I almost laughed. I almost cried. I just looked at him.
“I don’t remember what the next question was after that,” I said. “So let’s backup more… You have secrets. The other wolves are a touch afraid of you. What is it you’re hiding? Who are you really? Are you ever going to tell me?”
Isaac hesitated, nodded a little. “I’ll do my best.”
Chapter 29
Isaac’s mother, a human from Cumbria, had been a Wiccan practitioner, a fringe magic scholar who became involved in the true magic community only because she was mistaken for a member. Isaac, however, had never learned the details surrounding how his parents really met. His father was a wolf from Iceland—which should have been an oxymoron.
Icelandic wolves were descendants of Northern European wolves who’d fled regions where they were being hunted a few hundred years ago, and in some cases intermarried with local humans. Maybe it was the exact gene pool that formed from this close society, maybe it had something to do with the Icelandic humans. It could be that wolves and humans had always been able to produce shifter young, but the gene had been so diluted it was left with very few, or that it was even spawned from these generations of isolated wolves and humans in Iceland.
Of course, no one had scientifically studied the phenomenon—and they almost certainly never would. All Isaac knew for sure was that every wolf now alive in the modern world with a wolf parent and a human parent had at least the wolf side hailing from Iceland, usually both wolf and human. There were, in fact, many of them. Isaac had met some, had considered moving to the country as an adult. But he’d already been in school by then, followed by good jobs and he loved Scotland.
It wasn’t that shifting hybrids were impossible at all. It was simply that they tried very hard to be unknown because they knew how most packs—particularly the old school or more devout sort—would treat them. They could never be accepted as wolves among most of their peers. Yet they were exactly that.
In his teens, Isaac had been referred through relations of his father to a wolf doctor in Reykjavik. This person had interviewed him, studied his blood, and found the same conclusions he had with all the other shifting hybrids he had checked: Isaac was a wolf.
He’d never had the chickenpox or flu, his appetite, senses, and body were wolf, and it was unlikely he could produce offspring with a human—also just like any shifter.
Some said it was the human who mattered. That if they had a wolf parent themselves, they would be a carrier of the gene. Some said it was the wolf. If that parent had the gene that allowed wolf hybrids it could be enough. And the Icelandic wolves were the ones who had it.
Isaac hadn’t found all of this out, or met any of his father’s family, until he was in his teens.
He’d been born in Scotland, in Aberdeen, where his mother had extended family. His father had been a drifter in the first place. Like Omri, Andrew’s father, he’d roamed in and out of their lives.
As a child, or a pup, Isaac had taken it for granted that Dad would be there one day, gone the next. He was an engineer who jumped from project to project, from Iceland to England to Scotland. Sometimes he landed stable, well-paid work. Sometimes he went for long stretches with nothing, spending weeks on end alone rambling through the Icelandic mountains and fjords, or the Scottish Highlands and coast. Isaac was just old enough to enjoy the Highlands with him, learning to camp and understand the natural world around them, when his father took off again after Isaac’s eleventh birthday.
They waited and waited. Now and then he would send a support payment, but they couldn’t live on it and his mother had lost her part-time office job due to cutbacks. They moved to Carlisle for a cheap flat, bad schools, and a minimum-wage job. She worked days while he was at school, saw him in the afternoon, and had to go out again to waitress four nights a week.
By the time Isaac was twelve, he hated Carlisle, worried about his mother, wondered what he’d done to drive his father away, and lived in fear as he walked home and put himself to bed each night in a bad neighborhood in the city.
It was not until he was fourteen that things got really bad, though: when he started to feel twinges of the change and had no idea what was happening. Then they got word from his father’s sister that he’d been killed in an accident working on a bridge in Scotland—only 100 miles from Carlisle and he hadn’t bothered to stop by.
The problem with Isaac beginning transition was, of course, that he shouldn’t have been able to change at all. Even in Icelandic lines it was rare and his father had never so much as warned his mother about the possibility. With his father gone, his mother had assumed wolves were out of her life. But it was much worse than that. Because they had been part of no pack and his father had been a recluse with almost no sign of usual wolf social instincts, and because his mother had wanted him to grow up normal, Isaac had never known his father was a wolf.
As soon as she realized what was happening, his mother panicked and sent him to his father’s family in Iceland. Isaac had never been, never met them, and, though they were decent to him and mentored him through transition, it was still such a traumatic experience he was unable to deal with what was happening to him, with who his father had been, the lies his mother had raised him on, and he was desperate to go back.
When he did return to Carlisle his aunt explained to his mother that he had to continue to be around other shifters and progress with his transition. Usually, young wolves were mentored for years, not a few months when they were already undergoing the change and then popped back into human society. He might change in school and not be able to help it. He might change at home but get stuck, panic or be in so much pain with no one to help work through the situation that he would stay in fur.
She appealed to the Mountain Pack, both in Coniston and Peebles, Scotland. She made the mistake, with both factions, of telling the truth. Doors were slammed in their faces.
Years later, Isaac met other Mountain members, but it was never a happy experience. At the very most they would tolerate him for a gathering, but they had no place for him in their pack.
It was the Peebles wolves who told his mother about the foxes.
Isaac was sixteen when his frantic and increasingly sickly and endlessly stressed mother knocked on a door in a detached house a few miles inland out of Edinburgh. Twin sisters close to Isaac’s age opened the door: Leum and Dannsa.
It was a sunny Saturday in June. The young foxes invited them in, and Isaac’s mother sat with the vixens’ mother while a young brother, just shy of starting his own transition, raced through the house and garden with the family’s new puppy, and the twins interrogated Isaac in the kitchen under the pretense of offering him refreshments.
Isaac described them as the nosiest creatures he’d ever met. His father silent, his mother withdrawn, and himself an introvert and struggling socially in his teen years, he wasn’t used to being spoken to and asked questions at all—much less this chatter in their thick accents that they’d inherited from their mother and he often could not follow, despite having lived in Scotland.
While Isaac was cheerfully questioned and the little brother screamed through the garden with the puppy chasing a stuffed rat on a string, Isaac’s mother burst into tears at the vixen’s invitation to share her story.
Isaac remained with the family, off an on—mostly on—for the next two years. The two adult foxes, who modeled for Isaac what tandem, unified parents could be with a strong relationship and shared, active roles raising kits, were still teaching their own daughters to master their transition. Their son, with whom Isaac shared a room, was just coming up on his.
They taught Isaac the same, fed him his preferred steak dinners—though they were dainty eaters of all manner of foods—and he visited his mother at school holidays and most of the summer. With her coming up to Peebles for the paperwork, he was enrolled in the local mundane school, along with the twins—who’d only recently taken it up. They’d been homeschooled of late by their mother, but
it was their choice and they enjoyed school. They also showed Isaac how to enjoy it. While their parents showed him how to live, how not to be afraid, how to never allow his life choices to be based on fear.
He moved back to Carlisle when he was eighteen, even though he was getting ready to start university in Edinburgh, where he would live on campus. His mother was very ill, and he wanted to be there to help her. Fever and vomiting turned to bed rest, turned to blood, coughing up handfuls of blood like a faucet. Which finally turned to a diagnosis of stomach cancer six months after she’d first started with noticeable symptoms.
Isaac tried to stay with her. She insisted he start school. He’d received his A1 motorcycle license and had a used bike that he drove down most nights after class, two hours. Then two hours back in the morning.
A couple months after he started, she was dead, leaving Isaac desolate that he hadn’t stayed there when she’d needed a caretaker. He could have started school next year. He would never have another chance to spend time with his mother, to ask how it had all happened; her meeting his father, her knowing about the shifters when she wasn’t a member of the magical community at all. Now they were both dead, and Isaac had scant contact with anyone in his father’s family.
He missed some school but stayed in with the encouragement of the foxes. They were also leaving him, but not for another year as they gradually transitioned back to the far north of the country, where the mother was from, while only the twins remained in Edinburgh with Isaac. They attended an art school when they weren’t skiving off and already earning a meager living on the weird things they made and sold online.
He met more shifters through them, tried again with the Mountain Pack, but mostly lived an isolated life with only his classmates for company. Unfortunately, the whole Mountain Pack now knew about him and what he was from word of mouth. Peebles and Coniston were not addresses at which Isaac was welcomed.
Dating in the human world, and a couple of somewhat long-term relationships, brought some comfort along with lies. Through his early twenties he reshaped himself. No more fear, but living in this Moon. No more truth, but showing the world whoever he had to be in order to fit into that world. No matter which society he faced he had to pretend to be either pure human or pure wolf. It was the only way to survive.
After years working postgraduate in Edinburgh, newly single, having little community besides a few fox friends and some humans, now with money in the bank and a good project just coming to an end, he was restless. He returned to Cumbria in search of something he could not name. The family he had never really known, the missed months with his mother he could never get back. He still hated Carlisle, so he went south to Keswick. This spot he found enchanting and he ended up spending weeks motoring around the Lake District on his bike, hiking out and putting on his fur at night to take in the fells and lakes and majestic, quiet places. They reminded him of the only good memories he had of his father, making him change his mind about heading south. It was the Highlands he truly loved. He should turn that way.
Then, in skin and back on his bike in daylight, reality set in. He wasn’t his father. He craved a pack. He needed a sense of family and a community that only a pack could give. He knew of packs in Britain now from the foxes. He knew there was a whole cooperative down south.
He drifted through Cumbria and ended up last-minute signing on for an EMT workshop in Kendal. Medicine had fascinated him since he’d met the wolf doctor in Iceland and the idea of knowing more practical medical information than basic first aid had drawn him ever since the mangling of his mother’s case had resulted in a death far more premature than it had to be. It was not the first medical class he’d taken and, with space left and the timing perfect, Isaac had signed on and decided to stay a few days in Kendal while he considered how to approach this South Coast Cooperative. To be optimistic, he would start job hunting down there as well. Southampton or Brighton should be good prospects, though he could even commute into London if needed. After Edinburgh, he supposed he could handle London, though it certainly wasn’t a first choice.
Then he met Madison and changed his mind about needing a pack above all. He needed her above all.
Turned out, he hadn’t had to choose. On the condition they both could get the professional work they wanted there, Madison was interested in visiting Brighton and trying the southern life of sun and shore instead of mountains and gray.
A visit turned into a move. They’d worked and lived together for nearly two years when Isaac’s resolve that he had to keep what he was a secret both from wolves and humans cracked.
He couldn’t let her go through with it, legally tie herself to him, without her knowing what he was. She had to know. So he had to explain the story, slow and steady, about his parents, ease the blow with the whole thing about how he wasn’t even all wolf. In this case, it sounded good to say his mother was human.
Slow, careful, but beginning to panic all the same. Halfway through he changed his mind. She wasn’t even Wiccan. There was no fringe magic here, no background. She was going to be terrified. He couldn’t do that to her. So he stopped.
He changed his mind another dozen times in twenty-four hours and knew he had to go through with it: she had to understand or else he had to call off the marriage without explanation.
So he showed her. At which she screamed, threw things at him, grabbed her cats, ran out of the flat, and never returned.
At least this time he didn’t have to ask himself what he had done to drive away someone he loved.
He took her things back when he realized this could not blow over.
Then he went home so depressed he couldn’t work, couldn’t eat, and Atarah’s concerned phone calls after he’d missed Lunaenott with them finally drew him to visit the pack and see her.
She read his chart and he asked Diana did they have a spare den? Could he move into the property? Diana welcomed him while many remained suspicious of this alarming white foreigner. Isaac had already learned that the Sables were alarmed by most new things. They had shocked him with their vicious handling of infractions in the pack—from murdering their own members in fur to using the cuff as a punishment. He told them they didn’t do things like that in the Mountain Pack, that there were better ways to handle their problems. Really, though, he had no idea what the Mountains did or didn’t do, and he couldn’t blame them for taking out Gabriel Sr. after he’d bitten that human child. It wasn’t as if they had a prison to hold him in.
Gradually the pack grew to accept him. His white coat no longer seemed like an eyesore to them but just a stain that one got used to. Because of his good job and income in the human world, core took care of him, brought him boxed snacks to take to work and dinners each night. He made friends and always had Atarah to talk to as a sort of aunt after she’d taken a particular interest in him and his astrological chart.
No matter their understandable flaws, Isaac was grateful to them not only for giving him a pack for the first time in his life, but for taking him in right when he’d been sunk into a dangerously profound depression—his thoughts trapped in circles of his own failings and abandonments, counting the people who had walked out of his life, by choice or death, and would never come back. Plus the people he had never had, or who didn’t want him in the first place—which included all the wolves he’d ever known, or known of. Maybe the Sables weren’t perfect, but they’d taken him, and he loved them for it.
He was just feeling more integrated in the pack, safer, home, even like he could think of finding another mate one day, when wolves began to die. The murders started in December, just a few that winter. Then more in the spring and it was happening to others in the cooperative.
The pack appealed to casters, tried sniffing out tracks themselves, and stray wolves went hunting after their hidden foe. Nothing. Many were sure it was the mystery Beeches or angry humans who’d found them out before, in July, Andrew had turned them onto the magical conference happening at the Seastar Hotel where he wo
rked.
Isaac had been part of the push with him. Backed by Kage’s family and others, including Diana, many of the Sables got together, though still a drastic minority, and appealed to the council for human assistance once more.
Again, the method they used had shocked Isaac. He’d expected Peter and Hannah, maybe himself or Andrew in support, frankly approaching the casters and talking to them at the event. Instead, Peter scoped it out, chose a scry, and Kage and Jed brought the mark to the meeting without so much as a how do you do.
“But it worked,” I said, knife and fork down on the plate of baked halibut I’d just cleared. “Wonder of wonders, these Sables get things done in spite of themselves.”
Isaac, also done eating, smiled just a bit. “They are lucky, or Moon blessed. I have no other explanation. Fate, Moon, our guardians, brought you to us. I felt sorry for you at first. I couldn’t believe the crap you’d put up with from Kage and Jed and still been willing to try to help. I admired that and I wanted you to know you had an ally—that we weren’t all mad. I prayed Diana would let me come along and I caught her eye that night. She knew this was important to me. I enjoyed human company and mixed well. That first trip … I wanted to prove myself to you to make up for any poor impression you might have about wolves. Then … by the time we were home … it was more than that. By then I was remembering what Atarah had told me and seeing that necklace on you and … never wanting you to take it off.”
“I practically never do.”
Isaac looked at it through my V-neck. “Even now.” He glanced up. “I don’t deserve your loyalty after all this, Cassia.”
“You haven’t done much wrong. I’m no fan of lying. I like to think you’re giving it up with me now. But I understand why you did what you did. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what you’ve gone through and I’m … humbled by your strength of character. I kept walking away from you for the first weeks. Over and over. Now, I’m involved in multiple relationships. Yet you’ve always been a rock. I never had any idea you were afraid of being abandoned. I never would have guessed you had a history like that. Andrew says you’re possessive of me. I still hardly even see that. I guess the others know a bit more about you.”
Moonlight Whispers: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 8) Page 19