by Karen Ranney
The Brood all turned to look at me, each dog’s expression not difficult to interpret. Had I lost my mind?
The smell of roses was abruptly stronger.
I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the chair, and remembered the last time I’d been in this room with my grandmother.
Weres lived longer than humans, by about twenty or thirty years. However, we’re susceptible, perhaps more than humans, to diseases of aging. That’s why we have to be careful about Waxinine. It softens our bones in old age if we use it consistently as young Weres.
We also get cancer a lot.
My grandmother had been diagnosed with a rapidly accelerating cancer, but she’d been upbeat and positive to the end.
“We all have to go sometime, my dear Tor. Granted, I would much rather have danced myself to death. Or perhaps been terminally exhausted with a half dozen cabana boys.” She glanced over at me to see if I was shocked. She did that a lot. Almost as much as saying things that she hoped would fluster me.
What Sonny hadn’t understood was that I’d always been secretly delighted about her. She was unlike anyone I’d ever known. She was Auntie Mame, Maude, Gloria Steinem, and Audrey Hepburn all rolled into one. She had class and poise yet could shuck off both of them and get down and dirty, do the limbo, make the greatest margaritas in the world, and swear like a sailor.
My mother treated her with great care, almost as if Sonny was a bomb about to go off. My father ignored his mother when he could and when that wasn't possible, fixed a look on her, the one that quelled so many other people.
Sonny only laughed.
Neither Austin nor Sandy were as close to Sonny as I was. Austin treated everyone with contempt and Sandy didn't know what to do with a female who spoke her mind and did exactly what she wanted.
Such behavior was not rewarded in the Were community.
In me Sonny recognized a kindred spirit. I spent every available hour I could with my grandmother. I wanted to go on a Hunt with her rather than my other female relatives. She, however, refused, wiggling her eyebrows at me as she explained that it didn't matter how old a Were was, there were times when she just needed to free her inner wolf.
I’d interpreted that part to mean that my grandmother was going to, as the British would say, shag whoever was available at the end of the Hunt.
When Sonny died I thought the world had ended, but life went on as life does. I learned to live without her. Being at Graystone brought back all those wonderful memories of being with her.
I even thought she would wildly approve of Mark.
Nobody answered me now. I didn't hear any otherworld moaning. I didn't see anything written on the windows or the mirror above the fireplace in ice crystals.
Pepper jumped up in my lap. My attention was on him for a second. When I looked up again, the ottoman was in the center of the room.
Okay, then.
Cherry Pip barked. Cherry Pip never barks. She whines, but Pepper is the barker.
Just then the ottoman moved toward me.
I gulped and wondered if the rest of the furniture was going to start dancing. My grandmother could have picked a better time than now to start haunting Graystone. Like when the vampires had attacked, for example.
“Okay, knock it off.”
The ottoman stopped. A good thing, since it had reached my feet. Cherry Pip and Dalton were annoyed at having to move.
Pepper got up on all four legs and attacked the ottoman verbally.
“Enough,” I said, both to the dog and the furniture. Or the ghost.
Wasn’t the prevailing wisdom that the unliving — as opposed to vampires, the undead — only returned because of some unfinished business?
What unfinished business did Sonny have? Was it something to do with Graystone? Did she want to fuss at me about the vampire incident? The bricks of the bell tower were going to be repaired, honest. In a week or two you wouldn’t be able to tell there’d been claw marks down one side of the building.
We sat in silence for maybe five minutes, a very long five minutes. The furniture didn’t move; the dogs didn’t bark, but everybody was alert, watching for the slightest movement.
Maybe my grandmother wasn’t able to communicate very well. Maybe moving the furniture was all that she could do. That must frustrate her no end.
“Look,” I said, speaking to the center of the room again. “Let’s make the parlor a giant Ouija board. The fireplace will be no and the door will be yes.”
We’d played with a Ouija board once when I’d been twelve. I’d started my period that same night, so the wonders of the occult had been passed over in favor of fear about my changing body.
Weres menstruate just like every other female. The big deal with us was that the event marked the beginning of our education into what was expected of us as adult members of the Were society.
That night marked something else: the official start of my rebellion.
The ottoman moved away from my legs, off to the center of the room.
“Okay, let’s start,” I said, feeling slightly strange for talking to an ottoman. But, hey, I was a Furry, so everything about my life was a little odd.
“Is it you, Sonny?”
The ottoman moved unerringly to the door.
Okay, now what did I do?
“Do you have something you want me to know?”
The ottoman turned in a circle. I guess that meant, since she was already at the door, another yes.
“Is it about Graystone?”
She slid over to the fireplace.
Pepper barked, glanced at me, then sat down on my lap. I couldn’t blame him. The furniture had never had a life of its own before now.
“Is it about Father?”
She turned in a circle again.
“Is it Mark?”
Another spin. Okay, this wasn’t going anywhere fast.
“Did you just stop by to say hi?”
Another circle, this one faster than before. I got the distinct impression that the ottoman was getting annoyed.
“Is it about me?”
She shot across the room to the door.
All righty, then. What did that mean?
I really didn’t want to ask the next question, but it seemed like a natural progression.
“What about me? Is there something wrong with me? Am I sick?” Did being Pranic qualify?
Once more back to the fireplace.
I was honestly running out of questions.
“Okay, it’s about me, but there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not sick. Am I in danger?”
The ottoman spun so fast that I almost got dizzy looking at it.
“You want to tell me why?” I asked, before realizing that she couldn’t. It looked like I had to guess.
“Is it the vampires?”
She went racing toward the fireplace. Not the vampires, then.
“Is it Alice?”
She’d been my nemesis for so long that it was natural to think of her next. A spin of the ottoman indicated that I was wrong to guess her, though.
I honestly couldn’t summon up any more enemies.
“Am I going to be in an accident?”
Spin.
“I’m running out of questions, Sonny.”
The ottoman moved to the center of the room again, almost as if she were staring at me.
“But I’m in danger and you’ve come to warn me, right?”
She moved to the door.
“I don’t know what else to ask. There aren’t that many people who hate me.”
The ottoman didn’t budge.
“I’m not going to be in an accident and I’m not sick, so it has to be danger from someone.”
The ottoman did a curious side to side movement.
“Is it anyone I know?” I asked.
She raced across the room to the fireplace.
“So I have an unseen enemy,” I said.
Back to the door.
Well, great, what was I su
pposed to do with that information? For that matter, how was I supposed to convey it to anyone? I could just imagine the look on Mark’s face when I told him about my grandmother, the ottoman.
Or maybe I was just in the throes of a Pranic hallucination.
"Are you real?” The ottoman wiggled a little.
"How do I know you're real? For that matter, how do I know that you're really my grandmother? You could be an errant ghost, a homeless ghost. Somebody who just wants to come in and haunt something."
Honestly, believing in ghosts wasn't that far of a stretch if you were a Furry. After all, we’d already defied natural laws. What was one more? That the dead could actually come back and visit the living? Was it any stranger than transforming to a four-legged creature once a month? Nope – at least as far as I was concerned.
The ottoman thing was a bit much, however.
"Sonny, I promise not to scream or faint if you show up in front of me."
I waited, but nothing happened. The ottoman didn't even move.
"Sonny?"
Still nothing.
I waited a good ten minutes, the dogs forming a protective barrier around me. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. No ghosts appeared. Finally, I stood, put Pepper down on the floor and made my way out of the Sun Parlor, stopping to move the ottoman first so I could get out of the door.
The damn thing was heavy. Either Sonny had acquired muscles in the afterlife or physics meant nothing to the body challenged.
I headed back toward the kitchen. Now I couldn't smell roses at all. The smell had dissipated or maybe whatever had triggered the auditory, visual, and olfactory hallucinations had stopped.
Maybe I should be examined thoroughly by my doctor. A CAT scan wouldn't be out of the question, either. I just wanted to make sure I didn't have a brain tumor or something.
I stopped in the middle of the corridor, turned and looked toward the Sun Parlor.
I could've sworn I heard laughter. That wasn’t spooky or anything. I glanced down at the Brood. All three of the dogs were looking toward the parlor, too.
Where the hell was Mark when I needed him?
I practiced my spell another dozen times until I didn’t trip over my own tongue so often, fed the Brood, and then played a modified game of fetch with the three dogs.
Pepper loved to chase a ball and would return it to me nine times out of ten. Dalton would leap like a gazelle after anything I tossed, but would never bring it back — making me get off the couch and go fetch. Cherry Pip could care less about any kind of game unless it involved kibble.
I stood in the porch while the Brood went to their dog run, did their thing, and ran back into the kitchen. I pocketed three treats for them and we all made our way up to the second floor and my bedroom.
After my grandmother’s death I hadn’t moved into her suite, choosing instead to remain in the rooms I’d occupied since I was a child. My corner suite had a large bedroom, a sitting room, and a cavernous bathroom with both a clawfoot bathtub, walk-in shower, and bidet. The fancy Japanese toilet was in a separate WC.
The sentient toilet had been approved by my attorney when the renters had lived here. I hadn’t realized everything it could do until my first night back at Graystone. It anticipated your arrival, turned on blue mood lighting, warmed the seat, spritzed out a choice of natural scents, and vibrated. Not to mention what it did a few minutes later.
It was a bit more than I wanted, honestly, and I was giving thought to downgrading. After today with the ottoman, I was ready for something a little less intuitive, thanks, especially in the bathroom.
By the time I was ready for bed I still hadn’t heard from Mark so I called him. The call went to voicemail, so I left a bright, upbeat, and totally fake message.
The one night I really needed to hear from him he was nowhere to be found. That was an object lesson if nothing else. When you fall in love, when you invite someone into your heart, you start depending on them for odd things. Like making you feel better when you’re down in the dumps. Or reassuring you that you aren’t going nuts when an ottoman tries to convince you it’s your grandmother’s ghost — that sort of thing.
On that note, I crawled into bed and talked myself into going to sleep.
Chapter Nine
Am I special or what?
The next morning I decided that I was going to do something that was probably unwise. I was going to consult my father. I needed his expertise for two reasons. First of all, Alice, the Venomous Vet, had made an impression on me since her words kept ricocheting around in my brain. Was she right? Was our denouement coming any day?
Were Furries going to outed soon?
The second reason I wanted to talk to my father was because he knew something about vampires. My father was one powerful Were and I’d pushed that knowledge to the back of my mind until two weeks ago when he and the other Council members had acquitted themselves very well with a bunch of fangies.
Maybe he knew some way to make Maddock less of a danger to Marcie. The castle complex was beautiful, expansive, and a city unto itself. However, it was a prison if you could never escape it or only do so at great risk.
It would be also great if I could find a way to keep Maddock permanently away from Graystone.
I wasn't a bad ass. I’d never claimed to be a bad ass. I was a Were, a word I’d absolutely hated beginning in childhood. That's why I called myself a Furry, to the dismay of my family and those people in the clan who knew about it.
Right now it was more accurate to say that I was a Pranic, a Furry with witch and vampire blood. I was an equal opportunity paranormal being. All I needed was someone to sprinkle fairy dust over me and make me an elf.
Thank God my father didn’t know about the Pranic part.
Instead of heading for my parents’ house ultra early, I made my way downtown, to the building where he had his practice.
San Antonio wasn't known for its skyscrapers. If you looked at the skyline of our city, you would see a bunch of buildings, the majority of which were hotels. You could probably glimpse the Tower of the Americas from Hemisphere 1968, maybe the outline of the Alamodome, and a few other buildings that soared above the horizon. My father's law office was situated in one of those, in a building begun in the twenties, one that still had granite floors and Art Deco elevator doors.
Because I was a Boyd princess, I had my own parking space in the parking garage. I used it maybe twice a year, but it was kept for me, with a big “Reserved” sign and underneath: T.E. Boyd.
Am I special or what?
My father's law office looked like every other law office in the city: lots of dark wood and gold accents, the name of the firm inscribed on the glass doors in gold letters: Boyd, yada yada, yada yada, yada yada, PLLC.
The receptionist, a new one since the last time I visited (which was, I confess, some time ago) was blond and beautiful.
My father wouldn't have it any other way.
There was a couple sitting on two of the comfortable tufted leather chairs aligned against the wall. They looked affluent and worried. I knew, instantly, that they weren't Furry. I don't know how we knew, but I suspected it had something to do with pheromones. We didn't see anything different in people, we just simply knew if they were Furry or not.
My father had two types of clients: those who knew that he was Furry and used him to handle both civilian and Furry disputes, and the rest of the world. They didn’t have a clue.
His practice with diversified. One section handled family law. Another worked with defense counsel, not criminal defense but civil. If you sued a manufacturer, you were going to come up against one of my father's attorneys and they were good.
I walked up to the massive horseshoe shaped desk and announced myself only to be greeted with, “Oh, I know who you are, Miss Boyd. I'm Patricia."
I was left with nothing to say. What did my father do, show pictures of his family to all new staff members?
That made me wonder about the other families
. Were they welcome here as well? I was half tempted to ask Patricia, but I knew better.
She probably didn’t know anything about the concubines in Houston and Dallas, just like she didn’t know my father was a Furry.
Just because you had more than one family didn't mean that you went around bragging about it. Most Furry men kept quiet. Not out of respect for the legal wife as much as adhering to cultural norms.
We had a hell of a lot of cultural norms in the Were community. I’d broken a few of them.
"Let me tell your father that you’re here,” she said, smiling brightly at me. A second later she spoke into the microphone at the corner of her mouth, so softly that I couldn’t hear.
“He can see you now,” she said, to my surprise. “Would you like me to show you the way?"
"Largest office in the corner, right?"
The smile did not dim in wattage as she nodded.
Chapter Ten
It’s not what you think it is
"Torrance," my father said, meeting me in the hallway. “What a surprise. Come in, come in."
His meeting me halfway was different. So was the warm smile and his arm around my shoulders in a half hug.
My father and I hadn’t been close in the past few years. Part of that was my independence. I had done a lot of things that were frowned on for a female Furry to do. I’d finished an advanced degree. I’d set myself up as a professional. I’d moved away from home.
And the biggest sin of which I was guilty was that I hadn’t married and produced little Furries yet.
We walked into my father’s office. If anything, the space looked larger. It felt like there were at least eighty feet from the double doors to the massive, heavily carved desk.
The desk had been commissioned by my father and was very clever. You had to know what you were seeing. There were flowers of Scotland, indicating that the clan had originated there, scenes of the moon in all of its stages, flora and fauna from South Texas, and a wolf face here and there, cleverly concealed in the intricate woodwork. A Furry would recognize the significance of the faces. A civilian would never notice them.