“I was drawn away in the middle of the night. You did everything you could.”
When she said she’d been drawn away, Julia noticed one of Dee’s eyebrows rise inquisitively.
“Jordan,” Mara said, plunking herself down next to Julia. “My ankle is still swollen.”
“Perhaps you should be resting like a certain doctor told you to.”
“I’m helping Kyle and Katherine build their cabin,” Mara said. “I just need some more painkillers.”
“What you need is to sit down and leave that ankle be,” Jordan admonished. “I’ll bandage it and you can ice it, but no more working on the cabin. Sit on a log and do quality control if you insist on helping.”
Mara rolled her eyes.
“Let’s take a walk, child,” Dee said. “Some light exercise is good for the babies. Right, Jordan?”
“Yes ma’am,” Jordan said.
Julia and Dee went outside, leaving Mara to argue with the doctor, and walked parallel to the tree-line. The night was refreshingly cold, and the sky was clear and alive with stars.
“So” Dee said, once they were far from the house. “You were drawn away that night?”
“It was the werewitch,” Julia said. “She showed me the path to where she was living.”
Dee nodded. She hesitated, looking vaguely troubled. “I don’t imagine you’ll ever run into the werewitch again, but if you do, I think you should keep your distance. One can never be sure of the intentions of such…unearthly beings.”
The word “unearthly” prompted Julia to tilt her head back and soak in the stars…and just as she did, as if the sky were waving hello, a hot white streak arced across the dark canvas.
Both Julia and Dee spoke at the same time: “Did you see that?”
Julia giggled. “Do you remember when you told me about what they were? You said the stars were souls trying to find Earth, and when they came here to their bodies they lit up the sky.”
“Those are the old shifter legends,” Dee said. “I just couldn’t tell you that at the time. So I just told you it was something your parents believed.”
“I always thought when I saw a shooting star that maybe it was them, coming back to Earth to be born again.”
There was a question that had been bouncing around in the back of Julia’s head ever since she’d learned she was a shifter, and now it came to the front.
“Dee,” Julia said. “Did my parents…you said they died in a car crash.” She saw Dee’s eyes cloud over as she spoke the words.
“Do you remember?” Dee asked, her voice a whisper.
“I remember living in the cabin when I was young.”
“The two of them lived on the edge of the territory. They were a strange couple. I’d always known your mother was a strange girl. My little girl. But neither of them were like the rest of the pack. They never hunted for sport, or practice. Truth be told, they loathed the violent ways of the pack. But they were purebred - they could travel anywhere in human form without being noticed by other shifters, so they were useful to the pack.”
“Were they…killed?” Julia swallowed the lump in her throat. She almost didn’t want to hear the answer. But there had been so much Dee had hidden from her. Curiosity burned through her, and every answer to her questions opened up another mystery. Dee was silent for a moment, and Julia thought that perhaps she wouldn’t answer the question anyway. The old, white-haired woman reached up to a nearby branch. Between her fingers, she rolled the thin pine needles, then brought the scent close to her nose, inhaling. Then she spoke.
“Near the end, before we left. The pack wanted to expand into the Karawka region, and your parents would have moved in to occupy the land. It would have been perfect for them—an isolated spot in the middle of a large preserve. But the area was occupied by other shifters, so they fought a battle. The pack leader told your parents that it was their job to fight for the region. I fought there alongside my husband as well. It was a bloody fight.”
Dee’s eyes strayed to the forest, seeing a battlefield out there in the shadowy depths. Julia inhaled. The air seemed so peaceful. She could not imagine the fighting that her family had to go through.
“The constellations are made up of godly souls, which is why they twinkle so brightly,” Dee said. “It is very rare for one of them to fall.”
“That was in the book my mother read to me. The fairytale book, when I was little.”
“That was the book of Kar. I made a children’s copy for her to read to you. All of the tales in there are scripture.”
“But then—”
“There were stories in there about you.”
Julia smiled, remembering. One of the protagonists of the book was a young girl, so Julia’s mom had always read the story as if it were her.
But Dee was not smiling. To Julia’s surprise, her eyes were shimmering with tears. A realization jolted Julia.
“It wasn’t me,” Julia said. “It was just a princess who had frizzy red hair. Someone who looked like me. Her name—”
Julia broke off.
“She was never named,” Dee said. “Don’t you remember? She was always just—”
“Wolf.”
Julia’s eyes rose to her grandmother’s as she spoke the word.
“I never understood it,” Julia said. “I thought it was just a silly nickname. But yes, I remember. The story of Wolf and the—” Her breath caught. “And the Two Jewels,” she heard herself finish.
All at once Julia understood why her grandmother’s eyes had been shimmering. A void seemed to open in her chest, and her heart began to pound.
“In the end…” Julia said.
“In the end the two jewels are taken from her.” Dee’s voice quavered. Only for an instant, but enough to make Julia glimpse how old she really was.
“They could be anything,” Julia said. “The two jewels could be anything.”
“Two rubies, one dark, one light—”
“Stop.” Julia put her hands to her head, trying to press out the sounds of the world. She felt them in her, just barely moving, but alive. Distinct presences.
“I’m sorry, child, but we must all face—”
“STOP!”
Dee’s presence was still there, and Julia realized that her new sense was a curse as well as a blessing. Before when she’d been stressed out beyond imagining, she would retreat to her room and cocoon herself under the covers. The isolation calmed her down, helped her to realize that whatever she’d been dreading wouldn’t be the end of the world. Now, though, she had no way to retreat into the safety of aloneness.
Everywhere she could feel presences of the other people in the house. Kyle passed by outside her door and it was as though he was inside the room; Julia had taken to staying in the bathroom whenever she was nak*d. Even in her bed under the sheets, she felt exposed to anyone who passed near her.
Worse was Damien, for Julia had no respite from his constant emotions. However tiring it was to handle her own, sometimes irrational, emotions, it was more than twice as tiring having to handle Damien’s as well. She’d get frustrated while she was writing, and would throw her pen down before realizing that it was simply Damien doing a crossword, getting upset and tangling his moodiness into her attitude without her even realizing.
She did not like feeling so vulnerable. And now, Dee thought that her babies would be stolen away from her…
“I’ll leave you be for now, child,” Dee said. “But we should talk soon.”
“We?”
“Damien, you, and I. The pack. We need to decide what to do about all this.”
Julia shook her head. Ideas of safety and home whirled in her mind.
“I need some time to think,” she said.
“Think, then,” Dee said. “And think on the stories you have already read. But don’t go anywhere alone.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Damien
Damien waited in wolf form for Julia to shift. She’d taken off her clothes, the fabric falling in whispered rustles to the ground. There had been so many people coming through the woods recently that Damien’s nose picked up a jumble of scents. Kyle and Katherine, Mara, Jordan. His pack.
Julia was afraid; he could sense it in their connection. He sent love her way, love and reassurance. Jordan had said it would be fine, and he always knew best. He did not press Julia to go faster. She would shift in her own time.
Damien heard her breathe heavily and then focus her energy inside of her, feeling herself shift into wolf form. Her limbs twisted, her breath strained. She whimpered as the claws came through, and Damien remembered the first time he had shifted as a child, how it had hurt him. Nowadays he didn’t even notice. Then she was a wolf entirely, her scent a wolf’s scent. There was no human left, and it made Damien c*ck his head before remembering. She was purebred and could be entirely human, entirely wolf. Strange, but beautiful. Just like her.
As soon as she had shifted and fallen onto her paws, their connection strengthened and Damien’s senses grew heightened. Damien could smell the dew on the pine needles, the bitter berries in the shrubs along the trail. He felt the brief rays of the sun as they twinkled in through the forest branches, and the cool of the wind as it ruffled his fur. And, too, he could feel Julia’s wonder as she stretched her body, newly furred.
He came alongside her and nuzzled her belly with his nose. He still couldn’t sense them yet. Their babies. No matter what, Damien knew that she and then were the most important parts of his life.
Julia jumped then, leapt into the air, and the joy emanating from her body rippled through Damien, infecting him with excitement. Then she was running, and he ran after her into the forest.
The air was crisp, clear, and as Damien ran behind Julia he could see—almost, perhaps it wasn’t seeing—the branches and the paths twisting in front of him. Perhaps it was his memory of running through the forest that he was seeing, but it came only in brief, momentary flashes of sight, almost like a fragmented dream. If it was a dream, it was a wonderful one.
Then he sensed something else, a scent that crossed his nose and made him stop in his tracks. The flashes were gone; everything was dark again, and Julia stopped in front of him, trotted back, and waited expectantly.
The scent was a bad scent. It was the scent of death, of danger, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. Damien twisted his neck, his nose sniffing the air around them, but it was gone.
He did not want to ruin the moment for Julia. She waited for him, and he barked once, jumping over her back in play and rolling on the ground. They tousled for a while, Damien being careful not to hurt Julia in any way. She seemed to be stronger as a wolf, for she nipped at his heels like a pup at play and ran back through the woods as quickly as she had come. When they finally arrived back at the house, Julia shifted back into human form, but Damien sensed a hint of disappointment in her, a longing for the forest.
“We’ll go running again,” Damien said. Being human had its drawbacks, but at least he could hold her hand.