Shadows by Robin Mckinley

Author:Robin Mckinley [McKinley, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Love & Romance, Paranormal, Fantasy & Magic
ISBN: 9780698135376
Google: kVDLzj7vIrMC
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

WE HEARD THE SHED DOOR OPEN, FOOTSTEPS—one pair with shoes, one pair without—and then a hand turn the kitchen door handle. Val’s dressing gown went nearly twice around Takahiro but didn’t quite reach his knees. He’d wrapped the belt round and round and tied it in front, like a samurai’s obi. He looked almost as unhappy as he had as a wolf: all curled in on himself like he used to be eight years ago, and it made my heart ache. I wanted to believe that it didn’t make any difference that he might turn into a wolf any time he was stressed out—but it did, you know? It meant he was in danger all the time. Which meant that his friends were also in danger all the time. There was no way the niddles wouldn’t believe we all knew. I said I didn’t know Takahiro at all. But I did in some ways. I knew that was one of the things he was thinking about right now. Because now some of us did know. No wonder he’d never really finished becoming one of us. We just thought it was because he was half Japanese, and lived in a huge house on the other side of town with a dad who was never home and who none of our parents had ever met. And possibly because he was an arrogant moody stuck-on-himself creepazoid. And here he wasn’t even a real gizmohead. He was just a grind. And a werewolf.

The kitchen was starting to smell of chocolate. It was probably my favorite smell in the whole world, and all I could think of was that we’d just had it last night, and I’d thought last night had been serious-enough-for-an-emergency-hot-chocolate-ration enough. I looked down along the floor. There were gruuaa everywhere. I could see them more and more easily even when they were hidden by normal furniture-and-people’s-legs shadows. I didn’t know if that was Hix’s influence, or that I’d stopped trying to ignore them—or stopped hating Val—or what. There was a heap of them in the shadows under the table and a coil of them wrapped around and through the bottles in the tall skinny bottle rack between the edge of the cupboard and the refrigerator. There were several more of them winding around Mom’s flour-sugar-coffee-tea canisters at the back of the counter by the sink. (Which contained, of course, two kinds of pasta, rice and dried beans.) I wasn’t going to mention this. Mom was kind of a hygiene freak and I didn’t know if shadow feet could carry germs or not. Hix had moved slightly to between Mongo’s front legs and he was dementedly trying to lick the top of her head. If that was her head.

It was. Her three eyes blinked open to look at me. “Hey, sweetie,” I murmured, which tended to be what I called all friendly critters. All the long-term residents at the shelter knew their name was “sweetie.” Hix’s eyes still glittered but they didn’t look like silverbugs to me any more.

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