by Drew VanDyke
“Don’t make me cry, Ashlee,” she said, then bogarted one of my donuts and began to eat. “Oh my God, this is soo good,” she said.
My jaw dropped. My sister was fastidious about what she ate, avoiding anything unhealthy.
“Don’t look at me like that. The kid’s young and she’s a werewolf. Hell, in this body, I can eat whatever I want and she’ll just burn it off. Beats being in Siegfried; I stay too long inside him and I’ll be begging Elle for table scraps.”
“So, what happened?”
She finished the sugary confection, very messily, and then used the hand sanitizer she always carried with her no matter what body she seemed to be inhabiting.
Then, with Colby’s mouth, Amber shared.
“After the Street Witches did the Blood Moon protection spell we were all pretty wiped, so I went to bed early. I heard a strange noise out back, and I woke up absolutely terrified for you, Ash. I shouldn’t have, I guess, but I said the ride-along spell to try to jump to you and warn you, and the next thing I knew, I was in Colby and I was a wolf and tearing up the mountain following the sound of a whole lot of howling. I tried to stop my headlong rush to wherever I was, and then I thought to open up the twin bond, but you just weren’t there. You must have already turned.
“Then it was like the pull of the moon and the need to run took Colby-wolf over, and dragged me along with it. It felt like that time I was riding horseback and I lost control of the horse. All I could do was hang on for dear life.
“Colby’s wolf was so happy to be reunited with the pack, and at first, it was amazing. All of these alphas on display, primping and preening, sparring and dancing, playing tug-of-war with a beef carcass and eventually playing with each other. But something about Colby being there set everyone on edge.”
“She’s an unattached alpha female in her prime. I bet there was confusion.” I said. “Without their human minds, they didn’t know where to put her in the pecking order.”
“Yes, well. I tried to steer her away from the males who looked like they were ready to mount her and the females who wanted to drive her off, but before I could, I saw something. Something awful.”
“What was it?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“You were the other anomaly. Your wolf, I mean. I don’t know how to tell you this, Ashlee, but your wolf isn’t monogamous.”
“I most certainly am,” I said. “Wolves mate for life.”
“Just let me tell it. While the rest of the pack was eating and the mated pairs were, um, doing it, you and Will were getting it on too.”
“Getting it on. Nice image, Amb,” I said, and turned my attention inward to my wolf, who’d been sitting up on her haunches, listening. She arched her head at me coyly, lay down belly up and showed me the little bulge we had going.
“So much for waiting. Guess Will got his wish after all,” I said.
“I stayed upwind and watched your pack go from deadly predators to doggie style within a half hour. It was like having a front row seat to a National Geographic documentary.”
I snorted. “Like that song – something about doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel?”
“Exactly. But your wolf, Ashlee – your wolf couldn’t seem to stay still. After you and Will, you know, got done and he fell asleep – well, your wolf got up and decided to go for round two.”
“Shit.” I said and rubbed my belly. “Who was it?”
“Jackson. He was the only other unattached alpha male.”
“Holy Mary Mother of God.” What was I supposed to do with this information? My wolf didn’t feel guilty about it; she looked pleased as punch. The human side of me, though, was…confused? Revolted? I wasn’t at all sure, so I grabbed another donut and stuffed it into my face. Always a good response to stress, right?
“I was mortified, Ashlee. It was like a train wreck and I couldn’t look away. I felt like washing out my eyeballs. There are some things a sister just shouldn’t see. But that’s not the worst part of it. Before you joined with Jackson, you turned,” she said. “You turned hybrid, Ashlee. You weren’t just lycanthrope and lupine, you did it as werewolves. Anubis form, I think you called it. Wolf-man to wolf-woman. It was freaky.”
“Christ Almighty,” I swore. Forgive me God, I thought. The Good Book says all things work together for good, but this may be pushing it. “I’ve never turned hybrid. I’ve seen Jackson do it, but I thought it was something that only alphas did.”
“You’re an alpha, Ashlee. Everyone in our natural family is. You, Adam, me, Dad, we all are.”
With great power comes great responsibility, my padawan, Siegfried said into our heads.
What, poodles watch Star Wars? Like weirder things weren’t happening.
“So, what does that mean for my…?” I rubbed my human belly in wolfish sympathy, afraid of any answer, which was a moot point because I don’t think anyone had any idea anyway.
“I have no idea, but if I were you, I might consider termination.”
“What? First, you berate me for not having enough maternal instincts, and then you advise me to abort.” I said it in a rising snarl.
“We don’t have to make the decision now,” Amber said in that twin-sister-knows-best tone, “but it better be soon. From what I hear, the wolf’s term is less than half of a humans.”
My wolf snarled inside of me and I felt her claws rake across my soul. Mine! She howled in fear and anger and covered herself in darkness, leaving me alone in my head.
She didn’t have to worry. No way was I going to do any harm to our children. “So, is that everything, or is there more?” I said it sarcastically, not expecting anything worse than this.
“Yes, actually –”
And then she shuddered and said, “Isn’t that enough?” and I looked up to find my twin sister gone from Colby’s eyes.
“What was Amber going to say?”
Colby’s face turned cold. “Nothing that was her business to see. It was totally uncool to ride along like that without my permission. I tried to be nice about it and you needed to hear about what happened to you, but you don’t need the details on what happened to me.”
“What happened to you?” Then it hit me. She was rubbing her belly too, as if unaware she was doing it. “Who?”
She dropped her eyes. “Jackson. As it should be. We’re fated to be mated. It wasn’t supposed to happen so soon, but…it wasn’t so bad.”
Amber’s awake! Siegfried called.
Colby leaped up to run to the main house and gather with the others at my sister’s bedside. I let her go. I could tell with the twin bond that Amber was fine, physically anyway, and she had plenty of people to fuss over her. I locked my door, and then ran a hot bath to give myself time to think.
Eventually I called Will, told him Amber was all right and advised him not to come over, that I was taking some time to myself after all the stress we’d all been under. After that I crawled into bed and disappeared under the covers. I already had a lot on my plate and the heap of stink Amber just hit me with was much too much, doing it with two guys on one night. Pardon my French, but as far as I was concerned, the world could go fuck itself and I’d show back up when I was good and ready.
I spent the next few days in bed. Pre-partum depression is how I described it, or maybe it was post-impregnation. I mean, what do you do when you feel like your body isn’t your own, and that it could get up and dance by itself and there wasn’t anything you could do to stop it? Okay, only during the full moon, maybe only during freaking Blood Moons and then only with pack magic driving all the wolves into joyful frenzies.
I trudged around the house in my bathrobe. Stopped answering calls. Begged off my freelance assignments until I started to see the money run out of my account. And I pondered the state of the world and how I had come to this.
In retrospect, the whole thing seemed stupider and stupider. Why hadn’t we all just locked ourselves in and suffered through a night in solitary confinement? Yeah, the wit
ches had cast their spell of protection, but maybe they’d only made things worse. In fact, maybe they’d caused the whole thing! It was like that Oracle chick in the Matrix had said, something about what was cause and what was effect when prophecies came into play.
In other words, what if the predicted disaster was caused by the very spell of sublimation that turned our bloodlust into, well, just lust? What if that was what the warning was about, and we’d walked straight into it?
After thinking some more, though, I wondered if I was again the main object of someone’s machinations. So, tell me, how do you turn a victim into a hero? I kept thinking I’d wake up and have some idea.
I logged into Facebook and followed the highlight reels of some former friends’ lives. I finally had to log off when I realized that it was making me feel like shit, seeing all their happy faces and their perfect families and their suburban lawns.
After a while I took a few homeopathic sleeping pills and tried to dream through it, thinking maybe my subconscious would give me some answers. Maybe I’d wake up later and things would look different. But the laters kept coming and the world still stayed the same.
Through it all I ignored my calls and only came up for air to tell Siegfried to tell Amber to tell everyone that I was fine, that I just didn’t want to see anyone.
Aw, who was I kidding? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. No matter which way around it, I had been thoroughly screwed, by two guys, and who knows what the result would be? And should I tell Will, or should I keep this a secret? With Will in his current state of alpha-maleness, he would probably go after Jackson and get himself killed, or badly hurt anyway. Will might be my alpha, but he wasn’t the pack’s alpha.
No, I couldn’t tell him. If he found out later, so be it. At least there would be a cushion of time in between. And as for me and my ambivalence? Best thing to do is accept the situation and move on, I told myself.
Easier said than done, isn’t it? This from the Siegfried-Amber peanut gallery.
A wise woman once told me, “Happiness isn’t about having what you want; it’s about wanting what you have.”
Was that my problem? I thought I knew what I wanted. But what if a person wanted changes? Then what?
Ugh. I slept again.
You know they say in therapy that it’s not what happens to you in life that counts as much as how you respond to it. And speaking of therapy, do they even have therapists for supernaturals? I’d have to ask Con about that. Or Sully. I wasn’t talking to Jackson until I had a better handle on what I was going through and I had a feeling that bending Ghost Mom’s ear wasn’t going to be enough.
Whom could I talk to that I could trust? Amber had made it perfectly clear what she thought, so she wasn’t an option. Siegfried was, well, a dog, Elle’s dog and Amber’s familiar. Too close. I didn’t know any of the witches well enough, nor Will’s sister Sam. Not for this.
Then I realized: I’d talk to Adam. Of all my family, Adam seemed to be the rock we could always turn to when we needed someone to have our backs, if rocks had backs.
So I called Adam and told him the whole story. He stopped me when we got to Amber’s part. “So, how did Colby get out anyway?”
“Wait, what?”
“You said that Amber woke up in Colby’s body already headed up the hill. I thought you said she was locked up. Obviously she was the anomaly we had over in sector eight. She must have come through and we were looking for wolves going out, not coming in. Anyway, she was supposed to be locked down, so we didn’t suspect.”
I could tell he was blaming himself. “She was. I locked her in myself, but I didn’t think about that until just now.”
“Someone else must have sneaked in and let her out. I’ll send one of my people in to do a forensic sweep. Have you been down in the basement since?”
“Only to do laundry. The bedding in the cage looked clawed up, but I wasn’t even thinking about how Colby got out, what with Amber in a coma, and all. Oh, Adam, I feel so stupid,” I said. “Not to mention violated.”
“I’ll talk to Elle about upgrading the property sensors and getting you on a dedicated line. You might want to have a witch you trust come in and do a magical sweep.”
“Wait, you think the witches are involved?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them. Why?”
“It’s just, they’ve been all over the place while Amber was in her coma. You don’t think one of them…”
“I don’t know, Ashlee. Better safe than sorry. Are there any of the witches you would specifically trust or distrust?”
“Naw, they’re all kooky and weird, but nobody stands out as especially unnerving. Sister Lena seems to have a good head on her shoulders.”
“She’s leader of the coven,” Adam said. “I’ll send her in to do a broom-sweep.”
“A broom-sweep?”
“What did you think witches’ brooms were for? Flying?”
“Umm…”
“Do you know how much magical power it takes to levitate? Don’t believe everything you read. It’s like we do it for bugs, only for magic. Anyway, tell me what happened after Amber woke up playing sidecar to Colby’s wolf.”
I continued the story without interruption until the end. “So, what do you think I should do?”
“Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I would have told you to ride it out anyway. I mean, it’s not like you were raped or like they have birth defects, right? I’m not that parental myself and I know it’s not politically correct, a woman’s body and all, but I still think you should carry the pups to term.”
“You would. You started all this, anyway.” After all, he’d sent the werewolves to my door in the first place, though I didn’t have to open it.
“I did?” His voice got all innocent-like.
“Some day you’re going to sit down and tell me everything you know about Knightsbridge, supernaturals and just what you do in that top secret job of yours.”
“I am, eh?” He laughed. “Believe me, Ash, you’re better off not knowing. But my main job right now is to keep my sisters safe, with Dad and Rhonda none the wiser.”
“Speaking of which, you may want to make plans with Dad over Halloween, as Rhonda’s coming to Knightsbridge for the Street Witches Convention.”
“Why?”
“I guess she’s getting into witchcraft. Or was already.”
“Really? Wonder if Dad knows he’s in an interfaith marriage. Didn’t see that one coming.”
“I know, right?” My neck was getting stiff from cradling the phone on my shoulder and I groaned. “Take him to a movie. I bet it’s been a while since he’s been in a real theater. He’s such a bookworm.”
“Roger wilco,” he said. “Oh, and remember, expect a visit from my forensics guy. I’d like to know who let the dogs out.”
“Who, who?” I groaned at his punishment. I bet he was waiting the whole conversation just to slide that one past me, but that’s my brother: deadly, with a juvenile sense of humor.
“By Ashface.”
“By, Alien,” I said and hung up. I always felt better after talking to Adam. It’s not like my situation had changed or anything; he just made me feel less alone in the midst of it.
A guy named Nick showed up the next morning with an actual CSI kit. Two, really, one in each hand, opening like tackle boxes with their stairstep holders. Fingerprint powder. Tape. Beakers and eyedroppers and cotton swabs and solutions, plastic zip-lock bags and rubber gloves and more obscure whatnots.
And he was deadly cute. Good thing I was already soo monogamous. Then my wolf derailed that thought and I felt bad all over again.
“Whoever set Colby free did a good job of covering his tracks,” Nick said after testing around the linoleum and the bars of the cage. He crawled in and squatted on his gloved hands and padded knees and surveyed the mass of thrashed bedding. He rifled through the scraps, grabbed something and turned to me
and held out his hand. “Isn’t this one of your scarves?”
It was one of the scarves I’d given to the Delegation of Bitches. In fact, it was the scarf I’d given to Sierra. I knew because it was the ugliest of the lot. Maybe it was petty of me to give her the one I liked the least, but she didn’t have to know it. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that.
“Sierra,” I said.
Nick said, “But she was up on the mountain with us during the change, right? Even if she was involved, she couldn’t have done it herself. Nobody got out.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s a setup. Everyone knows I hate Sierra. Adam’s sending a witch in to check for magical traces. Said if you don’t find anything, Sister Lena’s the best next bet.”
Someone knocked on the door upstairs. “Speak of the devil,” I said and headed up to let the witch in.
Sister Lena entered with a swiffer and a dustpan, followed by Spanky, Siegfried, Ghost Mom, Colby and Amber, in that order. Hoo boy.
“We invited Elle too,” Colby said as if reading my thoughts, “but she seemed more interested in the game.”
“Small mercies.” I looked to my sister and we smiled. Gotta love Elle. Our island of normal in a sea of insanity. I was glad she seemed to have forgiven me now that Amber was normal again. At least as normal as she ever is. “A swiffer?”
“Hey, we’re modern when we can be,” Lena said.
Nick came up from the basement and gave us the all-clear; forensically, that is. “I’ll take what I got to the lab and see what I can figure out.” Then he left.
Sister Lena said, “I hope you don’t mind, Ashlee, but when Adam called and said you needed a broom-sweep, Siegfried and I decided that this would make a good teaching opportunity for Amber’s training.”
“And the rest of you?” I looked at the others.
Oh, we’re just here for moral support, Siegfried thought at us, and we all had to laugh.
“Well, this I gotta see,” I said. Hey, if my space was going to be invaded, I might as well be entertained.
