His bed.
I looked over at it and frowned. Couldn’t be.
I walked over to the pile of blankets George and I had set up for Barkley in the corner. My hand suddenly felt clammy as I felt around underneath. I closed my fingers around the chain and pulled it out where the gold caught the sunlight streaming in through the side window.
I glanced at Barkley.
He shrugged. “Found that in your room last night. What can I say? I’m drawn to shiny things. It’s not like I ate it. Remember last week when I ate that pair of tweezers? I still can’t sit down right.”
I eyed the necklace without saying anything. What was it? Obviously not just for decorative purposes if it had anything to do with Barkley’s transformation. And I had a funny feeling that it did. I left it under the blankets. As good a place as any to keep it hidden.
I shook my head. “This is ridiculous.”
He finally put the towel in place. “Hey, you don’t have any of those steak-flavored biscuits lying around,
do you? I think they would be awesome dipped in this coffee.”
I bought Barkley those biscuits for being instrumental in getting me to go outside before my apartment blew up. I looked at him with a frown.
“That night. My apartment. How did you know? Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember. I was stuck as a werewolf, not a werewolf with amnesia.” He appeared to think about it for a moment. “Yeah, I had a sense that something bad was going to happen. I’m a little bit psychic. That’s one of the reasons I left my pack two years ago. I sensed that somebody was going to kill me since I was next in line to be alpha. Since I didn’t want that to happen, I took off and after a while traveling in wolf form, I got stuck that way. You ever see the TV showThe Littlest Hobo ? The one with the German shepherd who travels around helping families and then leaves when he’s done to help somebody else?”
“I used to love that show,” George breathed. “I always wanted him to stay with the family. They would have been good to him! He wouldn’t have been cold or alone anymore. Why, is that like you? You travel from town to town helping people, but never find a home of your own?”
“No, I was just going to say that that wasn’t a German shepherd at all. It was a werewolf stuck in that form just like I was. Real jerk, too.” He shook his head. “Actors.”
The doorbell rang.
George clutched his head. “Ahhh!”
My brain was working overtime trying to figure everything out, and I absently walked over and opened it up. It was a guy in a brown uniform. A courier van was pulled up at the curb.
“Got a delivery here for a Sarah Darling?”
“SarahDearly ?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Sign here.” He pointed at the bottom of his clipboard and I signed my name, eyeing him nervously. Then he wheeled a large flat box inside the house and placed it up against the wall.
“Have a nice day,” he said, without much enthusiasm behind the words, and left.
I looked at the box. “I didn’t order anything.”
“You must have,” George said. “They were here yesterday trying to drop whatever that is off, but nobody was here, remember?”
I shook my head. “It’s a bomb. I just know it.”
“But you sound so calm.”
“I know. It’s a little eerie.” I took a deep breath. “It’s the hangover.”
“It’s a little flat to be a bomb,” Barkley said. “And I don’t smell any . . . bomblike materials being used.”
“You can smell that?”
“My sense of smell is very acute.”
“So’s mine. Sort of.” I sniffed the box. It smelled like cardboard. So much for my superpowers.
“So open it.”
I looked at the courier form on the front. Whatever it was came from New York City.
It was a little too flat to be anything all that scary. I hoped. With my luck it was just one very large piece of junk mail. Or a huge bill.
I tore the strip down the side. There were a few layers of bubble wrap I waded through before I got to an envelope.
“There’s an envelope,” George pointed out.
“I see that.”
I grabbed it, tore it open, and saw that it was the shipping receipt. Whatever it was had been ordered personally by Thierry.
I looked at the box again and removed the last scrap of bubble wrap.
George gasped.
“It’s me,” I said.
And it was. My reflection, anyhow. Reflected in a full-length, oval shard, as tall as I was.
“You are so lucky!” George said. “Holy crap, I hope somebody bombs my place so I can get one, too.
So worth it.”
I could only imagine how much something like this cost, or how hard it would have been to find a shard of this size and have it delivered so quickly after I lost the first one in my apartment.
I was completely speechless. Other than the first shard Thierry gave me, it was the most generous,
thoughtful gift I’d ever received in my entire life.
And it did officially confirm that I looked like hell today.
“What an amazing gift,” George said, after no sound came out of me for a moment. “The man is obviously crazy about you.”
Barkley nodded. “It’s true. Werewolves are very perceptive about love.”