Black Magic (Howl #4) Read Free Page A

except for the boxes that were piled high that he must have packed up the night before. “Leaving here is one of the hardest things I’ll ever have to do. I have roots here, you know?”
    “Well, you don’t know what’s going to happen to the house, do you? The last time I talked to your mom, she wasn’t sure if she was going to sell it yet or not,” Samara pointed out. “Maybe you can come back to live here eventually. There’s still time for you guys to decide.”
    Colby shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Even if my mom wants to keep it, I don’t think I could ever be okay with coming back here. It doesn’t feel like home to me anymore. It feels like all the time we spent here was just a lie. All those soccer games, math competitions, spelling bees . . . everything my dad supposedly missed because he was on business trips . . . it was probably all a lie. He was probably with them the whole time. His other family .” His tone turned bitter as he said the words.
    “Are you sure that’s the way it really happened?” Samara asked quietly. “He must not have been around all that much because Josh didn’t seem to have any idea that he was his father. If Jason knew when they were younger, Josh probably would have known, too. Plus, this is a small town. People talk. You would have found out the truth a lot sooner, I think.”
    Colby shrugged. “Maybe he was there watching them from afar, just to see what his other kids were doing. I don’t really want to know. But either way, it’s all I think about now. I’m going to question my whole childhood and even the past few years now that I know the truth. I don’t want to live in this house knowing that my father once lived here. I don’t even consider him a father now. He’s just Darren Jackson to me. A traitor.”
    Samara didn’t say anything; she wasn’t sure what there was to say. As much as she wanted to be able to relate to what Colby was going through, she couldn’t.
    “What’s even worse is that I think I knew, deep down, all this time,” Colby continued. “Have you ever felt like one of your own family members didn’t love you?”
    “I’m not sure,” Samara replied, hesitantly. Before Seth had saved Luke, she had thought that he didn’t care about her anymore, but this was probably different. Colby and his dad were supposed to be on the same side as one another; she and Seth didn’t have much of a choice but to hate each other . . . or to at least pretend they hated each other. She wasn’t actually sure how he felt about her.
    “I always knew that the way my father acted towards me wasn’t the way a dad would act towards their son if he really loved him,” Colby explained, running a hand over his longish curly blonde hair. “Even on the rare occasions when he was here for me, you could always tell that he didn’t want to be. It’s like his body would be there, but his mind would always be somewhere else.
    “I always tried to justify it by telling myself that’s who he was, that it was him and not me, but now I wonder if he just wasn’t mentally present because he was off somewhere else plotting for all of this to happen since we were kids. Maybe he knew all along that he wanted to be my enemy.”
    Samara gulped. “If he was that obsessed with this whole thing, don’t you think your mom would have gotten wind of it at some point?”
    “He did a damn good job of hiding his second family from us . . . and from his own pack, too,” Colby pointed out.
    “That reminds me. We’re having a meeting tonight with Darren’s pack to fill them in on everything that’s happened.”
    Colby’s face froze. “You didn’t tell them to come over to the new house, did you?”
    “No, of course not. I know you said your mom trusts all of them, but we don’t know how many of the others are in on this. I told them to meet us in the backyard for a bonfire, just so they wouldn’t want to come in the house. They might catch onto the fact that