Chapter 4 #2
“How have you been?” Matti asked his cousin from all the way at the end of our line. I wasn’t sure how it happened, but somehow, I’d ended up directly behind Henri. Duncan had his head stretched forward, trying to smell him discreetly without being noticed. With his floppy ears, it was so cute because it wasn’t sneaky at all.
“Fine,” Henri answered him in a clipped tone. “Busy.”
That was informative.
Matti thought the same thing. “I figured that when you’d barely respond to my texts the last six months.”
“I replied,” Henri answered with a grumble that might have held a touch of guilt to it. “There’s been a lot going on. We finished expanding parts of the ranch last month, and I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime.”
“Still working at the sheriff’s office then?”
“Still.” Henri Blackrock was a sheriff? Or a deputy? “Still doing aviation consulting?”
My friend answered, “Still.” There was a pause. “You get into a fight before we got here, or did you punch yourself in the face?”
The self-control it took me not to snicker….
That must have caught Henri off guard too because his pace slowed for a second. “It was more of a disagreement than a fight,” he answered cryptically, and I didn’t even know him and could tell he was being weird.
Mr. Curious wasn’t letting it go. “With?”
“Dominic” was the one and only answer he provided.
There was another pause “Over?”
Nothing.
“Leadership?”
Henri’s reply was a single low grunt.
How long was this hall? I wondered as we passed a smaller hallway, then another that branched out from the one we were on. This place was even bigger on the inside than it had seemed from the exterior. Peeking around Henri’s frame, I found that we were almost to the back of the building, and with a few more steps, he turned suddenly to the right, through a doorway and directly into a room.
In it was the biggest living area I’d ever seen. Multiple couches surrounded a television, there was a small bar area with stools in front of it, and a table that belonged in a conference room. At it were older adults whose magic felt very contained and low. One of them had a single eye… in the middle of his forehead.
An enchanted forest, a green swamp thing, a couple of satyrs, a werewolf the size of Falkor, and a cyclops.
Where exactly had Matti brought us?
“Over here.” Henri indicated toward the table and the empty chairs at it. “Sit.”
It was time to shine and, like I’d told Duncan, be on our best behavior. I took a seat right in the middle. Matti slipped into the chair beside mine, while Sienna decided to play bodyguard and stand directly behind us. Henri stayed off to the side with his arms crossed over that chest the size of Rhode Island, his expression still that tight one that didn’t tell me if he was aggravated about the Jenny Greenteeth, his cousin being here, my and Duncan’s very existence, or maybe it always looked like that.
The six men, women, and cyclops stopped talking the moment we settled in.
Like a line of dominoes, each one of them slowly caught sight, or possibly smell, of my puppy. Every single set of eyeballs went wide. Then wider.
One of the females delicately gasped. The cyclops rubbed a hand over his single eye. A man with wire-rimmed glasses leaned forward, pushing his frames up his nose….
“Dear gods,” the man exhaled as Duncan let out the cutest yawn, not even slightly worried about his audience.
But my body went on high alert anyway, especially when I realized the man was focused on me, not Duncan.
I hoped he wasn’t one of those people. Some older magical beings were way more superstitious than younger ones. Nothing I could do about it though.
“He’s a good boy,” I claimed out loud, just in case anyone was thinking otherwise.
And that earned me the rest of their attention and similar reactions. The woman who had gasped did it again but slightly fainter, and the cyclops rubbed his eye—a blue one—one more time. It was a striking blue too. The man with the glasses sat up straight in his seat.
For some reason, I had a flashback of the time a woman had thrown holy water at me that she’d carried around in a necklace. I’d been seventeen and on vacation with my parents. Why she had holy water on her was beyond me, but she’d been sorely disappointed when all I did was frown. It had been shortly after that, that I started wearing an obsidian bracelet.
Some people had problems.
And it had only been years later that I’d regretted not asking why her reaction had been so violent. Maybe she had known something I didn’t. She may have also tried exorcising me if I’d done that. I was never going to know.
Matti cleared his throat beside me. He clasped his hands together on the table and bowed his head. “Elders, thank you for allowing us this visit and for the gift of your time and attention. If you remember, I’m Matti?—”
The cyclops waved a wrinkled, heavy hand. “Be quiet, Matti. No one here has forgotten the time you lit the kitchen on fire.”
I’d never heard that story.
The one-eyed man snorted. “I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I would rather hear the young lady explain what you’re doing here.”
All right, I guess I was winging it then.
I pressed my lips together and tried to give the group the friendliest smile I had in me. “I’m Nina,” I said. “Nina Popoca.” I lifted my donut a little, grabbing his front legs in the process and then holding them up toward them. It made him look extra cute and like a stuffed animal. “This is Duncan. Thank you for allowing us to experience the magic in your community.”
That must have been the right thing to start with because all the elders nodded. It was the man with glasses who spoke next, his eyes a little narrowed, as he smoothed his hands down the front of the vest he had layered over a button-down shirt. “Hello, Nina. You smell young, but sometimes our ages can be deceiving, can’t they?”
That was… an interesting comment to make.
It meant he either already suspected something or… he was wondering about childbearing years. I hoped?
“Most of the time, I feel old and young at the same time,” I told the man carefully, trying to read his body language. “I’m thirty-two.”
Out of the corner of my eye, Henri shifted his weight and crossed his arms again.
The elder nodded stiffly, still too watchful. “Tell us why you’re here.”
As I adjusted Duncan on my lap, he set his head on top of the table, and I bumped Matti’s foot with mine for moral support to get through this next part. “We’re here, elders, because I need help,” I explained. With my chin, I gestured to the puppy who was busy looking at them. “I didn’t give birth to him, but we’ve been together since he was a newborn.
“Two months ago, he went from appearing like a normal puppy”—that was a subjective description, but hopefully they understood—“to his tail and eyes changing and becoming what you see now,” I explained. “I need to know how to fulfill his needs as he keeps growing. I’ve tried figuring out what kind of being he is, and I have a few guesses, but I don’t know for sure. The only knowledge I have of raising a pup is what I know from the wolves I grew up around, and they’ve all told me how important having a pack is at this age.”
A few of the elders started whispering to each other. Glasses, I noticed, wasn’t one of them. He was sitting very, very still.
“Matti said you’re all very wise and accepting.” He hadn’t said that, not exactly, but I wasn’t above sucking up. “More than anything, I really hope that you might let us live here since this is a secure community. The world out there isn’t safe for him. I’ve already had people try to steal him, and I don’t want to put him at risk. I want him to be happy, healthy, and safe, and I hope this place might be able to provide all that for him.”
There was stirring, and looks were cast that didn’t make me feel all that optimistic. Or maybe I was just expecting the worst. They had been polite so far, but they were picky about their privacy and community. That much was obvious.
The cyclops narrowed his eye. “You’re in danger?”
“Not anymore, only in the moment,” I explained. “On two different occasions recently, people tried to take him, but I took care of the problem.” I paused and held Duncan’s foot. “They won’t be an issue again. We aren’t bringing any danger or attention here.”
Matti huffed beside me. He’d heard the whole story on our first day of driving, and he and Sienna had just about exploded over me keeping those incidents a secret for so long.
“How can you be sure of that?” one of the female elders asked. Her hair was so silver it bordered on pale blue.
“Because there’s no way they knew my name. The incidents happened at campgrounds at night. I checked their phones and cars before they… were taken away. There weren’t any pictures related to us, and there hadn’t been any recent calls or texts they’d sent or received.” I’d been lucky their phones’ facial recognition had worked.
“That doesn’t confirm that you can’t or won’t be followed,” the cyclops argued.
They were really going to make me tell them more than I wanted to. But I couldn’t say I didn’t understand why they needed to make sure I wouldn’t be bringing any drama. My hand trailed up to my neck, where it had still hurt up until yesterday. “Every person involved suffered a brain injury and some other wounds. If they ever wake up, the chances of them remembering… or being able to communicate again… are slim.” I tried not to wince. “Very slim.”
A small part of me still thought that I had no right to mete out any kind of justice, but another part of me knew it hadn’t been justice at all. I’d done what I had to, and I felt bad about it, but I wasn’t going to apologize for it either. Both of our lives had been at risk.
I stroked my hand down Duncan’s side, his coat so, so soft. Probably from all the sardines he ate. To be honest, out of everything I’d ever done for him, scooping those tiny fish out of their containers was the grossest. Not pulling hair out of his butt after a poop or having him sneeze into my open mouth. Nope. Sardines. I didn’t like fish, but I did it every day, and it still made me gag. But like the song said, I would do anything for love.
I was here, willing to do what I was willing to do, and Matti and Sienna had come with us, and if that wasn’t the four-letter word that had started wars and maybe even ended them, I didn’t know what was.
My hand kept going along his side, over his flank, until I could wrap my fingers around the middle of his fluffy tail. I’d teased him before, telling him he had to be half fox with that thing, and he’d given me the stink eye even though I wasn’t even sure he knew what a fox was. It would look like a black dust sweeper… if it wasn’t for the tiny blue flame on the tip of it. I pinched it and smiled as the color flickered around my fingers.
There were multiple gasps, and it was the woman who spoke that time. “But how…?”
Maybe they were letting the incidents go for now.
“It only gets ‘hot’”—I used quotation marks with my free hand—“when he’s scared or protective.” It had changed colors when he’d been trying to save me from the giant werewolf, but I was the only one who’d recognized the signs. “He burned a few of the men who tried to kidnap him. Those were the other injuries they received. But it was in self-defense.” It had happened right before I’d taken action. Just thinking about that moment pissed me off all over again because it had been my fault for hesitating.
I reached with my free hand to rub Duncan’s ears between my fingers. Multiple sets of eyeballs moved from his relaxed body to the hand I had on him and back. Several nostrils flared again as the elders smelled him—and maybe me too—all while staying quiet, hopefully just intrigued by whatever he was and whatever I was. Two mysteries wrapped in the same tortilla.
I knew better than anyone how much was at stake. It could have been so easy for me to have lived a lonely life. Love could have been something I’d only read about in a fairy tale. I’d thought about it often, how different my life would have turned out without the love of my parents, of Matti and his family, of Sienna and hers. Without Duncan’s.
Everything I knew about love and loyalty was because of them and their presence in my life.
You don’t spit in Love’s eye, my mom had told me once before my body had changed. You’ll make her mad if you do.
I don’t think you can spit in Love’s eye, Mom, I had argued.
The face she had given me had been only a little patronizing. Sí puedes, Nina, and she’s not as nice as you’d think.
It had been an interesting conversation, but I’d taken her words to heart. When life gives you a true love, you keep it.
And that was Duncan for me.
He was special, and I’d known it from the moment I met him, which had been about a heartbeat before I’d fallen in love with him. Up until then, I had always thought love at first sight was BS. An excuse for being horny, if anything. Then he showed up, and I suddenly understood just how the universe could drop something into your existence that your soul recognized belonged there.
Sometimes you learned real quick how you could love something more than you loved yourself.
“How old is he?” the man with the glasses asked quietly but still kind of weird.
“Two years old.”
There was a murmur among a few of the elders.
“His magic is strong,” he noted softly, attention locked on my donut.
“I know. When he was a baby, he felt magical but faintly, universally. The way most young magical kids do. I had hoped he might be an iron wolf because of his dark hair, or a mix?—”
Matti’s foot bumped mine beneath the table.
“But since his tail and eyes changed, I started second-guessing that,” I finished telling them.
The woman with the silver-blue hair cleared her throat and leaned forward. “How did you manage to become the child’s guardian?”
* * *
My life with Duncan started on the night of a full moon.
Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. Full moons were the time when magic was the strongest. When it pulsed and resonated and reminded those with even the faintest trace of it in their cells that there was something greater out there. Something so powerful that, once a couple thousand years ago, give or take, our ancestors had thought the world was ending when magic streaked across the sky and fell to the earth, or so the stories from so many civilizations said.
It had always made me wonder if the first person to write about mysticism on full moons had been magical. Then I wondered if someone had taken them out for spilling a secret. That was the first thing we were taught the moment our brains could comprehend it: Don’t tell anyone.
On those special nights, I always had a harder time falling asleep than usual, which was why I’d been awake in the first place when I’d heard something big moving around in the bushes outside of my camper. I’d only been at that state park for two nights at that point, and the first thing the employee who had checked me in had said was “Watch out for coyotes.”
Animals didn’t concern me. It was everyone else that moved around on two legs that I side-eyed, at least until I got to know them. As many good people as there were in the world, it always felt like there were ten times as many not-so-good ones.
But the truth was, I hadn’t thought much of the noises going on outside my RV at first. By that point, I’d been living in it full-time for almost three years, and I’d heard and seen some things. For the most part, I liked staying at RV parks more than I enjoyed parking in the middle of nowhere. Being able to plug in to power and drain my gray tanks easily was a luxury I didn’t like living without. Having access to Wi-Fi, a shower that wasn’t confined to a tiny stall, and laundry facilities? If I’d wanted to rough it, I could have lived out of a tent, but I wasn’t that simple of a person. I loved air-conditioning too much, and the twenty-foot travel trailer I pulled behind my truck was more than enough space for one person.
Which was why I had been there that night in the RV section of a state park in Arizona, my reservation good for a whole month. Depending on how much I liked a specific location, and the ages of the people also around, sometimes I would stay for a month or two. Every once in a while, maybe three, if there was availability, among other criteria.
When I’d been outside earlier that day, I’d overheard a couple two spots down talking to another couple about how they were pretty sure they’d seen a wolf the night before, the night I’d gotten there.
It hadn’t been a wolf, but they wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told them the truth. My nose might not be anything spectacular, but my night vision was. The chupacabra had slunk around in the dark, keeping its distance from my van before eventually finding its way back into the fifth wheel where it had come from. The trailer with New Mexico plates had been gone by the time I’d woken up the next morning.
I didn’t take it personally. I had been busy replacing the elastic thread that held the beads of my bracelet together when I’d spotted it. I hadn’t intended on running it off.
So honestly, when the rustling started on that bright night, I hadn’t thought much of it. I wasn’t sure what kind of predators lived in the area, but I’d figured chances were a coyote was poking around. It hadn’t been until I’d heard creaking on the steps, followed by something nudging at my camper door, that I’d sat up in bed, which was wedged into the open space at the front of the trailer, and listened. The stairs only creaked when something human-sized or bigger was on them.
The hairs on my arms had gone straight up.
An awareness of magic like I had only felt around one other being before—my neighbor—had filled my chest in the next instant. That was the best way to describe what sensing other beings felt like. An invisible nudge hello—pressure, even. A sensation that said, This person is a little like you, with most beings, but with this one, it had been a shout across a room, a HELLO, HELLO, HELLO.
The most startling thing of all was that I’d been able to smell its magic. Sweet and potent, it had triggered something in me that left me itchy. I had driven through areas with it sprinkled into the leaves of its trees. Diluted in the water that filled its rivers and creeks. Invisible to most, but not to those that kept its secrets.
But I had never felt it the way I did then, maybe because it was so close. I’d never been within ten feet of my neighbor when he let the full spectrum of his power out for the whole neighborhood to feel. The magic at that moment had made me lightheaded. My heart had pounded faster than ever.
And just as every single instinct in my body shivered in reaction to what was outside, I’d heard it.
“Child,” the soft voice had whispered, a stranger talking directly into my head.
And I hadn’t known as I got to my feet—my own magic boiling to life in my sternum in reaction, awakened, tickling my nose, my throat, my spine, and every nerve branching out from it—what I was going to find as I’d crept to the door that led outside.
“Hello?” I’d whispered, fully aware that I hadn’t imagined hearing something in my head. The only voice that had ever sounded like that, felt like that, had been in my dreams, and that one had been different.
But I knew I hadn’t been dreaming. Even if the voice had gone quiet, the magic had still been present.
Somewhere between scared and concerned for the first time in at least a decade, I went for the latch and opened the door, knowing dang well that whatever was outside wouldn’t be stopped by some aluminum framing and fiberglass siding.
And as I swung the door wide, I braced myself.
I’d seen a lot. Bogeymen and sirens. Gray men and harpies.
I had known a man who could turn into a gryphon when he wanted to, and a woman who had told me once at a bar that she’d pulled a man into a part of the ocean that was so deep, his body hadn’t known what to do with the pressure.
My parents had never held back from sharing stories about the beings they had grown up wary of and those their parents had revered, like Kukulcan and Hunab Ku… among others.
There wasn’t a whole lot I genuinely feared, but the magnitude of the magic that had snuck into the campground undetected until then was right on the cusp. And it wouldn’t be until months later that I realized she had done that on purpose. The magical being had let me feel what she was capable of to draw me outside, like a curious moron who would die at the beginning of a horror movie.
And at a little after midnight on that full moon in May, with a power so great making me second-guess why I would even be outside in the first place, trying to find where the magic was coming from , my senses still managed to pick up on a tiny trickle of something.
All it took was a glance down from my camper doorway to spot it.
On the dirt-packed ground had been an itty-bitty body covered in matted black fur that looked wet. The lump had made a sweet cry right at that moment that I felt in my bones.
I’d jumped to the ground and crouched in front of it. The wetness was something that looked more like gel than water, I’d realized as I’d wedged my hand beneath the body and lifted it, thankful for my near-perfect night vision. Crust-covered eyes were set above the smallest nose I’d ever seen.
“Oh my god, you’re a baby,” I had cooed in surprise. I’d felt its fragile bones and its scrawny little chest raggedly rising and falling as the four-legged creature learned how to breathe right in my hand.
A newborn baby—not a dog, I’d been able to sense that, at least not any kind of normal dog that I knew. And as I’d cradled it to my chest, this innocent life too young and defenseless to take care of itself, I had raised my head and looked around. My heart was back to beating so fast.
I saw it then, in the distance of the chaparral landscape. Two bright red eyes.
“Care for him,” the silky, tired voice commanded in my head.
“What?” I had squawked like it hadn’t been the middle of the night and a powerful magical being capable of telepathy hadn’t been communicating with me and I wasn’t surrounded by people who didn’t know about how true folklore was. I’d glanced down at the baby that fit into the palm of my hand before raising my gaze to meet the two eyes moving further away by the second.
She was backing up.
It was its mother. I would’ve bet my life on it.
She howled so deep, long, and loud, there was no way anyone who knew anything about animals would ever believe it was from a coyote.
As I gulped, futilely waiting for an explanation that was never going to come, bright red eyes winked out of view… and the glow of power disappeared.
The fuzzy, wet creature in my hand had let out another newborn-sized whimper.
With the full moon overhead, I stood there for a very long time, hoping the creature would come back for her baby.
But she never did.