by Geonn Cannon
"Deny your true self as much as you want, Ariadne. But you've just proven that you are one of us no matter how much you protest. When this war comes, you will either be a soldier or a casualty. The time to choose is now."
She crouched down as the drugs began to do their work. Ari's rage, obviously induced but not wholly created by the wolfsbane, collided with the sedative and the two fronts created a storm in her mind. Her mother's voice sounded hollow as her body began to go limp.
"This is a war, Ariadne. And in a war, we are asked to make sacrifices. If you're not willing to give up Dale, then I am more than willing to give up the daughter who turned her back on me. Dale will mourn, but then she will do what she must in order to save lives. She learned to love one wolf... she can learn to love another."
Ari's vision swam. She saw Milo looming above her mother and the fight went out of her. The drugs won the battle and she passed out.
Chapter Sixteen
The scene she woke up to was so dreamlike that she couldn't swear that she was actually awake or if it was some bizarre fevered hallucination. She was in an enormous four-poster bed and the windows were completely blanked out, as if the world had been erased. The room was so cold that Ari couldn't feel body under the blankets. Or maybe that was the drugs. Everything in the room seemed to be painted a monochrome blue-gray except for the woman sitting by her side. Dale. In a black shirt and a blue scarf, face bright pink and red hair pinned up at her temples by small silver barrettes, Dale was a splash of life and color in the dreary fog. Her eyes were wet and she was holding Ari's hand in hers.
Then, seemingly in the blink of an eye, Dale's shirt became white, and she was stretched at the foot of the bed. Then she was sitting up and gently running a wet washcloth over Ari's upper arm. She noticed Ari's eyes were open.
"Ari?"
She was sure she would fall asleep again. She waited for the quality of light to change, waited for Dale to disappear or jump across the room, but she just leaned closer and put her hand on Ari's cheek. The palm was unbelievably warm, and it was enough to wake Ari enough that she became convinced it was for real this time.
"Hi."
Dale smiled. "Hey there. How do you feel?"
"I don't know."
Dale touched the washcloth to Ari's forehead. "Yeah, she said that you might be a little out of sorts when you woke up."
"She?" Ari's eyes opened. "Mom?"
"She's gone. And Milo said her grandpa went back to England just before the storm hit. It's just me and Milo here."
Ari's expression changed, but it was a lateral shift. "Oh. You and Milo."
Dale nodded. "She explained everything to me when I got here. Apparently she kicked everyone else out before she called me. You've been fading in and out for almost three days. How much do you remember?"
"Everything that happened in the kitchen. They told you everything?"
"Yeah." Dale reached into her pocket and held up Ari's collar. She let it hang from her fingers for a moment, then leaned forward. "Lift your head a little?"
Ari did as she was told and Dale put the collar back on her. The effort of holding her head up for fifteen seconds was all Ari could manage, and Dale guided her head back down onto the pillow. Ari closed her eyes at the soft touch of Dale's fingers on the throat, and Dale leaned forward to kiss her dry lips.
Ari touched the collar. "That feels better."
Dale smiled. "She told me about the ceremony. It wouldn't work, Ari. The first time it worked because Johanna and Agatha were in love."
Ari shook her head, dismissing the conversation for the moment. "Can I have some water?"
"Oh, shit. Yes."
Dale reached for the nightstand and poured from a tall plastic pitcher. She tried to angle the glass so Ari could take a drink without sitting up, then gave up. She took a drink, then lowered her glistening lips to Ari's mouth. She stroked Ari's cheek as she pushed the water into her mouth, and Ari closed her eyes as she accepted the tepid offering. It could have been ambrosia as far as she was concerned. Dale pecked the corners of Ari's mouth and sat up again.
"If all it takes is a canidae marrying a human, then I'll just marry you."
"You'd do that?" Dale asked softly.
Ari shrugged. "I'm planning on doing it someday anyway. If the schedule has to be sped up to stop a genocide, then so be it. There are worse reasons to get married."
Dale smiled. "Well. As sweet as that hypothetical proposal is - and I would hypothetically accept - I already brought it up to Milo. Apparently it won't work."
"Why not? Because the humans chose her as the candidate instead of me?"
"I don't know. She said it was a personal reason."
Ari closed her eyes. "Detective Lorne must be going crazy. I said I'd check out that bar for him. I've been here for three days? Shit... I've got--"
"Ari, you're not going anywhere. Neither is..." She looked at the window and waved her hand. "Hell. No one in the city is going anywhere."
"What?"
"It's a blizzard, Ari. It was blowing in the night you came over here, and it was really starting to pick up when Milo brought me over. No one expected it, but it's stretched from Tacoma almost up to Vancouver. It's a mess. Roads and bridges are out and iced over, we lost power yesterday about... well, about a day ago. For the time being we're stranded. You're lucky you didn't miss much."
Ari grunted and shifted under the blankets. She supposed it could be worse; the storm could have come in before her mother left and stranded them all together. She found Dale's hand without opening her eyes and linked their fingers together.
#
The next time Ari woke, Milo was in her room. She was wearing a red and black turtleneck sweater and looked as if she hadn't slept in a week.
"I'm out."
Ari blinked at her.
"The agreement. I'm not going to go through with it. They'll have to compromise. They'll have to decide you and Dale are the right candidates and, even if they don't, I refuse to participate. Their original plan was just to take Dale. Leave you a note that said she had gotten tired of the danger and all the canidae shit, and they would tell her that you were dead." She chuckled and shook her head. "They're not the smartest pups in the litter, ya know?"
Ari managed a smile. After a moment of heavy silence, Ari said, "You should have told us from the beginning."
"Yeah." She was standing by the window and hugged herself against the chill. "Like I said, I'd done this sort of thing before. Dive-bombed relationships just for the hell of it. Figured this was more of the same, but I wasn't prepared to like you so much. Both of you. Let me know if you need anything. I got a pretty full pantry you and Dale are welcome to take advantage of."
"What was the shit Gwyneth blew in my face? Wolfsbane?"
Milo winced. "You have to believe that I had no idea she was going to pull that. It was insanity, Ari. Her own daughter..."
Ari snorted. "You'd be amazed at what that woman has done to her daughter. Does it always hit that hard?"
"Yeah. Sometimes worse. Hunters came up with it by accident, discovered turns us feral without a transformation. Your mother is worried that they're going to release it in Seattle, let us go ape-shit, and then come in and sweep up the mess. That way it doesn't look like they're slaughtering innocent people, they're taking care of dangerous killers."
"You believe that?"
Milo shrugged. "Makes sense, right? You saw what it does first-hand. Imagine that on a grand scale, sweeping through Seattle and infecting every canidae it touches. We go crazy and the hunters save the day. It's bottled justification for murder. Hunters have done a lot worse."
"Like what?"
Milo pursed her lips and leaned against the wall. "Okay. A canidae woman was at college when a couple of other students realized what she was. The boys were sons of hunters, so they'd been taught that canidae are real. And now they had a real-live one to play with. So they spent a few nights tracking her movements, stalking her, just to
see if they could do it. They were just boys playing until one night when they realized the wolf was all by herself in a big empty room. They may have gone hunting with their dads when they were young, but this wasn't an animal. This was just a pretty girl sitting in a library doing research for a paper. They couldn't kill her any easier than they could have killed a random shopkeeper.
"But she was a wolf. And they had been brought up with the legacy of being hunters. So the four of them surrounded her. Though she knew about the history, she never expected to be confronted by hunters. Far as she knew, the peace was still in place. They harassed her a little, teased her, but then it started to get mean. She tried to leave peacefully and they let her get as far as the courtyard before one of them knocked her down."
Ari wanted to tell her to stop the story, but she knew that it was the kind of tale that had to be finished once it was started. Milo's voice was detached, flat.
"They finished with her about an hour later. At one point they were almost seen so they carried her to one of their dorm rooms so they wouldn't be interrupted. When they finally got their fill of the fun and games, one of them drove her to a bus stop. Told her to consider herself lucky because most hunters would've just killed her. He made her say thank you 'fore he let her out of the car."
"Did the police ever catch them? Punish them?"
"Nah. No reason to make the report, right?"
"I'm sorry, Milo."
Milo shook her head. "It's not my story. It's your mother's. She found out she was pregnant a bit after that, and decided to keep the baby. Remember what she said about hunters getting it in their DNA over the past thousand years or so? Your father was a hunter, Ari, and your mother was a canidae. That's why you couldn't change when you were born. Your natures were fighting each other. Gwen just chose a winner. And that's why you're not a viable candidate for the ceremony. You're tainted with hunter DNA."
Ari's mind was swimming.
"I'm not saying don't hate her. God, what she did to you... I can't even imagine. I'm only saying maybe accept that she had a reason for what she did." She started toward the door. "I'm going downstairs. You want anything?"
"No."
"Want me to send Dale up?"
Ari nodded, and Milo slipped out of the room. Ari looked at the snow-blanked window and sank back against the pillows, trying to come to terms with the information she had just been given. She'd always known she wasn't the product of a loving relationship, but to find out the truth so bluntly was harsh. She thought about all the questions she'd asked growing up, begging for stories about her father. Gwyneth eventually demanded silence on the subject when Ari was ten, insisting that there are some things it's just better off not knowing. As much energy as she'd put into hating her mother over the years, she could feel her resolve slipping just a little now that she knew what she'd gone through.
The door cracked open and Dale stuck her head in. "Hey..."
Ari motioned her to the bed. Dale slipped out of her shoes, crawled onto the bed, and Ari cradled her close.
#
It had been a week since Ari's last transformation, and the wolf didn't care that she was recuperating from what amounted to a drug overdose. She was up and out of bed, wearing an outfit borrowed from Milo, and she could feel the animal clawing at the corners of her mind. She didn't know what it expected; even if she transformed there was no way she would let it outside. The drifts were almost up to the second story on the north-facing side, and the backyard was an unbroken sea of white.
On one of her meandering trips through the house she crossed paths with Milo in the sitting room. Milo smiled knowingly.
"Going a bit mad, huh?"
Ari nodded at the window. "I keep looking out the windows hoping that if the wolf sees the snow it'll realize running is a lost cause. It doesn't seem to have gotten the message yet."
"Yeah. They can be a bit stubborn." She hunched her shoulders and looked longingly at the door. Finally she tossed her head to get the hair out of her face and looked at Ari. "You know, we don't have to wait until the snow melts to go out. It's a big house. It's mine. Who cares about a few scratch marks on the floor? Better than freezing our tails off out in that mess."
Ari hesitated. She felt like she should refuse on principle, but the urge was even stronger now that there was a potential outlet.
"I don't know if it's such a good idea so soon after being sick."
"You'll be fine. Besides, I've been meaning to talk to you about some pain management techniques. I know a few good tricks we could use so you maybe wouldn't hurt so bad. C'mon."
"Where are we going?"
Milo walked backward so she could face Ari. "We're about to take off our clothes and do breathing exercises together. I think we both would feel a lot more comfortable if Dale was in the room acting as chaperon."
"I think she'd feel more comfortable with that, too."
They found Dale in the library, eager to put aside the book she'd been reading to supervise their deep-breathing session. Ari was in her undershirt and panties, and Milo was wearing baggy shorts and a tank top. Their legs were crossed in front of them and they were close enough that their knees were almost touching. Dale had turned out the lights but the sun was reflecting off the snow through the window so that the room was still shockingly bright.
"The massages are a great idea, but you've been focused on managing the pain once it's begun. It's great and it's brilliant. I'm not surprised it's helped you. But a big part is properly preparing yourself for the transformation. Ari, your body wasn't made for the change. It's not a painless experience for any of us, not really, but you're suffering much more than you need to be. It's the same thing that happens to the people who were bitten as kids when they grow up."
Dale said, "How did you learn about these methods?"
"I had a girlfriend from Sussex who was bitten when she was seven. She was big into trying new ways to manage her pain. Okay, Ariadne... deep breaths. Close your eyes and relax. No tension whatsoever. The world outside is blank and white and your mind should be the same. The wolf is in you. It's a part of you always even if you're on two legs. You feel her, you can hear her, just like she can hear you when you're on four legs. Your body wants to fight the change, but there's no reason to. The wolf has just as much right to the body as you do. Deep breaths."
Her voice had taken on a different cadence, and Ari found herself hanging on every syllable. She breathed in through her nose and released it through her lips. Her hands were resting lightly on her thighs, her feet tucked underneath her knees.
"Don't fight your wolf, Ari. You like how it feels when she takes over, especially times like now. When it's been so long and you're aching to let her take over."
"Yeah." It was barely spoken aloud, just a word carried on a quiet exhale. Her skin was tingling, as if anticipating the transformation.
"Okay. I'm going to keep my eyes closed out of courtesy, but it's time to undress. All right?"
"Yeah."
They undressed quickly and then sat on their knees facing each other. Ari took a deep breath and let her hands hang limp by her sides. Her fingers were twitching, their movements out of her control as something deep inside her began to swell and crest. Ari lifted her chin and parted her lips, and her right arm lifted as if pulled by a string.
"Dale..."
"I'm here."
"Don't look. I know you hate it when I change, so don't--"
Dale wrapped her fingers around Ari's outstretched hand, kissed the knuckles, and let it go. "I'm here for you, Ari. Completely and totally."
"I--" The words 'love you' transformed into a gasp, and then her mouth wasn't the proper shape to form words. She sagged backwards, dropping on her rear end and then rolling onto hands and knees as her body contorted. Her eyes snapped open and she saw Milo passing through the same transformation, her small breasts transformed into a convex breastplate covered with fine white fur.
Within seconds she and Milo were standing a
nd facing each other in the middle of the room, giving their faces tentative sniffs before Ari moved over to Dale. She pressed her face against Dale's side, and Dale ruffled her fur with her fingernails curved into talons. Ari arched her back at the rough massage, making tiny sounds of pleasure before she pulled back. Milo was waiting by the door, so Dale smiled and petted Ari's head and nodded.
"Go on. Go play with your friend."
Ari licked Dale's palm, then turned and ran out of the room. Dale snickered and stood to follow them just to make sure they didn't run into any closed doors.
Chapter Seventeen
The weather conspired to keep Seattle in permafrost for the length of the season. At noon the mercury climbed just enough to start thawing out the top layer of snow, but after dark it plummeted back down to re-freeze the melt until there was nothing but glass-smooth dunes as far as the eye could see. After a few flickering false starts, the power came back on at Milo's home long enough for them to watch a press conference where the mayor request power rationing. They didn't want to stress the generators by having everyone suddenly start switching on their computers and televisions and heaters, so they restricted their usage to cooking and raising the heat to bearable levels. Several major thoroughfares had been cleared to allow the city to stutter back to life, but again the mayor was requesting people stay off the streets except in the case of an emergency.
Ari and Milo were now making daily transformations, stretching their wolf muscles with races through the front hallway and up and down the stairs. At the moment Ari was in human form and dressed in a shirt and skirt she had borrowed from Milo. She was at the window, watching the water trickle off the roof so she could see when it turned from liquid to icicles.
In the parlor, Milo was playing the piano. Ari thought it was maybe something by Vienna Teng, but she couldn't identify the specific song. There was a break in the music and Ari heard footsteps behind her. Even without cheating with her advanced sense of smell, she knew who it was and smiled.