by Sara Dailey
I, in turn, took it as an opportunity to race home before Mom could get there, and rush up to my room before I had to face her.
I had been shut in my safe-haven for over an hour without so much as a peep from anyone, which made me even more nervous. Mom rarely lets me do the whole leave-me-be-thing, and she was obviously upset after speaking to the principal. Maybe she was taking some time to cool off. Mom can be good at that sometimes.
Although, more often than not, when she’s acting all patient she has an ulterior motive. Nine times out of ten, she’ll leave me alone just long enough to make me think that maybe I got away with whatever it was that I royally screwed up, and then POW! She’ll let me have it. I had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. Especially since this wasn’t her first conversation with the administration about my behavior.
Trying to keep myself occupied, I grabbed the US Weekly from my nightstand and cranked up my iPod.
I had just taken my mind off of my impending doom when Aiden eased my door open and peeked inside. “Hey Al, just so you know I was knocking. Anyways, dinner is ready,” he said, attempting to sound causal, as if I didn’t realize I was about to have to face the wrath of mommy-dearest.
I looked up at him with a blank stare, even though I had clearly heard him, and put my iPod down.
When I didn’t respond, he repeated, “I said dinner was ready.”
“Great. I can’t wait,” I said sarcastically. “Did Mom say anything to you?”
He looked down at the floor without answering. What did that mean?
“Aiden! Did she say anything or not? You’re freaking me out,” I said as I slammed my magazine down on my bed.
“No, but I have a feeling that it’s not going to be good. I mean this is your third fight. What do you think Mom and Dad are going to say? Great job, Honey. Third time’s a charm!”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Ad,” I said, and jabbed him in his ribs with my elbow on my way out the door. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
***
I sat down at the dinner table with my eyes glued to the floor and waited for the fireworks to begin, but they didn’t come. Instead, my dad acted like nothing happened. He even asked me nicely if I wouldn’t mind helping him set the table, which, for some reason, made me feel even lousier about the trouble I had caused.
With the table set, there was nothing left to do but sit back down and endure whatever Mom had coming for me.
Is Principal Murphy going to kick me out of school?
What if my parents kick me out of the house?
What if they send me away to some school for screwed up teens, like the reform schools you see in movies?
I sat there, waiting, but no one said anything. We all ate dinner in what could only be described as a seriously uncomfortable silence. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen? No one spoke. Aiden hadn’t even looked up from his plate. What the hell?
Dad had made steak, my favorite, and I couldn’t even find it within myself to enjoy it. Maybe this was some new method of parenting Mom read about; make the kid feel so bad about herself that she never gets in any trouble at all.
Finally, the silence was broken.
“We are all going to have a talk after dinner, okay?” Mom said sounding a bit nervous.
Dad reached over to pat Mom’s arm as if to comfort her, which made my stomach churn.
Shit! I am definitely going away. They are so kicking me out of school! I know it! Military school, here I come.
My mind reeled as I watched my parents talking with their eyes. I glanced back and forth between the two of them, and when I turned to Aiden to see how he was taking all of this weirdness, as usual, he seemed completely unfazed by any of it. I felt like shouting, “Hello? Earth to Aiden! Are you seeing this? Your sister is about to be booted out of school! Do you even care?”
I pushed the food around on my plate, no longer able to stomach it with the tension mounting in the air. The longer we sat at the table the more anxious I became. Finally, I couldn’t take the suspense any longer and belted out, “Can we please just get this over with? I’m not really in the mood to puke up my steak and baked potato, and if someone doesn’t tell me what is going on, it just might happen.”
Mom and Dad froze and both suddenly looked as though they may puke as well. Their silence was all but killing me.
Aiden put down his fork and cleared his throat. “Ummm, should I leave? Do y’all want to talk to Al alone?” he asked.
Thanks a lot Ad. Way to be there for me, big bro.
Mom and Dad looked at each other once more. Then their eyes darted back and forth between Aiden and me before finally landing on the floor.
I stared at them both unable to believe that it had come to this. They couldn’t even look at me.
“Just tell me!” I shouted. “You’re sending me away, aren’t you?” I asked, sure my number was up.
Finally, Mom opened her mouth to speak.
“No Alli, we are not sending you away. God, this is so hard. I’m not sure where to start,” Mom mumbled under her breath.
Dad poured her another glass of wine and reassured her, “You can do this Lillian. They’ll understand. They can handle it.”
“Just say it, Mom. Whatever it is, I can take it,” I said trying to sound convincing. Honestly, I wasn’t ready for it. Whatever it was.
Mom scooted her chair out from under the table and turned toward Aiden and me, suddenly seeming a lot more confident. Taking a deep breath, she began, “Okay, several months ago, we started to notice that you were both changing. Physically. And obviously from what’s been going on with Alli, emotionally too. God… I should have told you this a long time ago. Maybe you would have taken it better, especially you Al. I’m so sorry.”
“What are you talking about Mom? You aren’t making any sense.”
“Just let her finish, Alli. This is important,” Dad said.
Mom again looked back and forth between Aiden and me and finally admitted, “Okay, I’ll just say it. I’m a werewolf and y’all will be too very soon. There, I said it. It’s out.”
Aiden and I looked at each other and busted out laughing. Had she lost her ever-loving mind?
“Hey Mom! Grrrrrrrrr! Maybe you should lay off the wine before you sprout some back hair,” Aiden somehow managed to say through his laughter.
I was doubled over, almost in tears, when Mom got up from the table and left the dining room without a word. Our laughter ceased when Dad threw his napkin on the table and stood up to surely chastise us, but his speech was cut short when an enormous, dark-brown wolf wandered into our dining room and bared its teeth at Aiden.
“Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” the wolf growled with fury.
Now it was Dad’s turn to laugh as Aiden high-tailed it on top of the dining room table, screaming, “Holy shit! What the hell is that?”
Still smiling, Dad said, “That would be your mom, son, and no cussing at the dinner table.”
I wasn’t screaming or jumping on table tops. Instead, I was frozen in place, seemingly suspended in time. Dad was laughing, Aiden was shaking, and my mom…wolf…mom-wolf, whatever she was, was staring at us all with the same dark brown eyes she’s always had. It was real. She was real. Holy shit is right! My mom is a werewolf!
Chapter 3
ALLISON
After the initial shock of Mom’s little “announcement” settled in, my mom, no longer in her wolfie form, decided to tell us the real story of how Dad and her got together. The one that was supposedly going to explain all of this craziness and help us understand just how we ended up in this paranormal state of existence.
Mom took a moment to straighten her clothes before she began. “Well, you know the story of how your father and I met?” Mom asked.
Aiden and I nodded.
“It’s all a lie. We didn’t actually meet in church like we told you before. I’m sorry kids, but we couldn’t exactly tell you the truth,” she bluntly admitted.
“Holy shit, Mom. What else is a lie? Is he even our real father?” I asked without thinking first, which was probably not the best thing to do, but to be honest, I was completely appalled by the whole absurd situation.
“Your mouth, Alli. Jeez, we did not raise you to speak that way,” my dad immediately scolded.
Tempted to get up from the table and storm away from this whole nightmare, I reminded myself to calm down and to breathe. I couldn’t run from this. I needed to know what was in store for me now, now that I’m apparently not as human as I had previously thought.
After a few deep breaths, I said, “Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just a bit freaked out at the moment. Can you blame me?”
Mom patted me on the leg. “It’s okay, honey. I know this is a bit hard to swallow.”
“So what is the truth, Mom?” Aiden added sympathetically, playing the-good-son part.
“The truth? Oh God, where do I start?”
“How about the beginning, Mom,” I suggested trying to keep the irritation out of my voice but failing miserably. I was riding a rollercoaster of emotions that I couldn’t seem to get off of. I went from being a jerk to apologetic to a jerk again in no time flat, and I wasn’t able to control it.
Mom gave me a snarky little smile before explaining, “When I was twenty-one, I went with some friends from my pack into town for a music festival.”
“Wait, you had a pack, like a wolf pack? This is kinda cool, Mom,” Aiden said.
“Shut up,” Dad and I said in unison.
“Yes, I had a pack, but, if you don’t mind, can I tell the story?” Mom paused for a moment to make sure we were listening. “So, we went to see this punk band that we had heard was pretty good.”
“A punk band, Mom? Really?” I asked, surprised to hear that Mom would have actually liked that kind of thing, even that long ago.
“Hey, don’t knock it. It beat the bluegrass bands that were there most nights. Anyway, there we were watching this really great band,” Mom said as she winked at Dad, “when I saw your dad. He was the bass player. Our eyes met and… what can I say. It was love at first sight. I made my way up to the stage just as they finished their set to introduce myself, and, well, we ended up spending the entire night together after the show.”
“Spent the night together, huh?” Aiden said before he smiled and winked at Dad.
Mom glared at him and said, “It wasn’t like that, honey. It was the perfect night. We talked, and danced, and talked some more. After that night, I snuck off the estate whenever I could to see him because, you see, at the time, I was kind of engaged.”
“What! Engaged? To whom?” I asked, astounded that my mom was engaged to someone else, someone I had never heard of, and that she was cheating on him with my father.
“Yes, sort of. Promised, really, to my pack’s soon-to-be alpha. We dated for a long time, but see, we were friends and while I did care for him, I didn’t love him, not like that anyway. The truth is that if we were to have gotten married, it would have been to strengthen the pack, not because we truly wanted to be husband and wife.”
Dad reached out and grabbed Mom’s hand, a sweet gesture that I’m sure Mom appreciated. Watching Dad be all husband-like, I couldn’t decide which was harder to believe, that my mom was a werewolf, or that my dad was in a punk band. I mean my dad’s cool and all, as far as dads go, and he is a musician, well a song writer now, but a punk band. Wow! That pretty much blew me away.
While I was in the midst of pondering over were-mom and punk-dad, apparently Aiden was more concerned about what soon-to-be-alpha meant. He turned to me with a look on his face that I didn’t quite understand until he finally asked, “Wait. Alpha? What exactly does that mean?”
“Well, werewolves live in a pack. We’re like real wolves in that respect. In every pack there is always an alpha, who is the leader,” Mom explained.
“Are there a lot of us? I mean, how many werewolves are we talking about here?” Aiden asked, clearly as shocked I was about the whole thing.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been away from the pack for a long time. But yes, there are many different packs, and surely hundreds of werewolves here in America, probably thousands all over the world,” Mom explained.
“So the alpha controls everything. Like the president?” Aiden asked.
“Well, yes, sort of. There are very specific rules when living with a pack, and if you’re going to stay in the pack, then you have to follow the pack’s rules.”
Sounds more like a dictator than a president, but I didn’t bother correcting anyone.
Mom looked over at Dad and smiled as she continued, “Being with your father was definitely not following the rules. And not long after we met, I decided that what I really wanted most was to be with him, but I couldn’t, not without telling him the truth. I knew if we were going to be together, I would have to leave my family and the pack. There were very strict rules at the time, and I was breaking just about all of them. Late one night during one of our secret dates, I decided to come clean.”
I looked over at Dad to find him smiling as if he was remembering that night.
“So this is where I can kind of relate to how you guys feel,” Dad added. “It was quite a shock finding out that the woman you are in love with is a werewolf, especially when she just blurts it out. I’ll never forget that moment. We were sitting on the floor in my dorm room, talking about nothing in particular, when she casually interrupts me and says, ‘Would you still love me if I were a werewolf.’ And well, after I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to be her dinner, I accepted it. I had to. I mean, what else was I supposed to do? I loved her, everything about her, even the fact that she could kill me with her bare hands… or paws, I guess I should say.”
This was unbelievable. My mother, Lillian Wright, PTA board member, SUV driving, IT nerd was a werewolf. I watched Mom and Dad holding hands under the table and longingly staring into each other’s eyes as if telling the story made them love each other that much more. On one hand, it kind of made me want to gag, but on the other, it was pretty amazing to think it all worked out, Mom telling him the truth and him not running the other way. I’m guessing not everyone would take that kind of information so well.
“So, without any plan at all, we ran off together and started a life here in Houston. I haven’t talked to the pack, or my parents, for that matter, since the day I left. I miss them, but I can’t say that I regret leaving. It was them or your dad and I made my decision and never looked back,” Mom admitted.
“Wait, so we like have grandparents?” Aiden asked. “I always assumed they were dead and you just couldn’t deal.”
“Well, that’s a whole other story. I told you both when y’all were little that your grandparents lived far, far away and then neither of you ever asked about them again, so I didn’t mention it. Kind of worked out easy that way.”
“Okay, not to butt in, but where exactly does this leave us? Me and Aiden, I mean,” I asked, not sure whether I was ready for her answer or not.
“Well, let’s see. All the stuff you’ve been experiencing is actually completely normal. Rapid growth, increased strength, and aggression. I’d assume your senses are better, like sight and smell, maybe even taste?”
“Is that why I’m freakin’ hot all the time? I’m like having one long hot flash, like a menopausal old lady,” I admitted, relieved to finally have a few questions answered.
“Actually, yes. Your body temperature is increasing. Werewolves are very warm-blooded. Don’t worry, you get used to it after a while.”
Aiden looked around confused. “Are you sure I’m a werewolf, Mom? I haven’t noticed anything different about me.”
“Really, Aiden? Come on! You’ve grown a foot in the last year, and you have girls chasing you down like kittens in heat. Thought I might have to take the water hose to ’em. Hate to burst your bubble son; you’re a good looking’ kid and all, but there are these little things called pheromones, and they’re burst
ing out of your pores,” Dad added laughing to himself.
“Huh? Really? I thought it was my winning personality and these big guns,” Aiden said, flexing his muscles like Mr. Olympia.
“Anyways, so what now, Mom?” I asked, rolling my eyes at my idiot brother.
“I’m not really sure. I mean, I grew up knowing I was a werewolf. I’m not sure how you two are going to be able to handle the change. Or even if you will be able to adjust to being a were in this setting. I heard of lots of weres who live outside of packs, but I’m not sure how it works with teenagers. It’s something we will all have to discuss as things progress. But for now at least you know what’s happening.”
***
We wrapped dinner up with a whole lot of unanswered questions. Yes, I know what Mom is and what Aiden and I will be one day soon. But what about everything else? I got into bed and pulled the covers up over me. Then immediately threw them back off. I genuinely missed the days when I could snuggle up under the comforter to keep out the cold, but apparently, those days were long gone.
I closed my eyes hoping sleep would find me, but this was all too much to take in. There were so many questions I should have asked, but I didn’t even know where to begin. What now? What is going to happen to me? Will I be able to control it? What if I morph into a wolf in the middle of Calculus? Can that even happen? Will everyone keep hating me? Will I always be a freak?
Chapter 4
ALLISON
It’s my birthday today. Seventeen. I’m supposed to be excited, overjoyed, ecstatic, right? But what did I have to be happy about? That could be summed up in one word—nothing! I had no one to be happy with, except for my now totally dysfunctional family, complete with wolf mom, ex-punk-rocker dad, and the ever-popular brother, who couldn’t wait to go out and party with his friends tonight after my oh-so-exciting birthday celebration.
