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The kitchen at the Greywood house is the size of my grandmother's entire ground floor and roughly four thousand times more pleasant to be in.

It runs the whole back of the building, with a long farmhouse table down the middle that Alex built himself and has since had to extend twice, both times badly. You can see the joins. Nobody's allowed to mention it. There are twelve chairs and not one of them matches, a cast-iron range that Amber inherited from her mother and treats like a family member, and a window over the sink that looks out on the tree line where the stumps started.

It always smells like flour and coffee and, faintly, underneath everything, wolf. Warm and a little wild, like a wool coat that's been left out in the rain.

That night it smelled like cinnamon, because Amber had baked four hundred dollars' worth of pastry for a café she wasn't allowed to open, and the overflow had colonized every flat surface in the room. Something I failed to notice when I entered it earlier because one small bread roll took all my attention and became the center of my world.

"He's alive." Sissily chirped excitedly. She was sitting cross-legged on the counter with a mug the size of her head, and her eyebrows went straight up into her hairline when River came through the door behind me. "Well…” She gave him a once-over and twisted her mouth like she smelled dirty feet. “He's vertical. Are we counting vertical?"

"Vertical counts." I dropped my shoes unceremoniously by the door.

"Miss Stormblood," River offered.

"Uh huh." Her blue peepers went from him, to me, to the space between us, and I watched my best friend file her comments away for later with the efficiency of a woman who has been keeping a list of my disasters since we were four. "There's soup. Amber made soup, not me thank Hecate. There's also an evolutionary experience happening on the counter behind you and Jack will be genuinely wounded if you don't eat some of it."

The roll was still on its chipped plate. Somebody had put a dish towel over it, which was both touching and completely futile.

Jack Greywood was asleep under the table.

Not on a chair. Under the table, in wolf form, curled up on a folded quilt somebody had put down there for exactly this purpose, with his nose tucked under his tail and one ear flicking at whatever nine-year-old wolves dream about. His sock was on the floor next to him. Only the one.

I sat down on the bench and put my feet very carefully on either side of him.

"He waited up for you until nine sitting at the table," Sissily murmured. "Then he waited up for you under there."

"Don't do that."

"I'm just reporting the news."

"You're being passive aggressive and trying to guilt trip me. It’s working by the way but my emotional capacity for today is fully spent." I pulled a bowl toward me. "I’m going to consult with the book."

The air in the whole room shifted.

Sissily's mug came down slowly. River, who had been examining the pastry situation with the focus of a man trying to neutralize a ticking bomb, went very still by the counter. Even the fire in the range seemed to duck.

"Hazel."

"I've been ignoring it for days." I picked up a spoon and did not use it to eat. I was waving it around like a wand. "The Council sanctioned an entire pack because of me. Danika left a hex in a shoe store I loved when I was nine. I don’t want to talk about it now, I’ll tell you about it later. River's…" I gestured at all of him swallowing the words that were fighting to get out. "River's River. And there's a book upstairs that has been trying to talk to me since I was in Hell. I have been treating it like it’s an overdue bill I don't want to open."

"Because last time you opened it, you bled out of your ears," Sissily said flatly dropping the mug she was holding with an agitated thump.

"Yeah, well." I finally looked up from the soup. “Last time I didn’t have any questions worth the nosebleed.”

None of us said anything for the longest time until I pushed the bow of soup away from me with a huff. It was untouched. “No time like the present.” I muttered and stood up.

The said book lived in the bottom drawer of the dresser in my room, wrapped in a pillowcase, which I'd like to say was a security measure but was actually just my cowardice covered with laundry.

My room at the Greywood house is on the second floor at the front, over the porch. It has slanted ceilings on one side, a window seat with a cushion that's lost its will to live, and floral wallpaper from about 1974 that Amber keeps apologizing for and I keep telling her not to touch. There's a water stain on the ceiling shaped like Portugal. A radiator that clanks twice, always twice, whenever the heat comes on. And a scattering of shoes across the floor in an arrangement that Sissily calls a hazard and I call a filing system.

Eleven days I'd been sleeping in that room with a talking book six feet from my head.

The three of us sat on the floor around it now, because none of us wanted to be the one who suggested the bed. River put his back against the door. Sissily lit the candles on the windowsill with a flick of two fingers, and the flames came up in that fast, greedy way fire does when a Stormblood asks it to, throwing our shadows huge and crooked up the slanted ceiling.

Outside, the wind had come up off the lake. I could hear it moving through the cut tree line, and it sounded different than it used to. Thinner. Like a room feels when the furniture is taken out.

Swallowing thickly I unwrapped the book.

It's not much to look at. That's the thing nobody believes. It's smaller than a hardback, bound in something that isn't leather and isn't cloth and has always been slightly warm to the touch, with no title on the cover and no marks on the spine. It sat in the pillowcase in my lap like a cat that hadn't decided if it likes me yet.