Chapter 2
It was light outside when I woke. Huh, I reckoned I wasn’t dead after all. I took in a deep breath and sighed in disappointment. I couldn’t even manage to die right.
“Ethan?”
Was that my sister’s voice calling to me?
“Ethan?”
She sounded panicked.
“Ethan! Are you out here?”
Out here? Out where? I blinked and looked around. I was alone in the same dingy alley from the previous night.
“Please, please, you have to be here. You just have to… Ethan!” she screamed.
Yeah, I was there. The question was, what was Crissy doing there? A female shouldn’t be off pack lands at all, let alone by herself. Not that I was following the rules any better. At twenty, I had no right leaving pack lands either. None of us should have been out there. But my pack mates had been looking for glory. And I had been looking for… I sighed again. I had been looking for something I’d never find. There was no honor in a shifter who couldn’t shift. Not even an honorable death, apparently. Why hadn’t the bloodsuckers killed me?
I climbed to my feet, ready to respond to my sister’s cries, when I noticed that my perception was catawampus. Everything seemed higher…or I seemed shorter. I mean, I wasn’t a big guy on my best day, but this was… Were those paws? I lifted my right hand, and sure enough, that there was a paw. A quick check of my left showed the same situation. I had paws. That meant I had shifted, right? I’d shifted!
If I had been in my human form, I would have cried from the joy of it. I was happier than a puppy with two peters, so I started yipping and hopping toward Crissy’s voice. She was going to be so proud of me. My whole family would, of course. It’d been hard on them, I knew, having a cub who had never shifted, who could barely run without passing out, who was weaker at twenty than he had been at eight. But they’d stood by me, finding pleased looks to send my way and words of praise for whatever insignificant accomplishment I’d mustered.
My sister was different, though. Her expressions were never forced, her pride never put-on. She had always loved me just as I was. So much so that she had made me find a way to love myself.
“Ethan? Is that you?” Crissy was staring at me, wide-eyed. I ran to her and jumped up, hitting her thighs with my paws. “Oh praise the Lord, it is. Ethan, you—” Her eyes were suddenly wet. “You shifted.” She plopped down on the ground, right there in that filthy alley, not caring that her long flowered skirt was going to get stained, and wrapped her arms around my neck, her tears dripping onto my fur.
My fur. God, it felt weird to think it. I had fur! Finally.
“When you didn’t come home last night, we was so scared, and then those no ’count fools confessed what y’all had done. They said you was de—” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter what they said. Look at you! You’re a wolf. A beautiful brown wolf.”
She petted my flank and I licked her face. My tail was wagging like one of those dogs the bloodsucker had accused me of being. I didn’t care one bit. Something had finally gone right. I was finally right.
“Let’s go home. Mama and Pop are fit to be tied. They’re talkin’ to the Alpha now, gettin’ permission to put together a search party.”
We both knew they’d still be trying to get that permission when we got home. The Alpha wasn’t going to take up anyone’s time to look for me. He was probably dancing a jig thinking I was finally gone. After all, a pack was only as strong as its weakest member, and I’d been considered the weak link since puberty hit and I still hadn’t shifted. But all that had changed now. I would no longer be a source of shame for my family. The relief was freeing beyond anything I’d known.
“I don’t know what all y’all were thinkin’, Ethan,” my sister said as we started the long trek out of Kfarkattan and back to the woods that held our home. “Sneakin’ away at night to go to townie bars.”
I wasn’t surprised the other guys had lied to the pack about what we’d been doing. Going into town to go to bars and being attacked by vampires was one thing. If the elders knew we’d searched out the bloodsuckers and instigated the fight, we’d all be in line for a whupping from our folks.
“When I was your age, we used to have boondockers in the woods,” Crissy continued her lecture. “Next time y’all want to drink, let me know. I’ll buy some beer and y’all can stay on pack lands to drink it. Nobody has to know.” She shook her head. “Comin’ to the bars in Kfarkattan is right dangerous. Especially now with all them bloodsuckers around. Y’all are lucky they didn’t kill you.”
True enough. I’d never felt more lucky. After all, I could shift now. And I didn’t hurt. My heart no longer felt like it was too big for my chest. My skin no longer ached like it had been stretched too tight. Even the scabs from where the bloodsucker had clawed me didn’t bother me all that much. I assumed the shift had helped speed up the healing. Yup, I was one lucky shifter.
The walk home took two hours, same as the walk into town. But on the way there, I’d barely kept up with the other boys. My heart had been pounding in my chest. My swollen limbs had protested every movement. Now, though? Now I was trotting alongside my sister, enjoying the feel of the cool morning breeze ruffling my fur and blowing against my snout.
Crissy had been quiet for a while, so I glanced up and saw her looking down at me with wet eyes. “I’m happy for you, Ethan.” She wiped her hand across the corner of her eye. “Not because there was anythin’ wrong with you before, mind,” she added firmly. “But because I know how much you wanted—” She paused, presumably trying to come up with the right words to finish that sentence: how much I wanted to be normal, how much I wanted to stop being a stress to my family, how much I wanted to stop shaming my pack. “How much you wanted to fit in, how much you dislike being different.”
I rubbed my head against her leg in a loving gesture, and she reached down and tangled her fingers in my scruff. We walked together in silence. She reached down and petted me every so often. It was peaceful, just the two of us together, and I remembered that even before I’d shifted, I’d been lucky for at least one reason: I had Crissy for a sister. We were deep in the woods, steps away from our parents’ den, when she spoke again.
“Just remember, little brother, whatever happens, different ain’t bad.” She stopped walking, so I halted too, and tilted my head to the side, looking up at her in question. “You’re special, Ethan.” She said the words I’d heard from her lips countless times during my childhood. “Those other boys are fine. If you want to be friends with them, that’s okay. Just remember, they’re here now, but they’ll be in the past soon enough. Friends will come and go every time the sun rises and sets. Kin too. All of us will be gone. Except for you. You—” She pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then she looked at me in that unique way she had, the way where her eyes became almost cloudy and it seemed like she was looking at something else, something the rest of us couldn’t see, that way my parents and her husband had told her never to do outside of our home. A cold chill washed over me, like someone done walked over my grave. “You’re special, Ethan Abbatt. You’ll save us all.”
We stood still. The familiar background noises in the forest—the birds, the wind, the rustling leaves—all of it disappeared. I looked at my sister, not understanding what her words meant. She looked through me, as if she could see more than any shifter.
Eventually she blinked and her eyes cleared, the thickness in the air dissipated, and familiar sounds surrounded us once again.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. If I had been in my human form, I would have hugged her. As it was, I yipped quietly. “Twins. These here are girls,” she added as she rubbed her hand over her belly and started walking again.
Five boys in six years. Her husband had been proud after the first one. He had strutted like a peacock after the second. After the third, he had laughed somewhat uncomfortably at the comments from his friends about his virility and masculinity. By the time the fourth had been born, Richie looked nervous and tired. I’d even overheard him telling my sister they needed to stop or at least slow down. When we were waiting in his living room while the midwife and my mama helped my sister deliver the fifth, he said a prayer that should have been too quiet for me to hear, but somehow the words had drifted over and surprised me.
“Please, Lord,” he’d begged. “Please give her a daughter.”
I’d never heard a male ask for a daughter. Sons meant strength to build homes and hunt for food, power for the pack, and warriors to fight against the bloodsuckers and shield us from the humans, or half-souls, as the pack called them. My fifth nephew had entered the world ten minutes later, healthy and pink and chubby, just like his brothers.
“Richie doesn’t believe me,” my sister said with a chuckle. “Not that he says that, mind. He just smiles and nods, but I know he thinks we’re having another boy. He’s wrong, though.” She dropped down to the ground and grinned brightly. I stopped walking. “We’re finally gettin’ our girls,” she whispered. And then she threw her arms around me and squeezed tightly, the hug feeling familiar even though my body wasn’t.
“Crissy?” Richie’s voice rang out. “Is that you?”
“Right here, Richie,” my sister responded as she stood.
The door to my parents’ house slammed, as if he’d let it go without taking the time to close it. I heard his heavy, fast footsteps and knew he was running toward us.
“Oh, Lord, Criss!” he shouted in relief as he reached us and pulled his wife into his arms, not seeming to notice me on the ground. “Darlin’, where you been? With everythin’ happenin’ with your brother, I reckoned you’d be helpin’ your kin. When your folks done said they hadn’t seen you in hours, I near about lost my mind.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek as she patted his chest. “I was helpin’. I went to find Ethan.”
“You”—he bowed up and narrowed his eyes dangerously—“you what, now?”
Not intimidated in the least, despite her husband’s significant height and weight advantage, my sister giggled. “I done brought my brother home.” She cocked her head and moved her gaze toward me.
“Are you sayin’ you went into town?” Richie raised his voice, something he rarely did when speaking to his wife. He tore his ever-present straw cowboy hat off his head and slammed it against his thigh. “Damn it all to hell, Crissy, that’s right dangerous. What in tarnation was you thinkin’ wanderin’ off pack lands?”
“Well…” She drew the word out slowly and moved her gaze from her husband to me again. “I figured I’d collect Ethan and bring him on home.”
He finally followed her gaze and saw me sitting on the ground in wolf form. I yipped and raised my paw, then scratched at his knee.
“Well, boy howdy, how about that!” His anger disappeared at the sight of my wolf, and he bent down and patted my head. “Way to go, Ethan! We knew you could do it.”
No, they hadn’t. Hoped, sure enough. But knew? Nope. At twenty, I was a good decade older than even the slowest male shifter was when he first took wolf form. Nobody, not even me, had expected me to be able to shift by that point. And because I got weaker year after year, I was pretty sure they all expected me to pass young. Well, all of them except Crissy.
Thinking of my sister’s unwavering loyalty and support had me changing back into my human form. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close, resting my forehead against hers. We were the same height, not because Crissy was particularly tall, but because I was knee-high to a grasshopper. She’d always told me that made me the perfect height to hug. I blinked tears out of my eyes as I thought of that and held her tight.
“Thank you,” I whispered roughly.
She patted my back.
“All right, y’all. I think that there’s enough of that. Ethan, I’m proud of you, now shoo.” Richie waved his hat toward my folks’ house. “Go on and get some clothes on.”
I chuckled as I pulled back from my sister’s arms and punched him in the shoulder. “You jealous, Richie?”
He shrugged and tugged on my sister’s arm until she was pressed against his side, then he draped his arm over her shoulders possessively. “Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t enjoy seein’ a man touchin’ my wife, and a naked one at that. Now get! Your folks are inside wearin’ a hole in the floor.”
“She’s my sister!” I shouted with a laugh. “That’s just nasty.” But I walked away with a strut in my step. No one had ever called me a man; no one had ever seen me as a threat to anything.
“That was nice of you,” I heard my sister whisper to her husband just as I moseyed into the house.
“Richie?” my mama called out as soon as I opened the squeaky door.
“No, it’s me, Mama,” I answered.
“Ethan!” She rushed out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel before throwing her arms around me and rocking from side to side. “Oh, my baby, my baby.”
“I’m okay, Mama,” I said. “Honest.”
She sniffled and nodded as she moved back and cupped my face between her moist palms. “Sure enough. Such a strong boy.” She took in a deep breath and then looked back over her shoulder and raised her voice. “Gerald, our boy’s home.”
My father hustled over, his brow furrowed, concern etched all over his face.
“Sorry I worried you, Pop,” I said quietly as I lowered my eyes.
“Well”—he cleared his throat—“I reckon there’s no real harm done seein’ as how you’re hale and healthy. You’re gettin’ older, and it’s natural for you to push, Ethan. And I know you spend a lot of time on your lonesome, so I was right happy to hear that you was running about with some other boys.” He paused and waited for me to look up and meet his gaze before continuing. “But you worried your mama something fierce layin’ out all night with no word. We can’t have that again.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said, and she hugged me again, still sniffling.
“Uh, son,” my father said hesitantly. “Why’re you in the altogether? Where’re your clothes?”
I gave my mama a final squeeze and stepped back.
“I’ve got news,” I said quietly. Then with a deep breath, I crouched down and called my wolf, feeling my body change until I was standing on all fours, and then looked up at my astonished parents.
My father was first to break the silence. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Oh, my,” my mama added, tears streaming freely down her face. “Would you look at that.”