Adriana #3
“Well, to what do I owe the pleasure?” the dragonborn exclaimed, smiling hugely at the woman on the other side of the aisle. Adriana nearly tripped over her own feet in her haste to see the woman, but the sound of her voice brought her up short again, body freezing.
“Good morning, Kaz! I was just passing by and thought one of your ledgers might be beautiful for the reception guestbook.”
Her voice had completely changed. Smooth and bright, half an octave higher, no trace of a coastal accent at all, no hint of trash-strewn alleyways or rundown houses, not even a rumor left of garlic and olive oil to be found.
The woman’s voice had lost all trace of who she was or where she’d come from.
The dragonborn was all too eager to move to the opposite wall where said ledgers must have been, but the unseen wolf with the ability of a chameleon stopped them.
“I already took a few pictures to send to the bride, if that’s okay. Not my decision to make, of course.” The lie rolled off the woman’s tongue without missing a beat, her laughter high like a bell, and the dragonborn laughed their agreement.
“Of course! Young people today want things exactly as they envision. I blame social media, personally. Well, if they have any questions at all, you know where to find me!”
The door was opening, wood creaking as the woman stepped out, and Adriana practically threw herself after her. She needed to see, needed to put eyes on this stranger who talked like her mother but was walking around Cambric Creek.
She stumbled her way out the door, forgetting there was a step until her foot nearly missed it. “Wait!”
The woman turned on the sidewalk, already several steps away.
She was nothing that Adriana was expecting.
Of an age with her own mother, but shiny like a new penny.
Cinnamon-colored hair fell to the middle of her back, painted in golden highlights that caught the sunlight overhead, making her glow.
Her makeup was natural and neutral, her perfectly shaped eyebrows the same color as her expertly dyed hair, filled and soft and not at all dramatic.
Nothing about her was tacky or tawdry, insults she’d heard leveled at the women of her pack all her life.
Adriana felt the drag of the woman’s emerald green eyes moving over her, this stranger who’d so rudely accosted her, her shell-pink smile curving up, revealing even, brilliant white teeth.
“Yes? Is there something I can help you with?” That same voice, high and bright, perfectly pitched and even. A voice of respectability.
Adriana floundered. She didn’t know how to verbalize the tumult of her thoughts without sounding like she was out of her fucking mind, which she probably was. “You from Walnut Hill?” she choked out, realizing the woman would turn away if she continued to say nothing at all.
The change was subtle but immediate.
The she-wolf’s bright green eyes narrowed, looking Adriana a bit slower.
“Forsythe,” she answered at last. The code switch was immediate.
“Who the fuck wants t’know?” Her nostrils flared, sucking in a deliberate, sniffing breath.
“A yote. Haven’t sniffed one of you out in ages. You’re from the Gravani pack?”
“Sciacalo.” She was trembling. She hadn’t felt this exposed, this seen, since she’d left home for university on a full scholarship, never looking back.
Adriana found the wolvish conundrum of the Ship of Theseus fascinating; a thought experiment that hit close to home.
She, too, had stripped herself down, piece by piece, trading who she was and where she was from for education and ambition until she scarcely recognized the person in the mirror.
She didn’t know what that made her. She certainly couldn’t ever go home again, but she’d never managed to cultivate someone new.
She wasn’t the girl from the scavenger pack who’d grown up on the edge of the wolves’ territory anymore, but neither was she anyone else. The stress of work had subsumed it all.
No one cared where she had come from in the emergency department.
No one asked questions about where she’d grown up or what prep schools she’d attended.
No one asked about her community; no one even bothered to ask what kind of were she was, if they noticed she was something other than human at all, which few did.
She was too busy saving lives, intubating strangers in hallways, being covered in their blood and sick, too busy being too busy for any of that to matter .
. . but it would matter in a place like this, where everyone already knew too much about her and would surely dig for more.
Poverty was transience.
Don’t get too attached, don’t accumulate too much.
One never knew what calamity might befall them next without a safety net to catch them.
Jobs could disappear, housing too. It was important to know where the laundromat was, for if one was lucky enough to own their own machine and it died, there was no telling how long it would take before a replacement might be afforded.
Discount food stores meant one could stretch the budget for a single meal to last an entire week, if needed.
Surviving poverty was a life skill that had been etched onto her bones, and it didn’t matter if she made a healthy six-figure salary now.
She would never forget how to be poor, would never shake off the need to budget, and spending without calculating the cost to her savings would never come naturally to her.
She would never not feel poor in those same bones, and her life felt just as transient.
She’d never needed to worry about knowing a patient’s name, for once she left their bedside, after quickly assessing and giving orders, she’d likely never need to see them again.
Her apartment had been a place, the place where she slept.
She hadn’t had time for friends or relationships outside the occasional hook-up that never lasted beyond the following morning.
This place, though . . . everything about Cambric Creek screamed permanence.
The trees that dotted the long stretch of green at the center of Main Street had trunks that advertised their age with their width, planted long before any of the impressive surrounding industry existed, having stood sentinel to witness the progress rising from the mud.
The buildings that ringed the park had been built more than a century earlier, perhaps longer.
The benches down Main Street possessed shiny bronze plaques, as did the monuments, and others shining from the brick walls between storefronts.
Cambric Creek had a tangible history about it, one that advertised itself in shining bronze and wide oaken trunks.
All around them, orcs and goblins and trolls went about their day, coming and going from the coffee shop up the block to the bookstore or hardware store, crossing the street with the unconscious ease of folks who had grown up assuming they belonged exactly where they happened to be standing.
Adriana couldn’t relate.
“You’re a long way from home,” the woman acknowledged. Further than could ever be measured in distance. “Can I help you with something?”
Her mouth opened, jaw working, her voice trying and failing to start until the werewolf raised an eyebrow pointedly.
“I just moved here. I-I heard you on the phone,” she blurted out at last, fire rushing up her face. “ And then when the owner came out, and I just . . . how? How did you do that? How did you learn to—” She gestured at the woman, voice trailing off. How did you learn to become someone brand new?
The werewolf’s eyes softened, intuiting what hadn’t been said. “Well, it didn’t happen overnight, if that’s what you’re hoping. Do you have a job yet? If you’re running away from your pack, I can put you in touch with—”
“Oh, I, um. I’m a doctor. Yeah, I have a job.”
“A doctor?!” The woman laughed, taking a step closer.
“Honey, you already have everything you need, in that case. And you’re pretty.
You just need to . . . let it go. And I know, that’s easier said than done.
Let me guess — you got a sibling in rehab?
Parent who’s proud of you but resents you, too?
Expects you to give every bit of yourself and every dollar in your pocket to people who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire?
And you hate them but you still desperately want their approval? ”
Adriana smiled thinly. Read you like a fucking book. “Well, my brother’s in jail, so . . . I guess that’s a version of rehab.”
“Close enough,” the wolf laughed. “A doctor . . . Okay, so at least you have a budget to work with. Clothes — nothing with a designer logo. Simple. Spend money on fabric, not labels. You’re going to make an appointment at this salon,” she paused, fishing a tiny notebook from her bag, “and do whatever they say. Get your nails done if you can’t do them yourself.
Every week. Keep your shoes clean. That’s what people will notice.
The voice . . . I watched a lot of movies.
I also had the benefit of being pregnant for two straight years, so we had a lot of time for movies, but .
. . higher than you feel is normal. Enunciate.
It’s not, yeah, you have a job; it’s yes, of course I’m employed.
I copied. I copied until it was natural. ”
She handed over the name and number of the salon she’d written on a scrap of paper, her stack of gold bracelets sliding.
The wedding ring she wore sported a blue diamond the size of a gumball, its anniversary halo a circle of shining stones, and the pendant around her neck sparkled with an emerald and a sapphire.
She was polished and put-together and expensive-looking.
And she’s from two towns over from where you grew up.