Raised by Wolves

by Bridget Essex

  My mother ignores this and continues: “Your uncle Fergus had been planning to organize a fox hunt after dinner—”

  “Then we'll leave after dinner,” I reply curtly.

  “No, no,” my mother says, keeping her eyes trained on me. She sniffs. “I'll just have him postpone it.” She softens just a little bit more as she puts an arm around my shoulders now, giving me a little squeeze. “You really like this woman,” she murmurs to me. “I can tell. Your sweat glands are on overdrive around her—”

  “Mom, don't smell my sweat,” I sigh, “please.”

  For a long moment, Ma says nothing but trains her eyes on me. She's the Alpha, and that comes with a lot of responsibility, yes, but one of the things my mother has always told me about being Alpha is that it means she can always tell what her pack members are feeling—happy or sad, disgruntled or loyal. And she can tell, right now, that I'm happy.

  “I'm happy for you, Becca,” she tells me, and I think she means it. “There's no need to get defensive. All I've ever wanted is your happiness.”

  But I know that's not true, not even a little bit. And after our confrontation, I really don't have any patience left to tolerate such a blatant lie. “You mean, as long as it coincides with your happiness,” I murmur, holding her gaze.

  My mother takes a step back from me, as if she's just been slapped, and she sets her mouth in a thin, hard line. “Becca, I've been strict, I know. I was strict about the Rob thing.” She lifts her chin. “But it was only to prepare you to lead,” she says, smoothing her features and speaking softly to me. “You have all of the qualities you need to lead the pack—”

  “Ma.” I'm tired as I stare at my mother, as I hear the same old words pour out of her mouth. I'm tired, but I have to say it, just like I always say it. And I speak now, my voice hushed, pained. “And if I don't want to lead the pack?”

  She shakes her head, takes a deep breath. “It isn't a matter of wanting. It's about being there for your family.” She takes a step forward, and she's curling her fingers around my arm. She looks genuinely sorry as she looks at me now, and it makes my blood run cold.

  I don't think I've ever seen her look sorry in her life.

  “When you're Alpha, you'll understand,” she croons to me. “You must always do what needs to be done to ensure that the family stays safe and sound. That's what an Alpha does. You'll see.”

  “No, I won't—” I start, but then there's an outbreak of loud laughter from the sitting room. The kind of laughter that my raucous family is fond of making when something's just gone terribly, horribly wrong.

  Well, that can't be good.

  “We'll talk about this later,” I tell my mother pointedly, and then I'm turning and racing through the kitchen door, back down the hall and into the sitting room, expecting to find dead animal bodies or, I don't know, Loren standing in the middle of a pack of wolves.

  But no.

  There is an animal in the room, true.

  But it isn't a wolf.

  Gotta admit: the sight of a live goat standing in your mother's sitting room is kind of an odd way to start out a dinner party.

  “Ah, I see you've met Angela,” I groan, placing my hands on my hips. I watch helplessly as my younger cousins start to herd Angela toward the back French doors and out onto the veranda.

  I haven't mentioned Angela yet? Well, let me tell you a little bit about that crazy goat.

  My mother isn't zoned for agriculture (hell, her house is still technically part of Boston), but she gives a little money to the right people, and a blind eye is turned to her chicken coop, the ducks on her pond (who have their own little house) and Angela. My mother loves goat milk, so when I was a teenager, she built a bigger shed and bought Angela. Angela was supposed to provide my mother milk, but it became quickly apparent that it was impossible for her to become pregnant (goats and cows gotta continuously have babies, or they can't make milk—who knew?), so my mother—never one to waste an opportunity, or a goat, organized a “goat hunt” for the family.

  But here's the thing about Angela. She's a fighter. And practically evil. Because, when an entire pack of werewolves descended upon her in my mother's snowy woods...Angela fought back.

  She literally beat off an entire pack of werewolves. And when we transformed back into our humans selves and stared at her in genuine shock, she calmly went back to being Angela, the normal, super-nice, “I'm going to eat everything around me” goat.

  My mother had laughed that day. I still remember it. She'd laughed, and laughed, then said that Angela had earned her right to be an honorary part of our pack, since she was already so damn bloodthirsty. You know, for a goat.

  So that's who's in the sitting room right now, planting her little cloven hooves squarely on the big red rug in front of the fireplace, lowering her head and staring at my younger cousins with slit pupils, practically daring them to come after her.

  Loren is watching the goat with surprise, but she's also smiling a little, which is a good sign. Rob sits beside her on the couch, and he looks more comfortable now, even resting his ankle on his knee, leaning back against the couch with a lazy smile on his face.

  My younger cousins just aren't that familiar with Angela. They know that my mother keeps her as a pet, but they don't know her history, and they have no idea that, if Angela gets pissed enough, she transforms into Hulk-goat.

  “Guys, be nice to Angela,” I tell them, placing my hands on my hips and raising a brow. The closest cousin to me, Victor, is only five, and when he turns to look at me, giving me a wide smile, I can see that his two front teeth have fallen out.

  “Aw, Becks, I haven't transformed all day and—” he grumbles, and immediately Rob is sitting up a little straighter, putting an arm around Loren and introducing her to...

  Oh, crap.

  He's introducing her to my cousin Jimmy.

  I can't blame Rob. He had to take evasive action, and Jimmy was the closest relation to the couch, but dammit. I grab Victor by the scruff of the neck like a misbehaving dog and drag him away from Angela, who, if I didn't know better (and I might), appears as if she's preparing to blow fire out of her nostrils.

  “Victor, seriously, leave the goat alone,” I tell him, then snap my fingers at Angela.

  The angry goat blinks. And just like that, she slips out of her “I was about to kill you mode” and blinks sleepily at me.

  “Come on, pretty girl,” I croon to her, hooking my fingers into the collar around her neck. “Let's go get you some hay.”

  “Who let the goat in?” my mother roars, and I wheel around, surprised to see Ma standing in the doorway, looking every bit like the She-Hulk (seriously, my mother and Angela actually have a lot in common).

  Instantly, my littler cousins scatter, running around and squealing like the puppies they are, and I'm tugging on Angela's collar, trying to get her out of the room...

  And that's when my cousin Jimmy tries to sit on Loren's lap.

  I don't know when or why he first started to do it, but he just does it now all the time, to random women. I asked him once if that had ever gotten him a date or gotten him laid, and he looked at me in surprise and said, “No,” as if he'd never actually thought about it. Jimmy's handsome but not the brightest bulb in the shed. All of the stuff that might have gone to his brain went to his muscles, instead.

  “Jimmy! Hell, no!” I mutter, dropping Angela's collar and sprinting across the sitting room to grab my cousin by the ear and shove him off of Loren's lap. Loren glances up at me, startled, like she thought I was joking when I'd told her that Jimmy was probably going to try to snuggle up with her.

  “Hey, I was only having some fun,” Jimmy whines, standing up. When Jimmy stands, he's an entire foot taller than me, and he has about a hundred pounds more muscle than me, but he's never intimidated me in the slightest. I stand there, glowering at him, as he holds up his hands in a conciliatory expression. “You know I don't mean any harm by it, Becks,” he says, wheedling.

&n
bsp; Of course, Jimmy's father, my uncle Kyle, takes that moment to step up in front of Loren and gaze down at her with—I kid you not—a mouthwatering grin.

  You know the cartoon wolves who whistle and stamp their feet when a pretty girl walks by? Yeah. Kyle is the living, breathing embodiment of them.

  “Don't even, Kyle,” I snap, and Kyle glances at me with a mock indignant expression.

  “What?” he says, practically pouting. “I was just going to tell your friend that she looks good enough to eat.” I literally put my face in my hands and groan as Kyle grins down at Loren. “Because you do, darling,” he says, and Loren blinks again.

  “Um,” is what she says, and now she's frowning deeply.

  “Sorry, Loren,” I groan, giving Kyle enough side-eye to encourage him to take a step back. He also waves his hands in the air, just like Jimmy did. Like father, like son. “He's a dirty old man,” I mutter, rolling my eyes.

  “And proud of it!” Kyle calls.

  “Rob?” I tell my cousin sweetly, then crouch down beside him. “I've got to get Angela out of here before she kills a couple of kids,” I mutter, as we both watch the little boys and girls approaching Angela again. Seriously, if we were out in the wilderness, and they were actually puppies, they wouldn't survive until summer. Survival of the fittest, my ass. “Can you make sure that no one says or does anything wolfish...or, you know, slimy...until I get back?”

  “I seriously can't guarantee that—” Rob starts, and then, with equally horrified expressions, we watch as Victor steps a little too close to Angela, who was so near to the open French doors—and freedom.

  Angela loses it.

  One moment, the black goat is standing there, blinking her slitted eyes and trying to keep all of the kids, who are circling her like a pack of wolves would surround a wounded prey animal, in her sights... And the next moment, she's fed up.

  Angela lowers her head and charges at Victor.

  Female goats have horns, too. Not big ones, necessarily, but they don't need to be big. Goat heads are hard, and when a goat is rushing at you at the approximate speed of light, you don't need enormous horns to lay waste to a pack of kids.

  Which is exactly what Angela intends to do now.

  Victor goes flying and falls to the ground with a resounding thunk, but Angela's not even close to being done. She turns and immediately aims her hard head and little horns at Emily, another one of my little cousins. Emily tries to smoothly sidestep Angela as she comes rushing at her, but Angela is too quick for her—and Emily's only seven. She hasn't quite mastered the art of the smooth sidestep yet. Angela barrels into Emily, and Emily goes flying, too, hitting the wall of the sitting room so hard that the painting hung on that wall falls to the floor, and when Emily's body follows suit, I can see that there's a crack in the wall where she hit.

  Immediately, I'm on my feet, but not before Angela picks another target of the little werewolf puppy pack. This time, it's Connor.

  “Aw, crap,” I mutter, trying to sprint across the room in enough time to get my ridiculously stubborn cousin out of the way.

  But I'm not fast enough.

  Victor's bad (not necessarily a bad kid, but he doesn't listen worth a damn, never has, and I'm assuming never will), but he's got nothing on his one-year-older brother, Connor. Remember the movie The Omen, and that kid Damien?

  Yeah, Connor makes Damien look like a glittery baby unicorn.

  Connor's kind of rotten. Connor and Victor are both brothers to my cousin Jimmy and are therefore my uncle Kyle's kids. Kyle has this idea that telling a kid when they're being bad hurts their development. He wants to encourage them to think for themselves. I can get behind that, sure. But when your kids are being bad just because they want to be...you gotta draw a line.

  Like, for example, that time that Connor set fire to his parents' house because he wanted to see “how fast it could burn.”

  Now, when Connor looks at Angela barreling toward him, he gets this evil little glint in his brown eyes, the kind of glint he probably had when he was striking the match and getting all excited to watch his house go up in smoke (seriously, they could make a horror movie about this kid). And then Connor is lowering his head, just like the goat did, and he's charging at her.

  This reminds me of one of those moments on nature documentaries when you see the Rocky Mountain goats getting ready to spar, but the thing is, we are not in the Rockies, only one of these two running creatures is a goat, and there is no way that this is going to end well.

  And it doesn't.

  Connor's head, being a boy's head (and not, you know, a goat's head), isn't nearly as tough or solid as Angela's, so when his skull connects with the goat's, he—of course—goes flying. He hits the wall where Emily hit it a few moments before, and when he tumbles down to the ground this time, I can see a fist-sized hole in the wall.

  Here's the thing: if Connor were a normal kid, he'd probably be dead right now. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they could hear the sound of that goat and that boy colliding on the space station.

  Loren gasps, and she's on her feet, her hand at her mouth, looking like she just witnessed a car accident.

  But Connor is, obviously, not a normal kid. He's pure evil, for one. And he's also a werewolf.

  “Ow,” he mutters, sitting up and rubbing at a spot on his head. “Stupid goat,” he mutters, and then he gets up, dusting off the seat of his jeans. “I want to eat her.”

  “No, you don't,” I say, reaching him just in time to grab him by the nape of the neck. “Seriously, do not change,” I tell him, lowering my voice and murmuring it into his ear. “Do you understand? And tell the other kids, too. Tonight is a no-change night. Got it?”

  Connor looks up at me with narrowed eyes, his little lips drawn over his teeth while he growls at me. “You're not the Alpha,” he tells me imperiously. “I only take orders from Auntie Sophia.”

  I shake him just a little, like a pissed-off wolf-mom would shake her bad puppy. (I'm not his mom, but any older person in the pack is entitled to do this, and it has the same effect and meaning). “You take orders from people who know better than you,” I mutter, letting him go. He springs away from me, giving me sullen, angry eyes while he rubs the back of his neck.

  He gave me no guarantee that he won't change...but then, who ever has a guarantee of anything?

  “C'mon, Angela,” I tell the goat, chirping to her and hooking my finger. The goat trots happily over to me, and again I grab her by the collar and gently lead her out through the French doors and back toward her little paddock and shed. I glance back over my shoulder at the dinner party. Everyone seems to have gone back to (somewhat) normal, laughing and talking, the kids playing on the outskirts of the room, still in kid form, not werewolf form.

  Angela's gate is askew and unhooked. It has a really hard-to-open latch, because Angela is a goat genius and has gotten out of her pen enough times that it became increasingly clear that the latch had to not only be childproof but also genius-proof.

  “How in the world did that happen?” I mutter, slapping Angela's rump gently so that she trots into her pen, looking the picture of innocence. I shut the gate, and then I stare at the latch for a long moment.

  There is absolutely, positively no way that a goat could have opened this. I mean, seriously, it requires two hands to open it, each one doing something different while you push the latch together. It's an elaborate toddler latch, the kind that you put on stuff that you don't want kids up until age ten getting into. There is no way that a goat, with one mouth (the only way she could attempt to open the latch, what with her cloven hooves and all) could possibly have opened it.

  Maybe one of the kids came out here and opened it. They're just bratty enough to do that, drawing the goat out of her pen to make mischief. Yeah, that must have been what happened. But as I turn around to make my way back to the dinner party, I see a glint of mischief in Angela's eyes.

  I shrug and walk back to the house.

  Chap
ter 12: Hungry like the Wolf

  By the time I make it back through the French doors, everyone is standing, because my mother's come into the sitting room.

  “Dinner is served,” she says with a pointy-toothed smile.

  I take a deep breath. Okay, we've survived the pre-dinner shenanigans. Loren and I are one step closer to going home without incident. Or...we had incidents, but nothing truly devastating. Children being hurtled through the air by a goat, stabbing holes in walls with their bodies, and escaping the violence unscathed is all perfectly acceptable. Right?

  As we enter the dining room and I sink into the chair next to the one Loren chose, Rob taking the seat on my other side, I look around the room and realize that I don't see any of my young, rowdy cousins.

  I glance at the kid table at the far edge of the dining room. Empty, not a kid to be seen.

  That doesn't bode well.

  Everyone sits down and starts to chat while my mother rings the little bell beside her plate. No one stops talking, but the far door at the edge of the gilded dining room (this room has always been a too fancy for me. It's embarrassingly ornate: gold trim on everything, including the napkins—and large mirrors on all four walls make the space seem bigger than it is...and very disorienting.), the doors open, and Roderick pushes the first serving cart into the room, laden with silver-domed dishes.

  It's the first course, and while most people might have a first course of soup or salad, that's not really how we operate in my family. So Rod sets down a plate of duck in orange sauce in front of each of us. With the orange sauce, my family actually considers this dish to be a salad; I can even hear a few people mumbling their complaints about “rabbit food” down at the far end of the table.

  The kids are still absent, which is making me more anxious.

  As everyone starts to chow down on the duck, I'm highly, highly aware of how exactly my wolfish family is eating. Across from us, uncle Kyle is scarfing down his duck like an animal, picking pieces off of the duck's breast with his bare hands and shoveling them into his mouth. He's making a mess of himself, but then so is everyone else.