Slowly, Malik sighed, lifting a hand to drag it through his hair. “I could explain,” he stated slowly, “but you wouldn’t believe it if all I did was tell you. So, come with me.” He crooked two fingers and turned away, heading towards the basement stairs.
Curiosity compelling her, Ainslie fell into step behind him.
She hadn’t been in the basement before that point. Not because she wasn’t allowed, but simply because from the limited amount she had heard about it, there was simply not much for her to do down there. The laundry room was behind the main floor bathroom, so it wasn’t as if she needed to go into the basement for that, and the weight room held little appeal for her.
To Ainslie’s bemusement, Malik walked through the weight room without pausing, instead heading out into the garage through the basement entrance.
Ainslie had been in the garage, of course, and it was with confusion that she followed. She didn’t recall there being anything particularly outlandish or amazing or… skill-based in there.
“Face the door,” Malik instructed, gesturing loosely with one hand for Ainslie to turn around.
As soon as she obeyed the command, her back to Malik as she faced the door they had just walked through, she heard the sound of fabric rustling. Slightly alarmed, she whipped back around, just in time to see Malik lose the last of his clothing and change shapes entirely.
Where Malik had been standing just an instant before, there was instead a bear. A black bear. Larger than normal, though still nothing truly enormous (at least not by the standards of a bear). Ainslie gaped for a second as the situation processed, before she squealed in alarm and began backing towards the door to the basement, only to forcibly come to a halt when she tripped over Lily’s skateboard and landed on her ass on the concrete floor.
Malik—for she had no choice but to assume the bear was still Malik—rolled his eyes and sat down on the floor. He watched Ainslie placidly while she gaped at him.
Cautiously, the door opened and Lily poked her head out, presumably to see what the shrieking and clattering that had apparently woken her up had been about. Utterly calm and unalarmed, she regarded the bear for a moment. “Oh,” she offered after a moment, as if she was simply observing that it had started to rain. “Are we showing her that now?”
She asked the question so calmly that Ainslie almost wanted to demand to know if they were, in fact, both looking at the same sight. Such things were rather antithetical to her role as a caregiver, though, so she wisely bit her tongue.
Malik shrugged in a manner that Ainslie had previously assumed bears were incapable of, and the fact that the gesture seemed slightly helpless did not make it any less absurd just then.
He jerked his muzzle towards the door expectantly, and with a sigh and a roll of her eyes, Lily disappeared back into the basement, the door clicking closed once again.
For a few more seconds, nothing else happened. Finally, Malik jerked his head expectantly towards the wall. Ainslie didn’t speak bear or pantomime, but considering he had told her to turn around earlier, she was pretty comfortable in assuming that was what he wanted just then, as well.
Not quite trusting herself to stay on her feet if she stood back up, she instead simply covered her eyes with both hands and let her chin dip towards her chest. After a moment she could hear fabric rustling again, but with no proof of whether or not Malik had actually transformed or not, she kept her eyes covered until she heard him say, “Alright.”
She peeked through her fingers first, as if she still expected him to be a bear when she looked, regardless of the fact that she heard him speak and he hadn’t seemed to be able to do that while he was a bear.
Seeing him once again looking like a human being and fully dressed, Ainslie let her hands fall away from her face, landing in her lap. It took a few more seconds before she risked getting back to her feet.
When Malik gestured for her to follow him back into the house, she fell into step behind him after only a second of hesitation.
He led her back up the basement stairs and into the den, where he motioned for her to wait before he left the room once again. Ainslie sat down in an armchair and stared at the carpet as she tried to figure out whether she was dreaming or not.
By the time Malik came back with two mugs of coffee, Ainslie had come to the decision that she was not dreaming and she was not hallucinating. Slowly, she accepted the mug that he handed to her and stared into it rather than taking a sip.
“I’m a were-bear,” Malik stated eventually, before he paused to sip his coffee. “My wife was a wolf,” he added.
“So the girls can…” Ainslie trailed off as she tried to think of the word she wanted to use. “Change,” she finally settled on.
“Lily and Paisley can,” Malik confirmed. “Lily is a bear, like me. Paisley takes after her mother. Only one of my wife’s parents is a were-wolf,” he continued. “Her father is a regular human. So as unlikely as it seemed, it… skipped a generation, I guess, in Andy’s case.” One shoulder rose in a lackluster shrug. “Considering her parentage, I don’t know if she really qualifies as fully human, but she isn’t a were-animal.”
Suddenly, everything Andy had been talking about made a great deal more sense. After a moment longer of staring into her coffee, Ainslie finally took a gulp of it, swallowed, and observed, “She said her grandparents kept telling her to give it time, but if Paisley and Lily are already confirmed were-animals, it doesn’t sound like it’s a… puberty thing, or whatever.”
Malik sighed quietly and turned his mug back and forth in his hands. “More often than not, we know from close to birth. Lily’s first full moon was two weeks after she was born, and she changed. Paisley’s first full moon was just shy of a month after she was born, and she changed. But sometimes, there are late bloomers. Were-animals who don’t have their first change until puberty, like you said. But while that’s not unheard of, generally it happens at the beginning of puberty.”
“So if it was going to happen for Andy,” Ainslie mused slowly, “it would have happened by now.”
Malik nodded once, stiffly. “She knows that. She’s known that for a while. Her grandparents keep insisting that there might still be a chance, though, and it feels like they’re trying to get her hopes up for no reason by now. It’s… caused a bit of a disruption,” he finished awkwardly.
Ainslie cleared her throat. “I noticed.”
“She doesn’t really like to talk about it, usually,” Malik carried on, eying Ainslie thoughtfully. “How did you get her to say anything about it?”
Ainslie shrugged nonchalantly. “I let her decide if she was comfortable telling me. As it turns out, paying a little bit of attention and letting someone know you think they’re special even as a regular human does a lot to make someone comfortable.”
Holding his mug in one hand, Malik glanced aside and rubbed the back of his neck. “I suppose Andy does fall by the wayside, now and then,” he admitted reluctantly. “She just… always seems to have a handle on herself, and Lily only just stopped accidentally transforming if she’s too badly startled. I’m honestly amazed that you haven’t seen Paisley transform, considering she only barely understands the concept of secrecy.”
“So I’m going to go out on a limb and assume Evey was aware,” Ainslie guessed, her tone dry.
Malik huffed out something like a quiet laugh against the rim of his mug. “Not at first, but she figured it out pretty quickly.”
“I guess you’re two for two, then,” Ainslie observed.
“You’re planning on sticking around, then?” he asked slowly, his tone cautious.
Ainslie sighed slowly and busied herself with her coffee for a few seconds before she answered. “I’m sticking around,” she replied. “I’d be a pretty poor nanny if I decided to pack up and run.”
*
Andy was sitting on the stairs when Ainslie stepped out of the den. She jerked to a halt, startled at the sight of her. Andy looked conflicted, like she was searching for the words even when she wasn’t sure she knew what she wanted to say.
Ainslie beat her to the punch. She didn’t mention anything about wolves or bears or anything like that. She didn’t say a word about were-animals. Instead, all she asked was, “Can you play another song for me later?”
Andy blinked slowly a few times, as if the rug had been ripped out from beneath her and she was trying to reorient herself. Finally, she smiled just the slightest bit. “Yeah, sure,” she agreed, before she levered herself back to her feet ad made her way back up the stairs.
If Ainslie expected that to be all that would happen that day, though, she was incredibly mistaken. Slowly, Lily peeked out of the family room, her fingers curled around the doorframe and her chin perched against her knuckles.
“So, you know now?” she asked cautiously, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“That’s right,” Ainslie replied, nodding once.
Lily glanced off to the one side and chewed at her lip for a few seconds, before she asked, “Do you want to see?”
Slowly, Ainslie nodded. She was pretty sure she was going to freak out later once she had some privacy in her bedroom, but for the moment, she was calm, and she may as well use that calm to the best of her abilities.
Lily grinned hesitantly and gestured for Ainslie to follow her up the stairs. Dutifully, Ainslie followed and waited outside Lily’s bedroom until a bear, small but not quite small enough to be sure she still counted as a cub, wandered out of the room. She sat down heavily on the rug in the hallway, nearly sitting on Ainslie’s feet as she stared up at her.
She was fuzzy. Which seemed rather obvious, considering she was a bear, but she was fluffier than Malik had been. And her ears were fluffy. And even if Ainslie wasn’t unsure whether or not she qualified as a cub or an adolescent, there was still something distinctly teddy bear-ish about her face.
She was adorable, and Ainslie was crouching down to scratch the top of her head before she could contain herself.
If Lily objected, she showed no sign of it, instead simply sitting and letting Ainslie scratch her head for a moment before she stood up and lumbered away. She moseyed back towards the stairs, and Ainslie watched her thump her way down them, her back end bouncing with each step.
Unsure of where exactly she was going, Ainslie followed her down the stairs. She was only halfway down when Lily made it to the bottom and disappeared into the family room, and Ainslie heard an odd grumbling noise that she supposed was Lily. Seconds later, Paisley squealed fit to shatter glass, and just as Ainslie’s feet touched the ground floor, her shoes were being accosted by a grey-brown wolf pup.
Paisley consisted of about eighty-seven percent legs and her ears weren’t quite standing up straight yet, and her tail still resembled a large pipe cleaner more than it resembled an actual tail.
She was adorable, and she wiggled and yapped in delight as Ainslie’s scooped her up and cradled her, because evidently all of her self-control had gone right out the window, as if she was back in grade school and being presented with her first kitten.
She sat down on the stairs and Lily joined them, sitting down heavily once again and resting her chin on Ainslie’s knee.
Being able to show people what they were, rather than hiding it, was apparently rather important to them. As strange as it was, and even if she was pretty sure she was still going to have some sort of freak-out about it later that night, Ainslie was glad to know.
Even with the excitement of being able to show a new person what they could do, the fact still remained that it had probably been a very busy night and they were still tired. Before long, Ainslie found herself in the unexpected position of needing to carry a small bear and a wolf cub to the couch, as both of them had fallen asleep on her.
She folded Paisley’s quickly discarded clothes and left them in a pile on the side table before she turned to make her way back up the stairs.
*
Andy’s bed was a complicated combination of bunk bed and futon, with the actual mattress up top and something like a stunted couch built into the lower portion of the frame. Like the rest of the room, it was in various shades of black and neon, and Ainslie was half convinced that once she stood up from her place on the couch, she was going to be glowing.
If nothing else, it would be an interesting story to explain to Carrie.
As Ainslie watched, Andy dug through a box on her desk, pulling sheets out, scrutinizing them carefully, and then shoving them aside as if they had done something to personally offend her. Until, finally, she proclaimed, “Yes!” and emerged with a page of sheet music. Setting it down on her desk, she fetched her guitar from its case in the corner and returned to stand in front of the futon.
Bashful suddenly, she fussed with the tuning for a moment longer than was strictly necessary before her expression hardened as she steeled herself. She glanced over the sheet briefly, refreshing her memory of what she was about to play, before she took a breath, closed her eyes, and began to strum.
As before, it wasn’t a particularly complex song, and nor was it particularly long. It had a simple, drifting melody, accented pleasantly a few times as Andy started humming under her breath unconsciously.
It was a soft and soothing song, reminiscent of a lullaby, but with a strangely determined undertone. Ainslie found herself smiling without any conscious thought.
Slowly, the song began to trickle off, as if it had been given a few bars just to let it say goodbye, until Andy strummed the last note and opened her eyes once again.
For a moment, neither of them said anything as Andy watched Ainslie expectantly, fingers tapping at the strings and making them vibrate so it seemed as if the room was humming to itself.
Slowly, Ainslie broke into a grin and offered an enthusiastic, “That was beautiful,” and Andy’s shoulders sagged with something like relief, though her fingers continued to tap anxiously at the strings. “It was even better than yesterday,” Ainslie continued, her tone earnest as she leaned forward at the edge of the futon.
“What made you decide to play?” she wondered curiously, after Andy’s fingers finally stilled on the strings and the last note slowly faded.
Andy shrugged and plucked the nail of one thumb absentmindedly against one of the guitar strings. “Don’t know,” she mumbled, in a tone that implied she didn’t think it particularly mattered. “Guess I just wanted to do something that would make me special,” she added, voice dropping until it was hardly even audible anymore. “Not sure it really worked.”
Ainslie could feel her heart crack in her chest.
“Who said you aren’t special?” she wondered seriously, ducking her head just enough to meet Andy’s eyes.
“No one really needed to say it,” Andy returned, as she shrugged one shoulder and scuffed the heel of one shoe against her rug, as if the braided strands had somehow displeased her. “I just sort of figured it out on my own. Anyone can learn how to play a guitar or a ukulele,” she mumbled, before she turned away to return her guitar to its case again, putting her back to Ainslie.
Ainslie’s mouth twisted in displeasure and her brow furrowed as she thought. Slowly, she wondered, “Are you sure?” as she tipped her head to one side. “I mean, it’s something you still had to learn how to do,” she pointed out. “Did your sisters actually need to learn how to transform?”
“No,” Andy replied, glancing over her shoulder. She looked perplexed. “It’s just part of who they are. Just sort of… happened during their first full moons.”
Ainslie couldn’t help but to wonder what those first full moons had been like for Andy. She only would have been four when it happened with Lily, but she still would have been old enough to know it was something she couldn’t do, and it would have hit all the harder when she was nine and Paisley changed for the first time.
“So what makes it so special?” Ainslie challenged. “Because it’s rare? Your music is something you’ve had to learn yourself. It’s something you had to give to yourself. It belongs to you way more than their ability to transform belongs to them.”
Slowly, Andy turned back around, staring at the wall just past the top of her guitar case, her hands lax at her sides. “I guess I never thought about it like that before,” she admitted eventually, and she sounded as if she was far away.
Ainslie got to her feet, straightening her shirt as she did. It sounded like she had given Andy something to think about.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” Ainslie offered as she made her way to the door.
Stuttering back into motion to finish latching the guitar case, Andy nodded once, the motion quick and jerky. “Right,” she agreed, still sounding like she was somewhere far off in the distance. “See you at dinner.”
Ainslie closed the door quietly as she stepped out into the hallway.
*
Dinner that night was quiet. Lily and Paisley were still tired and Malik seemed distracted by the day’s events. And Andy, though slightly less sullen, hadn’t turned into a cheerful chatterbox because a single conversation gave her something to think about.
Even so, it was a good meal.
Malik pulled Ainslie aside afterwards, wondering cautiously, “You’re sure everything is alright, then? I don’t need to open up an ad for another nanny?”
“Everything is alright,” Ainslie confirmed, and she didn’t even have to think before she said it. Everything really was more or less alright, even if it all seemed a little surreal, still. She could adapt. Everything would be fine.
*
Christopher wasn’t in Ainslie’s bedroom that night. Andy’s door was open a crack, so she supposed that was where Christopher was. Despite herself, she was slightly disappointed.
She sprawled out on her back on the bed, headphones over her ears as music played from her laptop. The girls had gone to bed already and Malik was in the den, either working late or sleeping on his desk. Ainslie had caught him doing both. The night was quiet, and Ainslie pondered the merits of having a freak-out about the events of the day, only to come up curiously, bizarrely blank.
She couldn’t say she wanted to have any sort of freak-out, but more that it just felt like the natural conclusion to the day. But it just wasn’t happening.
True, she had a lot to think about, but she felt no urge to lose her head about it. Instead, she felt… fine. Maybe that on its own should have concerned her. After all, she had learned that her employer and his entire family could turn into wild animals.
But they hadn’t seemed like wild animals, and that was the crux of it. Malik had still been politely long-suffering, even shaped like a bear. Lily and Paisley had still been excitable and friendly. Even shaped like animals, they had still seemed like themselves.
So maybe it was just… okay. Not normal—there was nothing normal about the situation Ainslie had found herself in—but something didn’t have to be normal to be okay, and it wasn’t as if Ainslie felt like some huge change had taken place. She didn’t feel as if she was in any danger. She didn’t feel as if the world had stopped spinning and flung her out into space. She didn’t even feel particularly shocked. Considering how much humanity as a whole still didn’t know about the world, it didn’t exactly strike Ainslie as a huge surprise that something with human intelligence and the ability to seamlessly blend in could stay hidden in plain sight.
So she was pretty content in saying that maybe everything was just okay. Maybe everything really would be fine, regardless of the circumstances.
With a slow sigh, she paused her music, tugged her headphones off, and rolled over onto her belly. She crossed one arm beneath her and leaned her chin on her forearm, and with her other hand she groped about towards the nightstand until her fingers brushed her phone. She scooted it closer and grabbed it, pulling it over until she could dial in Carrie’s phone number.
It rang twice before Carrie picked up, lamenting melodramatically, “So am I doomed to never have a conversation with you in the daylight ever again?”
“In order to do that, I would need to take my eyes off of the kids,” Ainslie pointed out dryly. “If you spent any time around children, you would know that’s a fatal mistake.”
“Pretty sure you’re overstating things a bit,” Carrie returned dubiously. Her exposure to small children was limited to occasionally interacting with them at work if her clients happened to have any, and even then, it was only very briefly.
“No, no, it’s the truth,” Ainslie insisted. “You look away for too long and they go straight for the throat.”
There was a beat, and then a flat, “Uh huh, that sounds like fun.” Carrie cleared her throat. “What sort of adventures happened in the dollhouse this weekend?”
“Surprisingly few,” Ainslie returned smoothly, rolling over onto her back once again. She picked her head up enough to shoot her laptop a glare when she smacked it with her toes. “I took Andy—she’s the oldest girl—to that music fest in the city yesterday and today everybody bummed around the house.”
“The life of the rich and influential,” Carrie sighed loftily. “Never a dull moment.”
“To be fair,” Ainslie returned, “I do spend most of my time with a three-year-old girl.”
The noise that came from Carrie’s end of the phone was somewhere between a groan and a whine, and while Ainslie had no way to tell, she was reasonably sure it was because Carrie was shuddering as melodramatically as she could.
“Uncultured beasts,” Carrie stated, though there was remarkably little ill will in her tone despite the words. “I don’t know how you put up with them.”
“Well, someone has to,” Ainslie returned reasonably, “or else none of them would ever get a chance to grow up into cultured beasts.”
“I’m not sure anyone ever actually does,” Carrie laughed. “Anyway, was there a point to this call or did you just miss my sweet, soothing voice?”
Ainslie huffed out a breath, as if she was so terribly wounded by the question. “What, I’m not allowed to call my friends just to talk to them?”
“You could go talk to your super-hot employer,” Carrie suggested, her tone sly, as if she thought she was being so sneaky or so subtle.
Ainslie rolled her eyes. “About what?” she drawled, her tone dry. “My complete lack of propriety or professionalism?”
Carrie scoffed. “Both of those words sound stuffy and like they should be ignored,” she supplied helpfully. “You’re raising his kids,” she added, feigning an innocent tone with only limited success. “You may as well be ‘Mom’ anyway.”
With a drawn-out sigh, Ainslie stated, “That’s not how that works and you know it.”
With a huff, Carrie retorted, “Only because you won’t let it work that way.” She sounded so very matter-of-fact, as if she had all the answers to everything and was happy to share them, if only people would just listen to her wisdom.
Luckily, Ainslie was smart enough to know that Carrie tended not to have anything close to wisdom, unless she was explaining how to get out of trouble for something or how to enact petty revenge. Not that Ainslie was going to malign those skills; she had used both of them in the past on numerous occasions, and she wasn’t the sort to pretend she was pure and faultless at all times.
“Uh huh, yeah, it’s definitely because I’m too much of a square to want to ruin my job,” Ainslie returned, tone a deadpan. “You know that will go badly if it doesn’t work out.”
“But it could be pretty great if it does work out,” Carrie argued casually. For a moment, Ainslie couldn’t help but to wonder just how many times Carrie had attempted to seduce her clients in the past and just how many times it had apparently been successful, for her attitude to be quite so blasé about it. Only for a moment, though, before she decided that wasn’t really a topic she wanted to linger on.
With a drawn-out groan, Ainslie asked, “Why are you so hung up on this? You have your own boyfriend. You don’t need to live vicariously through my sex life or anything like that.”
Carrie made a wounded noise, too high-pitched and overwrought to be taken seriously. (Besides, Ainslie wasn’t convinced it was possible to hurt Carrie’s feelings.) “So touchy. I’m just trying to encourage you to live a little. Is that really so awful?”
“Your encouragement could get me fired,” Ainslie reminded her wryly, adopting the overly patient tone of a kindergarten teacher attempting to explain that yes, the water was wet, it was always going to be wet, that was just what water was. “I think you’re missing that point.”
“I’m just saying,” Carrie wheedled, trying and failing to sound innocent, “that it might be worth the risk.” Truth be told, she had never been any good at sounding innocent. Ainslie suspected that was because ‘innocent’ and ‘Carrie’ were basically opposites of each other, much like red and green on a color wheel.
With a sigh and a shake of her head, Ainslie decided, “I’m suddenly, inexplicably exhausted and need to go sleep immediately.”
Carrie snorted out a laugh, and her tone was knowing as she replied. “Uh huh, yeah. Sure. You do that, then. I’ll talk to you whenever.” It was her typical sign off. “Whenever.” Online, on the phone, even in person, it was always just “whenever,” Carrie liked to leave her options open. Ainslie maintained that she was afraid of commitment. Carrie never actually disagreed with Ainslie’s assessment.
With one more goodbye, Ainslie hung up the phone and tossed it towards her pillow.
Carrie was ridiculous. She knew that. Endearingly so, most of the time, but she could be a bit of a handful from time to time.
Despite that, the thought was pretty firmly lodged in Ainslie’s head after that. Malik was very attractive, and he seemed to be a gentleman as far as Ainslie could tell. He wasn’t exactly fully human, but so far that had hardly even caused any disruption, so it didn’t really seem like a problem. (Admittedly, that on its own it was a strange thought, and Ainslie was self-aware enough to acknowledge that.) And he was single. True, Ainslie knew he had been married and that his wife had died, but nothing he had said or done had implied that he was still pining after his late wife.
When it was laid out like that, Carrie’s idea sounded deceptively harmless.
With a groan, Ainslie groped about for her pillow and dragged it over her face, until she shoved it aside only a few seconds later and rolled over, instead burying her face against it. She grumbled under her breath for a few moments and battered one fist halfheartedly against the pillow, before she went limp, arms draped loosely over the pillow on either side of her head.
She should have known better than to mention to Carrie that her employer was hot. Oh, sure, even if she had never brought it up, Ainslie would still have been aware that Malik was nice to look at, and she would still have most likely daydreamed about what it would be like to kiss him, among other things. But it would have been something she could laugh at. It wouldn’t have been something that seemed quite so tempting.
With a drawn-out sigh, she stretched a leg out to close her laptop with her toes and then dragged her blanket over herself. She rolled onto her side and curled up, tugging the blanket over her head.
It took longer than she thought it would to fall asleep that night, and when she managed it, her dreams were odd, to say the least.
She dreamed of a wolf and a bear frisking in circles around her while music played far off in the distance, getting softer and sadder as it got farther and farther away, even as Ainslie tried to follow it without tripping over the wolf or the bear.
When she woke up the next morning, she felt strangely unsettled and she wasn’t even sure why. It hadn’t been a bad dream. Nothing bad had happened to her. It was as if someone had taken a running nightmare and stripped away the danger and foreboding. All the same, though, it left her feeling out of sorts.
As she showered and got dressed, she did her best to put it out of her thoughts, so she could function just like normal as she woke the girls and headed down the stairs to begin the day.