House of wolves, p.20
House of Wolves, page 20
Chapter Ten
I
Lou
When I was little, I thought I wanted to be a princess. In every story, I idolized the damsel in distress, the pretty and helpless young girl. I liked pink and soft things and flowers and skirts. I still do. When I held on tight to all things girly and gentle, I also internalized the idea that I was helpless and weak.
I didn’t think it was a bad thing. I knew it was okay to depend on people sometimes. It’s okay to need help. I was caught up in the fantasy of a whirlwind romance with my own prince charming, who would love me and make me happy.
I’ve grown up now. Maybe I still tend to be too optimistic, too naïve, but I am not helpless. I am not weak.
I learned that I can be fierce and protective when I defended Cal from snide remarks in school when she first came to live with us. I realized that I could be strong and confident when Mom got sick, and I couldn’t rely on her to prepare me for the world any longer. I learned that I don’t need someone just to have someone when I thought my ex loved me, and then he broke up with me when we moved because he didn’t have a chance at sleeping with me from Lilly Falls. I can be me just for me. I learned that I can be confident in my own skin when I learned to embrace myself and shake off the backhanded comments about my being biracial, and if only my curls were a bit tamer, or that my skin is beautiful and “not too dark.”
Now, I may still look like a meek and pretty princess, but I can be a soldier for my sister if I need to be.
Between Dad and Jasper’s parents, they convinced Cal to leave the house today to stay at Jasper’s. Jasper just had to mention that he felt like garbage, and Cal grudgingly agreed to go and hang out. Sometimes it seems like they can’t stand each other, but they care about each other deeply.
The plan is that excuses will come up and Cal will spend the night there. It’s not like she’ll walk herself home. When Dad told me his idea, I knew she’d love it. He just needs her out of the house for a couple of days.
That leaves Matthew and me upstairs at my place. Dad and Liam dragged Cal’s couch from the basement and up the two flights of stairs to take my advice and put it under the skylight. She never uses the couch anymore anyway. Dad’s boxes have been shoved to the other side of his room.
Matt and I have taken up spots at either end of the couch overlooking the big window now, and we’re poring over what to do next.
“Cal wants him dead,” Matthew says. He’s circled back here a few times, and while I don’t think he’ll really follow through on it, I’m beginning to think he and Cal are made for each other with how ready they both are to consider violence an option when push comes to shove.
I hope they will cancel each other out and keep each other out of trouble, but that’s far-fetched.
“As romantic as that would be for you two, I’m not willing to commit murder, Matthew,” I scold.
He shrugs. “I think it counts as self-defence at this point.”
“It absolutely does not.”
He puts his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, fine. So, we find Hallam, and we talk to him. He seems like a totally reasonable guy,” he mocks.
I sigh. “We shouldn’t confront him at all. We need to figure out how to get the police to pay attention to what he’s doing again.”
“We’ll wave a donut in Hallam’s direction. They’ll follow it.” Matthew giggles at himself.
I frown. It keeps coming back to this: we need to prove that Cal and Jasper are reliable and haven’t lied about anything. I haven’t touched Cal’s phone since I deleted Hallam’s messages, and I mentally kick myself for doing so. I was angry and disgusted with him, and I didn’t think about holding onto the voicemails. I tell Matthew about it, and he perks up despite the kind of content I tell him Hallam sent.
“Do you still have her phone?” he asks.
I nod: she gave it to me and doesn’t carry it with her anymore. I hop up from my seat and run downstairs, stopping only to let Dad and Liam drag a sheet of drywall in through the side door and to the basement. Once I get to my room, I have to squeeze through a small crack of an opening in the door to keep Simba from running out. He glowers up at me after his failed escape attempt.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I tell him. “I don’t want you getting outside while the door is open.”
Simba doesn’t care about my excuses, but he returns to his sleeping spot on Cal’s bed. I retrieve her phone from my bedside table and close the bedroom door behind me again before returning to Matthew upstairs.
I flop back down onto the couch and hand him the phone. “I deleted them all. It was stupid, but he made me uncomfortable, and I was worried Cal would hear.”
Matthew doesn’t respond. Instead, he flips through Cal’s phone with his brows drawn together in focus until he brings up the call log. He dials the voice mailbox and waits as it rings.
The automated voice tells us that there are no messages. I knew it was the case. Matthew keeps listening, though, as the voice begins to recite further options. Finally, it says, “to review deleted and expired messages, press 1-9.” Matthew lights up and punches in those numbers, and I listen in surprise as Hallam’s voice carries through the speakers.
“I didn’t know you could do that!” I balk.
Matthew’s smug grin widens as he listens to and re-saves every one of Hallam’s messages, though cringing every few sentences at his words. “I have to listen to the options every time because I never remember how to delete or save messages. You listen through it enough times, you remember all the options it gives you,” he says, shrugging off my acknowledgement.
“You’re a freaking genius, Matthew,” I breathe. He grins sheepishly up at me as he saves the last message from Hallam. He hands the phone back to me. “Do you think it’s enough?” I ask. “Do you think they’ll listen now?”
He gives me a look. “If I understood him correctly, he tried threatening to traffic you guys if Cal doesn’t do what he wants,” he says slowly. “I think they have to take that seriously whether they want to or not.” He pauses, then, “are you okay?”
I shrug.
“What he said was gross and awful. It can’t feel good,” he presses.
“It’s not great. I definitely don’t feel safe with him around and saying those things, but I feel better now that we have this,” I reply, gesturing at the phone on the cushion between us. I thought I screwed up again like I did with the massages from Hallam before. Dad’s warning came back to me, not wanting me to end up haunted by something I could have prevented.
We debate calling the station and sending the recordings to them, but we agree that it will probably take more than that to get their attention. We bring Cal’s phone and go there ourselves, and I don’t take no for an answer. It takes nearly two hours before the detective who was on Hallam’s case before it was dropped agrees to see us. I watch as he listens to every awful word Hallam says, making sure for myself that I won’t be ignored.
They take the recordings as evidence, and even though the detective doesn’t tell me he’s reopening the search for Hallam, I take it as a win. They brushed us off once, leaving Cal and Jasper to fight for themselves when they were deemed safe enough. I’m not going to let them leave us to fall through the cracks again until Hallam is gone.
II
Amala
On the third and final night of November’s full moon, I let Jana see me change. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.
She’s right. She’s been right all along. She asked me why I hid the wolf that is a part of me when I was so adamant that she should be proud of every aspect of herself. I’ve felt like a massive hypocrite ever since.
I explained to her that I am still me, no matter which form I am in. Well, mostly. The wolf has only the capacity of a wolf. She never once had fear in her eyes as she listened or as the moon took hold over me and I shifted.
In the morning, Jana was still there. I was relieved to find her beside me in bed when I woke, human again. She didn’t leave; she didn’t even leave the room.
She was still asleep, and it was still early. I slipped under the covers with her and rolled onto my side to face her.
She lay on her front, half of her face mashed into a pillow and her arms both folded beneath it. Her coppery orange hair was a mess around her, but the morning sun filtered through the blinds and set the colour ablaze. Jana always frowns when she sleeps, brows knitted together like she’s concentrating. It’s one of my favourite things.
I cuddled up close to her before I started to doze off again.
Now that Jana knows, I picture us together like that in the mornings, years from now. I want to wake up next to her every morning. I want to wake up next to her after a wolf night and feel normal. I want to grow old seeing the adoration she gets in her eyes every time she sees me. I want to grow old loving her. And then, I think, I can be okay with being me.
Falling asleep next to Jana, who was still here, I thought that even if my mother never finds a cure, I can live like this.
It’s a good thing, because for the first time, I have little hope for my mother’s work. I suppose it had to happen eventually, but Jasper and Cal have posed a problem, and I don’t think Mum will be able to work her way past it. I don’t think there is an answer.
Not only did Cal prove the cure so far to be ineffective, but Jasper’s bloodwork also shook my mother’s research down to its foundation. Years ago, she was able to isolate the genetic variation that made wolves possible – the structure that set us apart from regular humans. She identified a single gene that could affect the body like any other chromosome and mutate and infect a new host like a virus.
Thanks to just one blood sample from Jasper, we know she was mistaken. She has now identified a compact group of many sequences, masquerading as one and virtually inseparable in a way she couldn’t recognize before. She thinks that acting as one structure allows it to travel as one to a new wolf when infected.
Of these many different structures, Mum’s at least been able to identify a few of their functions. The first, named CLD1 in her notes, has no active role aside from carrying genetic information and coding.
The second, CLD2, interferes with the body’s chemical and hormonal levels. It, in turn, allows for the transformation of the physical form when triggered by the moon, an external stimulus that Mum still doesn’t entirely understand. Mechanics aside, she knows that the genes react to the moon and change the body in response.
A third, LYC, functions solely as a carrier from one person to the next in the case of a bite, mimicking a virus in its jump from host to host but taking the rest of the identified wolf genes with it.
CLD3, the final one Mum can identify now, has a function unlike anything else she’s ever seen. It’s responsible for the elusive connection between wolves. She might be more confident if she asked Cal back into the lab to study her and Jasper side by side. Still, Mum believes, based on how this last structure is so intertwined with others, that it responds in a very distinct way between biological siblings, taking signals from each other and any shared genetic material. If she had the means to look into it further, she hypothesizes that this specific molecular structure is linked profoundly with areas of the brain associated with perception and language. That would explain the link between Cal and Jasper and the near-telepathic ability it bestows upon them. It may function similarly in response to signals from the parent for the same reason in situations like Asa’s and Cal’s, rendering them at the mercy of the parent’s will once they’ve been infected.
It’s fascinating, but it all nods toward Mum being far from developing a functional cure.
It’s no longer as simple as one genetic marker that Cal and Asa and Matthew and my uncle and I have that others don’t. Jasper has the exact same thing, but the wolf genes are primarily dormant in him. Mum calls him Wolf-Born – he seems to have inherited the DNA like the other genes he got from his parents, but it was never activated and doesn’t cause him to change because he wasn’t infected.
Jasper provided a breakthrough, and Mum has done a truly astounding amount of work since he came to see her. In a matter of days, she’s got more answers and new information than she’s been able to gather in the last few years. A fire has been lit under her again. When she’s not working at her actual clinic, she’s poring over her notes in the garage.
But the conclusion she seems stuck on now, thanks to all this new information, is that she has no clue how to target and neutralize the wolf genes altogether. No matter what she tries, going back to previous versions of the cure and testing variations of the newest one, nothing works. She can weaken the activity of the CLD genes two and three, suppressing transformations and other effects on the body. But after just a short amount of time, they reject the cure and recover themselves. Nothing she tries seems to affect the first one: nothing damages the wolf coding that holds the rest together. She can’t even find a way to eliminate or weaken the LYC virus-mimicking molecules to prevent the further spread of infection.
Because that’s the thing: it’s not a virus. It’s not bacteria or a disease or a parasite. It isn’t a curse or a spell. How do you cure something if you don’t even know what it is?
She throws herself into her research regardless, even when my father tries to lure her out of the garage to sit down for dinner. Even when he asks if she’s coming to bed. She works as if she’s close to finding her answer, as if just one more test will lead her to the cure she’s been trying to find for nearly a decade.
I’m not so fooled by the exciting influx of new data. I know what it means. I have to be okay with being a wolf, because it’s not going to go away.
III
Accalia
No change of scenery can stop the nightmares now that I know how close Hallam is. Hanging around with Jasper is helpful as much as it makes things worse. Knowing that we’re both safe and unharmed in the same space is a reminder that Hallam hasn’t found us yet and that we got away from him last time, but waking up in the dark on the couch across from Jasper after falling asleep in the living room sends me right back to the basement. We’re both struggling to find balance. Since most of our relationship has been shadowed by trauma and suffering, it’s difficult for both of us to decide whether the other is a reminder of pain or of safety.
I’ve been floating in and out of a broken sleep all night, having first startled awake when I heard Jasper move on the other couch. This is the second night I’ve been stuck sleeping over because everyone is too busy to drive me home by the time it gets late. Last night he slept in his bedroom, but he didn’t make it that far earlier tonight and scared the ever-living fuck out of me when I saw him in the shadows across the room. I haven’t been able to go back to sleep properly since.
Every time I doze off, something horrific pops up to meet me. My mind turns the shadows cast across the living room by the bushes outside into figures. Between blinks, one of them becomes Hallam. My heart pounds, and as adrenaline wakes me up, the illusion disappears. I close my eyes again, and I look down at my broken body, blood pooling on the floor.
I sit up and scrub at my eyes, giving up on sleep entirely.
And then, even with my eyes open, I see more nightmarish visions. Except this time, they aren’t mine. Jasper is sound asleep on the other couch, unconsciously shoving his bad dream into my head. I huff, frustrated and unable to catch a break, and wait for it to stop. I’m only as patient as it takes to watch Jasper shoved down and force-fed pill after pill after pill before I take a pillow from the end of the couch and throw it at him.
The vision stops as soon as the cushion hits him in the head, and he groans, rolls over. We’re a disaster. He goes right back to sleep, but he doesn’t push any more of his dreams into my head. I give up on pretending I’ll get any rest and get up from the couch to snoop around.
Photos and other junk cover the walls and shelves and mantle. I find pictures of Emma from infancy all the way up to more recent photos. There are some of Jasper, too, when he was little. Clearly, he has been less friendly with cameras since puberty. I only spot one picture of him, framed in the hallway, taken in the last year or so. Every vase in the house – some holding real flowers, some fake, dusty plants, some sitting empty – is clearly the product of a young kid’s craft. There are surely too many for them all to have been made by Emma. I wonder which ones Jasper fingerpainted all over, years ago.
The hallway is lined with family portraits of Jasper’s family, and extended family I don’t know, as well as other, less staged, pictures. The stove light is on in the kitchen, and it lights the hallway just well enough for me to make out the photographs. I stop wandering when I spot a little blond boy in one of the pictures.
Matthew is the only one looking at the camera, and he only looks to be about seven, here. The photo was taken at a lake somewhere, and Matt’s eyes are squinted nearly closed against the sun. He’s got a big grin on his face, showing off his missing front teeth. Fishing rods rest on the ground in the background, and Matthew holds up a fish the size of his torso, gripping onto it with his whole fist instead of a thumb hooked on its mouth. Beside him, his dad is laughing, watching him and ready to catch the fish if he drops it. On Matt’s other side, a little Jasper stares at him and his fish with a horrified look on his face. Dustin has a hand on Jasper’s shoulder and cringes at Matt’s catch in a similar manner.
I can’t help but smile at the photo while I turn away to look at others. Instead, at the end of the hallway, I find the shadowy figure of a man. I jump, throwing my hands up in front of my face as if they’ll protect me. My heart pounds in my chest, and the dim hallway gets darker at the edges of my vision.
No.
He found me.
I don’t want to go back.
“Hey, calm down, it’s alright,” says a gruff voice.
Not Hallam, I tell myself. It isn’t Hallam. I try and fail to steady my breathing.
“Calia? Relax.”
I
Lou
When I was little, I thought I wanted to be a princess. In every story, I idolized the damsel in distress, the pretty and helpless young girl. I liked pink and soft things and flowers and skirts. I still do. When I held on tight to all things girly and gentle, I also internalized the idea that I was helpless and weak.
I didn’t think it was a bad thing. I knew it was okay to depend on people sometimes. It’s okay to need help. I was caught up in the fantasy of a whirlwind romance with my own prince charming, who would love me and make me happy.
I’ve grown up now. Maybe I still tend to be too optimistic, too naïve, but I am not helpless. I am not weak.
I learned that I can be fierce and protective when I defended Cal from snide remarks in school when she first came to live with us. I realized that I could be strong and confident when Mom got sick, and I couldn’t rely on her to prepare me for the world any longer. I learned that I don’t need someone just to have someone when I thought my ex loved me, and then he broke up with me when we moved because he didn’t have a chance at sleeping with me from Lilly Falls. I can be me just for me. I learned that I can be confident in my own skin when I learned to embrace myself and shake off the backhanded comments about my being biracial, and if only my curls were a bit tamer, or that my skin is beautiful and “not too dark.”
Now, I may still look like a meek and pretty princess, but I can be a soldier for my sister if I need to be.
Between Dad and Jasper’s parents, they convinced Cal to leave the house today to stay at Jasper’s. Jasper just had to mention that he felt like garbage, and Cal grudgingly agreed to go and hang out. Sometimes it seems like they can’t stand each other, but they care about each other deeply.
The plan is that excuses will come up and Cal will spend the night there. It’s not like she’ll walk herself home. When Dad told me his idea, I knew she’d love it. He just needs her out of the house for a couple of days.
That leaves Matthew and me upstairs at my place. Dad and Liam dragged Cal’s couch from the basement and up the two flights of stairs to take my advice and put it under the skylight. She never uses the couch anymore anyway. Dad’s boxes have been shoved to the other side of his room.
Matt and I have taken up spots at either end of the couch overlooking the big window now, and we’re poring over what to do next.
“Cal wants him dead,” Matthew says. He’s circled back here a few times, and while I don’t think he’ll really follow through on it, I’m beginning to think he and Cal are made for each other with how ready they both are to consider violence an option when push comes to shove.
I hope they will cancel each other out and keep each other out of trouble, but that’s far-fetched.
“As romantic as that would be for you two, I’m not willing to commit murder, Matthew,” I scold.
He shrugs. “I think it counts as self-defence at this point.”
“It absolutely does not.”
He puts his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, fine. So, we find Hallam, and we talk to him. He seems like a totally reasonable guy,” he mocks.
I sigh. “We shouldn’t confront him at all. We need to figure out how to get the police to pay attention to what he’s doing again.”
“We’ll wave a donut in Hallam’s direction. They’ll follow it.” Matthew giggles at himself.
I frown. It keeps coming back to this: we need to prove that Cal and Jasper are reliable and haven’t lied about anything. I haven’t touched Cal’s phone since I deleted Hallam’s messages, and I mentally kick myself for doing so. I was angry and disgusted with him, and I didn’t think about holding onto the voicemails. I tell Matthew about it, and he perks up despite the kind of content I tell him Hallam sent.
“Do you still have her phone?” he asks.
I nod: she gave it to me and doesn’t carry it with her anymore. I hop up from my seat and run downstairs, stopping only to let Dad and Liam drag a sheet of drywall in through the side door and to the basement. Once I get to my room, I have to squeeze through a small crack of an opening in the door to keep Simba from running out. He glowers up at me after his failed escape attempt.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I tell him. “I don’t want you getting outside while the door is open.”
Simba doesn’t care about my excuses, but he returns to his sleeping spot on Cal’s bed. I retrieve her phone from my bedside table and close the bedroom door behind me again before returning to Matthew upstairs.
I flop back down onto the couch and hand him the phone. “I deleted them all. It was stupid, but he made me uncomfortable, and I was worried Cal would hear.”
Matthew doesn’t respond. Instead, he flips through Cal’s phone with his brows drawn together in focus until he brings up the call log. He dials the voice mailbox and waits as it rings.
The automated voice tells us that there are no messages. I knew it was the case. Matthew keeps listening, though, as the voice begins to recite further options. Finally, it says, “to review deleted and expired messages, press 1-9.” Matthew lights up and punches in those numbers, and I listen in surprise as Hallam’s voice carries through the speakers.
“I didn’t know you could do that!” I balk.
Matthew’s smug grin widens as he listens to and re-saves every one of Hallam’s messages, though cringing every few sentences at his words. “I have to listen to the options every time because I never remember how to delete or save messages. You listen through it enough times, you remember all the options it gives you,” he says, shrugging off my acknowledgement.
“You’re a freaking genius, Matthew,” I breathe. He grins sheepishly up at me as he saves the last message from Hallam. He hands the phone back to me. “Do you think it’s enough?” I ask. “Do you think they’ll listen now?”
He gives me a look. “If I understood him correctly, he tried threatening to traffic you guys if Cal doesn’t do what he wants,” he says slowly. “I think they have to take that seriously whether they want to or not.” He pauses, then, “are you okay?”
I shrug.
“What he said was gross and awful. It can’t feel good,” he presses.
“It’s not great. I definitely don’t feel safe with him around and saying those things, but I feel better now that we have this,” I reply, gesturing at the phone on the cushion between us. I thought I screwed up again like I did with the massages from Hallam before. Dad’s warning came back to me, not wanting me to end up haunted by something I could have prevented.
We debate calling the station and sending the recordings to them, but we agree that it will probably take more than that to get their attention. We bring Cal’s phone and go there ourselves, and I don’t take no for an answer. It takes nearly two hours before the detective who was on Hallam’s case before it was dropped agrees to see us. I watch as he listens to every awful word Hallam says, making sure for myself that I won’t be ignored.
They take the recordings as evidence, and even though the detective doesn’t tell me he’s reopening the search for Hallam, I take it as a win. They brushed us off once, leaving Cal and Jasper to fight for themselves when they were deemed safe enough. I’m not going to let them leave us to fall through the cracks again until Hallam is gone.
II
Amala
On the third and final night of November’s full moon, I let Jana see me change. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.
She’s right. She’s been right all along. She asked me why I hid the wolf that is a part of me when I was so adamant that she should be proud of every aspect of herself. I’ve felt like a massive hypocrite ever since.
I explained to her that I am still me, no matter which form I am in. Well, mostly. The wolf has only the capacity of a wolf. She never once had fear in her eyes as she listened or as the moon took hold over me and I shifted.
In the morning, Jana was still there. I was relieved to find her beside me in bed when I woke, human again. She didn’t leave; she didn’t even leave the room.
She was still asleep, and it was still early. I slipped under the covers with her and rolled onto my side to face her.
She lay on her front, half of her face mashed into a pillow and her arms both folded beneath it. Her coppery orange hair was a mess around her, but the morning sun filtered through the blinds and set the colour ablaze. Jana always frowns when she sleeps, brows knitted together like she’s concentrating. It’s one of my favourite things.
I cuddled up close to her before I started to doze off again.
Now that Jana knows, I picture us together like that in the mornings, years from now. I want to wake up next to her every morning. I want to wake up next to her after a wolf night and feel normal. I want to grow old seeing the adoration she gets in her eyes every time she sees me. I want to grow old loving her. And then, I think, I can be okay with being me.
Falling asleep next to Jana, who was still here, I thought that even if my mother never finds a cure, I can live like this.
It’s a good thing, because for the first time, I have little hope for my mother’s work. I suppose it had to happen eventually, but Jasper and Cal have posed a problem, and I don’t think Mum will be able to work her way past it. I don’t think there is an answer.
Not only did Cal prove the cure so far to be ineffective, but Jasper’s bloodwork also shook my mother’s research down to its foundation. Years ago, she was able to isolate the genetic variation that made wolves possible – the structure that set us apart from regular humans. She identified a single gene that could affect the body like any other chromosome and mutate and infect a new host like a virus.
Thanks to just one blood sample from Jasper, we know she was mistaken. She has now identified a compact group of many sequences, masquerading as one and virtually inseparable in a way she couldn’t recognize before. She thinks that acting as one structure allows it to travel as one to a new wolf when infected.
Of these many different structures, Mum’s at least been able to identify a few of their functions. The first, named CLD1 in her notes, has no active role aside from carrying genetic information and coding.
The second, CLD2, interferes with the body’s chemical and hormonal levels. It, in turn, allows for the transformation of the physical form when triggered by the moon, an external stimulus that Mum still doesn’t entirely understand. Mechanics aside, she knows that the genes react to the moon and change the body in response.
A third, LYC, functions solely as a carrier from one person to the next in the case of a bite, mimicking a virus in its jump from host to host but taking the rest of the identified wolf genes with it.
CLD3, the final one Mum can identify now, has a function unlike anything else she’s ever seen. It’s responsible for the elusive connection between wolves. She might be more confident if she asked Cal back into the lab to study her and Jasper side by side. Still, Mum believes, based on how this last structure is so intertwined with others, that it responds in a very distinct way between biological siblings, taking signals from each other and any shared genetic material. If she had the means to look into it further, she hypothesizes that this specific molecular structure is linked profoundly with areas of the brain associated with perception and language. That would explain the link between Cal and Jasper and the near-telepathic ability it bestows upon them. It may function similarly in response to signals from the parent for the same reason in situations like Asa’s and Cal’s, rendering them at the mercy of the parent’s will once they’ve been infected.
It’s fascinating, but it all nods toward Mum being far from developing a functional cure.
It’s no longer as simple as one genetic marker that Cal and Asa and Matthew and my uncle and I have that others don’t. Jasper has the exact same thing, but the wolf genes are primarily dormant in him. Mum calls him Wolf-Born – he seems to have inherited the DNA like the other genes he got from his parents, but it was never activated and doesn’t cause him to change because he wasn’t infected.
Jasper provided a breakthrough, and Mum has done a truly astounding amount of work since he came to see her. In a matter of days, she’s got more answers and new information than she’s been able to gather in the last few years. A fire has been lit under her again. When she’s not working at her actual clinic, she’s poring over her notes in the garage.
But the conclusion she seems stuck on now, thanks to all this new information, is that she has no clue how to target and neutralize the wolf genes altogether. No matter what she tries, going back to previous versions of the cure and testing variations of the newest one, nothing works. She can weaken the activity of the CLD genes two and three, suppressing transformations and other effects on the body. But after just a short amount of time, they reject the cure and recover themselves. Nothing she tries seems to affect the first one: nothing damages the wolf coding that holds the rest together. She can’t even find a way to eliminate or weaken the LYC virus-mimicking molecules to prevent the further spread of infection.
Because that’s the thing: it’s not a virus. It’s not bacteria or a disease or a parasite. It isn’t a curse or a spell. How do you cure something if you don’t even know what it is?
She throws herself into her research regardless, even when my father tries to lure her out of the garage to sit down for dinner. Even when he asks if she’s coming to bed. She works as if she’s close to finding her answer, as if just one more test will lead her to the cure she’s been trying to find for nearly a decade.
I’m not so fooled by the exciting influx of new data. I know what it means. I have to be okay with being a wolf, because it’s not going to go away.
III
Accalia
No change of scenery can stop the nightmares now that I know how close Hallam is. Hanging around with Jasper is helpful as much as it makes things worse. Knowing that we’re both safe and unharmed in the same space is a reminder that Hallam hasn’t found us yet and that we got away from him last time, but waking up in the dark on the couch across from Jasper after falling asleep in the living room sends me right back to the basement. We’re both struggling to find balance. Since most of our relationship has been shadowed by trauma and suffering, it’s difficult for both of us to decide whether the other is a reminder of pain or of safety.
I’ve been floating in and out of a broken sleep all night, having first startled awake when I heard Jasper move on the other couch. This is the second night I’ve been stuck sleeping over because everyone is too busy to drive me home by the time it gets late. Last night he slept in his bedroom, but he didn’t make it that far earlier tonight and scared the ever-living fuck out of me when I saw him in the shadows across the room. I haven’t been able to go back to sleep properly since.
Every time I doze off, something horrific pops up to meet me. My mind turns the shadows cast across the living room by the bushes outside into figures. Between blinks, one of them becomes Hallam. My heart pounds, and as adrenaline wakes me up, the illusion disappears. I close my eyes again, and I look down at my broken body, blood pooling on the floor.
I sit up and scrub at my eyes, giving up on sleep entirely.
And then, even with my eyes open, I see more nightmarish visions. Except this time, they aren’t mine. Jasper is sound asleep on the other couch, unconsciously shoving his bad dream into my head. I huff, frustrated and unable to catch a break, and wait for it to stop. I’m only as patient as it takes to watch Jasper shoved down and force-fed pill after pill after pill before I take a pillow from the end of the couch and throw it at him.
The vision stops as soon as the cushion hits him in the head, and he groans, rolls over. We’re a disaster. He goes right back to sleep, but he doesn’t push any more of his dreams into my head. I give up on pretending I’ll get any rest and get up from the couch to snoop around.
Photos and other junk cover the walls and shelves and mantle. I find pictures of Emma from infancy all the way up to more recent photos. There are some of Jasper, too, when he was little. Clearly, he has been less friendly with cameras since puberty. I only spot one picture of him, framed in the hallway, taken in the last year or so. Every vase in the house – some holding real flowers, some fake, dusty plants, some sitting empty – is clearly the product of a young kid’s craft. There are surely too many for them all to have been made by Emma. I wonder which ones Jasper fingerpainted all over, years ago.
The hallway is lined with family portraits of Jasper’s family, and extended family I don’t know, as well as other, less staged, pictures. The stove light is on in the kitchen, and it lights the hallway just well enough for me to make out the photographs. I stop wandering when I spot a little blond boy in one of the pictures.
Matthew is the only one looking at the camera, and he only looks to be about seven, here. The photo was taken at a lake somewhere, and Matt’s eyes are squinted nearly closed against the sun. He’s got a big grin on his face, showing off his missing front teeth. Fishing rods rest on the ground in the background, and Matthew holds up a fish the size of his torso, gripping onto it with his whole fist instead of a thumb hooked on its mouth. Beside him, his dad is laughing, watching him and ready to catch the fish if he drops it. On Matt’s other side, a little Jasper stares at him and his fish with a horrified look on his face. Dustin has a hand on Jasper’s shoulder and cringes at Matt’s catch in a similar manner.
I can’t help but smile at the photo while I turn away to look at others. Instead, at the end of the hallway, I find the shadowy figure of a man. I jump, throwing my hands up in front of my face as if they’ll protect me. My heart pounds in my chest, and the dim hallway gets darker at the edges of my vision.
No.
He found me.
I don’t want to go back.
“Hey, calm down, it’s alright,” says a gruff voice.
Not Hallam, I tell myself. It isn’t Hallam. I try and fail to steady my breathing.
“Calia? Relax.”
