“Milk is good for you. Ice cream is not,” Joshua, who was living with us for the summer, countered.

“Ice cream is made of milk,” Jase added helpfully.

“So is the whipped cream,” Charlie chimed in.

“She wasn’t lying about the fruit either. Bananas, pineapple, and strawberries. It’s like a vitamin explosion.”

“And that would be the final nail in your argument’s coffin,” I said. “Talley is, as always, the deciding vote. You lose.”

“Loser, loser, loser,” Angel chanted. “Joshua is a big, fat L-O-S-E-R!” The second, third, and fourth verse were the exact same as the first.

It was good to be home.

I took a deep breath, delighting in the humidity laden air. Sure, it smelled of fish guts and sweaty children, but it was Timber air. At moments like this, when I was surrounded by the familiar, I could almost convince myself things were back to normal. It was hard to remember all the death threats (which had slowed from daily to weekly), Really Important Decisions (which I had to make with alarming frequency), or blood I had spilled when the teacher’s aide from my kindergarten class was munching on a hamburger ten feet away from where my little sister was being slung over the shoulder of an 80 year old teenager.

Okay, maybe “normal” was pushing it.

“But you said we could ride go karts,” Angel wailed, bringing my thoughts back to the here and now.

“They were full. We had to get a reservation,” Jase explained for perhaps the twentieth time.

“When’s our reserve?”

“Reservation,” I said. “And it’s at two o’clock.”

Angel pushed a stray curl out of her face. “What time is it now?”

“Fifteen minutes until two,” I said. Which means it’s 9:45 in Romania.

Not that I kept up with what time it was in Romania and thought about what a person there might be doing at any given time of the day. Nope. Not me. I wasn’t one of those crazy kind-of-not-really girlfriends. I mean, it wasn’t like I constantly thought about him and sometimes, like when I was hanging with my favorite people on earth at The Strip, swore I smelled him on the breeze or anything.

God, I was a sad, pathetic excuse for a human being.

“Fifteen minutes? It’ll take us an hour to walk there!”

Joshua, who had released Angel only when she agreed to hand over her banana split, pointed with the long, red spoon. “Those go-karts over there? It’ll take us an hour to walk across the street?”

“Yes!”

I couldn’t decide if she really didn’t have a firm grasp of time and space, or if she was being overly dramatic. Either way, it was kind of hysterical, especially since it seemed to really bug Joshua. Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy, but he’s really fun to annoy.

“We probably need to go anyway,” I said, peeling myself off the plastic picnic bench. “There will be a line--”

The world ceased to exist around me as I became entangled in a stare. He didn’t smile or give any other indication that he was happy to see me, but I knew.

You always know with your mate.

I started to cross the street, but then had a better idea. “Go on without me,” I said over my shoulder as I headed back towards the lake. There was a moment of indecision when I wasn’t sure which tree was the tree, but eventually I found it and made myself comfortable. I didn’t have to wait long.

“So, the guy sitting on the next bench down from me--”

“He smells like Play-Doh.” I threw up a hand to shield my eyes from the glaring sun.

“Why?”

“It’s one of life’s greatest mysteries. I don’t think we will ever know.”

Liam sat down across from me. I wanted to reach out and touch him to verify his existence, but I didn’t. A part of me knew he wouldn’t mind, that he would want me to. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the part of my brain controlling my motor functions. That part imagined how much it would hurt if he pulled away or looked uncomfortable at the contact. So, I sat there, hands in my lap, and tried to appease myself by looking at him.

“We could ask him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The urge to touch wasn’t fading, so I leaned back against the trunk, putting more distance between us. “I don’t know where you come up with these crazy ideas.”

It wasn’t like we hadn’t talked over the last few months. We sent emails (social networking sites weren’t really a great place for me to be, so we had to kick it old school), called, texted, and even had a weekly Skype check-in. Still, it was different to see him in person, to be able to see each of the folds in his cheeks when he smiled.

“Any new Challenges?” I asked to divert my attention.

“Just two since Wednesday; one backed down as soon as I walked into the room.”

“And the other?”

Liam plucked a blade of grass from the ground. “Dead.”

Which brought the total up to four. With each failed Challenge, I hoped it would be the last. It wasn’t that I doubted Liam’s ability to always prevail, but I worried about the scars it was leaving on his soul. We had already revoked the fight-to-the-death clause of Challenges, but there were some who refused to submit, no matter how badly they were beaten. I couldn’t decide if I found those men audacious or stupid.

“I had a Challenger from the Logsdon Pack show up this morning.”

Liam froze mid-pluck. “At your house?”

“Yeah, but he never got around to actually issuing the Challenge. Apparently he was one of Talley’s former suitors, so Jase answered the door with Joshua’s sword. I think the poor guy may have cried a little.”

Liam went back to ridding the earth of grass one blade at a time with a chuckle. I was about to ask him if he had heard any more about the pack of Siberian Husky Shifters someone was rumored to know when he looked up with a frown.

“Why are you wearing that face?” he asked.

I touched my cheek. Thanks to my mom and Gramma Hagan, I was starting to gain weight, but my cheekbone still stuck out a bit too far.

“This is the face God gave me,” I said, trying to hide the hurt in my voice. “I can’t exactly take it off and put it on a shelf.”

“I’m talking about this.” A finger brushed against my mouth. “And this.” He tapped the corner of each eye.