by Lori Drake
There was no time to waste. The truck was still coasting to a stop behind the house when Joey threw open the passenger door and hopped out, tugging at her clothes. Behind her, the engine cut off and she could hear the parking brake set. The other door opened and closed, but she wasn’t worried about her brother seeing something he shouldn’t. Nudity was kind of a non-issue with her family when it came to the full moon. She had her shirt off and her pants unzipped before she remembered her shoes, and ended up hopping on one foot as she removed each in turn. Her heart raced as she finally shed her pants and underthings, leaving her clothes scattered on the ground wherever they’d fallen. It could all be replaced, of course, but no wolf enjoyed shifting with clothes on. It was like getting your blood pressure taken with a full-body sleeve, until seam or fabric finally tore.
Joey knelt on the hard ground and closed her eyes. Her skin started to tingle almost immediately as she embraced her wolf. It was nothing like cinematic depictions. There were no contortions, no sound of cracking bones or tearing muscle. She’d seen packmates shift many times; the air shimmered around them and for a few seconds their human forms blurred like a mirage in the desert. When the haze cleared, a wolf stood in their place.
When Joey herself shifted, she felt a bit of tingling and a sensation not unlike a languid stretch as her wolf emerged. The night came alive around her. Her wolf senses put even her sharpened human ones to shame. She couldn’t just smell the desert air; she could taste it. A myriad of scents and sounds assailed her, but she processed them all effortlessly, an act as natural as breathing.
Her small body flowed from human to wolf in a matter of seconds, but somehow Sam still beat her to it. A soft growl escaped her as she heard him run past, opening her wolf eyes to see him lope off into the darkness. She leapt to her feet in an instant, gave her lustrous auburn coat a shake and sprinted to catch up. It hadn’t been a competition, until it was.
Sam may have been big, but Joey was fast. She not only caught up with him, she overtook him. Her paws drummed softly on the hard-packed earth as she ran. She gave herself over to the joy of running, of feeling the wind in her fur and the moon’s power filling her. Tonight, she would be stronger, faster. They would mourn, yes, but then they would run. They would hunt. They would fall asleep in one of their hollows with full bellies, moon-drunk and sated.
The pack gathered at the big rock under the clear sky, as always. The first sliver of the moon’s face was just showing above the horizon when Joey sprinted into the clearing, slowing to a lope as she approached the others. Her head lowered automatically as she approached her Alpha. She wasn’t looking for a challenge. Nonetheless, the other she-wolf’s ears twitched in annoyance and she snapped her jaws with enough ferocity that Joey skittered aside and found a place to sit with the others rather than risk getting too close.
The rest of her pack was crowded together nearby, sitting or lying on the still-warm ground. She flopped on her side at her father’s feet. He was a big, shaggy gray wolf with blue eyes and he leaned down to lick her ear. It tickled, and she gave her head a vigorous shake before rolling onto her back, twisting this way and that with all four paws in the air, scratching her furry back on the ground beneath her. Her father snorted, bending to bite playfully at her legs, until she rolled back onto her side and settled there, tail thumping the ground.
Sam wasn’t far behind her, but he was the last to arrive. Judging from their mother’s less than welcoming growl, she wasn’t happy about him cutting it so close. He approached her with his head much lower than Joey’s had been, practically belly-crawling toward their Alpha. There may have been more than one alpha in their pack, but there was definitely a pecking order and Adelaide was at the top.
Joey snorted a disgusted breath out her nose. Sure, they’d all been in Sam’s fur at some point or another, but Joey hated such subservient displays. It had been a bone of contention between her and Adelaide for years, the source of countless conflicts between them. Fortunately, tonight would not be one of those nights. Or, so she hoped.
Once Sam had groveled sufficiently, he joined the group. Together, they watched the moon rise in quiet communion until it hung heavily just above the horizon, big and round like low hanging fruit. By then, the world below lay cast in a silvery pall and the air seemed—to Joey’s wolf senses—to crackle with its energy. Adelaide had spent much of that time pacing back and forth, but once the full force of the moon washed over them she lifted her muzzle and howled.
Joey’s human consciousness had dimmed with her transformation, but she could still feel the loss of her packmate. She rolled to her feet and let her voice join her mother’s. The others followed suit, and their mournful cries echoed through the still night air as they said goodbye.
Joey woke to the smell of earth and fur. The first rays of morning sun slanted under the rocky outcropping that the pack had sheltered beneath for the night. All around her, she felt the press of warm furry bodies and sighed in happiness. A sense of wrongness intruded slowly. It took her a few moments for the why of it to penetrate her sleep-fogged wolf brain. Chris's scent was missing. That pleasant feeling wisped away like smoke in the breeze, leaving naught but a wistful memory and a familiar, lingering ache as it passed.
Carefully extracting herself from the wolf pile, Joey crept quietly from under the rocks, stepping out into the morning sun. Her wolf eyes blinked a few times, adjusting to the change in light level. The day had dawned bright and clear, sunny and dry. Her sensitive nose prickled with the scent of earthy sage, basalt, and the spicy aroma of nearby flowering bushes. The air was much drier here than it was closer to the coast, and she sneezed softly before shaking some of the dirt from her glossy red-grey coat.
The moon was still up. She closed her eyes and turned her furry face up to it, savoring its lingering power as it washed over her. It called to her, made her want to run. As it turned out, she had somewhere to go. Picking up her paws, she loped away from the den. She could find her way back to the house easily from just about anywhere within a five mile radius. After all, she had grown up roaming this rocky, brushy landscape with Chris, on two feet as well as four. She carried those memories with her as she went, bittersweet but too precious to discard.
She approached the house more cautiously than usual, wary of unknown threats in a way she usually wasn’t. In fact, she ran a circle around the whole house, nose to the ground, before eventually sloughing her wolf skin out back and retrieving her scattered clothing from the ground. She fished her phone out of her pocket on her way to the back door. Cheryl had sent a few messages with escalating levels of concern, so she decided to give her a call once she was back inside the house.
While the phone rang, she tossed her clothes in the basket by the door and snagged her robe from its peg on the wall. The call rolled over to voice mail, and she awkwardly juggled the phone while slipping her robe on, sandwiching it between shoulder and ear.
“Hey, sorry I missed you last night. Family stuff. Didn’t mean to worry you. Anyway, I’m fine. I’ll send you info about the service when I have it.”
Upstairs, she found her suitcase sitting on the floor at the foot of her bed. She’d have to thank Jon later for that.
As she hauled the suitcase onto the bed, she caught a whiff of her own scent. She still smelled like dirt and fur, somehow. It’d fade, but she also smelled like stale sweat. That wouldn’t. After plugging her phone in to charge and grabbing whatever clothes were packed on top, she headed out to claim the bathroom. It was kind of nice having the house to herself. Then again, it was such a big house that it was easy to feel alone in it even when she knew she wasn’t.
Easier now, with Chris gone.
She sighed and pushed the thought away as best she could, tossing her clothes and toiletry bag on the counter and looking at herself in the mirror. Her reflection was a little dirty, auburn hair tousled and skin pale against the black silk of her robe. Despite a full night’s sleep, she looked tired and there were faint smudges beneath her brown ey
es. She couldn’t really bring herself to care.
Turning away, she started toward the shower but changed her mind and diverted to the big jacuzzi tub instead. Steamy hot water soon flowed from the faucet. There would be no bubbles, no oils, just water. This close to a change, her sense of smell was on overdrive and she didn’t want to inundate herself with artificial scents.
While the tub filled, she hung her bathrobe on the back of the door and raided the stash of fragrance free soap in the cupboard. Just because she didn’t want an immersive scent experience didn’t mean she didn’t want to be clean. The tub was about halfway full by the time she had what she needed set out beside it. Soap, washcloth, towel. Everything was lined up in the order she’d need it. The simple act of placing them that way soothed her still-frayed nerves.
Climbing into the tub, she settled with a sigh and leaned her head against the little pillow. While the tub continued to fill around her, she closed her eyes and let her thoughts drift.
Had Selene learned anything? Was the woman that Chris had left the club with a hunter? An accomplice? A bystander?
What happened to him?
The final question was the most maddening one, and it choked her up all over again. Her eyes stung with welling tears, and she splashed some water on her face. The level had risen sufficiently enough that she reached for the faucet, fumbling to turn it off before settling back again.
Closing her eyes once more, she tried to think of something else. Anything else. But her thoughts kept coming back to Chris and the myriad of questions swirling around his untimely demise. Questions she might not ever know the answers to.
Maybe a long hot bath wasn’t a good idea after all.
Sighing, she took a deep breath and slipped under the water, immersing herself fully. Eyes closed, she held herself there until the urge to howl subsided. It took some time.
Before surfacing, she opened her eyes to look up through the clear water and just about jumped out of her skin. Someone was leaning over the tub, looking down at her. She inhaled in surprise and rocketed upward. As she coughed, sputtered and clung to the edge of the tub, her eyes darted around the room. Her lungs burned. Her heart pounded. The room was empty.
“What in the actual fuck?” she choked out, blinking rapidly. Tears joined the water running down her face and she started to shake despite the warmth of the water around her.
She knew that face. That black hair, those blue eyes. It had been Chris's face, looking down at her through the clear water.
Chris was starting to understand how a dishrag felt, wrung out and cast aside until needed again. But in his moments of clarity, slowly but surely, he was figuring out the rules of this place. He felt stronger, too. Now, when she called him back to the burning place it was a little easier to resist. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
He’d do anything to avoid the pain and the questions. The memory of his time with her was shrouded in a painful fog. He could remember bits and pieces of the questioning, but not enough to put them together. It was maddening, so he tried not to dwell on it.
He’d learned that if he focused on a location familiar to him, he could travel there. His thoughts kept bringing him back to the apartment, but Joey was never there. He’d finally tracked her down by checking their parents’ house. He’d found them all, actually. His whole pack. That didn’t change the fact that they couldn’t see him, didn’t know he was there. He was an outsider looking in, which was something he’d never felt before, despite not being an actual blood relation. They’d made him blood, had given him a home and a family when he had nothing. Now he’d lost it all again.
Whenever he managed to free himself from his tormenter, he came to the house and looked for Joey, drawn like a moth to a flame. He missed her, and it soothed him just to be in the same room with her. Watching her grieve was rough, but being around her made him feel a little less alone. It was strange to think that the spirit world was so devoid of, well, spirits. He hadn’t seen any others, anyhow.
He knew that he could, somehow, affect the physical world. So he’d been trying to figure out how he could communicate with the living. Pierce the veil. What did the ghosts do in the movies? Draw on foggy mirrors? Make things levitate? Rooms shake? He didn’t want to scare anyone, just let them know he was still there.
If I could just talk to her, maybe she could help me. Somehow.
He drifted from room to room, searching. Eventually, he got the idea to focus on her instead of a location and found himself in… a bathroom? He blinked, and embarrassment would have colored his features if he’d had any to speak of. But a quick glance around didn’t reveal her. A ripple of movement drew his attention toward the tub. There was water in it. He moved closer and leaned over to look down into it.
“Oh! There you are.”
He stood there, peering down at her blurry, washed-out face through the clear water. But as the moments passed, and she didn’t surface, he began to grow concerned. His birth parents had drowned, after all. Wolves could regenerate from a wide array of injuries, but suffocation was something they couldn’t recover from. It didn’t take much to tip his concern into outright panic. He may have been getting stronger, but his emotions were still difficult to rein in.
“Joey? Joey!”
She opened her eyes. She saw him. He was sure of it.
His heart stopped—or it would have, if he’d had a heart at that moment. Nonetheless, the sensation was there, that tightening in the chest, breath catching. He watched as she surfaced and coughed up some water, looking around with wild eyes and clearly not seeing him.
Growling in frustration, he kicked at the tub with an insubstantial foot. He wanted to push her under again, just to see what would happen. But he didn’t try. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, and if it had, well, the last thing he wanted was for her to think he was trying to kill her.
“What in the actual fuck?” she said. He didn’t even try to answer. Instead, he just turned and sank down on the edge of the tub, holding his head in his hands.
“I’m losing my fucking mind,” she added. Water sloshed in the tub behind him.
“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “You and me both.”
11
By the time Joey made it downstairs for breakfast, the whole family was settled around the table.
“Good morning, Kitten,” her father said, glancing up from his newspaper and looking at her over the tops of his reading glasses.
“Good morning,” she replied automatically. The notion of skipping breakfast had vanished the moment she smelled the aromas wafting up the stairs. Shifting between human and wolf form took a lot of energy, and her stomach had growled insistently at the first scent of bacon. Her depleted reserves demanded replenishment, regardless of her emotional state.
Reginald’s eyes lingered on her, brow furrowed in obvious concern. “Grab a plate, you must be hungry.”
Joey swallowed, grateful that he hadn’t voiced that concern. She paused on her way past his chair to give him a hug, leaning over his shoulder to kiss his cheek. “You know, the Union-Tribune is online now,” she said, in an effort to distract him.
“Not the same, not the same.” His response was predictable, but there was something comforting about the familiarity of it. The paper rustled as he folded it a different way and reached for his coffee.
Ben caught her eye in passing and flashed her a knowing smile. He was by far the most tech-savvy of the bunch, only seventeen years her senior. Normally, they’d bond over their shared amusement—and at times frustration—over their older relatives’ lower tolerance for technology. Today, she flashed him a strained smile and looked away, quickly scanning the table. Everyone looked fresher this morning, but Joey’s eyes still stung from recent tears. She kept them lowered as she filled a mug full of hot coffee from the carafe and settled at the table.
It was all in your head. Just act normal.
Joey was a long way from normal. She wasn’t sure she remembered what no
rmal was supposed to be, so she filled her plate. There was never a shortage of things to eat at the Grant table, and especially not the morning after the full moon. She’d just finished rolling an overstuffed breakfast burrito that required both hands to manage when her hopes of a quiet, peaceful repast were dashed.
“Josephine, what are your plans for the day?” Adelaide said.
Joey quickly took a bite of her burrito while her mother was speaking. No one spoke with their mouth full at Adelaide’s table, so it gave Joey a chance to collect her thoughts. She even wiped her mouth on her napkin for extra brownie points before answering.
“I don’t have any. I guess there’s no point in going to the studio.” Her chest tightened, and she focused her eyes on her breakfast. It was easier to look a burrito in the tortilla than it was to look her mother in the eye this morning. She took another hearty bite, even as the first sat heavily in her stomach.
“I suppose not,” her mother drawled, tapping a fingertip against the edge of her juice glass. “Regardless, you shouldn’t mope around the house all day. Christopher wouldn’t want that. You can come to campus with me. I only have one lecture today.”
Joey blinked. “You’re working today?”
“Of course I am, you know that brainless TA of mine can’t be trusted with even the simplest—no matter. I thought we could spend some time together.”
Bile rose in Joey’s throat as she gave her mother an incredulous stare. “So we can do what, exactly? Have a mother daughter spa day and get our nails done for the funeral?”
Adelaide’s eyes narrowed, but Sam stepped in smoothly.
“Actually Mother, I could use Joey’s help today. I need to deliver some clothes to the funeral home, and we need to discuss the next steps in the investigation.”
Though she wasn’t sure how she felt about a trip to the funeral home, Joey held her tongue and bit off another chunk of burrito.