by C. T. Phipps
“What’s the difference between a raven and a crow?” Emma said, looking around the muddy path for a good place to change.
“What’s the difference between you and a poodle?” Maria asked.
Emma frowned. “I’ll have you know dogs aren’t related to wolves. Modern domesticated dogs are descended from a now-extinct sister species.”
“Thank you, Ms. Science,” Maria said, gesturing with her flashlight. “Now go help us find the trail. I suggest starting with the muddy footprints.”
Maria gestured with her flashlight to the ground and there were a lot of muddy footprints, mostly ours, but a couple that led down the path toward the lake. Great.
Before I could start to that direction, I noticed Emma had already made her transformation into wolf form. Emma was a beautiful wolf with red-and-white fur that made her look spectacular even in the dim light of the flashlight. Wolves were not animals I was automatically inclined to like as a deer, but there was something majestic about them, at least the kind Emma became.
“What’s that, Lassie? Timmy fell down a well?” Maria said. “Well, then that’s Darwin at work.”
“Fudge off,” Emma said, growling. She was actually barking, but it was the nature of were to understand us.
“Fudge off?” Maria said, looking about ready to laugh. “Really?”
Emma looked sideways. “My parents don’t like swearing.”
“Yeah, well neither do I,” I said, lying my ass off. “Let’s get going, though.”
Emma didn’t hesitate to go investigating, and I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about the fact I was leading her down this road. There was no other option; Agent Timmons and Sheriff O’Henry were in danger—that was what I kept telling myself. However, it was still putting my friend in danger because I wanted to be the hero. I was also leading her down to Darkwater Lake as we continued down the muddy road toward the place I’d lost my cousin.
I didn’t want to admit it but I was also frightened. Despite the fact I was carrying a gun and a Taser. Despite the fact I was a supernatural shapeshifter with powers far beyond those of mortal women, able to leap tall fences in a single bound and outrun bicycles, I didn’t go back to that lake. I didn’t want to face what was out here. It would be better to get my mother, a posse, or even call on the local crime lord to save us.
But I pressed on.
Jane, are you all right? I heard Emma’s voice in my head say.
“Ah!” I said, almost sliding down the muddy trail.
“What’s wrong?” Maria said.
“Nothing!” I said, looking around. “Just missed a step.”
“Oh yes,” Maria sighed, “we are one badass crew. Fear us, mighty woods demons.”
I shook my head. Then I thought at my friend, Emma? Is that you?
Yeah, telepathy is my Gift, Emma said in my mind as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I’ve told you this before.
You never use it, though, I thought back. Wait, I thought you could only project thoughts. Can you read minds?
Only when you’re projecting, Emma replied quickly. I don’t like using my Gift. I have enough trouble with people thinking I’m a freak without adding the fear that I might be reading their thoughts.
We’re all freaks to the one-forms, I thought back at her.
That’s not what I meant, Emma said.
I was confused. What are you referring to, then?
Emma’s wolf form turned around to stare at me.
Wait, really? I thought back at her. You’re worried about that in 2017?
If a wolf could show disdain, then Emma did in that moment. Yes, Jane, I’m worried about that. Where do you think you are? Bright Falls, Michigan is not exactly a center for progressive views.
I knew and I didn’t care, I said, not sure this was the best time to have a conversation about my friend’s coming out. Especially when I didn’t know she was closeted.
You weren’t supposed to know, Emma thought at me. I tried very hard to keep up a front. Now it seems like it was all for nothing.
I’m sorry, I said, thinking about what to say. Think. Project. Whatever. Listen, if this is about that whole ‘I love you’ thing. Then—
Don’t worry about it, Emma said, a little too harshly. I know you’re straight as an arrow.
Honestly, I was closer to a one on the Kinsey scale than an absolute zero. I could appreciate how beautiful the women around me were even if I was much-much-much more into dudes. Emma was my best friend, though, and one I could never think of in that way. I doubted that was what she wanted to hear. I’d also picked up on Emma’s crush a long time ago. I’d just thought it would have disappeared by now.
Well, if you need any dating advice, then I’m here for you. When down, you can always look at me and go, ‘No matter how bad it gets, I will have more luck than Jane.’
Emma mentally grumbled. I can smell how much Alex and Lucien were both turned on by you.
I blinked. Wait, really? You can tell? That’s awesome. My sense of smell is good but I totally can’t pick up on those things. You can be my wingwolf.
There was a growl in my mind and I realized that might be a touchy subject right now.
Sorry, I apologized.
Let’s just talk about something else, Emma replied. I’m picking up Clara and Alex’s scent along with a third one. It might be Rudy’s. He could be carrying them.
Rudy is a hundred pounds soaking wet, I thought back at her. There’s no way he could be carrying two grown adults. Also, how the hell would he disable them both?
Maybe he’s a shapechanger possessed by a god now? Emma suggested.
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. Maybe.
Do we have any Bat-God repellent? Because I’m not sure what the hell we’re supposed to do when we meet him. If we meet him. I could feel Emma’s fear.
It would be Deer-God repellent, I said, trying to hide my own. For I am Deerwoman. I started as a distaff counterpart to Superstag, but took off with young girls until I eventually got my own movie with Helen Slater playing me. Now Melissa Benoist continues my legacy of Cervid-themed crime fighting.
You have no idea, do you? Emma asked.
Actually, I did. If I saw Rudy and he came at us, I intended to shoot him. Maria present or not. I figured if Agent Timmons’s gun could kill demons, then it could kill a possessed skinwalker. Instead of saying that, though, I replied, I’ll think of something.
I was disturbed how comfortable I was with that plan. What was wrong with me?
Do you believe Maria’s story? Emma thought, making a curve as we came to an old wooden staircase that led directly down to the lake shore. I could feel its presence now, pulsing with memories and pain. I couldn’t tell if the feelings were magic or a product of my guilty conscience.
Possibly both.
I think it’s a pretty damn elaborate lie for a girl I know to use the words ‘hella’, ‘totes’, and ‘haters’ unironically, I thought, still trying to wrap my head around it all. How had I missed so much of my brother’s life? Had I been that wrapped up in my own thing that I completely ignored his changes? Yeah, I had. Damn. What about you, Emma?
Emma didn’t respond for a moment, instead trotting down one step at a time. I want to believe it’s true.
You do? I asked, surprised.
If what she says is true then Victoria didn’t hate me. Didn’t want to hurt me. That she was a good person underneath all of that anger and regret. Maria said that she even tried to use the Big Bad Wolf to protect me. What do you think about that?
I dunno. I…well, I don’t know how to react to the fact you were abused. You never told me. I mean, I knew your parents were ass—
Emma interrupted. It was only Marcus. Spare the rod and spoil the child. The best part of my becoming a werewolf was the fact that he didn’t have to hide any bruises when I turned. Victoria had to wear long-sleeved shirts and claim to do a lot of hiking. Eventually, Grandpa just hired a private doctor.<
br />
That made me sick. I wish you’d told me.
I didn’t want to get you involved and it wouldn’t have helped anyway. Clara tried to protect me a few times but Marcus ended up putting her in a hospital thanks to his bodyguards. He’s still the Clan Lord of Clan Lords after all. Aunt Alice told me just to take it until I was an adult, like she and Clara did.
What about your parents? I asked.
Emma made a low growl. Christopher never cared. My mother told me she couldn’t do a thing about it and I had to take it.
Maybe I should contact my mother, I started to say before realizing that was the wrong thing to say.
She knew, Jane. Emma didn’t say anything else. It was just easier to turn a blind eye.
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
We reached the bottom of the staircase then and I saw Darkwater Lake for the first time in almost a decade. The clouds had parted and the rain storm stopped, allowing the moonlight to shine onto it and expose the eerie location. It stretched on past two cliff sides and twisted around the preserve. There was an old wooden dock nearby and I could remember standing helplessly on it as my cousin drowned. Even the “NO SWIMMING – $5,000 FINE” sign was still there, warped and leaning right due to the climate as well as the passage of time.
Around the lake was a dirty wooden shack that looked abandoned but I remembered had been a place my grandfather had taken me several times. It was collapsed now with its roof having fallen in and the windows having been busted with rocks. I admitted some degree of guilt there, having enjoyed vandalizing the property with Jill.
“They’re here,” Emma said, turning back into her human form.
“What?” I said, looking around. “Who’s here?”
“Them!” Emma said, looking around. “The people we’re looking for. Their scent is in every direction.”
I cursed. “Well, that’s just great. What the hell does that mean?”
“Ooo, shiny!” Maria said, pointing her flashlight to the ground and reflecting the light on something there.
I reached down and picked it up, revealing a long silver necklace with a cross at the end over a pentacle. Silver didn’t burn shapeshifters when held, contrary to some movie depictions. It only affected us when we were stabbed with it. I recognized the muddy amulet as belonging to Victoria. I’d seen her wearing it a lot in her junior year, but she’d stopped wearing it when she became a senior. That was when she’d started letting herself be possessed.
Maria made a grab for it. “Shiny! Gimme!”
“No!” I said, pulling it away from the human-shaped magpie.
“I call dibs!” Maria said. “Those laws are sacred and no shapeshifter can deny them.”
“Watch me!” I said, feeling it would be blasphemous in some way. I felt that made me feel it was doubly important.
“Quiet, you two!” Emma snapped, looking nervous. “There’s something here. I can feel it.”
“What?” I said, turning around.
That was when I heard a ringing noise so loud and awful it caused me to grab both my ears. Emma and Maria also looked pained, with the former falling to her knees and grabbing her temples. The noise was like a siren from a 1950s air raid, but it was weird and unearthly, as if it had reverb added.
The light of the moon changed too as I saw it turn from a soothing white to blood red. Everything about me looked crimson and something nasty welled up from inside me. In that moment I hated Emma. I hated her for being whiny, clingy, and always holding me back. I hated Maria for having a weird brother and sleeping with mine. I wanted to shoot both of them and trample them with my hooves. That was when Maria charged me and I backhanded her before she turned into a giant crow woman. It was only five feet tall but it had an enormous beak, claws, and enough of a female body to make me think of the Greek harpies.
I pulled out my gun.
My gun.
Oddly, then, the weapon glowed and burned away the confusion in my mind. It was blessed to kill evil and the spell on me was nothing but.
“Wait, fight it!” I snapped.
That was when Maria grabbed me by the shoulders and started lifting me in the air. “I’m going to crack you open like an oyster!”
“Crows don’t eat oysters!” I said, pistol whipping her across the face and causing her to drop me.
In Darkwater Lake something stirred, and I was briefly reminded of the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where the Watcher rose and ate Bill the Pony. For those less high-fantasy inclined, I saw a series of bubbles begin to appear beyond the edge of the dock followed by slimy tentacles thrashing from within. Those filled me with a primordial terror and caused me to flash back to Jill’s drowning, but this time, I remembered seeing her wrapped up in things very much like those.
No.
Had it been a monster all along? “We have to get out of here!”
Emma had returned to her wolf form and was advancing on me with murder in her eyes. “You are so mean! Mean and rude!”
Wow, she really didn’t like swearing. “Stay back, Emma! This is not you!”
Emma went for my throat. That’s when the red light blinded me and everything went black.
Chapter Seventeen
I woke with a monstrous headache. I was lying down with a wet wash cloth over my head and jolted up once I remembered what had happened. “Emma!”
No answer.
The sight that surrounded me was a confusing one because I was in the family cabin. Sort of. It was identical to how the cabin had been when Grandpa Jacob was alive, not redecorated like Jeremy had wanted with his posters and stuff. The place had an old rustic feel with fishing equipment, stuffed trout, and portraits of the Wild West on the walls. The floor had several hand-woven rugs done in Odawa patterns. Sunlight was streaming through the windows even as yet another rainstorm was pouring down, not diminishing the light one bit. I could see the kitchen past a load-bearing pillar, still looking like it’d been decorated in the 1950s.
Grandpa Jacob didn’t own a TV and in its place was an extra stuffed couch that had been patched several times. I was sitting on the leather couch across from it, an old Return of the Jedi blanket over me. Beside me was a plain wooden coffee table with a steaming mug of hot chocolate inside it. The mug had a cartoon stag holding a rifle on it, along with the words, “Deer Hunting Season 2001: This time we hunt you.” Oh Grandpa Jacob, father of so many weredeer traditions.
There was another quality that disconcerted me as I looked around the place. It was the fact the cabin was huge. It loomed around me not as I remembered it from the time I was an adult but like I remembered it from my earliest memories. The couch was sized for giants or me as a toddler, though I was in my regular form. I reached for my throat and thought about Emma going for it. She obviously hadn’t since I wasn’t dead. Was I?
“No,” I muttered, shaking my head. “If I was in Heaven it would be coffee. I hate hot chocolate.”
“Who hates hot chocolate?” the voice of my grandfather spoke.
Turning my head in shock, I saw the figure of Grandpa Jacob Abair. The oldest and wisest among our kind, theoretically, he was an Odawa man with weathered light-brown skin and long silver hair. Unlike the majority of the ones I’d met, he also had a thick bushy beard. He was dressed in a thick pair of slacks, a flannel shirt, and hiking boots. He had a bright smile on his face and looked not a day over sixty. I didn’t know much about his past, though I understood he was originally from the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians rather than Bright Falls or the Little River Indian Reservation. Yes, that meant I was one quarter Canadian.
Rather than react in a manner similar to heroines would in a novel or movie, tearfully embracing a long lost relative. I, instead, turned around and screamed before jolting to the other side of the couch. The sound that escaped my mouth as I knocked over a lamp, jumped up, got entangled in the cord, and fell over was nothing but pure profanity.
“Oh yes,” Jacob muttered. “This is going to be a gre
at test of your worthiness.”
“You’re a ghost!” I said, finally getting to my feet and way more freaked out than I should have been since I handled a trip through Hell calmly.
“And you’re a weredeer,” Jacob said, putting his hands on his hips. “Shouldn’t you be better at this?”
“I’m sorry I flunked shaman training!” I said, angry now.
“And whose fault is that?” Jacob said.
“Yours!” I snapped. “You said you were really angry to turn into a weredeer at eighteen since you’d spent your entire life trying not to be a magical Native American.”
“Well I did!” Jacob said. “It was all on my French Canadian grandfather’s side that he put the magical weirdness in my bloodline. Then I ended up marrying a Caucasian weredeer girl that I swear my mother set up behind our back. You exotic white people with your mysterious connection with nature are ruining it for rest of us.”
Okay, that made me laugh. “That’s really racist, Grandpa.”
“I’m old, so I get a free pass.”
I smiled so broadly it covered my entire face. “Is that really you?”
“I dunno. It could be. I could be a product of your imagination brought to life by this place or a spirit taking your grandfather’s shape. I could also be the product of head trauma, in which case you’re screwed.”
I glared at him. “Not very comforting, Grandfather.”
He frowned and walked over to me before picking up the mug of hot chocolate on the table and drinking it down in three gulps. “It’s not supposed to be. You’re up the creek without a paddle and in a real s-word sandwich. You’re in frigging trouble, Jane, and I don’t know how you’re going to get out of it.” Except he didn’t say s-word or frigging. Wow, Emma was starting to rub off on me.
“Am I in the Lodge?” I asked, looking around.
“Outside of it,” Jacob said. “You shifted into the Great Woods when you were about to die. Which is a good thing, since the kelpie was about to kill you.”
“Kelpie,” I said, blinking.
“A water horse,” Jacob said. “A siren or nek. They’re big ugly masses of foliage and goo possessed by demons that turn into beautiful women or stallions to lure men to their doom.”