by Lilly Pink
Her mother, who looked very much like her except older and a good deal colder of spirit, looked her up and down with an expression of mild distaste. Not that it made a massive impression on Eloise, who had been on the receiving end of those looks for all the life she remembered.
Her father, on the other hand, laughed in his large, boisterous way and shook his head. He had played witness to the silent battle between his wife and daughter for years, but instead of allowing it to get to him he seemed to find it funny. If Eloise were a different kind of person she might have wondered what was funny about a dynamic like that, but she hadn’t ever been the type to question her father. Basically, she loved him. She loved him fiercely, loved him the way that any daddy’s girl would.
“Don’t mind her, sugarplum, she’s just cranky, that’s all. You know your mother. She’s always cranky. You certainly didn’t get your sunny disposition from her.”
“Really, Edward, do you have to encourage her?”
Eloise’s mother looked even more displeased, her face the perfect picture of someone who had just bitten into a lemon. She wouldn’t say anything else, though, not to her husband. At the end of the day, in the Wright household Edward’s word was law. All it took was one look of warning and her mother shut right up, which was usually how Edward Wright liked it. Once that was accomplished, he turned his attention back to Eloise.
“Now, tell us what you were so excited about, sugar. You really did seem like you thought you’d just hit on the eighth wonder of the world.”
“No, nothing that big, but something I want to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“There’s a carnival coming! Look, it’s right here in the paper.”
Eloise’s father’s face changed instantly, and she knew she had her work cut out for her. Edward Wright had very specific rules about where she could go and when. He was stricter than most, but because he had their little secret to use as a reason, Eloise was usually pretty compliant.
There was something about this carnival, though, something she couldn’t let go of. In that moment, Eloise wasn’t in the mood to be compliant. If her father wanted her to fight for permission to go, that was exactly what she was going to do.
“Eloise, come on. You know you aren’t allowed to go into New Orleans on your own. And before you even suggest it, neither your mother nor I are going anywhere near a carnival.”
“But you won’t have to! It isn’t in New Orleans! I could actually walk there from the house if I wanted to. It’s practically in our backyard.”
“And what if you lose control? Have you thought about that? What if you lose control and shift right there in front of everyone? You’ve had very little experience out there in the world, and certainly not in crowds. Perhaps we’ve sheltered you too greatly, but there you have it.”
And there it was. Eloise was a lion shifter, and that fact had been the central force that had directed her life. For as long as she could remember, the nature of what she was had gotten between her and the things she wanted to do. Because she had been instilled with a healthy fear of losing control, she had rarely fought with her parents when they brought the possibility up. This time, though, it was different. This time, she was ready to go to battle because one way or another, she was going to that carnival.
CHAPTER TWO
“Oi! Hey, what the hell is the matter with you? You go hard of hearing all of a sudden?”
Archer Grant knew the yelling coming from across the camp was directed towards him, but he did nothing to acknowledge it. He chose to handle the situation like that for several reasons. First of all, and this was the biggest reason, he ignored the summons because he was busy. Archer was a sometimes painfully logical man and saw no reason to stop an important task because someone was calling for him.
The second reason, which had very little to do with logic but was the other major part of who he was, was that he was an incredibly stubborn man. He didn’t stop what he was doing to respond to the call because he didn’t want to.
He was a fiercely independent man, just turned thirty and unaccustomed to answering to anyone. The only person who was able to tell him what to do was Gram, and that was because she told everyone what to do. She was the matriarch of the clan and going against her word was the first step in having yourself cast out.
Not to mention she was his actual biological grandmother and old as the earth, two things Archer thought made her deserving of an unusually high level of respect. So yes, Archer would listen to her, but everyone else? As far as Archer was concerned, everyone else could go to hell, be they friend or foe.
“Archer, you old bastard! Don’t pretend you can’t hear me, because I know you can. That kind of excuse doesn’t work with us, remember? Just one of the blessings and curses of being what we are.”
“Right,” Archer grunted in acknowledgement without bothering to turn around, “thanks for the reminder.”
“What the blazes are you doing out here on the outskirts, anyhow?”
Because Archer was sure that it was perfectly obvious what he was doing—he was chopping wood—he didn’t bother to answer the question, just kept on chopping. After each block he cut through, he knocked it aside and set up another one, with a stack of wood beside him so large it looked like it could be bottomless.
It was a chore many people would have found tedious or downright annoying, but Archer didn’t think either of those things. For him, it was just another part of a life built around difficult tasks and long days. He didn’t mind any of them. What was the alternative, after all?
“Brother, do you intend to ignore me all day? Because I can wait. You know I don’t mind doing it. I’ve been fighting to wait you out for all of our lives.”
“Alright, if you put it that way. What is it, Roman? What do you want?”
“Well! There’s a way to greet a friend! If I didn’t know you well enough to know that you’re always this sullen, I might think I’d done something to piss you off.”
“How do you know you didn’t?”
Roman cocked one eyebrow at him, causing Archer to crack a smile for the first time since he’d heard someone calling for him. The word brother was an appropriate one when it came to the description of Roman and Archer’s friendship. The two of them had known each other since they were practically babies, toddling around in diapers and not much else. They’d grown up together, fought together, both against each other and against the townies from whichever place they happened to be holed up in at the moment.
They’d chased girls together from a young enough age to be worrisome to adults who weren’t familiar with the gypsy culture, and at the age of fourteen, they’d gotten drunk together for the first time, from some truly awful hooch Roman had lifted off his father. They’d drunk the whole bottle, passing it back and forth until there wasn’t a drop left and neither one of them could’ve seen straight if their lives depended on it.
Roman had only managed to get to the bottom of the front steps of his father’s trailer before he’d gotten violently ill, but Archer had kept himself together. He’d felt like he was sleeping on a ship instead of dry land that night and suffered a wicked hangover (the first of many) the day after, but he had kept himself together, nonetheless.
That was just how Archer was, what he did. Archer was a man who kept himself together even when everyone around him was losing his head.
“Where the hell do you keep running off to, brother?”
“What are you talking about, Roman? I’m standing right here in front of you.”
“Sure y’are, in body. You’re standing right here in front of me with everything but your mind. That part ain’t anywhere near here.”
“Nothing. It’s nowhere, alright? I’m just thinking. You should try it out some time, Roman. You might find it useful.”
“Bah! I’ve been doing just fine these thirty-two years working things out my way. I think I’ll just keep it up.”
“Up to you. What is it you want,
though? I’ve got work to do. You probably do too, although lord knows you probably won’t do it.”
“You’re right about that. I just wanted to see if you’ve heard.”
“If I’ve heard what?”
“About the move. We’re on the move again.”
Now that was news worthy for putting down the axe. Archer propped it up against the stump he’d been using as a base for his wood chopping and wiped a hand across his sweaty brow. The sky hanging overhead of the large, sprawling forest his troupe had been using as a campsite for almost a month was overcast, full of the kinds of clouds that looked weary of holding their internal burden.
There was a crisp chill in the air to accompany it, the first licks of a winter that was clearly on its way. Despite both of those things, however, Archer was covered in a thin, slick film of sweat. It didn’t matter that most people would be wearing a light sweater while he’d removed his shirt at least an hour ago.
From the trees nearest the encampment, he could hear several of the younger troupe members, all of the female persuasion, giggling and whispering to each other. He thought about yelling to them that he could hear every word they were saying, but what was the point in embarrassing them?
He was used to the adolescent girls, full of raging hormones and a false sense of their own maturity, drooling over him. Even in his gypsy community, Archer was considered wild. After both of his parents had died in some nameless town for a who-the-hell-knew reason, it had gone to Gram and the group as a whole to raise him. They did the best they could, at least most of them did, but he had still grown up to be even more untameable than all of the rest of them combined.
The younger girls in the troupe, and some of the older ones who hadn’t yet been misused by him, pined over him openly. It was like each one of them believed that she would be the one to tame him, buying into some bullshit fantasy that would never come true.
“Jesus, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” Roman growled, then turned his head over one shoulder to look in the direction of the tittering females. Apparently, he was less inclined than Archer to spare them their egos, whether because he was mean or because he was jealous, nobody would ever know.
“Why don’t you fuck off?” He shouted at the top of his lungs, loud enough to make Archer wince and to put a stop to the giddy whispering immediately. He could have stopped there, Archer wished he would have, but he didn’t. It wasn’t Roman’s style to stop, not until he had his fill or until someone made him.
“Go on, get! You think we can’t hear you? Think we can’t smell you? You pups have got a lot to learn, and we ain’t in the mood to do babysitting duty. Scat!”
The disappointment and shame the girls felt was something Archer could actually feel, and he felt a familiar pang of dislike for his oldest friend. It wasn’t the kind of dislike that hung around, more like a brief whiff of an unsavory scent easily forgotten once passed by.
He was well versed in Roman’s mean streak. He’d frequently been on the receiving end of it before he’d gotten bigger than his friend (the two of them stood at six foot three and six foot five respectively, making them impossible to ignore or to miss). It was one of the things he didn’t understand about Roman, but he accepted it the way a man accepted any number of unsavory characteristics in his buddies. Still, accepting it didn’t mean he had to keep his mouth shut, and he didn’t intend to.
“Why you wanna act that way with ‘em, huh? What’d they ever do to you, Roman?”
“Shit, come on! Who the hell cares how they feel? They’re just stupid kids, right?”
“Sure, but they weren’t hurting anything.”
“What’s the matter, Archer, I scare away your next girlfriend? Because if that’s the case, I can call ‘em on back, no problems there. All you gotta do is say the word.”
Archer didn’t answer, just stared his friend down until he finally looked away. Archer thought to himself, not for the first time, how fucked up it was that he was the one out of the two of them that everyone always feared.
Archer was the taller of the two, and just his height was enough to scare a lot of folks. He had a thick mass of black curls spilling down past his ears, more likely to be tangled than not. He always had at least a month’s worth of beard on his face topped with bright, intelligent eyes a shade of gray so unusual people frequently forgot what they were saying when they looked into them.
Roman had the exact opposite look, like he was the photo negative of him walking around in human form. Just two inches shorter, he had a similar build, but with less muscle. He was lanky in a way that made him seem a bit like a teenager, despite the fact that he was thirty-two years old. He had thick blonde hair that had a habit of falling rakishly across one of his sparkling brown eyes.
He looked like every American’s idea of the boy next door and was one of the only members of the troupe who could pass for normal amongst normal people. Because of that, he was often the one to make runs into the towns that the clan first rolled into. It was a way of easing the townsfolk into the idea of them, of making a good first impression.
If Archer had gotten a notion to saunter on into town, people probably would have gone inside and locked the doors until he left, and left for good. Instead of a lucrative stint of carnival work and taking gullible people’s money, they would have been run off with people armed with guns and scripture.
Thinking about it, Archer shook his head. People were so sure they understood the world, thought they could look at it and know the way it worked. Archer knew better, same as all of the troupe did. All they had to do was look in the mirror to know things weren’t always what they seemed.
He glanced at Roman, looking to see if the meanness had gone out of his eyes. There was still some of it there, a glimmer of it, but he was also looking more like himself, which meant he was worth talking to again.
“You finished?”
“I guess I am.”
“Then tell me what you came to say. We’re moving? The whole troupe?”
“Of course, the whole troupe,” Roman snapped back testily. “What, you think we’re going to split up? Since when’d we ever do a thing like that?”
“Gram’s been known to send people off on runs by themselves. In small groups, sometimes. You know that.”
“Yeah, well this ain’t that. It’s everybody, Archer. We’re picking up and moving out.”
“Alright, I gotcha. So, you plan on telling me where we’re going, or did you want me to go ask Gram herself? I can do it either way, but it’d be nice if you saved me the trip.”
“Jesus, Archer, sometimes you’re no fucking fun. Sometimes you’re no fucking fun at all. It’s New Orleans, man. We’re headed to New Orleans. Whatcha got to say about that?”
Archer’s heart skipped a beat. Although Archer wouldn’t say much of anything, he had plenty of thoughts on the matter. Plenty. New Orleans was a city he dreamed about with some frequency. The city was legendary for its supernatural components, ranging from everything to disgruntled spirits to vampires.
And then there were his kind. The werewolves. Most of the people who traveled to New Orleans did so to experience the excess for themselves. They went to be a part of the extravagance, and a lot of them went to get themselves good and spooked by whatever ancient supernatural shit the city had to offer at the moment.
Then there were those like Archer and his people, and they traveled to New Orleans for a whole other reason. For them, it was a city that represented a kind of freedom found in no other place. It also offered the potential to make boatloads of money, more than in many of the other cities they would visit.
For a lot of reasons, New Orleans represented opportunity for Archer. The fact that it was also the city in which his parents were killed was the only unfortunate pitfall.
“When do we leave?”
“That’s it? Nothing else?”
“Nope. Not a thing.”
“We leave tomorrow. Get whatever shit you need done taken care of today
. Maybe chop a little more wood, see if it makes you feel any better.”
He gave Archer a mean little grin, almost like he was daring him to do something about the nastiness of his attitude. “Jesus,” Archer thought to himself, “with friends like these, right?” But he didn’t say anything in return. There was no way he was going to let himself be baited, especially not by Roman.
When Roman was in one of his moods, which he clearly was now, there was no sense in messing with him at all. He’d go get drunk, which would make him madder even though there was nothing much to be mad about, and then he’d pass out. In the morning, he’d be sheepish and sick with a headache, rapping on Archer’s airstream door and asking to play co-pilot for the journey.
Archer watched his face falter as he realized he wasn’t going to get the reaction he was looking for, then gave a little wave to Roman’s back as he turned on his heel and stalked off. God forbid the girls who’d been watching them were still anywhere within a half a mile radius, or Roman would give them hell just because he could. Archer reckoned he was just feeling nervous, maybe even a little bit scared. Archer himself wouldn’t lie and say he wasn’t feeling a little bit of that himself.