“Nope,” I said quickly. “Had one of those pap smears, and, erm, I’m good. The castle has not been breached.” The smile felt forced, and I was blushing horribly. Yes. I was the seventeen-year-old who hated talking about sex.
“Good.” Beneath her thick curtain of hair, I could see that Citlalli was smiling. Really smiling. “That’s good to hear, Raina. You’ll have to give me the number to your clinic.” She sighed. “I have an appointment of my own to make.”
Only after she left to get us some patbingsu did my smile fade.
There were some battles I had to fight on my own.
***
Daniella left Citlalli a scathing voicemail worthy of an upcoming mother. The whole subway could hear it. The nearby group of ajummas looked impressed.
From Yu Li, there was a courteous “get well” message. From Rafael, nothing. Citlalli didn’t mention it, but I knew that hurt worse.
She clicked her phone shut. “Damn. When are we going to tell Daniella that we have incredible shapeshifting powers?”
“Do you want to drag Dani into this when five out of eight vampyre princes are still out there?” I asked mildly. “She and Hosuk are safe in America helping Papi through AA.”
Citlalli shrugged, popping her gum obnoxiously loudly. “True. There’s still a giant, fanged, shapeshifting war going on. At least one sister in the Alvarez family should be blessed with blissful ignorance, a normal job, and a hottie boyfriend. God knows the rest of us are doomed. And when are you going to tell your father that you want to start learning about your incredible powers? That pretty calligraphy letter can’t stay on our kitchen table forever.”
“He’s going to need to give me some space.” I shut my eyes to block out the looming family crest intertwined with the fiery red beast. Yong. Dragon. “There are swim meets coming up, university exams to prepare for… I can’t do it all, Citlalli.”
“I know,” she said softly, staring out at the tunnel rushing by. “I need you, too. So I don’t go crazy.”
We both sagged against each other, her iron-muscled arm the only reason I didn’t fall.
Mami let Citlalli know she’d been fired through text message:
I understand your circumstances, mija, but there is no earthly reason I can give to cover for you. The staff must understand that this type of behavior will not be tolerated—by anyone.
I watched my sister’s face grow whiter and whiter.
“That does it,” she said suddenly. “Call Yu Li. I’ll round up the rest of the pack. I’m the Alpha, and I’ve decided we need a goddamn vacation.”
Chapter 5: The Mud Festival
~Citlalli~
I stood high atop a water slide overlooking the golden East Sea and banners fluttering from rows of white tents on the carnival grounds. The air tasted of salt and fish, and the ocean was filled with the bobbing heads of beachgoers. I inhaled deeply. This was what I needed.
I launched myself head-first down the slide—much to the dismay of a groaning Bae behind me.
Rushing water roared in my ears as I was sucked down the chute. My mind was lost in delirious joy at the speed and the sheer vertical drop. I shot into the puddle of mud at the bottom.
“PIG PILE!” A dark shape flashed over my head, and my fist flew out instinctively. The next thing I knew, a stocky New Zealander was groaning in the mud beside me, covering his left eye.
Four of the New Zealander’s mud-caked friends stood nearby, staring at me in amazement.
“Hey!” They pumped their hands in the air. “Did you see that? Knocked Connor straight out.”
“You should jump in the mud-wrestling pit, girlie,” Connor slurred beside me in his thick Kiwi accent.
“Been there. Done that!” I sprang free from the mud and sauntered off as cockily as one could when slogging through a foot of clay-red mud. Only when I felt significantly lost amongst the throngs of carnival-goers did my grin fade.
“Oh, Citlalli.” Raina stood with Yu Li by the Mud Painting Tent, in which they’d spent the last half-hour meticulously decorating their bodies in pastel pink, blue, and green mud. Their glossy black hair gleamed in perfect condition. In turn, I looked like a savage emerged from the swamp, gray mud swallowing up my bathing suit all the way to the roots of my wild curls.
Raina covered her mouth to keep from laughing. Yu Li was less amused.
“Alpha,” she stressed, “I know the Boryeong Mud Festival is a time for fun, but you do know we are here to represent our pack. Not roll around in the mud like children.”
“Beta,” I replied. Usually, all pack members were on a first-name basis, but I just liked reminding her of where she stood in the alphabet. “Beating their chests and rolling around in the mud is what men do best. I’m just bonding with Bae and Kaelan. You know, Kaelan the Irish fellow—the only pack member to witness Jaehoon passing on the title of Alpha to me?”
She raised a striped eyebrow. “And where is Kaelan?”
Bae caught up at that point to unhelpfully add: “I see Rafael sunsaeng-nim ask Kaelan to drink the makgeolli together.”
Rice wine. A traditional bonding drink to laugh and share good times with. I glared at Bae. “Don’t call Rafael ‘teacher.’ He’s a pack breaker.”
“And if he wins Kaelan over to his side, then the stalemate is broken.” Yu Li’s eyes darted to mine, wariness hardening her features at the name of the man we both loved. Had loved. “He wins.”
I gazed off into the angry glare of the sun. It dipped over the sea to cast everything in a bloody light. I always felt a queer tremor run down my spine when night approached. I didn’t feel safe. Not when the vampyre princes Khyber and Donovan were still out there. Not when tensions were mounting along the DMZ after the North Korean military had “accidentally” sunk another South Korean ship.
Not when the pack—my pack—wasn’t unified to face it.
Dealing with Demon had been a definite set-back, but the problems had started long before that. When my first command as Alpha hadn’t been to serve up exiled Vampyre Prince Khyber’s head on a plate, Rafael had split from the Seoul werewolf pack. And he had taken intelligent Moon, strong Namkyu, and bitter Iseul, grieving over the loss of her close pack mate, Ae Cha, with him.
I’d thought it would be a brief separation. I understood: I was an eighteen-year-old foreigner, and I hadn’t exactly gotten off on a smooth footing with the pack.
But I’d always thought that out of all the werewolves, it would be Rafael, my creator, my teacher, my first love, who would step up to support me as Alpha. I’d been sure that with time, Rafael would grow as tired of the Were War against the vampyres as I was. He would put his obsessive crusade to kill Khyber on the back burner. Not because it was wrong—I fully understood the need to destroy the murderer responsible for ending his mother and sister’s lives—but because thanks to the malicious Dark Spirits, I was cursed to a life bond with Khyber. As long as I lived, so did he. To kill Khyber meant to end me. Rafael had done nothing to suggest he wasn’t against that.
It hurt. I’d thought…he would choose me over revenge.
I scowled. So what if I’d been left with Bae, our resident omega who had once lost a fight to a particularly violent alley cat, and Yu Li, Rafael’s ex-girlfriend who had clashed with me as often as she had vampyres?
God knew the only reason Yu Li was sticking around was to feed information to the rebel pack, but really, what did it matter? I had Kaelan, didn’t I? He had been with me that last terrible battle in the spirit world of Eve. He had been there when our old Alpha, Jaehoon, had bravely taken the lead over a cursed bridge and fallen to his death. Kaelan had also witnessed Jaehoon passing on the tooth necklace of the Alphas to me: “Do not lose the necklace I gave you, Citlalli.” His word kept my pack the official one in the eyes of the International Were Council.
Kaelan had changed after Ae Cha’s death. The Irishman’s laughter was harder now; his sense of humor black. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking anymore. How long would h
e follow me, “the Fire Wolf”? His own daughter had been a prisoner of the Vampyre Queen Maya during the Were War, just like my sister Raina. However, his daughter hadn’t made it. She had died to protect Raina. Would Kaelan be tired of war and death like I was, or would he set himself on fire with it as Rafael had done—eating, drinking, breathing flame until he consumed himself?
The mud mask suddenly felt unbearably tight against my face. “Which way did Kaelan and Rafael go?” I asked Bae impatiently.
He blinked, and then pointed back toward our hotel. Bae understood way more English than he let on, but he was too shy to speak it most of the time. I knew the feeling. I’d gone through the same thing myself, minus the “understanding way more Korean than I let on,” part.
“If you’re going by the hotel, then I’ll come, too,” Raina said in a rush. “Early night for me.”
“Are you sure, Raina?” Yu Li asked kindly. “Some of us are going to the concert tonight. It is a nice, family event. Many lights. You’re welcome to come.”
“Maybe another time.” Raina’s smile twitched. “It’s going to take forever to get all of this mud off.”
I slipped an arm around her thin shoulder without a word. My younger sister doesn’t like it when night falls, either.
Yu Li snorted. “Even with mud, you look very polished and refined. It is too bad you are not a wolf. The pack could use you.”
“Nope, I’m just a water dragon.” We looked at each other and grinned. Bae shook his head, not wanting to understand.
We jumped into the ocean for a quick rinse and then threaded our way back through the legions of Koreans and foreigners alike screaming, running, and splashing through the mud. I walked Raina back to the Iris Room in our beachfront hotel, rolled out a sleeping mat for her, and then turned on every single light. I offered to watch TV with her until she fell asleep, but she shoved me away, laughing.
“Citlalli! Rafael already stole your heart, and now you’re letting him steal your pack! Go! But if you bring me back some barbequed clams, I’ll love you forever.”
“Thanks.” I slid my phone screen open. Four text messages.
“Oh, are those from Minho?” Raina rolled over on the bed. “Persistent.”
“I can’t face him ever again. Stupid Demon. She’ll cut off half of the eligible population.” I squatted by my luggage and took out a lantern, which was crafted of delicate buttercup-yellow papier-mâché. “Here. This is a special lantern I made in the workshop. It’s called a sunshine lantern. It chases shadows away.”
My old friend, the Chinese lantern maker Zhi Renshu, had given the spirit world Lantern Shop to me after I’d shown him how to move on. I hoped that wherever he was now, he’d reunited with his brother, the original lantern-making talent.
“It’s from There?” Raina looked at the sunshine lantern, but made no move to touch it.
“Not everything in Eve is bad, Raina.” Easy for me to say. I’d had the freedom to run around the spirit world, not be locked in a creepy palace with a mad vampyre queen. “The White Tiger rules Eve now. She’s changed things. You should see it. Everything is beautiful and blossoming with summer.”
“I’m sure it is.”
I left the lantern at the foot of her bed.
Outside, my faithful shadow, Bae, gazed at me sympathetically.
“She’s getting better,” I told him. “She spent several months locked in Eve, where it was never daylight. The first time the sun set after the rescue, she just flat-out bolted. Found her in the bathtub rocking back and forth, with a damn moonflower clutched to her chest.”
He didn’t understand, but he touched my hand anyhow.
“We’ll work our way back,” I told myself. “Someday, Raina will stop being afraid of the dark.”
Chapter 6: Drinking Makgeolli
~Citlalli~
Men crowded the bar stools in the tent, laughing and toasting each other with shots of soju. Steam hissed from juicy strings of clam fat barbequing on the fryer. I saw the New Zealanders devouring large bowls of bibimbap, mixed seasonal vegetables and white rice swimming in red-hot chili pepper sauce.
Rafael and Kaelan dominated the center table of the tent, lifting bowls overflowing with the milky-white makgeolli rice wine and then gulping them down together. They’d attracted emissaries from the wereleopards of Cambodia, several painted goshawk women from China, and one graying Japanese werebear. Maya, the soul-eating Vampyre Queen who had haunted their lives since the Korean War, was dead. Of her eight feared children, three of the vampyre princes had been slain and the rest routed. The rare White Tiger, the daughter of the original Lady of Eve, had returned to the throne of Eve. She had liberated the enslaved ghosts. There was much to celebrate, and our fellow Weres weren’t in any hurry to return to their own nations. Not when there was mud to be played in.
I was starting to think this vacation was my best idea yet. It had certainly been a popular one. But the easy decisions usually were.
Rafael raised a hand to the server for another round.
“Citlalli!” My friend from Thailand, the werenaga named Thaksin, gestured unabashedly for me to join their table. He thought for a moment, and then said, “Come!”
Our relationship consisted mostly of one word sentences in our respective languages. However, because of Eve, the spirit world in which all creatures could be understood as they wished, I knew he had a wife and two daughters back home, and for vacation they all liked to take midnight dives to the bottom of Emerald Cave, at which time, Thaksin assured me, “the sharks were much more active.”
With Bae trailing cautiously behind, I took a seat between Kaelan and Thaksin. Unfortunately, that meant I got to stare across the table at Rafael’s sun-kissed skin, his messy brown hair, and his lean, muscular shoulders, which were currently being massaged by a petite goshawk woman named Miao. Every time she laughed, a twinkling wind chime sound, the men flushed and had the tendency to knock over makgeolli bowls.
Not a word about the encounter in my apartment. Of finding me frothing and writhing on the ground as Wolf in broad daylight. I vaguely remembered seeing Rafael that day through a shifting kaleidoscope of color that mixed up his expressions. One of his faces had reddened with anger when he’d demanded my return, but the other had been broken-hearted. I wasn’t sure which one was real.
My eye bore into his forehead, but he didn’t look back. That was it, then. All of those words. Dipped and splashed in guilt.
I scowled and found more mud in my ear.
“You are Citlalli, the new leader of the wolves!” Miao exclaimed, extending a prim hand. “It is funny, isn’t it? An American girl leading wolves in South Korea?”
“She must be providing them with weapons,” another goshawk joked, and the pair laughed.
All of the “wolves,” deliberately didn’t look at each other. It would be stupid to let the other Were tribes know how estranged the pack was at present. Our story was that there were minor problems “adjusting,” to the new leadership, but few were buying it. No wonder so many goshawks were sticking around. Xu Xiang, leader of the International Were Council, would want to know how deep the problem went.
I have to get the pack back together as soon as possible. I wiggled anxiously in my seat. I’d seen separation in a family before—my family. It was bitter and ugly and led to a divorce that left all of us shocked at the monsters we could become. None of us had trusted the other. What we had trusted was silence, and when that silence went on for too long, many of us almost lost our lives to it. Now my father drank and rarely answered my calls. My smart older sister Daniella had no idea I was a wolf, and oh, that man Mami had cheated with that resulted in Raina’s birth? A shapeshifting dragon. My brother Miguel had barely survived a life of drugs and gangs to come here, and my eldest sister, dearest Mari, had died at the hands of vampyres.
At least now I knew she was at peace.
I’d blamed Mami for the divorce, for the silence. For losing Mari. Now I was responsible for a
family. I would not let us crash and burn.
“What is your agenda, pack leader?” Miao was asking. “Will you go after the vampyre princes who hurt your sisters?”
I knew very well who had put those words in her mouth. I glared at Rafael, but he seemed to find everything else in the tent interesting except for me.
“The pack’s agenda is one of peace,” I said loudly. “This war has gone on for half a century. I have photos, Miao, of all the werewolves lost in the struggle.” I remembered all too well the haunting black-and-white photograph that Alpha Jaehoon had shown me from the Korean War. He had been the only one left from it. Jaehoon had been trying to teach me to stop thinking about only myself. I wouldn’t let him down. It already hurt when I looked at photos of our current pack and saw faces that weren’t around anymore.
“We have begun by sending emissary monks from Peomeosa Temple into the countryside,” I continued confidently. “Daegu, Gyeongju, Mokpo… The Korean War scattered the pack, so who knows how many werewolves are out there, lost with no pack, believing themselves the only one of their kind? We will work together with Peomeosa Temple to find them. We will bring them home here, to Seoul.”
“And while we’re at it, China can rest assured that the Seoul werewolves will also be looking for any signs of the exiled vampyre princes,” Rafael spoke suddenly, his razor-sharp intensity burying the words into my heart like a knife. “After all, it would be foolish to underestimate the threat they present just because their Mummy’s gone.”
He looked calmly at me. “I can take Jeju Island with Kaelan. What do you say…Alpha?”
That did it. I knew what I’d promised Raina, but my mind reeled at Rafael’s blunt subversion of authority. Wolf came to life in a bundle of snarls, leaving the door open for Demon…whose cold, taut anger caused my skin to crackle ever so slightly.
Year of the Dragon (Changeling Sisters Book 3) Page 4
