The More Things Change

by Emily Holloway

  "Look, Jackie," Nick says, "I know that you think you're doing good work. But . . ."

  His voice trails off. Jackie gives him a minute, curious about what he might say, then prompts, "But what?"

  "Nothing. Never mind." Nick gives his head a decisive shake. "Let's get you home and see about a new ice pack."

  *~*~*

  "What do you mean, she shot you?" Maya demands, after hearing the first tenth of the story Gabby is trying to tell over the fire.

  "Maya, she had to," Gabby says, somewhat impatiently. "If she hadn't, her partner would have, and he would have aimed a lot higher. I'm fine."

  Maya's scowl deepens. She trusts Jackie—God knows why, but she does—but she doesn't like the idea of her baby sister being in trouble. "How did you even get spotted? We all had the patrol schedule. You did have the patrol schedule, didn't you?"

  "I memorized it like everybody else," Gabby says, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "I lost track of time. There was some good stuff in that dumpster. I screwed up, okay? It happens."

  It isn't an answer that Maya likes, even though it's a completely reasonable one. It isn't the first time one of them had gotten hurt, and it won't be the last. But Gabby doesn't understand how it feels to be the alpha, to be responsible for everyone. Losing their mother was hard on both of them, but Gabby had recovered in a way that Maya never had.

  None of the others know what it's like to be huddled up at underneath someone's porch and suddenly feel that surge of alpha power and know that your mother is dead. They hadn't found Carmen's body until three days later, but they knew that she had been killed. They didn't even know for sure what had happened, although it was obvious that one of the patrols had somehow captured her. They had tortured her for information on the whereabouts of the rest of the pack, but Carmen had died without saying a word.

  They had eventually heard through the grapevine that Leo Donovan took credit for the kill, which didn't surprise them. Leo might not have been the best soldier in the militia, but he was the most dedicated and the most vicious. He had led the team that had killed Ryan's father and brother along with Maya's two younger sisters. Maya had had a newspaper clipping about that with his picture in it for a while, and she had studied it at night, wondering how it was possible to hate somebody she had never met so much that it set her nerves on fire.

  Maya had struggled after her mother's death. She didn't want the alpha power, but was desperately afraid that she wouldn't be able to protect Gabby without it. She had recurring nightmares of waking up without it, of finding her sister's body. That was why part of why she had built the pack. That way, there would be other people who could help her look after Gabby. She had figured teenagers were a good idea. But she hadn't foreseen all the extra worry that having younger people dependent on her would bring. Every time one of them got hurt, it felt like her fault. Every time the pack split up, it felt like it was her fault for not being able to keep them together. One of these days, two or three of them would follow Jared and they'd all get killed and that would be her fault too.

  "You can't blame everything on yourself," Gabby says, when she sees the way Maya is brooding. They had talked about this before. Survivor's guilt, Ryan calls it. But Maya can't help it. She's always looking back, thinking of ways things could have been different.

  If Jackie is a double agent, she's had plenty of opportunities to betray them. But Maya reminds herself for the millionth time that trusting Jackie to warn them about raids can't be their entire strategy. They have to stay on alert. It never lets up. Not for a second. And she's tired. She's always tired these days.

  "What are you thinking?" Gabby asks.

  "Just…wondering how much we can trust Jackie," Maya admits. "I mean. She's a Donovan. Ryan trusted Nick, and look where that got us."

  "That is a really bad comparison," Gabby says.

  She's right, and Maya knows it. She had asked Ryan once about his relationship with Nick, shortly after Carmen's death. Ryan didn't really like to talk about it. In fact, after his father had been killed along with his brother, he rarely even mentioned Nick. But he answered readily enough, that they'd had an on-again, off-again, never serious or emotional, relationship.

  "There was something magnetic about it," Ryan said, during one of those rare, brief moments where he opened up and let Maya see him. "We both knew it was a bad idea. That was part of the fun. The forbidden fruit. I guess I didn't realize up until the end how strongly I actually felt, and how much it disappointed me that he had never felt the same way."

  And now there's Jackie. Strong, capable, self-assured Jackie Donovan. She's everything that Maya isn't, and everything Maya wishes she could be but still such an enigma. How had someone raised by Nick Donovan wound up like that?

  "Besides, Jackie isn't technically a Donovan," Gabby says.

  Maya scowls again. "I know that."

  Everyone knows that. Even without Ryan's inside information—the fact that Nick had told him about Jackie's adoption—her dark skin and hair made it blatantly obvious. Besides that, the murder of the Jackson family was one of the first incidents that had touched off the war between the supernatural and the mundane. Murdered in their home by a werewolf, their daughter clutching their bodies and crying. Someone had snapped a photo of Jackie being carried out of the house by Leo Donovan, her clothes soaked with blood. It had been on the cover of TIME magazine, for God's sake. Maya's not about to forget that any time soon.

  The crime had never been solved. People had demanded accountability, answers from the alphas in the area. It had led to werewolves being murdered while trying to surrender to the police, to lynch mobs and literal witch hunts. The tension had been building for a while, and the Jackson murders had been a spark tossed onto a patch of gasoline. The military had been called in to 'settle things down,' Leo and his troops had killed dozens of innocent people, and the supernatural world retaliated. Everything had spiraled out of control.

  Maya doesn't know why Jackie helps them after her parents were killed by a werewolf. She doesn't know how much of what happened Jackie is even aware of. She was nine years old at the time. Nick and Helen had taken her in and apparently raised her like their own.

  Jackie's motives are a total mystery to Maya, so that's what she tells Gabby over breakfast.

  Gabby looks unimpressed. "You could do something revolutionary like ask."

  "It's not my business."

  "If we're all depending on her, then yeah, it kind of is," Gabby says. "Use your words. Come on, big sis. I know you've got it in you."

  "Smartass." Maya gets up and starts cleaning up the remains of their meager spread before anyone can smell the food and demand a share. "Pay more attention to the patrol schedule next time."

  "Ma'm, yes, ma'm," Gabby replies.

  Chapter Three

  "Oh my God, Jackie, are you okay?" Valerie asks, abandoning her math homework as her sister comes in through the door with the mostly-melted icepack still held against her bruised face.

  "I've had better days," Jackie says as Nick steers her into a chair. "If Mark Dalton ever asks you out, you're now contractually obligated to say no. Dumbass almost got me killed."

  "Mark's a creep anyway," Valerie says. "Seriously, how hard is it to understand that I already have a boyfriend?"

  Nick watches the two of them as he pulls the ice pack away to get a better look at the damage. He heads into the kitchen and wraps a towel around some ice from the freezer, handing it to Jackie as Valerie asks, "What happened?"

  "I took down a wolf, and Mr. Trigger Happy went to subdue her without his stun gun at the ready," Jackie says. "She kicked the shit out of both of us."

  Nick seethes silently at this reminder of why his daughter is injured. He knows better than to think nobody ever makes mistakes in the field. Mark's error was understandable. He was a rookie. He had never actually faced a werewolf before, had no real comprehension of how dangerous they were. Mark had figured that after receiving half a dozen bullets
to the back, she'd be down for the count.

  Jackie's mistake of not firing once the werewolf had started to move was equally understandable. An adult might be able to make that split second call of risking a comrade's life by firing in a close combat situation. It wasn't the sort of choice that a teenager should ever be forced to make.

  Whenever he brought that up to Mitchell, his father just said, "That's the world we live in now, son," like that made it okay.

  Nick knew that Jackie was being punished because it was a way for Mitchell to keep Nick in line. A way to demonstrate how flawed he thought Nick's choices were. Watching his daughter suffer for things that weren't her fault made Nick burn with the injustice of it all.

  Sitting there in the kitchen, watching Valerie gnaw anxiously at her lower lip as she examines her sister's injuries, he decides he's going to put a stop to it. He claps Jackie on the shoulder and tells her to take it easy for the rest of the day, and then heads back to the militia's HQ in what used to be a community center. But he doesn't go talk to Mitchell. That's always pointless. He hasn't had a civil conversation with his father since he was knee high.

  Leo is there, prepping his things for their next supply run. "Hey, big bro," he says as Nick walks in. Leo is always glad to see him, never treats him like Mitchell does. Nick has no delusions about where Leo's loyalties lie, but if he can help Nick without pissing off their father, he usually will. "What's up?"

  "Heard about what happened on patrol today?"

  "Yeah," Leo says, reassembling his gun with lightning accuracy. "Dalton's going to be laid up for a while."

  "I don't care about Dalton," Nick says. "I care about why Dad was treating Jackie like a criminal."

  Leo lays his gun across his lap and gives Nick a considering look. "Is your persecution complex rearing its ugly head again, Nick?"

  Nick glowers at his younger brother. "Dad never wanted me to adopt Jackie and you know it. He's treated Jackie like dirt ever since they met. And that's nothing to say of what happened after…" He closes his mouth, because bringing up what happened to the Callaghans is a pretty good way to get Leo to start rolling his eyes and disagreeing with everything Nick says on general principle. Besides, he doesn't want to talk about that with his brother. He can't prove that Leo had killed Sam Callaghan and his children in cold blood or that he had purposefully escalated the situation so the supernatural world had no choice but to strike back. And he prefers to stay on Leo's good side because otherwise he doesn't have Leo to mediate between him and Mitchell. "My point is, he was way out of line today. What's going on?"

  "It's not what you think," Leo says. He sets his gun down and stands up, going over to the door and closing it. "Dad thinks we have a mole."

  "In the militia?" Nick asks.

  Leo nods. "We've been getting more misses than hits on our patrols for the last few months. And our raids have been even worse. We're only finding people where we've been tipped off that they'll be in a certain location about twenty percent of the time now. Someone is giving the rats in the sewers fair warning. And it has to be someone in the militia because nobody else has access to that kind of information."

  "And Dad thinks that it's Jackie?" Nick asks, feeling skeptical. "Jackie hates werewolves and everything they stand for." Mitchell had certainly made sure of that. His father had always made a big deal out of the murder of Jackie's parents, of what brutal monsters the werewolves could be. Nick wishes he hadn't stood back and let it happen, but he can't do anything about it now.

  "No," Leo says, scoffing. "Dad thinks it's you."

  "Jesus Christ." Nick rubs both hands over his head. "And what will interrogating my daughter accomplish?"

  Leo shrugs. "Soften her up, make her feel like she's in trouble. She might have agreed to spy on you, report back to Dad. Anyway, I told him it was stupid. The only thing Jackie hates more than werewolves is our daddy dearest, courtesy of his tender treatment."

  "Did you tell him that it was stupid to think that I was a mole?" Nick asks.

  "Yeah, I told him that too," Leo says. "You had your chance to pick sides five years ago. What the hell would you be doing trying to change that now?"

  Nick doesn't reply. What can he say to that? Leo is right. He could have helped Ryan's family and he hadn't. He'd had good reasons, but he still hadn't, and now they were dead. He hasn't seen Ryan in years, and he supposes that Ryan probably hates him. It isn't the sort of thing he can fix.

  "Look, Jackie will be out for a week or so anyway," Leo says. "Dad will cool down."

  "If I have my way, Jackie won't be coming back at all," Nick says.

  "Good luck with that." Leo gives a snort of laughter. "That kid takes after you in all the wrong ways. She's stubborn as hell, thinks she knows better than anyone else, and is basically a fountain of misplaced rage."

  "Yeah." But Nick is thinking about it now. If he can get Jackie away from Mitchell and Leo for a little while, even if it's just a few weeks, maybe he can get through to her. The problem is that what happened to her parents will always hang over all their heads. Jackie is convinced that all werewolves are monsters because monsters killed her parents. "Hey, Leo," he says. "You ever have any ideas about who killed Jackie's parents?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "I don't know. Maybe it'll give Jackie something to do, something to focus on. You were the one who found them."

  "If I knew anything, I would have said something a long time ago. You know, when it mattered. Whoever it was, they're probably dead by now anyway. Hold this."

  Nick lets him dump a bunch of supplies into his arms while he pulls out a box for them. "Yeah, you're probably right," he says. If Leo doesn't know, he knows somebody else who might. Somebody who always knew about what was happening in Cold Creek. 'Suspicious knowledge,' he had called it once, and Ryan had laughed and agreed.

  Not that Ryan has any reason to talk to him. But he won't know until he tries. And it's for Jackie, for his daughter. He walks out of Leo's office pretending that that's the only reason he's suddenly excited about the idea of seeing Ryan Callaghan again.

  *~*~*

  Despite the bars on her windows, sneaking out of the house is easy for Jackie. Her parents both go to bed early. She waits until ten thirty or so and then leaves through the front. She stays in her pajamas when leaving her room, so if they happen to be up, she just says she was going to look for a snack. She keeps a spare set of fatigues in an out of the way spot by the fence.

  Once she's changed, she heads for the supply warehouse. There's only so much she can steal at a single time, and she keeps meticulous records so she won't be caught. The first time she had brought supplies to the Callaghans, Mitchell had figured out it was her in two days. Fortunately, they hadn't figured out exactly whom she had brought the supplies to. She claimed that it was to an old woman who had helped her get away from the Cervantes pack, and they hadn't questioned.

  Ever since Jackie had joined the militia, she had studied it like it was a living thing, learned its ins and outs. She had learned who was responsible for what, who was good at their job and who was sloppy, who took it seriously and who didn't. She had memorized requisitions, learned to forge signatures and had drawn maps of the different buildings to keep track of where everything was stored.

  All the records she kept were encoded with a cipher, the kind that couldn't be broken without the key. The key she used was obvious, but she doubted that anyone in the Donovan family knew how to spell her full name, her real name. God knows they had never attempted to use it. They had called her Jackie, a shortened version of her last name, for as long as she could remember.

  The warehouse itself doesn't have a guard. Theft inside the complex has never been a problem. There's a lock, but Jackie got a copy of the key a long time ago. She opens it up, goes inside, and turns on her flashlight. Then she gets her bag and starts filling it up.

  There's only so much she can carry, but since it would be a bad idea to steal in bulk, it doesn't really matter. S
he runs down the current inventory list and makes a plan. A bag of oranges. A collection of canned vegetables. Some canned tuna—that's a special treat. That's about all the heavy stuff she can carry. She throws in a couple boxes of tampons and half a dozen bars of soap. Hefts the bag, testing it. Sets it down, adds some pasta, some dried beans, and a small bottle of kerosene. Then she goes over to the logbook and adds the supplies she removed, signing off with the name of one of the sergeants. She rotates, to make sure nobody gets suspicious.

  She's long ago perfected the timing of getting over the fence, between the guard patrols and the floodlights. From there it takes ten minutes to jog over to Cedric Solomon's office. He's one of the few witches who still lives in the human community rather than going underground, and he gets away with it by doing healing charms and potions for free. He isn't exactly a doctor, but he's as close to one as the town has. He keeps tabs on almost everyone, so it only takes Jackie a minute to get the current layout of the city, where everyone is hiding. Then she heads for the warehouse district, where the Callaghan pack is holed up. She stops outside and takes a deep breath. She's not exactly sure of what her reception will be, after what happened with Gabby.

  As soon as she pokes her head in, several voices bombard her. "Hey, you're back!" "Hey Jackie!" "Look who's back, everybody!" She enters the room the rest of the way, flushing slightly pink as Jared pounds on her back and Siobhan smacks a kiss onto her cheek. She can't help the smile that's starting on her face. She belongs here. Not at the compound with the Donovans.

  She knows that they're her family, and she's grateful that they took her in, but she's never belonged there. There are a hundred little reasons why that maybe only she can see, along with a dozen big ones that everyone else can. It's in her dark skin and her strange name that her family was too embarrassed to call her. It's in the way Helen always treats her second best and never asks for her opinion. It's in the way Nick is the opposite, bending over backwards to make Jackie feel welcome. It's in the way Valerie sometimes looks at her quizzically like she just doesn't understand what planet she's from.