“Yeah, but you hardly know me,” I say, shaking my head. I finally sit across from her at the table. “You don’t have to be so nice to me.”
“I’m going for Miss Congeniality,” Ella jokes, but then adds, “Besides, the Fenris attacked you once when you were sleeping in your car. Think I’d let that happen again, when I’ve got a home full of queen-size mattresses?”
I blush a little and mumble thanks as Lucas walks past the doorway. He’s in the adjacent room, walking back and forth in front of the studded leather couches. I lean in to listen close—he’s asking questions, dialing, redialing, asking others. Things like, “My sister is supposed to swing by today—super blonde hair, blue eyes. Have you seen her?” or “My drunk friend forgot where he left my car before the storm. It’s a silver Lexus; is there one in your parking lot?” He looks like he’s itching, a dog locked in a pen.
Ella sighs and explains he’s been like this all morning—there’s too much snow to go out and look for Mora himself. The station wagon has no hope of making it out the drive, and neither do any of Lucas and Ella’s cars—though he tries each and every one. When the pink Hummer (“It was an impulse buy, but now it’s just embarrassing to drive,” according to Ella) stalls out at the bottom of the hill, Lucas gives up.
“I can find her,” he tells me when he emerges from his den of investigation at one in the afternoon. “I can find anyone. She’s playing it right, though—she’s taking the same route back that she took coming down, following her own tracks. It makes it hard to know if she’s still here or already gone. Raccoons do it, too, when a dog is after them—”
“Mora’s acting like a raccoon?” I ask doubtfully.
“Don’t knock nature,” Lucas says. “If there’s one thing it’s good at, it’s surviving. But I’ll find her. I just need to get out of this house….”
Ella looks up from a tablet—apparently, she gets dozens of newspapers delivered daily and reads each and every one. With the snow preventing delivery, she’s resorted to various websites and seems to be finding the entire process somewhat vulgar. “How am I supposed to stare at this thing to read the articles? It hurts my eyes. But Lucas—all this aside, we have to figure out what to do about food.”
“There’s no food?” I ask, remembering a fairly large assortment of cereal in the kitchen this morning.
“There’s food,” Ella says, “but Becky can’t get here with the storm.”
“She makes dinner,” Lucas says a little awkwardly.
“You have a woman who comes every day just to make you dinner?” I ask.
“I guess we could eat cereal for the third time,” Ella says, sounding sad. “Although after grad school I swore I’d never eat it for dinner again.”
“Can I… see what you have?” I ask, trying to squash the bolt of laughter growing within me at Ella’s helpless expression. She nods, and we walk to the kitchen. The cereal is still on the counter, and our bowls from breakfast and lunch are still in the sink. Ella wrinkles her nose at them, then opens the door to the pantry.
I’m pretty sure the Reynolds’ pantry is as large as my entire kitchen in Atlanta. There’s a glass pendant light hanging over a butcher-block table, and everything has its own separate, defined spot on the wire shelves. There’s flour—wheat, pastry, self-rising, all-purpose—and rows upon rows of tiny glass jars full of different-colored crystals; it takes a moment before I realize they’re salts from all over the world.
“We don’t have any bread,” Lucas says. “Ella doesn’t eat anything with preservatives.”
“Neither should you,” Ella says. “Don’t think I don’t see the MoonPie wrappers on the Audi’s floorboards.”
Lucas shrugs, smiles, and doesn’t look the least bit apologetic.
“Okay,” I say, brushing past them. I open the refrigerator and find it’s more of the same—lots of ingredients, but nothing prepackaged or precooked. “Give me an hour?”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have to cook! You’re our guest,” Ella says, a flash of the pageant queen emerging in her voice as she steps out of the pantry.
“Lucas ran over a werewolf to save me,” I say. “We’ll call it even.”
Lucas and Ella insist on helping. Lucas seems to have a clue, as if he’s at least seen someone knead dough before. Ella watches the entire thing like it’s a cooking show, sliding ingredients and utensils across the counter to me when I ask for them. She looks mildly concerned when she sees me cutting butter into chunks, as if she’s calculating the fat content of the dish. It’s something Kai and I would have made fun of—he always thought it was hilarious when seven cheerleaders opted to split a single candy bar. But because the look on Ella’s face is so endearing—and because she’s so quick at converting the metric measuring utensils to standard and back again—it’s hard to judge her.
I make what I’m good at—breakfast. Scrambled eggs and bacon don’t require recipes, but for the biscuits, I use a recipe from Grandma Dalia’s cookbook. The three of us carry the serving dishes to the kitchen table, where Lucas has already set up plates. The utensils are all in the right place, lined up perfectly, and there are even cloth napkins. Everything is loud, and the kitchen smells like bacon and is messy with flour and used bowls, and it feels…
It feels like home in the way that I thought only Kai could. I’m not sure how—it’s been less than a day—but there’s something around my heart that feels relieved, comforted, happy in a way that has nothing to do with the dozens of bedrooms or expensive paintings. It makes me smile; how can I smile when Kai is missing? But I can’t stop.
“Maybe we should ask Becky if we can help her cook sometimes, too,” Ella says, rubbing her hands together eagerly. “So we can learn things. Other than the microwave, I mean.”
“It’s not like you let me use the microwave anyway,” Lucas says, half joking.
“That’s because he wants to make Hot Pockets,” Ella says, frowning. “Day and night. They’re awful.”
“You’ve never had one,” Lucas points out.