Page 65 of Welcome to Blackbird Hollow
Alice
Ishove one of the last remaining donuts into my mouth as I push the door of Wyatt’s truck open, my half-full travel mug of coffee in my other hand. Fern’s right at my heels, jumping down onto the cracked blacktop. The air is thick with the smell of woodsmoke as I draw in a deep breath.
I shut the door and tip my head back, looking up at the large building—an old factory with a hardware store on the first floor. Like everything else, it’s closed up tight. Main Street yawns wide and empty at my back, the sweep of dusk curling around Blackbird Hollow like a giant’s fist.
Halloween night is here. The Hunt is coming.
“Do you feel it?” Wyatt asks me from the other side of the truck, where he’s gazing down into the valleys that spill out below Main Street. He’s got his head tilted to one side, hands in the pockets of his jacket, the last scraps of the sunlight outlining him in gold, and for a moment, he looks immeasurably ancient. Or maybe just…not entirely human, like there’s something else running through his veins, something that’s different from the rest of us.
When he turns to look at me, he’s just Wyatt again. I consider his question, opening my mouth to say no. But then a nameless feeling stirs in me, and I press my lips together, gazing into the hills. For once, no porch lights twinkle. No smoke curls from chimneys or bonfires. Instead, it’s just darkness. I know that everyone’s doors are locked, lined with rowan and iron. The wind comes blowing again, wild and crackling with energy. For a moment, I do feel it. Not because I’m a hedgerider—because I’mhuman.
And we’ve always been afraid of the things that come in the night.
“Actually,” I finally say, turning back to him, another shiver creeping along my shoulders, “yeah, I think I do.”
“Don’t really know whether that’s a good or a bad thing, to be honest,” he tells me. He pauses, gesturing to the factory’s roof, which’ll serve as our post for the evening. “Ready?” he asks.
He offers me his hand, and I gladly take it, our fingers lacing together. I don’t think I believe in things like fate or destiny, or even soulmates. But it’s hard not to feel like we weren’t made from the same stardust. Or some shit like that.
Fuck. I’m inlove, aren’t I?
I set my jaw and follow Wyatt through a side door into the old factory. As we begin to climb a set of enormous metal stairs, the same two sentences echo through my brain, over and over again:
I just found him.
And I’m damn well not gonna lose him.
“Alright,”Wyatt mutters, settling into the camp chair next to me a little less than an hour later, the muzzle of his gun resting on the roof’s ledge. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
I take a deep breath, surveying Main Street from our vantage point, perched a few stories above ground level. The leaf peepers and weekenders seem to be cooperating. Even the Archer Inn’s outdoor dining patio, which flanks the side of the elegant antique building, is bare of any tables and chairs. Above us, dark clouds roil in front of the quarter-moon, looking ominous as all hell.
Luckily, it’s only an illusion courtesy of the town’s witches, cast to help convince out-of-towners to stay the fuck inside. On a night this quiet, I should be able to hear oldies like Type O Negative or Concrete Blonde blaring from Lucky’s just a few doors down, but it’s utterly silent. Besides the leaves driven into wild dances by the wind, there’s no movement at all. For a town usually so full of life, it’s deeply eerie.
The handheld radio crackles to life, scaring the shit out of me. “You sure we shouldn’t swap?” comes Falllon’s staticky voice. “Alice and I need to have a girls’ night debriefing. Also, if you get all horny while the Hunt’s here and end up distracted, that’ll make us look bad.”
I burst into laughter, snatching the radio before Wyatt grabs it. I can’t put into words how grateful I am for her dry, flippant humor right now. “We’re good, I promise,” I tell Fallon, looking across Main Street to where I can just make out her form on the roof of the Archer Inn. “Could we add a girls’ night round-up into the ‘we survived the Hunt’ debriefing?”
There’s a pause, and then Fallon’s voice returns. “No, Alice, don’t be absurd,” she replies gravely. “We can’t just tack something so silly onto a huge, important discussion.”
I nod, tucking a stray lock of hair back into my braid. “You’re right,” I reply, turning to Wyatt. “We might have to postpone the debriefing on the Hunt.”
Fallon’s cackle echoes through the handheld radio at the same time Wyatt rolls his eyes.
“The devil made you both on the same day,” he grumbles, doing a bad job of hiding his smile as he checks the chamber of his gun—for the third time, I can’t help but notice.
I open my mouth to shoot back, because the humor feels so good right now, but then Fern gives a low warning growl from where she’s lying between us. In the dim moonlight, I watch her slowly rise. Her coat stands on end, tail held stiff and straight as she sticks her head over the half-wall at the roof’s edge. Time seems to grind down, impossibly slow, as she takes a long, deep inhale, like she’s searching for a scent in the air.
The moon breaks through the witches’ clouds, turning Fern into something that looks remarkably like a silver wolf. My breath catches. Then she throws her head back and howls—long, mournful, more human than any dog I’ve ever heard, and yet so incrediblyinhuman it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Without a word, Wyatt cocks his gun. The rifle in my hands is filled with salt capsules, but he’s got pure iron loaded in his chamber, anointed with Wanda’s faesbane oil—a highly guarded recipe that’s been in her coven for hundreds of years, since They came to these shores.
Everything seems to hold perfectly still, and then the radio resting next to my knee crackles. It’s Caden’s voice this time, not Fallon’s—deep and resonant, perfectly calm.
“They’re here.”
Some strange, heady mixture of eagerness and terror floods me, my heart slamming into the delicate skin of my throat. I peer over the half-wall, scanning Main Street, which more or less follows the ley line. I don’t have Caden’s wolf-vision, though, so I don’t see anything yet but shadow and lamplight.
“You good, sweet girl?” Wyatt asks me, his voice uncharacteristically strained.
