by Molly Harper
As I scurried away to the study carrel, I heard scuffling from the other side of the bookshelf. I unlocked the door and stuffed all of my belongings into my backpack. When I came out, the vampire was standing by the front desk, holding both boys by the collar, immobile as they tried to squirm away. He was speaking to Mrs. Stubblefield, giving the boys a gentle (by vampire standards) shake occasionally to make a point. I tried to catch his attention to at least wave goodbyes, but he was wholly focused on Mrs. Stubblefield…or maybe her eyebrows. They were like two gray, hairy exclamation points on her forehead. I knew I had trouble looking away when I talked to her.
My phone buzzed again. Another impatient text from Mama. “Where are you?! You better answer this phone now!!!”
I winced. Mama was not one for text speak, but she was one for excessive punctuation.
I glanced back toward the checkout desk and the handsome stranger with the velvety voice. Who was I kidding? Why would I need to stay to talk to him? It wasn’t like this attractive stranger was going to ask me out for…did vampires drink coffee? It didn’t matter. I doubted I would see him again. My life was too complicated for that sort of connection. I needed to get home, and quickly.
With one last look at the vampire’s back, I hurried out of the library and into the street. It would take me about twenty minutes to jog home—ten if I ran at full speed.
My pocket buzzed and somehow, it sounded angrier.
Full speed it was, then.
I ducked between the library and the courthouse, into the less desirable area of the Hollow’s town proper. It was shocking, really, how close the woods edged the more vital areas of town. I wasn’t the toughest member of the pack, or the fiercest, but I was the fastest.
When I reached the tree line, I slipped out of my clothes and stuffed them into my backpack with my phone and laptop. I secured the straps around my shoulders and clipped the belt around my chest so it would stay on my back when I changed into my other form.
I rolled my shoulders, glancing up at the moon. Just another Friday night, running naked in the woods.
I tried buying a car when I was nineteen, scrupulously saving my earnings at the butcher shop until I had enough for a used Ford sedan the color of spilled beer. I sold it within a year. Every time I turned around, my aunts and cousins had borrowed the keys without asking or my daddy had insisted that someone should use the car for some random errand because “pack shares with pack.” Eventually, it was just easier to sell the car to a distant cousin to avoid the frustration, and save my gas and insurance money.
As usual, shifting into a wolf felt far more comfortable than my human skin, like shedding an itchy wool sweater. I shook out my sleek chestnut fur, stretching the muscles I would need on a run over land I knew as well as the back of my human hand. My phone buzzed insistently in my backpack, reminding me that I didn’t have time to relish just how good this felt.
Scanning the area one last time for people or predators, I bounded through the trees and followed the scent of home. My paws slipped over the soft grass silently and the wind tickled at my sensitive ears. Scent and sound and sight blended into one sense, channeling information into my hind brain—the rustling of potential prey under the brush, the light of the moon against the leaves, exhaust from cars on the faraway interstate. It was like trying to read a dozen books simultaneously, all at once distracted and laser-focused. Home was the only thing that could keep me from following the myriad of prey scents that flared across my nose.
As I loped over what my cousins called the “wrassling hill,” the McClaine pack compound came into view. The McClaines were among the first to settle in Half-Moon Hollow, choosing to stay far away from the early human settlements and stick to our own. Though my family was sinfully proud of it, the compound was nothing fancy, an ancient farmhouse surrounded by a neat array of trailers on nearly seventy acres that stretched all the way to the Ohio River. The trailers stood in varying states of repair and the pickup trucks had seen better days, but as my Uncle Lonnie liked to say, “They’re paid for, and that’s what counts.”
Still, we were better off than some packs, who had to sell off their territories as the wilds of the world shrunk and poverty was an ever-looming threat. People talked about the disappearing middle class without realizing exactly how bad things were getting for were-creatures in this new modern world. While there were a precious few werewolves who could stand to live in crowded cities, to attend college and become doctors and lawyers, most of us remained pretty blue collar. The sort of jobs werewolves could do without losing our damn minds—mechanic work, farming, anything that kept us outdoors and out of an office—were changing so fast that we couldn’t keep up. And so, some packs were forced to sell their land to developers to keep the metaphorical wolves from the door.
All you had to get my old Uncle Creed cussing was say the words “gated community.”
Werewolves were the most highly evolved were species and underwent the most complete, dependable changes. We also had the most stable social hierarchy, so our lives were a bit easier to balance between the two forms. Each pack had an Alpha male mated to an Alpha female, who controlled their packs through a combination of biological imperative and social conditioning. While their “subjects”—like my parents—had all of the property rights and general free will of any regular person, all major decisions had to be approved by the Alpha couple. Everything from mate selection to major (or sometimes, minor) purchases had to be deemed for the good of the pack to be acceptable.
Our Alpha couple, my Uncle Lonnie and his wife, Mimi, lived in the trailer closest to the old farmhouse, which had mostly been used as a communal meeting space since the family outgrew it decades before. My daddy technically should have been Alpha as eldest son of the previous Alpha and Lonnie’s older brother, but he’d been overlooked after he’d left the packlands to wander. By some strange instinctive magic, leaving had stripped Daddy of his authority and transferred it to Uncle Lonnie. Personally, I’d always thought Lonnie did a much better job than my father would have done. He was fair, but firm, with a kindness in manner that made you want to do as he asked. And yes, he bothered to ask, which could not be said of all Alphas.
Of course, I never voiced these thoughts in front of my parents. That would lead nowhere good.
After years of his wandering, Daddy came back mated to my mama, who was carrying me. While Lonnie accepted Daddy back, it was just “understood” that Daddy’s place in the pack was tenuous. My whole life, I’d heard Daddy rail about being given a spot on the far end of the land, how he’d been edged out, rejected. Our placement may have allowed Daddy his privacy, but in his eyes, it was also a daily reminder that he’d never be fully accepted back into the pack.
So, the situation had soured long before I was born into it. I was an only child, an anomaly in werewolf society, and not the much-desired son – which only added to Daddy’s list of perceived slaps from the universe. We were an alarmingly fertile bunch, which was why there were so many trailers on the compound. Our three-person family unit was just another thing that made us “odd.”
Secretly, I’d always been grateful for it. Crowding more people into our house definitely wouldn’t have made it a happier home.
I whuffed off the calls of the uncles and aunts who were out on their front decks, enjoying the soft spring air. Uncle Eagan commented on how I was out late, with that tone that managed to express disapproval, along with genuine concern. Aunt Paulene asked if I’d eaten yet with the same fretting anxiety she always had: that any member of the younger generation would drop dead if she didn’t cram them full of carbs every three hours.
I stopped just in front of my family’s trailer. White and laminate paneling, it certainly wasn’t the nicest one on the compound, but it wasn’t the worst-off. (That particular honor belonged to my cousin Vance, whose moldy “bachelor pad” would be condemned by any health inspector with eyes and sense.) But Mama made an effort to spruce it up, planting bulb flowers a
round the stoop and hanging a pretty windchime she’d made from tumbled bits of old glass Coke bottles.
I ducked around the corner of the trailer to shift back to two legs and put on my clothes. Generally speaking, nudity was no big deal for a werewolf. Clothes just got in the way when you were trying to shift back and forth between two forms. But I didn’t enjoy seeing my family members naked, so I was a little more careful of where and when I was dressed. Fortunately, my parents felt pretty much the same, at least, if we were in the house.
Though the windows were lit, the trailer was silent aside from the screech of the front door. Normally, the TV would be blasting some sort of sports channel or one of Mama’s game shows. Maybe they’d decided I warranted the cold shoulder and decided to go to bed early? No—the last time they’d done that, they’d shut the trailer door with one of those anti-theft Club things and I’d had to sleep in my car.
“Tylene McClaine!”
Shit.
Like a lot of female McClaines over the last two generations, my name ended in some form of “lene.” Because my daddy was Tyler, I was Tylene. Still, I was better off than my poor cousin, Eugenelene.
“Where have you been?” my father thundered from where my parents were seated at the dinette set with two of my aunties, Lurlene and Braylene. Oh, hell.
Petite and cherubic with meticulously dyed auburn curls, Braylene had had three cubs by the time she was my age. She included that little factoid in almost every conversation we had. She even wrote it in my birthday card once. Lurlene had been a great beauty in her time, blessed with what she called an “hourglass figure.” She’d had her pick of mates from the best packs and never let anyone forget it. Of all my aunts, Lurlene and Braylene were the most “involved.” They didn’t like how I dressed, how I spoke, how I refused their constant advice. (I much preferred Aunt Paulene and her endless carbs.)
When I was younger, I’d learned how to quietly fade into background of the pack, easy enough to do when everybody else was so damn loud. My parents were lucky I was a good kid who was more interested in my schoolwork than the bad choices available to me as a teenager in a rural area. But once I graduated, it was if I popped back up on the pack’s radar and they started questioning what I was going to do with my life, when I was going to settle down, get serious about my role in the pack. My aunts and uncles, for the most part, weren’t content with my plans for community college and a job I enjoyed.
In general, werewolf attitudes towards social justice may have evolved over the last century or so, but it took much longer for my relatives to adjust to the idea that I might want something more from life than marriage to a big strong male who could provide for me and the children I would bear for him.
When I didn’t immediately change this attitude, they’d taken to ambushing me with makeovers and “sons of friends” visiting from nearby territories. I tensed, scanning the trailer for the sight or scent of an unknown male.
When I didn’t see a stranger, or a set of hot rollers , I relaxed ever so slightly and smiled, like I didn’t have a care in the world.
I hadn’t done anything wrong tonight, not even by werewolf standards. Okay, sure, I was about to lie…but that hadn’t happened yet. My whole life was spent dancing on the edge of this sort of subtle distinction. “I was out with some friends from school.”
“What friends? You haven’t talked about friends in months,” Daddy scoffed, rising from his seat. Like most McClaine men, he was huge, well over six feet tall and still fairly muscled for a man in his early fifties. Deep, unhappy lines bracketed his mouth, the roadmap of his unsatisfying life. My mother sat, quietly working through a crossword puzzle book, as if her husband wasn’t hollering to wake up the whole pack just a few feet from her face. I’d watched over the years as she’d perfected her little bubble of concentration, impervious to noise or tension or the verbal barbs from my aunts. Unfortunately, the bubble had also hardened against her daughter’s discontent a long time ago.
“Where were you?” Daddy demanded.
“I was at the library with friends,” I told him.
He burst out laughing. “What the hell would you be doing at the library on a Friday night?”
“Reading?” I suggested.
“A girl your age should be on a date,” Aunt Braylene said, shelling peas into an old stoneware bowl. “What happened with that Scottie? Darla’s boy? I gave him your phone number. Or do you kids just talk over the texting now?”
I clamped my lips together to keep my expression neutral. I’d agreed to one date with Scottie Briggs. He’d been so handsy, I’d barely escaped the movie theatre without popcorn butter-flavored handprints on my ass. I would not subject myself or my jeans to that again.
A headache started to bloom behind my eyes.
“It didn’t work out,” I said vaguely.
“You know, when I was your age, girls didn’t hide in their rooms behind computer screens. If you want to catch a man, you’re going to have to work for it,” Braylene told me.
I shrugged. “I’m good. Really.”
Lurlene looked sincerely offended. “You need to think about your future. You know, your daddy isn’t gonna put a roof over your head forever.”
I had a lot of opinions on this topic. I’d been willing to move out for years. I’d even tried a few times, only to cancel my plans when my parents claimed it would somehow make their position in the pack even worse. So, my secret savings account grew right along with my frustrations. Daddy glared at me hard enough not to bring those opinions up.
“Why don’t you come on over to my place tomorrow? We can freshen up your hairstyle a little bit, make you over,” Braylene pressed, with a significant look towards Mama and her dishwater blond hair. “You were lucky enough to get the McClaine coloring, honey, but you gotta take full advantage.”
“I’ll think about it,” I promised, angling my body towards my room, so I could make my escape as soon as possible. I would not submit to another torture session in the chair Lurlene’s oldest son had ripped out of a defunct hair salon. Last time, she’d damn near given me a perm.
“Well, what else do you have goin?” Lurlene asked. “Hank said that you’re not signed up for a shift at the butcher shop. Or the bait shop. Or the towing business. What are you gonna do with yourself all weekend?”
“I have homework,” I lied again smoothly. Community college coursework had been my go-to excuse for years. And while I did have a few associates degrees under my belt, including computer science and marketing, I hadn’t taken actual classes in about six months. My parents didn’t need to know that.
“Oh, honey, community college isn’t gonna get you anywhere you want to go,” Braylene said. “If working for family is good enough for your cousins, it’s good enough for you. You know how busy the butcher shop is on weekends.”
“Angelene met her husband while she was working at the butcher shop,” Lurlene added.
“Angelene’s husband thinks he’s gonna make money off of selling homemade batteries!” I retorted.
“He says it’s all about who you know,” Braylene said, shaking her head.
“Pardon me if that isn’t exactly what I’m looking for in a mate,” I huffed.
“Well, you’re never gonna find one if you’re so all-fired picky,” Lurlene shot back.
I objected, “It’s not ‘picky’ to—”
Daddy cut me off with a gesture. “All right, all right, enough. I’m sure Tylene will come to her senses soon enough.”
Braylene stood, picking up her bowl of peas. “You need to talk to that girl, Tyler.”
She pulled Lurlene up by her elbow. Lurlene was trying to pull away, whispering to me, “Just some layers around your face maybe. Or some bangs! We could tease ’em real high!”
“With all due respect, Aunt Lurlene, I would rather be bald,” I said quietly, shaking my head.
With the front door slamming behind my aunties, Daddy whirled on me. “I’ve had enough of that library bulls
hit, Tylene. I know when you’re lying to me. Where were you? Were you with some boy we don’t know? Go ahead and tell me. You know I could smell him on you if I wanted to.”
Pointing out that at twenty-four, I should be spending time with men, not boys, was a point that would have been completely lost on my whole family. Instead, I chose to focus on the idea of my father literally trying to sniff out my sins.
“Oh, gross, that is a huge violation of privacy,” I said, backing away from him.
“You live under my roof, so you follow my rules.”
“Well, then maybe I shouldn’t to be under your roof.”
“Don’t start that again, Tylene,” Mama said quietly. “Until you’re grown, your place is in our home. If you leave sooner, the whole pack will ask why. You’ll put our place at risk.”
“I am grown! I’m twenty-four years old! I have savings. I can pay my own bills, my own rent.”
Mama rolled her eyes. “You know what we mean by ‘grown!’”
“‘Married’ does not mean grown!”
“How do you all the sudden have all this money?” My father’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s been giving you money?”
I gritted my teeth and took a big breath through my nose. These arguments were always so circular, not to mention pointless, because they never listened to a word I said anyway. “I don’t suddenly have money. I’ve been saving it for years! I have more than enough to support myself. I could get out of your hair. You don’t even like having me around. You think I can’t tell when I’m not wanted? Trust me, I’ve picked up on the signs.”
“What do you mean ‘not wanted?’” Mama exclaimed. “We’re your parents!”
“Okay, but most people move out from their parents’ home by the time they’re twenty!”
“Most humans, you mean,” Daddy countered.
“I knew this was going to happen,” Mama murmured. “I told you, when Jolene married that human, that she’d bring the whole pack down with her.”
“This has nothing to do with Jolene,” I groaned.
“Just look at this.” Mama tossed a copy of the local newspaper onto the table. The headline read, Beeline Abuzz: Hollow-based vampire concierge service expanding to five new cities. When I failed to react—because I couldn’t figure out what that had to do with us or Jolene—Mama rolled her eyes and flipped the paper over to show a photo of an event celebrating Beeline’s “statewide launch.” Mama stabbed a long finger into the background of the photo, where Jolene and Zeb seemed to be happily wrapped in a sort of group hug with the vampires.