The Things We Water

Chapter 3

The centaur child kept peeking at me as we walked. He was so gangly, it was adorable, and with his splash of freckles, huge brown eyes, and eyelashes so long they looked like extensions? I wanted to give him a hug too.

“Are you okay?” I asked him after the fifth time I caught him.

On the ground, trotting next to him, Agnes the crazy puppy followed. She had tried to bite Matti when he’d offered to take her. She was on her own now.

“Can I hold your hand?” the little boy asked shyly.

That made me miss Duncan, and it had been less than an hour since I’d left him with Sienna.

I held my hand out, and his slipped into mine. It was warm and sweaty, and it made me like him even more. “What’s your name?”

“Shiloh,” the centaur/goat child answered. “What’s your name?”

I had already given it to him, but he’d had other things to worry about. “Evangelina but everyone calls me Nina.” Not even my own parents had called me by my full name.

He squeezed my fingers before gesturing toward the adorable menace at his side. “That’s Agnes, and that’s Pascal.”

I nodded and smiled, glancing up to make sure Matti was doing fine as he carried who I now knew was Pascal in his arms as he led us through the forest. We had decided it would be faster and easier to drive us all back. I just hoped one of their pack didn’t come looking for them before we got there, thinking we were trying to kidnap them. That would be a great introduction.

Shiloh squeezed my fingers again, and I focused down on him. His eyes went so wide, so dreamy, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It definitely wasn’t what he said next.

“Are you a forest princess?”

Up ahead, Matti tried to muffle a sound. I pretended I didn’t hear him. “I’m not, but thank you for asking.”

“You look like one,” he told me in a small, timid voice.

I jiggled his hand in mine. “Thank you.” If things worked out here, he was definitely on my Christmas list.

Shiloh kept looking at me with that innocent, curious face. “What are you?” he whispered.

It was a taboo thing to ask someone what they were. Either you offered it, or you didn’t. It was a sign of trust to tell another person your heritage if it wasn’t obvious by scent or feel. I’d been told that all werewolves smelled slightly similar, and I could confirm that they all felt a certain way, like all ogres, trolls, and other beings like that. The same way an accent would give you an idea of where someone was from. Magic was the same in its way.

But, as I knew firsthand, a lot of people were very, very protective of that information for their own reasons, and I again wondered how many of those beings sometimes just didn’t know what they were—look at me and Duncan. Regardless, asking a person’s heritage was the equivalent of someone asking what color your nipples were or how big your penis was. So, it was rare to ever have someone just ask, if they had manners.

But Shiloh, who was holding my hand like we were old friends, eyes glittering when they met mine, looked so guileless….

I’d give him my bank account numbers if he looked at me that way when he asked.

“Back there… with that… you know… you smelled like… you smelled like—” His shoulders went up and down as he struggled to express himself. “—a birthday cake.”

That was a new one.

I think I might have blushed.

“I don’t know for sure,” I whispered back, honestly. “I never met my real mom or dad.” I had some ideas, sure. One was a very, very good guess, but most of the people in my life had all agreed that it was better for me to never actually voice my guess because of superstition with saying certain names out loud. The man and the woman who I considered in every way to be my parents didn’t share DNA with me, but that didn’t mean much to anyone. Like Matti had said: werewolves didn’t care.

Big brown eyes blinked before the child frowned. “Never?”

I shook my head, grateful that this wasn’t a sensitive topic for me. It was like talking about a celebrity, in a way. Or characters I’d read about in books.

“What do you look like?” He meant in my other body, like how he could go from half goat to human.

“I don’t change. I can’t,” I answered, trying to explain it as simply as I could. “I always look like this.” I was average, medium, in almost every way. Wavy dark hair, brownish peach skin that was a clue of who I’d inherited it from, and light hazel eyes that were another clue—but a really broad one. My bone structure was a hint of my possible parentage, I thought, but the rest of me was pretty ambiguous.

From the way he blinked, the concept of not having another form was unheard of to him.

It was to the majority of people. Myths were myths to some, and legends were simply legends to others. But they weren’t.

My parents had explained it to me once when I’d been sixteen and that special thing in me had woken up and changed me. I hadn’t understood why or how I could be so different from them. From everyone in my life. Why I couldn’t turn into something too. Shift , some people called it. To me, it looked like a shimmer more than anything.

My parents had sandwiched me between them and explained that if there was something— magic — in this world that had created all those beings in mythology, that there was no reason to believe that something —that magic from a meteor—couldn’t be capable of creating all the other beings in the world that had stories and legends written about them too. That they were all intertwined for a reason.

“ We’re in the same books but our stories are different, Nina ,” my mom had assured me. “Why would only some be real but not the others?”

And then we had gone to our window and, through the blinds, watched our neighbor across the street: a tall, very old man with an eye patch who had two pet ravens that he tried to play off like they were wild when all the magical people in the neighborhood knew better. He was usually sitting out on his porch. I had always known on some level there was something different about him. He’d worn a bracelet most of the time, but when he didn’t? His magic had been staggering. He had been nice to Matti and me, but I remembered how much he had loved Henri. That was when my parents had mouthed to me who they thought he had been once upon a time.

They had never used the word “immortal” to describe him, but rather said “long-lived.” From an old, old pagan culture. One of the few ancient beings whose existence hadn’t faded from memory.

I would never forget that they had no sooner mouthed his four-letter name than the old man, who went by Otis, had turned his attention in the direction of our house and smiled in a way that made the hair on my arms rise.

We left for the store an hour later and bought a puzzle that I had dropped off on his doorstep.

Even now, thousands of years after magic had made its initial presence, some names, and the magic and the gifts that came with them, still evoked fear.

Nobody had called the puzzle an offering, but nobody said it wasn’t one either.

The older man had left an impression on me, but that still hadn’t been enough for me to accept who one or both of my biological parents might be. But when you’re young, all you want to do is fit in.

And when you’re older, you’ve accepted who you are, and you just want to be left alone. Funny how that worked.

In that moment though, Shiloh blinked, still confused, his gaze falling to my bracelet. It wasn’t anything special. It looked like a normal bracelet, with one smooth, round obsidian bead strung to a fire obsidian and then a quartz. The pattern repeated throughout the length of it. It was the obsidian though that did all the work. It hid what I wanted to keep a secret.

“But… but the monster was scared of you,” the little boy stuttered in confusion.

But he thought I was a princess anyway? There was no point in arguing his observation. I nodded. “You aren’t scared of me, are you?”

His lips pinched together, and he shook his head. “No, you’re nice.”

“Thank you.” I squeezed his little hand. “You’re nice too.”

Shiloh, the centaur/goat child, gazed at me for a second, the question about my identity lingering in his head before he used one of his two legs—hooves?—and kicked at a small twig. “My dad says you don’t have to be the biggest to be the scariest.”

“It helps to be big, but being small and scary works too. Like a spider.” I dropped my voice. “My friend saw one and came running out of the bathroom screaming that he thought it was going to eat him. It was a tiny little spider too.”

In front, Matti slowed down and glared at me over his shoulder but kept his mouth shut. That wasn’t exactly what had happened, but I could be dramatic too. Just less often.

Shiloh’s expression went pensive. “I was scared. Agnes was too, but she tried to fight.”

“Don’t feel bad for being scared. That thing was mean. You didn’t run or cry. You stood up to it. You should be proud of yourself. I bet if you really wanted, you could have stomped on it. Broken a couple toes at least,” I suggested.

Matti snickered.

“You think so?” little Shiloh asked.

“Definitely.”

Maybe I shouldn’t put that idea into his head.

He was quiet until after we’d jumped over a fallen log—him gracefully, me not so much—and then waited for crazy Agnes to take three tries to get over it too after she’d tried biting Matti again when he tried to help her. That time though, Matti had quietly growled at her and continued doing it until she’d stopped. I forgot there was a huge brown wolf under that ’stache.

Then Shiloh asked, freckled nose wrinkling, “But why was that mean lady scared of you?”

How was I supposed to explain that to a child, especially one who was holding my hand when I’d had full-grown adults who left campgrounds when I arrived? Plus, Shiloh wasn’t a predator.

I guess I wasn’t one either.

“I don’t turn into anything like you all do, but I have magic that it doesn’t understand. You liked the way I smell, but it didn’t,” I told him as casually as possible, not wanting to alarm him or give him a reason to ask more questions I wouldn’t know how to answer.

“But—” he started to say just as we approached the visible signs of a road ahead. Matti gestured us to the left with his head, and I followed. He had to help all of us, minus the white puppy who dug a hole and belly crawled under the fence , and once we were clear, I spotted the travel trailer exactly where we’d left it.

“You’re taking us home?” Shiloh asked with another squeeze of my palm.

“Yup,” I told him. “We were going there anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m hoping your pack will let me and my pup live there.”

“You have a pup?”

“Yeah. His name is Duncan, and he’s over there with my friend, Sienna. She’s a wolf like them.”

Sienna wouldn’t care if I told her secret—not that it really was one anyway, since the little boy could probably sense the similarities between her and his pup friends.

Shiloh’s eyes widened in interest as Matti got to the spot where Sienna and Duncan had been waiting. He leaned in and kissed her, rubbing the top of my donut’s head while he did. Duncan leaned toward the boy, Pascal, and I was pretty sure they were smelling each other before my puppy gave the boy a lick. Sienna laughed and grinned before they made their way to the truck and opened the rear passenger door, loading Duncan inside first, then the child.

I squeezed my new friend’s hand again as the white werewolf reached the truck and she barked at my best friends.

“Don’t be scared,” I told Shiloh. “None of us are going to hurt you, and I promise we’re just taking you home. You’re safe.”

He gave me that spirit-soaring, dreamy smile. “I know,” he assured me as more sharp barks filled the air. Agnes the werewolf pup was on the ground, her small face tilted up to the truck where Duncan was. She was wagging her tail and snapping her teeth at him. Sienna took a step between them.

“Stop, pup,” she demanded, clearly aiming the command at the crazy one—but not that crazy because the puppy knocked it off and sat on her hind legs. That tone of voice usually had the same effect on Duncan, who hadn’t made a peep to begin with. He was picky about what he was willing to get in trouble over.

Sienna smiled sweetly, and Matti and I both gave her an impressed face. I whistled at her, and she looked up, ready to say something when her mouth dropped as we made it to the truck. “Are you a satyr?” she gasped at Shiloh with sheer joy.

A satyr . That’s what he was.

Shiloh leaned against my thigh. “Yes,” he whispered, suddenly shy. Or maybe it was because she was a new predator he didn’t know?

She squealed. “You’re so cute!”

My new friend glanced up at me, his freckled cheeks pink. “You are very cute,” I promised him. Then I focused on Duncan, who was too busy staring at Agnes to even notice I was back. “I missed you too, Dunky-Dunk,” I called out with a laugh.

Bright red eyes moved toward me a split second before that fluffy tail swept from side to side. That warmth that felt like a hug in my chest flared in sudden greeting.

“ Yes.”

I blinked, trying my best to get used to this ability that had popped up when his appearance had changed. He wasn’t using it very often yet, but when he did? It was like a Christmas present. When I’d told Matti and Sienna about it, after we’d discussed the ranch, they had both looked at me like I was nuts. But I hadn’t been totally surprised when he’d done it the first time; I’d had a feeling he would someday be able to communicate with me like that.

His mom had been great at it.

Duncan focused back on Agnes, his tail swinging around.

“What’s that smell?” Sienna asked out of nowhere. She wrinkled her nose. “It’s like sewage.”

“I think we met a Jenny Greenteeth,” Matti answered.

“A what ?” we both said at the same time.

“Jenny Greenteeth.” He scratched his nose. “That’s what they call them in England.”

“What’s a Jenny Greentooth?” Sienna asked, reading my mind.

“Greenteeth, baby. An old crone that lives in a river and eats….” Matti’s eyes flicked over to the truck, where the kids were. His lips and mustache went flat.

I took after Matti and scratched my nose. “I’m impressed you know that much obscure folklore, Matti.”

“My roommate junior year of college was from Lancashire and had this book I read when I took a shit.”

That explained it.

“You guys stink.” Sienna wrinkled her nose. “Some more than others.”

I didn’t think it was us that smelled. I was pretty sure it was Agnes since she was the only one who’d gotten touched, but I didn’t trust the puppy not to bite me if I talked about her. She wasn’t barking anymore as she waited at the truck, her attention still on Duncan.

She was a wary one for sure.

But she was so dang cute.

I got Shiloh’s attention. “Need help getting into the truck?”

He shook his head as he let go of my hand and jumped gracefully into the back seat, landing on the floorboards perfectly. “Come on, Agnes,” he called to his friend. The puppy gave the three of us adults a mean look before backing up and jumping in too… barely making it. Duncan’s tail waved faster, but he didn’t lean down to smell or lick her like he had the boy, Pascal. He gave Shiloh space too, I noticed.

Matti held out his hand. “I’ll drive the rest of the way, okay?”

“Sure,” I agreed. I just wanted to give my boy a hug now. What if that child-eating asshole had found him instead?

He could have lit her on fire, but that was beside the point. I only wanted him to light things on fire that he wanted to light on fire—and that was a thought I didn’t think I would ever have. This whole situation was one I never would’ve imagined either.

“I’ll sit in the back with them if you want to ride shotgun,” I offered to Sienna, who nodded.

It only took a second for me to get in and shut the door. Duncan settled into my lap and licked my cheek. “Hi, Donut.”

His “ yes ” was soft and gentle. His form of hi. We were both still learning his gift. His voice was nowhere near as clear or strong as his mom’s had been, and I wondered what it would sound like when he was older.

“Is that fire on his tail?” Shiloh whispered.

Pascal, who was leaning over, gawked. “Why are his eyes red?”

“The same reason why yours are gold. You got them from someone in your family,” I answered him.

The boy seemed to think about that for a moment. “He smells like you, but he doesn’t smell like you,” Pascal the wolf boy argued. “You’re not his mom.”

Duncan licked my cheek in a way that felt like an argument against that claim. It sure felt like I was his mom, even if I’d never used the word out loud.

“He didn’t come from my body, but he is my pup,” I tried to explain, gently.

“He wasn’t in your stomach?”

“Nope.”

“Was he in his dad’s stomach? Because my mom said that she wished my dad could have babies, and Dad said that seahorses do. And that maybe other animals do too, but not wolves,” the boy rambled on out of nowhere before making an expectant face.

He actually expected me to answer that?

Sienna turned all the way around in her seat as Matti pulled us back onto the road. Pinching her index finger and thumb together, she dragged them across her lips. Freaking coward.

“I… I really don’t think his dad carried him in his stomach either. I’m pretty sure it was his biological mom.”

“What’s biological?”

This kid hadn’t said a word to Matti during the walk to the car, but now he had a million of them.

I wasn’t exactly qualified to have this conversation. Duncan was the only child I’d spent significant time with since I’d been a kid, and he didn’t argue with me or ask questions. He could push my buttons playfully sometimes, but that was different. He was an angel on four legs. And I just had to peek down at him, finding those big, sweet eyes, to know it was true. He was one of those puppies that looked like he was smiling.

But no one else seemed to want to answer the boy’s question, so I guessed it was up to me. “Uh…” I started fidgeting. “That means....”

There were coughs from the front seat that sounded deceptively like laughs.

I guess I couldn’t expect any backup from Matti or Sienna on this.

I cleared my throat. “To have a baby, the baby has parts from the mom and the dad. Like maybe you have your dad’s eyes but you’re funny like your mom? Because most beings can’t have babies without someone else sharing part of their… bodies?”

Pascal frowned at me like I didn’t make sense, and let’s be real, it didn’t really, but how did you explain biology and cells to what looked like a seven-year-old? I sure didn’t know. I wouldn’t even know how to explain the birds and the bees using the birds and the bees analogy. I hadn’t understood the concept when I was thirteen, and I still didn’t understand it now in my early thirties.

And I was not going to be the one to explain a daddy’s pee-pee going into a mommy’s privates. I would throw myself out of the truck first. “But Duncan is my pup. I take care of him, he takes care of me, and I love him,” I told them before they could nitpick my BS explanation.

“Does he love you?” the werewolf child asked in a way that kind of sounded innocent but also pretty judgy.

I glanced at Duncan, who still had his attention on me, and smiled. “He does.” I didn’t doubt it for a second.

“My aunt says that moms and dads are great but other people are just as good as they are,” my friend Shiloh butted in, wise beyond his years.

“Your aunt is a genius. As long as someone loves you, it doesn’t matter.” I paused and thought about something. “Do you want to call your parents?”

I’d never seen anyone go from being okay to looking like they wanted to throw up so fast.

Agnes decided right then to start growling again, and Shiloh had to scold her, which then led to the three of them arguing about whatever it was they were arguing over. Getting in trouble? Getting busted? The boys were talking over each other so much it was hard to tell what each one of them was trying to say while the white wolf pitched in her own thoughts through low grumbles that made me want to giggle from how adorable they were.

I guess nobody wanted to call their parents. If we weren’t so close to the ranch, I would’ve insisted but…

I focused on Duncan then, grateful that he didn’t talk a lot. Those red eyes were bright and attentive. I had already told him multiple times what we were doing and where we were going, and my gut said he understood, but I lowered my voice and palmed his back. “Do you remember where we’re going? I’ll be with you the whole time. Nothing is going to happen. This place smells so good, and I think you’re going to like it. If you hate it, it’s okay. You just have to tell me, all right?”

His “yes” was a touch to my soul. I could eat his telepathy with tortilla chips, I loved it so much.

I stroked the fur between his head and the base of his tail, then I did it again, trying to keep my thoughts on him. If I didn’t focus on how this meeting was actually about to happen—how our future hinged on how it went—my body wouldn’t react to the worry that came with it, and the exceptional noses in the truck would never notice I was ramping myself up.

Regardless of whatever happened, we were going to be fine. Duncan and I would figure it out. Matti had said something about Alaska, hadn’t he?

The truck slowing down brought me back to the moment as Matti turned the wheel a hard left. Through the rear passenger window, the only things visible were massive trees and a fence taller than the one we’d jumped. The difference now was that there was an imposing iron gate ahead. Multiple signs were posted, claiming PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING, NO SOLICITING, NO POACHING, YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW, and YOU ARE UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.

They weren’t screwing around. Good.

We slowed to a stop, and the driver’s side window rolled down. There was an intercom-looking thing to the left. Leaning out of the window, Matti pressed a button on the keypad. It beeped. “Hello?”

Nothing.

He glanced at Sienna, who shrugged, before he leaned out the window one more time, making the intercom beep again. “Hello? This is Matti. I used to live here….”

Nothing.

The side mirror reflected his frown.

He did whatever he did to make the intercom beep for the third time. His mustache was flat across his upper lip. “It’s still Matti. My cousin is Henri Blackrock. I found three of your children and have them with me—oh, the gate is opening now,” he muttered in a voice that cracked with irritation.

On my lap, Duncan leaned to the side to peek out the window. I had already talked to him about how careful he needed to be around them. I didn’t want to scare him or be so strict, but it was a necessary evil. I rolled the window down a crack. His shiny nose started twitching, taking in the air that somehow felt even more magical than before. Against my hand, his little heart started beating faster, so I stroked his chest. Did he sense the same thing I had when I’d gotten out of the truck? Nobody else seemed to be reacting to it, but….

Slowly, the gates finished opening, and Matti drove forward, giving me a close-up view of the black ironwork. Part of me had expected to see the outline of a wolf on them or something kind of catchy like that, but the only decoration on the iron was a half-moon on each side, which formed a whole one when closed. A full moon.

Duncan’s nose kept twitching, twitching, twitching.

I glanced over at the kids and found Shiloh looking nervous. He was wringing his little hands. “Are you okay?” I asked.

Huge brown eyes blinked in the least convincing way ever.

“What were you all doing running away from home?” Matti asked from the front seat.

Those adorable eyes almost bulged out of his head as the most nervous laugh I’d ever heard came out of his body. “We weren’t running away! We were going to look for?—”

“Shh!” the werewolf boy hissed, putting his index finger up to his lips.

Shiloh gritted his teeth before offering almost glumly, “Stuff?”

That sounded real believable.

Sienna turned around in the seat as much as she could. “Were all of you born on the ranch?”

“No,” the werewolf boy answered at the same time as Shiloh said, “Me, yeah. Agnes, no. Her mom?—”

From the floor, the white puppy barked.

The satyr stopped talking.

I was learning real quick he might be sweet but couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. I think I loved him already.

It was Pascal who leaned forward so his head would have gone between the seats if he was bigger and wasn’t wearing a seat belt. “Are you really Henri’s cousin?”

In the rearview mirror, Matti’s face brightened. “He’s my older cousin.” He paused. “I’m his only cousin.”

I wasn’t sure Matti even knew the technicalities of their relationship, but I wasn’t going to bring it up. If it had never mattered to him, why would it to me? I knew next to nothing about his dad’s side of the family, and that was all right. If he’d wanted to talk about it, he would have by now.

“The one who used to pee his bed?”

My mouth dropped, and I leaned forward too, my head over Pascal’s to get a good look at Matti’s profile in person. He was focused on the road, but he wasn’t beaming anymore. “ What ?”

“Henri said you used to pee your bed because you were scared,” the boy explained.

“You were fourteen when you moved here….” I couldn’t even finish my sentence. I started cracking up.

“No!” Matti shook his head. “I never?—”

“He said you did it all the time.”

Sienna reached back to blindly grab my hand, and then we were both cackling.

“No.” Matti’s face…. “Why would he…?”

“All the time,” the werewolf pup insisted, just in case we hadn’t heard him. “Lots of pee.”

Sienna and I were too busy trying to breathe to make a single comment.

Why would he make that up about Matti?

I couldn’t stop laughing. Henri had said that? The teenage boy I remembered would not— would not —have said something like that. Ever. That made it even funnier.

“I don’t pee the bed, and you both know it,” he argued, way too defensively. We were still busy gasping for breath when the truck slowed down again just as Matti whistled, back to ignoring our BS. “This place has changed.”

Wiping away my tears and saving the moment for later, I sat up and peered through the windshield, the laughter leaving my body almost immediately.

The ranch, the part of it I could see, wasn’t what I’d expected.

There was no cozy farmhouse set on a desolate and dusty parcel of land. There were no pens of horses, or a riding rink surrounded by cowboys. There wasn’t a single cow or steer in sight either, like most of the ranches I’d driven by.

In front of us was what seemed like a giant gravel parking lot that could have belonged at a sports stadium. Across from it was a building that was so large it resembled an old courthouse or a mansion… or basically a billionaire’s gigantic cabin that was visited once a year. The walls were made of some of the most impressive logs I’d ever seen.

There were UTVs parked next to each other in between the lot and the building. To the sides and behind it, the woods cleared and opened a bit to show small homes in the distance. Most of them were also cabin-looking, but some of them were more traditional homes with muted neutral colors. There were multiple paths that branched out toward the dwellings from the huge building.

From the way it was all set up and the small number of cars parked in the lot in front of the main structure, it seemed like you had to leave your car there to get around.

“They didn’t have this back then,” Matti said, like he could read my mind. “The parking lot was here but not that building.”

I opened my mouth to ask about the parking situation when a nudge at my chin had me tipping it down to find Duncan’s pupils slightly dilated. “Everything is going to be okay,” I promised him with a stroke of his soft, floppy ears. He didn’t look all that worried, or even a little bit worried. Was it me? Was I giving off anxious vibes or something? “I’m fine.”