“I can’t believe he got caught up with a nymph. For all we know, she’s enchanted him and they’re frolicking in the woods while we worry about him.”
“Oh, Mom. Alex would never do that.”
My mother snorted. “I find that hard to believe after a pregnant nymph showed up at our door.”
I shook my head, but I let her rant. Better for her to assume that he was with Karey than captured by the Long Island werewolves.
“While you were in college in Pittsburgh, he had so many girlfriends I lost count. Though actually, your aunt Vera did start counting all the girls he cavorted with.” From across the room Aunt Vera nodded. “While you managed to stay with one man, he couldn’t wait to sample every flavor in the fruit basket, if you know what I mean.”
“Did those two witches ever find out about each other?” my aunt asked.
“Those poor girls never had a clue.”
I suppressed a chuckle. Those girls had likely met each other, all right. Both in the same bed, with my brother.
Mom shook her head. “I’m not sure how it happened, but my homebody husband and I gave birth to a ladies’ man.”
She continued to unravel. “If those dirty wolves have touched my boy—”
Aunt Vera brought my mother another cup of hot herbal tea. She murmured in Russian, “Don’t worry about him, Anna. I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding.”
The phone rang and Dad rushed to answer it. We all stopped and waited with expectant faces.
But then he frowned. “This isn’t the time, Yuri. No, I won’t put your grandmother on the phone.”
Mom and Aunt Vera groaned at the same time. If I hadn’t found my cousin’s timing slightly amusing, I would’ve done the same. After a few curse words, and a threat to have his mother take away his car privileges, the conversation ended.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. This time Dad checked the caller ID and quickly picked up. But the hope in his brown eyes faded as he turned to us and briefly shook his head. “No, Stan. Thanks for checking out those places for us.”
He turned to my uncles, rubbing the small balding spot on the crown of his head. “Looks like the time to go out and hunt for Alex has come.”
I stood and followed the men outside. No one questioned my decision to join them. All this time Aggie had remained at my side, quiet and solemn. Once outside, everyone divided into teams. Aggie joined Aunt Vera to head west. Dad pushed Mom in my direction. “Look after your mother, Natalya. Search the lake and the surrounding property.” My mother headed for my car, but my father tugged on my arm to speak to me privately. “You won’t find anything there. Just keep her busy. She’s starting to think the worst.”
I had the same fears, but I buried them under resolve. It was no time to release the wolf straining to act on my mother’s words. I wanted to hunt. To track and find him.
When I reached the car, I found my mother in the driver’s seat. “Are you sure you want to drive? You’ve had a few drinks.”
“Be quiet and get in the car.”
I shrugged and got in. Dad had wanted me to distract my mom from the hunt, but I suspected that those distractions shouldn’t include getting pulled over by the cops.
We drove northbound for a while, heading toward Highway 9, which would take us to the lake, but instead of taking the entrance we continued through town.
“Mom?”
“I know what I’m doing, Natalya.”
“Are you sure? We’re supposed to go to the lake.”
She ignored me, so we just sat there for a while as she drove. I tried to figure out where we were headed, but I didn’t have any friends on the north side of town. Then, after a certain point, South Toms River Township turned into Toms River. Where the hell did she plan to take us?
Mom twisted and turned through a subdivision, and then pulled up in front of a three-story brick condo building.
I leaned closer to the window. “Who lives here?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Did my mother know something about the kidnapping that my father didn’t? “Is Alex being held here?”
She pulled into the parking lot. “I have my suspicions.”
Of all the ideas my mother had ever hatched, this wasn’t the smartest. We shouldn’t be here. Not alone anyway. But before I had a chance to stop her from leaving the car, she jumped out and made a beeline for the building. I slowly followed her, pausing to catch the scent of other werewolves. Only one scent lingered in the air like a faint whisper.
My brother had been here. Matter of fact, he’d marked the bushes outside the apartment. In werewolf form.
“I smell Alex.”
Mom nodded, but she didn’t speak. She simply walked inside the building. No glancing around. Almost as if we were visiting an acquaintance.
A cramp hit my gut. “I don’t like walking into unknown territory.”
As we passed the mailboxes, I noted one in particular: Karey Nottingham. So the nymph lived here. We marched up the stairs, only to have a nymph meet us on the way.
With a pixie haircut and freckles covering her nose, she looked us over warily. Her light blonde eyelashes fluttered as she said, “Karey isn’t here.”
I stared the girl down, searching my memory. There was something about her. Unlike Karey, this one’s scent reminded me of springtime after a rainstorm. But it wasn’t her smell that triggered the memory. It was her face. This was Karey’s getaway driver from my parents’ house.
“Are you friends with her?” I asked.
“I’m her roommate.”
“Where is she?” asked my mother. Her voice was even.
“She said something about needing to find Alex.” The nymph’s lips formed a sneer. “You’re his family, aren’t you?”
Somehow my mother warped space and time to make herself three inches taller. “Yes, we are. Have you seen my son?”
The nymph’s confidence receded. “No, I haven’t.” She swallowed two times. “But Karey should be back soon.”
Mom nodded. Her eyes darkened. She didn’t trust the nymph. “I would hope so.”
With the conversation concluded, my mother backed down the steps, then twisted to walk away. Mom never presented her back to an enemy. All these suspicious occurrences set me closer to panic overload. I hissed on the way out, “What’s going on?”
Mom continued through the parking lot and darted to a lone Toyota Camry. She circled the vehicle with me trailing after. My nose told me that magic covered the car from the bumper to the driver’s seat. Forest magic from the wood nymphs.
I peeked into the backseat—and just about passed out from the car’s contents. These wood nymphs were preparing for something. But their preparations didn’t include a car seat and other baby stuff for Karey’s impending birth. Oh, no. These nutcase nymphs had littered the backseat with rope, pink duct tape, towels, and rubber bands. I clutched the hood of the car, ready to rip the door open. Who the hell carries around this shit? Mom said things in Russian that even I refused to repeat.
Had my father been mistaken about who’d taken Alex? Had the nymphs kidnapped my brother? We reached the trunk and eyed each other before I touched the lock. Part of me didn’t want to open it, but I had to know. Even if his scent didn’t linger here, we had to explore all the options. Would that crowbar-wielding nymph be crazy enough to kill my brother in cold blood?
My panic rose and my blood boiled. I broke the trunk’s lock and wrenched it open. And then I gasped.
No one lay trapped inside.
But the nymphs had left more supplies for their planned heist inside the trunk. Five more rolls of pink duct tape. (What store sold that much pink duct tape?) I rifled around and found three pairs of scissors, a packet of magic markers, shaving cream, a razor, and pink nail polish. Oh, my God.
My mother’s mouth moved but nothing came out.
I was just as speechless. In the back I also found some makeup, a platinum-blonde wig, and a disposable
camera. To top it off, there was also a bag of cheap cat food. Like a sorority of deranged woodland creatures, they had likely planned to kidnap him, hold him somewhere, and then dress him up Marilyn Monroe–style with cat food in a bowl as a backdrop.
Mom touched the multipack of pink duct tape. “I don’t think they have him.”
I wrinkled my nose at the disgusting cat food and slammed the trunk shut. “I agree.”
“We need to go home. If I stay here any longer, I’ll do something I’ll regret.”
Formerly the epitome of the suburban mother who cooked for local church groups and the PTA, Mom’s yellowed eyes and twitching fingers now indicated that she hungered for blood. But she seemed conflicted too. If Karey was truly carrying Alex’s baby, Mom would never harm her, even if she’d planned to capture my brother and humiliate him.
I drove back to my parents’ house with the radio turned low. Over and over in my mind, I kept picturing how the nymphs would have run him down. The woods around his apartment’s parking lot had plenty of hiding places. Trees with leaves beginning to turn color. Their scents would blend into their surroundings. They’d giggle in the shadows with smirks, ready to pounce. The whole thing seemed like a B-grade horror movie with zombies and papier-mâché swamp creatures swooping in to attack. By the time we pulled up to the house, I didn’t want to continue imagining my brother’s embarrassment at having the Knocked-up Patrol take him down.
During the short time that we’d been gone, my father had returned. I tried not to get excited at seeing his car in the driveway. Why had he returned so early? Had the search for the Long Island werewolves taken a turn for the worse?
We found Dad inside sitting on the couch—alone.
Mom asked, “Fyodor, have they found my boy? Where is everyone?”
“Nyet. Nothing at all.” He perched on the edge of his seat, staring at the phone. “But I did get a call from that girl Karey. She’s coming here in a few minutes.”
Mom left the room. When she gets stressed out, she either has a generous serving of her friend Jack Daniel’s, or she found solace in her kitchen. From the sounds of slamming cupboards and banging pans, I guessed she planned to use culinary therapy to keep herself from attacking wood nymphs in the night.
“What will you say to her? Will we hold her here?” I asked.
“Your father wouldn’t do such a thing,” said my mother from the kitchen. “He may have battled the Bolsheviks in the thirties, but he wouldn’t hurt a harmless pregnant woman.”
“Harmless? Based on the contents of the nymphmobile, Mom, I don’t think Karey’s as harmless as she seems.” Should I call Supernatural Family Services now or later? I wondered.
The knock on the door came right on cue. I could smell the nymph from my spot on the love seat. But a new scent accompanied her. It belonged to a man who towered over her, his gaze scanning the room.
Thorn had arrived.
Karey waddled into the house, her forehead wrinkled with worry. She sat down on the La-Z-Boy while Thorn took a spot next to me on the love seat. He swallowed the space and glanced at me twice, but I refused to meet his eyes. I didn’t want him to see me like this. To see me teetering on the edge of a panic attack. They had my brother and they wanted me. For some reason, other than extermination, they wanted to kill me. But why? I kept asking myself the same question over and over again: Why did they want to kill me now, after all this time?
“I heard from my roommate Lydia that you’d come looking for me.” She clasped her hands over her belly. Though her eyes remained focused on my father, everyone else’s went right to the shiny rock on her finger.
Her ring finger. Alex, you responsible little devil.
She continued with, “Thorn told me I needed to come here to tell you what I know. Especially since I meant Alex no harm.”
I snorted. Kind of hard to believe that, with her trunk’s contents. My father shot me a warning glare.
“Alex proposed to me this morning.” She twisted the ring as her voice lowered. “He told me that he’d call me after he took his grandmother to the store. He never did.”
After what I’d seen I wanted to be upset with her, but now it was rather hard. Alex had proposed. Somehow—maybe with bleach and heavy scrubbing—I might be able to wipe away the nagging fears that she’d hurt him.
“I have more news,” she managed, “from the fairy folk.”
News from the fairies? The most I heard from a fairy’s mouth was from Bill’s every day. As a goblin, he sure as hell wasn’t a true fairy, but a backwoods cousin, as he called it. He’d blurt tidbits once in a while—that he spotted brownies, or hob goblins, poking holes in people’s tires in the parking lot or about the irate fairy manager down at the Cracker Barrel. Just like Bill, they roamed the countryside around unsuspecting humans. Pretty much any kind of news I learned was never good.
“The fairy folk have been speaking in whispers about the outsider wolves lurking among the trees.”
“The Long Island werewolves,” I said.
“Yes—” She licked her lips and gripped her belly as if labor pains plagued her already. But in her eyes I detected the pain of loss. “The crazy dark elf who works at the 7-Eleven told me they’ve taken Alex. They plan to kill him unless you give up Natalya and surrender the South Toms River territory.”
Chapter 14
Nothing in life can prepare you for a vicious hit from reality like this one. That painful swelling in the chest when everything goes wrong. The feeling, like a burden of a thousand bricks stacked one on top of the other. All I could do was endure. Hope my body could fight the desire to claw at my throat for air.
I gripped the side of the love seat and leaned forward. I could deny the facts again and again all I wanted. But they’d taken my brother. And now they wanted me in his place. Nothing in the universe could set things right. Nothing except for the death of every Long Island werewolf who dared hurt my brother.
Thorn touched my shoulder. Somehow his words bled into my thoughts.
“I’ve spoken to our pack leader about the matter.” He paused. I refused to look into his eyes. “And he has made his decree. One life should be sacrificed for the good of the many.”
“No!” I stood up, fists clenched. “Don’t give me that bullshit, Thorn.”
My father boiled, but he didn’t move. His furies were always contained. Anger that I’ve never seen unleashed. His mouth formed a thin, twitching line.
The kitchen had gone quiet. Without a sound, my mother entered the room and approached Thorn. The blank look on her face made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“I wish Farley would come here and say those words to my face,” said my father, his voice even.
Thorn took a deep breath before he spoke. “Fyodor, Alex is pack. He’s my friend.”
“Then why didn’t you tell Farley we need to find him?” I asked.
“I did speak for him.”
“Yeah, right. Old Farley doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Thorn’s voice rose. “He is still pack leader and my father.”
I walked away from him to sit next to my father. Why sit next to Thorn if he didn’t care about me? “Some leader.”
My father broke in with, “Be that as it may, my family doesn’t need the pack to go hunting for my son.” He stood with a straight back. “We will search for him and bring him home.”
Thorn ran his fingers through his hair. “I can’t let you go out there alone.”
“You just told us my brother is expendable—”
“Damn it, Nat. Have I ever listened to my father? Time and time again, he’s ordered me to do things I didn’t want to do. But this time all he ordered me to do was relay the message. That’s done. Now it’s time to get the bastards who took Alex.”
I swallowed, trying to ease the rising constriction in my chest. This whole situation left me weakened and bitter. “How long until we leave?” I managed.
Thorn’s face resembled stone
. “You’re not coming with us. Not this time. You’re in no condition to take this on.”
Somehow I laughed. “You think I plan to sit here? This isn’t pack business anymore. This is my—” Suddenly, I couldn’t find the breath to speak. My throat went dry and only a moan escaped. Thorn took a step forward with his hand extended to touch me, but I shrank back.
“This isn’t open for negotiation. If you think you’re coming, you’re mistaken.”
I attempted to stand my ground. “You. Can’t. Stop. Me.”
“I know you. And that’s why I’m giving you a direct order. Sit down on that couch and don’t move.” He advanced a step. His eyes glowed with warning. A warning that shoved me into the seat.
As I watched Thorn follow my father out of the house, I tried to think what I could do to make this all better. But nothing came. Only the overwhelming stress of my brother’s kidnapping and pending execution. I ran my fingers over the fabric of the love seat. A flood of memories collided with my pain. The past always came back to haunt people. This particular room held devastating memories. I knew that most of all.
The three months after Thorn left me resembled a white dwarf star collapsing into a supernova. The raw wounds from my broken heart seemed fresh and all-consuming.
I distinctly remembered the day when I left New York and moved back in with my parents. As I sat in the living room with Grandma, she tried to cheer me up with a gift. Inside a beautiful brown box lay my first ornament: a papier-mâché farmer boy holding a Christmas wreath. On his beautifully painted face, he had a bright smile that held promises of the future.
“My child,” she said, “hold on to him. He represents love. My beloved Pyotr fixed him for me after your aunt Olga tried to break him in half.”
The spring air turned into the heat of the summer. I remained in the house helping Aunt Olga take care of my grandmother. With the pocket money Grandma gave me, I bought more ornaments. That was how it began.
Hours and hours of watching TV with soap addicts had been my downfall. In between the reruns of Ryan’s Hope, which I translated for my grandmother, we watched the Home Shopping Network or QVC to look at the clothes. At first, I found these channels boring and mundane.
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