Is she my mother?
My wolf’s eyes meet her woman ones. She has eyes like mine. Dark hair that falls to mid-back with curls. Hair like mine, but a touch of silver threads through it. She’s trim, athletic, and has little lines around her eyes but doesn’t look old. Her scent… her scent wraps around me like something warm. Something familiar. Another woman runs in my direction and I straighten to give her a warning, but I don’t need to, because she stops at the side of the woman I am now sure is my mother and puts her arm around her. This woman smells like her, but different. Family to her. This means… family to me. The second woman weeps openly, looking at me with affection before she says something to my mother and my ears would hear it if I were focused on it but I’m not. I’m taking everything in and trying to comprehend what I’m seeing. My mother takes a step forward. I make no moves. She shifts into a black and grey wolf with mostly grey over her face and moves in my direction. I lift my chin and watch her slow approach. She’s as small as a non-shifting wolf, and her wolf is stunningly beautiful. So beautiful it hurts.
A foot away, her eyes stare into mine and the pain in them grabs me by the chest and seizes that thing that beats in me. It stops beating for a moment and then returns with a tempo that spills anguish. I see in those green eyes the loss she’s experienced, the pain. I feel that sorrow. My anguish transforms to anger.
Cornelius smelled like he’d been inside her. I smelled her fear. I smelled what he took from her and brought back. He stole into this village and he took her against her will.
And before that, he took me.
Why? Why did he take me and raise me and lie to me? Why?
I miss when she moves closer until her nose strokes my muzzle and I tremble with anger when I see the sorrow and loss in her eyes from this close. I want to shred things. I want to shred him. But he’s already dead. He’s already decayed, turned to dust and earth other than some bones that are bleached white from the sun.
No, not all that’s left. He left something else. Me, like this. Filled with this emotion.
There are people surrounding me, people who look at me with what feels like respect. Most of them have moved closer. I’ve never had respect before and if what Riley Savage told me is correct, respect is what I’m due, what I would have had growing up here, being one of them, contributing to their society.
I can’t do this. I can’t bear it. If I didn’t feel so much loss, the anger would take over and send the lightning bolt through my spine.
I take a step back away from her, from them, and my eyes trace an arc across my perimeter to see all of them.
Almost all of them are now in wolf form; more have joined, around two dozen of them. Four more cars are coming to this intersection and I see others moving in on foot, too. Shifting, one after another. Men, women, older children. Several women with babies in their arms stay in person form. Every single one is in a pose of submission and respect and they watch as I stretch my neck and feel the emotions cleave through the center of me, through the man and the wolf, both.
I release a cry of undiluted grief, a lament to the sky of absolute emotion.
I turn and I run the other way, back the way I came, without looking back.
23
Ivy
It’s been quiet for a long time, and I’m hungry.
I get out of bed and find myself alone in the house, so I boil some water for tea and eat a banana. I wash down my birth control pill with tea and then I pace. I pace the cabin as I climb the walls in my mind, thinking about all the things I have going on in my life that I don’t like. And then I decide to tally up all the things I do like.
I’m excited about my new job.
Um…
That’s it. That’s all. Is it really all?
Yep.
I’m not excited about my sister’s upcoming wedding. In fact, these final weeks leading up to it will be fraught with stress because Amelia Brennan is a bridezilla of the tallest order. She doesn’t want Dad walking her down the aisle and got mad at me for trying to make her make up with him. I worried she’d regret it later if they eventually made up, but she didn’t have him at her wedding.
I fought with Amelia about breaking up with Ben and how that affected her wedding. Mom fought with me about how me and Amelia were fighting. Dad whined and complained to me about Mom and Amelia.