Dizzy, I reach out to steady myself on the doorframe. “You gave them my father?”
“He’s fine,” Harmon says through clenched teeth. “He’s the one who offered to trade. He’s living at his house in the Third Valley. You don’t have to believe me. I’ll show you tomorrow. But tonight, I’m going to see the doctor. You can do whatever you want down here.” He pauses, then turns back to me. “And Stella? I’m sorry.”
With that, he steps back and closes the door. I throw myself at it, trying to turn the knob before it locks, but I’m too late. I hear the deadbolt clunk into place, and I slide down the door and rest my forehead on my knees. Behind the door, I hear Harmon’s uneven footfalls on the wooden stairs. I refuse to feel guilty for injuring him.
But I do, anyway.
After a while, I return to my spot under the window. I have a lot to think about. Most of all, how I’m going to get out of here, find my dad, and leave once and for all. I can’t stop returning to that one question—why hasn’t my dad come to get me? Harmon must be lying about him living at his house. He’d come for me if he could.
I should have gone with Mrs. Nguyen. I think over her words. She told me not to trust Harmon, but I didn’t listen. Now I know she was saying those things for a reason. I replay what she said before she left. Look around. See what’s there, but don’t trust my eyes. Don’t trust anyone or anything. The wolves say they’re honest, but if I’ve learned anything here, it’s that they are all liars. And I am always alone.
20
The next few days are strange. Harmon lies under the ladder on his blanket, with a new cast on his foot. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Just when he gets out of one bandage, another one appears somewhere else. His father died. He can’t take his rightful place as Alpha.
But when I start to feel guilty, I scold myself out of it. I know better than to believe his sad act. He’s here by choice. He could be up there, being waited on hand and foot by all the cute wolf girls who would at least pretend he’s not hideous. They’d probably still flirt and beg to be his wife. Pride alone keeps him down here.
As for me, I have other obstacles to consider. I no longer sit around reading, occupying my time and waiting for something to happen. Filling my time and escaping the mind-dissolving boredom only appealed when I couldn’t find a way out. Now that I know I’m Harmon’s prisoner, everything is different.
I realize as I settle into the bed the night after Harmon’s confession that I am not afraid of him anymore. I’m not scared of what might happen if I try to escape, because I know Harmon won’t hurt me. The thought doesn’t sit easy with me, but there it is. From that night on, I sleep in the bedroom, leaving Harmon to wallow in despair in the gloomy basement. The bedroom is damp and musty, too, with the same small window at ground level that the other rooms have. But I don’t have to share the space with Harmon. I only see him when he shuffles through to use the bathroom, his head down, his eyes fixed on the floor. Good. At least he’s feeling guilty about what he did. He deserves it.
When he’s not in the room, I take to filing the splintered end of the broom handle against the rough sandstones that make up the wall beside the bed. It’s the one stone wall in the basement, on the far end of all the rooms. I’m guessing it’s aligned with the wall of the house above and needs fortification. I’m using it as a grinder to sharpen a stake. Emmy would have rolled her eyes and told me stakes are for vampires. But as I don’t expect a gun loaded with silver bullets to magically fall into my hands, I’ll have to make do.
At the very least, it will slow them down. These wolves seem as vulnerable to injury as regular humans. Which means I can sharpen a wooden broom handle and impale someone. I can use the fork I squirreled away last night to jab someone in the eye. If Harmon is going to keep me in prison, I’m going to have to start thinking like an inmate. I conjure scenes from long-forgotten movies and TV shows, drawing on them for inspiration. Harmon has no idea what I’m capable of.
Now that I know my enemy, I can fight him. I have all the advantages. Harmon thinks I’m going to passively accept my fate like I have the last two months. The last two years. He thinks it’s fine to let me use silverware. He’s no prison warden. He’s a slacker, as trusting of me as I was of him before I learned the truth. To him, it’s as if it makes no difference, as if the only thing that has changed is my knowledge of it. But everything has changed.
Finally, after a week of plotting, the day arrives. The day of the second full moon. As Harmon stalks into the bathroom, I hide my broom handle between the wall and the mattress, smiling to myself. Maybe I should have gone with Mrs. Nguyen, learned how to be a witch. I’ve already got a broomstick.
And it will have to do, because I don’t get a chance to work on it all day. Harmon paces the basement and the sitting room all morning, and I’m too nervous to risk him walking in and finding me with a weapon. In the afternoon, he appears in the bedroom doorway. “Do you want to go outside?”
“I thought you were the dog here,” I say, swinging my legs off the bed.
Harmon looks confused. Of course. No one here has pets, so he wouldn’t know about taking the dog outside.
“Never mind,” I say.
“I’m going to go walk the paths in the rose garden. Do you want to come?”
I want to go so bad my toes curl in anticipation of the soft grass underfoot. But I feel a trap in this, somewhere. I want him to think I’m normal, though, that nothing has changed. If he gave me a chance to get out last week, wouldn’t I have done it? Refusing the offer might raise his suspicions. He may not turn the place upside down for the wooden skewer I’m going to drive through his back while he’s incapacitated, but he might realize I’ve finally snapped.
“Sure,” I say. “Aren’t you afraid people will see us, though?”
“No one goes back there except kids playing on the path.”
“And they’re too afraid of your face to brave it?”
A muscle in his cheek twitches. “Are you coming or not?”
“Coming.” I hop off the bed and beam up into his glowering face.
He turns and stalks to the door, but he can’t manage an intimidating gait with his crooked legs. By the time we reach the top of the creaky wooden stairs, I’m fighting a mixture of impatience to get outside and remorse about my plan. Like I told him, I don’t actually want to kill anyone, even my jailer. But I will, if it means escape. It’s easy to hate him when he’s not with me. It’s harder when he’s here, so human in his monstrosity.
He throws open the door, and I blink against the brightness. When we step outside, though, my eyes adjust quickly. It’s not actually very bright. I’m glad I’ll be escaping at night. If the sun was shining, I might be completely blinded after spending so long in a shadowy basement.
Harmon takes my hand and leads me towards the rose patch, the tiny white petals bright under the dark clouds. It’s one of those stormy days of early summer, the air thick with a heavy warmth, the earth expectant. Deep grey clouds hang low in the sky, looming over us as we step onto the narrow path through the tangled vines.
“I don’t know if I’d call this a garden,” I say as we duck around a barbed branch hanging in our way. It seems to reach for us as we pass, but we slip by. Harmon didn’t say anything about possessed roses.
“That’s what my mother called it,” he says, leading the way. This time, he lets me walk behind him, but he keeps hold of my hand. “She cut the paths through it so we could walk here and enjoy it. It used to be an impassible patch of thorns.”
“Where is your mother?” I ask, glancing around. I realize I’ve never seen his mother, never heard her spoken of. It’s one thing to have a male pack leader, but to have his wife completely obscured by his status is another.
“She’s dead.” He doesn’t slow when he speaks, and his voice has no inflection. But it’s a practiced flatness, I can tell. I’ve grown to know the subtle shifts in his voice, his face, his body language. I really don’t want
to have to kill him.
“I’m sorry.” I wait for him to tell me what happened, but he doesn’t. Of course not. No one volunteers information to the outsider. Determined not to let it bother me, I follow him through the green bushes, their thorns stark beneath the solid ceiling of ominous, angry clouds. At last, we reach the end of the path. Before us lies a large rock, the bushes cleared away for a few feet around it.
For a long time, we sit in silence on the stone. Harmon rests his elbows on his knees and stares at the brambles. I work a thorn out of my bare foot.
At last, he says, “You can come out here any time you want.”
“As long as I put myself back up when I’m done?”
He frowns down at his hand, kneading his paw as he speaks. “I don’t want you to feel like a prisoner.”
“I am a prisoner.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I can go home? To Oklahoma City?”
“No,” he admits. “No, you can’t do that.”
“So I’m free to live here…against my will.”
He turns to me. “Why are you so against joining us? We’ll take care of you, Stella. I don’t understand why you don’t want to be part of the community. I’m offering to take you in. For you to live here like anyone else. They’re not prisoners. They’re members. Why do you insist on seeing it that way?”
“Really? You don’t understand why I don’t want to join your pack?”
“No,” he says. “I honestly don’t. You’d belong. We’d accept you as one of us. We’re good people. We’ll be good to you.”
“Like you have been for the past three years? Leaving me in my mother’s attic and doing nothing? Or like you have been the last few months, letting me think I’m being held captive by evil shifter kidnappers, when really you’re the evil kidnapper?”
“Okay, I admit, I should have told you. And if you want to go home, to your mother’s house, I can ask the pack if they’re okay with it. I should have done that a long time ago, you’re right. I just…” His crooked eyes meet mine, and I have to look away first. Harmon clears his throat, and his voice takes on a businesslike, impersonal edge, so I’m sure that he was going to say something other than what comes out. “I don’t know how responsive they will be to me. I’ve never been their leader. I was injured before I took over.”
“So who’s running things?”
“Everyone,” he says, throwing up his hands. “Everyone but me.” He’s quiet a minute, glowering at the millions of tiny white roses. Finally he goes on. “Mostly your mother is in charge. As the former Alpha’s child and my father’s Second, she’s equipped to lead. But she doesn’t have the necessary bond with the pack to be Alpha.”
“And she’s a woman.”
Harmon sighs. “Why are you so fixated on that? Women aren’t second class citizens to us. They’re treasured and protected, the same as any other member of the pack. They do equal work and have equal status.”
“Except for Alpha.”
He’s silent for a long moment. “Yes,” he admits at last. “That’s our tradition. It’s never happened before. But I don’t see why it couldn’t.”
“So my mother could be Alpha?”
He thinks this over, frowning down at his hands. “As far as I know, a woman has never wanted to be our Alpha. But if your mother wanted to challenge me for the position…”
“By fighting you? She’s old, and a girl, so she has no chance. That sounds fair.”
“So you’d expect me to take it easy on her, right? Now you see why it doesn’t happen?”
I grumble my displeasure at the unfairness, but Harmon’s expression remains stoic. “If she wanted to challenge me now, she’d have the advantage,” he says quietly. “Since I haven’t been confirmed, and I’m unable to shift, she’s acting Alpha. Before my father died…” He breaks off and swallows. “She had a lot of influence on him during the past year, when he was injured. He was confused, and she’d feed him ideas, and he just…went along. She’s practically led the pack this last year. The pack trusts her.”
I try to wrap my head around that, to see my mother as their leader. My cold, heartless mother putting everyone else first? But then, Zechariah wasn’t exactly warm and friendly. It’s easier to imagine them moving from him to my mother than from him to Harmon. I wonder what she’ll do with me if she’s Alpha—certainly not invite me to join the pack.
I remind myself that it doesn’t matter. I won’t be here then. I’ll be somewhere else…maybe Oklahoma, though my childhood dreams have lost their luster. Even college seems like a laughable fantasy now. What am I going to tell people about my high school?
Oh, you danced with your friends and took cheesy pictures at prom? I went to a werewolf coronation which was interrupted by irate shapeshifters, and my crush was brutally attacked by my father, who, FYI, happens to be a mountain lion.
I am not equipped for a career in anything but how to survive in prison, which I’m guessing is not a booming field of study. When I try to imagine the future, it’s a big fat nothing.
“So what happens to you?” I ask.
“I stay in the basement until I can shift,” he growls. “My aunt has been bringing us food. I don’t have anyone else. This is my house until they choose a new leader.”
“And in that time, I’m just supposed to be happy to be subjected to the whims of the pack at any given moment? I’m confused about why I should want to be a part of this community now, after being treated the way I have. Especially if my mother is Alpha.”
He frowns down at his black paw. I try not to stare at him. I can’t keep my eyes from him, but I can’t look too long, either. In daylight, his grotesque appearance is magnified, laid bare to see. The black wolf fur sprouting from tan human skin on his neck makes me shudder. His clothes fit him strangely, hanging loose in places they shouldn’t and stretching tight in others.
“You’re right,” he says at last. “But the fact is, I can’t change any of that now. All I can do now is offer you this. To live as one of us, not a prisoner. To be part of our pack, and if you don’t want to do that, at least a part of the community. You’ll have your own house. A share in the community garden. It’s not what you want. But it’s the best I can do right now. It’s all I have to offer, and I’m offering it to you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, standing to face him. “It’s not enough.”
21
We walk the rest of the twisty-turny path through the roses in silence. Harmon walks ahead, his hand in his pocket, his paw hanging loose. If I had my broom handle, I could stab him in the back right now. But I can’t stomach the idea. He’s not the only one keeping me prisoner. If I kill him, the pack will probably kill me. If I injure him and run, which is my plan, they’ll run me down and devour me. If I’m lucky, they’ll simply throw me back in the basement and lock the door. But I’ll lose Harmon’s trust and…friendship.
That’s all it is, I remind myself. Even so, the thought—and my accompanying resistance to the idea—is unsettling. Maybe I am his prisoner, but I’m more than that to him. I can see it every time he looks at me. And I don’t want him to see me differently than he does, to look at me with hatred and disgust. No matter how I feel about him, I don’t want him to despise me.
When we reach the end of the winding path, and step out onto the grass, Harmon turns to me. “Is there anything I can do to make you happy?” he asks.
“Besides letting me go?”
“Yes. Anything.”
I square my shoulders. “No. I’ll never be happy here.”
“Then what would make you happy?” he asks, rocking a little on his human foot, forwards and back. “If you went back to Oklahoma, what would be different? I asked what you missed, and you said pizza and clothes. I brought you those things. And you’re still not happy.”
“Maybe it doesn’t translate for a wolf,” I say slowly. “You’re all about obedience, and being one with a pack. I want to be myself. It’s nice to feel like p
art of something, but I also want to be an individual. And here, I can’t have either. I’m not part of the pack. Even if I join, I’ll never be one of you.”
My throat tightens as I speak, and when I meet his eyes, they’re so full of sadness and compassion that I have to look away again, swallowing to stop the tears.
“And what would you do once you got home?” he asks.
But it’s not like before, when I’d tell him about my old life to pass the time. That’s all gone now.
“I’d bring my dad home,” I say. “And we’d start over.”
“You can’t go back in time,” he says. “You can’t forget what you know. This is who you are now, Stella. You know about us, and that’s dangerous.”
“I’ll never tell a soul,” I say, my heart hammering. He is looking at me differently, like a stranger. An outsider. Like he might be considering it. “I promise. My dad lived out there for years, and he never told. I—I’ll do anything you want. I’ll sign a contract promising.”
He smiles a little. “I don’t think my people would put much faith in a shifty shifter contract. And look what happened to your father. Something brought him back here.”
“He got trapped here.”
“Because he came back.”
“Fine, you’re right, he came back,” I say. “But you said you’d take me to see him. When? Are you holding him hostage somewhere, too?”
“I’m going to talk to the pack tomorrow,” he says. “After…after everyone’s awake. I’ll ask about letting you go back. And I’ll show you how to see your father tonight.”
20
Later that night, I pace the tiny bedroom and the equally tiny sitting room, as nervous as Harmon about what the night will hold. When I hear the door in the other room scrape, I duck through the tunnel. It’s too early to make a move. Harmon is sitting under the ladder, with his back to the wall, his eyes closed.
Beastly Beauty: A Fairy Tale Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 2) Page 13
