by Lisa Ladew
It was a snarling wolf with honey-colored eyes.
Ella stared at the wolf, loving everything about it, even as she felt a worm of worry or fear thread through her. She ignored it and felt in her pockets for her phone. Had she left it downstairs? No, no. She shook her head again, chastising herself for forgetting that she’d just received a text from Accalia. She shouldn’t forget something like that. She shook her head again. No, it was Shay, she’d gotten the text from. She tried to concentrate, hating the way her mind was slipping, like she was eighty years old instead of twenty-five.
She found the phone and drew it out, wanting to take a picture of the wolf so she could send it to Accalia who would, no doubt, appreciate it as much as she did.
She held her hand out below the slowly-twirling pendant to catch it, then brought it towards her face, as her thumb lovingly caressed the detail of the wolf’s body.
The wolf’s eyes glowed and the room flooded in bright light, making Ella squint against the glare.
The glare that felt achingly familiar.
Ella gasped and dropped the pendant, her eyes tracking it as she immediately regretted the act. What if the pendant were broken?
But the floor beneath her was gone, replaced by green grass. She looked at her feet, surprised to see they were too small and clad in a pair of pink and white sneakers, one of them streaked with grains of golden sand.
A boy laughed and she looked up, amazed to find herself in a playground, with black swings to her left, a sandbox to her right, a large red building blocking most of her view of the road, and four sneering boys surrounding her. Ella pinched her leg hard, dismayed to discover that the leg pinch happened in what could only be some sort of a hallucination.
Except it had actually happened.
“I said give me your bag,” the largest one who stood right in front of her snarled. She remembered his name, it was Chad. He was well-known in the school as a bully and a future criminal.
“No,” she spat out at him, unable to help doing exactly what she had done fifteen years before. Her head swiveled, looking for her mother, but her mother had forgotten to pick her up again, drunk and passed out on the couch maybe, and all the teachers had gone home. She was on her own.
“I love it when they fight,” Chad said to the boy next to him and they both laughed. Ella heard something evil in that laugh, something that she didn’t quite understand, but something she instinctively knew was very dangerous to her. These boys were older than her by several years. Thirteen, or fourteen, maybe.
“She needs a lesson,” a sly but somehow awful voice said, and Ella’s head whipped to the left. Another boy was sitting on a swing, but he hadn’t been there a second ago. She barely had time to wonder who he was when he stood up and approached Chad. He was big, and even older than these boys, with long dark hair and eye-arresting eyebrows. He wore faded blue jeans and a sweatshirt that said Wolves Drool with a cartoon rendition of a wolf on its back, it’s tongue hanging out and its legs in the air. He held a cigar between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. A puff of wind brought the scent to her. Sweeter than a cigarette could ever dream of being.
Before Ella could work out what any of it meant, her attention was forced back to Chad, who backed up and curled his hands into fists, his face mistrustful. “We weren’t doing nothing,” he spit at the new boy.
“Indeed,” the boy said, and Ella forced down the gorge that rose in her throat at the sound of his voice. Something about it was just so … wrong. He must not attend her school. She knew she would remember that voice. The way it crawled through the air and fastened itself to her like ticks in the forest.
She crouched slightly and threw a glance behind her. She was fast. If she could slip between two of the boys, maybe she could escape. Her house was more than three miles away, but she could walk it, she had many times before. A pang of sadness that her mother wouldn’t let her ride the bus hit her, but she ignored it. Not the time.
Chad looked like he might break and run. Maybe this would all be over before it started. Ella felt a fierce hope stir in her chest.
But no, the boy with the wolf shirt held up his hands, the cigar leaving a trail of wispy smoke. “I mean it. I know you aren’t doing anything wrong. I thought you might need help.” Ella felt like falling to the ground at the voice. Giving up. Permanently. The boy’s eyes met hers and she saw them flash yellow, but only for an instant.
Chad snorted, but relaxed. “I don’t need help.”
The boy backed up and dropped into a swing. “Ok, I’ll just watch then,” he said, with a sick smile, as his eyes found Ella’s. As the connection was made she felt a strange stirring in her body, like a car engine turning over. It was pleasant and terrifying at the same time. It made her feel powerful and very strange. But it didn’t erase the danger of the situation.
Ella hitched her bag up on her shoulders and backed up as Chad signaled to his crew and the boys began to close in on her. She could hand over her backpack, there was nothing in there but books and assignments and maybe some loose change left over from lunch, but she knew the bag wasn’t really what these boys wanted. They wanted something … more than that from her. Maybe just to make her cry. But maybe not.
Without warning, the boy behind her lunged and caught her by the hair. She made a high keening sound and tried to pull away as the other boys laughed. Chad pushed up against her and looked straight in her eyes, his face only inches from hers. This was it. She knew she was going to get beat up or something worse.
Movement to her left made her shoot her gaze that way. The boy from the swings was up, his grin feral and dangerous, his cigar pitched into the sand. He reached Chad and pushed him out of the way, knocking him backwards easily. But his eyes were on Ella. His attention was only for her.
She shrunk backwards, against the boy who had ahold of her from behind, whimpering. She didn’t want to be touched by the boy with the horrid voice. His hand raised, heading for her, the fingers mere inches from her midriff.
He covered the distance in an instant and she felt tears drip down her face. It was going to be so bad…
The moment he touched her that engine inside her kicked over again, pushing a foreign power outwards in a pulse, and a scream erupted from deep inside her. The face of the boy contorted in surprise, and then, not fear, but utter and absolute disbelief, before he was catapulted twenty feet in the air, like he’d been pulled backwards by a rope tied around his middle, the other end fastened to an airplane.
She watched his face, even as she screamed, even as she didn’t believe it either. He landed hard, staring at her with a malevolence she’d never experienced, then winked out of existence, disappearing before her eyes, as if he had never been.
Ella’s mouth dropped closed, cutting off her scream. She put a hand to the back of her head, noting the throbbing there. The boy who had ahold of her hair had disappeared. She turned in a circle. The two boys who had been at her sides were backing away slowly, like she was a bomb. She flipped back around to face front and saw Chad had the same look in his eyes.
“She’s a …. a witch!” one of the boys yelled, and they were all up and running away in an instant.
The sound of the pendant hitting the floor as it fell jolted Ella back to her aunt’s attic. The necklace lay between her feet, the angel side of it facing up.
Ella hadn’t thought about that incident in years. That had been what had caused her mother to start homeschooling her, and although being home with her mother all day hadn’t been as bad as being in school, it had still been pretty bad. But she hadn’t been able to go back. Not after what had happened to the boy who had his fingers twisted in her hair.
Her eyes traced the contours of the golden jewelry as her mind tried to make sense of what had just happened. It had been too detailed to be a memory—it had been like she was there. She had even felt the pain in her head.
Ella’s hand drifted to the back of her head as she noted with something like terror t
hat she still had a faint throb there. She really was going crazy. She backed away from the pendant, clear across the room to where a broom and dustpan stood. She picked them up and walked back to the pendant, her eyes glued to it, like it might animate and start talking to her. She had no idea what had happened, but she did know she wasn’t touching that thing again.
She bent and pushed the pendant into the dustpan with the broom, turning it over as she did so. The wolf snarled at her, making her hesitate. She loved everything about it. The wildness. The duality. But no. She forced herself to dump it into the box. Something was wrong with that thing. And she never wanted to replay that incident again. The nightmares had lasted for months after it had actually happened. Years, maybe.
Ella closed the box and sealed it with tape. Even if most of the jewelry was worth nothing, that pendant had to be worth a few dollars at least. She pushed the box towards the stairs, then tackled the rest of the attic, thankful to lose her thoughts in her work.
Chapter 3
Trevor pushed his red Silverado work truck to its limit, not wanting to be late. Wade abhorred lateness, and since he was not only one of the deputy chiefs of their all-wolf-shifter police department, but also the Citlali for the entire region, he had a lot of authority. Plus Trevor respected the hell out of him.
Citlali were the spiritual and judicial leaders of the shiften, given the position at birth because of their star-shaped renqua, a variably-shaped mark on their right shoulder that all proper shiften had. Citlali earned greater power with their first prophecy, and as far as Trevor knew, none had ever been fired or found wrong.
Trent, sitting on his haunches in the passenger seat with his nose out the window, and Troy, lying in the back, sprawled in a wolf’s curious resting pose, both whined at the same time. Trevor looked out his side window, knowing what he would see.
The green and white sign that read ‘Welcome to Serenity’ with the large stone statue of a bear marking it.
Trevor locked eyes with the bear as he always did, feeling the cool autumn air hit him in the face. He locked eyes with the wolf and the mountain lion on the other roads into Serenity when he passed their statues, too. He told himself it was the respect he paid to the guardians of the little town that had become his home, but in reality, the statues creeped him out, and his brothers, too.
He shushed them and put a comforting hand on Trent’s flank. At one hundred and seventy-five pounds, Trent was the smaller of the two wolfen, and the more sensitive.
Trevor cranked his neck out the window and looked up, way up to the water tower behind the sign, seeing graffiti there. He frowned and craned his neck to read it.
They walk among us. Werewolves are real!
Trevor’s frown deepened. Someone was trying to spread rumors in Serenity? And where the hell had the felen who was supposed to be guarding the water tower been when that graffiti had been placed?
Fifteen minutes later, Trevor pulled into the police department parking lot and got out with the wolves— dogs, his mind corrected. He had to think of them as dogs when they were at the station. He couldn’t afford to slip up and say wolf or even wolfen to a member of the public. The Czechoslovakian Wolfdog cover story could only hold the K9 unit for so long if some human heard a cop refer to them as actual wolves.
Trevor lifted his nose, sorting the different wolven scents out of the air. Mac’s scent lingered, but was already starting to drift. He’d gone inside only a minute or two ago. Trevor walked faster, then started to jog to keep up with his brothers.
They strode in the back door and ran into Mac almost immediately, fully healed, and ready to continue their battle. Trevor met him head on, knowing he’d calm down eventually if Trevor let him get it all out.
“Finally.” Macalister Niles’ eyes were cold and his sneer showed his long canine teeth. “You know if you got laid every once in a while, you wouldn’t need to hide out in the woods so often.”
Trevor kept his expression neutral, with effort. “Getting laid doesn’t protect you from going moonstruck.” He dropped a hand to Troy’s head to try to quell the growl that was coalescing in his throat.
Mac snorted. “Moonstruck. Yeah, that’s why you were out there.” He turned on his heel and strode away. Trevor heard him mutter, “Nice try,” under his breath.
Trevor and Troy watched Mac go, while Trent sat down on his haunches in the hallway, seemingly bored with the situation. Let me bite his ass, Trevor caught from Troy. If I take a big enough hunk out of it, maybe we’ll be able to see his personality.
Trevor nodded hi to a patrol officer passing them in the hallway, then rubbed the scruff growing on his chin and rolled his eyes heavenward. “We’ve already discussed this. Now both of you, head to the K9 center. See what’s been going on overnight. I’ll come get you when my meeting is over.” He watched long enough to make sure they obeyed him, then jogged down the other hall after Mac, catching up to him just before he entered the deputy chief’s office.
It was empty. Wade would be waiting for them in the underground meeting room. With a frown on his face.
Mac passed Wade’s cluttered desk, the flag in the corner, the plaques on the wall, then brushed aside the poncho hanging on a hook on the wall and leaned his head forward to stare directly at what looked like a slight imperfection in the paint there.
Trevor tensed like he always did when someone used the retinal scanner, but he jogged inside to be right behind Mac, that way the door that would open in the wall wouldn’t have a chance to close before he got through it, making him have to shove his eye right up close to the damn thing. He hated looking in it. It creeped him out in the same way the statues did.
Mac’s eyes passed muster and the wall slid open, letting them into the dark staircase that would lead them to the underground tunnels and meeting and storage rooms. They descended, the door closing behind them. The passage was narrow, too dark for an ordinary pair of eyes, but not theirs. They went down the corridor and walked silently through the maze of tunnels, Trevor slightly behind Mac, neither speaking a word, finding the correct door by scent.
Mac turned the knob. The door opened up into a large room, at least the size of a high school gymnasium, their footfalls echoing strangely. Mac headed straight for the monster conference table that was easily as big as a back yard, but Trevor wound his way along the inner wall, unable to help staring at the masses of news stories tacked up there. Shiften were forbidden from recording their history any way other than orally, spoken from generation to generation, but that didn’t stop them from collecting any human written history that pertained to the core purpose of the shiften race.
The humans wrote off the actions of the shiften’s sworn enemy as accident, coincidence, terrorists, or just evil conduct of a select few, but the shiften knew differently.
Trevor’s gaze ran over the headlines, even as he curled his fingers into his palms to avoid his impulse to touch anything. The cool air and lack of light in the tunnels preserved the newspapers and magazines, but still thousands of them were yellowing and cracking with age.
FIRE KILLS 12
FREAK EXPLOSION LEVELS CITY BLOCK, 20 MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD
EARTHQUAKE! SAN FRANCISCO IS OBLITERATED. 300,000 ARE HOMELESS
EVERY PERSON IN SMALL TOWN DISAPPEARS: SUPPER STILL ON TABLE IN MOST RESIDENCES
NEW, PLAGUE-LIKE DISEASE EMERGING
SARS EPIDEMIC FEARED
SWINE FLU PANDEMIC SPREADING
CHOLERA OUTBREAK SPREADS FEAR
EXPLOSIVES FOUND IN TOY, PROMPTING MASSIVE RECALL
BATTERY PLANT EXPLODES, ENTIRE CITY EVACUATED
COUNTRY’S WATER FOUND TO CONTAIN HIGH LEVELS OF WOLF’S BANE AND CUMIN. OFFICIALS STUMPED
WORLDWIDE WATER SUPPLY FOUND TAINTED WITH XYLITOL, CUMIN, AND WOLF’S BANE. MILLIONS OF PETS DIE
TERRORISTS BLAMED FOR EXPLOSION THAT BROUGHT DOWN CHICAGO SKYSCRAPER
POISONED CITY: FLINT WATER CRISIS GROWS DEADLY
TWO PLANES COLLIDE IN MIDA
IR – WITNESSES REPORT BRIGHT FLASH IN THE SKY JUST BEFORE
Trevor let his eyes wander over the monstrous room. Every available surface was covered with these stories. He didn’t know who put them up. Whose vigil this was. He thought it was a fitting way to remember why they were all doing this job. The headlines in this room alone signified millions dead at the hand of their nemesis. All of whom would someday receive vengeance. He swore it. He would find a way to make it happen, no matter how much of a fraud he was. Determination and hard work could make up for personal failings.
The sight of the tragedies was enough to make his fists clench, enough to make a lump form in his throat even as his body became battle-ready.
Someone cleared their throat, drawing Trevor’s attention to the center of the room. He shook his muscles, rather in the manner that a dog shakes off water, trying to rid himself of the tension. There was nothing to fight there.
Deputy Chief Wade Lombard sat at the end of the conference table, his hands tucked under his chin as he perused some files, a police radio on near him with the volume low. He was, by appearances, a male close to sixty with silver hair, although Trevor knew he was much older. Bastard still had a mate, which would keep him young for a good two hundred years, unlike the rest of them. Trevor drew close to the table, but slowed before he got to it, sensing something off in Wade.
“Wade,” Mac drew close to the table and greeted him first. “I…”
Wade held up a hand. “Before either of you say anything, let me speak. You need to know we’ve got a transfer coming in from Scotland. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Scotland?” Trevor’s dark eyebrows furrowed. He knew nothing about wolfen in Scotland. Nothing about how they ran their enterprises. Nothing about their loyalties.
“He’s got some special abilities, and so he’ll be coming in to help the KSRT. You said you needed new bodies.”
“Wait, what? I’m the head of the KSRT. I should have been consulted about this.”
