Wolf Bargain (Wolfish 3)

As I have many nights before this, I once again stay tucked inside the library late into the evening hours—well after everyone else in the house has gone to sleep.

It’s hours later when Romulus stumbles in on me, sitting here in the half-dark room lit by waning candlelight and chilled by the night air that creeps in through the cracks in the windowsill. The sight of me sends him reeling for a moment, but then he seems almost impressed.

“Bit of late reading, Sabrina?” he asks as he eyes the tall piles of books that I have stacked up around my little reading spot in the corner.

“Yeah,” I say, a blush rising in my cheeks as I glance around myself at the accumulated mess. “I just want to know all about everything.”

I pick up the book closest to me and hold it out, my eyes glowing as I look over the worn leather cover. “Everything,” I repeat.

Romulus chuckles.

“All about everything?” he says. “That’s a pretty tall order of knowledge. No one knows all about everything.”

That’s true.

“Well, then I want to know about as much as I possibly can,” I say, amending my answer.

Romulus nods his head as if he’s influenced by what I’ve said. He takes a quick look around the room and walks over to the hearth to start a small fire inside it.

“What does your mother think about all of this?” Romulus asks as he stokes the beginnings of the flame.

Ugh, my mother.

I set the book down with a little too much gusto. I’ve spent the last few months here trying not to think about her.

“She’s too busy thinking about herself at the moment to care what I’m doing.”

Romulus glances over at me with a sideways stare.

“I doubt that’s true,” he says. “Haven’t you told her anything about your involvement with us?”

Maybe I would have if she wasn’t so concerned with her own involvement elsewhere.

“Define anything.”

“Sabrina, does she know that we’re wolf shifters?”

I don’t answer. The look on my face tells him everything he needs to know.

While he seems pleased at the fact that I haven’t betrayed their trust, he also seems a little wary. He nods his head in thought.

“Just be careful,” he says, “that you don’t lose touch of your old life so completely that there’s nothing left to hold on to after the transformation.”

He leaves me with that before I have the chance to answer.

And maybe that’s a good thing, because I’d hate to have to tell him it’s already too late.

2

Sabrina

I used to have dreams about my mother when I was little.

I would dream that she looked like an angel, complete with wings and everything. On especially difficult nights when my father was at his cruelest, I would dream that my mother flew into my room and lifted me straight up through the ceiling and far away. It was never to any one particular place.

It was just … away.

It felt so real as a child that I can still remember the feeling that I had of her soft wing-feathers against my cheek and the chill air that rushed past me as we soared above the Earth. I would sometimes wake up with such a lingering memory of that dream that I would actually expect it to happen.