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There are cars in the driveway. An obscene number of cars, almost none of which belong to their family. So many cars that Laura is forced to park on the grass around the side of the house and squeeze through the gridlock to get to her own front door, which is standing wide open and letting shitty techno music spill out into the evening air.
Derek meets her in the entryway, positively reeking of alcohol.
There are a lot of questions Laura wants to ask, and she fully plans to get to them all eventually, but the first one that comes out of her mouth is an incredulous, “How much did you drink?”
Derek rolls his eyes. “Does it matter? It’s not like I can actually get drunk.” He downs the last of whatever he had in his red solo cup. “I can play drunk really well, though,” he adds with pride. Suddenly swaying on his feet, he lets his eyes unfocus and his words slur. “Did you hear about Connie? Yeah, she totally made out with Pam, it was crazy.”
His inebriation disappears in a blink. He grins, apparently waiting for applause.
Laura doesn’t give it to him. “Aw, you’re so cute,” she drawls, thick with sarcasm, and pushes past him into the house. The first thing she sees is an overturned side table. Next up, a throw rug twisted and shoved up against the wall. Then, dozens of people jammed into the living room, all bumping and grinding like it’s a fucking nightclub. Laura stops in the doorway to stare, then redirects her horror and disbelief to her brother.
“What did you do?”
Derek has the audacity to look confused. “Threw a party,” he says, “obviously. Like you told me to.” When Laura blinks at him in consternation, he rolls his eyes again. “Last week, remember? When mom and dad said they were going out of town for the weekend? The first thing you did was suggest a party! I only did what you told me to.”
“I asked if you were having a party,” Laura says. “I didn’t tell you to have a party. This is the opposite of what I told you to do!”
Thinking back, Laura didn’t explicitly tell Derek not to throw a rager as soon as their parents left, but she hadn’t thought she needed to. The question was a joke! She thought her little brother wouldn’t be so flagrantly irresponsible as to invite the entire fucking human population of Beacon Hills into the home of their secret werewolf pack like a complete idiot. Apparently, that was her mistake. She makes a mental note to never trust Derek with anything ever again.
Her brother doesn’t seem to care. He drops his empty cup onto one of the still-upright end tables, grabs another one filled with god-knows-what, and takes a swig of it. When he offers it to Laura, she gives a wordless groan of exasperation and makes a break for the stairs. The cacophony of loud music and people is making her head pound, and she needs quiet if she’s going to figure out how to fix this without flipping her shit and just roaring at everybody to get the fuck out of her house.
“Oh, come on!” Derek calls after her, following in her wake. “Don’t be like that! Honestly, this is for your sake, not mine. You’re way too tense, you know. I thought it would be a good way to get you to relax and loosen up a little.”
Laura scoffs. “Well, it’s the thought that counts.”
The door to her bedroom is open. She never leaves her bedroom door open, because she’s got two nosy-as-fuck younger siblings and she learned that lesson years ago. Laura barges inside to see that her bed looks untouched, thank god, but her closet is open and the drawers of her bureau are hanging out precariously. One whole drawer is empty.
“Okay, where are all my sweaters?” she demands, shoving the drawer back into its place and turning an accusatory eye on her brother.
Derek’s smug nonchalance gives way to chagrin for the first time. He scratches the back of his neck and says, “There may have been some spillage… They were looking for the linen closet, but this was the first door they tried, and, well…” He shrugs. “You may be missing a few socks too.”
“Oh,” Laura says, dangerously calm. “Oh, you’ve started stealing my socks now?”
Before Derek can defend himself, a laughing guy in a basketball jersey stumbles into the room, some stupid joke already half out of his mouth.
Laura doesn’t let him finish it. She snaps, “How did you get in here?”
He flees. Derek watches him go with some trepidation. Like the realization that he’s made a number of mistakes is just starting to dawn on him. Laura lets him sweat—a trick she learned from their mom—until he finally throws his head back with a groan.
“At the risk of getting myself in even more trouble—”
“For starters,” Laura breaks in sweetly, “that’s impossible.”
Derek gives her a dirty look but doesn’t dispute it. “I was only trying to have some fun, anyway,” he grumbles. “Everybody at school thinks we’re weird, you know that? I just wanted them to…”
To think he was cool. Laura wishes she didn’t understand the impulse, but she does know what everyone thinks of them. Relating to humans was always a little tricky for werewolves, especially born werewolves. The disconnect was made worse by the fact that they were homeschooled until ninth grade. Everybody else had already spent years together, making friendships and forming cliques, and the weird shut-in newbies who lived in the woods were nobody’s first choice for socialization in the lunchroom.
But that doesn’t excuse this. When Laura’s stern expression doesn’t falter, Derek sighs.
“Whatever,” he says. “Just, don’t go all alpha on them, okay? Let me talk to them.”
Laura lets out a put-upon sigh of her own. She plucks the red solo cup out of Derek’s hand, sniffs the contents—primarily tequila—and makes a face.
“Yeah, well, if you weren’t so ‘drunk’, maybe I would.”
She ignores Derek’s spluttered protest and sweeps past him. She steals the cups of every person she passes on the way to the living-room-turned-dance-floor, helpfully informing each of them where the door is in the process. She does manage not to roar, but she definitely yells. Beta though she may still be, it’s plenty “alpha” enough to have the partygoers running for the exit and the house is emptied out in five minutes flat. She dusts her hands off with great satisfaction and turns to find Derek, scowling fiercely, in the doorway.
“You’re gonna make me clean everything up by myself,” he says. “Aren’t you?”
Laura doesn’t even justify that with a response. She just raises an eyebrow and looks pointedly around the room, which is nothing short of trashed.
“That’s not even fair!”
“That’s not even fair,” Laura parrots back at him, high-pitched and mocking because, despite being the far more mature of the two, she’s still only seventeen and she deserves to be a childish little shit sometimes too. After the night this turned out to be, she’s earned that.
“I’ll just wait until Cora gets back from her friend’s tomorrow,” Derek tells her. “If I promise to make her her favorite cookies, she’ll totally do it for me.”
Laura snorted. “Well, the probability of that is zero, but you go ahead.”
She pats him on the shoulder as she passes him, fully determined to take a nice bath, read a book, and go the fuck to sleep. The house may be a disaster zone, but that’s not her problem, and if the house is still a disaster zone when their parents get home because her brother is too much of a brat to clean up his own messes, then she’ll be happy to sit back and watch the fireworks that ensue.
By the time she reaches the upstairs bathroom, though, there’s the rustling of a garbage bag and the squeaky crunch of plastic cups being smashed into it. Derek curses quietly to himself. Then, loud enough for Laura to hear clearly from upstairs, he calls out, “I hate you, you know that?”
Sniggering, Laura sings-songs “love you!” back at him and closes the bathroom door behind her. All little-brother brattiness and irresponsibility aside, she’s willing to bet the house will be spotless by the time she’s out. She might even get her socks back.