So, as much as I would have liked to tell Malachy about my latest episode, I decided that it was better to leave that Pandora’s box unopened.
I had been steeling myself all day for a serious conversation with Red, but he’d been out when I got home. He must have come back after I’d gone to sleep, which was a relief, really. I’d figured we’d talk in the morning.
But when I’d just started waking up, Red had placed his hand on the curve of my hip, a question. Before I’d had a chance to think about it, I’d rolled away. A moment later, I had turned over to see him lying on his back, his hands under his head. His sharp cheekbones had cast dark shadows over his eyes, showing me the wolf in his face, and for a moment, I had wished for him to shift so there would be no need for words. That faint, delicious odor of forest and musk still clung to him—it might even have grown a shade more intense. If he had been in wolf form, I thought, he wouldn’t have been so tentative and I’d have wanted to touch him.
But, a little voice intruded, you can’t conduct an entire relationship out of just one aspect of yourself. As usual, the little voice sounded like my mother. I’ve never been sure, however, whether this is because, deep down, I recognize my mother’s innate wisdom on such matters, or whether the sheer force of her personality has colored the tone of my conscience. In any case, I’m not at all sure that a B movie star turned animal rescuer is really the best source of relationship wisdom.
So I pushed aside my doubts. I loved Red, and I felt lousy about a bunch of things: yesterday’s outburst, not noticing that he’d been injured, the whole rolling around on the ground with Malachy thing. So I did what most American women probably do when they want to please their men. I went shopping for steak.
Before my change, I’d been a vegetarian, and even now, I only ate meat at certain times of the month, and I preferred it to arrive on my plate fully cooked and sauced and as unlike a living, breathing cow as possible. At least, that’s what I liked in my human form. When I was furry and four-legged, I would happily have torn a chunk out of a cow’s chest, were the opportunity to arise.
But right now I was as human as I’d ever be, and shopping for raw meat, touching it and washing it and sloshing it around in marinade, well, that was a sacrifice I would have made only for love. I stared at the porterhouse, trying to remember if lots of little flabby white veins of fat running through the meat was desirable or not.
“Excuse me, but you’re blocking the aisle.”
I turned around, my muscles tightening at the sound of that familiar, sultry, accented voice. “Hello, Magda.” I glared up at the woman who was living with my soon-to-be ex in the home we’d shared. She was wearing a fitted red wool coat and had a new, short haircut that showcased the dramatic streak of white in her dark hair. She had fifteen years on me, but I felt like a gnome standing beside her in unflattering jeans and a puffy vest from the Tractor Supply store.
“Oh, hello, Abra,” said Magda, as if she hadn’t known perfectly well it was me. Besides being a werewolf, Magdalena Ionescu was a senior wolf researcher and an experienced tracker—not the type to let her mind drift while meandering around the supermarket. I had no idea why she was playing coy with me, but it was making me bristle. We weren’t friends, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
“Oh, don’t these look delicious.” Magda plucked the other four porterhouse steaks out of the display and smiled at me. “Are you taking that one, or not? I don’t mean to seem greedy, but my brothers are coming to visit.”
Belatedly, I comprehended that her fake friendliness was a form of aggression. If we’d been in wolf form, she’d have marched on over to sniff me before knocking me to the ground.
“I’m sorry, but I’m making a special dinner for Red.” I threw the last porterhouse into my own wagon.
“You know, I’m very happy for the two of you,” Magda murmured, leaning forward as if confiding in an intimate. “I know that you and Hunter were never right for each other, and I think it’s marvelous that you’ve found someone who suits you. And I’ve always liked coyotes—they’re very crafty, and they do make up in trickiness what they lack in size and strength.”
I felt my right eyelid begin to twitch. “First of all, Red’s not a coyote, he’s a red wolf. Second of all, I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
Magda gave a low, husky laugh. “My goodness, I seem to have hit a nerve. I’m sorry, I have nothing against Red being Coyote. In fact, considering that you can’t have children, I think choosing someone from a different group makes a lot of sense.”
Belatedly, I glanced around to see if anyone was listening to our conversation. Northsiders were experts at ignoring the supernatural weirdness all around them, and we were speaking very softly, but a small town is a small town: People care deeply about other people’s business.
I waited till two women had pushed their shopping carts around a corner, then said, “What do you mean, since I can’t have children? Just because I didn’t get pregnant last time doesn’t mean I can’t have children.”
Magda bared her teeth in a smile. “Poor Abra. You really don’t have a clue, do you? And yet you are a veterinarian, so you must know about breeding cycles in wolves and dogs.” In case I still hadn’t made the connection, she said, “False pregnancies, my dear. A nondominant female hardly ever whelps a litter.”
The moment she said it, I realized that I never really thought of myself as being half wolf. The way I saw it, I only moonlighted as a wolf; human was my day job.
But what Magda was implying was that I couldn’t get pregnant because I wasn’t assertive or alpha enough. In the wild, nondominant wolf females cycle with the alpha. Even if they don’t breed, they go through the symptoms of pregnancy along with the lead bitch, and after the leader’s pups are born, the other females produce milk, so they can nurse the pups when the mother is off on a hunt.
But even when lower-ranking females do become pregnant, they tend not to carry to term. It’s not like a human miscarriage—there’s no blood, no outward sign at all. Veterinarians don’t really understand it, but the body seems to just reabsorb the pregnancy with no ill effects.
My face must have revealed some of what I was feeling, because Magda said, “Oh, now I’ve upset you.” She leaned over the meat counter and absently pressed her finger into a package of liver so that blood pooled beneath the plastic. “But you wouldn’t really want to start a family with someone like Red, would you, now?” Adding the liver to her cart, Magda met my eyes. “In Romania, we have two kinds of unwolf—vârcolac and pricolici. But Red, he says he is shapeshifter, yes? What is his word for it—Limmikin. He told me about it when I stayed with him.”
Now that was rubbing salt in my wounds. I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that Red had allowed Magda to stay at his cabin when she’d first arrived in Northside. Sure, he’d had his reasons—Hunter was new to his change, and Red had been scared that he’d tear me apart. Magda was supposed to step in as his mentor, helping him through the mindless violence of his early transformations. But part of mentoring him involved screwing his brains out, which was how he’d gotten infected with the virus in the first place.
So I wasn’t exactly grateful to Red for putting Magda up. I wasn’t actively angry, though—at least not unless I thought about it.
“I know all about the Limmikin,” I said stiffly. “It’s the Mohawk term for a shapeshifter.”
“So you know that the term is not a complimentary one. Ah, I see you did not hear this. The Limmikin are—How do I explain this? They are like the gypsies of the human world. Thieves. Fortune-tellers. Con artists.”
I gritted my teeth. “You forgot the part where they invented flamenco and suffered centuries of persecution. And before you say anything else, you should know that my father is Gitano. From Barcelona.”
“How charming. Yet another thing you have in common with Red.” Magda leaned down, emphasizing the difference in our heights. “But you should know that you are different kind
s of therians. The strain you carry, the strain that comes from me, this is pricolici. There is also vârcolac,” she added, making the motion of spitting over her left shoulder. “Those disgusting dabblers in dark arts. But at least we both have the sacred link to the moon. But your man, he is not lycanthrope at all. He is a lesser kind of thing, which is why I allow you to remain in our territory.”
Sometimes I wondered if Magda had learned her English from my mother’s old movies. “Lady, you have issues.” I was aware of people openly watching us now, some of them clients, but the anger was pulsing through me now, pushing at my ribs, snapping my knuckles, making each hair on my head feel as if it were electric with fury.
Something flickered in Magdalena’s dark almond eyes. “What are you doing?”
I took a step forward, shaking my finger in her face like an avenging nanny. “I have had just about enough of you today. What is it, you came here looking for a fight? Well, let’s go for it, then.”
Magda grabbed my right wrist. “Get control of yourself.”
“Get your hands off me!”
“You are shifting, Abra. Look!” She thrust my hand in front of my face. The nails were darkening, lengthening, changing shape. And so were the bones.
Abruptly, Magda turned, putting her arm around me and turning me toward the freezer section. It must have looked as though she was comforting me, but she was effectively shielding me from the little audience we’d attracted. Looking over her shoulder, I spotted Marlene of the dragon lady nails and Jerome in his Little House on the Prairie shirt—two of the biggest gossips in the county. Oh, God, this was going to be all over town by tonight.
“Deep breath. That’s it. Slow and steady.” In teacher mode, Magda was almost reassuring. For the first time, I had a glimpse of what must have attracted Hunter back when Magda was a senior wolf researcher and he was a journalist chasing a story.
“Thank you.” I took another breath and shuddered.
“You are all right now?” Her accent was more pronounced.
I nodded. “I’m sorry. I seem to have less control of my temper these days.”
“Of your temper. And has your … cycle been irregular?”
I didn’t need to respond.
“I see. And do you have any idea why this is happening now?”
I looked at Magda. Up close, there were fine lines visible between her brows, fanning out from the corners of her eyes. It made me like her better. “No.”
The hand that had been loosely holding me across my shoulders tightened, and I winced. “The lycanthropy is progressing. I would never have expected it, but there it is. You are in season.”
For a moment, I was so stuck on the first part of the sentence that I didn’t understand the end. When I remained silent, Magda frowned and said, “Don’t you get it? In season. In estrus. In heat.”
EIGHT
According to my mother, every romantic relationship is a reaction to the one that came before it. Since my mother is Piper LeFevre, iconic sex symbol, her theories about romance carry some weight in the world. Women’s magazines still quote her, usually with the picture from Lucrezia Cyborgia with my mother in that tight, clear plastic space suit.
The magazines might think twice about their sources if they knew that my mother renounced men about fifteen years ago. More recently she swore off women as well. Still, she did tell me that she’d always worried that Hunter didn’t love me enough, and that being with him had turned me into a caricature of myself: the studious, earnest, geeky girl that’s a staple of teen movies, complete with long hair, big glasses, and boxy wardrobe.
She’d been right about that. For all I knew, being celibate made her an objective oracle on love and romance.
After the very public scene with Magda in the Stop and Shop, I was willing to take a chance and pay Mom a visit. I’d be the first to admit that it was also a way to postpone having to talk with Red. So instead of a steak dinner, Red got a message on his cell phone: Had to run off to my mother’s at the last minute.
I realized that leaving like this was the sort of thing Hunter used to do to me, but I couldn’t help it. I recalled Red’s ebullient mood after my lost night, my feeling that there was something he had neglected to tell me. I didn’t trust Magda, but I knew she was perfectly capable of telling the truth when it served her purpose.
Presumably she was as wrong about the Limmikin as she was about gypsies. What did a Romanian wolf researcher know about Native American shapeshifters, anyway? I tried to remember everything Red had told me about his family. Last year we’d meant to go north, to visit his surviving relatives in Canada. But then I’d gotten the position with Malachy and we’d postponed our trip.
But hang on a moment. It was Red who insisted that I go ahead and begin my new job immediately. Maybe he’d had second thoughts about my getting to know his people.
I may have had my reservations about my future with Red, but until this moment, I’d never questioned our past together. I’d always felt that I could depend on him to be open and honest. It was one of his chief attractions, after all of Hunter’s secrets and subterfuges.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
And even though I knew I could have called up my friend Lilliana for advice, I didn’t feel up to exposing the fact that I was involved in yet another dicey romance.
So I threw the groceries in the back of the car and drove up to my mother’s house, flipping around the radio dial until I found Natalie Merchant singing with bruised eloquence about jealousy. This was followed by yet another rendition of Faith Hill singing about how good she and her husband had it so I turned the radio off. The sky was overcast and gray, but as I approached Pleasantvale, the clouds and mist cleared and I caught a glimpse of the half moon, pale and almost translucent around the edges. The sight of it was a reminder, and I took stock of my body, but as far as I could tell, the change was still weeks away. Which was odd; usually, I felt a pang, like that of ovulation, in the middle of my cycle. Maybe changing last night with Red had used up the lycanthropic hormones. Which meant there might be a bright side to my having a complete memory blackout.
As I turned off the highway, all traces of snow and ice on the ground disappeared. My mother lived an hour and a half away, and seventy-five miles south the air was warmer, the houses larger and built more closely together.
In general, Pleasantvale was a very upscale community, although my childhood home was situated in the one remaining working-class enclave. It looked singularly out of place, surrounded by mixed-family units with names like Paradise Heights and small houses crammed together with mismatched fences and clashing holiday lights. When I was a kid, I’d thought that our neighbors’ homes reminded me of strangers stuck sharing a table at a hotel banquet. Our own home was like a movie set. A movie set for a gothic romance, to be specific.
Modeled after El Greco’s house in southern Spain, it was a fabulous, whimsical villa, and I have some hazy early memories of my parents entertaining other Hollywood types. There was always a cloud of cigarette smoke perfumed with women’s eau de toilette and men’s aftershave, and I could invariably find my father playing director behind his elaborate wet bar, while my mother passed around some fussy, fatty, now defunct appetizer: rumaki, or liver wrapped in bacon and doused in soy sauce, clams casino, pigs in blanket. The main course was often something gimmicky and low rent, like spice-your-own chili or stab-your-own cheese fondue. I remember sneaking into the living room in my pink flannel nightgown and fluffy slippers, risking third-degree burns to jab my skewered bread into the pot when no one was looking. When I was back in my bed, I could hear my parents, shouting with laughter late into the night. Being an adult, I remember thinking, was going to be a lot of fun.
Not long after came the realization that adult fun was paid for in blood. I stayed up listening to my parents shouting without laughter late into the night. The drinks no longer had names, and my diet of stolen appetizers was replaced by TV dinners. I used to read the product descript
ions with great optimism: tender breast of chicken lightly breaded and fried, baby niblets of corn, crisp Idaho fries. I was aware that the reality was damp chicken, soggy potatoes and kernels of corn everywhere, but given a choice between fiction and reality, I went for fiction.
These days, my father owns a small hotel in Key West, and my mother has turned the house into Beast Castle, a not-for-profit refuge for abused animals. I admire my mother’s decision, but it didn’t make coming home a relaxing proposition.
“Thank God you’re here,” my mother said, as she opened the massive front door. She was wearing a purple caftan, just as she had in her hostessing days, and her dyed blond hair was pulled back with a barrette, revealing gray roots. She had lost weight, which I’d been nagging her to do for years. It made her look tired. And still, she was more beautiful than I would ever be.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I think the husky has an impacted tooth.”
“I wish you’d said something when I called.” Knowing her as I did, I’d brought a variety of medications, just in case, but I hated being taken for granted.
“I didn’t know then. He just started acting funny when I gave him a bone.”
I followed my mother as she swept down the hallway, the ragged hem of her purple caftan trailing behind her. Like my mother, the house was looking a bit seedy, with antique chairs listing to one side, and all the couches and curtains bearing claw marks. The medieval suit of armor in the main hall looked as though it were rusting around the edges, and the tiled fountain under the domed skylight gave off a strong smell of feline urine.
“So, Mom, how is everything? Besides the husky, I mean.”
“Oh, I’m going crazy. Two of the new girls never showed up for work today, and I’m expecting a new litter of kittens. And here’s Snowboy, poor fellow, he was being kept in a closet all day.” She pointed out the husky, who had his head between his paws and was regarding me with a baleful blue gaze. Like most wolfish dogs, he had a wider range of expression than smaller-faced breeds, but knew how to put on a poker face when he was in pain and strangers were watching. I held out my hand for him to sniff before rummaging in my large leather bag for my stethoscope. Hunter had given me the bag for my birthday, right before we’d left the city, and even though Red kept offering to buy me another, I still loved it too much to give it up.
Moonburn Page 7
