Taming the Beast

He wanted badly to. He wanted her to come out of that castle she’d erected around herself.

Why did she do that?

“…Fallon…moon?” were some other sounds she made.

He kept listening, but he didn’t understand. He understood, however, that he was supposed to.

But how?

Chapter 6

“I hate to make you repeat everything you just said,” ex-Fallonite Maggie Gilisson said, “but I think it’s important that Muriel hears the story out of your mouth.”

Mary cringed and rubbed her eyes. “Okay.”

The wolf had settled onto his belly and was watching her less intensely than before, but she still felt ill at ease. She didn’t know if what he was doing was normal—if he was waiting for her to look away so he could stage some sort of attack. The crates weren’t all that secure. If he were to brush his side against the tower hard enough, it’d topple.

“Come on, girlie,” Maggie said. “You don’t need to be afraid to talk to her. She’s just like everyone else.”

“Bullshit,” Mary said.

Maggie laughed, and so did Muriel Hall—the third party of the three-way call.

If reaching out to Maggie hadn’t been a frightening enough prospect, now Mary had to rustle up some fortitude and explain her situation to the Afótama’s last queen. Muriel, Contessa’s grandmother, apparently maintained the clan’s genealogies. She may have had some information about certain Fallonite lines. After all, they’d once been one group.

“Okay,” Mary said after taking a deep breath. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but I don’t know a lot. His name is Andreas Toft. As Maggie knows well, his family has always been something of an institution in Fallon. Very rich. Made a fortune on gold and land during the nineteenth century.”

The wolf shifted onto his side, eyes closed. She hated speaking of Andreas as if he weren’t right there but, in a way, he wasn’t.

“Mostly, the Tofts kept to themselves,” she said. “We always found them to be a bit eccentric. I suppose the same could be said for anyone around here.”

“Hear, hear,” Maggie muttered. Of course, she would have agreed. She’d lived in a parked Airstream trailer way off the grid and liked to put Mormon proselytizers to work should they dare knock. Mary had heard about one pair she’d had sort the aluminum cans out of her junk haul.

“What he told me before he shifted into this wolf was that his family had a curse that hadn’t been seen since the gods pulled magic back from our groups,” Mary said.

“Go on,” Muriel said.

Mary licked her lips and watched a muscle on Andreas’s back twitch as though it were being repeatedly plucked. That couldn’t have been normal.

“I…I think he said that when magic started flowing back to you, he was affected as well. No one in his family had shown any signs of the curse in recent history, and he doesn’t know enough about what he is to guess the triggers, or anything, really. Right now, he’s asleep on the floor in front of me.”

“As a wolf?” Muriel asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s fascinating.”

“How so?”

“I’ve pored over every book in the library here in the executive mansion, including the ones you sent. Thank you again for donating those, by the way. They were quite unique.”

“Oh! Well, you’re welcome.”

“The interesting thing about wolves is that there are numerous groups of wolf shifters, and they all came about more or less the same way. Some people might call what the gods did a curse. Others, like me, may simply say they introduced a mutation into the gene pool.”

“A mutation?” Mary furrowed her brow.

“Yes. We all have them. Different ones, of course. That’s why we have disparate magical abilities that all seem to travel down family lines. The mutation has always been there, but there simply wasn’t enough magic around for it to assert.”