Red

by Kait Nolan

  I didn’t like it. And maybe she hadn’t asked for a guardian werewolf, but if something was going on with her dad that shouldn’t be, I wasn’t going to leave her to face it alone.

  I’d watched the old black pickup disappear from view, already calculating how I’d get away. The opportunity presented itself when we’d returned to base camp so I could pick up my Jeep. The call came in that they’d found Molly Phillips, alive and terrified, but unharmed, somewhere along the river, exactly as her brother had said. It was easy to lose myself in the midst of all the celebration.

  The argument was in full swing by the time I got within listening range of Elodie’s house.

  “ . . . the hell did you think you were doing?” Her father, showing none of the emotional control he’d displayed in public.

  “I was on the search just like—”

  “No. No, it wasn’t like any other search because you were not out there with an adult. You were on your own with some other kid.”

  Never mind that this “kid” can do more to protect your daughter than any member of that search team, I thought.

  “And we found Rich,” said Elodie in a reasonable tone. “What are you so upset about?”

  “What am I upset about?” His voice went up several decibels, and I found myself leaving the shelter of the trees and slinking closer to try and peer in the picture window on the back porch. “There’s some kind of lunatic out there and you’re just wandering around with no protection. I don’t know what the hell Eileen was thinking.”

  They were in the living room, squared off on either side of a coffee table. Mr. Rose paced in agitation, rubbing both hands over his short hair. By contrast, Elodie was still. I could read the tension in her body, see the temper she was holding back as she tried to stay reasonable.

  “What would you have had me do, Dad? Nobody knew it was as bad as that until after we were already out. I followed protocol. I radioed in as soon as we found him. I stayed with my partner. There was nothing about that search prior to finding Rich that indicated we were in any kind of danger, so you can’t go blaming Eileen for sending me out. This is what I’ve trained for, what you’ve made me.”

  “I did not train you to put yourself at risk.”

  She folded her arms, the first suggestion of belligerence I’d seen. “And exactly what risk would you be referring to? The idea that I was out in the park, off trail and unarmed, or the fact that I could have been compromised?”

  What the hell did she mean by compromised?

  Her father whirled at the statement, his face going pale. “Were you?” he demanded.

  She spread her arms and pivoted once before walking over to get in his face. “Do I look compromised?”

  He stared at her, looking for . . . I didn’t know what. She just looked like herself.

  “Would you tell me if you were?” he asked.

  Something flickered across her face. “Of course. I’m not Mom.”

  Mr. Rose flinched. Obviously Elodie’s mom was as big a sore point with him as mine was with my dad. His shoulders slumped and he reached out, curling a hand around the back of her neck. “Ellie,” he sighed, drawing her into a hug. “I just don’t want to see you—”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I can’t go through that again. Not with you.”

  Go through what? The suicide?

  “Look, no more going out in to the park on your own. No going off trail.”

  Great, finally the man says something I whole-heartedly agreed with. Elodie being out on her own was reckless and unnecessarily risky.

  “I’ll talk to your boss—”

  “I’ll talk to my boss,” she interrupted. “I’m sure he’ll want to change procedure, be sure we keep to large groups. There will probably be a staff meeting in the morning after the sheriff makes whatever proclamations he’s going to make about safety in the park.”

  “Okay, fine. But I’m serious. Be careful. Regardless of our own personal . . . problem, there’s still some nut job out there who kidnapped Rich and his sister. They’re lucky to be alive. Promise me you won’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  “I promise.”

  He kissed her forehead. “You wanna cook or call for pizza?”

  Food. The universal sign of truce.

  “Pizza,” she said. “Double pepperoni. We’re celebrating a successful rescue.”

  “I’ll call it in,” he said.

  “Okay. I’m going up to change.” Elodie started across the room.

  “Elodie.”

  She stopped in the doorway, carefully wiping the expression of oh shit guilt from her face before looking back at him.

  “I love you, honey.”

  Why did that sound so hard for him to say?

  Judging by the look on her face, it wasn’t something Elodie was used to hearing. “Love you too, Dad.” Then she went on and bounded up the stairs.

  That was possibly one of the strangest conversations I’d ever overheard between a parent and kid. Clearly something was going on, but I didn’t think it involved her dad being some kind of abuser or molester, so I slunk back into the trees and began to make my way toward home.

  What was Elodie hiding?

  This obviously went well beyond the bounds of an over-protective, single dad looking out for his teenage daughter. I could have been compromised. It was such a strange thing to say. Whatever she meant, it wasn’t a matter of her virtue. It had something to do with the scene where we’d found Rich. Something other than the obvious threat of whoever had done it still being loose. But how could that have compromised her?

  Was it her emotional stability he meant? That somehow the blood and death would send her over the edge like her mother?

  No. Elodie was clearly rock steady on that front. It had to be something else. Yet still something to do with her mother. Some secret she’d kept from Elodie’s father. What was the connection between her mother, who’d killed herself seventeen years ago, and the bloody scene of today?

  Dad was waiting in the garage when I drove up, perched on a stool at the makeshift lab that lined one wall. A half empty bottle of water sat on the table in a ring of condensation. He didn’t turn as I walked in, but I knew by his too careful stillness that something was wrong. Tension coiled in my muscles as I prepared myself, though I wasn’t sure if it was to receive bad news or for a fight of some kind.

  He didn’t turn as he spoke. “Where have you been?” The question came out weary rather than accusatory, so I unbent enough to answer with semi-honesty.

  “Elodie’s.”

  “Why?”

  Okay, this whole talking to his back thing was annoying me. “I went to let her and her dad know that the little girl had been found. Elodie was really worried about her.”

  “And what about last night?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where were you last night? You didn’t come home until hours after you dropped her off.”

  A fight then, I thought. “I didn’t realize I had such an early curfew,” I said, crossing to the mini-fridge and grabbing a bottle of water for myself.

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “I was out.”

  “Out,” he repeated, a low thrum of anger seeping into his voice. “And I suppose that’s why I found this on our search today?”

  He swiveled and held out his hand. In the center of his palm lay a large tuft of grayish white fur. Mine.

  Shit.

  “So I went for a run. So what? I was careful.”

  “And what exactly would you have done if it had been Patrick who’d found this?”

  I jerked my shoulders in a shrug. “It’s fur. There are no timber wolves in this area naturally, so logic would dictate that it was from somebody’s Malamute or a wolf-dog hybrid. Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. There’s no reason why he should think it was from a wild wolf and no reason why he or anyone else should connect it to me.”

  “You w
ere out near where that boy disappeared. Your scent trail crossed his.”

  I shrugged again. “I scented him while I was out. Followed his trail for a while, then got distracted.” By that other wolf, which I still hadn’t told Dad about. Now didn’t seem to be the time. I twisted off the cap of the water and took a drink, waiting to see where he was going with this.

  He said nothing, just continued to stare me down, his gold eyes the only sign his patience was waning.

  I lowered the bottle, slowly. “You don’t think I had something to do with this, do you?”

  “Did you?”

  “No!” I exploded. “How could you think that? What motive would I have for stalking some guy and his kid sister? They were both attacked and drugged. I don’t have access to that kind of stuff.”

  Except that I did. I realized as soon as it was out of my mouth that we had tranquilizers both here and at the research station.

  Still, he said nothing. Watching me. Waiting for me to slip up. My temper spiked. I couldn’t believe he was accusing me of this. But blowing up at him wasn’t going to help my case. So I thought of Elodie and searched for patience. “I didn’t drug them. I didn’t even see them. And I sure as hell didn’t modify a bear trap to hack halfway through that guy’s leg, then tear up a deer nearby for shits and giggles in order to attract predators. All I did was go for a run. That’s it.”

  Dad let out a breath and his eyes faded back to their usual green. “Okay.”

  I blinked at him. “Just, ‘okay’?”

  “You say you didn’t do it, I believe you. But son, you’ve got to be more careful.”

  “Is this the part where you point out that there’s some psycho out there like a normal parent? Because we both know I can protect myself.”

  “We both know that doesn’t necessarily mean jack shit. You have to see the threat to defend against it.”

  The stab of pain hit just below my breastbone. Mom. If she’d been attacked directly, she probably would have survived.

  “I can’t take it if something happens to you too,” said Dad quietly. “So please, promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “I promise.”

  ~*~

  Elodie

  By some miracle I held it together through dinner. Dad didn’t seem to catch on to all the lies I was spouting, so clearly I deserved an Oscar for my performance. Bully for me. I even managed to scarf down three slices of pizza, though the meaty, cheesy goodness sat like lead in my stomach. He’d have noticed if my appetite had changed. And while I could have blamed it on Rich and what I’d seen, I knew he’d pay more attention if I did. So I stuck to the everything’s fine, everything’s normal routine until I got upstairs to my room. Then I promptly shut and locked the door, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower to mask the noise, and lost my dinner.

  The shakes started then. Full body tremors. I wanted to fight them, to tense up my muscles and simply refuse to give in to my body. But after the day I’d put in, I just couldn’t. I stripped out of my clothes and crawled in the shower, sinking down to sit beneath the steaming spray. Jesus, I was cold. And achy. Like that time I’d had the flu when I was twelve. The last time I’d been really sick.

  I’d forgotten how much it sucked.

  As long as I was wrapped in the cocoon of steam, my senses focused on the drumming spray, I didn’t have to think, didn’t have to consider what I’d done today. But eventually the hot water ran out. My skin was all pruney and sensitized from the beating as I stepped out, still freezing. Quick as I could, I toweled off and bundled up in my flannel pjs, buried deep in the drawer from winter. Then I practically hurled myself beneath a mound of blankets on my bed and lay there, shaking.

  Oh this was not good. This was so not good.

  If the fevers were starting, there was no denying that I’d pushed the envelope today.

  Who was I kidding? I’d been pushing the envelope for days, ever since I woke up smelling that bacon. The change was coming. After all the years of being so careful, of doing everything right, it was happening anyway. All I’d managed to do was delay the inevitable.

  My mother had been right.

  I’d never really believed it. That I was cursed. I mean, seriously, who honestly believes in curses? That’s the stuff of fiction and fairy tales.

  Which is fitting, I suppose, since my family spawned a fairy tale. You know the story of Red Riding Hood? Yeah, that’s my great, great, many times over great grandmother. The original version, before it got diluted and Disneyfied, was a morality tale, meant to keep good young women chaste and obedient.

  According to the story I’d parsed out from the journal—which had been a slow process, as I’d had to translate some pretty archaic French—this all started with a girl named Sabine. Sabine was a good girl, pious, devout, submissive. A real testament to her family. Then she fell in love with some guy. They met on the road outside her village. She was on her way to visit her grandmother, who was ill. He was, well, I couldn’t quite figure out the translation. It was something like “wanderer.” I’d always romanticized it to him being some sort of Gypsy. But whatever he was, her family didn’t approve. So they forbade her from seeing him. Of course. Because that always stops headstrong women from doing whatever they want. She had an affair. I don’t know how long it went on, but eventually, Sabine’s wanderer convinced her to run away with him.

  Her family found out and intercepted them, killing the wanderer for besmirching their daughter’s virtue. Sabine got shipped off to relatives in some other part of the country. Right around that time, it came out that she was pregnant. She was married to some other guy in a hurry. Sabine’s husband was a good guy by all accounts, a widower with a son by his first wife. When Sabine’s daughter was born, he took her as his own, and everything was hunky dory for a while.

  But the daughter, Brynne, was wild, even more so than her mother. By the time she was fifteen, she’d gotten involved with some guy. She was brazen about it, which really flew in the face of the morality of the time. Her stepfather decided to put a stop to it, and I don’t know what exactly that he did, but I can guarantee it wasn’t some emotionally touchy feely intervention Dr. Phil style. Things got physical and she . . . well, she changed. That went over like a lead balloon and he attacked her. According to the journal, she killed him in self defense, then left her village alone, scared, and—like her mother before her—pregnant. It pretty well went that way from generation to generation—not with the killing part, but with each generation bearing a daughter who also reached sexual maturity and turned into a werewolf. I’m really not clear where the whole idea of a curse entered into things, but the story perpetuated in various versions throughout the journal was that Brynne was Sabine’s punishment for her lack of virtue.

  Nobody really talked about love until my mother.

  According to her, she and my dad were a Romeo and Juliet, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, love story. They fell in love in high school—a blistering, lightning-strike, love-at-first-sight kind of thing. They kept their relationship quiet because their families would never have approved. When Mom got pregnant, she went through hell keeping my father’s name a secret, no matter what her dad said or did, she held her silence, and they planned.

  She was supposed to give me up. It’s what her father was expecting. One of those private adoption deals to a couple in another town. Her mother, of course, wasn’t around anymore to issue an opinion. But instead of some strange couple, she handed me over to my father. He took me, left town, and waited for her. She was supposed to take a Greyhound bus to meet him a few days later, once she was out of the hospital. But she never showed.

  He told me she’d died from complications. That’s less scarring, I suppose, than telling your child that her mother slit her wrists, which is what I found out after some unauthorized snooping in his room turned up the newspaper articles about her death. I was ten. It was kind of hard to keep believing the illusion of their love story after finding out she’d made the choi
ce to leave us. The fact that Dad still believed it made him seem kind of sad and deluded. I didn’t have the heart to bring it up. But even he didn’t know the real truth. Not until the letter. Now I wonder if he wishes he left me behind.

  I knew Dad believed. Or believed enough that he was willing to uproot us and force me into this fringe existence where the most important Rule was to remain unnoticed. He’d been scared after we got the letter and the journal. He’d never told me why. I’d gone along with it because it’s what he wanted. I figured I would pass the age that Mom died and he would finally accept that the only thing that was being passed down the female line was some kind of mental disorder. Because, seriously, which is more logical: that I was the latest generation of a curse that follows the female line of the family because some long distant ancestress couldn’t keep her skirts down or that my mother was a raving lunatic?

  I’d been all prepared to admit my own insanity if it came to that. Because surely if I’d begun to think that any of these physical changes were truly happening, it would be nothing more than a delusion.

  But I couldn’t argue with what I’d done today.

  Apparently great-great-great—however many greats—Grandma Brynne had passed on something worse than big feet or an overbite or any of a million other inheritable genetic traits. Because it had to be genetic. I was too much a scientist at heart to believe in anything like curses. Looking at this story as a true scientist, it wasn’t Sabine but her lover who’d introduced the werewolf gene. And evidently it was dominant. Like how the offspring of a brown-eyed person and a blue-eyed person was probably going to be brown-eyed, unless the brown-eyed person had a blue-eye recessive gene to pass on. My AP Biology class hadn’t covered genetics in enough detail to explain why only daughters had been born from the line, but I figured there was some scientific principle out there that covered it.

  Punnett squares weren’t going to fix my problem, though.

  In the end, it didn’t matter whether it was genetic or a curse or straight up magic. It was happening. To. Me.