Chapter Sixteen – Angela
Chapter Sixteen
Angela
My parents did take me back. There were a few tense weeks of ‘I told you so’s’, but after they found out I was pregnant and had escaped, their anger faded into a lingering sense of disappointment.
School…dwindled. Between the fear that some member of the Pack would come and haul me away, plus the vast gulf of life experiences that now divided me from my classmates—I didn’t seem to have a connection there.
To anywhere—or anyone, really. I felt like I was living in a fog and that things only happened to me distantly, like I was always five steps out of sync.
Full moons were awful. I bought a bottle of colloidal silver like the Pack had behind the bar and spent a week staring it down. Would silver have saved Willa? Maybe. Would it’ve killed her baby? Maybe that, too. If only she’d been given the choice….
But I knew what I was getting into. And—just like I’d told Willa her child was half her own, my baby was half mine too.
So I sat down each full moon night and waited, bottle in hand, feeling my wolf roil around inside my body like she was looking for a way out.
I couldn’t risk changing like Wade and Gray, I didn’t want to wake up tomorrow vomiting up a piece of mom or dad.
But either I couldn’t change into a full wolf all the way, or she and I reached some sort of internal détente, on behalf of our unborn child.
The only thing that kept me sane then, between the loss and the fear, was my art.
All the emotions I could never give voice to I drew or painted out.
Nothing was safe—cocktail napkins, the walls of my room, the onesies my mother bought for the baby shower I wouldn’t let her throw.
And in this way everything I touched became a piece of me, until slowly the real world pulled me back inside, as did my baby—after I made sure to have a C-section on a no-moon night.
I started taking silver—and giving it to Rabbit—the day after.