Chapter 65 Familiar Faces
Molly stepped back from the doorway and her eyes moved over Grace again in a way that was trying to be practical and kept getting derailed by concern, the makeshift bandage, the dirt on her knees, the general appearance of someone who had recently been through something the details of which were not immediately obvious from the outside.
"How do you even know where I live?" she asked, and the question came out more bewildered than accusatory. "I know I've mentioned it before, I'm sure because I talk too much... I didn't think you were listening."
"I'm always listening Molly, I have always listened," Grace said, and it came out a little more exhausted than she'd intended.
Molly looked at her for another moment. Then she stepped back further and opened the door wider because whatever else was going on, a person didn't show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night looking like this and get left standing outside.
"Come in," she said. "But I have to let my mum know. She'll hear anyway and if I don't tell her first she'll worry more." She glanced toward the stairs and lowered her voice. "Just stand here for one second."
Grace stepped into the entryway and stood on the mat while Molly went to the kitchen where her mom sat with a portrait photo and a glass of wine.
"Hi Mom," Molly looked at the photo her mom was holding and felt her throat clog up a little, but she pushed it down and continued, "A friend of mine just showed up, she's had a rough night. We're going to be in my room."
"This late?" Her mom responded, raising her head to look at her. Molly nodded, "That's alright, you girls have fun, but no sneaking in boys, okay?"
Molly’s face heated up. “Mom!!! I know!”
She laughed then opened her arms and Molly stepped into them, letting her mom kiss her forehead before she turned to leave.
"Love you mom," she said quietly, with the practiced reassurance of someone who had been managing her mother's anxiety gently for the past several days.
A little sniffle then, "I love you too my darling girl."
Molly returned to Grace with an expression that had settled into something more focused. "Okay," she said quietly. "Come on."
Looking around now, Grace could admit that the interior of the house was so lit up and white that it almost made her eyes hurt. This must have been the new house Molly moved to. It wasn’t as big as the mansion Molly used to live in before, but it was much bigger than an average person’s home.
They went upstairs.
If Grace was confused as to why both she and her mom were still awake by this time, she didn't comment.
Molly's room was the kind of space that accumulated personality over the years rather than being aesthetically decorated, there were band posters overlapping with photographs on one wall, a desk that had jewelry cases, hair brushes, bands, and lip glosses organized perfectly.
There were strings of LED lights along the headboard and ceiling that cast everything in a purple glow that was kinder to Grace's battered appearance than an overhead light would have been.
There were fairy lights with anime character figurines and books that sat on a huge shelf opposite her bed. Molly sat cross-legged on her bed and Grace sat in the desk chair across from her with her bandaged arm resting in her lap, the house was quiet.
Grace wondered how to start a conversation and just began with, "When did you get back?"
Molly who had been watching her took some seconds to respond, "Like a week ago."
"No wonder I didn't see you at school—" she couldn't finish because Molly cut her off.
"You went to school?!" She said looking at her pointedly.
"Um, no, these injuries are new, I—"
Molly got off the bed and headed straight for her bathroom while scolding Grace and asking what kind of trouble she's gotten herself in, saying it was unlike her character to be showing up at people's houses late at night with heavy injuries.
She returned with a first aid box and sat on the floor in front of Grace, "Your hand."
Grace had thought about how to tell her everything on the walk over. She'd had an hour of cold air, a throbbing forearm, and uneven footpath to work out the best way to begin, and she'd arrived at no particularly elegant solution, so she'd decided she would just say it and let the pieces land where they did.
So when Molly took her hand by force, since Grace was slow in giving it, and gasped as she saw flesh slowly re-knitting itself.
She began.
She started with the marking because that was where the whole explanation hinged, and she worked outward from there, what it meant, what it had done to her, what she now knew about the world that she hadn't known before she'd walked into all of this. She talked about the pack, about what wolves actually were and how they actually lived and all the parts of it that bore no resemblance to anything mythology or folklore had suggested.
Grace talked about Zion, Enzo, and Maddox, not in detail, not the parts that were still too tangled to be spoken aloud to anyone, but enough to put names to the reality of what she'd been living inside.
And she talked about the witch part carefully and last, because that was the piece she was still making peace with herself.
When she stopped talking, the room was very quiet.
Molly's mouth was open. Not slightly but fully open, she was staring at Grace with an expression that cycled through several things in quick succession without settling on any of them.
"Okay," Molly said finally. The word came out completely flat.
Grace waited.
"Okay," Molly said again, as though repetition might help it absorb faster. "So you're telling me." She pointed at Grace. "You. Are a werewolf. And a witch."
"Yes."
"Both."
"Yes."
"At the same time."
"That's generally how it works."
Molly pressed both hands against her face, covering her eyes, and stayed like that for a few seconds. Then she pulled them away and looked at Grace with the wide, slightly unfocused expression of someone performing rapid recalibration.
"And Zion," she said slowly.
"Werewolf, yes."
"Damn… I’m actually one of his fan girls from school. But I’m too nerdy to catch his eye.”
"Yup."
"And Enzo."
"Yes."
Molly facepalmed, "Of course he would be, they're cousins. And Maddox." Molly said the last name with a different quality than the others, slightly more careful, watching Grace's face as she said it.
"Yes," Grace said, and kept her voice even.
Molly pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them and sat there looking at Grace over the tops of her kneecaps with an expression that was trying to decide whether this was the most insane thing she'd ever heard or whether, in some strange way that she couldn't quite articulate, certain things were starting to make a different kind of sense than they had before.
"Are you pulling my leg right now," she said. "Grace. Are you genuinely, seriously, pulling my leg?"
"I showed up at your door at two in the morning with a bleeding arm and mud on my knees," Grace said. "I'm not pulling anything."
But Molly wasn't listening to her and was talking to herself, "Of course she can’t be pulling my leg, I literally saw her injury close. Show me your arm again." She directed the last part to Grace.
Grace obliged and Molly could see the injury almost closed completely, she stared at Grace for another long moment. Then she exhaled slowly through her nose, the breath of someone deciding to accept an enormous amount of information without fully processing it yet because fully processing it would take longer than the immediate situation allowed.
"Okay," she said for the third time, and this one sounded different, less like disbelief and more like a door opening. "Okay. I believe you."
Grace let out a breath she hadn't been aware of holding.
They sat with it for a moment, the information settling around them like something that had changed the dimensions of the room slightly without moving any of the furniture.
And then Molly's expression shifted.
It happened gradually, the openness in Molly's face moved toward something heavier. Something she'd been carrying in a way that had changed how she held herself, subtly, in a way Grace now noticed she'd been doing since she'd opened the front door.
"I have something to tell you too," Molly said. Her voice had changed entirely. "Something happened. Something—" She stopped, and the stop had weight in it. "Something drastic."
Grace looked at her properly. Looked past the surface of the conversation they'd been having and saw what was underneath it, the swollen eyes that she'd attributed to Grace's arrival at an unreasonable hour but that were older than that, days old, it was the specific exhausted grief of someone who had been crying in intervals for a sustained period.
"Molly," she said quietly. "What happened?"
Molly's arms tightened slightly around her knees. "My brother," she said, and her voice was steady, "Daniel was killed."
The words dropped into the room and Grace felt them land.
"Someone shot him," Molly continued. Her jaw was tight. "He was—he'd just joined the police force. He was so proud of that." A pause where something flickered across her face and was brought back under control. "And now he's gone, whoever did it is still out there, and no one can tell me anything useful because it's an open investigation and—" She stopped herself, then took a deep breath. "I just need them to find who did it. That's all I keep thinking, I just need someone to find who did it."
"Molly." Grace moved from the desk chair to the floor, closing the distance between them, and put her good hand on Molly's arm. She didn't have adequate words for this, there weren't adequate words for this, she'd learned that about grief, that words generally weren't the point. But she stayed close and kept her hand where it was and let Molly feel that she wasn't alone in the room with it.
Molly leaned her head back against the bed and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to just drop that on you."
"Don't apologise," Grace said. "Don't ever apologise for that. I mean, I also dropped a huge thing on you."
They sat like that quietly, and Grace's mind was turning things over in a way she didn't fully pursue yet because this moment belonged to Molly and she wasn't going to pull focus from it. But somewhere in the back of her thoughts, pieces were moving. A brother. A police officer. Killed, with the perpetrator still unidentified. She didn't know how it connected to anything, she didn't know if it even connected at all, but the feeling that things were closer together than they appeared had been with her for weeks now and it hadn't been wrong yet.
The doorbell rang.
The sound travelled clearly up through the house, bright and ordinary and slightly startling in the quiet of the late hour. Both of them looked toward the bedroom door instinctively. Grace glanced at the time and found herself confused, it was some hours past midnight, which was not an hour for social calls.
“You’re expecting someone?” She asked.
“Not really.”
Molly's mother's voice floated up from below, calling out that she'd get it, her tone carrying the mild surprise of someone not expecting a visitor at this hour but responding to it anyway.
Molly lifted her head and some of the emotional weight on her face was set aside, replaced by a small, tired attempt at readjustment.
“Molly, love, Ryan’s here.” Her mom called from downstairs.
Molly took a breath and got up from the floor, she moved toward the door and paused with her hand on the frame, looking back at Grace. "I'll be back up in a minute. You okay for a second?"
"Go," Grace said. "I'm fine."
Molly slipped out and Grace heard her footsteps on the stairs, descending into the warm light of the ground floor, and then the sound of greetings being exchanged below, Molly's mother's voice, quiet and welcoming, and Molly's voice joining it, and then a third voice, a man's voice, low and tired. It carried the particular worn quality of someone who had been awake for a long time on the back of several other long days.
Grace tried to look at the string of lights along the headboard and give Molly the private moment she was having downstairs with someone who had known her brother.
She managed for about three minutes, but the werewolf hearing was making her itch. Because, she was sure she’d heard that voice before, and the certainty grew more uncomfortable the longer she sat with it.
She told herself to stay where she was.
Then she got up.
She moved to the bedroom door quietly and opened it just enough to hear more clearly, and the voice came up from below more distinctly now, she caught a phrase, just a fragment, something he was saying about an investigation, about not stopping until it was done, and that fragment was enough.
She knew exactly where she'd heard that voice.
Grace moved to the top of the staircase on feet that were careful and quiet, half hidden, she looked down through the bannisters into the entryway below where the hallway light was on and three people were standing—Molly's mother with her half filled wine glass in hand, Molly with her arms folded and her face soft with the complicated tenderness reserved for people who were grieving alongside you, and a man with his back partially turned, jacket on, the specific posture of someone who had come from somewhere difficult and hadn't quite let it go yet.
Then he turned slightly, enough for the light to catch his face, and Grace's hand closed around the banister post without her meaning for it to.
She knew that face.
She had last seen it in a hospital room, questioning her.
The police officer from the hospital was standing in Molly's hallway.
Grace tightened her hand around the banister as her heart moved loud and unsteady in her chest, and she did not move.