True Nature

by Jae

“Grounded means no TV and no having friends over, you know that!” While she spoke, Ms. Harding slashed her hands through the air, her signs so large and sweeping that Kelsey could make out a few of them even from behind.

  “No, I don’t,” Danny signed. “You should have been clearer. Have your secretary send me a binding agreement to sign.”

  Ms. Harding lowered her head like a bull seeing red. “You think that’s funny?”

  Daniel nodded a yes with his fist and made the sign for “hilarious.” A smirk spread across the youthful face, but his gaze kept veering away from her. His stance said he didn’t care, the typical rebellious teenager, unimpressed by authority.

  His smell said something else, though. The moment Ms. Harding loomed over him, the biting odor of acute nervousness permeated the house. Kelsey wasn’t sure if it was just the reaction of a busted teenager who had been caught by his mother returning home early or something more.

  “Goddammit, have some respect and watch your mouth when you’re talking to me, Danny.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not using my mouth.”

  “Enough!” Ms. Harding leaned over the still sitting boy and grabbed his upper arms.

  Daniel’s friends jumped up but didn’t intervene.

  No! She’s hurting him! Instinct propelled Kelsey forward to protect Daniel.

  Two yards into the living room, she paused.

  The human wasn’t hitting or choking Danny. She just had his upper arms in a firm grip and glared down at him, but she wasn’t grabbing him hard enough to hurt.

  Danny didn’t struggle. He stayed perfectly still, not attempting to pull away or cross his arms to protect himself. His shoulders slumped forward, and his gaze dropped to the coffee table.

  He’s reacting like a Syak when his natak takes a dominant stance with him. The tension in the room made Kelsey’s skin itch.

  Abruptly, Ms. Harding let go of Danny and backed away as if embarrassed by her momentary lack of control.

  The boy looked up and saw Kelsey.

  Their gazes met and held.

  His nostrils flared, and for a moment, the fake casualness disappeared as he stared at her.

  Is he recognizing me as a fellow Syak? Does he even know he’s a wolf-shifter? Kelsey wasn’t sure.

  “Who the fuck is she?” Danny directed his signs at Ms. Harding, probably not expecting Kelsey to understand his language.

  Ms. Harding whirled around and pierced Kelsey with a sharp gaze.

  Kelsey froze.

  Then Ms. Harding’s gaze softened, and she waved at Kelsey to come closer. “That’s Kelsey Forrester.” She finger-spelled the name slowly. “She’s...” Her hands faltered while she searched for the correct sign.

  One of the other boys slapped Danny’s shoulder. “Ooh, your old lady’s got a new squeeze.” He finger-spelled the last word in rapid succession so that Ms. Harding wouldn’t understand. “At least she’s got nice tits.” He quickly finger-spelled the last four letters.

  Kelsey sucked in a breath. She struggled not to look away from his leering stare.

  “What did you say?” Ms. Harding asked the boy. “I didn’t catch everything.”

  No one answered her.

  Kelsey felt the weight of the moment. If she hoped to deal with Danny and earn Ms. Harding’s respect, she needed to do something now. Praying her cheeks weren’t flaming red, she stepped forward so that the boys could see her hands—but Ms. Harding couldn’t. “Thank you,” she signed. After practicing on the plane, her hands easily found the familiar shapes and movements. At least she didn’t have to speak and give herself away by stammering nervously. “I always thought they’re rather nice too, but it’s good to have confirmation.”

  The three teenagers stared at her. Danny and one of his friends roared with laughter, untamed, rough sounds that echoed through the living room.

  Kelsey laughed with them, showing them that it was all in good fun. She had learned to defuse provocations and insults with humor at a very early age.

  “What did you say? I couldn’t see,” Ms. Harding said, a deep line carved between her brows. She clearly didn’t like being left in the dark.

  “Oh, I just introduced myself as Daniel’s new tutor,” Kelsey said and signed at the same time. “It seems they find my West Coast accent funny.”

  Danny and his friends stared at her, probably wondering why she hadn’t ratted them out.

  Ms. Harding fixed Kelsey with a narrow-eyed gaze but then gave a short nod and turned back to the teenagers. “You two. Get out of here and go home before I call your parents and tell them you’re not in school.” Again, she accompanied her words with signs, sometimes hesitating and searching for the right sign. Her index finger pointing at the door was unmistakable.

  The two teenagers rolled their eyes but finally ambled to the door.

  Danny stomped the floor to get their attention. When they turned back around, he signed, “Come on! Don’t let Rue boss you around.” Instead of using the sign for mother, Danny crossed his middle finger over the index finger to make an “R” next to his chin.

  But his friends shook their heads. “Later, man.” Then the front door fell closed behind the two teenagers.

  Danny whirled back around. “You had no right to throw them out!” His hands hurled angry signs at his adoptive mother. “I invited them.”

  “What? Please sign slower.”

  With exaggerated slowness, as if talking to a child, Danny repeated what he’d said.

  “You had no right to invite them when you’re grounded.” Ms. Harding pointed at the stairs. “Go to your room.”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  After sending first Ms. Harding, then Kelsey an angry glare, he rushed out of the room and stomped up the stairs.

  Seconds later, a door banged shut.

  “Don’t you dare lock that door!” Ms. Harding shouted.

  As if on cue, Kelsey heard a lock being turned.

  The human didn’t react, so she probably hadn’t heard it.

  Shouting after a deaf boy isn’t very helpful. How long has she been living with him without figuring that out?

  “Jesus Christ,” Ms. Harding mumbled. Then she shook her head as if to clear her mind and sat on the couch. “Take a seat,” she said, pointing at an armchair.

  It sounded like an order, not a friendly invitation.

  Kelsey perched on the edge of the seat, clutching the armrests. Her insides quivered. Had she ruined her chances at being hired by entering the living room even though Ms. Harding had told her to stay in the foyer?

  Ms. Harding made her wait to find out. She reached for one of the half-empty snack bags and crunched a handful of peanuts as if she wanted to grind them into submission. Finally, she swallowed and looked up. “I don’t appreciate my wishes being ignored.”

  “I’m sorry.” Kelsey lowered her gaze to the maple floor and watched Ms. Harding through her lashes. “I was just worried. The argument looked as if it might get out of control.”

  Ms. Harding narrowed her eyes at Kelsey. Her jaw bunched as she annihilated more peanuts.

  Oh, no. That was the wrong thing to say, idiot. A woman like her doesn’t like looking as if she’s losing control. “It won’t happen again. I promise.”

  Slowly, Ms. Harding set down the bag of peanuts and wiped her hands on her tailored slacks, apparently not caring that they must have cost a few hundred dollars. “All right.”

  Kelsey flicked her gaze up to meet Ms. Harding’s. “Does that mean I’ve got the job?”

  “Do you still want it?”

  Excitement bubbled up in Kelsey, and she struggled to conceal it, not wanting to appear desperate. “I do.”

  “Then you’re hired,” Ms. Harding said. A grin warmed her glacier blue eyes. “After all, I still need to find out what you really said to the boys.”

  Kelsey suppressed a surprised cough. Be careful. She’s not easily fooled. She hurriedly changed the subject. “He calls
you Rue,” she repeated the name sign Daniel had used, “not Mom.” Maybe the simple observation would help her find out more about the relationship between Danny and his adoptive mother. Now that Ms. Harding had hired her, it was time to dig for information.

  Ms. Harding shrugged. “Guess it’s a teenager thing.”

  Kelsey couldn’t imagine calling her mother anything but “Mom,” no matter the physical and emotional distance between them, but Ms. Harding seemed indifferent. Does she really not care? Even with her sense of smell, Kelsey couldn’t tell because the aggressive sting of the confrontation still hung in the air.

  “You can call me that too,” Ms. Harding said. With a grin that others might have found charming, she added, “Rue, I mean. Not Mom. I have enough people calling me Ms. Harding at work.”

  “Rue,” Kelsey repeated, testing it out. The name tasted as bitter on her tongue as the herb with the same name. “So, what kind of help does Daniel need from me?”

  Rue snorted. “Well, it would be faster to list the areas where he doesn’t need help. He’s fallen behind in nearly every course, especially English, Spanish, and Social Studies.”

  Kelsey wasn’t surprised. Her brother had also struggled with courses that depended on language or required a lot of class discussions. “I saw that Danny’s signing well, but that won’t help him in a public school. Does he wear hearing aids?”

  “He has the best hearing aids money can buy, but he’s too stubborn to wear them all the time.” Rue rolled her eyes. “Even when he does, he can’t understand speech, just detect very loud noises like the doorbell ringing.”

  That meant Danny’s wolf form would probably be deaf too. Even shape-shifting couldn’t heal an almost complete hearing loss. “So maybe he has trouble following the classes,” Kelsey said. “How are his lip-reading skills?”

  “Danny had speech and lip-reading training since he was two,” Rue said. “If he pays attention, he’s pretty good at it, especially if he’s talking to a person he knows well. His deafness isn’t making it easy, but it’s not why his grades dropped.”

  “So you think the problem is an academic one?” Kelsey asked even though she knew what the real source of the problem was. No teenager could focus on school during his or her Awakening—and certainly not if he lived in a human family who couldn’t help him deal with the changes and confusion he was going through.

  “Not really.” Rue rolled down her shirtsleeves and buttoned the cuffs. “He’s not stupid. He could make straight A’s if he only tried, but he’s wasting his potential.”

  Tension rose in Kelsey’s jaw, and she realized she was clenching her teeth. She had heard the same accusation from her parents a few thousand times. Her determination to protect Danny increased. “But even if he can lip-read, it’s very exhausting. Have you tried an interpreter?”

  “He had one for a while, but that just made things worse,” Rue said.

  Kelsey tilted her head and lifted an eyebrow.

  A grim expression settled on Rue’s face. “He only lasted for a month, then Danny got into a fistfight with him. He said the interpreter was going through his stuff. According to the interpreter, he was just getting a book for Danny, but Danny still refused to ever work with an interpreter again.”

  So he’s fiercely territorial, defending what’s his. Most dominant Wrasa teenagers were. Kelsey’s chest constricted as she remembered borrowing her brother Garrick’s favorite soccer shirt when she was eight. She could still feel his grip on her shoulders and his hot breath on her face when he let out a territorial growl.

  She had never touched Garrick’s stuff without permission again, no matter how much her stuffed cocker spaniel needed a blanket. For her next name day, Garrick had given her his soccer shirt. A good leader will always give you what you need, but it’s not yours for the taking.

  Her lips curled into a smile at the memory of a lesson learned, and she quickly wiped it off her face. “So that’s why you prefer a female tutor—less risk of getting into a fistfight with Daniel?”

  “Well, either that or I wanted to look at something more attractive than an unshaven face across the breakfast table,” Rue said. Toothpaste-ad-white teeth flashed as she grinned.

  Is she flirting with me?

  It took Kelsey a moment to react to what Rue had said. “Breakfast table?”

  “Didn’t the job ad mention that? I made it clear that I want someone available at all times, so you’ll stay here and homeschool Danny, at least until I get him enrolled at another school. So?”

  Piercing blue eyes met Kelsey’s. Clearly, “no” wasn’t in Rue Harding’s vocabulary.

  “That’s not a problem,” Kelsey said. “I’m happy to stay.” And she was. Now she didn’t have to come up with excuses to hang around the house for longer than a lesson or two.

  “Then come on.” Rue stood.

  When Kelsey stood too, Rue guided her, one hand resting on the small of Kelsey’s back.

  The touch seemed to sear through Kelsey. She couldn’t stand the thought of being touched by the same hand that would hurt an innocent boy.

  “I’ll show you the way,” Rue said. “Elena agreed to let you stay with her.”

  “Elena?”

  “Elena Mangiardi, my housekeeper. She lives right next door in what she calls the servants’ cottage. I hope you like dogs because she has one.”

  “I love dogs,” Kelsey said before she could stop herself. The problem was that dogs rarely liked her. While Wrasa could easily fool humans with their dulled senses, dogs smelled that shape-shifters weren’t the humans they pretended to be.

  Kelsey bit her lip. Sharing space with a dog that constantly barked and growled at her would be a distraction, and she didn’t want to scare the poor animal. Also, if she stayed in the cottage next door, she couldn’t intervene when things got out of hand between Rue and Danny. Her imagination showed her Rue choking him while Kelsey slept in the cottage, unsuspecting. “But wouldn’t I be of more help if I stay here in the main house?” she asked, keeping her voice gentle. If Rue was anything like her former alphas, she would probably react better to indirect questions than demands. “Assuming, you have a guest room.”

  “I do, but—”

  “If I’m close-by, I could even tutor you in sign language.” At Rue’s furrowed brow, Kelsey quickly added, “Not that your signing is bad, but I noticed you have a few problems when Danny signs too fast or starts with the four-letter words.”

  Rue regarded her through narrowed eyes for a moment, and Kelsey winced, hoping Rue hadn’t read it as an accusation. She needed to stay close to Danny, not just to protect him, but also to gain his trust and keep an eye out for any signs that his First Change was approaching.

  “I’ve only been using ASL for a few years,” Rue said. “When Danny first came to live with us, I thought it would be better to focus his education on speech training and lip-reading. I wanted him to be able to function in the hearing world, not be an outsider. Paula was the one who insisted on using signs with him.”

  Kelsey hadn’t been born yet, but her brother had told her that their parents had gone through the same debates when they had first found out he was deaf. It had been particularly hard for her mother to accept that her son would never be part of her hearing world, would never be able to listen to her music. I bet it took her a few years to accept that her adoptive son would never be able to speak like a hearing boy, no matter how many speech therapists she hired.

  “Paula?” Kelsey asked.

  “Danny’s other mother.” Rue bit her lip but didn’t explain why Paula wasn’t part of their lives anymore.

  The scent of her emotions filled Kelsey’s senses. Was that grief? Had Paula died? Was she Danny’s biological mother and a wolf-shifter? But except for Griffin, no Wrasa Kelsey knew had ever risked violating the First Law by entering into a relationship with a human. And no Wrasa would ever let a human adopt a shape-shifter pup.

  “All right,” Rue finally said. “I’ll show yo
u the guest room, then I need to get back to work. Can you keep an eye on Danny?”

  “No problem.” Kelsey followed Rue’s powerful stride upstairs. I’ll keep both eyes on him. And on you.

  Chapter 6

  The smell of pancakes and bacon tickled Kelsey’s nose, evoking a sleep-drunken smile. On the mornings her mother hadn’t been in the recording studio or on a concert tour, she had awakened Kelsey and Garrick with the same type of breakfast.

  Then Kelsey opened her eyes. She wasn’t in her childhood home but in the Hardings’ guest room.

  A dresser and a small table of dark wood contrasted nicely with the light maple floor, but except for the delicious aromas of food from the kitchen, the room smelled all wrong—of cleansing agents and furniture polish, as if no one had slept in the guest room for ages.

  Seems Ms. Harding and Danny don’t often have guests sleeping over.

  Thinking about Danny got her out of bed, showered, and dressed in a hurry. If she was lying around in the guest room, she couldn’t protect him.

  On her way out the door, she glanced at the clock. Just six o’clock. Someone is an early bird. If Danny was anything like most Wrasa teenagers, it wasn’t him.

  The scent trail led Kelsey downstairs and into the kitchen. Her gaze slid over custom-designed kitchen cabinets and took in the golden glow of maple countertops. Mom would kill to have a kitchen like this. Without the human in front of the stove, of course.

  A large woman hunched over the frying pan, flipping pancakes with deft movements of her plump hands. Kelsey wasn’t sure if it was her canine eyesight, but the woman’s silvery hair appeared to have a purple tint, as if a dye job had gone wrong.

  Kelsey’s mouth watered at the heavenly smells wafting through the kitchen, and she had to swallow before she said, “Good morning.”

  Spatula in hand, the woman turned around. A smile deepened the many lines carved into her tan skin. “Oh, hello, dear. You must be Kelsey. I’m Elena Mangiardi. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you yesterday. It was my day off.”

  Instead of having an Italian accent, as her name and her complexion suggested, Mrs. Mangiardi spoke the queen’s English. Kelsey blinked and stood staring for a moment.