She grinned sympathetically.
I was still turning over the woman’s brief comment on the Cullens, and piecing it together with what I’d read from Edythe’s reactions the other day. I looked at Jules, speculating.
“What?” she asked.
“You want to take a walk down the beach with me?”
She looked at Logan, then back to me with a quick grin. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”
As we walked north toward the driftwood seawall, the clouds finally won. The sun disappeared, the sea turned black, and the temperature started to drop. I shoved my hands deep in the pockets of my jacket.
While we walked, I thought about the way Edythe could always get me to talk, how she would look at me from under her thick eyelashes and the gold of her eyes would burn and I would forget everything—my own name, how to breathe, everything but her. I eyed the girl walking alongside me now. Jules just had on a long-sleeved t-shirt, but she swung her arms as she walked, not bothered by the cold. The wind whipped her silky black hair into twists and knots on her back. There was something very natural and open about her face. Even if I knew how to do that burning thing that Edythe did, this girl would probably just laugh at me. But not meanly, I didn’t think. With Jules, you would always be in on the joke.
“Nice friends,” she commented when we were far enough from the fire that the clattering of the stones beneath our feet was more than enough to drown out our voices.
“Not mine.”
She laughed. “I could tell.”
“Were those other kids your friends? That one seemed kind of… older.”
“That’s Samantha—Sam. She’s nineteen, I think. I don’t hang out with her. One of my friends was there before—Quil. I think she went up to the store.”
“I don’t remember which one she was.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t catch many names, either. I only remember yours because you used to pull my hair.”
“I did? I’m so sorry!”
She laughed. “Your face. No—that was just my brothers. But I totally could have convinced you that you were guilty.”
It was easy to laugh with her. “Guess so. Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“What did that girl—Sam—what did she mean about the doctor’s family?”
Jules made a face and then looked away, toward the ocean. She didn’t say anything.
Which had to mean that I was right. There was something more to what Sam had said. And Jules knew what it was.
She was still looking at the ocean.
“Hey, um, I didn’t mean to be rude or anything.”
Jules turned back with another smile, kind of apologetic. “No worries. It’s just… I’m not really supposed to talk about that.”
“Is it a secret?”
She pursed her curved lips. “Sort of.”
I held my hands up. “Forget I asked.”
“Already blew it, though, didn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t say you did—that girl Sam was a little… intense.”
She laughed. “Cool. Sam’s fault, then.”
I laughed, too. “Not really, though. I’m totally confused.”
She looked up at me, smiling like we already shared a secret of our own. “Can I trust you?”
“Of course.”
“You won’t go running to spill to your blond friend?”
“Logan? Oh yeah, I can’t keep anything from that guy. We’re like brothers.”
She liked that. When she laughed, it made me feel like I was funnier than I really was.
Her husky voice dropped a little lower. “Do you like scary stories, Beau?”
For one second, I could hear Edythe’s voice clearly in my head. Do you think I could be scary?
“How scary are we talking here?”
“You’ll never sleep again,” she promised.
“Well, now I have to hear it.”
She chuckled and looked down, a smile playing around the edges of her lips. I could tell she would try to make this good.
We were near one of the beached logs now, a huge white skeleton with the upended roots all tangled out like a hundred spider legs. Jules climbed up to sit on one of the thicker roots while I sat beneath her on the body of the tree. I tried to seem only interested as I looked at her, not like I was taking any of this seriously.
“I’m ready to be terrified.”
“Do you know any of our old stories, about where we come from—the Quileutes, I mean?” she began.
“Not really,” I admitted.
“There are lots of legends, some of them claiming to date back to the Great Flood—supposedly, the ancient Quileutes tied their canoes to the tops of the tallest trees on the mountain to survive like Noah and the ark.” She smiled, to show me she wasn’t taking this seriously, either. “Another legend claims that we descended from wolves—and that the wolves are our sisters still. It’s against tribal law to kill them.
“Then there are the stories about the cold ones.” Her voice dropped even lower.
“The cold ones?” I asked. Did I look too interested now? Could she guess that the word cold would mean something to me?
“Yes. There are stories of the cold ones as old as the wolf legends, and some much more recent. According to legend, my own great-grandmother knew some of them. She was the one who made the treaty that kept them off our land.” She rolled her eyes.
“Your great-grandmother?” I encouraged.
“She was a tribal elder, like my mother. You see, the cold ones are the natural enemies of the wolf—well, not the wolf, really, but the wolves that turn into women, like our ancestors. You could call them werewolves, I guess.”