“Not to mention poisonous,” Romulus mutters beside me.
I look at Romulus as he sips the tea that she hands him.
“There’s a tea to keep that from happening?” I ask, surprised. “If it’s that easy, why don’t you all just drink the tea when you want to skip a transformation?”
I think back to all the times I’ve been forced to leave, forced to hole up in the cabin for sometimes days at a time, thanks to these transformations. Before I can begin to work myself up too much, however, Romulus answers.
“It only works on me,” he says bluntly. “I’ve been a shifter for a very long time, so I have a great deal of control over my body, even during the shift.”
Lydia goes back inside to do something, and the three boys stand up and pull their shirts off. I feel immediately flushed and especially awkward sitting next to Romulus as I can’t help but stare at the bodies of his sons. Even when I try to focus my gaze ahead, I can see them out of the corners of my eyes.
“Where’s Vivian?” I ask as they get ready to hop over the patio railing and onto the snowy ground, hoping to steer the conversation towards something that keeps my cheeks from growing red as rubies.
Kaleb overhears me, his wolf hearing once again picking up something I didn’t mean him to. He turns back and grins over at me from where he stands at the edge of the railing.
“She’ll be in the woods,” he says. “Far away from here, just to be safe.”
“Are you jealous?” Romulus asks.
The blunt question stuns me, pulling my attention back to the boys’ father here by my side. I look at him for a minute with my mouth hanging open and wish that Lydia were here to reign him in, as she so often has to.
“Of course, she’s jealous,” Kaleb says with a smirk, despite the elbows digging into either of his sides from Rory and Marlowe. “Vivian’s a badass in wolf form.”
A far-off howl echoes through the trees, and all attention turns towards the ridge of mountains in the distance.
The boys all jump the railing and fall into the snowy garden, their hands digging into the snow to form snowballs while they wait for their shift to come. I know Kaleb didn’t mean that comment the way that I took it. It was just the usual way they banter about their old friend, but he should have known it would hurt me, especially after everything I told him inside the tree not so long ago.
And then again, after our conversation at the cave.
Sometimes I feel like they don’t listen to me at all. They only hear what they want to, not what I’m really trying to say.
Stupid boys.
Stupid wolves.
I set my teacup down on the arm of the chair. I want to feel the cold again so that it can help dissipate the rising heat of anger growing in me. Fortunately, overhead, the glow of the moon means the start of the transformation.
A welcome distraction.
The transformation itself is by far the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. One minute the boys are standing in front of us, bare-chested and pitching balls of snow at each other, laughing and smiling and teasing about who has been working out the most. The next minute, their bodies look like a molting shell that gives way to the beast inside them. I am both enthralled and terrified.
It’s different from the shifts they’ve shown me before. More … feral.
It’s faster, more graceful, like the girl in the woods the first time I saw a shifter transform.
“Does it hurt them?” I whisper to Romulus, my eyes still glued on the wolves stretching and pawing at the ground down below. I can’t take my eyes off them.
“No more than that of a muscle being exerted,” he says. “The first few shifts are painful because one doesn’t know what to expect. The mind is a powerful thing, and if it lets fear preside over things, the expectation of pain contorts the sensation. After the unknown is no longer feared, the body and the mind work in unison and there is no more pain.”
I watch the boy’s transformed bodies down below. They are so fiercely beautiful. I can tell exactly who each wolf is, even once they start running around in skirmished circles. Each has a slightly different shade of soft, thick fur, and the moon paints a slightly varying hue on each set of reflective eyes. I’m entirely captivated by them.
Who wouldn’t be?
They’re larger than wild wolves. Stronger, too. Even beneath the thick winter fur, I can see the ripple of powerful muscle.
“There are other things that can make the transformation less pleasant, though,” Romulus adds.
“Oh? Like what?