by Amira Rain
“Commander Wallace is out running a patrol with his elite pack, and he said he won’t be home until later on in the evening. So Hill and I thought we’d cook you dinner and bring you over a bottle of wine for a little bachelorette party, since your wedding is tomorrow afternoon. We’ve got some meatballs all bubbling up in the crock pot right now, to make meatball sub sandwiches with. I thought those would be kind of fun for a party. We’ve got some veggies and dip, and we’ve got chips of all kinds, and we’ve got some fruit kebabs. For dessert, Hill made this stuff called vanilla panna cotta, which is like a rich Italian custard in case you don’t know, because she thought we needed to add something a little fancier to our bachelorette party meal. We’re even going to drizzle a little chocolate sauce on top, if you like that. So, how does that all sound?”
Although I couldn’t decide if I felt relieved or disappointed that Commander Wallace wasn’t currently at the house, I was certain about one thing, which was that the meal sounded wonderful to me. I smiled at Jill. “It all sounds great.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but then seemed to catch sight of something behind me and gasped. “Oh, your fur-babies! Plum and Quiet, right? Oh, let’s get them out and bring them in.”
I turned and saw Plum and Quiet, both stretching with their paws against one of the back windows, both looking just as calm as they’d been the entire trip. In the five years that I’d owned them, they’d both proven to be such good, laid-back car riders that I’d let them out of their carriers in the backseat as soon as I’d brought them down from my apartment that morning, allowing them to roam free in the backseat during the long trip so that they could stretch their legs, eat and drink, and use their litterbox. Acting like the very smart cats I’d always thought them to be, they’d managed to do all that just fine, hopping down to use the litterbox on the floor when needed, and eating and drinking from heavy ceramic dishes I’d buckled into one seat, using clothespins to keep the seatbelt on. The vast majority of the time, they’d sat curled up together in the empty seat, sleeping. Just once, Plum had hopped up into the front seat, but after doing a little sniffing around and apparently not finding things to her liking, she’d hopped right back in the back seat after giving me a quick cuddle and head-butting the side of my leg a few times. Quiet had apparently been too sleepy to even investigate the front seat at all.
Now, however, even though he and Plum looked calm, they also looked alert and ready to be free of the confinement of the car. I got in the front, leaned over the seat, and grabbed Quiet before passing him off to Jill, then did the same with Plum, handing her off to Hillary, saying that I’d get the litterbox and the duffle bag I’d brought. A few days before, I’d shipped all my other possessions to Briarwood, except my furniture, which I’d donated to a local domestic violence shelter, where one of the students I helped teach was temporarily living, along with her mom.
In response to what I’d said about me getting the litterbox and my duffle bag, Hillary immediately shook her head, already passing Plum back to me. “Nope. You take her, and I’ll get the litterbox and your bag. No way a bride-to-be should have to do any work the evening of her bachelorette party. Especially not after a very long, and I’m sure very tiring, drive. I’m even going to clean the litterbox for you, too, once we get in the house. You might have your hands full, anyway, trying to keep the cats calm around Jake. He’s incredibly boisterous, and he might really scare them. Our village vet estimates he’s probably six or seven years old, so definitely not a puppy, but the way he acts sometimes…it’s like he’s ten puppies. He really only listens to Commander Wallace, and even then…well, not all of the time.”
Poor Jake actually turned out not to be a problem as far as scaring the cats. When Jill and I stepped in the house, each cradling a cat, Jake trotted over to greet us, happily barking and wagging his fluffy golden tail. But then Plum suddenly hissed, lunging out of my arms as if she wanted to threaten Jake. He stopped dead in his tracks, whimpering, then started backing up when Quiet hissed at him as well. Plum then began hissing louder, and Jake took off, racing out of the kitchen with a loud cry of a whimper that held unmistakable fear.
Feeling terrible for him, I glared at Plum and Quiet in turn. “You two are naughty! Very, very naughty.”
I’d actually only heard them hiss maybe once or twice each in five years. They were normally the most docile, even-tempered, cuddly cats ever. However, I realized, they’d never spent much time around dogs. And now that I was thinking about it, the only times I’d heard them hiss had been in the vet’s office when dogs had been present in the waiting room.
Once Hillary was in the house with the front door shut behind her, I set Plum down, saying I was going to go find Jake. “I feel like I owe him an apology and some cuddles, if the cats didn’t scare him off of me, too.”
The front door opened into a small foyer that was part of a spacious kitchen, which struck me as maybe slightly unusual, but I found that I kind of liked this front-door-to-kitchen layout. There was a large granite-topped island with four bar stools around it in the middle of the kitchen, and I imagined that it might be nice to bring guests directly into a warm kitchen for hot apple cider or hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day. I thought that it also might be nice for Commander Wallace to come home, step right into the kitchen, and smell a nice dinner cooking after a long day of logging, or patrolling, or whatever else he did every day.
Other than the front door basically opening right into the kitchen, another unusual feature of the house was that a wall of sorts, maybe four-feet high, made from the same caramel-colored wood as the kitchen cabinetry and the hardwood floors, divided part of the large kitchen. Wide windows covered the wall beyond the divider wall, and I could see an inch or two of the tops of high-backed chairs, as if maybe this divided part was some sort of a small sunroom that overlooked the backyard and the adjacent forestland. I wanted to investigate, thinking that I’d probably really like this little room, but at present, I needed to stay on task to find Jake.
The far end of the kitchen led to a short hallway, which opened into a vast room containing a long, rectangular dining room table and chairs near a stone fireplace in one half, while the other half of the enormous room seemed to be a living-room-within-a-room, with a long couch, a loveseat, and several overstuffed chairs in various shades of tan and cream. A few low bookshelves lined a wall catty-cornered to the furniture grouping, and directly across from the grouping, next to a row of windows, at least a dozen potted plants of all different kinds sat on wooden stands of various heights. I didn’t see a TV anywhere, which I liked. In my apartment, I rarely even turned the TV on, usually preferring to read during free time instead. Sometimes I did like to watch movies, but I usually did that on my laptop, in bed, anyway.
After having a quick look around the living room area of the larger open room and not seeing any sign of Jake, I made my way over to the dining room area, admiring the stone fireplace and the long, glossy table. But I didn’t see any sign of Jake there, either. Coming to a stop by the table, I just listened for a few moments, gazing on the nearby staircase and wondering if he’d gone upstairs. If so, would it be right of me to go up there to find him, being that the owner of the house hadn’t shown me around yet or told me I could go up there? However, I soon heard a faint noise that told me I wouldn’t be needing to go upstairs to find Jake. The noise I heard was the soft, rhythmic sound of a dog panting quietly, and it was coming from underneath the first four stairs, which formed a column leading to a landing. The staircase then turned ninety degrees, leading upstairs.
Having a good idea that there was a hollow behind the first column of stairs, I quietly walked over, knelt, and sure enough, saw a panting golden retriever curled up in the dark recess, trembling. “Oh, Jake. You poor little thing.”
Whining, he flinched away, though he couldn’t flinch very far, considering there was a wooden panel on the side of the stairs to his right.
“Oh, Jake, it’s okay. I�
�m not going to hurt you. I’m sorry my cats were so mean.” After getting down on my hands and knees to duck beneath the open side of the stairs, I crawled into the hollow a little way, reached out a hand, and began tentatively petting Jake’s trembling body. “Oh, they scared you so bad, didn’t they? They were very naughty cats.”
He woofed once, quietly, as if agreeing with me. I moved a hand to pet one of his silky ears, heart melting, realizing that no matter how things went between Commander Wallace and me, I was at least officially in love with his wildflowers and his dog.
CHAPTER THREE
Jake didn’t seem like the type to hold a grudge, at least not against me for my cats’ behavior. Within a few minutes, he and I were good friends, playing with a rope toy I found beneath the stairs. When Jake tried to stand and bonked his head, I backed out from the hollow, kind of pulling him out with me via the rope toy, which he held clamped between his jaws, growling. Once free of the stairs, we played a bit more, but then Jake turned suddenly lovey, gently pouncing on me and covering my face with slobbery kisses, which I tried to avoid. I was appreciative, but I didn’t exactly want my face to be covered in slobber.
Soon Jill came out, saying that she and Hillary had corralled the cats in the sunroom. “There’s a rolling bookshelf thingy that can maybe serve as a ‘baby gate’ across the doorway to keep them contained for a bit while we fix our plates for dinner. I know the wall isn’t very high and they can probably jump it, but maybe they’ll be more comfortable in a smaller space while they get used to the house, and maybe they’ll actually want to stay in there.”
It turned out that they were actually quite content in the sunroom. After a trip to the hallway bathroom to wash up for dinner and to wash my face from Jake’s kisses, I peeked over the four-foot-high wall to see Plum’s fluffy, gray tail disappearing into the covered litterbox. Quiet was curled up in a rocking chair, surveying the field of wildflowers beyond the high, wide sunroom windows, with a look of perfect contentment, tail slowly swishing.
During dinner, neither cat emerged, but Jake sat closely by my chair, looking around anxiously every so often, as if expecting them to come tearing out at any second, hissing. It was like he wanted me nearby to defend him--that may have been the primary reason he was sitting so closely to me. He did reveal a secondary reason, though, when I dropped half a meatball from my sandwich. He quickly gobbled it up from the floor, proving that he was more than willing to “help” me in cleaning up spilled bits of food.
While the three of us ate and sipped wine, Jill and Hillary asked me how my trip had gone, asked me some things about myself, and told me a few things about Briarwood. Once Hillary had served our dessert, I had a question for Jill. I asked her to tell me a bit more about her “demi-psychic” powers, like what they were exactly, how they had developed, and if they were somehow the result of the germ weapon. I had to admit I’d been more than a bit curious since her initial email.
After taking a rather large gulp of wine, she made a very satisfied-sounding sigh and set the glass down, saying that she could write a whole book about her powers. “But since I know you’re probably tired after such a long day, I’ll just give you the super-short version right now. Basically, my powers are really hard to explain, and I don’t even understand how they all ‘work.’ I can’t see the future or read people’s minds or anything like a regular ‘psychic;’ I just get certain really strong feelings and thoughts when I see someone’s handwriting or mull over their answers to certain questions. It’s like maybe I can ‘see’ into a small but important part of the person’s brain. I don’t know if these powers are the result of the germ weapon, like how it changed the DNA of regular human men to turn them into shifters, or what. There’s just no way to tell. My powers could be just natural, intuitive powers that a small fraction of people have had since the beginning of time. It’s possible. But they could be because of some weird DNA change, or some weird activation of a certain part of my brain, or even something else completely supernatural that was part of what that madman did to create the germ weapon in the first place. Everyone says that he was obsessed with ‘dark arts,’ and the Graywolf breed of shifters might even be evidence of this because some of them have magical-type powers. And, and this is a big and because it’s probably an important thing, my powers started developing right around the time of the germ weapon and all the turning into shifters. Although really, it wasn’t even like they ‘started developing;’ it was more like I just got them. All of a sudden, I just started getting really strong feelings about people, specifically about couples or people that I thought should be couples, people that I felt were so right for each other and would make each other so happy. It even applied the powers to myself. I met my husband David when I was fourteen and he was fifteen; we’ve been together ever since. Some people might say that’s weird or unhealthy, but I just knew…even before I met him, I just knew.”
Fork suspended above my dessert, I asked Jill how, and she continued.
“Well, David had dropped a science paper in our high school hallway, and I found it. I looked at his handwriting, and I felt like I’d just been punched in my soul or something. I really can’t even explain it. Handwriting had never been important to me in my life before. It had never ‘told’ me anything. But all of a sudden, I was just getting like, worlds of insights from it, just from looking at it and even running my fingers across it. So, anyway, I looked at the name on the science paper, and I asked my friend, ‘Who’s David James?’ and she said, ‘Oh, he’s this new guy who sits at such-and-such table in the lunchroom.’ And I said, ‘Take me to him today,’ and she did.”
Intrigued, and just barely-buzzing from the wine, I took another little sip before responding. “And then what happened?”
Smiling, Jill took a large gulp of her own wine before responding. “Well, tons of stuff happened. But in short, David and I fell in love, even though we were young teenagers and even though our parents hated the whole thing. But then, when we were eighteen and nineteen, we wanted to get married. Everyone kept telling us that it was insane and that we’d regret it because each of us had never dated anyone else, and so on. It really wore me down and made me paranoid. So, finally, I told David we should just take a year off. Just one year to date other people. If, after that year, we still wanted only each other, then we’d know it was right. I told him this, even though it ripped my guts out and I just felt that it was so, so wrong.”
With my gaze on Jill, I swallowed a bite of chocolate-drizzled panna cotta, then picked up my wineglass. “So, what happened during the year?”
Swirling the remaining inch or so of wine in her glass, Jill chuckled. “Well, we didn’t quite make it to a year. I spent literally the next twenty-four hours bawling my eyes out; David got so sick at Army boot camp that he had to be put into the infirmary unit; and then he called me and was just like, ‘I really, really don’t want us to do this. I don’t want to date any other girls; I just want you for the rest of my life. I’m sure of it, and I have been since I was fifteen.’ And I was just like, ‘I feel basically the same, except I don’t want any other guys, and I’ve been sure of it since I was fourteen.’ Then we got married two days later. Over the next year or so, we got settled into army life. But then all the ‘late shifting shifters,’ mostly wolves, started developing years after the germ weapon, and David was one of them. We eventually came here because we’d heard that the American government might try to do all sorts of experiments on David and our future kids. David had heard that some former army ranger guy, who turned out to be Commander Wallace, was trying to set up a sovereign nation up here so that all wolf shifters and their families could be safe. The only problem was that once a bunch of wolves came up here, it turned out that most of them were single and didn’t even have families yet. And that was why, maybe six months ago, I came to Commander Wallace. I told him, ‘I have some weird skills with getting feelings from handwriting, feelings from questions people answer, and feelings from people in gen
eral. Just let me do this thing I’ve been thinking of to get wives up here for our population, and let me formulate some questions on a questionnaire in order to do this.’ He eventually said yes because he’d witnessed Hillary and Steb, and he’d heard about all of the other couples I’d matched, too.”
Swallowing another sip of wine, I shifted my gaze to Hillary. “Is Steb your husband?”
Drizzling a little extra chocolate over her panna cotta, she smiled. “Yes. His full name is Esteban Emiliano Hernandez Martinez, but somewhere along the line, he just started going by Steb.”
Jill cleared her throat. “I think I had something to do with that, remember? When I first got here, I told him it sounded cool, and then everyone started calling him that.” Jill shifted her gaze from Hillary to me. “That was when my matchmaking up here really got started. To make a long story short, whenever I saw Steb around the village, I kept thinking of Hillary for some reason, so finally I said, ‘Let me ask you a couple of questions, Steb, and I’ll need you to write out your responses so that I can see your handwriting.’ So he did, and then afterward, to make another long story short, I called Hillary, and I basically said, ‘I need you to get up here to Briarwood and marry this guy because you’re perfect for each other. He wants a wife and kids, and you want a husband and kids; just trust me on this.’”
Hillary smiled, lifting her wineglass. “I thought she was nuts. I said no way. I’m usually a very rational, methodical sort of person, and it all sounded absolutely insane to me.”
“But then I reminded her of how many dozens of friends and family friends I’d matched up that had gone on to get married…probably at least three dozen couples since I was fourteen or fifteen…and I reminded her of how many of our family members I’d matched up with their spouses over the years, and how many of them were and still are very happy. Hillary eventually said yes, came up here, married Steb after four days, and they’ve been incredibly happy ever since. This was part of why Commander Wallace eventually said yes to my plan, and how you eventually came to be up here, of course, Julia. I don’t want this to put any pressure on you, though, and this is why Hill and I wrote what we did on the website about the goal of these marriages being mutual respect and good communication and all that. We didn’t want anyone to feel pressured, and we still don’t. But this is what I’ve been telling all of the new brides. I’m good at what I do, and I’m good at my ‘feeling’ skills and my handwriting skills. I can even tell when a person is lying through their handwriting. I don’t think I’ve made too many huge mistakes on my matchmaking program up here. But like I said, no one should feel pressured to fall in love instantly. Not any of the new brides, not their husbands, not you, and not the commander. Just sink into it. It’ll happen. I wish the commander was here right now to hear me say all this because I could tell from his own handwriting on his form that he’s doubtful about all of this. He was even doubtful in some of his responses. I gave the shifters up here different questions than you prospective brides, and one of the questions was, ‘Do you see yourself happy and in love in the future?’ Commander Wallace wrote some roundabout vague answer about how kids and repopulation are important to him, but he’s dubious about love because he’s never been able to feel a deep connection with a woman. Like that automatically cancels out the possibility of a future deep connection, right?”