by Naomi Clark
I glanced at her, taking in her mussed hair and clothes. She was still in last night’s outfit and she hadn’t washed her makeup off. Mascara bled down her cheeks, giving her that panda look that, under other circumstances, I found adorable. “Have you been up all night?” I asked.
“Of course I bloody have,” she cried. “I was waiting for you! Where were you?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I didn’t want to talk about the feral in front of a human copper. “What happened to the door?” I asked instead.
“It was like that when I got back,” she said. “I was going to call the police when you got back, but you didn’t get back.” She leveled me with a hard glare, a silent message that, as happy as she was to have me home, she was also mightily pissed off. “So I called them this morning instead and PC Weldon showed up.”
“Obviously this is an Alpha Humans attack,” Weldon said, taking the last chair at the table.
“Obviously,” I agreed, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice.
“I understand you had a run-in with them a few months back,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, “so I’m assuming this is a revenge attack.”
I’d been arrested for affray last time we’d had a run-in with Alpha Humans, after Adam’s funeral. And Shannon had ended up in hospital. As far as I was concerned, we ought to be the ones seeking revenge. I kept that to myself though.
“So what do we do?” I asked, squeezing Shannon’s hand. “Their scents must be all over the garden—can we get a wolf copper in?”
He smiled patronizingly at me. “Scent evidence isn’t admissible in court, Ms Hammond, as I’m sure you know. For now, there’s nothing to do except monitor the situation. Nobody was hurt and unless they strike again, we don’t have much to go on.”
“You are not serious,” I said.
Shannon cut me short. “PC Weldon, this is intimidation,” she said, sounding far more sure of herself. “And a serious threat to our safety. Die dyke bitches is a pretty clear message, don’t you think?”
“Of course and we take such matters very seriously,” he said. “But at this stage there is simply nothing the police can do. We’ll file a report and take statements from you both and you’ll have an incident number. If anything else occurs—”
“What else has to occur before you can do anything?” Shannon asked. “I take it that when Alpha Humans are breaking down our front door and smashing the house up, you’ll do more than give us an incident number?”
Weldon kept his patient mask fixed in place, although I could smell his exasperation. I imagined a lifetime of this, dealing with irate and scared crime victims, trying to assure them all was well when it clearly wasn’t. I was exhausted just thinking about it.
Before Weldon could speak again, I jumped in. “Let’s just leave it, okay? I don’t have the energy for this now.” Shannon shot me a dark look, but Weldon seemed grateful. I smiled weakly at the odd role-reversal between me and my mate. Normally she was the pacifier and I was the one making a scene; the change made my head ache.
We gave our statements—both brief given that neither of us had been here at the time of the incident—and Weldon left, promising to stay in touch. Shannon slammed the door on him, flipped her hair from her face and rounded on me.
“I sat up all night for you, Ayla. What the hell happened?”
She sounded furious, but I caught the edge of anxiety in her voice. She’d been scared for me after seeing that graffiti. I’d have felt the same. Drained, I sat down on the bottom step and held my face in my hands. My stomach stung as I leaned over and I winced, straightening up again. Seeing me flinch, Shannon was instantly on her knees beside me.
“Ayla? Are you hurt? God, speak to me, will you? I was so worried about you.”
“Me and Glenn smelled the feral,” I said, raising my head. “And we followed him and we fought.” I pulled up the hem of the tracksuit jacket to show the faint pink scar on my stomach. Shannon touched it tenderly.
“Tell me,” she said.
I did, telling her about smelling Molly and other city wolves, reliving the feel of the feral’s claws ripping through my skin, the horrible plunge into the river. I shuddered, cold again at the thought of it. When I finished, Shannon heaved a heavy sigh.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she muttered. “You could have been killed.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“You should have just come home. This is exactly the sort of thing we’re supposed to be telling Eddie. He’s not bloody paying you to play hero, Ayla.”
“He’s not paying me at all,” I retorted. “He’s paying you.”
“Don’t say stupid things.” She stood, pacing the hall. Frustration rolled off her. “Do you know what I thought when I saw that awful graffiti and then you didn’t come home? I thought those Alpha Human thugs had found you and killed you. I thought I’d lost you. I thought all kinds of crazy things, Ayla, and you were off chasing ferals with Glenn and getting into fights!” She whirled to face me, tears in her eyes. “Why didn’t you just come home?”
I wasn’t sure if she was madder at me for staying out all night or for nearly dying. I did know that whatever I said would just make her angrier. So as much as I longed to stand my ground and argue that I’d done what I had to, that it was a Pack thing, I held my tongue. Maybe I was just too tired to speak.
“Say something,” Shannon demanded when I didn’t answer her. “Don’t just look at me, say something!”
“I’m sorry,” I said simply. It was the safest thing I could think of.
She shook her head. “We should never have moved here.”
“What?”
“Ever since we got back here, it’s been one shitty thing after another. You’re always off doing Pack things and I’m always sitting here wondering where you are, if you’re safe.” She turned away from me, hugging herself. “I thought you were dead last night, Ayla. Dead.”
“I nearly was.” I could have kicked myself. It was such a stupid thing to say.
“Exactly!” Shannon thumped the wall and spun back to me, tears streaming down her face. “That’s exactly my point, you could have died and I wouldn’t have known and for what? For a bunch of fucking werewolves who didn’t want you the first time round!”
I leapt up, righteous anger burning away my weariness. “Don’t say that!”
“Well it’s true! This never happened before, did it?”
“So it’s my fault? My fault a feral nearly disemboweled me? My fault a bunch of prejudiced bastards are scrawling insults on our front door?” Dammit. I couldn’t shut up now. I should, I knew I should, but I couldn’t. She was overreacting.
“It never happened before,” she repeated. “Before we moved here.”
“Well you didn’t have to bloody come, did you?”
“I wish I hadn’t!” she screamed.
We both fell silent then, chests heaving, eyes stinging with tears. I stared at her, wetting my lips and letting her words sink in. She stared back, fists clenched at her sides like she was restraining herself from…what? Hitting me? Surely not. Not Shannon. Not my Shannon.
“Do you mean that?” I asked quietly. “Do you hate it here that much?”
“This is your life, your world,” she replied. “It’s dangerous and it’s cruel and I don’t belong in it.”
“You can’t mean that.” I shook my head. “We never– We’ve always…”
“Before we moved here,” she finished my garbled sentence for me. She scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes. “Oh Ayla, I love you, but I can’t keep this up. How many more nights am I going to sit up waiting for you and not knowing where you are?”
“It was one night, Shannon.”
“And it never happened before.”
We fell silent again, deadlocked. She was overreacting, I told myself again. A mix of stress and relief turned to anger. It wasn’t like her, but then it wasn’t like me to disappear all night, I had to acknowledge. It wa
sn’t like us to have hateful graffiti painted on our door. “So,” I said finally. “What now then?”
“I’m going to bed,” she said, stomping past me. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
I slumped back on the step, listening to our bedroom door slam. Something inside me cracked. I hoped it wasn’t my heart.
ELEVEN
Raw and bruised from our fight, I couldn’t stay in the house. As much as I wanted to curl up and sleep, I couldn’t. Shannon needed space—I was sure that once she’d slept on it, she’d realize how over the top she’d been—and I needed peace. So I went to my parents. They were a little confused to find me on the doorstep at eight o’ clock on Saturday morning in someone else’s clothes, but to their credit, they didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell them anything except that Shannon and I had argued and retreated to my old bedroom to sleep the day away.
Once I was up there though, huddled down in my old bed, I couldn’t relax. The events of the night, the words Shannon and I had hurled at each other, ate at me. I stared around my room, trying to drive the thoughts away by cataloguing my childhood possessions.
My parents had left the room pretty much as it had been when I left at seventeen. They’d freshened up the paint, changing it from angsty-teen purple to soothing blossom pink. And they’d packed away most of my toys and stuffed animals in the attic. But my shelves were still loaded with beloved childhood books, including those terrible werewolf novels from the early nineties. My favorite author back then was Meredith Greening. She’d written the Katrina Pagan series, about a werewolf assassin, who took out vampires for the government. I’d read my copies to rags years ago.
I reached for one now, needing the comfort of something simple and familiar and was soon lost in a world of action-packed adventure and kinky sex. It was all so simple for Katrina, of course. She was always tripping over clues and finding men willing to risk their lives for her even when she was being a complete bitch to them. Me, I had a drag queen and a hysterical girlfriend. It didn’t seem fair.
Around midday I finally fell asleep, head in the book, and didn’t stir until Dad came to shake me awake a few hours later. The sky was darkening again outside and the rich smell of beef stew was drifting up the stairs, making my stomach growl. I hadn’t eaten since the restaurant last night, I realized and was immediately ravenous.
“Your mother thinks you should eat,” Dad said, in that tone that meant he thought my mother was interfering. “She seems to think you’re upset about something.”
And of course, force-feeding me would solve the problem. I yawned, stretched and followed Dad downstairs. Mum dished up the most enormous plate of stew and dumplings I’d seen in my life and then they both sat and watched me eat with the intensity of vultures waiting for a starving man to die.
After about two minutes of it, I set my fork down and scowled at them both. “I’m alright.”
“You’re obviously not, Ayla,” Mum said. “You looked terrible when you got here.”
“Thanks.”
“And you’re not eating, either,” she added, nodding to my plate.
“I don’t like being watched while I’m eating.” What was it about parents that turned you from adult back to sulking teenager so quickly?
“Are you going to tell us what’s wrong?” Mum persisted.
“Anna, if she doesn’t want to talk, you shouldn’t make her,” Dad warned.
“She does want to talk, don’t you, Ayla? I can tell.”
“Fucking hell, Mum!” I growled. “I came here for a bit of peace and quiet!”
“Ayla!” Dad barked. “Do not talk to your mother like that!”
I glowered at him and shoveled a spoonful of stew into my mouth, buying myself a few seconds of silence. My parents both continued to watch me. I swallowed and mumbled an apology to Mum. She patted my hand.
“So do you want to talk?” she asked. Dad cleared his throat pointedly and she amended, “you don’t have to.”
“I told you, I had a fight with Shannon,” I said. “I just thought we could do with a break from each other for a few hours.”
“Ah,” Mum said knowingly, shaking her head.
I ignored the spark of irritation that caused in me. “It’s nothing serious.” No sense telling them about the graffiti. They’d panic and lock me in my bedroom or something. “I’ll go home in the morning and everything will be back to normal.” I hoped. It had been a long time since we’d had a row bad enough for me to storm out over.
“Good,” Dad said when Mum opened her mouth. “That’s good, isn’t it, Anna?”
She closed her mouth and nodded meekly, some unspoken message passing between them. My irritation turned into anger. There was a sermon brewing, I sensed. Something along the lines of, well, these are the problems with dating humans, aren’t they? They don’t understand Pack problems. I could practically see the words working their way up Mum’s throat. Only Dad’s pointed stare kept her from actually speaking. Mum assumed that every time Shannon and I rowed it was because she was a human.
It wasn’t something she’d ever said outright. My parents had made a concerted effort to keep their mouths shut regarding Shannon since I’d moved home, scared of driving me away again. And really, their main issue with her was that she was a woman, not that she was human. But it was there, a silent undercurrent of vague worry, the silent message that Shannon and I were just fundamentally too different.
It shouldn’t have been an issue at all. Humans and wolves had been sleeping together for centuries before humans even knew we existed. For a while after the First World War, when we were first thrust out of the trenches and into the public eye, it was something of a taboo, but that didn’t last. The big deal with werewolf homosexuality was that there was little chance of naturally conceived children. Human-wolf relationships were no less fertile than wolf-wolf ones, so the Pack didn’t frown on them in the same way.
With wolf fertility rates dropping as they were, some Packs even encouraged interbreeding. Anything to produce the next generation of cubs. At the other end of the scale, some Packs forbid it completely, believing that it was our increased integration with humans that was causing our problems in the first place.
Of course, human-wolf children could have serious long-term health problems. The wolf genes were rarely dominant and the human body wasn’t built to deal with shapeshifting. There was Coral’s Disease, a degenerative condition that wore down the bones and muscles over the years, leaving the children virtual cripples before they even hit their thirties. Then there was Siodmak Syndrome, where sufferers just physically couldn’t shift leading to all sorts of psychological problems.
None of that was a problem for me and Shannon of course. Neither of us wanted children so we’d never even discussed adoption. And neither of us were about to turn straight either. Something Mum had come mostly to terms with after Adam’s death and our reunion. Didn’t mean she thought Shannon and I were right for each other, but she never said it out loud.
I could almost smell her desire to say it throughout the rest of the meal. The atmosphere was tense and charged and I almost wished I’d just stayed at home. Then I remembered Shannon saying she wished she’d never moved here and changed my mind. I’d rather deal with my parents.
After dinner, Dad went outside for his ritual post-meal cigarette and I joined him, leaving Mum to clean up. I used to offer to help when I was a kid, but she’d always insisted I just got in the way, so after dinner became my time to bond with Dad.
The night air was heavy with the threat of snow again and I hugged myself against the chill, longing for the hot summer nights that were still months away. Mum and Dad’s small, carefully-tended garden was lined with pots that would sprout into basil, thyme and parsley in the spring, but were just dead, dry earth for now. The light in the kitchen cast a small square of illumination over the lawn; everything else was lost in shadow. I wandered around the garden after Dad as he checked on his plants, feeling a little lost and
aimless.
“Your mother only wants you to be happy,” Dad told me suddenly, voice soft and low in the dark. “You shouldn’t get angry with her.”
“I know, I’m sorry. But I am happy. I love Shannon. We just…” I shrugged. “Don’t you and Mum ever fight?”
“Of course,” he replied. “We tend not to run home crying to our parents whenever we do though.”
I bristled indignantly. “I didn’t run home crying.”
“More or less, pet.” He knelt down to poke at a rose bush, dormant for the winter. “What exactly did you argue about?”
I hesitated. Dad was more pragmatic than Mum, but the mention of Alpha Humans would set him off nonetheless. Adam had been his nephew after all and his death was still a raw wound for the whole family, especially when we were no closer to justice than we had been when he died. I decided to leave the graffiti out of it for now. Pack gossip would ensure my parents found out sooner or later, but I’d prefer later right now.
“I was out all night with Glory,” I said finally. “We went for a run and I’d promised Shannon I’d be home early, but …” Again I halted, mentally censoring myself. I wanted to tell Eddie about our encounter with the feral before I told anyone else. I felt obliged to. God. It seemed like a lifetime ago already. “But we lost track of time.”
“That doesn’t seem such a big deal to me,” Dad said. “We’re wolves, we run. Shannon must know that.”
There it was. That wolf-human divide he and Mum were so careful not to bring up directly. “Of course she does. But I promised her and I broke my promise. She was worried about me.”
“And you fought about that? It really doesn’t sound worth fighting about, Ayla.”
I bit my lip to contain my frustration. He was right. If you stripped our row down to its bare bones, it wasn’t worth fighting about. It was all the other stuff that made it so complicated. “She said she wished we’d never come here,” I said. That was what stung me the most. The idea that she was unhappy here gnawed at me.
Dad straightened up and took a long drag of his cigarette. “People say things they don’t mean when they’re angry.”
