He wore a knowing grin when my eyes opened, adjusting to the fast dying light of the forest at twilight. “Tell me yes, Geri. I’ll make you the happiest shewolf in history. Plus, you know it would totally piss off your mom.”
A bonus if ever there was one. And I couldn’t deny that in the gentle moments of daydreaming when good sense and reality drifted away, I had pictured what it would be like to be Cody’s wife. Those fantasies dissolved in the rays of day, when I looked in the mirror and could imagine myself cloaked in red and wielding silver, readying myself for the hunt.
“But I’ve planned for going to Chicago for so long.” My last-ditch attempt at a justification to say no came out as more of a whine than a retort. “I worked so hard, Cody. Pulled straight A’s at Community, saved up enough from work to make the trip, applied for entrance and got it, all without my mom finding out. To have done all that for nothing?”
“Fine, then we’ll go to Chicago together.” He tilted his forehead against mine. “As long as I come home for a few days around full moon, I’ll be fine.” His hands braced either side of my face. “Marry me.”
All my kick-ass skills and abilities washed away in flood of girly glee. “I owe my mom the truth about Chicago first. Let me just get that out of the way, and then I can make a decision. Just give me a couple days, after the full moon and after the fires. Okay? I’m not leaving until the weekend.”
“I waited this long for you, I can handle a few days more.” He placed another kiss on my lips, this one the perfect balance of sweet and spicy. “She brought it on herself, you know. Your mother, I mean. Naming you after Little Red herself? She was practically tempting fate that you’d end up with a wolf.”
That she was. That she was.
IV
Smoke rose from the trees, creating a plume that I could see a quarter-mile from the entrance to our property. Fall bonfires were commonplace here, the easiest and most efficient way to get rid of the carpets of leaves. Even though it was still early for such practices in mid-September, I doubted anyone would even notice. Hoods were backwoods folk, a necessity when charged with the policing, and when necessary, destruction of werewolves. We lived where they lived – away from civilization as much as civilization would allow.
In Chicago, I’d be alone. No hoods. No wolves.
Maybe an occasional vampire.
No slayers. They were all dead.
The twelve-foot gate that surrounded our compound would raise eyebrows in the lower peninsula, but in the U.P., privacy was respected. Did the locals know that behind those gates, in addition to a house, a barn, and garage, was a state-of-the-art training facility for the House of Red? Unlikely. Cousins, aunts, and uncles had their own homes and mini-compounds dotted across our territory, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Dakotas above the forty-fifth parallel, but the head of the operation and the command of the region lay with the Matron of our bloodline, my mother.
The gates clanged shut behind me, and I felt the weight of the cameras pivoting as Old Bessie started her way up the half-mile drive to the house. The smoke here was thicker, and the taste of it tickled my tongue and scratched at the back of my throat. Tonight’s bonfire must have been bigger than usual. I needn’t wonder why. As I got close enough to the house, a sea of trucks, SUVs, and smaller all-terrain vehicles formed a veritable parking lot. It wasn’t unusual for a few family members to drive out for feuernacht and spend a few days reporting to my mother, but tonight it looked as though everyone had shown up.
Great, my mother would be distracted and wouldn’t have the vaguest clue that...
“And just where have you been, Gerwalta?”
My mother’s voice could crack lake ice in January. I dropped my car keys in the basket by the door and found myself trapped in the entryway. Leaning against a wall, Brünhild Kline met descriptions of both terrifying and beautiful. Her long black hair streaked with gray sat atop her head in a severe bun. Her ivory skin still held a touch of youth, though the lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes grew deeper by the year. Solid biceps flexed as she crossed her arms and glared at me, waiting for an answer, a scowl contorting a face that rarely knew smiles save when born of exacting pain on wolves or in the precious moments when my father could woo the little softness left within her.
“Like I said this morning, I had to work today.”
“Yes, and you told me you were getting off at 5:30. It’s nearly night now. Where have you been in the intervening two hours?”
The best way to lie to my mother was not to, to tell her only a partial truth and hope she didn’t consider it worth her time to ask for more. “I ran in to Cody.”
I bit my tongue before saying, literally.
“I know that much. I can smell the beast’s stench all over you.” She straightened her back and arched an eyebrow. “And exactly what were you doing with the alpha’s son?”
The same thing we always do, mother. Making out and dry humping and wishing we could sleep together without so many consequences.
And also, he proposed.
“Just talking.”
“Just talking!” My words rebounded, coated in a layer of acid. “Can I remind you, daughter, that someday when you are the Matron of our bloodline, he will be your adversary. That you talk with him is concern enough. That you two are friends is something that must end.”
I stared at the carpet, feeling as tall in my mother’s eyes as the faded shag beneath my feet. “Maybe I don’t want to be matron.”
Without pretense, she delivered a response so well worn, the edges had lost all color.
“If not you, then who? All this ̶ all of it, I have built for you. You are my sole heir, my legacy. You are the path by which the House of Red shall retain its rightful place in our world. You must be a worthy leader. A pack will never respect you if they know you once pined away for their alpha, and a pack that does not recognize our authority grows dangerous.”
“An authority that does not respect its own limits and fails those it protects breeds revolution,” I spat back through anger held down with leather straps.
“Spoken like a modern woman.” My mother stepped closer, gaining strength in proximity and brewing fear with reserve. “Yours is not the world of modernity, Gerwalta. Yours is an old world of myth and chaos and death for those who forget their natures. What kind of hood would think something like that?”
“I’m not a hood,” I reminded her. “Not yet.”
She met my retort with a slow bob of her head. “No, you haven’t taken your rites yet. I may have granted your father’s request to wait until you finished with your college thing, but that’s done now, isn’t it?”
I’d finished my associate’s degree at the local community college in June. That this hadn’t come up before astounded me, but I chalked it up to a suspicion that my father wasn’t quick to inform my mother. He’d been my passive ally since high school. Maybe it was only the change in the seasons and the lack of a new tuition bill that tipped her off. Maybe she didn’t know at all and was only bluffing.
I resorted to partial truths. “Yes, I finished all my classes at community.”
A cat-that-got-the-cream grin pulled taut the corners of my mother’s mouth; she wore a smile born of my pain. “Then you’re lucky that most of the clan just happens to be here for your cousin Robert’s fire. He’s proven to be not as difficult as you.”
The fact that Robert was three years my junior, and my mother’s passive aggressive insult meant to point out that truth, didn’t allude me. The moment I visualized the building of the fire behind our house, of the clan chanting the sacred words and my cousin’s form stepping into the heart of the blaze, of his body consumed by flame, burning away the traces of his humanity and leaving only that part of him which was beyond human, stirred primordial longing in me. I couldn’t deny that I’d felt the pull of the consumption, even dreamed of my own fire. Inside, my nature called on me to take rites and claim my hood. But deeper, I wanted change,
freedom, to know that I chose something out of will and not breeding.
Cody’s words reverberated in my memory, reminding me why I’d really resisted my birthright.
At least with you, I’d know you’d fallen in love with me before we’d been together, not because some genetic mating imperative was forcing you to.
Going through rites would only enhance my genetic hardwiring. I wasn’t sure I could think of him the same way on the other side of the fire. If I were to have any hope of marrying him...
“Then we should wait for next month,” I said, desperate to find any way to get myself out of this corner. “A fire burns for only one hood. Tonight, that should be Robert. I can’t usurp his moon.”
“Agreed.” My mother crossed her arms. “But I want you to remember how much this means to you, even as you attempt to deny it. Go to your room, you will not join us tonight.”
Like the wolves communally taking their animal forms on the full moon, the hood was called to clan and fire. Just like a juvenile wolf, I had the ability to forgo the gathering if needed. But it would hurt. My insides would twist, my heart would race, and I’d feel a thirst for appeasement. It was the worst punishment my mother could bestow for daring to argue with her, but even more so because it would be the last time I was with my clan for months or even years to come.
In the blink of an eye, I reverted to my five-year-old self. “But that’s not fair!”
“Is that your best defense?” she asked, cool as the moon in the autumnal sky, and just as distant. “Since when has fair had anything to do with my decisions? I am just, whether or not you believe I am fair. When you feel like your body is pulling itself in two tonight, remember that you brought this on yourself. Now go.”
I remembered suddenly what I’d come home hoping to do before I’d been distracted. Before I could chicken out, I put my hand on her wrist and held her back.
“Wait! I want to talk to you about something. Not about feuernacht or my rites. It can wait, but maybe tomorrow?”
A slow drip of consideration in her eyes proceeded her response. “Very well.”
With a nod, she was gone, leaving me to climb step by lonely step to my bedroom. Hopefully I could open my window and at least smell the fire. With any luck, I’d take part of its heat within me and be able to stand up my end of the conversation better with my mother in the morning.
V
Through the night, the revelry rang out. As the sounds of howls and hoots, laughs and claps, swish and swirl floated up to me through my cracked bedroom window, the draw of my clan tormented me. Damn my mother, and damn those born with the blessing of not being her daughter.
The upside of my punishment, however, was that come next morning, I was fully rested while they were not. Right after the rise of the sun, I crept downstairs, determined to sneak out before anyone was the wiser. I knew I’d be telling my mother about Chicago later on in the day but I needed to get out to nature to clear my head first.
I was just about out of the kitchen door, my truck keys in hand, when a voice dripping with Latin flavor spoke up.
“And where are you going so early in the morning?”
As central as my mother was wherever she happened to be due to her brawn and bluster, my father was her equal in cunning and stealth. I’d heard stories of how he snuck up on a lone wolf driven mad with lunacy and slit his throat. I wasn’t exactly suffering lunacy, but I was definitely about to have my head handed to me on a silver platter.
“She didn’t say I was grounded. She only sent me to my room.”
My father pulled a languid draw of coffee, not saying anything, a tactic he knew worked with me. If left in silence, I’d out myself through babbling for every transgression.
“Nothing happened,” I insisted. No need to say anything more than that. My mother would have informed him.
“You mean, nothing has happened yet.”
“Just because Cody and I are friends...”
His hand jutted up, blocking my retort. What my mother did with glares, my father did with gestures. “Please, boñita, do not insult my intelligence. I’ve understood for some time that you and Cody and more than friends. I have tolerated it because I know you are wise, and I do not need to tell you how dangerous that game is.”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t see the look on my father’s face when I told him the truth. “I love him, Papa. I’ve loved him for a really long time.”
When I dared look again, it was only to discover my bomb had failed to detonate. Instead, my farther fixed indifferent eyes on me. “So what? Does that change anything?”
“Of course it does. I mean, if the Matron of the House of Red and an alpha were in love with each other, don’t you think that would ultimately be a good thing for wolf-hood relations? Think of how many conflicts we could resolve through dialog instead of violence.”
“And think how many more conflicts such a union alone could inspire. An alpha is, first and foremost, answerable to his pack. Even before his own mate, the needs of the pack have priority. The first time one of them disagreed with his dictate, they’d blame it on you. He’d need to appease them, or they would challenge his leadership. Either way, he might die, and you would then likely do the same.”
I didn’t know what drove such boldness. “He’s asked me to marry him.”
For once, my cool and collected father bristled. “Dios mio, porque no!”
“Why is it so crazy? I’m not lying, Papa. We’ve never slept together. If Cody loves me, it’s because he loves me.”
“I forgive you for your daydreams. Ignorance and youth blind us, but a wolf and a hood can never be together. Remember what became of Die Verräterin.”
Die Verräterin, the Betrayer.
My father couldn’t have chosen a more impactful way to drive his argument home. I winced as the images filled my mind, a child’s imagination sketching out the rougher details. Gerwalta Faust, after whom my mother named me, paid dearly for the greatest transgression a hood can commit: she married a wolf and bore him a child. While the fairytale painted her as a heroine trapped by naiveite, the real Gerwalta wasn’t as fortunate as the Grimm Brother’s Little Red Riding Hood. She, her wolf mate, and their child were skewered on silver spits and roasted alive while her matron – her own mother - chanted ancient incantations, relinquishing her powers so she could not defend herself.
“You don’t need to tell me to remember,” I said in softer tones. “I’m reminded each time I sign my name.”
Stroking his beard, my father’s head dipped. “She named you after The Betrayer so you could make the name one of pride again, not follow in her footsteps.”
I had had enough of bearing the expectations of the three hundred years of hood that stood between me and my namesake. “Sorry, Dad. I guess that was a bad decision.”
VI
Walden went to the woods to live deliberately; I went to the State Park where I had worked until only yesterday to live thoughtlessly.
In the measure of whom I loved more – my father or Cody – they were practically tied. Had it not been for my father’s encouragement and willingness to have my back when my mother wanted to lash it, I’d probably have left home a long time ago. Not to run off to college and turn my back on all I’d known, necessarily, but at least to live with one of my cousins in Wisconsin, Ontario, or Montana.
As I followed the path toward the Upper Falls, I looked out on the rushing river, feeling the echo of my own struggle. For so many years, I had flowed along without conflict, letting the path I’d been born on move me. Then, as I became aware of my mother’s sadism, and my father’s tangential disavowal of her ruthlessness (to me in private, as he’d never openly question our clan’s matron to anyone else), I began to rebel. I sped, I changed course, I rushed to jump over the edge.
I fell in love with a werewolf.
I stared at the falls before me, a series of aquatic plateaus cascading in seven different directions, and wondered which way to fall, and how
much churning there’d be when I did. It took a few moments before I realized someone was talking to me.
I turned to see a woman, her head covered in dark cloth, biting her bottom lip.
I shook myself back to the moment. “I’m sorry, what?”
Her outstretched hand twitched again, offering her phone to me. “I said, would you mind taking a picture of us?”
Blinking away my inner thoughts, I smiled and took the device. When she backed to the railing and laced her fingers through the hand of a man wearing a yarmulke, I tried not to show the awkwardness I felt. I held up the Muslim woman’s phone to square them in the frame with the mists of the waterfall rising behind them. Afterwards, the man moved on a few steps to get a better view as I handed the phone back to the woman.
Curiosity seized my tongue before I can stop it. “I’m sorry if I was gawking.”
“Were you?” Her smile flickered. “No worries. We’re used to getting looks. People don’t expect to see a Muslima and a conservative Jew married to each other. We’ve learned to live beyond expectations, though.”
An image of my father’s anger-flecked eyes popped up in my mind. A wolf and a hood can never be together.
Because culture and history demanded it? Assumed it? Expected it?
Forbade it?
“I think that’s...” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “...beautiful.”
VII
It was time. Time to come to terms with everything I felt for Cody, and time to set out to do all I had decided to do with my life. Time to tell my mother about my relationship, about college, and that I’d decided to become the future alpha’s bride.
I didn’t need to take my fire to fuel the flames. I could make my own fire.
I’d accept what I wanted, stop feeling like it was something I had to hide or apologize for, and be a freaking adult. My mother’s reaction wasn’t my responsibility. If she wanted to summon her silver, skewer me, and roast me over the fires meant for my hooding, what could I really do to stop her?
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