Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  I looked between Sol and Seamus.

  “That explains precisely NOTHING. How is it possible that I’m a were anything? How could I not know this?! Didn’t you say it was genetic?”

  That last one I directed firmly at Seamus. Last night, when I’d been peppering him with questions, trying to convince myself that werewolves didn’t exist even with the evidence staring me in the face, he’d explained that the condition wasn’t transferred by bite, it was genetic. You were only a were if your parents were weres, and your animal was likely to be the same animal that your parents called on, although there were exceptions.

  “You lied to me,” I said, staring him down. “My parents weren’t weres. I would have known if they were, they would never have hidden that from me, and I’ve never changed before. Until… until she BIT me!”

  I glared at both of them.

  “It is genetic, Gatita. My biting you didn’t do anything except call your animal to you for the first time. Our animal forms require another were’s bite to bring them across. Contact with another were’s saliva is like a neon sign calling your animal over. Like calls to like.”

  “WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!”

  None of this made sense. Don’t get me wrong, I’d spent my entire childhood and early adolescence waiting for my damned owl to arrive and tell me I was special, magical, somehow privy to a different world in which dragons were actually REAL, but this was ridiculous. I was an adult now, or would be in a week or so, and I knew as well as anyone that magic wasn’t real, as much as I wanted it to be. I couldn’t be a wereleopard. My parents would have told me. Also, physics. I mean, come on. How on earth could I be both a human and a snow leopard at the same time? That just didn’t make sense.

  Judging by the looks on Sol and Seamus’ faces, I must have said some portion of that out loud.

  “Gatita, physics is precisely how this whole thing works. I’m not one of the folks who research this kind of thing, but the way you access your were is through dark matter, at least that’s what the latest scientific journals are claiming. It’s not the kind of thing I pay attention to.”

  That was a non-explanation if ever I’d heard one, but it was clear that Sol wasn’t super up-to-date on the physics stuff. I’d have to ask someone else about how dark matter allowed me to have a snow leopard form. There were plenty of other questions fighting for my attention instead.

  “But my parents…” I argued feebly.

  “Now that one, Gatita, I can easily explain. Your parents certainly knew you’re a were. They were both weres themselves, and they probably told you about it, too, at least early on, but… after your brother went missing…”

  “My brother…”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother, Vic.”

  “I don’t… I didn’t… I don’t know…”

  I suddenly had a raging headache, one that felt like my skull was about to split.

  “We’re going to need tea, I think,” Sol said, fumbling through my cupboards and pulling out the kettle and my assorted tea collection.

  “Gatita, I don’t know how to say this any other way, so I’m just going to say it,” she said, filling the kettle and placing it on the stove top. “Your brother is alive and I know where to find him.”

  And that was when I passed out.

  THE TEAKETTLE STILL hadn’t boiled when I opened my eyes to find Seamus holding my hand and whimpering at me even though he was in human form.

  “I’m ok,” I said, shaking him off and sitting up slowly. “Just… I’m not sure, actually, my head feels like I’m recovering from a bender.” I’d never actually been on a bender, but the one time I’d gotten drunk at a cousin’s wedding it had felt kind of like this the morning after.

  Seamus helped me to my feet, despite my best efforts to shake him off, and I couldn’t decide if I was appreciative of his concern or peeved by the coddling. Honestly, I was shaky enough that I was leaning towards appreciative. The peeved part of me was probably a holdover from his interference in the fight. Where he’d gotten in my way and wound up causing Sol to bite me. Which had turned me into a freaking snow leopard.

  “Did I hallucinate that?” I asked, even as I checked out my ankle and found it devoid of any sign that it had been bitten by a three hundred pound panther. My brain seemed to be ignoring the fact that the run-up to that question had all been in my head.

  “Hallucinate what, Gatita?” Sol asked, handing me a cup of Earl Grey. “Drink this, it will help with the headache.”

  “Did you infuse it with eye of newt or something?” I asked, eyeing the cup warily.

  Sol laughed.

  “No, caffeine helps with headaches, that’s all. I’d make you a coffee, but I don’t see a coffee maker, so…”

  I shrugged and took a sip of the Earl Grey, not bothering to mention my aero press—which was probably still in my backpack from the weekend anyway—or the fact that there was a coffee pot hidden somewhere in the pile of boxes I had yet to unpack in the garage. Honestly, just doing something as normal as sipping tea helped me let go of some of the tension in my neck and shoulders.

  “Me turning into a snow leopard,” I asked, trying to get back to the subject at hand, instead of getting sidetracked by home remedies. “Did I actually turn into a snow leopard, or was that just a freaky hallucination? I don’t have any signs of a bite on my leg.”

  “Yes, you turned into a snow leopard. The signs of it disappeared because you shifted afterwards, the bite was small, and shifting speeds up healing,” Seamus said. Then he smiled. “See, I told you, you aren’t just a normal human.”

  The look on his face made it sound like it should have been the best news in the world, but even though turning into a snow leopard was basically a childhood dream come true… the whole thing just felt like a betrayal.

  “How is it possible my parents never told me about this?”

  Seamus looked at Sol quizzically.

  “I told you she might not remember,” Sol said, making me even more confused.

  “What? What am I not remembering?”

  “Vic, Sol said there were some powerful mage spells put on you and your parents when you were a kid.”

  “What?! Why?”

  That didn’t sound good. None of this sounded good, and my headache was coming back with a vengeance.

  “Do you remember what we were talking about just before you passed out?” Seamus asked. His voice sounded gentle, like he was about to pull off a Band-Aid but wanted to lessen the sting.

  I tried to think back to what we’d talked about before I’d blacked out, but it just made my headache rage, and I couldn’t think through the pain anymore. I cradled my head in my arms and focused on not vomiting.

  “This isn’t going to work. The spell is too strong. She’s just going to keep passing out every time we bring it up,” Sol said, though I could barely hear her over the pounding in my ears.

  “What if she shifts and we tell her snow leopard?”

  “That might work,” Sol said, after a pause. “If the spell was only cast on her human form, her snow leopard might be free of it. It won’t work if it was a spirit binding, but if it was just a corporeal spell, that should do the trick.” She hesitated for a moment. “Nice thinking, puppy.”

  If I’d been in less pain, I might have given her a talking-to about backhanded compliments. As it was, the headache was still raging, and besides, Seamus could probably take care of himself. I might have heard a growl, but it was hard to tell over the sound of my skull being stabbed repeatedly with a knife—metaphorically speaking.

  “Vic, can you hear me?” Sol asked.

  I nodded, and then instantly regretted it. Mental note: DO. NOT. MOVE. HEAD.

  “Vic, can you manage a shift? Do you have any idea how to call on your snow leopard right now?”

  I did not shake my head, but talking seemed like an impossibility with my jaw seizing with pain, so I just whimpered a bit and hoped that got my point across.

  “O
k, Seamus is going to talk you through it.”

  I had no idea why Seamus was being voluntold to take care of me, but I was in no position to argue or second-guess.

  “Ok, Vic… just… try to relax, if you can. Can you remember what it felt like to be a snow leopard? Try to imagine it, if you can. What was different from the way you normally move, smell, see, taste, balance? Try to picture those things, and then… sort of… will them into being.”

  Sol snorted, and I wondered if she thought Seamus’ instructions were lacking in some way. I tried to do what Seamus said, but the pain was too much for my concentration.

  “Vic,” Sol said, her voice getting closer to where my head was cradled in my own arms. “If you manage the shift, the headache should go away.”

  Suddenly, I found the will to concentrate. At that moment, I would have done anything to make the headache go away, and damned if I wasn’t going to figure out how to turn into a snow leopard right that fucking moment.

  I tried recalling the details that Seamus had suggested, but it was hard to come up with things like sight, sound, and smell right then. My brain was overtaken with pain, and those kinds of details were hard to recall even on a good day. So I focused on the parts of me that didn’t hurt. The sensation of having four paws, the agility to right myself mid-fall, the balance of a giant, glorious snow leopard tail.

  Then, suddenly, I was calling on my tail, paws, and agility to balance me as I slid from a precarious perch on a stool and kitchen island and fell to the floor.

  I smiled delightedly when I landed on four paws, and then smiled wider still when I realized the damned headache was gone.

  “Is she purring?” Seamus asked, his face bewildered.

  Sol just laughed.

  I looked at them both expectantly. I wanted to know about whatever it was I had forgotten.

  “Ok, Vic, now do you remember what we were talking about before you passed out?”

  Oddly, I still had access to those memories. Which was weird, because those memories were in human form and currently I was a very large feline. I ignored the disconnect and focused on the memories themselves… we had been talking about my parents and them not telling me I was a were, and then Sol had started to explain why and….

  I sat down with a thud, my tail flipping angrily around me as the weight of memory hit me. My brother… I had a brother, and he was still alive, and Sol knew where he was.

  And then the floodgates opened. Images from my childhood that had been blocked, or that I had repressed. A little boy, my age, my height, similar features, just… a boy, and clever, and mischievous, and we’d had soooo many adventures together, and…

  Did snow leopards cry? Or… I shut my mouth and looked at Seamus and Sol, and the horrified looks on their faces confirmed that I had been making a truly terrible noise.

  So I focused on the feeling of tears in my eyes, and grief in my throat, and… suddenly I was sitting in the middle of my kitchen floor, naked and sobbing.

  “I REMEMBERED HIM!” I cried, standing up and reaching for the kitchen counter, ignoring the pile of my clothes that lay on the floor beside the stool.

  “Good. Then the spell is gone.”

  “No.” I shook my head, grateful that the headache seemed to still be gone, even though I was back in human form. “I mean, I remembered him before, when I was a kid. They tried to charm us all, they DID charm us, but… it didn’t quite take on me at first. After they took him, my parents tried to get him back, tried and tried, but nothing worked, and then… then we moved, and my parents told me I couldn’t talk about Trevor anymore, and then… they had us all charmed, all of us, and… they stopped talking about him. It wasn’t like he was dead, they pretended that he had never existed, that I’d never had a brother, that my twin didn’t even exist, but it didn’t work on me… not at first, and I kept trying to make them remember, and they kept telling me I was making up stories, and…”

  My breath caught in my chest as the memories hit me, one after another.

  “They sent me to see a psychiatrist. They had me treated… and… I stopped. I didn’t want them to put me away somewhere, and I didn’t want them to be so mad at me all the time, so finally… I just stopped talking about him, and… eventually, I couldn’t remember if he was real or not, he felt more like something I had made up…. My mom always talked about the day they tried to take me as though that was all that had happened, as though they’d never taken Trevor, of course, because he didn’t exist… and then…”

  My breath hitched on a sob before I managed to speak again.

  “I forgot about him. I stopped talking about him, and, slowly, I started to believe he’d never existed. Eight years of memories… how could I forget about him? How? How did I forget my twin brother?”

  Seamus patted my back, and caught me as my legs started to give out again. I let him support me for a moment before I settled myself on one of the stools. Then I remembered that I was still naked. I ran the back of my wrist across my face to get the worst of the tears and snot, then grabbed my clothes and rushed upstairs to put them on again.

  When I came back downstairs, Seamus and Sol were standing on opposite sides of my kitchen island, sharing what looked like an awkward silence.

  “So… do cats and dogs not get along in the magic world, either?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood. Sol merely shrugged in response, but Seamus grinned.

  “I like you just fine,” he said.

  The sincerity of his smile made me smile in return.

  “You’re alright in my book too, Seamus,” I said, bumping shoulders with him on my way back to my tea mug. “At least for now. Don’t show up in my room uninvited or anything.”

  Seamus growled, even though he was still in human form.

  “No worries on that front,” he muttered.

  I sighed, taking a sip of my tea as I sat down at the kitchen island once more.

  “Vic, when you talked about your brother disappearing… you kept saying ‘they’ took him. Do you know who ‘they’ is?” Seamus asked, pulling up the stool beside me.

  I shook my head.

  “Not really. My parents knew, I think, but… I don’t think they told me, or if they did, I’m not sure I understood. I was only eight. Sol, you said you know where he is. Do you also know who took him?”

  Sol nodded.

  “I do. He’s in Bolivia, and I know who put him there, and why. Are you ready to hear any of that?”

  I took a deep breath, letting the long-suppressed memories of my brother resurface. Letting the kidnapping come back to me was hard. It was difficult to relive the terror I’d felt as an eight-year-old watching my brother get taken away.

  “Shotgun!” Trev called, rushing towards the car, the way he always did, as if Mom ever let either of us ride up front.

  “Trev, wait up!” I called from behind him, tugging Mom along so she would hurry up. Trev and I were both excited to get home and test out the new gaming console we’d just gotten. No more playing at Frida’s house! Wii bowling nights could happen in our very own living room!

  “Come on, Mom! This is going to be the best birthday ever!”

  Mom laughed as I tugged her along, dragging her feet, probably just to give me more of a challenge.

  “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  My head shot up, and Mom and I were both suddenly running flat-out towards the car. Two men had grabbed Trevor and were wrestling him into a nondescript white van. Trev wasn’t going without a fight though, he was flailing and kicking like a wild animal. I heard one of the men grunt in pain as we got closer to the car.

  Then Mom turned into the biggest bird I’d ever seen, and launched herself at the men holding Trevor.

  “LET GO OF MY BROTHER!!” I screamed, over and over again, while the two men holding him shoved him into the back of the cargo van, and my mom screeched and threw herself at them repeatedly. A third person emerged from the front of the van and came running towards me then, and I screamed until my lung
s were on fire. Mom dove at the woman, just before she reached me, digging her talons into the woman’s face, causing her to scream even more loudly than I had.

  The woman turned and ran. Probably because the white van was pulling away.

  Mom flew after it, throwing herself at the windows, but the woman turned back in my direction and I ran away from her, screaming for help. I didn’t see what happened to her, but I heard her scream as I dove into the elevator that would take me back to the main floor of the parking garage and the entrance to the mall. Mom landed next to me a moment later. As the doors closed, she returned to her human form, naked and sobbing.

  I was crying again by the time the memory was over, but I took comfort in knowing that I was about to find out who those people had worked for.

  Finally, I nodded, wondering how much time had passed since Sol had asked her question.

  “Yes, Sol, I would like to know who took my brother.”

  Just as Sol opened her mouth to answer, I heard a knock on the door.

  I glanced at the clock on my microwave. 2:41PM.

  “Who the hell would that be?” I asked, standing up and heading for the door.

  “Wait!” Sol, shouted. “It could be a trap!”

  “A trap?” I asked, still walking for the door. Who would come to trap me in my own house? Hell, who even knew where I lived?

  I walked to the door, worried that it might be Edik, but deciding that, just in case Sol wasn’t crazy, I would check the peephole before I opened it.

  What I saw made my brain skip so hard that I opened the door before I’d even had time to think about it.

  “Hey, Vic,” Trevor said, standing with his hands in his pockets, looking for all the world like a six-foot-tall, dark, handsome, unsure puppy.

  I could barely see through all the tears, but I launched myself at him before he had a chance to back away, and wrapped him in a bone-crunching hug.