by Heloise Hull
To avoid worrying them with frantic calls and crazy eyes from their old bedroom when I was supposed to be on an Italian island, I sent them both a text message with a bunch of heart eyes and asked if they needed a lullaby to go to sleep. Our usual humor.
Josh sent a quick “I’m good” reply while Jacob sent a puking emoji and then a JK. Just kidding. My heart rate finally slowed, and I promised to call them tomorrow.
Maybe I could call Aradia, too. As I began to search, I heard a knock. It was soft and hesitant. That meant Marla.
I pulled the door open, ready to defend myself and my room, but all arguments died on my tongue when I saw she was holding a blanket and a glass of water.
“I thought you might be thirsty,” she said by way of an explanation.
“Uh, thanks.” I put them on the nightstand and waited to see what other wonders of the Marla-world would come.
She stared around a bit. I cleared my throat. Finally, I took pity on her. I could appreciate how awkward this whole charade was.
“I won’t stay long,” I said, hoping it was true.
“Oh, that’s no bother. It is your house.”
“See? Thank you. Tell Jim that for me, would you?”
Marla laughed, a small little thing, and stopped almost immediately. “Well, I better get to bed. Goodnight, Ava. I hope you enjoyed your Italian vacation.”
Marla couldn’t have known how her words struck me. A rush of cold settled over me as she squeaked the door closed behind her. Surely it wasn’t just a vacation. Aradia was my home. My real home. This place was nothing more than a house.
As soon as she left, I connected to the WiFi on my phone. At least I could count on Jim being too lazy to change the password. While a digital detox on Aradia had been nice, I couldn’t deny the little happy dance my heart did at the white screen of Google. I cracked my fingers and began to search.
“Come on,” I muttered to myself. “You can’t be invisible. Can you?”
No matter how many times and different ways I searched, including “random Italian island” and “supernatural hotspot + Marco’s taverna”, nothing gave. It was as if Aradia only existed in my mind.
I rubbed a sore spot on my wrist and tilted my shoulder to see my tattoo in the mirror. Yep, still there. I still had skin in the game.
So I’d just have to have patience. I’d wait to contact Aradia until my trial. The Council had to give me witnesses. And I’d have to call my witnesses. It would all be fine. In the meantime, I could do my own research on the She-Wolf. Starting with who she really was. What had happened to her?
I squinted and began to read. Most of the information online came from pedantic scholars. I suffered through a few articles on the location of her cave before one caught my attention. The twin boys, Romulus and Remus, weren’t the She-Wolf’s offspring. Of course! She found them and nursed them.
I looked up from my screen, considering. Maybe my boys would be fine. I’d been known to overthink things before. I’d certainly birthed them. They had my smile and my sense of adventure. No scary magical demons wanted them. Anyway, why would a god curse two innocent little babies?
A whoosh of hope settled in my chest.
It lasted about two seconds before my heart sank. At the end of the article, the scholar argued that merely drinking the She-Wolf’s milk turned illegitimate boys into the founders of Rome. She had passed on her power and her curse in the most motherly way possible.
I’d breastfed my boys.
I could still remember the exact feeling of my milk letting down every few hours when they were sleepy babies, blinking at the soft light of the hallway as I tiptoed in to feed them at three in the morning.
The more I thought about it, the more my heart sped up. Broken bones were a yearly occurrence. Overnight stints in the hospital, concussions, stitches, even freaking malaria. Malaria. In Missouri! They were magnets for misery and disaster.
Did I do this to them merely by feeding them? How could I have known?
My hands were shaking. I twisted them together, my thoughts darting as fast as minnows in a stream. I would never apologize for nourishing them. Never. I’d given them formula, too. Anything to keep their ravenous hunger at bay.
Right now, I had to figure out some way to keep the boys at school. I didn’t want them to see me stuck here like some petulant child or endanger them by my very presence. Worse, I’d have to figure out a way to do it without telling them why. That would only open uncomfortable questions, and they did not need to know anything about curses, wolves, or magic. The only thing they needed to do was to focus on their course work. The only thing I needed to do was work on getting out of here.
“Manu, if I ever see you again, I’m going to kill you,” I muttered. I stood up and shook my fist at the ceiling. “Do you hear that? I will kill you!”
I didn’t expect a response, but then I heard it. A thumping sound.
The mirror was moving. Wiggling back and forth on the dresser, the frame shook and the glass rippled like disturbed lake water. I yelped and jumped back as my jailer shimmered to life and pinned me with a glare that could freeze liquid nitrogen.
“You were saying, godling?”
Chapter Two
“Death threats?” Manu asked mildly. He still wore the long, leather duster from my arrest, but in my half-conscious state, I hadn’t noticed much else about him. Now, I studied his angular cheeks and dark eyes that looked like an abyss. He had glowing runes shaved into the sides of his head and swirling black tribal tattoos down one side of his face. Both accentuated his pitiless expression.
I recovered my composure, chin up. “Why am I here? I hate this house.”
At that, Manu narrowed his eyes. “This house?”
“Are you hard of hearing? Yes, this house. I literally flew halfway around the world to escape this house. Is this my punishment? I’ll have to applaud you for the hell-on-Earth atmosphere, I guess.” I proceeded to slow clap.
Manu rubbed circles around his temple. “Would you stop talking for a second and let me think?”
I opened my mouth, but couldn’t decide on a retort. Why did Manu look so confused?
“This house was chosen specifically for you,” he finally said. “Until we understand what you are, you are to be treated as an exalted prisoner. If the Council were to imprison a god, then they could be punished and fear divine reprisals.”
“I’m not a god!”
“In your memories, this is the house where you spent the majority of your life. You’ve laughed here and loved here. You tickled your children here and made love to your husband here. It was an obvious choice.”
“You went through my memories?” I was horrified. I didn’t even like digging around in there.
“No,” was all Manu replied.
“What does that mean?”
“That I didn’t look in your memories.”
“But somebody did?”
“I only read the report.”
I groaned. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re annoying?”
“Yes.”
“This is getting us nowhere.” While I wanted to keep the She-Wolf’s identity close to my heart, I decided it was better to reveal what I knew rather than wait to be accused of working with the gods. “I’m the She-Wolf of Rome. I’m not powerful. Take me to the darkest, dingiest dungeon. I promise I will prefer it to this place.”
“I can’t do that. You might be lying in order to punish us later.”
I threw a pillow at Manu’s reflection. He hardly flinched. “So what?” I asked. “I’m supposed to stay here until you decide what I am?”
“Of course not,” he replied curtly. “Your trial will begin soon. I’ll come back to gather you in a fortnight.”
“A fortnight? I assume you don’t mean the game.”
“I don’t play games.”
“Manu, how long is a fortnight?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks! You’re out of your mind. I canno
t live with my ex-husband and his booty call for two weeks. He’s suspicious, and for once, I don’t blame him. This is unnatural, this is a travesty, this is—”
“I get it,” Manu interrupted.
“You do? So I can leave?”
“No. You are to remain here. Not only is it your most familiar connection, but the Council’s meeting place is in the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan area.”
“You’re joking.”
“I am not.”
I sat down weakly. “This can’t be happening. I bet Luca actually killed me and this is purgatory. I’m dead, aren’t I? Is this really hell?”
“No, I told you, this is St. Louis.”
I looked for another pillow to throw.
“St. Louis is the confluence point of elemental energy,” Manu explained. “Why do you think the greatest prehistoric civilization in North America settled on the other side of the river? They felt the power of earth and water and built up to the sky. And were destroyed by it.”
I pictured Cahokia Mounds over the Mississippi River near East St. Louis. My boys went there on a field trip once. It looked like large landfills, but the guide assured us it was once the epicenter of life in North America. And as for those landfills, it took as much manpower to haul their dirt as it did to build the ancient pyramids of Egypt. I know. I was skeptical, too. “Are you going to tell me where this meeting place is then? At the mounds?”
Manu began to disappear, his form wavering along the edges. “No.”
“No to the mounds or no to telling me where the Council meets?”
Manu was already gone, but his disembodied voice still floated through my room. “Has anyone ever told YOU how annoying you are?”
“Get in line, buddy,” I shouted.
With that, my body felt the urgent need to collapse for at least a century. My human brain could barely cope with the influx of information. I wanted to curl into a ball and rock myself to sleep. Crawling toward the bed I’d thankfully washed after the boys left for college, I slid under the Transformer sheets and pulled them over my head. I didn’t want to read any more about wolves, Cahokia, or magic. I wanted to sleep and to pretend none of this was happening.
“Please dream about the dentist. Or the grocery store. Anything mundane would be great. Give me a root canal, I don’t even care,” I mumbled, falling asleep.
If only.
Chapter Three
Normandy, France.
January, 832.
Unknown woman.
I was wrong.
My feet blistered and bled on the rocks littering my path. The frigid wind of January cut through my fine dress as sharply as a dagger, and the light of a midwinter moon left its mark on frosted leaves that crunched under my feet. The smell of snow hung on the wind. I had to hurry. I had to get rid of the unnatural child.
Blood soaked through the gauze and moss I’d tucked between my thighs, but I persisted through the tangled, brown vines and windswept heather. There were hazy clouds drifting around the moon like a halo. I knew it must be a sign.
Throughout my life, I’d been plagued by whispers that dissipated upon closer inspection. I kept them to myself, but they were omnipresent. They told me to close my legs for that knight, to open my legs for another. Since they never failed me, I began to think of them as my very own guardian angel. But they only came on full moons.
Once I wed, the whispers told me that bearing twins was unnatural. Any woman that bore two babes at once had surely committed adultery and sullied her good name. I mustn’t have twins. At all costs, I must not.
So I spoke viciously against my rival who birthed twins, letting my jealousy simmer to the surface at her good fortune to be bearing children at all, barren as I was. I bent to willing ears, murmuring how the seeds of two fertile males must have taken root in her womb for such an abomination to have occurred. Forgive me, but I did.
Then, my guardian angel abandoned me, and God punished me for my tongue.
Hardly a year passed before the pains of labor shot through my stomach, ricocheting up my back. The pain was immense; I barely had time to prepare myself. One perfect little girl came, slippery and mine. I was content, as was my knight.
Yet, not ten minutes later, the pains began anew. I barely remembered the second girl, panicked as I was. I barely understood how I found myself in front of an abbey, frantically scooping out snow from the hollow of an ash tree. If anyone were to find out there were two, they would shame me as a slut or call me a liar. Both were unacceptable. I found a third way. I was a survivor. I always found a third way.
With a small blessing and a kiss, a golden ring and a bolt of embroidered silk from Constantinople, I left her swaddled inside the hollow near the abbey. I didn’t look back. I never suckled her. No one knew I had ever birthed twins.
For twenty years, I stayed content with my only daughter, named Hazel for her bewitching eyes. She was fair, a maiden sought after for her refinement and beauty and for her father’s lands. The whispers had forsaken me since that cold winter’s night, but I cared little. I had arranged a good marriage for Hazel to a young knight.
During the feast, I went to prepare their marriage chamber, lighting a cold torch to help fasten the flowers to the post. A figure swathed in shadow stood, and I clasped a hand to my bosom at the fright before relaxing.
“What are you doing here, wench?” I called to the girl with tears on her cheeks. His mistress, I supposed, as these things were common. She was no prettier than my Hazel in the flickering torch light. No source of competition. Only a poor wretch with no prospects.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured in a courtesy. “I wanted everything to look perfect for him.”
The pain on her face would have once twisted my heart, but I’d found I’d lost my heart twenty years ago on a winter’s night such as this. One with snow in the air. “Begone. I will—” My voice caught painfully in my breast. “Where did you get those things?”
I went to the girl and shook her. “Where did you get this ring and cloth?”
Despite the wild frenzy in my eyes, she held strong. “I was left in an ash tree, wrapped in this cloth, clutching this ring. I have accepted I cannot marry my knight, but I insist on making his wedding chamber acceptable, madam. Please unhand me.”
When she twisted her wrist free, I let her go. I staggered back as she went about the chamber, finally whispering what I already knew. “What is your name, girl?”
“Le Freine. Ash. For the tree.”
Ash and Hazel.
“My daughter,” I whispered. The only child of mine I hadn’t suckled. The only one to escape my curse.
That very night, Hazel’s marriage was annulled before it even began. Ash married her knight. And my whispers returned. They taunted me. You thought you could outrun destiny. You thought you were better. You were wrong.
They found my body hanging from an ash tree.
Chapter Four
I stumbled to my feet, hair sticking to my cheek from all the drool dangling from my open mouth. Daylight streamed through the blinds, shining brightly off of the double row of Josh’s polished gold trophies.
The fading dream haunted me as I made the bed. They’d come with increasing regularity since un-cursing Thessaly with god magic. I had dreams every week of women who lived only to see their children die. Always twins. Yet, the worst occurred in my astral jump with Manu. While the actual trip only took minutes, I’d lived two years as Cleopatra during the last days of her doomed love affair with Marc Antony.
More urgently, I began to suspect that they were all me. I’d never known my parents. I was told I was an orphan. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I never had parents, because I kept reincarnating every couple of centuries, ever since that god in the cave touched me with his magic. That would make this life, this one I was starting to adore as Ava Falcetti, doomed to fail. They all had. My real curse was failure.
For a precious moment, I stopped folding blankets and sat on the bed, my head in my hands.<
br />
Just like three weeks ago when I was here last, my life was spinning out of control. I was under arrest, awaiting a supernatural trial, and living with a curse that was apparently over a thousand years old. And I’d cursed my twin sons, too, with my breastmilk. Awesome. Put that in the baby book.
Had I not paid the price for freaking centuries? When would I have some peace? When would it break? A dark part of me wondered if I would break long before the curse did.
Instantly, I pictured Thessaly’s turquoise hair and mournful Tyrrhenian purple eyes. There was a woman who understood what it was like to be cursed by the gods and to rebel. I missed her and Coronis and Rosemary. I hoped Nonna had all of her garden canned and that Tiberius had stored enough nuts to satisfy the chipmunk in him. I missed apertivo hour and the sound of the waves breaking on the cliffs, and I definitely missed Marco’s cooking.
Aurick’s slicked back hair and rakish smile surfaced. Yes, I missed his banter, too.
For the first time in a long time, I’d felt like a real adult. I was on my own, dating, enjoying female relationships where nothing but friendship was asked. I’d even learned to bake Italian pastries and run a store. Sure, I had no idea the difference between latte macchiato and caffè macchiato, but I thought I had decades to learn.
Now, I merely hoped I had tomorrow.
I dragged myself downstairs, needing to mainline caffeine after a night of trees and twins. Things mostly looked the same in the kitchen. My pictures of lemons were over the counter, and the forks, spoons, and knives were all in their proper places. The only thing out of place?
Marla.
She wore a sports bra and skin tight yoga pants, and she flitted around as if she knew where everything went. It would’ve been annoying had it not been so shocking. She’d spent two years as my assistant, and she still didn’t know where we kept the extra staples.