Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,43
it took some effort to get him to back off. He was still bristling, his lips twitching with barely suppressed snarls, when he finally obeyed my command to move aside and sit. Maybe I’d let him bark for too long and now he was having trouble reining it all in. He’d never bitten anyone before—except in training, when he was supposed to—but something about the way he looked now made me uneasy. I decided I’d rather be safe than sorry, so I grabbed his collar and led him into my dad’s office at the top of the stairs and closed the door before finally letting Piper in.
The girl I let in my front door barely looked like the Piper I remembered. She’d cut her beautiful golden-red hair until it was so short on the sides you could see her scalp, and she’d dyed it white-blond. The longer section on the top was styled into a severe, punky-looking ridge that was kind of like a sideways-leaning Mohawk.
Piper grinned at my look of slack-jawed amazement, turning to give me a 360-degree view. “What do you think?” she asked when she faced front again.
“Um…” I struggled to find something suitably noncommittal to say, because there was no point in telling her the truth, which was that I thought it looked awful. “It’s different,” I finally said.
Piper laughed. “In other words, you hate it.”
“I didn’t say that!”
She snorted. “You didn’t have to. You have the worst poker face I’ve ever seen.”
Polite instinct told me to lie a little more convincingly, but I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge. The stark white color and the severe angles of her new haircut somehow leeched all the warmth and friendliness from her face, made her look unapproachable, even cold, despite her usual winning smile. The look set me completely off balance. There was no way I could convince her I actually liked it.
“What do your parents think?” I asked instead, but I already knew the answer.
Piper’s smile turned into a self-satisfied smirk. “They loathe it, of course. My mom said I should wear a wig until it grows back. But hey, one of my cousins is getting married next weekend, and I bet my mom will let me out of going. She wouldn’t want her snobby friends to see me with my hair looking like this. So it’s a total win.”
I wondered what Luke thought of all this, but I refrained from asking. “Did you just stop by to show me your hair?”
“Nope. Get your coat. I want to do some shopping. I need to get some clothes that go with my new look, and shopping is no fun alone.”
I glanced at my watch and saw that it was three thirty. It would be getting dark in a little more than an hour, and that would leave precious little time for shopping. “Maybe some other time,” I told her. “It’s kinda late, and I don’t want to be out after dark.”
Piper made a dismissive noise. “You’re not buying into all that bullshit on the news, are you?”
I shrugged, feeling not a bit tempted to tell her about my own encounters with the weird. “I believe we’re in the middle of a crime spree and that the wackos are coming out in force at night. Maybe we can go tomorrow.”
“We’re going now,” Piper said firmly. “I have my car, and I’ll make sure you’re back home safe and sound by dark.”
“That’s only an hour from now,” I pointed out, not sure she had any idea what time it was.
“So it’ll be a short shopping trip.”
“You don’t do short, remember?”
Her grin was still impish, even with the new crazy hair. “So don’t count on me to keep track of time. You set an alarm on your phone, and when you have to go, you just say so.”
I hesitated. It would certainly be more fun to go out with Piper than to sit around the house by myself for the rest of the day. But when had Piper ever managed to get me home by whatever deadline I or my father had set?
“Come on, Becks,” Piper wheedled. “I know I have a bad track record, but you have to admit, it’s not all my fault. You never speak up until it’s already too late. As long as you’re paying attention to the time, everything will be fine. Please?”
The fact was that getting out of the house for a while was a temptation too great to resist, and Piper’s