by Hettie Ivers
“If you were smarter, you wouldn’t,” she told me, her expression frank. She really believed it.
That was the toughest part to reconcile. That and the fact that she spoke like a twenty-year-old already at times. Still, I attempted to respond to her as if she were a preteen—as if I didn’t realize her IQ was already higher than mine.
I shrugged and teased, “Maybe I live to disappoint you. I hear that’s what moms are for.”
“You won’t live much longer if you keep coming back.” She tilted her head in indication of my bloodstained clothing as I fought the lump forming in my throat, knowing what she was going to say next.
I nodded mechanically as I tried to emotionally prepare myself. I had yet to manage a good response to this line of conversation we’d been repeating lately.
“You’re going to die when they come for me,” she announced. There was no emotion in her violet eyes as she said it. There never was. “I’ve seen it. It happens that way in every dream.” She was simply reciting the facts, as she knew them. “You always die. I can never stop it.”
I nodded. The tears slid down my cheeks as she stared stoically back at me. It was the statement of fact that she spoke at the end that always made me cry: “I can never stop it.”
She said it with zero emotion, yet the meaning was there: In her dreams, she had tried to stop me from dying. More than once. Perhaps in every dream.
My daughter didn’t want me dead. For a little girl prophesied to be the ultimate Rogue, it was as strong of a profession of love as I could ever expect to get. It filled me with hope. Hope that Sloane could connect. That she could love. Maybe in a way that would always be different than what the world wanted from her, but it still counted.
It fucking counted. And I would make the world see that it did.
“I wasn’t supposed to be born. I was a mistake.” More statements of fact.
“No.” I shook my head, wiping my tears away. “No, it wasn’t a mistake, Sloane.” I forced an easy, gentle smile as I took a few steps into the room, careful not to come too close. Getting too close to her physically too quickly often set her off. “I wanted you to be born. And your … soul … wanted to come here,” I faltered. I’d never been religious, and I still struggled with the concept of souls, even though I’d felt firsthand the part of me that had survived death. “So we could be here together on earth … and have fun … adventures together.”
She gave me a dubious look that called bullshit. I couldn’t blame her. We didn’t really have a lot of fun. Hiding and running for your life all the time got tiresome fast.
“I can’t have fun, Avery. I can only do bad things. The voices know. If you could hear them, you’d know, too.”
“What!” I laughingly shrieked, while inside, her words eviscerated me. “Are you kidding me? You were born to have fun! My mission in life is to have fun. It’s impossible for my daughter not to be fun, too.”
“You don’t know that. You just like to believe it. You and the old blind spot like to pretend you see good in me so you can sleep better.”
I took another step closer, reminding myself that I needed to ask her at some point why she’d started calling Azda “the old blind spot.”
“Look, Sloane, I did some … not-so-nice things as a kid. Most of the adults around me all thought I was … well, pretty much evil, and that I was destined to only do bad things in the world. I heard them tell me so for years, and their voices stayed in my memory, playing in my head long after those adults were no longer around. But they were wrong.”
“I was supposed to die,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me, her eyes drifting to a corner of the room. “I was supposed to take the voices with me and stay dead. It was a mistake when I was born.”
How I despised those voices in her head. I wished I could strangle every one of them. “It wasn’t a mistake, Sloane. I was there. I wanted you to be born. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
It was the truth. Sloane was my greatest love and life purpose. If I had a soul mate, she was it for me. More so than Marcus had ever been. I hadn’t realized it until my death—when I’d experienced how easily I’d been able to separate from Marcus. I’d loved my fiancé very much. He and I had shared a strong connection, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t enough to hold me to him in death. I’d had a stronger bond with my best friend, Sloane, and even that hadn’t been enough to keep me from my baby, Sloane.
She was my reason for being. I had come back to life for her. And I would never give up on her.
“That’s what you have to say.” She shrugged at the empty corner of the room as she dismissed my words. “You won’t think I’m the best thing that happened to you when you’re killed because of me.”
“Yes. I will, baby. I’ll still think it.” I knelt on the floor by the edge of her bed, trying to catch her line of sight. “If it happens that I have to leave you because I leave this world, you’ll still be worth every moment I’ve gotten to spend with you. You’ll always be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
She didn’t make eye contact with me, and she began hum-talking to herself once more. I stayed and watched her for a while. Watched as she became more engrossed in her strange, internal discussion, as she shut the world around her out until her entire focus was inward—on the darkness that lived and breathed inside of her.
Unlike the rest of the supernatural world, I refused to accept that it was an indomitable darkness borne of magic or prophecy. Although, sometimes I felt that might’ve been easier for me to face.
My greater fear was that this was a darkness I already knew. One I had seen and faced … and lost to before.
“Peter has always reminded me of my most delicate garden flowers.”
I snorted, eyeing the old bat’s grandson with disdain where he sat on the swing set all the way on the opposite side of the yard—too scared to come near me. His head hung low, and his long, auburn bangs blew across his face, partially concealing it. I could still make out the black eye I’d given him the day before, though, and I couldn’t help but smile a little.
Poor kid. He was already weak enough. The last thing he needed was a grandma who compared him to a fucking flower. He probably got his ass beat daily at school. I would find out soon enough when I started going with him in a few days.
“Do you know why I picked you, Averhilda?”
I was about to say the extra cash from the state that I knew foster parents got, but instead, I went with, “Don’t really care.” I gave her my best bored, “fuck off” face that got me slapped by most adults. When she didn’t hit me, I sassed, “My name’s Avery. Remember it if you want me to answer.”
She smiled and nodded. “Okay. Avery, then.” Her white hair was streaked with dirt. She even had dirt smudged on her face.
I missed the smell of the city already.
“I chose you because you are not a flower,” she told me.
Oh, boy. I had a live one here.
“Flowers are beautiful, but fragile,” she continued to ramble. “They can be temperamental. Their existence fleeting.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners despite her smile as they darted a glance at her loser grandson. “You remind me of a lovely, stalwart garden weed, Avery. The kind of weed that grows strong and proud despite less than favorable soil conditions.”
I rolled my eyes as she bent to pat more dirt around whatever she was planting. I decided I’d hit her grandson every chance I got until she sent me back. Anything was better than hanging out in Bumfuck with a gardening old lady and a boy too slow to block a punch.
“A weed that can survive even when it’s starved of light and water. A weed that has managed to thrive even though it has received no love at all.” She paused in her dirt patting to look up at me. She smiled and bit her wobbly old lip, looking as if she might cry. “Because your power is sourced from within, child.”
Aw, crap. “Gardens suck,” I interjected. Lame comeback, Avery. Her weird, emotionally char
ged gardening lecture was making me uncomfortable, though, giving me this terrible hollow feeling in my chest.
She laughed like I’d said something hysterical. “Hellfire, Avery, gardens are life. And the weed is the hardiest, most enduring plant in any garden.” She looked around her ugly garden full of random weeds and flowers and dying tomato plants like it was some kind of paradise to take pride in, before returning her gaze to me.
“We live in a world filled with delicate flowers. It’s a rare gift to be born a weed. Be glad of it. You were meant to rule the garden, dear. You may choose to be a weed who overpowers and strangles the delicate flowers around her, or you may choose to protect them.” Her eyes cut to Peter. “Maybe even teach them to be stronger flowers.”
Now we were getting somewhere. The awful hollow feeling in my chest fell away the minute I knew the score. Gardener Granny was speaking my language now.
“You want me to keep other kids from bullying Peter,” I concluded. “Because he’s a weak flower who gets beat up by weeds like me.” Why hadn’t she just said that?
Her brow wrinkled and she nodded. “That’s right, Avery.” The sad yet hopeful look in her blue eyes suddenly made me feel powerful. Less than forty-eight hours in and already I owned these country hicks.
The old lady could think me a weed if she wanted to. A scrapper was what I was. Some had used the term “hustler” before. There was no great mystery to how the world worked. You figured out what people were after and then figured out how to give it to them in exchange for what you wanted. It was that simple. And I was good at it.
I looked over at pathetic Peter, then at his pathetic grandma. “Yeah, I guess I can do that,” I told her with a shrug. “But it’s gonna cost you.”
She nodded and bit her lip again, only this time it looked like she was trying to hold back laughter rather than tears. “Okay.” She held her soil-coated hand out for me to shake. “Let’s cut a deal then.”
I took her bony, wrinkly white hand and gave it a firm shake, our palms mashing the soil between them.
The deal I struck with Grandma Ellie at age eleven was a momentous turning point in my childhood. Being placed with Ellie resulted in one of the most important shifts of my life. My happiest childhood memories were of the three years I spent befriending Peter while living at Ellie’s home.
I protected Peter from bullying kids at school. And I grew to love him like he was my own brother. But he remained a delicate flower. Try as I might, I never managed to strengthen him. Not while Ellie was alive, and not after her death that would thrust us both back into the state’s care.
I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes as the warm shower spray rained down on me, blocking the memories of the years that followed Ellie’s death from my mind as I washed away the sins of my day.
Sloane wasn’t Peter. She never would be. No matter how much she spoke of death, she didn’t mean it. She didn’t understand what she was saying.
My daughter was a stalwart weed. Like me.
She was destined to grow and thrive and weather any storm. I’d known it from the moment our souls connected: She was a weed like me. I wouldn’t accept otherwise.
Weeds didn’t give up. Weeds clung to life even when the delicate flowers around them they loved most withered and died.
Peter wasn’t the first or last fragile soul to enter and leave my life. But he remained my deepest loss and greatest regret.
There had been times when I’d hated him for being weak. Resented how easy it had seemed for him to give up. To leave me behind.
But that would always be the hardest part about being a weed: Seeing the fragile flowers around you give up and fade away. Not understanding why they were made that way—why they couldn’t seem to change. Watching the inevitable, dark storms brewing within them and not being able to stop it.
Knowing you’d always be the one left behind, because it was written in your DNA to survive.
Avery
The landscape of Denver had sure changed over the past decade. Between the expansion of the light-rail and the birth of the aerotropolis, the city was swarming with aging, entitled hipsters. And they all seemed to have congregated in uber-gentrified LoDo on this Monday night, filing out of their boozy art and guitar classes to hit the shittiest formerly-condemned-brick-building-turned-cool-urbanspoon-nightspot that they could find.
Ironically, they made for a convenient addition to the trendy shithole setting in which my former werewolf pack was supposed to be convening with my easy-target Reinoso informant.
As embarrassing as it was to admit it, I was able to blend in with the hipster crowd fairly well. I was a cute, hip, indistinguishable ethnic girl whose appearance fell within what I liked to think of as that “safe” mix of nebulous races that urban white people felt cooler just for being seen with.
With my slouchy beanie firmly in place, I launched into a debate about the restrictiveness of teaching music theory amid the upsurge of creative autonomy in the modern music scene. Within two minutes, I was able to blend into the background of the hipster group at the bar as they ran with the debate, while I covertly kept an eye on the seven members of the Highlands Ranch pack sitting at a table in the corner. They were awaiting their Reinoso pack guest, I presumed.
Several of the pack members I recognized from the brief time I’d spent with them prior to burning their community to the ground—like the one who’d always had bad breath even though as a werewolf his temperature ran high enough that it should’ve killed the offending bacteria in his mouth.
I shuddered internally in remembrance of my time with those idiots. It truly was a blessing that I hadn’t felt the need to belong to a pack for very long. And luckily, those idiots had known me when I was pregnant—before I’d lost my scent. Without a werewolf scent to tip them off, I was banking on them simply dismissing me as another clueless human who had come to hang out in the dimly lit, former-eighteen-hundreds-era-brothel-turned-bar tonight. They were too self-absorbed to look very closely anyway.
Twenty minutes of nauseating urbanite conversation went by while I nursed my shitty craft whiskey with the cutesy label. I was beginning to think the Reinoso informant wouldn’t show, when suddenly, the next time I glanced over, a tall, sexy, dark-haired wolfman was standing by the corner table, shaking hands with none other than the bad-breathed redneck.
He must’ve come in through the back, because he sure as hell hadn’t walked in through the street entrance. I would’ve noticed him. He was standing in profile to me, and damn if he didn’t look good. From his fine, jean-clad ass to the dark scruff covering his jaw, he was basically edible.
It appeared he’d come alone tonight. Which made him a stupid hottie, but a hottie, nonetheless. From what I could view of his face in profile, he definitely resembled the werewolf in the photo that Wyatt had shown me. He ordered a beer and sat down at the table with my former pack. His face was still partially obscured to me.
I watched.
And waited.
It was difficult to hear very much of what was being said over at the table. Not with the hipsters now vying for my attention as they squawked ignorant platitudes at me about the contributions of Native American culture. After the music theory debate had settled down, I’d started one on the plight of the Navajo Indian. In truth, I knew very little about my Navajo heritage, but that had never stopped me from capitalizing on my one-quarter Native American blood just to incite political debates about the Long Walk before.
Finally, after about a half hour of tense torment, the Reinoso informant got up from his seat. He stopped a busboy, and I heard him ask where the bathroom was. Geez, he hadn’t even bothered to learn the layout of the place before coming to meet with these turkeys. Informant hottie was going to be an easy kill, indeed.
Fortunately for me, I had learned the weird layout of this renovated old brothel. So I knew that the men’s bathroom was located downstairs—in a section of the bar that was reserved for live performances, and otherwise
closed off on a Monday evening.
Luck was on my side tonight.
I waited until my werewolf target descended the stairs, and then I pretended to take a call on my phone, giving me the excuse I needed to leave the bar in order to find a quieter spot. Grabbing my backpack, I meandered down into the basement.
As I pressed my ear to the bathroom door to confirm that he was preoccupied, the door opened a fraction. No way. The fool hadn’t even locked it?
I was doing him a favor then. He was too stupid to live. I went inside.
As soon as I drew my gun and flipped the bathroom lock into place, it hit me: his scent.
Exotic. Spicy. Clean as ocean air. Earthy and pure like mountains and pine. But … complex. Strangely alluring. Surprisingly appealing, in fact.
And old.
As. Dirt.
Old and powerful. I caught the now-recognizable scent of magic on him—the same underlying scent I’d picked up on Raul—differentiating him from a normal werewolf and classifying him as a superbeast.
In an instant, I knew I’d been set up. My “easy” werewolf target was anything but. He was a werelock.
Wyatt would never betray me. Which meant that Wyatt had been set up to set me up. Or his mind had been compromised by a powerful enemy werelock—as Raul had claimed.
He looked enormous standing in the small space of the bathroom at the lone urinal. His back was to me, but the moment I’d entered and flipped the lock, his head had turned ever so slightly to the side, his nose tilted in the air to sniff out the intruder.
The fact that he wouldn’t be able to scent me could possible buy me a few seconds of additional time—if he was the curious type. Or it might get me killed faster. Because despite the fact he couldn’t smell me, I knew he would definitely smell the weapon in my hand.
Still, I hesitated, my composure shaken by the shock of his scent, of the perfect male beauty of his sculpted, naked ass cheeks on display—and the knowledge that I was fucked.
It was too late for retreat. I’d never make it out the door and back up the stairs if this guy was capable of the things I’d witnessed Raul do.