Chapter 1 #2
The expressions on both their faces said exactly what they thought about me not telling them about this change in him until now, and I was positive they were going to give me shit over it later, which was fair enough. But you had to put out the fire before you figured out what started it.
Just like I could read their faces, they could do the same to mine. Plus, they could smell my feelings. I could count on one hand the number of things I’d ever been able to hide from them before this. The fact I’d made it this long was only because I hadn’t seen them in person or talked to them on the phone since they’d gone on their trip.
Now that they were back, I needed advice. We needed help. I had to be realistic about our situation. Duncan and I couldn’t keep going the way we’d been going before, that was a fact.
I knew in my heart that our time traveling around in my RV, just the two of us, while I worked remotely, was over.
I had spent the last couple of weeks thinking and thinking, then thinking a little more, trying to figure out what our options were and why 99 percent of them couldn’t work. What it all came down to was this final act of desperation. The only idea I could come up with that might work long-term.
Life hadn’t been the same since I had found my furry donut, and now it was changing again. And I could either ride this new reality out with him because he had attached himself to my life and my heart like a cherished barnacle that gave me the kind of love that I’d become addicted to or… I could do something that I would never be able to live with.
There wasn’t even a choice to be made. The only thing I wanted to do was make sure they couldn’t think of something I hadn’t been able to first. Just in case.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but I have to figure something out,” I told them, trying to stay neutral. “He’s gained four pounds since his tail happened. He was eight pounds up until then. I can hide him in a blanket right now , but barely. What about in a month at the rate he’s going? In six months? How big is he going to get? What else is going to change about him?” My voice got higher and higher with each sentence, and I had to clear my throat by the end.
There were too many variables, and Duncan wasn’t the only one stressed out. I hadn’t even gotten to the part about his telepathy. “He can’t live out in the world anymore unless he pulls a Pinocchio and turns into a real boy.” That was the best way to explain what Matti and Sienna, and every other nahual, or shapeshifter, like them could do: go back and forth between their fairy-tale body and their human one.
It was such a weird concept if you thought about it. To be human one second and something so totally different in the next, still fully aware of yourself—or so I’d been told. It was kind of a miracle, depending on how you looked at it.
And a curse, sometimes, in some ways, for some. For people who weren’t likable werewolves. Or nine-tailed foxes revered in so many different mythologies. Or unicorns— everyone loved a unicorn. Or dozens of other beings like that, that were cute or honored or respected.
But there was a reason why civilization after civilization had equally worshipped and feared certain entities, as my mom used to tell me. There was the good, the bad, and the tales of beings who struck sheer terror into so many hearts, their stories continued being told throughout the centuries. I knew a lot about the latter.
“And he might not ever be able to, I don’t know,” I kept going, laying it all out there in a ramble. “The problem is that I don’t have a safe place for him to be himself if he stays like this. He can’t live his whole life not ever being able to go outside. And what if he needs more people around him than just me?”
Some people and beings were fine being solitary, but so many weren’t. There was a reason why werewolves, ogres, and centaurs raised their children in communities: for safety and for family ties. You had to learn to be a functioning magical being in a modern world from someone or someones . Kids were a handful under the best conditions, and add a magical chromosome with the potential of scaring the crap out of the majority of humanity?
Honestly, it was incredible the cat hadn’t been let out of the bag after so long.
Magical beings had managed to remain a secret.
I had thought about moving back where I’d grown up, a small town in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico that had been rich with magical beings when I’d been young. It had mostly been the wolfy kind, but there had been some ogre families too, plus a couple of others who I had never known, for sure , the truth about; they’d been so secretive.
Or maybe they hadn’t known what they were either. I’d never thought about that possibility before.
But things had changed over the last decade, and the town wasn’t what it had once been. The population had dwindled as businesses closed, and the elderly, who had held the community together, passed on, leaving the younger population to move away. Matti’s parents were gone. My parents weren’t there either. Sienna’s had moved after we’d graduated, and they lived in Wyoming now. There was no one left that was worth putting up with the heat for. Going there would only bring more attention to us at this point.
“Letting him out to pee and play has already given me a few grays,” I told them.
I was scared now every time we left my trailer. The entire way up to their apartment had me sweating bullets. What if I slipped on a recently mopped floor and he fell out of the blanket? What if I moved my hand too much and someone happened to see his tail? What if his collar broke and popped off? I’d lost a lot of sleep worrying about all those scenarios.
“You already had gray hairs before,” the smart-ass I knew and loved replied, his brown eyes flicking down to the mystery in my arms as I touched the “collar” that I’d gotten for Duncan last week. It was basically a bracelet with a clasp so I could put it on and remove it easily, if I needed to. “Is that obsidian like on your bracelet? Is that why we can’t smell him anymore?” He rubbed his nose. “I didn’t notice I couldn’t sense anything other than his shampoo and his breath until now.”
At least my savings had been well spent. If Matti couldn’t sense him, no one else should be able to either.
“Yeah,” I answered. After the two incidents, it just made the most sense to hide as much as I could about Dunky. Looking back on it, it’s what I should have done from the beginning, butttt… I couldn’t turn back time and make wiser decisions: like paying for overnight shipping. Fire obsidian wasn’t cheap or easy to find, unless you ordered it. “Better to be safe than sorry.” Even though that was kind of a lie. We hadn’t been safe, and we had been sorry because of it.
But since I couldn’t rewind time, and my regrets wouldn’t do a single thing, all I could do was do better. Duncan needed me, and I wouldn’t let him down. Not again.
All three of us glanced at the legs that stretched out from beneath the blanket. There was a small paw with shiny black fur, dark paw pads, and short black nails.
And then a flame, a little bigger than the kind you could find on a lighter, on the tip of a fluffy black tail slipped out from the blanket too.
Sienna sucked in a breath like she was surprised all over again.
Matti made a grunting sound in his throat that honestly sounded foreboding, and I wondered if he’d already come up with the same solution as I had.
His eyes slid in my direction.
My favorite woman on the planet, beside my mom, blew out a breath before scrubbing her cheeks with her long, slender fingers, oblivious to her husband side-eyeing me. “Honestly, Nina, I got nothing.” She shook her head. “I thought you could build a cabin out in the woods, but that’s not safe unless you bought a thousand acres. The chances of being caught would be too high, and that doesn’t solve the issue that Duncan might need a pack. We talked about that.”
We had. I remembered that discussion right after I’d found him. That conversation had been a lot like this one, except now I had an idea of what I was doing and what I was willing to do for him.
When we first met, I would’ve probably done anything for him.
Now, there was zero doubt in my mind I would, and I’d do it with a smile on my face.
“Every option I think of has a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t work. You can’t hide what he looks like. You’re in danger every time you travel. What if you break down and have to pull over? What if someone looks in the window of your truck or trailer and sees him when you’re not around?” Sienna went on, her round face scrunching up.
That was exactly what had gone through my head too. Nothing worked. At least not long-term.
Matti cleared his throat. “I have an idea.”
We blinked at each other.
My oldest friend might be a different gender, a different species of magical being, and his own complete person, but so many times throughout our friendship, I’d thought there was something that tied us together. Maybe we’d been twins in a different lifetime. Maybe just siblings. I didn’t know, but there was something that had bonded us together.
And with just that look, I knew we were on the same page.
“You know what I’m going to say,” he warned.
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure I do, but go for it.”
The next words out of his mouth were exactly what I’d expected them to be. “You need to go to the ranch.”
I smiled, and it wasn’t a happy smile exactly, but it wasn’t a bad one either. Two weeks ago, there was no way that would have been my reaction to his solution. To what it meant. Much less what it required. At this point though, I’d already convinced myself of all the reasons why the ranch was the only choice Duncan and I had.
It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t necessarily what I would’ve chosen if I had a few million dollars to buy a thousand acres of land, but… I was at peace with it. Life had thrown enough wrenches at me, and I had dodged, ducked, dipped, and dived them all, time after time.
Maybe it was time to start throwing some wrenches back at it.
This was my choice. My future. Our lives.
I’d had a decent idea of what I might be signing up for when I had kept Duncan instead of finding someone else to care for him. No one knew better than I did the kind of sacrifices you might have to make to care for a child with secrets even they didn’t know they carried. It wasn’t just the least I could do, paying the favor I’d been given forward; I liked to think it was my destiny. If I had one.
“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” I admitted and earned myself a satisfied, almost smug nod from him. There was a certain amount of pride you could have when you knew someone almost as well as you knew yourself. That was almost thirty years of friendship for you.
“Wait,” Sienna cut in with a wave of her hand. “Whose ranch? What ranch are we talking about?”
I raised my eyebrow at Matti in surprise, and he winced. “It’s where I lived with Henri for a few years after my mom passed away,” he explained vaguely.
It was the mention of Henri that had me glancing up at the ceiling.
Sienna picked up real quick on his word choice. “You’ve never really talked to me about that time in your life, Matti,” she said slowly, squinting a little. “And I’ve never brought it up because it was a painful time for you, but now I think I’ve missed something important.”
“Not important, ” he emphasized that word, “but I don’t like talking about it because of Mom.” There was a beat of silence after he brought her up. He rarely ever did, and that went for both his parents. Matti cleared his throat. “I had to move hundreds of miles away to live with my cousin, who I barely knew back then”—I was pretty sure he still barely knew him, but I kept that thought to myself—“and had to deal with this new life I didn’t want,” Matti explained, seriously. “I wasn’t supposed to talk about the ranch while I lived there or after I left it.”
That got me a side-look from him.
There were a lot of things Matti hadn’t been able to talk about that all revolved around one side of his family. Some of them he had kept to himself, and other things had slipped through. The ranch being one of them.
I drew my fingers across my lips and tossed them over my shoulder. I’d never told a soul and never would. I hadn’t even shared its knowledge with Sienna, and she knew the intensity level of my monthly period cramps. Plus, it wasn’t like he’d shared any information that valuable with me anyway—at least I didn’t think so.
“You knew?” Sienna asked me, and I nodded.
“Just a little bit, and he did it on the phone a couple months after he got there. We’ve never talked about it again since,” I clarified, knowing she wouldn’t be upset about it but still not wanting to risk it. There had never been any weird feelings between us where Matti was concerned. Even if I hadn’t always talked about him like he was my best friend, she had always been able to sense with her nose that there was zero sexual attraction between us. It was the same with Matti and my friendship with Sienna. I loved them both differently and equally, and that love was reflected back in the same way.
My favorite people were married. Mated. I got to see them both at the same time. It was a win-win.
Fortunately, Sienna’s reaction didn’t let me down. She made an understanding but squinty expression. “Okay, so why would living at ‘the ranch’ work?” Sienna snapped her fingers. “Wait! He owns a lot of land in Colorado that we’ve never been invited to but that he inherited from someone.” She snapped again. “Is that the ranch? That’s where you lived back then?”
He nodded.
“Ahh. You haven’t brought it up much, and the couple times I’ve seen Henri, he’s… oh .” It dawned on her. “I see. It’s a secret. Is there that much acreage there? Is that why we’re talking about it? If Henri doesn’t want us to visit, why would he let Nina move there?”
There was that mention of Henri again. I was well aware that Sienna had met him a few times and that she thought he’d been standoffish and “a little cold.” That had been one of the few mentions of Matti’s older cousin I’d heard in years.
My oldest friend sat up and angled his attention to focus on his wife. “There’s enough acreage that there’s been a village of magical beings who have lived there for hundreds of years, and no one bothers them. Henri inherited it from his dad’s side, which is my dad’s side. Except my dad gave up his rights to the ranch when he moved away permanently, and I did the same when I left too. I had to sign legal paperwork. Now it’s all Henri’s. He doesn’t live there by himself,” he said all matter-of-fact, like it was a suburban subdivision with a billboard off the highway.
From the look of her face, I wasn’t the only one who thought he’d framed that explanation loosely. “Aren’t those ‘magical communities’ cults? Like communes?”
Everyone who had any kind of mythical ancestry in them had heard of the kind of communities that were whispered about in small circles. The places where magical beings lived in homesteads of sorts, out in tracts of land where most normal people had no interest in living or visiting—at least that’s how those places had been explained to me. Places where privacy was affordable, or had been at some point.
It was a place for beings who wanted to live near others similar to them, so that they didn’t have to pretend to be something else. The closest to that I’d ever found had been where I’d grown up, and even then, there had been a certain level of hiding because it hadn’t been a strictly magical place. There hadn’t been walls or security, just people who knew how to keep their mouths closed and were really good at pretending.
“It’s not like that. It’s… a village, and some people work for it, and some who live there work outside of it. But everyone there is magical, and they’re all expected to participate in running it and maintaining it.”
“Still sounds like a commune,” she argued, shooting me a look like she was expecting me to agree with her.
And I mean, it kind of did with just the small amount of information he’d shared just now.
“It’s not,” Matti assured her. “It’s as self-reliant as they can manage. It’s also supposed to be a secret. How people keep their favorite vacation destinations to themselves so that everyone doesn’t start going there and ruin it.”
“If it’s so great, what’s wrong with it then? Why did you leave?” A thought occurred to her. “Why didn’t your mom and dad live there to begin with?”
“My dad said it was too much responsibility. He left as soon as he was old enough.” Matti’s throat bobbed. “There’s nothing wrong with it, but it never felt like home when I lived there, and I like the city. There’s a small town close by, and there are a lot of people like us who live in it, but....” He shrugged. “The residents like their privacy and don’t want strangers constantly trying to move in and mess up their balance.”
“So they aren’t friendly,” Sienna muttered, casting me another look.
“Friendly-ish.”
I laughed. “You’re blowing this so bad I think you might be talking me out of it, and it was my idea to start with.”
“I swear….” Matti groaned but collected himself. “The point is: it’s secluded, and Nina and Duncan would be surrounded by people who are more likely to understand them than anywhere else would. It’s as safe as you can get because everyone’s objective is to live in peace, in secret. It’s on a big piece of land.” Matti paused and blew out a breath. “You can run until you get tired and still be well within the perimeter. It would give Duncan space to stretch his legs and grow up. I wouldn’t have been happy anywhere back then, but it was good for me while I was there.”
I’d kind of blocked that period of time out in my memories: when he’d left after his mom had passed away. His cousin, Henri, had picked him up one day while I’d been in class, and he’d been gone—his room cleaned out, the house basically abandoned—by the time I’d gotten home. It had been IMs that kept us in touch afterward, where he’d vaguely explained that his cousin had taken guardianship of him, and he was going to live in Colorado from then on.
It had been devastating. First his dad in a terrible car accident, then his mom, and finally him. Each loss had been sudden and unexpected.
I’d only heard from Matti once a month after that and never details about where exactly he was, no matter how much I asked. There had only been that one conversation where he’d revealed more than he should have. And in the years afterward, Matti had been real cagey about talking about that time. I’d never brought it up. If he’d wanted to talk about it, he could have.
He hadn’t.
“The majority of the residents have Amarok or iron wolf in them.”
Nina perked up at the mention of her iron-wolf ancestry. There weren’t many of them left after all. Matti himself was a blend of Amarok, on his dad’s side, and Mexican wolf, on his mom’s. Like my parents were.
Matti kept going. “You know werewolves love kids, it doesn’t matter what kind they are.”
We both knew that from experience. But he didn’t need to sell me on it. I had already sold myself on the community. The ranch .
My chest, though, still felt tight at the idea. I hadn’t lived around people like us in years, not since I’d moved out of my parents’ house when they’d finally retired. Of all the places I’d ever been, my childhood home had been a safe haven back then, and I knew exactly how lucky I was to have been raised around the people I’d grown up with.
Now , I knew that some beings sent others screaming at just the scent of them. At the potential they carried in their bodies. I touched the bracelet around my wrist on purpose.
Being different was hard. I didn’t care what anyone said.
Sienna snapped her fingers again and pointed at Matti. “It’s not a bad idea, baby.”
“I never have bad ideas” was his reply.
Her eyes slid to mine, and we both scrunched up our faces. “Yeah, okay,” I muttered before snickering. She leaned over, and we high-fived. We looked at each other, cackled, and then high-fived again.
I loved her.
He ignored us. “Something Henri mentioned the last time we saw each other made me think there are sasquatches that live there?—”
That got me. “Did you say sasquatch?”
Matti nodded, like referring to the big, hairy mythical creatures was no big deal.
Which I guess it wasn’t since he was a big, hairy creature that belonged in folktales too.
Then he said the one thing that would have won me over more than anything. “You know how wolves are toward people we consider to be members of our pack.”
I did know firsthand. I’d been raised by them. Adopted by two of the best ones. I used to stay up at night and wish and wish and wish that I was like them too, even though no one had ever made me feel bad about being different. My parents used to try and sell me on how lucky I was to be special—like I even knew what that meant. I missed them so much, but thinking about them reminded me of my duty.
And that was to do what they had done: do the best I could for a child that might not be biologically mine but was in every other sense. In every way that mattered.
That meant moving to a place with a strong wolf presence. They didn’t mind me and the way I smelled. Neither did ogres. But werewolves were as overprotective, possessive, and family oriented as books and movies made them out to be, especially around children and family members. Most screenwriters had gotten that part right.
There were worse things in the world than a group of people who all took it upon themselves to raise every child in their proximity as their own.
“You haven’t brought up the ‘but,’” I pointed out to Matti. “Tell her.”
Sienna’s face lit up. “There’s a ‘but’? What is it? Do you have to shave your head to live there? Animal sacrifice? Are they polygamous? Because I can’t see you having sister wives.”
My eyes strayed to Matti’s. He smiled, and then I smiled.
“I was getting to it.” He was being so ominous I was grateful to already be aware of what was going to come out of his mouth. He met his mate’s gaze. “She would have to join the pack. They won’t let her live there without a commitment to them. It’s how they’ve kept it a secret for so long, and part of the reason why they don’t have beings constantly trying to move there.”
She scrunched up her face again. “What kind of commitment are we talking about here? It can’t be that bad if you still see Henri every once in a while. They aren’t keeping him hostage there, are they?”
“You think someone could keep Henri hostage?” Matti scoffed.
If he was anything like how I remembered, that was going to be a negative. My memories of him had been stored in some part of my brain that I had locked up. Most of them had been neutral, some positive, some very positive, and then there were the parts that hurt. The ones I’d clung to until I had been old enough to process them and understand why Matti’s cousin had done what he’d done.
She snickered and shrugged her agreement. “So, what’s the catch?”
Matti side-eyed me again like he was testing to make sure I was prepared for his answer.
I smirked at him, because I knew . The tuna-sized catch had kept me up at night wondering if I could go through with it. Testing the boundaries of how much I loved Duncan. How much I would be willing to do for him.
And if me agreeing to do this didn’t tell the universe that I adored my boy, I wasn’t sure what else could.
Matti had a gleeful little glint in his eyes as he dropped the explanation that would’ve driven a less desperate person away from moving to a secret ranch. “Nina’s going to have to get married.”