13: JOSHUA
They were halfway home in the taxi when Joshua realized that he’d forgotten paint. He whimpered—something he was doing distressingly often.
“Hm?” Decker leaned close so the driver wouldn’t overhear them.
“I wanted to paint my bedroom. I forgot to look to see if Target carried paint.”
The day had left Joshua feeling lost and confused even in the familiar surroundings of Target. All the store’s departments had been in different places than the one in Utica. Tomorrow would be Monday. He wouldn’t be getting up for school. He wouldn’t be eating lunch with his friends. He wouldn’t be going to the dojo after school. There would be no eating dinner in the living room with his parents while watching Jeopardy. As he thought of everything he’d lost, the universe seemed to open up wider and wider, and he felt even more adrift.
The TV shows on hoarding were all about people rebuilding their lives. They’d had their lives nuked in a totally different way; they were buried under the rubble of their own addiction. It gave him a framework. All the hoarder shows had the same formula. Declutter. Strip off any wallpaper. Roll on a coat of cheery yellow or calming blue paint (never white). Voila, a new life. Cue the weeping with joy.
The shows seemed to regard paint as some kind of magical elixir. Joshua had his doubts but he wasn’t going to mess the formula. “I don’t know a thing about painting a room. Do you?”
“No, painting is not my forte, at least not walls,” Decker said. “I’ve painted pictures. In my time, gentlemen were expected to learn to draw and paint. I suspect because if you wanted to illustrate something you had in your head, you couldn’t simply find the likeness in the Sears Roebuck catalog. You needed to draw it yourself.”
Sears Roebuck?
Joshua dug his new pens and notebooks out of the shopping bags. He wrote: paint, brushes, whatever. Watch some YouTube videos on painting a room. Pick up paint chips.
“Paint chips?” Decker read over his shoulder.
Joshua blushed with embarrassment as he realized that somehow he’d scooted so close to Decker that he was nearly on the man’s lap. Every time he stopped paying attention to what he was doing, he ended up leaning against Decker. It was some weird werewolf reflex. At least Decker didn’t seem to notice. Joshua still had Decker’s phone in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out, using the movement to casually slide away from the vampire. “Samples of paint colors. I’ve seen them every time I’ve been in a hardware store with my folks. They’re pieces of paper with like a zillion colors. You can take them home. See how they look in your house.”
A quick search brought up two hardware stores within a half-mile of Decker’s house. “I can hit one of these tomorrow.”
“I like most greens,” Decker mysteriously stated. “Not crazy about the pale mint green that was popular in the fifties, but just about anything else is good.”
“What?”
“Your favorite color. It’s green.”
“It is?” It kind of felt right and wrong at the same time.
Decker laughed. “You got green towels. Green sheets. All the shirts you picked out were green. It’s not that hard to guess.”
If it was not so hard to guess, why did he have to think about it? Was it really his favorite or was this some new werewolf preference? Why would werewolves have favorite colors?
Was he seriously overthinking all this?
No, he wasn’t thinking enough. He had all these new weird werewolf quirks and no idea what triggered them. Decker said Joshua didn’t have to worry about the full moon, but what if Decker was wrong? “After we get everything unloaded, can you show me the coal cellar?”
“The coal cellar?” Decker must have forgotten.
“You said—” Joshua remembered that they weren’t alone. He glanced toward the cab driver, then leaned over to whisper. “You said we could use it as a cage for the wolf.”
“I don’t think you’ll need it,” Decker said.
“Why not?”
“Saul arranged for me to meet with the Prince of Boston when I moved from Philadelphia. It was the only way I could have stayed in the city.”
“What was he like?”
“I told you about how most monsters don’t have an off switch? How they’re always on and uncontrollable because of that? You’ve seen those little bitty Christmas lights, the single white bulb?” Decker pinched his fingers together to describe tiny. “That’s what most monsters are like, little lights, always on. Magically. Once you feel it enough times, you’ll understand more. The potential. What you see is what you get. I made the mistake of taking the prince by surprise. He looked like a normal man. Tall. Black hair. Dark brown eyes. Not particularly strong or striking looking. But then, as I startled him, he turned on his power. He didn’t change, not a single hair on his head, or even the color of his eyes, but I felt like I’d just touched the surface of the sun. He controlled all of Boston and most of the state and I could feel that. There’s not an inch of his territory where I could go and stay hidden. He would know. That’s why Saul had to introduce me. Otherwise the prince would have sensed my presence, assumed the worst, and hunted me down.”
“So he seemed completely human—until he didn’t?”
“Yes. If you’re like the Prince of Boston, you control the switch, not the moon.”
He remembered Winnie saying how Seth would check on her at night from New York City. Then there was that weirdness with the Wolf King thing that showed up at Sioux Zee’s. No, he wasn’t like that at all. He could be just like the legends. Decker certainly was conforming to the vampires in stories. “You go down for the count at sunrise.”
“I’m a different kind of beast entirely. You have a reflection, I don’t.”
“Why is that? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Like I told you. Logic is for men. Magic is for monsters.”