Read Shiftless Online

Authors: Aimee Easterling

Tags: #Romance, #Fantasy, #Werewolves

Shiftless (3 page)

"I've found her," I said, and dropped my chin onto Melony's baby-shampoo-scented hair.  Relief never smelled so sweet.

 

 

Chapter 3

The Carrs were so exuberantly grateful for the safe return of their daughter that I was forced to pretend I had a pressing engagement elsewhere in order to escape their praise.  Drifting toward the parking lot and my fictional date, though, I stopped in my tracks when I saw my fellow park rangers gathered beneath a picnic shelter at the edge of the lot.  They were toasting each other with hot chocolate, high with the relief of having found Melony just as dark truly set in.  I knew that my co-workers would have been glad to include me in their circle, and the wolf inside me begged to join the camaraderie of even such an ephemeral pack, but I couldn't stand the thought of talking, so I slipped back into the rainy woods, retracing my footsteps instead.  Reaching a spot just outside the illuminated circle cast by the battery-powered lantern in the center of the Carr campsite, I stood in the dark and watched.

For someone who craved a pack, the family tableau unfolding inside the tent was riveting but bittersweet.  Looking in through the screen door of the dome tent, I could tell that Mr. and Mrs. Carr were unwilling to take their hands off their little girl, who had already warmed enough within their family huddle that her trauma was receding into the distance.  The three curled together on top of an air mattress, intertwined in each other's limbs, and the contact had made the mother's drawn face relax and the father's smile lines spring back to life.  The same curiosity that had pulled Melony into the woods that afternoon was in evidence as well.  As the toddler reached up toward the swaying lantern, her mother tangled the girl's hands in her own, bypassing the child's urge to leap out of bed and explore.

I could hear the murmur of loving voices, but I was just far enough away that the words themselves were a muddle of syllables, much like the patter that had flowed out of Melony's mouth as I carried her back to the campsite.  The babble of sound was familiar, though, since on many days, I felt like everyone around me was speaking another language, like it was all baby talk on the verge of being understandable.  Even in daylight, when I showed up at my job, smiled at Maddie, deflected Fred's flirting, I knew I was an outsider looking in.  Later, I would go home to a dark cabin and thaw out the soup I'd obsessively stewed on my day off and then frozen in meal-size portions.  Two cups of soup for one person, the same day after day.  I'd imagine adopting a cat or drinking myself into oblivion, but would reject both avenues of escape as too dangerous.  At last I'd crawl into bed with a book and would read myself to sleep.

My life hadn't always been so lonely.  When I was Melony's age, I'd felt the same cocoon of love that the Carr's little girl was now enjoying, but mine had been magnified by ten due to the tribalism of a werewolf pack.  Haven was a small village by human standards, but was just right for an extended werewolf family made up of a few dozen offspring and relatives of my great-grandfather, the pack founder.  If I had crawled out of my parents' home at Melony's age, not only would my cousins' keen noses have found me in short order, someone would likely have picked me up and taken me home with them before I could walk more than a few steps away from my parents' front door.  I'd be returned, full of milk and cookies, a few hours later, once my mother had finished whatever task took her watchful eyes away from her baby.  No searchers would ever have been forced to frantically stumble through the trees looking for my freezing form because the entire pack was always keeping an eye on its younger members.

With that memory so vivid, and the family in front of me so pack-like, it was hard to remind myself why I'd voluntarily left such a paradise.  But as I watched the Carrs, I knew that my corner of Haven had lacked the supportive love that made this family's bond so strong.  Instead, the same village that had felt like a protective cocoon when I was two years old quickly morphed into a restrictive wet blanket by the time I reached my teen years.  Before I reached my majority, it had become clear that Haven was no haven for me.

There were many factors that made my later childhood problematic, but in the end, I fled our pack's village to escape my father.  My mother's death, the absence of my older sister's buffering presence, and the pregnant stepmother who soon moved into our home shook up my world, but my father could have pieced the remnants back together into a family if he'd tried.  Instead, the Chief retreated into his role as pack leader and only took notice of me to make the occasional paternal decree, which always seemed to fall on the morning of my birthday.

The first pronouncement came on the day I turned twelve, when I clattered down the stairs from my attic room and found my father waiting at the bottom.  "You can't run around like a wild wolf pup anymore," Father told me coldly, taking in my unbrushed hair and bare feet.  I had planned to sneak out into the woods to see if the hummingbird I'd been watching the day before had finished building her nest, and although I hadn't really expected a cake and streamers upon my return, a simple "Happy birthday" would have been nice.  Instead, I got the world's most painful lecture about how I would soon be changing into wolf form for the first time and needed to start learning my place within the pack.  According to my father, learning my place seemed to equate to spending every spare minute helping my stepmother Cricket in the kitchen, making up for the absence of my older sister Brooke, who had fled the family home just months before.

Although I'd immediately missed Brooke's gentle presence after she left Haven, after my twelfth birthday, I realized that I'd taken her role in our family for granted.  Without Brooke to fill the good-daughter shoes, my father was forced to turn his attention to me—and we all soon realized I was sorely lacking in that department.  The daughter of an alpha was supposed to be a role model for the younger wolves, but I found it a struggle to keep my hands out of the dirt and my clothes clean, let alone to smile and help out around the village.  And every time I failed, my father noticed and reprimanded me.  For the first few weeks after my twelfth birthday, I hoped my father would eventually give up the struggle and focus on his new son, but instead, his rules simply became stricter and stricter, and Haven began to feel like a prison.

Meanwhile, I'd grown old enough to change into wolf form, and the more upset I got at my father's restrictions, the more my shifts flew out of control.  I hated the fact that I'd been born a girl, without the male ability to change form at will.  In contrast, those of us unlucky enough to be born with two X chromosomes had to deal with what I liked to call "werewolf PMS from hell."  At that time of the month, human women cope with bloating, aches, and grumpiness, but the same hormones in werewolves cause us to change into wolf form at the drop of a hat, no matter how inconvenient fur and claws might be.  This fact, more than anything else, was the reason werewolf packs were so repressively patriarchal, because the female werewolf really was the weaker vessel in need of shielding from the outside world.  And I was even worse at controlling my shifts than most female wolves, which made my father's disdain of my weakness yet more evident.

By the time I turned thirteen, I was flipping back and forth between wolf and human form dozens of times a month.  My father was irate at my inability to control my wolf, and his frequent tirades made me shift even more often.  Again, I had a hint of hope when I realized that the Chief was starting to give up on my potential to be a pack princess, meaning that I wasn't likely to be married off to an alpha outside the pack to cement an alliance.  But then I discovered that the only other alternative my father saw for me was to become the spinster daughter, hidden away in my attic bedroom for the rest of my life.

That realization prompted me to dive into my education, and for a while, school and books became a relief from my depressing home life.  In Haven, all young werewolves studied at the village school, and most of us were expected to voluntarily end our schooling a few years after our first shifts began, when we were old enough to help out at home.  But if a young werewolf showed aptitude for learning, he or she often continued studying under the schoolteachers, training to become a replacement teacher in the years to come.  Since I wasn't going to be a pack princess and was terrified of turning into a replica of my meek stepmother, I figured teaching would at least let me build a place for myself within the pack.  However, on my fourteenth birthday, my father killed that dream just like all of my others.  Waiting for me once again at the bottom of the stairs, the Chief informed me that I was no longer a student at the village school.

The ensuing shouting match woke Cricket and my one-year-old brother, the latter of whom soon drowned out my arguments with wordless complaints of his own.  In my anger, I shifted into wolf form and fled to the woods, but I eventually came home hungry, my tail between my legs.  My father was waiting at the door in his own fur form, and his reproving bite on the top of my muzzle wasn't the ceremonial chastisement most alphas would use against an erring underling.  Instead, the Chief's teeth broke through my skin, and I picked at the scabs in human form for days thereafter.

The scabs were what finally pushed me over the edge and made me decide to leave the pack.  "A werewolf can't survive alone," Cricket had told me months earlier when I sobbed on her shoulder about my hatred of Haven, and I'd believed her then.  But I was starting to realize that my wolf couldn't survive
within
my father's pack either.  It was quite normal for young males to leave the village and hunt down another pack in order to court unrelated females, and teenage girls sometimes spent time in the outside world as well, so the possibility was there.  But only if I could learn to control my shifts.

So I began to hunt down the root of my uncontrollable changes to wolf form.  Whenever I could slip away, I would retreat into the woods and practice shifting for hours, until my legs were so wobbly with the effort that they could barely carry me home.  Out of spite, I maintained the illusion of being out of control around my father, but by the time I was sixteen, my wolf and I were acting more like a team and less like two duelists.  As I practiced, I came to the conclusion that any unpleasant emotion could trigger the shift; even seeing a ball flying toward me out of the corner of my eye was sometimes enough to make the wolf pull out her fur to protect us both.  So I worked on proving to my wolf that I could take care of myself, and I also learned to smooth over my emotions, even during that time of the month when they were especially hard to control.

I'm sure that Cricket knew what was happening, but she didn't tell my father, and he was oblivious to anything that didn't impact his iron control over Haven's pack.  Just learning to work with, rather than against, my wolf gave me a bit of peace, and I drifted through my restrictive life for most of my sixteenth year, not sure I really needed to leave the pack after all.  Then my father's eye came back around to his wayward daughter.

When I walked down the stairs on the morning of my seventeenth birthday and found my father waiting on the landing, I couldn't resist thinking that perhaps the Chief had thespian aspirations.  Why else would he always pin me down on the morning of my birthday?  Unless—depressing thought—that was the only day my father could be bothered to spend a minute thinking about his disappointing middle child.

"What now?" I demanded, deciding to go on the defensive even as I sought to still the wolf inside me.  My period had begun the day before, and the wolf was more awake than usual inside my body, making the dim house seem brighter and the sound of my father's harsh breathing louder.  I reminded my canine half that I had everything under control, that shifting to fur would do neither of us any good, and she quieted, although my senses didn't diminish.

My father ignored my argumentative opening and merely said, "You're old enough to give me grandchildren."  Then he turned on his heel, content in his knowledge that he'd laid down the law and I would obey his orders.  But there was no way I was going to give the Chief the illusion of implicit consent by letting a statement like that stand, so I called out to him before he could leave.

"What, you're saying I need to get married?" I asked, my voice turning shrill despite my best efforts.  "When?  Today?  And with whom?  I assume you already have my future husband picked out?"  I was livid from this latest assault on my independence, and I could feel the fur starting to poke out through my skin despite my silent requests for my wolf to settle.  Even though my father hadn't allowed me to continue studying to be a schoolteacher, I'd assumed the Chief would leave me alone as long as I did enough around the house to prevent Cricket from complaining about my laziness.  Apparently I was wrong.

My father didn't even turn back to look at me, nor did he grace me with a reply, but I could feel my mind beginning to twist as it worked to obey the alpha wolf's orders.  The more specific an alpha's demands were, the less leeway a pack wolf had to work around their leader's command—our biology just wouldn't let us disobey the alpha.  It was then, while I struggled with my own body to squash my sudden urge to choose a mate, that I finally understood that while I was living under my father's roof, I would never be able to follow my own path.  So I did the unthinkable and broke the alpha's hold over me.

"I'm not getting married," I said slowly and coldly, and wasn't surprised at all when the Chief stopped in his tracks, although the pack leader still didn't turn to face me.  "I'm leaving today, and I'm never coming back."

The words seemed to float in the dim air for minutes while my father and I stood, frozen by my insolence.  Then the Chief began to laugh, and I felt the first ache of packlessness in my stomach.  "Go," he said, when his chuckles finally receded.  "I'll be glad to see the back of you.  But don't let your wolf be seen by a human or I'll come kill you myself."

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