He paused, and there was something gentle in his face that I hadn’t seen previously when he continued. “You let me join in and I’m grateful. I’m the one profoundly in your debt.”
EVENTUALLY, SLIM TOOK his debt home, leaving me to keep vigil in the dim waiting room. Which is when my thoughts turned to Bastion. I trusted Luke to do everything possible, but what if...?
Refusing to let my mind flow further in that direction, I asked a nurse for directions and headed for Clarence’s room. The door was open, the scene inside so melancholy it was hard to remember that the dying boy was a serial killer.
Tubes and machines, slow beeps and deep breathing. Mrs. Smythewhite had pulled her chair up as close as she could get without actually crawling onto the bed with the patient. Her torso had bent down over her son’s as night deepened, and I could almost imagine their foreheads drifting closer and closer over minutes and hours.
Now, the skin of their temples just barely touched.
Interrupting the tableau would have been sacrilege. I turned...and the bare feet I’d been hiding from hospital staff all evening smacked down just loudly enough to catch Mrs. Smythewhite’s attention.
“Honor.” Her voice was scratchy. “Come in. Sit by me.”
My hand fell to my hip, searching for a dagger that I’d dropped in the forest. My other hand reached for ghost fingers that were minding my cousin instead.
With nothing to support me except my own self-name, I padded forward and slid into the empty chair, eighteen inches from Mrs. Smythewhite.
Like Slim, she spoke before I could. Also like Slim, her topic came as a surprise.
“Promise had a fur just like that one. May I touch it?”
Despite the intimacy of her request, I nodded. Braced myself for the trickle of sensation across my nose and chest.
“Where did it come from?” she asked after a moment.
“It’s a family tradition,” I explained vaguely. Then, realizing what she’d told me seconds earlier: “You saw my aunt’s fur?”
Mrs. Smythewhite nodded, her palm stroking my spine now. “She kept it underneath her mattress when we were roommates. She said it gave her strength.”
I jolted this time, but not because of my companion’s contact with my fur. Under her mattress. Just like the location where the scent trail had led in Clarence’s suite.
Which meant....
“You put one under your son’s bed.” It wasn’t a guess but rather a certainty.
Once again, Mrs. Smythewhite dipped her chin in confirmation. “I hoped....” She inhaled, dismissing a fancy that hadn’t come to fruition. “When we’re desperate, we grasp at every straw.”
That was why we’d been unable to find Bastion’s pelt. First it had been in the one room I failed to look in. Then it had been wrapped around Clarence’s body beneath his blanket while he lied to the police.
But that was water over the dam. Bastion’s pelt had been found. Grace’s and Justice’s hadn’t.
I tried to keep my voice level, but excitement flooded in anyway. “Where did you get it?”
“An estate sale.”
I could hardly breathe. This was the solution. If I found Grace’s pelt she’d come back to me. She’d have to....
I grabbed one hand with the other, forcing myself to ask the important question rather than reaching over to shake information out of the serial killer’s mother. “There were others? Other wolf furs there?”
And the pity in Mrs. Smythewhite’s eyes suggested she understood more than she should have. “No. There was only the one.”
Chapter 37
Clarence died at three o’clock that morning. We were dozing, or pretending to, when the machines went haywire. Mrs. Smythewhite folded herself across Clarence’s body as if she could force his soul back inside it, her keening stifled by fabric. There at the end, pity warred with my relief.
Later, while we waited for her cab and Luke’s arrival, she thanked me. “If you need anything,” she finished, “I’m here for you.”
The words cut deep into my gut. This was my fault, every inch of it proof of my fallibility.
If I’d realized what was going on from the beginning, could Clarence have been rehabilitated? Could I have returned the pelt to Bastion in a more gradual manner that wouldn’t have drained away the last of the teenager’s health without reinvigorating the cousin I loved?
“No.” I shook my head. “Don’t thank me.”
Whatever she saw on my face made Mrs. Smythewhite raise one hand to brush hair away from my temple. Aunt Promise had soothed me just like that. She’d also always managed to know far more than I hoped.
Just like Mrs. Smythewhite.
“It’s obvious there’s more to this story than Clarence falling while hiking.” The tiniest hint of a smile rose on her lips as she added the clinching fact. “My boy doesn’t know a carabiner from a crampon.”
I shut my eyes. No, Mrs. Smythewhite was nothing like Aunt Promise. She was an avenging warrior. I deserved her recriminations. I braced myself for the blast.
Braced myself so long, in fact, that silence forced my eyes back open. Mrs. Smythewhite was watching me with tear-stained cheeks but with the aspect of a mother. Only when she gauged I was ready to listen did she continue.
“I need my memories of Clarence to be good. Please, don’t tell me any different.”
In the silence that followed, the cab arrived. My ex-employer disappeared with its taillights. Moments later, Luke stepped out of the shadows where he’d been waiting for who knows how long.
The questions on my face were silent but he answered them anyway.
“Bastion is still with us,” he promised. “It’s time for you to come home.”
HOUSES AND CITIES WERE bad for Bastion. Or so Justice and I gathered when we carried our comatose relative out to lie in Luke’s backyard the next day.
“No, not there,” Justice told me when I began to set our burden down on a soft patch of grass in the shade of a maple. “In the sun.”
He was right. I could tell the moment early morning light struck Bastion’s features. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of an eyelid, but I felt Bastion soaking up sun strength the same way I knew that Luke was hovering in the shadows, making himself available while at the same time giving space to our family.
The warmth of Luke’s presence provided leeway for me to brainstorm. “Do you think it’s worth taking him home?” I asked Justice.
It had been years since the four of us spent more than a day at the farmhouse where we’d been raised, so ragweeds and goldenrod were likely as tall as the porch roof. Still, despite the dust and emptiness, there was peace there. Trees older and wilder than the ones sunlight dappled through here in the suburbs. A richness to the earth that my gut said would help Bastion heal.
Justice shook his head, stating the obvious. “It’s too far.” Ten hours in the car with Bastion comatose.... The first few minutes would suck away whatever earth energy Bastion was currently gathering. We couldn’t risk it. This piece of greenery in the city was our best bet.
Or...maybe not. Luke’s voice came from inches behind us. “It’s half an hour to my other property. The place is a camp. Cabins, cold water. But there are trees, sun, room for wolves to roam.”
I started to nod, but Luke wasn’t done listing off the downsides. “It’s isolated though,” he continued. “Spotty cell-phone service.” He paused, his voice lowering. “I can open the place up then leave.”
This was what I got for hesitating to send him to Bastion after my cousin and his pelt were reunited. How to explain that my initial reaction had been ingrained due to decades of secrecy? That it had nothing to do with Luke himself?
“Will there be other sk—” I caught myself, used Luke’s own language “—other werewolves? At your camp?”
“No.” The word was firm, dependable. Still, Luke elaborated. “Once a year, I invite campers. But not until September. No one would dare trespass now.”
“Then that sounds perfect. Thank you. The camp and you both....” I tried to imbue all of the trust I felt for Luke into my answer. Then I backpedaled as I remembered the obvious flaw. “But Grace would be furious.”
After all, my twin had pulled me aside mere moments ago to remind me that a twin held veto power over mate choices, the implication being that she hated Luke enough to stoop to the level of tearing our incipient partnership apart. Perching in a Luke-scented den where she could call a cab and escape into the city whenever she got claustrophobic was bad enough. Isolating ourselves on Luke’s country estate would be akin to giving a cat a bath.
I expected Justice to agree with me. After all, he’d been watching our conversation up until this point like a kitten at a tennis match.
Now though, he reached out to grasp Luke’s shoulder in a gesture that was almost brotherly. “My twin, my decision,” he told both of us. “Thank you. We accept.”
LATER, I HOVERED OUTSIDE the kitchen window, keeping one eye on Bastion while eavesdropping shamelessly on Justice breaking the news to my sister. Grace wasn’t a morning person, so her reaction was about what I’d expected. What I hadn’t expected was the conversation’s abrupt left turn.
“Okay, but if I do this for you then you have to back me up about the scheidung.”
I took a step away, nearly falling off the edge of the flowerbed in the process. There it was, the term I’d been dreading. My sister wanted a twin divorce.
If Bastion had been awake and present, he would surely have rejected Grace’s suggestion. But Justice wasn’t my biggest fan.
“You realize the position you’d be putting Bastion and myself in. We’d have to make a very permanent decision.”
He sounded like a lawyer. Cool, calm, and collected. As if he wasn’t speaking about cutting off all contact with a cousin. As if Grace wouldn’t be breaking our family apart.
I couldn’t listen any longer. All I could do was return to Bastion, run my hand across his brow, take comfort in the fact that the skin there was no longer gray and sweaty. Was he getting better? I could only hope so. Other than sun, nothing else had made any difference in his health.
Well, the sun and his pelt. I twitched Bastion’s fur to reposition it...or tried to. But the leathery underside clung to his body. My fingers trembled. Could he possibly be beginning to shift?
Bastion’s torso was already naked to improve contact with the pelt. So all I had to do was rip away his jogging pants, avert my eyes as I pulled down his boxers.
And...he changed. Not as fast or as smooth as he used to. Instead, this was a slow, painful grind of bone against bone.
Bastion’s agony infused me. It was never-ending. Perhaps he wasn’t ready for transformation. Perhaps....
Then Luke was present like the sun-warmed version of a shadow. “Shift. It might help him.”
I shed my clothes right there, where any neighbor could be watching. Slipped beneath my pelt. Burst into the form of my wolf.
And Bastion came right along with me. Eyes still squinched shut, his lupine body was nearly as ragged as the moth-eaten pelt he’d been covered by.
But he’d shifted. Inside me glowed a kernel of hope.
Chapter 38
As promised, Luke’s camp was deep in the forest. Bird song took the place of road noise and cell-phone signals were spotty at best.
Bastion grew sleeker every hour in this setting, but Grace chaffed at the isolation. Each time I took over sitting with our cousin, she retreated to her cabin in silence. I wondered what she was doing there until the third morning when she showed up in the dining hall wearing a bed sheet turned into a haute-couture dress.
“That’s...impressive.” Luke’s murmur was wry. He’d done his best to charm my twin, and when that failed he started meeting each snub with a snub of equal or greater measure. Surprisingly, he drew more flies with vinegar than with honey, and this morning was no exception.
Because Grace—who still refused to speak to me—at least answered Luke. “If you don’t have the balls to say it aloud, don’t say it at all,” she called across the room. Was she teasing? Did I dare hope that? I tried to catch her eye, but she pointedly looked away.
Or, wait, this time Grace wasn’t ignoring me. Her right hand rose to finger the spot where our friendship necklace use to lie in the small of her throat. And her eyes widened as something outside the window drew her away from bantering with a pro.
“He’s awake.”
Silverware struck the floor. Oatmeal splattered on linoleum. I didn’t know who dropped what and I didn’t care. Unleashing coiled muscles, I ran faster than one of the skinless out the door.
There, I took in the most beautiful vision I’d ever been treated to. Ramshackle cabins with barred windows—I’d need to ask Luke about that later. Bits of plastic tucked in amidst the gravel where a raccoon had gotten into the garbage bin and shredded a hotdog wrapper. Weeds, weeds, weeds, and more weeds.
So, yeah, it wasn’t the location that made the scene beautiful. It was the inhabitants.
One man and one wolf, strolling toward us across that plastic-littered gravel. Brothers together. Both awake, both vibrant.
Justice’s hand drifted down to land on Bastion’s furry head.
I’D LIKE TO SAY WE all lived happily ever after. But lack of worry over Bastion returned my relationship with Grace to the potential explosion of baking soda in the proximity of vinegar. Bastion and Luke were running in wolf form—four legs still being easier for my favorite cousin than two legs—when the science-fair volcano came to a head.
It started with Grace stomping into the common room, the scab on her cheek a slice of fury. Her tone matched her facial adornment when she barked out our cousin’s name: “Justice!”
He glanced up from the thick law tomes he’d lugged out of the car to fill his hours, lifting reading glasses off his nose. “Yes?”
Grace didn’t so much as glance at me, but I knew chance wasn’t responsible for my presence during this conversation. Instead, my twin’s words, although aimed at Justice, were entirely for my benefit.
“It’s time for the scheidung.”
Luckily, I was sitting. Because the declaration made me lose all feeling in my legs.
For the first time in nearly a week, I spoke to her directly. “Grace, listen. I know you’re disappointed in me. But Bastion is getting better....”
She actually answered, but her reply wiped away any gratitude I might have nurtured for breaking through her silent treatment. “This isn’t about Bastion.”
“Luke then.” I pressed one hand into my gut in a futile attempt to block the pain. “I understand your hesitation about spending time with the skinless. If that’s what it takes for us to be twins again, he and I can slow things down.”
I wasn’t willing to say I’d leave Luke forever at my sister’s insistence. But, time for her to get used to a werewolf joining our family? That I could provide.
Unfortunately, my twin only shook her head. “You think this is about everyone other than yourself. You....”
To my profound relief, Bastion blew in then like a turkey vulture scenting carrion. “Who’s in trouble?”
His eyes twinkled and I fully expected Grace’s shoulders to soften. After all, she’d been so relieved by Bastion’s appetite last night at dinner that she gave him all of her tomato-and-cucumber salad—and quality tomato-and-cucumber salad was second only to designer handbags as the center of her life.
Now, though, she merely glanced at Justice rather than answering his brother. In response, the lawyer-in-training rose, his gesture unbearably formal. Hands clasped behind his back, he spoke in Grace’s place.
“It’s good you’re here, bro. Grace is about to request a temporary scheidung.”
Temporary. I was so relieved that I laughed aloud...realizing one second too late that Grace would think I was making light of a situation that weighed a million tons.
“For your information, 79% of trial separations end in divo
rce,” my sister bit out. “That part’s only to make Justice happy. Don’t get cocky.”
So Justice had gone to bat for me. The room—shut up for nine months before this week—was musty. I wiped a speck of dust out of my tearing eye.
I wasn’t the only one affected. “You plan to accept this?” Bastion asked his brother. “To force the two of us to choose between them?”
Justice’s nod was bobble-headed—gliding and repeated. “It’s the only way.”
Our cousins’ eyes met then. Two men who looked identical. Two men whose life paths had diverged to run miles apart.
I could almost see the twin-sense bouncing back and forth between them, the silent communication Grace and I now lacked. Bastion raised his eyebrows. Justice shook his head in negation.
I faltered as the twin who had been my partner for the better part of the last decade took a step past me to stand by my sister’s side instead.
“Alright then.” Bastion’s puppy-dog eyes made it impossible to hate him. “Temporarily only.”
I turned away to hide my tears—okay, so that damp stinging hadn’t been due to dust after all. Outside the window, the camp appeared empty. Wherever Luke had gone after his run, it wasn’t here.
So I’d be alone. I could handle that. I mean, I’d learn to handle it. After all, Luke had lived for years without his family. A woelfin was even less animalistic. Surely we didn’t require a pack.
I stood and was surprised to find my legs still able to support me. “I hope you’ll change your mind,” I told my sister, even though I knew she wouldn’t. My gaze slid over our cousins. “I hope you’ll all change your minds.”
Not that I expected them to. I’d started this ball rolling ten years ago when I failed to protect my family’s pelts. The only surprise was that it had taken so long for the other shoe to drop.
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