Undead and Underwater (22 page)

—
URBAN DICTIONARY

A dream is a shadow . . . of something real.

—CHRIS LEE, THE LAST WAVE

“I just killed my best friend!”

“And your worst enemy.”

“Same difference.”

—VERONICA SAWYER AND JASON DEAN, HEATHERS

Worry (v):

1) to torment oneself with or suffer from disturbing thoughts; fret. 2) to seize, especially by the throat, with the teeth and shake or mangle, as one animal does another. 3) to harass by repeated biting, snapping, etc. 4) to progress or succeed by constant effort, despite difficulty.

—DICTIONARY.COM

“It’s anxiety. Jenna’s been away too long. She’s a goner, I’m sure of it. She’s probably choked on a piece of LEGO or something.”

“She’s just at work!”

—RYAN AND WILFRED, WILFRED “HAPPINESS”

Well, you know, Lois, you mean a lot to me. I mean, things you say and things you do resonate with me in a big way. When you drive away to go to the market, I just don’t know what to do with myself. And then when I hear that car coming up the driveway, I just go berserk. I mean, you know, half the time when you go to the market, I just assume you’re leaving forever, and when you get back, I realize I have no idea how long you’ve been gone, and I . . . well, you know what, I’m—I’m rambling.

—BRIAN GRIFFIN, FAMILY GUY

Author’s Note

Some writers use their work to put forward their own agendas, be they moral, political, religious, educational, pro-life, pro-death penalty, pro-can’t-we-all-just-get-along, pro-if-you-don’t-like-it-move-to-another-country, pro-why-do-you-hate-America, and the like. And I’m going to do that, too. I’ve got an agenda. Okay, it’s not so much an agenda as it’s an open letter to a woman who has been my archenemy for over a decade.

There’s a part in the story coming up about a mom hollering at her son, Curtis, on the beach. She’s yelling at him to come back for more sunscreen, and he’s ignoring her. And rather than get off her ass and go get him and haul his bratty butt back to their blankets, put him in a choke hold, and slather him crown to toes with sunscreen, she just stays on her towel and yells his name. And yells it. And yells it.

The kid never comes over, and why should he? He knows she won’t get off the towel. We all know she won’t get off the towel. The entire frigging beach knows she won’t get off the towel. Eventually Curtis gets hungry and wanders back for Goldfish crackers, and while he’s munching, she squirts him with sunscreen.

I know I’m sliding into a rant, but this happens to me every time I go to the beach. I swear this woman and her brat are following me around the world. In Australia her kid’s name was Christopher, in Florida his name was Mike, in Massachusetts it was Curtis . . . uncanny. (And it’s always a boy. I guess girls come back to the towel. Weird.)

Anyway. Anonymous lady with no real control over her offspring: stop following me. Barring that, get your ass
off
the blanket if the kid doesn’t come when you scream his name two dozen times.

Thank you, anonymous lady! It feels so good to get that off my chest. Oh, and thanks for buying my book.

CHAPTER

ONE

TEN YEARS EARLIER

She was happy she was born during the worst winter Massachusetts had seen in decades—since 1994, the old-timers claimed. It wasn’t an absolute, but a cub’s first Change usually happened around their birthday. Which meant that in the thrill and passion and danger and chaos of her first Change, she didn’t have to worry about running into any of the three million three hundred thousand tourists who flocked to Cape Cod in the summer and fall. Tourists didn’t have much interest in Massachusetts in mid-January, even the ferociously rude ones.

More clams for meeeeeee,
she thought gleefully, digging so hard the sand flew ten feet and hit hard enough to scratch glass (if there had been a glass sheet in the middle of the beach in the middle of January). The moon was full and soared above her, fat and white. The wind whistled off the Atlantic and chilled her, but not as much as it would have if she was down there in her tender pink skin and her pale hairless hands and her pale hairless feet.

She wasn’t! So that was good! There was a time for hairless hands and a time for efficient strong paws, and this was paw time.

Excited beyond words (literally), Lara dug and dug for her dinner, the hole already so big if she wasn’t careful she’d slip on shifting sand and topple into it. She was not known for her grace, on four feet or two. Wouldn’t
that
be a funny thing for her Pack mates to see!
Here is your future alpha leader, the one whose hairy butt is sticking out of that hole.

Ha!

Even if she didn’t get her teeth on the clams, in the clams, the act of hunting for her dinner was intoxicating.
She
would decide when and what to eat! Not Mother!
She
would decide if it was clams or rabbit or both or neither! Not Mother!
She
would blow off erosion concerns and decide how many holes to dig on the beach! Not the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution! She was thirteen; she wasn’t a baby cub anymore. Those decisions
should
be hers, but her mother was sooooo stubborn. She was even stubborn about being stubborn. Double stubborn!

She can’t even Change, she’ll never Change, but Mother decides? It’s wrong-bad.

But that was awful; worse, it was disloyal and mean. Her mother hadn’t been born to the Pack, but that was okay. She and Lara’s father had met on an elevator, and conceived Lara on that elevator, and that was okay; that was life in the big city. Her mother was the alpha female and, thus, the full fat moon of Lara’s days, if not her nights, and that was . . . sorta okay. Lara would owe Mother respect all the days she was the alpha female, and all the days after, when Lara herself was. And she wouldn’t be for years and years and years and years and years, and it would be years-long, it would be years-forever before she would lose her.

Thoughts for thinking later.
So many smells. Salt and wet and grass and rot and fish and cold and wood and a thousand others, each one begging to be followed to its source, each one calling her like chimes bringing her to church. She would keep digging for supper. No, she would run down the dead fish up the beach. No, she would dig. No, she would flush rabbits from the deep green lake of grass. No, she would dig. Why was she digging again? Oh. Supper-food.

A seagull who thought he had dibs swooped above her and dived, then pulled up at the last instant. He soared above her and dived again, all the time scolding, scolding. Lara lunged straight up and her teeth snapped shut a bare inch from the gull’s left leg, startling it in midcall:
Khee-khee-kheeaa—kheeaaaawwwwppp!

Almost got you, gull-bird! More of that if you get too close! Might get you next time, might! Why was I digging—oh. Right.

There had never been a more wonderful night in the history of forever.

She was a lucky, lucky cub. She lived in a magnificent stone castle with a red roof, a castle with a mile of grass in front and a bazillion miles of the Atlantic behind. There were hundreds of windows she could peek out of, windows so big and wide that no matter how little she was, she could stretch up and peek out: at two, at four, at five, at seven, at ten, at twelve, now.

It had many outdoor rooms where she and her Pack could eat or rest or eat, and even cook in the rooms and then eat in them, outdoor rooms protected from all but the yuckiest elements, outdoor rooms—

She knew that was wrong; groped for the right word. She remembered almost everything on four legs that she’d experienced on two, but interpreted the events differently. So it took her a few seconds for the association to—porch! The castle had many porches. And three little oceans inside. Pools!

If she couldn’t be in her wolf form all the time, it was nice to have a castle to run amok in the rest of the month. And the castle was stuffed with people, generations of relatives and friends and friends of friends; the Pack always tried to live together if territory would tolerate the numbers. Solitary living was death-pain for them.

Then she saw him, and was glad.

She wasn’t sure why watching the inlander watch her made the night even better. They weren’t friends; they didn’t know each other except to nod hello. They couldn’t: his litter was made up of people who
chose
to live far from the bulk of the Pack; she didn’t know how they bore it.

He’d know who she was, of course, but the poor cub couldn’t Change.
Horrid
legacy from the witch. Not his fault, but the other cubs disagreed. On wonderful, wonderful nights like this, he could only watch; never join. It was a sad, unlucky thing.

She was sorry for him but glad for herself. All her good luck—the castle, the rank, the Change—made his bad luck, his inlander luck, seem worse. She was selfish enough to be glad it wasn’t her, and sorry enough that it was him.

She was glad he was there now. She thought she’d want to go through her first Change alone, and until that moment, she had. But being able to share the experience, even for a few moments, made it better.
Did you see I almost got that noisy-stupid-smelly gull? Do you see how wide and wonderful-deep my hole is?
She felt they had a connection, she and this neighbor she rarely saw and did not know.

They stared at each other across the beach for a second-hour-eternity, and then he raised a hand to her and continued on his way, and she went back to digging for her supper.

The clam was so sweet and delicious she didn’t mind the sand in her teeth.

CHAPTER

TWO

“You’re mad I’m not dead, aren’t you?”

Lara Wyndham, Pack leader of the Wyndham weres for nineteen hours, groaned and rubbed her eyes. Her toe throbbed from where she’d stubbed it before sitting at the table. “Of course not, Dad.”

“Really?” Michael Wyndham shook out his newspaper. His actual newspaper, paper and ink and circular ads and everything—how quaint! “
I’d
be mad I wasn’t dead.”

Given that her father took the Pack to avenge the murder of
his
father, that was something to think about. “You’re such a nutter.” She stared down into her bowl of grits with butter and four slices of crumbled bacon. Normally she’d be unable to resist such a soupy, bacon-ey, buttery delicacy, but the thought of wolfing (heh) anything besides a cup of tea brought on faint nausea.

Which was, she knew, stupid. It was also a huge giveaway to her folks that something was wrong. So she seized her spoon and started to eat.

Her mother slouched into the kitchen, yawning and going straight to the sideboard to grope for a coffee mug. She was dressed in her even-though-it’s-Thursday-I’m-dressing-like-it’s-Saturday-morning outfit of jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, although the temp was supposed to hit thirty degrees that day. With the Atlantic in their backyard, her mother often went around shivering.

Jeannie Wyndham’s curly blond mass was streaked with gray (“Battle scars, right up there with stretch marks.”), and the laugh lines around her blue eyes had deepened over the years, but there was no way around it: her mother was, as several of her friends, male and female, had pointed out, “so mega-hot she’s absolute zero.” (Thank God,
thank God
that when the remarks got back to her mom, she had no idea what they meant.) Back in the day they’d have called her a
cougar
. Lara preferred
Mother
or
You make me so . . . arrgghh!

She stirred her hot chocolate and thought again that it wasn’t easy, having a legend for a mom. Oh, and one for a dad, too. Definitely to be filed under “Things To Deal With: Not Easy.”

“So, big day.” Jeannie was heavily creaming and sugaring her coffee, which she’d poured into a mug the size of a flower pitcher. “Feel any different?”

“Tired.” She had not slept well; she hadn’t for days. She didn’t mention this to her parents. The thought of the chat that would ensue (“Mommy, Daddy, I’ve been having nightmares; I’d like a nightlight and for you to tuck me in with lullabies and toast. Lots of toast. A bed isn’t a bed without crumbs. Also I keep dreaming about Derik’s son even though I don’t really know him.”)
made her shiver.

“I’m not sure it bodes well, if you’re already tired,” Michael teased. He, like her mother, was aging well. Unlike her mother, he was Pack, and Pack always aged well; it was written into the genetic code. There were grandfathers on the Cape who occasionally got carded. (“We card everyone, though,” was not reassuring to a species trying to stay beneath the radar.) There was no gray in his deep brown hair, and not many lines on his face. Only his eyes changed with age: their startling gold color—like Baltic amber, like old coins—deepened each year. Her mom good-naturedly complained it was like staring into a road hazard sign.

It was a good life, and her parents were smart enough or humble enough to know it. They looked great, they were rich, they had decades ahead of them, their cubs were grown (“Note we didn’t say
out of the nest
, because they’ll never leave.”), and so Michael and Jeannie Wyndham were doing something no alpha couple in the two-million-year history of the Pack had done.

Retiring.

CHAPTER

THREE

SIX YEARS EARLIER

“But we don’t do that. Alphas don’t retire.”