Page 49 of Shifter's Homecoming

Her mom didn’t say anything.

“Mom, are you taking your medication?”

While she was waiting for her mom to answer, Rowan set to straightening the counters, putting away all of her ingredients, and filing all of her notes. Talking to her mother could exhaust her in a way that even pulling an all-nighter could not do. She would need to sleep soon.

After another minute of silence, she repeated herself. “Mom? Medication. Are you taking it?”

“Of course I am. I just forgot for a minute that you had moved. Whatever happened to the job at the veterinarian clinic?”

Rowan shook her head and made a note to call her mom’s doctor. Her mom still lived in New York, and if Rowan could have convinced her to move to Illinois with her, she would have.

“There was never any job at a veterinarian clinic, Mom. I can’t work with live animals, because, well, you know.” She didn’t like to say it out loud because she didn’t like people to know and she didn’t want to lose her job. She was a veterinarian because she loved animals and she had wanted to help animals since she’d been a little girl, but she worked in research because animals with bleeding injuries, or any fresh blood actually, made her instantly pass out. She’d barely made it through school.

Her blood, someone else’s blood, it didn’t matter, it all put her flat on her face. She’d first passed out when she was a young girl, but by the time she was a teenager, getting a period every month, she’d found several ways around it. The one that worked the best was a serum she created herself in her last school’s research laboratory. The only problem was the more she took it, the shorter time it lasted for, so she tried not to take it very often. She fiddled with the tiny silver bottle full of it that she always wore around her neck.

“Are you being safe?” her mom said, and her voice took on that frantic quality that Rowan knew well.

Rowan knew exactly what her mom meant. “Of course I am,” she said.

Her mom had a long history with bad luck and bad men that went back before Rowan had even been born. She’d been married once and her husband had cleared out her accounts and left with some other woman. She’d fallen into a depression and lost her house, her car, and her job. She’d been homeless for much of Rowan’s life, which meant Rowan had lived on the streets with her sometimes, and lived with relatives other times. She hadn’t had a bad life, just an unstable one. She did not know who her father was, and Rowan did not think her mother knew either. All Rowan knew for sure was her mom had been living in a women’s shelter when she’d gotten pregnant with Rowan.

Sometimes, when she was at her worst, she told Rowan that her father had been an angel—an actual angel, with light coming from his skin and wings on his back who had come to her in the shelter as she slept. She said she didn’t know his name or why he had come, but he’d told her she would have a female child, that the child’s name should be Rowan, and that someday, Rowan would save the world.

Rowan didn’t mind that crazy story so much, but sometimes her mother told another story, one that was much darker, one about a man who could turn into a wolf, and that was what they were talking about now.

“Don’t worry about me, Mom, I’m good. I’m great,” she said, thinking she should try to get her mom to tell the dark story. She told that one so much that Rowan thought of it as “The Story” in her head. It was dark, sure, but her mom was always more focused after she told it.

“Good,” her mom said. “You know they can hide themselves from humans, and you know they love the woods. That’s why you shouldn’t live in a small town. Lots of trees always means lots of werewolves.”

Rowan looked out the back window at the reservoir stretching behind her laboratory, and the wide forest that bordered each side. It was probably good that she hadn’t been able to convince her mom to move to Illinois with her.

“I know, Mom, I remember.” She considered for only a second, then said, “Tell me the story again.”

“Ok, ok, good thinking,” her mom said. Her voice became instantly smooth and rich as the story flowed out of her. “You were young, only a few months old. You weren’t with me. I had left you with my sister becauseone of themwas following me. I knew it, I could sense it. I could always tell, and this guy was one of the worst.”

“Uh huh,” Rowan said, as she wiped down her counter. She’d heard “The Story” so many times before, she could recite it word for word.

“I walked in the door of the Mission Street shelter—that’s where I had been staying—and I went down the back hall to the unused wing. I didn’t know why I was doing it then, but later I could see he had been using his mind tricks on me in order to get me alone.”

“Right,” Rowan said.

“I went in one of the rooms, not really thinking anything, and he came in behind me and shut the door. I whirled around and saw him. He was big— tall, wide through the shoulders, with thick muscles and strong hands. He had a military haircut and his face was lean and wolfish. He wasn’t wearing anything special, jeans and a shirt and work boots. He snarled when he talked. ‘Where’s your baby, Vanessa?’ he said to me. I didn’t know how he knew my name but I didn’t care. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. I told him I didn’t have a baby, I didn’t want him to know anything about you. I realized I was in the old kitchen and I kept backing up, until my butt ran into the counter. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he said, and his voice went colder and harder and scarier but still I wasn’t scared, and to this day I don’t know why. He kept walking closer and closer to me and I didn’t know what I was going to do… until I found something on the counter. My arms were behind me, so he didn’t see what I had until it was too late.”

Rowan fell under the spell of the story, just a little, seeing the “werewolf” in her mind as her mother told the story.

“He came in close to me, super close. He said, ‘What did you name the baby?’ but I didn’t answer him. He was so much taller than I was, and so much stronger, and I knew I wouldn’t have a chance if he tried to hurt me, but I also knew I wasn’t going to let him do that. He used his whole body to press me into the counter and that’s when I took hold of the knife I had found and I stabbed him right in the side of the gut.”

Rowan winced like she always did at that part. Had her mother really stabbed a man in a homeless shelter twenty-six years ago? Was at least that part true? Or was the whole thing a fabrication?

“His blood was all over me. It was up and down my arm. I kept my grip on the knife and I ran around him and out the door, then I ran to the front desk and started screaming for someone to call the cops.”

Rowan held her breath. The story was always the exact same. Her mother never changed any part of it, and the ending was always the most chilling to her.

“I was at the front desk and I was holding up the bloody knife and blood was running down my arm and I don’t remember exactly what I was saying but the guy at the front knew me and he kept telling me to just calm down, no one was going to hurt me and he somehow thought I had stabbed myself, that it was all my own blood… and that’s when the other guy came out. He held up a badge and he looked me right in the eyes and he said, ‘Don’t worry, the cops are already here.’ I looked at his side where I had stabbed him, and his shirt had a bloody hole in it, but underneath, there was no mark in his skin, not even a scratch.”

Rowan didn’t say a word. The story was almost over.

“That was all I could take. I ran. I never went back to that shelter. I never saw that guy again. I kept waiting for the cops to find me and take me in but they didn’t. That night, I had a dream, and in the dream, I saw that man turn into a wolf.” Her voice dropped like this was the first time she was telling Rowan the story. “That’s how he healed himself, Rowan, he turned into a wolf. He was a werewolf and there’s more of them out there. There’s werebears and werecats, too. There’s hundreds of them. There might be thousands. There might be whole towns of them. That’s why you always have to wear your silver. They haven’t messed with me since I started wearing mine.”

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