Page 31 of Misfit Monsters (Pack of Outcasts #1)

Periwinkle

I get the feeling we’re heading into trouble before Jonah has even parked on the gravel driveway that belongs to Ted McGaffery.

There’s nothing I can put my finger on. Across the yard, the two-storey house looms quiet and still.

The yellow clapboard siding has transformed into a dingy beige most places, but I can’t imagine house painters are in large supply all the way up here.

No artificial light glimmers in any of the windows, which isn’t surprising when it’s late morning.

Not that it’s particularly bright out here. The gray clouds smothering the sky only add to the ominous mood. When I step out of the van, a damp breeze licks over my skin.

I pull up my hood both to conceal my hair and to ward off the chill. Why does the wilderness have to be so spooky half of the time?

The house stands in a cleared span of lawn about ten times bigger than the house’s foundation. A patchy garden lies to the left of the house, sprawling to a rocky hillside. Tall pines surround us on all other sides like a fence that’s sprouted.

A pick-up truck is parked farther down the driveway by a shed not quite large enough to serve as a garage. If Ted is the only person who lives here, that should mean he’s home, unless he has more than one car.

Jonah walks tentatively toward the house. “Mr. McGaffery? We’ve just come up from Pilverton.”

His voice rings through the hush of the wilderness. If the house’s owner is around, he should have heard our engine several minutes before we reached the house, crawling along that narrow dirt lane.

No one comes to the door or any of the windows. As Hail makes an impatient sound, Jonah strides toward the porch.

He’s still a few paces away from the stairs when a stronger gust of wind washes over us—and the front door swings open with a squeal of its hinges.

I’d jump out of my skin if it was looser. Raze springs to my side in an instant. Mirage lets out an uneasy hum.

Jonah has frozen in his tracks. “Mr. McGaffery?” he tries again.

No one appears on the threshold. It looks like the door was unlocked and blown open by the wind.

But if the owner is home, why isn’t he answering? If he isn’t here, then where has he gone?

Jonah walks to the door and leans his head inside. He calls out a few more times to no response before turning back to us.

“He doesn’t seem to be home. I don’t feel right tramping in there when we don’t know what’s going on. We could start by looking around outside, and maybe he’ll come back.”

“Seek and you shall find!” Mirage declares, and springs off to inspect the shed.

Hail aims a cool glance at me and Raze before heading toward the trees. “I’ll see if I notice anything unusual in the woods.”

I watch him go, only picking up a trace of indecipherable emotion from him. A wobble runs through my pulse.

The winter fae tried to be sweet with me last night—to get closer with me than I’d ever have thought he’d want to. There was something thrilling about having him let down his guard and reach out to me.

But he didn’t totally want to. Why would he touch me or kiss me if it unsettled him? Even if he kind of liked it too.

And he got angry when I tried to talk to him about it, which means it’s probably bothering him even more than I could tell.

Is this some complicated fae thing I’ve never learned about?

I shake off those thoughts and nudge Raze. “Let’s see what’s around back.”

Whatever’s going on with Hail, he couldn’t have made it more obvious that he doesn’t want me meddling. If I’ve learned anything from my time at the academy, it’s that trying to soothe emotions people don’t even want to admit they’re having only pisses them off.

If he ever decides he wants to open up properly, it’s not like I’m hard to find.

As we approach the side of the house, my skin starts creeping. Scratch marks mottle the siding, some thin and shallow, others deep gouges.

Apparently some beast decided it needed to claw the house down, and I don’t think it was a big bad wolf .

Raze frowns. “It looks like his house did get attacked.”

He marches ahead of me and sniffs the area with a flick of his basilisk tongue. The shake of his head reveals his disappointment. “It was too long ago for the scent to linger. At least a few days.”

I swallow thickly. “Maybe the creatures didn’t come back after he told people in town about it.”

But where is Ted McGaffery himself?

I venture into the backyard. A chicken coop stands next to a fenced area where the birds must have been allowed to wander, but there’s nothing except scattered feathers on the grass now.

When I get closer, splotches of dark red stand out against the scuffed earth.

I hesitate. “I think whatever came through here, they ate his chickens.”

R.I.P., birdies.

Raze comes up beside me with a hint of a snarl. He motions to the patchy lawn next to the chicken coop. “They tore up the yard too.”

More clawed spots rake the soil between the patches of grass. I can’t restrain a shiver. These creatures had a major beef with the entire property.

Mirage and Jonah come around the other side of the house to join us. I point out the signs we’ve noticed.

Jonah’s eyes darken. “We don’t know for sure that shadowkind creatures did that.”

Mirage cocks his head. “Are there any mortal creatures that would try to tear down a house?”

Our team leader grimaces. “Not that I can think of.”

Hail steps out from between the trees, his gorgeous face unusually grim. “Some of the tree trunks near here have been battered with claws and maybe spikes. It doesn’t look natural to me. ”

Jonah exhales in a rush. “We have to be careful, considering how the creatures came at us the last time we encountered them. Raze, can you make a wider circuit through the woods and see if you pick up any fresh scents? Shout if you get any indication that shadowkind might be nearby. The rest of us will take a look inside the house.”

Raze is the only one he trusts to be able to defend himself if there’s a sudden attack. I can’t argue with Jonah’s judgment, even if my heart gives a little squeeze watching the man I’ve come to adore lope off into the woods alone.

I follow the others into the unlocked house.

We wipe our shoes on the doormat and pad carefully through the rooms. Ted keeps his home tidy—a magazine lies on the living-room coffee table and a mug sits by the kitchen sink, but just about everything is in its place. Upstairs, his bed is made and his clothes hang neatly in the closet.

No monsters rampaged through here. I rub my arms against my rising apprehension. “It doesn’t look like there was a struggle.”

Hail scowls. “A human wouldn’t live out in the wilderness just to spend all his time inside his house. He must go out regularly. Maybe he’s taking a hike.”

But all kinds of things could happen to a human strolling around in the forest, even if there weren’t disturbed shadowkind roving around.

Raze’s gruff voice carries through the bedroom window. “Team! I’ve got something.”

He doesn’t sound worried, but I hustle out into the yard as quickly as my twinging feet will take me. Another holler brings us tramping through the woods east of the house.

Raze backtracks until he comes into view and waves for us to follow him. “I caught one fresher trail. Something passed by here earlier this morning—another of those strange shadowkind scents.” He pauses. “Should we see where the creature went or where it came from?”

“Where it came from,” Jonah says immediately. “That’s what matters the most. And that’s the trail that’ll fade sooner.”

I smile more to raise everyone’s spirits than because I feel particularly upbeat. “That makes sense to me. Let’s get this mystery unraveled!”

As we set off through the forest, no one else helps break the silence. Raze sets as swift a pace as Jonah can keep up with on his human legs, and pretty soon I need to slip into the shadows so I can keep up.

Mirage is still bounding through the underbrush in the physical world, but Hail has shifted into his most ephemeral form too. I sense him through the darkness, his presence like a slightly brittle chill.

Despite my earlier resolve not to push the subject, I veer closer to him. There has to be some way to give last night’s conversation a better ending.

“I know you might not want to talk to me right now,” I say. “But I’m sorry if I upset you last night.”

Hail’s response travels through the shadows in a mutter. “Don’t worry about it.”

I don’t think he means he’s actually fine, but I do have plenty of other things to worry about. Like whether we’ll encounter more feral beasts while we wander through the woods. Like what the sorcerer who commanded them is up to now.

“All right. I’m still glad you invited me to walk with you!”

Hail simply snorts.

As we keep pace behind Raze, the sun reaches its peak over the treetops and begins descending to the west. Jonah swipes at the sweat on the back of his neck. I re-materialize to keep him company and dip back into the shadows when my ankles are throbbing.

Finally, the basilisk shifter jerks to a halt. He stares at something farther ahead of us, his stance rigid. “That’s… I’ve never seen one like that before.”

I flit forward through the shadows. Before I’ve quite reached him, a current of energy tremors through my being.

That feels almost like?—

I pull myself into physical form and find myself staring at the most formidable rift I’ve ever encountered.

It’s true that I haven’t observed a whole lot of the portals that connect the shadow realm with the mortal world. I only returned to my native habitat a few times after I first stumbled into this realm and realized how invigorating human emotions were.

And then, after I got away from my captor… I stuck to just one place, traveling through the same rift to sample the emotions of the local mortals. Practice makes perfect!

Except when it doesn’t.

But all of the rifts I’ve passed through were easy to miss if you weren’t specifically looking for one.

The hum of shadow energy normally blends into the general thrum of mortal life.

There’s nothing really to see unless you squint just the right way to make out the blurring of the terrain on the other side.

And they’ve all been up off the ground, not accessible except through the shadows.

This rift… With just a few more steps, the sense of the world of darkness beyond it jitters right through my skin. The vast, hazy maw stretches up above the treetops—but it also gapes all the way down to the forest floor.

It’s several times bigger than any of the rifts I’ve encountered before. You could toss Ted McGaffery’s entire house in there without scraping the edges.

I peer at the forest around us as if the trees might offer some explanation. My gaze catches on a bit of thread snagged on a twig.

The olive-green color makes my pulse hitch with a flash of memory—the suit jacket my former captor liked to wear, the same color of fabric stretching across his wide shoulders.

I inhale the cool forest air and peer closer. When I consider the details, this thread looks like yarn from a sweater, nothing that would have come from a suit jacket.

I can’t keep panicking at scraps that mean nothing.

Jonah is still studying the portal in front of us. He lets out a low whistle. “Now that’s a rift. How could the shadowkind community not already know about this one?”

“Maybe it’s new?” I suggest, but that idea seems absurd considering how huge it is.

A shudder ripples through Mirage’s lean form. His fox ears pop from between the strands of his bright red hair. “It feels too big. Like it’s… pushy.”

Hail inclines his head in a slight nod, his gaze fixed on the rift. “All the ones I’ve come across in the past give off a neutral impression. This one makes my hackles go up.”

I hug myself. “What do we?—”

Before I can finish my question, a shadowy figure tumbles out of the rift. It transforms into a physical body as it hits the ground just in front of the portal: a creature standing a little taller than my waist, with four bowed legs, a squashed face, and scales that lift into jagged tips.

Someone drew the shortest straw.

Raze’s nostrils flare. “It smells like the other strange creatures.”

As if to confirm his remark, the beast spasms. Its legs shrink while its jaw juts several inches longer. Not an improvement.

Only mild emotions waft off it, like a thin broth .

“It’s curious and a little confused, but not hostile,” I tell the others.

Hail’s stance has gone rigid. “For the moment.”

Jonah looks from the creature to the rift. “I think we’ve discovered where the influx of new, unusual shadowkind are coming from. Now what are we going to do about it?”