Unlikely Magic: A Cinderella Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 1)

by Lena Mae Hill

  “Have you chosen mates?” I ask them.

  They exchange a look. “Not yet,” Zora says with a secret smile. Is she hoping for someone in particular?

  “Will you choose after Harmon?”

  “Maybe,” Elidi says from her chair, where she’s stitching her hemline. “I’m just glad we’ll have someone to protect the pack again. It’ll be so much better with a strong Alpha.”

  “We all follow the pack rules, but it works better with a leader here to enforce things,” Zora adds. “The second-in-command can try, but she doesn’t have the same natural command over us. We could choose to disobey her. But without anyone to lead, we’d be no better than the shifters in the next valley. Anarchy.”

  “Sometimes we have to wait, though,” Elidi says. “Mother says it can go on for years sometimes, until the next eclipse.”

  “Wow,” I say. “This really is a big deal.”

  “Yeah,” Zora says impatiently. “So make it perfect. I’m not going to the coronation in some scraggly dress because of you.”

  “At least you’re going,” I mutter.

  Elidi’s hands sink to her lap and she gives me a calculating look. “Did you want to go?”

  “No,” I say quickly. “Of course not. Mother says it wouldn’t be safe.”

  That, and Harmon despises me. All his promises about life changing under his rule were erased by my treasonous act. And the worst part is, I don’t blame him. I’m the one who betrayed him. I almost killed not only his Alpha and ruler, but his father. If the roles were reversed, if he’d hurt my dad, I’d never forgive him.

  “We do get a little wild,” Elidi says, picking up her sewing again.

  “Do you, like, change while the eclipse is going on?” I ask. “While the moon is blocked from view?”

  “Change?” Zora asks. “You sound like we’re putting on a new outfit.”

  “It’s called transitioning,” Elidi reminds me.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask, remembering the way she screamed and fell on her face when I saw her do it at the bonfire. It seems so long ago now that I can’t imagine ever thinking they were normal, fully human people.

  “Of course it hurts,” Zora says, shaking her head like I’m missing serious IQ points for even asking. “Our whole bodies are rearranged within a minute.”

  “Sometimes seconds, for the older people, who have more practice,” Elidi points out. “But it hurts less as you get older, too. Or maybe you just get used to it.”

  “If it hurts worse when you’re little, why do they make the babies do it?” I ask. “That seems…” I trail off before I can say inhumane.

  “It’s not a choice,” Zora says in that same voice, like I am testing her patience to the limits. “We don’t make anyone do it. It happens during the full moon whether you want it to or not.”

  “Unless you’re, like…seriously injured,” Elidi says, glancing at Zora. I remember how they made a big deal, when she got attacked, of making sure she was healthy by the next lunar meeting.

  “And then it’s a lot worse,” Zora says, turning so I can pin the last section of her hemline. “If your body tries to transition but you’re too weak or messed up.”

  The girls exchange wide-eyed looks.

  “What?” I ask.

  “If you don’t transition for three months in a row, you can’t,” Elidi says, like this is supposed to be the most shocking thing I’ve ever heard. “Ever,” she adds when I don’t answer with a gasp or fall into a dead faint.

  “Um…if it’s as bad as it looks, why would you want to?” I ask, sitting back on my knees to survey the pins in Zora’s hem.

  Elidi draws back like I just told her I hate babies and puppies and rainbows. “Because,” she says. “Not being able to transition would be like…like…”

  “Being trapped in a tiny cage where you can’t move for the rest of your life,” Zora says. “I’d kill myself. People have, you know. Killed themselves.”

  “Who?” Elidi asks.

  “Mother told me. When she was a kid, someone got attacked by one of the witches over the mountain. When he finally pulled through, he realized he couldn’t transition. He said they should have let him die. As soon as he could walk, he went out in the woods and ate an amenita.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “A mushroom,” Elidi says. “It’s so poisonous you can get poisoned just from touching it.”

  “Am I done?” Zora asks. “Because I don’t want to get this dirty by hanging out in it. Not everyone can just buy a new one whenever they want.”

  I bite back a response and nod. At least she gets to go to town to buy her clothes. I have to settle for whatever Mother orders for me, no matter how badly it fits. Not that it matters anymore. Except for the trip in to take my GED test when I turned sixteen, I haven’t been outside in nine months. I’m pasty and sickly-looking. The poor fit of my clothes is the last thing anyone would notice—if someone outside my family happened to glimpse me.

  Zora turns for me to unzip her dress, and I do so obediently, my eyes avoiding the jagged scars across her shoulder blade from her attack. She defiantly refuses to cover the scar for the party, almost flaunting it in her backless dress. She could unzip herself, since her zipper starts at the bottom of her ribcage and swoops down over her hips. But she likes me to wait on her.

  The satin pools at her feet like a bowl of sweet cream. She steps out of it, and I gather it up carefully, so she won’t have reason to be angry about its treatment. As I sink onto the couch, I can’t help but think it looks a bit like a sleek, minimalistic wedding dress.

  “Hoping Harmon picks you?” I ask, laying the dress across my lap. The thought of him still makes my stomach do funny things, though the last look he gave me left the distinct impression those funny things do not happen to him when he looks at me.

  “Hoping?” she asks, her voice sharp with bitterness. “No, that’s not the right word.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turns away, quickly pulling her shirt over her head. “Like you’d understand. You’re pretty.”

  I look like death. But I know better than to mention this to my sister, to give her the impression I’m complaining or asking for sympathy.

  “You have Fernando,” I offer.

  She gives me a look that could peel paint from the walls. “Fernando is my brother.”

  Before I can respond, she stomps out of the room and slams the door. Elidi and I listen to her feet thudding down the stairs. She walks just like our mother.

  “What was that about?” I ask when the front door slams.

  Elidi sighs. “She thinks no one will want her because of her scars.”

  “No, I mean the part about our having a brother.”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “Not our brother. Her brother.”

  I take a moment to digest this. “So she’s our half-sister? Or adopted?”

  “Half-sister.”

  “But I thought you mated for life. So how does Mother have kids from two people?”

  “You don’t know?” she says, lowering her voice to speak in a conspiratorial whisper. “Our mother was kind of a scandal. She married our father, who wasn’t a wolf, without permission. And of course he didn’t have the instinct to mate for life.”

  I drop my voice to a whisper, too. “Is that why they got divorced? Dad cheated?” I don’t want to speak ill of him, but he obviously didn’t have a problem deceiving people.

  “Mother refuses to talk about him,” Elidi says. “But after he left, she and Fernando’s dad had a thing. His wife had died. But he and Mother could never get married or be soul mates, because they had both Chosen.”

  “Chosen a mate?”

  Elidi nods. “The Choosing is the biggest decision of our lives. If you Choose wrong, you end up alone for the rest of your life, like our mom.”

  “Obviously she wasn’t mourning too hard.”

  “But it’s a terrible fate,” Elidi says, her eyes wide. “You’re desti
ned to be alone, to never really love someone again. The best you can hope for are relationships of convenience and companionship with someone who can’t love you, either. Wolves can only really love their Chosen One.”

  As if on cue, I hear the tell-tale chant of Harmon calling my sister. She freezes, so I give her a smile. “What about you? You think Harmon will Choose you?”

  “I hope not,” she mutters before shooting me a guilty look.

  I force myself to smile. “He seems to like you.”

  “He likes everyone.”

  “Not me.”

  “If he does, it’s all over for me,” she says. “At least you have hope.”

  Do I? As she sighs and deposits her dress on the couch to answer the call of the boy, the only boy, I have to wonder. I pick up the dress and start on the beading, though. This is the hope I’m allowed. To stay here, invisible, hidden away. It’s better than some things, I tell myself. It’s better than being sold to the pack across the mountain. At least I’ve come to know my mother, in whatever capacity she’ll let me. I can gauge her reactions, know what to expect.

  When Harmon becomes leader, I don’t know what will happen to me. Not knowing what to expect is worse than knowing to expect the occasional stinging blow across my cheek, and the sunshine on my face for less than a minute a day, and solitude, where my only friends are rodents. I’m used to this. It may not be ideal, but it’s safe. I know that after the last attempt. Each time I’ve run for freedom, I’ve ended up more trapped, my world constricting until it’s so small I can hardly breathe. Each time, the consequences get worse. I should be thankful for my tiny life, for the privilege of being alive at all after what I did to their Alpha. At last, Mother has succeeded. My will is broken.

  3

  All too soon, the days grow longer, warmer, and winter fades into a wet and muddy spring. Not that I’m out to experience it, but I watch from my window, and I clean the muddy boots and wash the muddy pants. Mother even lets me join them in the back yard one day to help turn the soil in her garden beds for spring planting. Though the day is cool and drizzly, I turn my face to the sky like a plant that’s been kept in the dark too long, glorying in the grey sky that spits cold droplets as we work.

  Afterwards, I catch glimpses of the tiny green buds poking up through the soil on my daily trips to the outhouse. The whole community seems to buzz with the new energy of the world awakening, changing. Their world is changing, too, for the first time in I don’t know how many years. And something is waking up inside me again—determination. Still chained, I climb out my skylight every day and lie on the steep roof, not caring if I fall. Maybe if I break a leg badly enough, Mother will take me to a real hospital, and I can tell them what it’s like here.

  From the roof, I watch the trees come back to life. From my new bed, I watch the moon’s monthly journey from a thin thread of silver above my skylight to a fat slice of honeydew melon to a full, round globe.

  It’s time.

  The day of the eclipse, I try to stay out of the way, confining myself to the kitchen and handling dishes and other chores while my sisters run around getting ready, as nervous as if going to their own weddings. If they choose mates tonight, I guess they kind of are. It seems they’ve thought of everything in the last few months, but suddenly, there are a hundred last minute things to do.

  In the afternoon, Fernando comes over to help Mother take the food I’ve made to the Community Center. Mother barely acknowledges my presence, let alone thanks me for the ham I’ve so carefully covered with pineapple slices, pinned in a pleasing arrangement with whole cloves, or the pans of apple cobbler made from apples they picked last fall, while I was in the attic with the mice. When all the food is gone, I collapse onto the couch, my stomach growling. I’ll probably just have a baked potato for dinner, or maybe some leftover chicken soup.

  “What are you doing just sitting there?” Zora screeches behind me.

  I jump about a mile, not having heard her approach from behind.

  “We’re not nearly ready, and you’re just sitting around doing nothing? You couldn’t even offer to help?”

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “What do you need help with?”

  “My makeup, for one,” she says. “My hair. My dress is all wrinkled. Elidi stepped on her hem…”

  I heave myself from the couch like a tired old woman and follow her into Elidi’s room under the stairs, which I’ve never entered in the two and a half years I’ve lived in this house. It’s tiny, barely bigger than a closet. Suddenly I feel guilty for my big room upstairs. Even with all the clutter along the walls, it’s easily three times this big. Mother’s room is across the tiny hall, the door standing open. It’s maybe twice the size of Elidi’s. Zora is right. My room is huge compared to all of theirs. It’s a wonder Mother hasn’t taken it for herself. Another flair of guilt, this one mixed with gratitude, springs to life inside me.

  In Elidi’s tiny room, clothes and shoes cover every surface, as if the closet vomited its contents. On top of piles of other clothes on the bed, Elidi’s dress is laid out, sparkling in the afternoon light filtering in through the unfurling, new green leaves on the trees outside the window.

  “I’ll never find shoes to go with this,” she cries. “Why didn’t we think of this earlier?”

  Zora studies herself in the full-length mirror on the back of Elidi’s door. She thrusts one hip out and slides a leg forwards sexily, then draws her satiny yellow dress up to reveal the pair of black knock-off Birkenstock sandals that she wore all summer. “We’ll have to go barefoot,” she says, kicking the shoes into the corner in disgust.

  “This is a disaster,” Elidi wails. “We’ll be the only girls there without shoes. We’ll look like total slobs!”

  For someone who’s hoping not to be chosen, she’s awfully concerned about the impression she’ll make. But then I look at the two of them in their gorgeous dresses, and I swallow the snarky comments. Emmy and I would never have forgotten shoes. But then, we had occasions to learn these things. This is their one chance, all their proms and homecomings and school dances rolled into one. This is it. Maybe even their wedding proposal.

  “I might have something,” I say. They both look at me like they’re just noticing my presence.

  “What do you have?” Zora asks, her voice an accusation more than a question.

  I shrug. “Some stuff I brought with me. I never had a place to wear them.” Admittedly, the shoes were impractical, and I don’t think my sisters will want to walk up a rocky driveway and along a dirt path in heels. But I have a couple pairs that might still fit me, and therefore, Elidi.

  Upstairs, I pull the suitcase from the corner and open it. For a moment, I sit still, overwhelmed by the memories swarming out of it, like the evils from Pandora’s box. I pick up a pair of strappy silver heels and cradle them in my palms. The one and only time I wore them was on a trip to the mall with Emmy, when I paired them with cutoffs and a tank top. I remember how Dad looked so uncomfortable to see me growing up, how he had to swallow a few times before he said that my outfit was “interesting.” I guess he didn’t know how to tell me he thought they were inappropriate without embarrassing me.

  I pull out the next pair of shoes, flat sandals with gold-leaf straps. When I put these in the suitcase, my heart was so wracked with grief I hardly noticed what I was doing. But I clearly remember thinking that one day I’d feel better, and I’d want some cute shoes. I thought that’s all they were. But now, looking down at them, I see that they’re everything I lost before I knew to appreciate it—a life where anything seemed possible, not just prom and homecoming but a whole future full of friends and boyfriends, photo shoots in glamorous locations, my face in magazines.

  A soft squeak pulls me back to the present. Tom is sitting on top of the dresser, the same one he hid under the first day I saw him, now watching me with his tiny ink-drop eyes.

  “Right,” I whisper, wiping my eyes with a little laugh. “They’re just shoes.”


  I’ll never wear them, anyway, so it would be selfish and a little cruel to hide them away in a suitcase while my sisters despair downstairs. Even if they only wear them for a few hours, at least someone will get some use from them. I scoop them up and head downstairs to Elidi’s room.

  “Oh my gosh, these are perfect,” Elidi cries, pouncing on the silver heels. She gives me a quick, guilty smile.

  “Take them,” I say, like it’s nothing. “I’ll never wear them again.”

  “Thank you so much,” she says, clutching them to her chest.

  I catch a glimpse of something on Zora’s face—jealousy? longing?—but she quickly turns away. “Here,” I say, awkwardly thrusting the gold sandals at her. “These would look good with your dress.”

  She snatches them from my hands and shoves her feet into them with greedy determination. Her wide, flat fee barely squeeze in. Her big toe hangs off the front and her heel hangs off the back. But she doesn’t take them off. They’re still better than black hippie sandals.

  For the next hour, I help them with their makeup. Mother bought them each a pallet of eyeshadow, a powder compact, a tube of lipstick and one of mascara, and blush. With as much excitement as if I were going myself, I open each one, savoring the pop of the mascara wand as it comes out of the tube for the first time, the untouched slant of each creamy lipstick, the scent of the Covergirl compacts that I’d forgotten. It takes me back to so many days sitting in Emmy’s room, putting crazy makeup on each other or trying to follow YouTube tutorials, laughing until we cried and messed it all up.

  At last, my sisters are ready. I have to admit, I’m a little jealous when I stand back to look at them. Elidi’s hair falls in soft waves across her shoulders like whipped cream, her pink mouth like a rosebud. Her golden eyes are shot through with dark, just like the tiger-eye stone on my necklace, highlighted by the contrast with her pale blue dress. They look huge with her long fringe of lashes mascaraed and visible at last, framing her eyes in dramatic fashion. The wolf pack tattoo on her shoulder is just the touch needed to keep her from looking too soft. A reminder that she’s a killer like the rest of them.