by Lynn Red
I wasn’t entirely sure what he was giving me, but whatever it was kept me in a daze.
I shook my head, to clear the cobwebs. Dane was laughing at the woman who I’d come to realize was his stepmother. I hated the way he was mocking her with every word he spoke almost as much as I hated what he’d done to me. Every word out of his mouth just dripped with venom and bile and hate, which didn’t make much sense because this woman was really friendly, and had made enchiladas.
“Dane!” she snapped. “Don’t you understand what you’re doing? You trapped that woman! That’s not a mate, that’s a slave!”
“Eh,” he shrugged, smiling as I involuntarily fed him a tortilla chip. “Ten of one, dozen of another.”
She cocked her head slightly, apparently just as confused as I was. “Don’t you mean—?”
“Shut up,” Dane snapped at me. “No one asked you to talk. Get more guacamole on the next one.”
“You’re insane,” the woman said flatly. She had told me her name, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember it. My entire being was shaky, like I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged – this world or a different one. Along with the equilibrium problem, my memory came and went. Sometimes I remembered things just as I always had, but other times I could hardly recall my own name, or where I lived. Although I guess that didn’t much matter since Dane had taken me to the place he called home, which was little more than a shanty outside of town.
“You’re a lunatic, and you’re going to kill this poor girl and drag us all down with you. All for what? To placate your nonsensical need for fighting and battle and blood?”
“No, mother,” Dane hissed the word, which made me hate him more. I dropped the guacamole-covered chip in his lap. With how clumsy I’d become it could pass for an accident, but... well, sad to say that’s what had become of my ability to rebel. “It has nothing to do with that. Well,” he paused for a second. “Okay, there is a bit of that. But why can’t you see what dad believed I was capable of doing? We used to be kings of the world, us lycans. And now we hide in the shadows, sulking around at night and happy that no one knows we exist because it avoids trouble.”
“It’s peace, Dane,” she said. “When lycans were kings there wasn’t a day that went by without some overly brave human hunting one of us down and using the skin for a cloak. There wasn’t a week that passed without a clan war either almost starting or actually erupting.”
The smile across my awful mate’s face told me that he was well aware of all that.
“That’s the way it was supposed to be,” he said. “Dad knew that. He trusted me.”
“No, he didn’t!” she got up in his face the way only a mother can. One hand was wrapped in an apron emblazoned with wolf paw prints that were all signed with grandchildren’s names, and the other was stuck right in the center of her enormous stepson’s chest. “Do you somehow not remember why you left? Is it possible you’re that insane?”
Dane stood up, looming over the old woman, but she didn’t back away a single centimeter. I want to be like her when I grow up. She stared right back at his face, her eyes burning with anger, but her voice calm and soft. “Then tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”
There it is, I thought. The chink in this idiot’s armor.
Dane tightened his jaws until his head was trembling. He clenched his white-knuckled fists, and his entire body shook with rage. He looked like a water balloon filled past the point where it can hold the water, ready to explode. But instead of popping, he drove his hands down to his sides and grunted like a kid throwing a tantrum.
“Right,” she said, as he backed down. “You remember. You remember him telling you that even though you were his first son, and he thought you probably could start another clan war, that he’d rather the entire pack wither to nothing? That all sound familiar.”
“Dad was an idiot,” Dane growled. “He didn’t understand either. He had no honor, no pride. He’s just like my spineless brother.”
That got him a slap across the face hard enough to turn his massive head. On his face was an absolutely priceless look of surprise and horror. “You will not talk that way about the alpha of this pack in my house.”
Damn, I thought, scooping up another wad of guacamole on a chip. For a moment I just stood there, holding the chip outstretched, and then I decided to once again exert my will by eating it. That’s... good God that’s good guac.
“He lost the challenge,” Dane said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The only reason you call him alpha is that he’s your son. He’s nothing to anyone who matters.”
“Oh, and who is that? You mean that gaggle of old drunks led by your uncle Norton who acts like your own personal army of simple-minded thugs? That’s very frightening, Dane. I’m sure the real alpha, the one who didn’t have to trick sweet Delilah here into wanting to be his mate, is shaking in his boots.”
Every time she jabbed at his pride, or insulted his authority, Dane got more unhinged. At first I noticed beads of sweat on his upper arms and then that the hair on the back of his head was wet with moisture. The fact that his entire head was red wasn’t lost on me either, no matter how fragile my mental state may have been.
She was advancing then, gray curls bouncing with every jab of her fingertip. Dane was backing away, though he was gnashing his teeth and breathing really heavily to cover that he was being intimidated by a woman about a third his size.
“You,” she continued, backing him into the counter where the enchiladas were cooling, “you’re the one with no honor, no pride. What you take for dignity is just arrogance, just hubris. What you think is the honor of being a member of this pack is just a game.”
She took another step further. “You know what the difference between you and one of my four year old grandcubs who likes to play army is?”
A look of self-satisfaction came over Dane’s face, and he had just opened his mouth when she said, “Nothing, except they’re too young to know better.”
“God damn that was a burn,” I heard myself say, in the instant before I realized I was saying it. Immediately I clapped my hand over my mouth and hoped for a brief second that maybe I’d just had one of my confused spells and hadn’t actually said that.
“Thank you dear,” she said, with a benevolent, grandmotherly smile. “I thought it was quite sharp myself. Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes. I want you to stay in here with me. Dane can go enjoy himself somewhere else.”
My mate was growling, but he wasn’t saying anything. Big, obnoxious, over-confident Dane had been thoroughly put in his place. He knew better than open his mouth again, because almost certainly he wouldn’t come out looking any better for it.
“She comes with me,” Dane snarled. “She’s my mate.”
He snatched my arm, yanking me almost off my feet after him.
“No, she does not,” the woman said in that voice of calm, quiet, absolute command. “She stays right here, because I need to get to know my daughter-in-law. Is that clear?”
I looked in her direction and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod of her head. Obediently, Dane dropped my arm and shook his head, muttering a curse. “I’ll be at my house. She knows the way, get her a cab.”
He turned and tromped away, through a house full of laughing guests. His little posse, including drunk uncle Norton, gathered around the big man for a moment, and shot plenty of nasty glances back at us.
“I’m Greta,” she said. “In case either I forgot to mention it, or whatever he’s drugging you with is still fiddling around with your brains and you forgot.”
“The... what?” I asked, taken aback. “I... I’m sorry for being so rude. I’m Delilah Coltrane, I’m not sure what’s going on with my mind lately, but—”
“I’ll explain everything. And I know who you are already – my other son – the one I don’t wish would go get lost and never come back, told me all about you. Never seen him lose his mind quite like he did for you. That’s... quite a feat.�
��
*
It left me shaking.
Just an hour of simple conversation, something I went through at least a hundred times a week, left me actually trembling.
“I had no idea,” I said, trying to find something to play with to keep my hands from shaking like a two-day dry alcoholic. “I really,” involuntarily my throat closed in something similar to a swallow, but that had so little saliva involved that my tongue just stuck to the roof of my mouth. Greta sipped her tea, a faint smile on her lips.
“You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s Dane, he’s... well, I hesitate to say monster, so I’ll go with ‘headstrong to a fault.’”
I took a big gulp of the extremely strong black tea she’d handed me, which got another little smile. “You can handle your caffeine,” she remarked. “Jake gets jittery after a cup and a half.”
“Oh I’m jittering. I just have a deathgrip on the tablecloth so you can’t tell.”
“To the point,” Greta said, “because we’re going to have a gaggle of hungry wolves starting to get cranky in a few minutes unless I get this food out to them.”
When she mentioned it, I had noticed the growing din from the other room. Ever since Dane and his idiot brigade left, it seemed to calm down for a time, but they were starting to get cranked up.
“The fact is you didn’t mark him back. Right?”
I tilted my head slightly to the side. “Like bite him?”
She laughed louder than I expected, which surprised me enough to snort a little tea up into my nose.
“That certainly is one way,” she said, dabbing at the corner of her left eye with her napkin and taking away a tear. “A very base, brutish, obnoxious way of doing it. Which is probably exactly the sort of thing Dane loves. But no, marking is just our way of marriage. It’s a very solemn oath that is usually followed by an absolutely astonishing amount of alcohol.”
I giggled at that too, partially because I could really use that astonishing amount of alcohol right about then. “Well, then no, I didn’t do any biting or any swearing of oaths. He just made me agree.”
She took my hand, massaging my palm with her papery, but surprisingly powerful fingers. “Well, his forcing you is a very good thing. I mean, not that it’s good, but since he chose not to follow the traditions, which of course he didn’t, because he never has, Dane won’t have a leg to stand on if this ever goes to a pack council.” Suddenly, she looked away, though held tight on my hand. “I’m so sorry this happened. It’s my fault, after all. I’m the one who pushed his father to take Jacob over Dane as heir.”
I shook my head. “You didn’t do any of this – Dane’s the lunatic. You just did what you thought – what was – right. How could you feel sorry for that?”
She took a deep breath. She took another. With long, measured breaths that rattled a bit in her lungs when she exhaled, Greta calmed her nerves, and took another sip of tea. “Thank you,” she finally said. “But the guilt I feel is in my heart. In my soul. Until he either realizes what he’s doing, or...”
“He will,” I cut in. “I know it sounds either stupid or crazy, or maybe both – but in between his bouts of megalomania and wild ambition, he’s not really like this all the time. When he’s alone, he’s more calm and reserved. He worries, he questions himself.”
She laughed. “If only he’d indulge in self-doubt over trying to reignite a fire that’s been burned out for as long as,” her eyes and her thoughts wandered. “Well, a long time, at any rate.”
“What did happen?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I have heard both of them talk about wars, or clans... packs, whatever. I’ve heard them talk about stuff that honestly sounds like it came out of a fairytale.”
With a gentle patting of my hand, Greta drew her thin lips into a crooked smile. “That you think of them as fairytales should tell you how well we’ve been hidden.”
“I never thought about it like that,” I admitted. “Of course, with how weird my head has been this last few days, I haven’t thought about very much except trying to keep the thin, broth soup Dane feeds me in my mouth instead of on my shirt.”
She shook her head again. “He is a savage in the truest sense of the word. Our people – the lycans, werewolves, whatever you want to call us – have had a past much longer than yours. There’s not much known about where we came from, or why we have the wolves inside us, and the reason we do not know is because of the wars Dane wishes to restart.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, if there have been all these things lost, and all these problems because of... okay I’m gonna need like the super-remedial version of all this. Give me some context – how long ago are we talking?”
With a blank look on her face, Greta shook her head. “We simply don’t know. There are some elder storytellers who talk about wolves being old when the pyramids were young, but as far as specifics go, we have nothing. All we know is that our people are older than yours, and we’ve never exactly gotten along.”
“Big bad wolf, three little pigs, all that?”
She nodded. “The beast of Bordeaux, unexplained kidnappings, assassinations and deaths the world over. We might not be very good at wrangling our own children, but if there’s one thing wolves are true wonders at, it’s manipulating human politics. Your president is—”
I put my hand up to stop her. “Nope! Nope, not that. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough, but for now let me be the kid in sixth grade who still believes in Santa because I want to, not because I’m dumb.”
“Very good,” she said with a jollier laugh than before. “Although all I was going to say is that some of them have known about us, but this one doesn’t. But the point is, we’ve always been here, always been in and around human affairs. But – and this is what Dane doesn’t understand – we were hunted almost to extinction.”
My jaws just about hit the table. “Big bad wolf?”
She smiled again, very sadly this time. “Those damned fairytales. Those Grimm boys, they really had it out for us. The story goes that one of them lost a girlfriend to one of us, or maybe it was a wife – and by ‘lost’ I mean ‘the woman picked the wolf’ and nothing involving killing or eating.
“Okay, stop right there. Wait just a second. You’re telling me that The Brothers Grimm, all the stuff they wrote about werewolves weren’t actually folk tales? They just made it up to get back at werewolves for stealing their girlfriend?”
“Oh, to be sure,” Greta said, “a great many of those were actually popular fables. But as you said – the ones about the wolves? Quite invented.”
I sat back in my chair and slid down until my head rested on the top of the wide-backed rest. “I’m not sure why I even care this much. I mean those stories never had any effect on my life, I wasn’t some kind of Grimm super-fan or anything, but... Jeez, that sorta makes me question the rest of history.”
“As you should. But before that, long before that, we’d gone into hiding. We had our packs and our own politics to worry about. Human affairs became too messy.”
“This is all starting to make sense.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dane,” I said, “with all his anger and ridiculousness about not wanting to be in the shadows anymore. He says it so dramatically... how wolves should be kings, and not peasants, that kind of business.”
She sighed. “That does sound like Dane. There have been other attempts to overthrow pack rule and do what he wants. They invariably fail though, because so many of us are so comfortable.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”
Greta nodded. “Anymore, that comfort isn’t the case. After all, even though we prefer to pretend humans don’t affect us, it isn’t true. Just as how it isn’t true that the Grimm stories don’t affect you. If not for that...”
“Oh God you’re right.” My stomach twisted into a knot. “I guess everything is connected if you think about it hard enough.”
“When you get to be my age, you sure don’t see many
coincidences, if I’m certain about anything, it’s that.”
In the living room, someone was shouting “say ‘pecker’ damn it!” at the television, which was far more excited than I’ve ever heard anyone be about Family Feud outside of my visits to my auntie Belgia at the rest home. I guess the person in question said something at least as funny as ‘pecker’ because the entire gang in the living room exploded with laughter.
“But,” Greta said, dragging my attention back from the hell of mid-day gameshows, “if there are no coincidences, then you’re not one, either.”
“What part could I possibly have to play? I’m just a college dropout who barely makes a living crafting gaudy yard art and carving dolphins out of chunks of ice,” I said, sounding more dejected than I’d intended.
“Wait, you know how to do that?” Greta’s eyes absolutely flared to life. Their normal stony gray started sparkling, dancing in the pleasant light from the overhead lamp. “With the dolphins? I just can’t get enough of watching those contests on late night sports channels. The rest of my family embarrasses me with all their reality programs, but I could watch people carve ice sculptures all day long.”
To say I was taken aback was a comical understatement. “Well,” I said, “yeah.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “I pretend I’m a very artistic sort of person, and I guess I am, but the ice sculptures are how I make most of my money.”
“Could you do a wolf?”
I choked slightly on my tea. “Well, sure, if I had a picture to go by. Dolphins are easier though because they’re flat. No fur to texture.”
Greta nodded slowly. “Very good. So you’ll do one for the marking? Or, wedding, whatever it is you want to call it?”
She must have noticed my eyes widening, because she caught herself. “Oh no, no, I mean the real one. When Dane is no longer an obstacle, you’ll have to follow the traditions of the pack with Jacob.”
“Do those traditions include gaudy statues?”
“Oh honey,” Greta said with a chortle, “you’ve seen those shirts with the wolves howling at the moon? We invented those.”
