deaf ears.

The group gets close, and I’m almost squeezed out, but Clark throws an arm over my shoulders, preventing escape.

“Oh, yes, there was. She tagged along with them everywhere,” my torturers hoot.

“When we first saw it, we thought they would tell her no, but they didn’t. Those boys just took her under their wing, teaching her all sorts of things, like how to punch, how to pickpocket, how to steal a car.”

I smile faintly at the memories. Those were good times.

“Why did they take her in?”

“No one knows, but the three of them let her into their group and treated her like a cherished pack member,” Cindy adds.

I close my eyes at the pain those words elicit.

“If anyone said a cross word about her, they were the first there ready with their fists. No one could touch her, not even her daddy,” Clark says.

“If anyone so much as looked at her the wrong way, the pack was ready.” Mary nods her head. “Yeah, they were devoted to her.”

“They chased out bullies and made this place safer, the four of them. It was a wild time,” Clark continues.

“You couldn’t have Kingston, Edric, or Mael without Selene. They were a team,” Davey throws out.

“Oh, the trouble they would get into. I remember the day they were all caught turning a tree into a pack house. The council wanted to cut it down. So, they climbed up there and refused to come down.”

“What got them down?” Peta glances at me with wide eyes and then back at Clark and Mary.

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