“But this time is different!” Jolene wailed. “This time I need help!”
“OK, OK.” I took the trap out of her hands and wrapped my arms around her. She sniffled into my shirt, leaving a spreading wet stain on my shoulder. “Are you sure about that he called off the wedding, Jolene? Sometimes Zeb misspells stuff in e-mails, and it comes across badly.”
“Of course I’m sure!” Jolene howled, drawing a sharp wince from Andrea, who was more accustomed to the slightly more sedate antics of vampires. “I’m not stupid!”
“OK,” I said, scratching behind her ears. It may sound condescending, but sometimes that calmed her down.
“Do you have anythin’ to eat?” Jolene asked, sniffing the air. “I can’t talk like this on an empty stomach.”
Jolene couldn’t do anything on an empty stomach.
Mr. Wainwright helped me scavenge leftover pizza, canned stew, and some Chef Boyardee from his apartment and then made himself scarce. Even his fascination with were-creatures wasn’t enough to keep him around a hysterical female. Note to self: Bring pot pies and bagged salad to the shop for Mr. Wainwright. This kind of diet could not be good for him.
“What happened?” I asked as she gorged herself on cold pepperoni. It was always oddly compelling to watch Jolene eat, with the stark contrast between the beautiful, trim girl and the huge amounts of food she shoveled into her face. If you didn’t know about her werewolf metabolism, you’d wonder where she put it all.
I tried to reach out to her mind, but the jumble of images—confused, pained, and frenetic—made me dizzy.
“My cousins played a little joke on Zeb, and he got so upset,” she said, gnawing on reheated crust. “I told him he was overreactin’ and he should be glad that my cousins were tryin’ to make him part of the pack. And then he said something about ‘not wantin’ to live on the farm with the Jerry Springer family’ and how we were going to lose our house thanks to them. I asked what the hell he meant by that. He said he was sure I knew all about it. I told him he sounded like a paranoid jerk. He said that if I really felt that way, then he wasn’t gonna to be able to marry me.” Her eyes welled up again. “How could he do that? How could he just break it off without even looking upset about it? How could he just leave me?”
I waited for the yowl of “meeee” to end. “What kind of joke did your cousins play on Zeb?”
“They put a bear trap between his usual parkin’ spot by the front door to Mama and Daddy’s place. It was just a joke,” Jolene insisted. “We do it to each other all the time.”
“Wolves set bear traps for each other? Isn’t that sort of, I don’t know, culturally insensitive or something?”
Jolene seemed befuddled by the question. “No, it doesn’t hurt that bad.”
“You heal ten times faster than the average human,” I told her. “That bear trap could have cost Zeb a foot. He’s already lost a pinkie toe to your family’s little jokes.”
“They’re just bein’ playful.”
“He lost an appendage, Jolene. That’s not playful, that’s wanton endangerment.”
Jolene sniffed. “Don’t! Don’t use the ‘talkin’ down the crazy person’ voice. And don’t act like you’re sad this happened. You probably set this whole thing up to get out of wearing the bridesmaid dress.”
“What is wrong with you?” I asked. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know!” Jolene cried. “He proposed to me! I was a normal person before this. He made me go crazy! I know my family is screwed up, OK? I know it’s not normal for your cousin to want to marry you or for your parents to make you move in less than a hundred yards away from them.
“I know it’s not normal to be so loud and in each other’s business all the time. I know they’re passive-aggressive and just plain aggressive and they pay no attention to boundaries. They know they could have hurt Zeb with these pranks, and that’s half of the fun for them. But what am I supposed to do? This is my pack. This is thousands of years of breedin’ and instinct. I can’t stop that.”
She sobbed and wiped at her eyes. “And that’s what I told him. Then I said he wouldn’t be so tense if maybe his parents were more supportive of us instead of torpedoin’ the wedding every chance they got. He asked me what I meant by that, and I said that it was obvious his mama would be a lot happier if he was marrying you instead of me. And when he told me that was crazy, I told him to take his ring and shove it where the sun don’t shine, and I stormed off, and now I’m sittin’ here, miserable, and with no idea whether I’m gettin’ married.”
Andrea goggled. “That was a Jane-worthy tirade. Really, very impressive.”
“Please don’t help,” I said, turning to Jolene. “And you, you’ve got to draw a line somewhere. You’re marrying Zeb. His safety and happiness have to be your priority, no matter what your family does. Stand up for him, if not to show your family that you’re going to be the first McClaine to break this weird-ass cycle of human abuse, then to show Zeb that you’re on his side.
“Apologize,” I said. “And then go perform some physical favors for him that I never have to think about. And both of you have to stop coming to me when you have relationship problems. I barely have time for my own problems, and yours are, well, weird.”
“You’re a really good friend, Jane,” she said, shoving the remains of pizza into her mouth.
I patted her arm. “I know. I was serious about that last part.”
Gabriel’s home on Silver Ridge Road would have been the crown jewel in any historical home tour … if anyone in town knew about it. Gabriel had worked for years to erase the house, with its white clapboard, big wraparound porch, and Corinthian columns, from public memory. The house was cozy and way less intimidating than you would expect inside. The rooms I’d seen were done in subtle, muted colors, soft fabrics, little knickknacks that spoke of Gabriel’s years of travel, the kind of rooms where you wouldn’t expect to find your boyfriend plying your best friend with liquor.
Poor Zeb looked absolutely miserable, splayed on the maroon leather couch with a glass in one hand and his head in the other.
When he looked up, I saw he was wearing an eye patch. This could not be good.