A Wolf After My Own Heart by MaryJanice Davidson (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕

will murder us SO MUCH so we live here now! Send snacks! And maybe Flanders’s cocoa!

That was the note Lila had found in her mailbox earlier. At the time, she’d packed a bag o’snacks and dispatched Sally with it while everyone was talking to Magnus Berne, who had popped up out of nowhere, was big and mildly terrifying, had a cool accent, but probably wasn’t the villain because it was never the first suspect. Except when it was.

Also: I have a shed?

Oh. Right. Her very first shed, in fact. The small brown building was tucked in the corner of the backyard against the fence, partially hidden by trees that should have been trimmed but never were. It was at the furthest point you could be on the property while still being on the property.

Once the IPA gang had left with Berne and Macropi went to chat with insurance adjusters, Lila had reorganized her OR schedule for the week—the Harrington kid’s teddy bear could wait, the Opitz twins’ Raggedy Ann and Andy, not so much—then went out to confront the vermin problem in her shed.

She looked to her left, even though it was dumb—you couldn’t see Macropi’s burned house from here, but she fancied she could still smell smoke. And there was no way to know if it was real. She’d smelled smoke on and off for over a year after…after what happened. Couldn’t even abide being around lit candles for the longest time. She fully expected the night terrors to return shortly, which was a bore. The nice thing about new trauma is that you got a break from your brain’s reruns.

She knocked. “Kids? You guys okay? Or are you planning more mayhem? I don’t care, I’m just trying to plan my day.”

Nothing.

Another rap. “Are you in there?”

She heard muffled shuffling, and then a note slid beneath the door.

No!!!!!

“This note is a lie, Daniels.”

And here came another one. No it’s not. There’s nobody in here. We swear!

“Then you won’t mind if I come in.”

Dammit.

She opened the door and greeted them with “You guys suck at stealth.”

“Ha! Only because we want you to think that.”

She blinked at them in the gloom. Like the Pevensies’ wardrobe, the shed seemed bigger on the inside. The shed had a cement floor, which had been swept clean and the broom had been placed neatly in the corner. The windows had been washed and the workbench had been tidied, then stacked with the snacks Sally had brought. Ritz Crackers, cans of smoked oysters and packets of tuna, dry cereal, dried fruit, two boxes of beef jerky. A bag of miniature marshmallows. A case of Coke and half a dozen bottles of Snapple. Two water bottles. The kids had been at Macropi’s larder except she just now realized the Little Debbie Swiss Rolls and the bag of miniature Milky Ways were from her own kitchen, fuck.

Two flashlights, extra batteries. Textbooks on the shelf just below one of the windows. An iPad and cords plugged into nothing.

There were also sleeping bags set up on lawn loungers that had been made to fold flat; Caro was stretched out on one, intent on a graphic novel. Sally was on the other, curled up like a shrimp and snoring lightly.

“Huh. You weren’t kidding when you said you lived here now. And hey, I have lawn chairs!”

“That’s not all.” Devoss hopped up and scampered—there was no other word for it, though she’d never tell him how adorable it was—to the far left of the workbench, showing her the back wall. “Check it!”

With that, Devoss gripped the back wall and…flipped it up. Lila realized that there was a small secret door set on hinges. When you pushed in the right spot, the door swung out and up, leading to…

She bent for a closer look. The doorway led to a path through the trees that grew right up to her fence, which you could follow through the woods, probably all the way to Pickerel Lake.

“Huh. That’s nifty.” She stepped back and straightened as Dev swung the doorway closed. “Let me guess—escape hatch for…what’d you call yourselves? Shifters?”

“Escape hatch for anybody, really.”

“Sure, sure. Totally normal. Everyone’s shed has a cleverly concealed escape hatch.” That might actually be true. This was her first shed, after all. “And I get why you guys are hiding, but you gotta know the adults know exactly where you are, right?”

“We’re huge believers in the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ axiom.”

Lila thought that over, then said, “I’m sure everything will work out just fine, Devoss.”

“Y’know, you could turn this into a She Shed.”

“Never while I live, Devoss.”

“Whatcha got against She Sheds?” the boy asked, sounding not unlike Oliver Twist asking for more.

“The silly-ass name, for starters.”

“Well, that’s fair. How about…” Devoss squinted up at her. “What’s your last name again?”

“Kai,” Lila replied.

“Kai’s Korner?”

“No.”

“The Kai Kubby?”

“Absolutely not. I’ll commit homicide all over you if you so much as try.”

“My point,” Devoss replied, and it was hilarious that he sounded exasperated with her, “is you could fix this up and it’d be super nice.”

“But why?”

He spread his arms to encompass the small dark building. “To have a sweet little den that nobody knows about.”

“It’s a shed, Devoss.”

Again with the arm spreading. “So? Look at it! It won’t be hard to fix up.”

“It’s dark.”

“Low lighting,” Devoss corrected.

“Crowded.”

“Cozy,” Devoss insisted.

“It smells like grass and dirt.”

“True,” he admitted. “But my point stands, it’d be easy, einfach, facile. You wouldn’t even know you were sleeping in a shed! Or if you had people over, you wouldn’t have to have them inside bugging you. They could just hang out here.”

Wow. She didn’t want to think why the kids were so excited at the prospect of out of sight, out of mind in a stranger’s shed, possibly indefinitely. Why they felt lucky to be in such conditions. She would think about it, of course. She just didn’t want to.

Daniels, she just realized, had been engrossed in Elfquest Volume Two during the entirety of the She Shed chitchat. She