Red and the Wolf

by Cindy C. Bennett

  As she sat down to listen, she pulled her brows together in confusion. She knew this song, but didn’t remember putting this one on the CD. Had her grandma learned to burn CD’s—unlikely—or had someone helped her make a new one?

  Ruby wondered if her grandma was relieved about her dad being in rehab, or angry it had taken him so long. His drinking had been a huge source of contention between the two of them for some time now.

  The song ended and she laughed at the irony as Mozart’s “Turkish March” came on. What were the chances that she’d put a song by Kate Wolf followed by a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart piece one right after the other? As she leaned back in the chair to enjoy the music, something pulled at the back of her mind, something she felt she was missing.

  Suddenly, she sat upright. She hadn’t been sure about the Kate Wolf song, but she was sure that she hadn’t put any Mozart on her grandma’s CD. Clearly this wasn’t the CD she’d made her. So who had? A knock on the door pulled her from her musings.

  Obviously it wouldn’t be her grandma; she wouldn’t knock on her own door. Ruby stood and opened the door, expecting either Rafe or one of her grandma’s neighbors. The blood drained from her face at the caller. An instinctive step back was read as an invitation, and Lowell stepped into the house.

  “Hello, Red.” He moved to close the door behind him as she retreated.

  “Um, hey, Lowell.” Ruby could hear the tremor in her voice, and Lowell reacted with a Cheshire Cat smile.

  “I thought we should talk,” he said.

  “Oh, well,” she waved a negligent hand at him. “Now’s not a good time. My grandma is on her way home, and I need to speak with her. Privately.”

  “No, she’s not.” He continued his advance, the same disconcerting smile marring his features.

  “Wha . . . what do you mean?” Ruby clasped her hands together, trying to hide their trembling.

  “Your grandma isn’t going to be back,” his smile widened, “for some time.”

  Fear crawled up Ruby’s spine as her insides turned to liquid dread. “Where is she, Lowell? What did you do to her?” she asked past her dry tongue.

  “I haven’t done anything to her, Ruby,” he said, holding his arms out, placating. “Why would you think I had?”

  “Lowell, this isn’t funny.”

  Lowell stopped and Ruby glanced past him toward the door. She considered her chances of getting around him and out the door. As if reading her thoughts, Lowell glanced behind him. He lifted one finger and shook it back and forth, admonishingly.

  The song on the CD changed, playing the Duran Duran song “Hungry Like the Wolf”. Lowell pointed toward the stereo as if surprised, one brow lifted, smile still in place.

  “Great song,” he said. Ruby abruptly sensed where the CD had come from.

  “Lowell, please, I don’t know what you’re doing, but—”

  His smile dropped and he bared his teeth. “What I’m doing?” he roared. “What I’m doing is showing you, Ruby.”

  “Showing me what?” she asked in as calm a voice as she could muster. She inched her way to the side toward the kitchen.

  “How great we could be, Ruby,” he said feverishly. “You and I.”

  Ruby stopped. “Lowell, there is no you and I.”

  “Because of Rafe?” he spit. “Rafe is weak. He doesn’t understand power, how to grasp it and use it to become a real man, the kind of man worthy of you, Ruby.”

  Lowell’s face shone red, and Ruby could feel the heat pouring off of him. She knew she had to tread carefully.

  “Not because of Rafe, Lowell. Even if Rafe hadn’t come back—”

  “If Rafe didn’t exist for you to pine over, things would be different,” Lowell said fervently. “He’s always been in the way.”

  Ruby shook her head. “No, Lowell, it wasn’t Rafe in the way. She began moving again, slowly, incrementally. “You’re an extremely good looking guy, Lowell. And when you want to be, you can be very sweet. But we were never meant to be. I’ve never looked at you as someone who—”

  “That’s because of Rafe! You can’t see beyond Rafe.”

  “No, Lowell,” she began, then broke and ran for the kitchen and the back door. She only made it as far as the midway point in the kitchen before Lowell’s arm snaked around her waist, jerking her to a stop.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked, breath hot against her ear, his cheek feverish on hers.

  “Let me go, Lowell!” she demanded furiously as she struggled, shoving ineffectively at his arm.

  “Stop struggling,” he growled, his voice low and ringing with a timbre she hadn’t heard before. “Stop now, before—”

  Ruby froze as she felt his breathing increase and his arm beneath her hands began to change, tightening, bulging, fur rising beneath her fingers. He flung her across the room, and she crashed into the fridge with shattering impact. She slid to the floor, limp as a rag doll, the room spinning and her ears ringing. She looked up at Lowell, horror and revulsion slithering across her skin at the sight before her.

  Lowell had increased in height, his face elongating, broad shoulders becoming impossibly wider. His arms lengthened, becoming sinewy and thick as the blackish-blue fur fully sprouted. His chest expanded, shredding his shirt as it did. Clawed hands—paws, really, came up to rip the shirt away. His legs changed, hocks forming, feet withdrawing into wide, padded paws. His snout swung her direction, teeth bared, saliva dripping. His eyes glowed gold and a low growl rumbled from his chest.

  Terror transfixed Ruby, until he took a step in her direction. She scrambled against the fridge, trying to push into it in spite of knowing the impossibility. Her breath panted out in a panicked staccato rhythm. She whimpered with each quick exhalation.

  “Lowell!”

  Rafe’s voice came from behind the beast, booming, commanding. Lowell swung his way and Ruby caught a glimpse of Rafe standing in the entryway of the kitchen, arms held threateningly to near his side, hands fisted, his angry gaze locked on the lycan.

  The beast snarled as it snapped its jaws. Ruby gained her feet and slid to the side away from Lowell.

  “Stop now, Lowell! Get control!” Rafe bellowed.

  “Change brother, and fight me fairly.”

  Ruby quaked at the guttural voice coming from the lycan. It was Lowell, and not Lowell.

  “You know I won’t do that,” Rafe answered furiously, his gaze cutting to Ruby for an instant. It was long enough for Lowell to notice, though.

  “You will . . . to fight for her,” Lowell said, turning back to Ruby and lunging.

  She screamed, but before he could make contact Rafe hit Lowell from the side, arms around Lowell’s thick middle, tackling him violently. Lowell howled angrily as they rolled to the floor in a tangle of muscle and fur.

  Ruby immediately turned and pulled open a drawer, searching frantically for something—anything—that she could use as a weapon. Her eyes happened on the butchers block on the counter, and she withdrew a long knife, turning back to watch Lowell and Rafe.

  Lowell had Rafe pinned to the floor, claws digging into his wrists, drawing blood. His bared teeth were inches from Rafe’s face.

  “Change, brother. Fight for her. Or die!”

  “I won’t change, Lowell!” Rafe thundered through clenched teeth. He lifted his head and Ruby saw his eyes glowing as he fought the change.

  “Lowell!” Ruby yelled, running forward, bringing the knife down. She jammed it into his shoulder. Her ploy worked. Lowell turned toward her, yelping with pain as he released Rafe, claws reaching behind, trying to dislodge the knife. Rafe didn’t hesitate. He clenched his hands together above his head and brought them forward forcefully, hitting Lowell in the center of his chest. Lowell howled as he fell back from the blow. Rafe was instantly on his feet.

  “Change, Rafe,” she cried.

  “No!”

  “Change!”

  Lowell howled as he tried again for the knife. His clawed paw reaching for the knife began to morph
into human fingers. He pitched to his feet, turning their way. His breath heaved pitifully as his body began to shrink, the fur retracting as his snout became a mouth clenched with pain. He fell to his knees as the transformation completed, Rafe rushing forward to catch him.

  “Brother,” Lowell breathed. “Forgive me.”

  His eyes closed and Ruby gasped as she saw the amount of blood coming from the knife which still stood out from his shoulder. Lowell’s eyes opened and came to hers. He tried to smile, though it was more of a grimace.

  “Good arm, Red,” he said before his eyes slid closed again as he went limp in Rafe’s arms.

  Part V: In the End

  Ruby knocked on the metal door. It burst open from the inside by the massive Hutu with the force denied her on her last visit here with Rafe.

  “Toa!” he cried, pulling her up into a bear hug. Ruby rolled her eyes. He’d stopped calling her “Mumu” since her run-in with Lowell and now called her “Toa”, which meant warrior.

  “Hi, Hutu. Everything ready?”

  “Just as you commanded, my queen,” he teased.

  “Leave the girl alone and let her in,” Ali’tasi said, smacking Hutu on the arm and pushing him out of the way, wherein she immediately grabbed Ruby and smothered her. When she released her, she lifted a strand of her black hair with raised brow. It was worse than a berating, that look.

  “I’ll let it go back, don’t worry. It was a moment’s insanity that I’m over now.”

  “Good. You’re a good girl,” Ali’tasi said, patting her painfully on the back.

  “Come on, Tin’a. Leave the girl alone,” Hutu teased his mother, then wisely darted away, laughing.

  Ali’tasi scowled at him, but then grinned at Ruby. “Have fun, Ruby,” she said, following Hutu.

  Ruby went behind the storage shelves and saw that Hutu had set the table identically to when Rafe had arranged it for her. He’d already left the food on a side tray with covers over them. She lifted a couple until she found the fausi she’d specially requested. She quickly stole a bite before replacing the cover, closing her eyes blissfully as the taste rolled across her tongue.

  “What’s all this?”

  Ruby jumped at the sudden voice and turned to face Rafe. She shrugged and spread her arms wide.

  “An apology.”

  Rafe walked toward her, a small smile on his lips at her words. “An apology for what?” he asked.

  “For everything. For walking out on you when you did this for me. For dragging you into the forest. For not believing you when you tried to tell me the truth.” She grimaced. “For stabbing your brother.”

  Rafe grinned. “That last part is something you definitely don’t need to apologize for.”

  “Rafe!” she admonished lightly. Rafe could joke about the stabbing. It turned out that while wounding Lowell had caused him great pain, it hadn’t genuinely harmed him. Within a few minutes of Rafe pulling the knife from him, the laceration healed. It’d taken Lowell a little longer to recover, though, due to the copious loss of blood.

  Rafe stopped in front of her, his hands gently on her upper arms, lightly moving them up and down.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “He’s agreed to go to Alaska.”

  “That’s good then, right?” Ruby was relieved, and pleased.

  “Hopefully it will be,” Rafe said. “He’s still angry about a lot of things, and not exactly thrilled with either of us. I don’t know if Lowell will ever have the kind of control he needs.”

  Ruby was having a difficult time thinking straight with the motion of his hands on her arms. “You want to sit?” she asked.

  He pulled her chair out for her then sat down across the table.

  “Have you spoken to your grandma?”

  Ruby nodded. “I told her I’d accidentally cut myself, but that I’d cleaned up the mess. Hopefully we did a good enough job she won’t know how much blood there was on her floor.” Ruby picked up her fork and twisted it idly on the tabletop. “It had to have taken some time on Lowell’s part to plan the whole thing.”

  “Yeah,” Rafe agreed. “Especially getting someone to impersonate your grandma, and making the CD. That was an unnecessarily creepy addition. Then getting there in time to get your grandma on the barge to go see your dad. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s doing well. He has very limited visiting hours. My grandma is staying in a hotel nearby so that she can see him whenever he does have visiting hours. She thinks quite highly of Lowell for being considerate enough to show up and get her to my father. I’ve talked to my dad a few times, and he sounds better, clearer.” She lifted her eyes from watching her actions with the fork to meet Rafe’s gaze. “Is it true, Rafe? Was my mom killed by a wolf . . . or a lycan?”

  Rafe closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wish I could say no, Red.” He looked directly at her. “It was a lycan, but not Lowell or myself. Another of our uncles, who’s always been a bit of a rogue, came to visit. Your mom ran across him one night in the forest while he was hunting. She startled him and he panicked.” Rafe stood and moved to squat in front of her. He reached up and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Red. He was sent to live in the remote reaches of Siberia, from which he can never leave. It’s the only form of punishment we have for one another. He will grow old and die there, alone.”

  Ruby missed her mother every day. Whether she was in a car at the wrong place and the wrong time, as she’d always been told, or in the forest at the wrong time, she was still gone. There wasn’t any justice that would bring her back.

  “Do you . . . I mean, do lycans kill often?”

  Rafe sighed. “Rarely. It’s been known to happen, but only very rarely, and never purposefully. At least, not in the past fifty years since the punishment was put into action. We pretty much all go to Alaska to learn how to control ourselves now as soon as we realize the change is coming. Your mom was the first in over fifty years.” He laughed scornfully. “As if that makes it any better. As if that will make you despise lycans any less.”

  “I don’t despise lycans,” she said.

  “You don’t?” Surprise reflected on his face.

  “I despise the one who killed my mom,” she said, her voice hitching. “In fact, I’d like to see his skin peeled from his flesh while he’s conscious.” She lifted her eyes to his, saw understanding there. “And right now I kind of despise Lowell. A little. But I’ll probably get over that, too, if he learns to control himself. But why would I hate an entire race of people based on the actions of a few?”

  Rafe shook his head. “You’re a better person than me, Red.”

  Ruby placed her hands on the sides of Rafe’s face. His gaze locked with hers, stunned and questioning.

  “Besides, I happen to be in love with one of the lycans . . . as weird as it is to hear myself saying that.”

  A grin split Rafe’s face. “Oh yeah? Any lycan in particular?”

  “Yeah,” Ruby said. “One who has been my best friend for as long as I can remember. One who went away so that he could do what was needed to come back and be with me. One who is far too gorgeous for his own good.” Rafe chuckled. “One who is my soul mate, and who I want to spend the rest of my life annoying with my short temper if he’ll let me.”

  “That many? That’s a lot of lycans to love,” he teased. Then he sobered. “It won’t be easy, Rubes. It’s a lot to take on, being part of a family that isn’t exactly normal. It’s not a decision to take lightly, giving up normalcy and risking having children who might turn into horrible creatures at some point.”

  “I’m not asking for easy,” Ruby said. “I only ask for you to love me.” She leaned closer to him. “And Rafe?”

  “Yeah?” he said, smiling happily now.

  “Call me Red.”

  “I love you, Red,” he said wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her from her seat down onto his lap as his mouth closed over hers. Ruby sighed, grateful that she was fina
lly home.

  ####

  Note from the Author

  I hope you enjoyed reading about Red and her two Wolfe’s. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the names of most of the characters in this story. Ruby Hood seems clearly obvious as a synonym for “Red Riding Hood” but the names of the Wolfe family are a little more complicated, excepting their last name of course. Rafe is the medieval form of the English Ralph, meaning "wise wolf." Lowell is an English surname transferred to forename use, derived from the Old Norman French byname Louvel, meaning "little wolf." Ulric is the Middle English form of the Anglo-Saxon Wulfric, meaning "wolf power,” and last but not least, Otsana is a Basque name meaning "she-wolf." Names are one of the things in my books that give me some of the most grief. For secondary characters I might not spend so much time, but for the main players I spend a great deal of time considering what moniker I’m hanging on them. For this story, I’m fairly proud of the names I’ve given to every one of my characters—secondary included.