“I’m sorry but…what does that have to do with your divorce, or my fits?”
She sits down on my couch and rubs her temples. “I’ll get you a mattress,” she says without looking at me.
“Tell me,” I say. “I deserve to know.”
“Your father and I disagreed on what to do. But in the end, this is a safer place for the girls. People from all over the world come here. Haven’t you noticed all the different nationalities? They come because this is a place that is safe and secluded for people like us. But we’re also very protective of this community from outsiders.”
“Like me,” I whisper.
“It was a decision handed down by the pack leader,” she says. “We have to obey the Alpha. It’s not a choice. We’re compelled.”
“What about Dad?”
She shakes her head. “He was like you.”
“Then how come Elidi isn’t?”
“The only way to guarantee a wolf is to start with two wolves,” she says. “We risked it. There was a fifty-fifty shot for each of you.”
“And you stayed when Zechariah made Dad leave?”
She doesn’t meet my eyes. “It was safest for my other daughters,” she says. “Someone had to think of them.”
“And you sent me away with Dad, just like that, because I wasn’t one of you.”
“Because it was safest for you,” she says. “Someone had to think of you, too.”
I try to find a reason to throw in her face, an option she could have chosen that was better than the one she did. I can’t articulate how angry I am at her decision. Seething, I search for a way out she could have taken, but I can’t see it right now. All I can see is that she sent me away, and that I’ll never be one of them, and it’s not because she’s trying to keep me out or I don’t worship Diana, the moon goddess they worship. It’s because I was born human, and they weren’t. There is literally nothing I can do to change that. I have never felt so infuriatingly helpless.
“I know you’re angry,” Mother says, standing and moving towards the door again. “I don’t expect you to understand the choices I’ve had to make. But I did what I thought was best for all my children. It was your father’s decision not to tell you about us. He thought it was better to let you have a normal life, and to tell you the fits were from a fall.”
I swallow past the feeling of betrayal. I want to remember Dad as kind and funny and brave for raising me on his own. But every time I find out some new way he deceived me, it becomes harder to continue idolizing him.
“But the real reason I have these episodes is because I’m some mutant half-breed, right? Because I’m supposed to turn into a wolf like you, but for whatever reason, Elidi got the gene and I didn’t.” My voice becomes bitter as I speak. “These spasms are my body trying to turn into a wolf, but it can’t, because I’m not a full-blooded werewolf. You took your fifty-fifty shot and got fifty-fifty results. So she gets to be one of you, and I get to me a freak who has weird seizures because I can’t change into a wolf.”
Mother sighs and closes her eyes for a long moment. When she opens them, her face is resigned. “Now you’re here and you know. We can’t change that. We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
With that, she opens the door and walks out. I pull my plate onto my lap. The rice and meat are cold, which means her food will have gone cold by now, too. I know it’s a small sacrifice on her part, to let her dinner get cold while answering my questions, but it feels like something incredible she did for me. While I eat the cold food, I wonder if she ever regretted her decision. If she loved my father. If it was hard for her to send me away. If once, she loved me, too.
11
I’m elbow deep in a sink full of hot water and soapy dishes when a knock sounds at the front door. I freeze. Without having been told, I know instinctually that I’m not supposed to let anyone in when my family is gone. But I hear the siren call, “El-lee ba-by…” And I want to open the door. I want to see him, though I know I shouldn’t. My skin sparkles at the memory of his hands on my hips.
For one marvelous second, I consider being my sister. If I opened the door like I owned the place, talked to him like a girl whose hips he wanted to touch, would he be convinced? Before I finish the fantasy, the door swings open and Harmon’s gorgeous face smiles in at me. The glacial blue of his eyes still startles me every time.
“Well, hello there,” he says. “I thought I heard someone home.”
“So you thought you’d just walk in?”
“Yeah…” He gives me an odd look, and it occurs to me that this might be completely normal and acceptable behavior here.
“No one’s here,” I say.
“Someone is.”
The way he says it makes me blush, so I turn back to the sink. “What do you want?”
“I brought you something”
My hands continue swirling the sponge around a plate while my mind races. I remember Mother’s words after he came by with the necklace before. And I don’t know how I feel about Dad anymore. Is it worth risking punishment for a necklace he gave me, when I don’t even know if he loved me more than my mother does?
“So give it to me,” I say, head bowed over the cleanest plate in the universe.
“I might.” He steps closer, until we’re standing hip to hip at the sink. I want to touch him so badly it hurts, find an excuse to lean the barest inch his way and let my elbow brush his. “Don’t get greedy,” he adds. For a second, I think he just read my mind. Are wolf people clairvoyant? Telepathic? Whatever it’s called.
I watch his hands sink slowly through the suds until it covers his honey-brown fingers, his strong wrists. I can’t breathe. I can’t swallow. I can’t move.
“What are you doing?” I ask quietly.
“What are you doing?”
“Dishes.”
“Me, too.”
The silence after stretches to eternity. Wild horses stampede in my chest.
This is all in your head, I tell myself. This is all in your head.
Because why would Harmon….?
“Don’t you want to see what I brought you?” he asks at last, handing me a wet mug.
“No,” I whisper before I can stop myself. I don’t want this moment to end, even though it’s nothing, just me and my sister’s friend doing dishes. But I take the mug and rinse it. He hands me a plate, then two spoons, and I rinse them, too. The spell is broken now. “Aren’t you afraid of being here with me?” I ask.
He laughs. “You think I’m afraid of you?”
“Everyone thinks I’m such a freak, right? Aren’t you afraid it will make you look bad? Isn’t the heir to the pack, or whatever you’re called, supposed to set an example?”
“You’re here,” he says. “And Elidi’s here. She’s the same old pain in the cajones she’s always been. So you must be okay.”
A flame of anger and shame darts thought me. I was thinking about tricking him. “What does that mean? You think I’d hurt my sister? Try to take her place?”
“There are plenty of people who want to hurt us,” he says, suddenly serious. “You don’t think you’re the first outsider who’s ever come around trying to figure us out, do you? There’s a reason we live out here. A reason only we live out here, and a reason people like us come here to be safe.”
“I didn’t ask to come here,” I say, tears suddenly prickling my eyes. “I never wanted this, and the second I’m eighteen, I’m out of here. So you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
His hands have gone still in the water. I take a shuddering breath to stop myself from crying in front of him. I can feel the heat of him racing up and down my arm. My little finger creeps toward his, searching for even this tiny form of rebellion, this secret connection. When our skin touches, a jolt rocks through me, but I don’t pull back. Neither does he. My breath catches, holds, as my finger climbs his, curls around it.
He shifts towards me, lifts those eerie eyes to mine. He wets his lips like he’s abo
ut to speak, but after a beat of silence, he pulls away quickly, withdrawing everything. Soapy water drips from his big hands onto the floor.
I can’t believe I just did that. I grab a dish towel and dry my hands to keep myself busy. I feel disconnected from my body, like this isn’t real. When I look up from the towel, Harmon thrusts his hands into his pockets, dragging out the chain with the brown and gold stone hanging from it. My hand finds the empty spot on my throat where it hung.
“Is this yours?” he demands.
“What if it is?”
“I found it in the woods,” he says. “I know it’s yours. I saw it fall when I knocked your mother off you.”
I try not to let the force of that blow show on my face. Until now, no one has spoken to me about that night. We’re supposed to pretend it never happened. And until now, it hadn’t mattered who attacked me. But now that I know, it does matter. I thought it was a random wolf. I’d assumed that Elidi had saved me, that she was protecting me the same way she did by lying and saying she was the one in the woods that night, that she hadn’t changed over like she was supposed to. That she was me.
But that’s so stupid, it doesn’t even make sense. She couldn’t have been the wolf who protected me, because they’d all know her wolf form. She pretended she stayed in human form. Harmon was the one who saved me from my mother’s snapping jaws. He was the one who faced off with the pack, trying to protect me. But why? For Elidi’s sake?
He steps closer, and I step back, pressing my back to the kitchen wall. Like his father, he’s a big, imposing guy. When he takes one more step forward, an invisible energy field surrounds him, pressing me to the wall though he hasn’t yet touched me. I reach for the necklace, my fingers shaking. But his fingers snap closed around it.
He leans closer, until our noses almost touch. I’m not sure if I’m scared, or excited, or both. “You’re not going anywhere,” he purrs. “You could have, if you’d done what Mommy told you. But you had to go exploring like a nosy little pussy cat. You know what kills the cat, don’t you?” He laughs so low in his throat I feel it more than hear it.
I hold my breath, hold myself motionless. As his words sink in, I shake my head slowly. I know too much. I’m stuck here. Forever.
That’s why my mother told me those things. Not because she’s finally trusting or accepting me. Because she’s teaching me how to survive here, as the only human. They are never going to let me leave now. I’ll always be the only real human, the freak, the prisoner in the attic. For my own good.
“What’s the matter, pussycat?” he whispers. “Cat got your tongue?”
“No,” I say faintly. “That can’t be true. I can’t stay here. I’m not one of you.” As I hear myself repeating the words my mother has used to hurt me so many times, I only dimly sense the irony. Because even as I understand her recent generosity with information, now I know that she was right. Even as I hate her for that, for being right all along, I hate myself worse. I should have listened to her from the start.
But I just had to run away, had to know the mystery. And now I’ll pay for it for the rest of my life.
“Don’t worry,” Harmon says, his mouth twisting into a smirk. “I’ll find a use for you.” He takes my hand and crushes the necklace into my palm, curling my fingers around the stone and squeezing my fist shut inside his big, big hand. A ball of ice is freezing inside my belly, as cold and hard as his arctic blue eyes.
“When it’s my pack, I won’t keep such a pretty kitty hidden away in an old woman’s attic.” He slides a hand behind my neck, gathers a handful of hair, and pulls my head back. “But if you’re in my pack, you’ll have to learn to obey.”
The ice in my belly splinters. My hands rise to his chest to push him away as I open my mouth to speak, to scream, to defy him. But I can’t. He’s too near, and I’m too starved for his touch. My hand curls into a fist in the fabric of his shirt so he can’t pull away. Our eyes catch and hold, and he leans closer…and closer. His gaze drops to my mouth, and I wet my lips as his warm breath sweeps across them.
With a low growl, his mouth crushes down on mine, his lips searing across my lips, his tongue tasting my tongue. He releases my other hand, and I cling to him, dropping the necklace and gripping his hip instead, pulling him in, in, in. As my knees start to go out from under me, his huge hand spreads across the small of my back, his palm flattening and securing my body against his.
He kisses me, and I kiss him. I can’t stop kissing him. I kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him.
He releases the pressure on my hair slowly, drawing back from the kiss. I rise up on the tips of my toes, trying to make it last longer, forever. But he’s too tall, and he breaks free of my starving mouth.
Breathless, I open my eyes. Chuckling, he strokes my cheek with the back of his fingers. “That’s better,” he says, smiling fondly at me.
“What does that mean?” I demand.
He grins impossibly wide, showing all his teeth. A wolf’s smile. “Is that how plebians say thank you?”
“Leave me alone,” I say, storming back to the sink. “I can’t believe you would do that to trick me.”
“I didn’t feel you protesting when I was doing it.”
“Go away.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” He comes up so close behind me that my skin yearns for more of him. He dangles the necklace in front of me. This time, I snatch it out of the air and rip the chain from his fingers. I get a bit of satisfaction when I see him wince. A triumphant smile quickly overtakes it. “Good kitty,” he says. “When it’s time, I’ll expect you at my coronation.”
With that, he’s gone, leaving me holding my necklace and wondering if taking it is one more mistake I didn’t know I was making until it’s too late.
12
I think about telling my sister or mother about Harmon’s visit, but I have too much to sort through. Like how my mother tried to kill me in the woods that night.
Just when I was starting to trust her, to think she might have done something selfless, something for me, I find out this. If I was suspicious of Dad before, it disappears with my new distrust for my mother. I’m not sure if I can even show her the necklace, if she might be infuriated that I took it. So I hide it back inside my shirt and hope she won’t notice the chain. I don’t know what I can tell her anymore.
And there’s another thing. I don’t want to share that moment with anyone. I’ve had crushes before, but this is different. I have to think it over for a few days to even know how I feel about it. Every time Harmon comes into my mind, my skin burns and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud. I don’t know what it is about him. But it’s not something I could explain, even to Elidi. And that kiss…
I touch my lips and shiver deliciously every time I think of it.
A few weeks go by, and the full moon comes. As always, my family goes out and turns into wolves and howls at the freaking moon. I huddle in my bed, wondering if I’ll still be hiding away during full moons when I’m my mother’s age. I’ll never be able to go out when they’re wolves, even if Harmon lets me out of the attic when he’s leader. It’s too dangerous. I’ll never get married. They’ll want more wolf babies—puppies?—and Mother told me the risk. My only hope is to one day get someone to marry me, have a normal baby, and get kicked out like Dad. To put it mildly, that’s a longshot.
In the morning, I’m woken by the sound of my family arriving. Still half asleep, I don’t pay much attention until a short, guttural scream cuts into my grogginess. I sit up, listen to the scraping sounds downstairs, a short bark, and then whimpering. I throw off my blankets and stumble to the door. But when I emerge from my room, I stop on the tiny landing between my room and Zora’s.
At the bottom of the stairs, in the big, open living area, a handful of people have gathered. They crowd around a smallish wolf, which is stretched out on some kind of wooden stretcher. A thin blanket is draped over its back half, crimson flowering across the
fabric. Blood streaks the brown wolf’s fur from snout to ear, down her neck, and across the shoulder.
I cover my mouth and try not to scream. I know it’s not Elidi before she appears from the kitchen. I don’t know how I know, but I do. And then she runs in with a towel and falls to her knees, choking out words through her sobs as she dabs at her sister’s wounds. Our sister. I know I should care about her as much as Elidi does, but she’s never spoken a kind word to me.
I shrink back, hugging myself, cold now that I’m not under the blankets. Usually, I get up and light a fire on cold mornings. But I don’t want to go downstairs with everyone here—the old woman I saw the first day, my crying mother and sister, Zechariah, Harmon, the boy with one arm, Fernando, and the Asian girl, Xiu.
I wait for someone to look up, to ask what I’m doing there, but no one does. They’re all hovering around the wolf—Zora. It’s hard to make myself think of an animal that way. My fingers clutch my necklace as they work, the old woman sewing up the long gash in her skin. The entire time, she howls in pain.
When I can’t watch anymore, I slink back into my room and sink onto my couch. My face is wet, though I didn’t notice I was crying. Finally, the howling stops and only soft whines are left. Footsteps and a closing door tell me everyone has gone. I expect someone to come upstairs, but Mother calls to me. I shove my necklace back inside my shirt and emerge, trying to still my shaking hands. Tears threaten when I see the wolf’s sides rising and falling inside the white sheets wrapped around her, serving as a bandage.
“Want me to light a fire?” I ask Mother.
“That would be best,” she says. “As you can see, we’re going to have to make a few adjustments.”
“What happened?” I whisper, not sure if Zora can hear me, if she can understand while she’s in that form. Elidi sits on the floor beside her, her head lain on Zora’s paw.
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