by Lisa Ladew
Willow saw Lucinda moving among the frames at the back of their property, still a mile’s walk up the side of the bluff for Willow. She had flubbed her mission to get hive beetle baffles from the store, but this discussion wouldn’t wait any longer.
As Willow drew close, a few bees alighted on her. She petted their wings absently. She’d never needed a bee blouse, never been stung. She wouldn’t try to test her theory, but she was pretty sure that, even if she crushed a bee between her fingers, it wouldn’t try to sting her. She didn’t know why, but her mother would only nod at her as the bees came to her like pets.
Lucinda stiffened as Willow moved through the tall grass toward her. Did she hear Willow? Or sense her? Willow had always thought her mother had a touch of the empathic abilities Willow overflowed with.
“How long have you been planning this?” Lucinda said, still turned away, but going on the offensive like a sniper. Lucinda was short, only four feet, nine inches tall, but she had never shied from a confrontation in her life.
At five feet, two and a half inches tall, Willow didn’t exactly tower over her mother. Her voice was soft as she responded, even if her words weren’t. “Planning what, Mom? To discover that you’ve got me wired for tracking, like some prized hound you don’t want to lose during the pig hunt?” Willow winced at the words themselves. She didn’t want to fight with her mother. She took a deep breath in through her nose and out her mouth, consciously ousting the accusation from her message and answering again, even softer. “I didn’t plan anything, Mom. I wasn’t going to leave for good. I just needed to see that, if I crossed that town line, lightning wasn’t going to strike me.”
Lucinda didn’t say anything. Her back was still turned as she pulled frame after frame out of the hive to inspect them for honey. Willow sighed. “It didn’t, you know. No lightning. No demon. I went a good five miles into Ogle County.”
Her mother’s movements turned jerky. Willow tried one more time, her voice even softer. “It’s ok, Mom, I understand why it scares you, and why you acted like my twenty-fift birthday never happened. Now that I’m twenty-five, the angel is supposed to come for me, and I’ll be active in the fight against the demon. That makes you nervous that you’re going to lose me. I get that. But I’m not safe just because I’m here anymore, right? That’s what the angel told you? So there’s no reason for me to stay in Serenity. It doesn’t keep me safer.”
Lucinda’s shoulders shook, and Willow stepped forward, uncertain. Lucinda socked the frame back into the hive too hard, smashing bees and making Willow wince. Lucinda turned around, her face partially obscured by the bee veil, but Willow could hear the tremor in her voice, and feel how cold her hands were as she grabbed Willow’s bare arms, careful not to disturb any of the bees. She peered into Willow’s face, her voice tight. “You’re not scared?”
Willow looked into her mom’s dark brown eyes, a testament to a conflicted heritage that was second only to the memory of her husband’s death announcement, with how much it colored Lucinda’s life, and spoke her heart. “No, Mom, I’m not. I’m still not certain I 100% believe it, exactly as you have always told me. But let’s say I do.” Willow ignored the pain in her mother’s eyes. She couldn’t be forced into believing by her mom’s suffering, or it would have happened by now. She kept speaking. “The demon may be strong, but the love of my angel for me and me for him will make us stronger. That was what my father told you, right?”
Lucinda turned back to the bees with jerky movements, her distress clear. Thought-forms swirled around her. Memories, things unsaid, emotions that Lucinda thought were from the current altercation, but Willow knew had never been healed and transformed when they had first happened. They were stuck there, in Lucinda’s brain, to play again and again, changing nothing.
Willow slumped, exhausted from the emotions, unable to block her mother’s thought-forms. What Willow could understand was always incomplete, not exactly the way her mother would see it, so Willow didn’t stress too much, or feel all the way bad for not trying harder to block. She just wouldn’t assign any credence to anything she saw. She would let it pass through her mind, unexamined.
A by-thought of her mother’s wavered in front of her, glowing and huge like a still-connected soap bubble, and Willow’s mind snagged it. She followed the snaky tendril of it all the way back to the original thought, until she could almost see the actual angel through her mother’s eyes, her mother’s memories. The angel who was her father. Willow watched the memory play out in front of her.
Lucinda was thirty-three when the angel came to her, a deeply-conflicted woman who rented the oversized lawn and field in front of her family homestead out to campers heading across the country in mimicry of their 1960s hippie predecessors. Lucinda had just finished taking payment, and had smoked some of it, retreating to the house and pulling the curtains in the living room for no reason she could fathom. She never pulled those curtains.
Willow watched the memory, not fighting it. She knew where to stop so that she wouldn’t see anything she didn’t want to see, or that her mother didn’t want her to see, but this was the only knowledge she had of her father. Willow mostly believed what her mom thought she had seen and heard, and she relished the memory, picked it farther apart each time she relived it. It was real. She was half-angel. But then again, there was no way it was real. She was all-human. She leaned toward half-angel more every time she tapped into this thought, because it seemed more real and right each time.
In Lucinda’s memory, the angel came.
Willow’s mom stumbled back to the couch, and dropped onto it, her mind wheeling and reeling from the good pot she had smoked. Something was about to happen to her, and because she was high, her experience of it would be different than it would have been if she was sober, even though he would have come either way. He was above any human judgment and saw nothing wrong with her smoking, seeking what she thought was reality.
She was about to have her mind blown, and she couldn’t wait.
He came, the being she’d sensed wanting to get at her, appearing as if he had always existed in her living room, the closed curtains at his back, light glinting off him, through him, as he took the form of a man made from light.
“Whoa,” Willow’s mom said, as energy hit her like a softball to the chest.
The angel spoke. His lips didn’t move, but his colors danced in time with his words. “Angel,” he said in his make-believe voice. Or that’s what Lucinda thought he said. His voice was lyrical, more songbird twitter than words. No, not twitter, but laughter-his voice was the laughter of a child before he learns what shame is. She thought he was telling her he was an angel, or maybe he was telling her he was a being that she could only conceive of as an angel, even if he was so much more.
Lucinda believed.
Willow opened herself up to the feeling her mom had received from the angel on that glittering night, twenty-five years ago. Pure, untainted love so thick it had a color, a shifting, glittering color that couldn’t be pinned down but was somewhere on the violet-crimson-indigo spectrum. The color-love shot from the angel to Lucinda and she knew that her life would be forever different. From that moment on, she would live for the baby. The baby the angel was about to give her.
Lucinda adopted nodded at the angel. “Come on, then,” she said. “I’m ready.”
He approached her, love shining through his eyes, but a different kind of love than existed between humans. It was an all-encompassing love, that meant no matter what she ever did or didn’t do, he would love her the same. He would never try to control her with his emotions or forbid her from anything. He wanted only life from her, but she was free to choose it or not. He gathered Lucinda into his arms and whispered the most beautiful music in her ear.
Willow, hearing the angel’s words in her mother’s memory, heard something different than she knew her mother had. Lucinda insisted what the angel said went like this.
“Our daughter will be a queen among the angels.
She will save them with her touch, her love, and her special connection with the angel. She will save, he will lead, and all will be right in the end. This I foresee.”
But what Willow heard went like this.
“Our daughter will be a queen among the barren. She will save them with her touch, her love, and her special connection with the barren who will lead them. She will save, he will lead, and all will be right in the end. This I foresee.”
Willow allowed herself a moment of puzzlement about that word, barren. It made no sense, and in a decade of contemplating it, she still couldn’t understand why she would be slated to lead the ‘barren’.
Moment over, Willow prepared to pull herself away from the memory, because just after this was where her mother had said the angelsex started, and Willow did not want to see that.
But because she stayed with the memory only a second or two longer than normal, she caught a glint of something in the angel’s hand. It was something that hung on a chain and caught the light in a way even the angel couldn’t manage. It seemed to glow yellow, then lavender, then yellow again, then a color she couldn’t name or describe. Willow stayed seated in the memory, risking a sight she didn’t want to see for one she couldn’t quite look away from.
The angel held his hand up. It held a delicate gold chain and at the bottom of the chain was a thick piece of gold jewelry an inch or so tall. An angel made from gold stared out at her, the jewel between its hands glowing a bright lavender, but when it twisted away from Willow/Lucinda, Willow saw the backside of it was a bear. A massive, snarling bear, whose upper lip was curled, massive fangs showing, open eyes glowing red.
Music. Birds singing. The angel was speaking, and it raised its hand to show off the pendant. The words were not clear, but the meaning was. “You will name her Willow. This shiftsegen will protect her, and guide her, and travel her. I will return after she is born, train her in the use of her special power. When she is twenty-five, her fated mate will be shown to her, and she will join him in the war against the demon, Khain. This is my will.”
Willow pulled back from the memory with a start. Her mother still had her back to Willow and was checking another frame for honey, as bees flew around her, reveling in the lack of a breeze.
The angel had left her something? She’d never seen that part of the memory before, and certainly never seen this shiftsegen thing with the snarling bear on it. Shiftsegen had been the only word that she’d heard with her ears and not her mind, as if he’d taken great care with it, knowing Lucinda’s brain had no way to interpret it.
But more than that, the angel had promised to come back? He never had. Willow gazed at the back of Lucinda’s head, seeing only white hat and black veil designed to keep bees out. What did Lucinda think of the fact that the angel had never come back? It had to increase her anxiety about her daughter. Her sadness about her life. Willow put up her blocks. She would ask her mom later if she wanted to shift through some of the emotions, maybe have Willow release them? But not until she thought more about that promise.
As for the bear/angel pendant, the shiftsegen?
She chose not to see it as a betrayal of her by her mother. She knew how hard her mother tried to take care of her. There had to be a reason her mother had never given it to her.
Willow spoke. “I’ll see you later, Mom. The restaurant is about to open and I need to be there.” Lucinda didn’t look at her or respond to her, and Willow turned around to walk away through the tall grasses, back toward the house.
She needed distance.
Chapter 5
Bruin sat in the truck, watching the crew he’d been traveling across the country with for the last month enter the police station. He was going to miss them all. They’d been close while they’d been traveling together, he, Trent, and Troy crashing in the same hotel room while Rogue and Mac took the adjoining one. They’d turn on Cops or Shield or Law and Order SVU, or sometimes one of those wolf documentaries Trent always lobbied for, then Mac would grab a beer and sit on the edge of the bed, ready for a night with the boys, until Rogue walked by, fresh from the shower and smelling clean. Mac’s eyes would move from the show to his mate and he’d shoot off the bed, telling Bruin, “I’ll be back in five minutes,” and Rogue would grab him by the ear and say, “You’ll be back in an hour,” and that would be the last they’d see of him that evening.
But Trent and Troy were good to hang out with. Such interesting males. Bruin loved the wildness of the wolven, and none were quite as wild as Trent and Troy. The two were the only non-shifting shiften Bruin had ever met, and ruhi with them was nothing like ruhi with Graeme, or Wade, or even Mac, who was falteringly learning to speak that way, now that he could hear it. He had never been able to his whole life, never even wanted to, but when his mate had been in danger, the ability had bloomed inside him with no warning and no instructions. Mac’s fledgling attempts at speaking into another’s mind were stilted and stuttering, while Wade and Graeme’s were like normal speech, although Graeme’s accent was thicker inside Bruin’s head.
Trent and Troy, though, their internal voices came with errant thoughts and sounds, at least to Bruin. For example, when Troy laughed, he always sounded more like he was chuffing, and when Trent was double-down serious, the voice in Bruin’s head rumbled so deeply the words were spoken on the growl of a vicious animal. Bruin likened their affectations to accents, and he loved to listen to them. He often wondered if they would ever be able to shift, and if they did, would they be able to speak right away, or would it take practice to use actual vocal cords?
Now that they were all back in Serenity, Bruin would miss their evening talks and the shows they watched together. Bearen were especially susceptible to going moonstruck without enough shifts and exercise in their animal form, but community helped. Back when the females were alive, most bearen had lived in communities with communal recreational houses, and children often stayed with families for generations, raising their cubs in their parental homes, sometimes in-laws even moving in with in-laws.
Bearen didn’t have alphas, and although they needed their alone time, quiet time to reflect and consider what life had recently brought them, they didn’t normally jockey for control the way wolven did. They could live together easily without one male or female being in charge of the others. They were polite by nature, like Canadians, mellow and philosophical. They saved lives, they didn’t take them.
Now that the females were gone, the bearen were even more of a mess than the wolven, all the males living on their own, hiding their pain from each other. If the females had been alive, Bruin could imagine one of them, his mom maybe, or his nan, grabbing him and his father by the scruff, or possibly the ear, and pulling them around until they faced each other. Bearen female had been tall and short, large and small, but all were dense like the males. Their strength had been legendary, and a male would never judge a female’s toughness by her height. You just didn’t mess with them, ever. Didn’t matter how big and mean you thought you were, a bearen female could always get meaner.
In Bruin’s mind, it was his nan who would force them to face each other. She had been short as a five-gallon bucket, but she could haul a fire hose quicker than any man, even as a mother of twelve and a grandmother of forty-three. She would have grabbed them both and said, “This is ridiculous. Neither of you will be right until you fix this. Now get to fixing.” And she would have stood there until both males had worked it out, not letting them leave or eat or even get a drink until it was done.
Bruin had never known his nan when he was an adult, but his four-year-old self had loved her with every fiber of his being, and respected her and his mother as the firm and fair directors of the family. A family that had shattered when both had been taken on the same day, along with all the female bearen.
Bruin didn’t want to go back to his empty house. It echoed, and when he spoke, no one answered. He missed his brothers.
The glass door inset in the building flashed sunlight in his eyes as
Mac opened it and looked for him. “Bruin, you coming?”
Bruin slid to the still-open truck door and called to his friend, “I’ll be right there.”
Mac nodded and disappeared back in the station. Bruin knew the KSRT had built a cabin on Trevor’s land for Mac and Rogue while they’d all been in Texas, and that an extra room had been added for Bruin, but Bruin hadn’t decided yet if he was going to take them up on it. Did he really belong with the wolves? He was a bear, but if the bears didn’t want him, and the wolves did…
He plodded toward the station. He needed to think on it. He needed to take some quiet time. And that meant he’d need to head to his house, at least for a bit.
He pulled the door open and stepped inside, the coolness of the air conditioning hitting him at once. A sea of blue greeted him, males at desks wearing detective outfits of tactical khakis and blue shirts sitting next to males in patrol uniforms, all with guns on their belts. Many of them turned his way. “Bru!” someone shouted. Rogue nodded to him from across the room. She was sitting on a desk, long legs crossed, examining her fingernails while Harlan and Mac talked.
Bruin nodded solemnly. “Noble alphas,” he said, raising a hand to the crowd of cops in greeting. A few males chuckled and more called his name in greeting.
Blake, one of the patrol officers Bruin had met a few times before, the last time at Trevor and Ella’s house for Rhen’s Blessing of Ella’s pregnancy, was at a desk near the door. When he spotted Bruin, he stood to shake his hand, then grabbed something out of his desk drawer and handed it to Bru. “For you, big guy.”
Bruin took it, a smile touching his lips. Bruin had never met a wolfen he didn’t like. They might be bloodthirsty in private, but in public, they were stand-up guys. Bruin held the bottle up to his face to read it. Rainy Bluff Honey, made in Serenity, Illinois. Holy smokes! He grabbed Blake by the uniform, his eyes wide. “Where did you find this?”
