Run the Line -- A Carly Shannon Story

  

    

Run the Line

A Carly Shannon story 

By Jenny Iroh 

Sixteen days and eight hours ago I was in bed with the two most beautiful rednecks you’ve ever seen in your life.

Braden and Kyle. Holy goddess. I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the shit-ass burg they call Florida, the size of a man’s belt buckle appears directly proportionate to the size of his dick.

As an Unseelie princess, I’m pretty much the authority on the size of dicks.

In fact, 16 years ago, I was fucking my way through the entire sidhe, and all the domains beholden to our sidhe.

No, you fucking asscake, it’s not sid-heee, it she. She.

Sidhe is pronounced she.

Because, Gaelic.

I sighed heavily and listened to Brenda Evergreen explain, for the 785th time, that she had a hemorrhoid and that’s why her ass bleeds when she shits, and I daydreamed about big dicks.

“I hate you,” I told the ancient werewolf.

“That’s very sad,” she replied, and then burst into a story about when I was a baby.

Knob came from around the bushes jerking on his trousers. Knob is my least favorite person. No, wait, Natalie Gray is my least favorite person, ever. She’s also my best friend. You’re probably a human and wouldn’t understand. I don’t care. We are above your petty ass. At least I am. Natalie is still pretty human.  

Anyhow, I’m typing this into my phone so that when I shove a cold iron rod up my ass and fucking kill myself, and you find my blindingly-beautiful corpse, you’ll understand why I did it.

“Your baby is very ugly, Cedar,” Brenda said cheerfully.

“It’s a gnome. It’s not my baby. And my name is Carly Shannon,” I said. Knob laughed.

“You’re as stupid as you are fat,” Knob said. “You rise to the bait for that old broad every time. Get her in the car.”

Hold that, I’m going to shove a cold iron rod up the gnome’s ass. I don’t even care if it’s deadly to him.

I pulled the decrepit werewolf to the car, while she talked about her adventures with Cedar when she was a girl, and I not-ungently pushed her in the backseat passenger side.

“Lock the door, quick,” I yelled to Knob. He was already in the backseat, and he reached across and pushed the button.

We were in West-by-goddess-Virginia because Brenda Evergreen, retired matron, and mate of the former pack leader, was a genius at escaping things. Like cars. And public restrooms. The only thing she was better at than escaping, was getting assholes and idiots to believe her and give her aid.

I rolled my shoulders and got in the driver’s seat and got slapped in the nose with the smell. Knob’s beady little eyes sparkled in the mirror, and if he wasn’t as exhausted as I was, I think he would have laughed until I killed him.

The pungent smell of piss.

We were in a shopping mall. We thought it was going to be an easy place to feed a werewolf while we regrouped and coordinated her drop-off. So, we thought.

Pre-piss, we lost Brenda Evergreen in the clothes rack at Macy’s almost immediately. She screamed when I found her and tried to drag her to the food court.

“You aren’t my real mom!” she screeched as the horrified perfume counter staff looked on.

Knob walked next to us both making the crazy symbol; circling his finger around his temple.

His presence was effective at getting us noticed and avoided all at once. Gnome magic is weird shit. The beautiful creatures, the fae, basically invented tentacle porn. Fairies are the reason harpies, centaurs, mermaids, and goblins exist.

If it has half-humanoid features and half anything else, a fae probably fucked something it shouldn’t have.  

My parents felt they were gods because they alone, we alone as a people, could create new forms of life. The vampires and werewolves could only change what already existed. Demons could mix with humans, but it wasn’t a new creature, it was a half breed.

Anyway. Fae are scared of few things. Gnome magic is terrifying.

The humans at the counter just whispered loudly as Knob went by. Mostly about how cute he was in his pointy little hat and his cute colorful britches.

A sharp inhale of breath to the left of me, werepanther by the smell, announced that the preternatural creatures in the area were also watching.

A quick hiss of alarm, and the single word ‘gnome’ rang through the store faster than sound.

Knob was an incredible bounty hunter. All gnomes were. They could catch anything simply by standing in its shadow. Gnomes had shadow magic and could freeze a body completely. You couldn’t so much as blink your eyes or swallow if a gnome was engaging its magic in your shadow.

They also had a weird underground network which nobody had ever seen, and an even weirder way of communicating.

They called it The Line, and it connected all the rocks on the planet. You could communicate with a gnome through a line call.

People who wanted a hit, someone or something killed off, placed a line call for one. The gnomes would choose to take the call or not.

Knob didn’t do hits anymore, he said.

“It’s boring as hell and ain’t nobody to fun with,” he said.

The gnome spoke like an old New Yorker who was from a different planet. Natalie usually interpreted his verbal shittings. I took it to mean that catching and killing isn’t a challenge. Once you stand in a shadow it’s a quick silver bullet or stake and The End. No challenge.

And there was the fact that Knob lived to insult people. He lived for it. Bringing back bags, or bounties, that were catch-and-return in the preternatural world, allowed him to verbally abuse the purchaser and the product, and the partner.

Catching a bag required a partner, because while Knob could catch you, at three feet tall, he couldn’t bring you in.

His last partner was a human Vodun Master. A powerful human, but a human all the same. Voodoo magic is real, and it’s strong stuff, but humans are delicate when it comes to standoffs with anything else.

Knob’s last partner had his arms ripped off as he cast a spell on a vampire. Not a great way to die. Weird, too, because vampires are not inherently wasteful.

Fae are not delicate. We can take anything but cold iron or decapitation. Because we’re as physically strong as a werewolf, can throw fireballs like a demon, are as fast to heal as a Goliath, and we can hypnotize with glamour better than a vampire, we are essentially the top of the food chain.

A werewolf could not kill me. I’d drop my glamour and make it my fuck-pet before it got close enough. Werewolves were human enough to get faestruck.

After we dragged Brenda Evergreen through Macy’s, we got some pizza and cokes at the food court. Mall pizza is a secret favorite of mine. Something about the toxic area, the angst and hopelessness in human greed flavored the pizza. I loved the taste of defeat and malls are bastions of self-loathing.  

We made her eat a pizza crust and then I stood in the public handicap stall and helped the old bag pull down her flowery cotton granny panties and sit on the toilet. I am actual royalty. I don’t use public toilets.

Even more important, I’m American Famous. I have a million TikTok followers.

I saved the fucking world after serving as an underwear model, and fuck if I ever had to sit on a seat that other asses had sat and shat from. Ever.

But there I was, staring into Brenda’s rheumy brown eyes while she tinkled four drops and passed enough gas to impress a gnome. She smiled and I had to help her back into the underpants.

And now.

Now…

“Oh dear, Cedar!” Brenda said cheerfully. “This seat is all wet.”

 ***

“I don’t understand why we can’t just put her to sleep,” I said.

Several exhausting hours had passed.

I went back and bought some old-lady clothes and adult diapers while Knob sat on her shadow in front of a mall fountain.

We checked into a motel for the night. I got the bitch showered and dressed again, and then, while Knob watched M*A*S*H reruns with her. I had to find a carwash with a carpet shampooer to get the piss out of my car’s back seat, and to air it out enough for us to use the car.

My sense of smell, like all elevated beings, is better than a human’s. The sickly-sweet undertone of Brenda Evergreen’s piss was in my nose, and I wasn’t sure it’d ever be out.

I could almost taste her old dog wee in the back of my throat.

I checked my phone in the car-detailing place, and Natalie had texted. I left her on read. Because whatever she was going through wasn’t as fucking bad as dog-lady pee and gnomes.

I held my breath, and checked my bank account, and I had plenty of money again.

I got my assets back at the beginning of this run with Knob, and I had to keep checking to reassure myself.

Natalie outed me to the world about a year ago. I was making a shitton of money as a model. Natalie spilled that I wasn’t human, so The Church of Souls froze all my assets.

There’s a law against pretending to be human. It shouldn’t apply to me, but I do understand. I have to use a lot of glamour, really ugly myself up to pass as a human.

My family is world-owning rich but asking them for money is the equivalent of ringing a dinner bell. Weakness in a sidhe is always exploited. It’s the fae way.

After I saved the world from a vampire-werewolf-demon takeover, The Church unfroze my assets. I have plenty of money again.

So why the fuck was I here, taking a bounty hunt with a gnome? Not just any bounty hunt, it’s not like we’re dropping and dragging back a hunky bad boy, or a cold-hard killer, we weren’t bringing in anybody good or interesting.

I could entertain myself with a killer.

We were bringing in an old lady. An incontinent old lady.

Because her son liked her.

That was so strange to me.

I think, if my parents weren’t immortal, that I’d gladly watch them toddle off a cliff.

Then the Unseelie Court would be mine. I’d have to kill a few older siblings, and a few aunts and uncles, but after that… I’d be the Queen of the Dark Court.

And I’d make some changes.

Starting with the breeding requirement.

Purity of the line, my ass.

Kids suck. They need shit to stay alive. Once you get them to an age at which they could feasibly live independently, they spend the rest of eternity wishing you were dead so they could do what they want, and not live within the micromanaged hierarchy.

Make a kid. It hates you. It wants you to die. You make it miserable. Everyone lives forever unless they’re murdered. It’s such a boring cycle.

I wanted more. I wanted all the power, and none of the spawn.

My parents are terrifying, and I think I would have attempted to kill them at least once if there had been a half a chance. I lost a dozen siblings to patricide attempts. His and Her Majesties are the most powerful creatures on the planet. I believe that. They were gods in their youth, and maintain the cold, soulless, motionless façade from those days. They were very demon-like in their appetites. 

I really admired them. I wished they were dead, but I did admire how brutal and cruel they were.  

Demon. Shit. I should text Natalie.

Shit. I should text Xavier.

“Fuck I need a dick," I said to no one.

A car-wash attendant looked up and got googly eyed.

Shit. I must have let too much glamour fall.

Mortals can’t handle the sight of fae. They fall enthralled, and basically stay high on beauty for the rest of their short lives. Having sex without glamour was a way to accidentally fuck a human to death.

It takes a few dead humans to learn where your control really ends.

Shit happens.

Nobody’s ever complained.

I pulled awareness around me, dimming my glow so that I was just a hotter version of Margot Robbie, and I averted eye contact. Hopefully he wouldn’t follow me home. I don’t think he got enough to get truly faestruck.

I got the car keys and the car smelled like piss and chemicals, so I drove back with the windows down.

Tomorrow. We’d have the old dog back to her pack tomorrow. Her son, Richard Evergreen, the new Southern United States Alpha, would have his dementia-ridden mom back and he could help her in her underwear.  We were an eight-hour sleep and an eight-hour drive from my freedom.

Sixteen hours. Sixteen seemed an auspicious number. It’d had been 16 years since my sidhe fuck-through, and 16 days since my cowboys, and I’d be rid of the werewolf in 16 hours.

I’d blow this place so fast. Fuck the gnome. And fuck those fake assholes who pretend to be my friends, Phelps, Natalie, and that weird kid. They could live their fake happy-ever-after story. Maybe I’d keep Xavier’s number. Maybe not.

But I was never going back to their stupid world. I was finishing this job with the gnome, getting on a plane with a couple of guys with big belt buckles, and never looking back.

Tomorrow.

 ***

“Wake up blondie, there’s trouble,” Knob said, slapping me on the forehead with his little hand.

My fingertips crackled with a faefire.

“Easy, chubby lumpkins, easy,” he said hopping off the bed. “Wake up, you need to watch the dog.”

“The world worships my perfect body,” I snarled, fingertips sparking a little harder.

“Yeah, and yet you still have a big ass. I don’t have time to swap spit with you, blondie, we got real trouble.”

Knob filled me in. Natalie had fucked some shit up in Washington, and vampires had the ghost-kid as hostage. Phelps was losing his mind, and Natalie was getting dragged to hell each night.

“So?” I asked. “Those sound like problems that aren’t mine.”

“I said that, too,” he said. “But they’re fucking the world up in the labs again, so I gotta go save the day.”

Knob was leaving to help Natalie.

“I need you here! This is your job!” I yelled.

Brenda Evergreen snorked a few times, curled into a ball and let out a watery fart.

“I’m not changing that!” I yelled louder.

“Her son is on the way. He’ll be here in seven hours. Keep the old bag here and then get on a plane to Washington,” Knob said.

“Fuck no,” I snapped.

“I have always wanted to piss in your hair, blondie. See if your magic works against mine, a challenge, you know,” he said.

I went silent and nodded curtly.

My magic was superior to everything on earth, but like I said, gnome magic was scary. Their urine was corrosive. I’d seen a sidhe tunnel collapse after a colony of gnomes pissed on it. Built by fairy hands, infused with fairy magic, it collapsed like a sand pile under a wave.

This job was not worth permanent disfigurement. I had glamour, but that was to dim my perfection.  Not hide a bald, disfigured head.

Brenda Evergreen was asleep and dead to the world. I just needed her to stay that way for seven hours. Seven hours.

Knob left and I looked at my phone. Richard Evergreen had shared his location with me.

I put a chair in front of the door and sat in it, glaring at the old dog sleeping. She snorked a couple of long breaths and farted again, and it was so rank that I gagged a little when it reached me. Fuck, old people smell like actual shit inside and out.

I checked my phone.

Six hours and forty-five minutes.

This was almost over.

 ***

I jumped and knocked my head on the back of the door.

“Mom? It’s me,” a deep voice called from the other side. “Miss Shannon, it’s Mr. Evergreen.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” I muttered.

I scanned the room, didn’t see Brenda, but the light was on in the bathroom. I unlocked the door and opened it to the most beautiful nonhuman I’d ever seen in my life.

Richard Evergreen was a mountain of a werewolf. A mountain I wanted to climb.

He was taller than the door and had to duck when he entered. While not as tall as a Goliath, he wasn’t far off.

His girth though. I licked my lips thinking about … girth.

Oh. Damn.

Richard’s shoulders also didn’t fit the door, and he turned sideways showing me he was monstrously thick, with biceps that could break bones.

I let my glamour flit down a teensy bit. Just a bit. And his eyes locked on mine as he moved past me.

“Miss Shannon,” he said.

His eyes. Full-wolf yellow with a predatory gleam in the jet-black pupil. His lash line was darker than a human, outlining his eyes like eyeliner. But not emo bullshit, super-hot. This man’s animal rode around close to the surface.  

An Alpha werewolf was a different thing. Bigger, badder, fewer manners. They were generally rude, uncouth, and bad, bad, bad boys.

Me likee.

“Miss Shannon, I’m Richard Evergreen, where is my mother?”

I batted my eyelashes a little and sighed heavily, so that my boobs jiggled. My breasts were as perfect as the rest of me, and his eyes flicked down and followed the movement, and then flicked back to my eyes.

Alphas were usually mated, so it was hard to get one alone in a hotel room. With as long as his mom took in the bathroom, I estimated the best 20 minutes of my month were about to unfold. I wondered if he could shift while fucking. I intended to find out.

Richard walked past me into the bathroom.

I stood utterly shitslapped. Richard walked past me.

“Mom?”

I let my glamour drop a little more. The room lightened as my skin illuminated the dingy space.

The door slammed and his eyes were backlit in the dark with a green predator shine. He took a step into the room, and his yellow eyes were intense and locked on me.

“My mother is not here, Miss Shannon,” he growled, and it was a growl.

“We’ll chase her down in a minute,” I said. “Come here.”

He growled low in his chest, a rabid, feral noise, and the cords on his neck popped out. He bared his teeth at me and the expression in his eyes never changed.

“Where is my mother, Miss Shannon?” Richard said. His voice sounded like a horror movie.

It’s a no-no, but I was pissed and horny, so I dropped my glamour totally.

My people were as luminous as the angelic Goliath, but sensuous. Every part of us was the model of sexual pleasure, and the origin of all desire shimmered like blue-glitter waves through our porcelain skin. Viewing us was like looking at the face of a god, you’d never recover, never be able to see anything but our afterimage.

This man insulted me. He’d die happy.  

Richard replied to my challenge by throwing his head back and howling. Two howls responded from right outside the door. The hair stood on the back of my neck.

Before I could respond, he grabbed my throat and slammed me against the door.

“Fae,” he snarled against my neck.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “I like it rough.”

 “I came in peace to get my mother, but I will rip your head off with my teeth if you try to enslave me or mine again,” he said. He touched my jugular with his teeth and threw me behind him.

A small howl, far in the distance, responded belatedly.

“Mom!”

I staggard and thought about blowing the asshole up. Then I realized Brenda really wasn’t in the room, and I had no idea how a woman who pissed her own pants got out of the room.

“Yeah, she’s out there. We’ll take my car,” I said. “She’s already peed in the seats, and it has child locks.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, fae,” he said, spitting the word like it was something sour and rotten.

“Why? Because I wanted to fuck you? Hey, that’s over,” I said. “Let’s get the bitch so I can collect and move on.”

“You would have enslaved me to you for sex?” he asked looming over me. His arms were crossed over his body, and he probably could have ripped my head off with his hands. His torso was like a tree trunk. I didn’t think I could wrap my arms around it.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I still might. Actually, I have no idea why you aren’t faestruck.”

He took my keys from the dresser and left.

I ran after him, cursing as I pulled on sandals. Two fully turned wolves jumped in the backseat and whined.

“Yeah, that smell? That was your mom. I wiped her ass for three days,” I snapped as I ran around the car and got in the passenger side. He wasn’t taking off without me.

Knob had threatened my hair.

“She’s six miles east,” I said as he got in the car, the wolves behind me growling and snapping at air.

“You can’t know that.”

“I’m a fairy. Numerology and narcissism are our religions. Every time she escapes, she makes it six miles away, and she goes directly east.”  I said.

It was true. I always knew what time it was. I knew what longitude and latitude I was on. I knew the numbers and counted the minutes. Not because they were ever going to end for me, I had all the minutes of all time, but because minutes had power.

Brenda Evergreen had wandered off three times on foot, and each time we found her, she was exactly east, and exactly six miles as the crow flies from where we lost her.

All the three derivatives should have been auspicious.

Sometimes numbers are cunts.

“She’ll be next to water six miles east,” I said. “Pull up a map.”

I didn’t mention we’d also lost her once for three days because a bus driver let her on and drove her 120 miles south. That was a rough four days.

But. She wandered exactly six miles from the bus stop and settled next to a water fountain for a day. Then she walked six miles east from the water fountain and found a small retention pond outside of a football stadium to rest by.

She was six miles away if she didn’t get in a moving vehicle.

I pulled my glamour all the way on so that I was just an obscenely attractive human.

“Better?”

He growled at me and let his eyes change. His eyes were the warmest brown I’d ever seen. Dark, intelligent, and kind. Then they turned back to the wolf. The wolves in the back whined.

“Ah. Shifted eyes can’t get faestruck, can they?” I asked. 

One of the wolves behind me chuffed. I felt like the three were wolves were talking to each other.

“Ah. You’re connected to your wolves, so they can pull you into a shift.”

I’d been around. Werewolves had telepathy and some immunity to being entranced. It gave them a more even playing ground with vampires, but it appeared to be effective against fairies.

Damn.

“Drive east, we’ll find her.” I said.

“We’d better, Miss Shannon,” he replied starting the car. “For your sake.”

 ***

The bridge we needed to cross was closed, and the reroute was 16 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

So, fuck the number 16.

Richard let the wolves out the spot that was due east and told them to find a way across and start scenting for his mother. They dutifully jumped out and loped toward the closed bridge.  

My phone blew up right then.

‘I ain’t never lost a bag in my life,’ Knob texted.

I rolled my eyes and waited for the explosion of insults about my weight and intelligence. They didn’t come.

The gnome was disappointed in me.

I didn’t give a shit. He was a gnome, for goddess’ sake.

Still.

‘On the way to get her with the son, your perfect record will still be perfect,’ I texted.

He left me on read. Asshole.

I looked over to the man filling the space with rage-y emotions. He was way too big for my rental car. The seat was all the way back, and lowered as much as possible, and his neck was still craned, his legs still crunched up uncomfortably. His strong jaw clenched, and his yellow eyes tracked every moment on the road.

Those eyes.

Wolf eyes are expressive, almost as expressive as human eyes, but they have a nasty case of resting bitch face. Wolf eyes, at rest, don’t care. It’s eat or be eaten, and there’s no room to give a shit.

I was feeling slightly bad, probably the chemicals and pee smell, because it wasn’t from disappointing Knob. But I felt like the silence needed something.

“Listen, she’s going to be OK,” I said. “She moves in the same pattern and stays mostly put when she finds water.”

Richard growled.

“I’m just trying to let you know she’s going to be fine,” I said.

Richard chuffed an angry laugh.

“She has Alzheimer’s, fae,” he said. “It’s 100 percent fatal. Her body is going to live for a number of years, but her mind is on its long deathbed.”

He shuddered.

“For a wolf, it’s a bad death,” Richard said.

Shit. That sounded like ass. But Brenda was a weirdo and old. Nature did its thing.

“I’m sure it’s…”

“Don’t spit pompous platitudes at me,” he said, slamming on the brakes as a car stopped abruptly in front of us. “She is Brenda Evergreen, mate to Reynold Evergreen, mother to me, and to watch her forget everything, and everyone in her life is hard. I don’t want people to lie. It’s not going to be ok.”

I checked my phone, hoping for a way out of the conversation.

Nobody had texted me.

Not a parent. Not a friend. Not a lover. Just the partner I’d disappointed.

And the man I was with didn’t adore me.

I was in uncharted territory, and I felt hot pressure in my face around my eyes. Tears? Fae don’t cry. Maybe a disease?

I took a shaky breath, unsure why I felt squeezy and shameful, and asked him to tell me about his mother.

 ***

Brenda Evergreen was just under 100 years old, not terribly old for a wolf.

She was a local legend, a rare female alpha, and the leader of the pack. Reynold Evergreen was strong, vicious, fair, and looked out for every member of his tribe, but Brenda was different.

Brenda was smart. The sly nature of the wolf, combined with a brilliant mind, made her seek a full-time career as a real estate attorney.

When the economy crashed in 2008, all the werewolf families in the area lost work. All of them. In 2008 the housing market just stopped. Their pack made its living in construction. No new houses. No new commercial buildings. No work. No money.

Most of the construction companies in the area were owned by pack members and didn’t require DNA testing. One foreman on each crew had to be a certified human to get a license.

To get government benefits, welfare, would have been beyond shameful. Packs are proud and don’t want handouts, but the money dried up faster than the pride could fill the void. Benefits, though, were for humans, and required species testing.

Brenda Evergreen leveraged a series of loans to purchase a massive land development that was abandoned when the developer went out of business. The land wasn’t cleared yet. It was near-virgin woods.

She put her people to work, turning a piece of woods meant for 1,200 new houses, into a community. The pack indentured itself to her, trusting without question. It built 60 homes, each with acres of land between it and the next house. Driveways were narrow, and barely allowed for truckloads of materials.

A community home was built first, in the center of it all. Brenda put the elders and the children there to watch one another, since every hand was needed, and there wasn’t daycare.

“We never missed a meal,” Richard said. “Great oak tables were crafted by the old wolves from the trees we had to kill. Hewn wooden benches. And each night we sat together, 74 members strong, and shared dinner.”

 Brenda figured out how to capitalize on the poor economy and thrive. Each time the pack needed less, she put the surplus into the human community.

“When the old men had made tables for everyone, they sold tables. The teenagers set up websites and did the marketing. When the families could go back to work and care for their kids, the elders set up a daycare in town,” he said. “Nothing in the wild is wasted. Nothing. Not skin, nor hooves, and my mother’s wolf instincts taught us how to waste naught in the human world. The less you waste, the more you have.”

Brenda Evergreen Inc. was the largest nonintrusive developer in the area.

“We build developments like ours on a smaller scale. We don’t sculpt grand walkable communities, we create safe havens from the world. A piece of land keeps most of the trees, and the process is expensive because getting supplies to an area without clearing is work.”

Richard sighed heavily and rubbed his forehead as the traffic inched forward.

“My father was a true beast, a real pack leader. He could shift in seconds. He could kill without reservation. His wolves were loyal, and stronger than any challengers. But my mother was our pride,” Richard said. “Beautiful, strong, smart and utterly devoted to mate-family-pack-earth.”

The traffic picked up.

Brenda Evergreen was busy in the corporate development world, but Saturdays were family days. Richard recalled shifting with his parents and running free through the mountains they leased from the earth.

The pride and security of running until he thought his heart would burst with joy, the sharp smells of life and death, and the flashes of movement from the corners of his eyes as his parents wove among trees.

“She goes six miles east because of me, it’s one of the things she remembers,” he said. “I didn’t realize what she was doing until you mentioned the milage and water. We wouldn’t have needed to hire a gnome if I’d figured it out.”

Richard was around nine, a very auspicious age, when he ran alone and got lost.

“I’d been gone a couple of days. The woods across the river were filled with the mournful howls of my pack as they searched for me, but I was so afraid and ashamed that I didn’t reply,” Richard said. “I wasn’t supposed to run alone. The lone wolf isn’t a role the future pack leader should try out. There is safety in support.”

As the howls triangulated on his scent, Richard said there were flashes of orange vests.

“I knew that meant dangerous humans, so I stayed quiet and made a little nest by a creek. A downed tree covered me,” he said. “I stayed in wolf form, so the cold nights didn’t bother me much.”

The traffic seemed to relieve a little and we finally made it to a steady 20 miles an hour. It seemed lightning fast after the shit-lock we’d been in.

Brenda found her son first. Then the humans in orange found them both.

“She used every bit of her alpha power to force my shift, so that I’d appear as a skinny naked boy,” Richard said. “The hunters thought she was attacking me and hit her in the right haunch twice before I jumped on her back.”

He paused. “The bullets were silver. They’d heard the howls and were out hunting werewolves.”

I felt something warm pool at my eye. Fae don’t cry. I don’t think we even have tear ducts. We have multifaceted eyes, but I don’t think we had tear ducts.

Silver was as poisonous to were-people as cold iron was to fae.

“She ran us out on three legs, carrying my weight on her back,” he said. “My mother was screaming with each step by the time we scented other pack members. But she never slowed down.”

As they neared safety, she lost her footing. Richard fell off his mother’s back, pulling out large clumps of her hair as he fell. Brenda skidded down the hill, blood poisoned, flesh hurt and unable to heal, and slammed her head into an evergreen.

“I stood behind the tree and cried like a small baby as they used a pocketknife to dig out the bullets,” Richard said. “Her head was covered in blood, and she wasn’t waking up. Her sides, where I’d ripped her fur out were bloody, and her femoral artery had been nicked digging the silver. My dad was holding the spurting artery closed with his bare hands, and we stayed like that to see if she’d heal or die for what seemed like years but was a few hours.”

When the bleeding stopped and her breathing leveled, Reynold picked up his wife and walked her back the six miles to their home.

“She runs away to get to me,” Richard said. “When she woke up, she said she’d never felt as driven, as powerful as she had when I was gone. Because there was no force on this world or the next, that could keep her from finding me. She felt the goddess Nyx run with her. So, she returns, over and over, to a place where nothing could stop her from saving her son.”

The traffic picked up. Richard shifted in his seat, and the springs in it groaned.

“And there’s nothing I can do to save her,” he said quietly.

We drove in silence for the rest of the time.

Richard’s phone went off and he handed it to me.

“Please answer it.”

I did. One of his wolves secured his mother. She was sitting next to a pond by a tree, staring into the distance.

“She’s not reacting to us at all, Richard,” the wolf said.

They sent the coordinates, and Richard broke space-time to get there through the gnarl of traffic. 

We arrived. Parked. Got out.

Richard knelt in front of Brenda and kissed her forehead gently. Her brown eyes remained unblinking, as if she couldn’t see the mountain of a man in front of her.

I walked behind him, and her eyes lit up and flashed to me.

“Cedar!” she said. Her voice sounded phlegmy, as if she hadn’t had anything to drink in a while. There was a lump in my throat at the anguish on Richard’s face. But I’d spent a bunch of hours hearing about her Adventures with Cedar.

“Yeah, hey Brenda. Do you remember when we were pups and we accidentally set Reynold’s car on fire?” I said kneeling next to Richard.

Her face broke into a wide grin, and she patted my face.

“You look terrible, Cedar. When did you get so old?” she said.

I laughed and took her hand.

“Remember Reynold?” I said.

“He was so handsome, so big, bigger than the whole world,” she said dreamily.

“Do you remember how the two of you used to run with your boy?” I asked softly, the heat in my face intensifying. I modified my glamour so the human face I showed had tears. I couldn’t cry, but my magic could.

“I remember the way the wind felt. How strong he was, my son,” she said. “How brave, even as a boy he’d do brave things. Reynold and I are so proud of that little cub. Cedar, where is your baby?”

I helped Brenda to her feet.

“We’re going for a ride, Brenda,” I said. “I lost my baby and I have to go find him.”

For a single moment, her eyes connected to her soul, and she stared fiercely at me, and then at Richard.

“I lost my baby once,” she said. “Nyx will guide you. A mother will always find her way back. A mother will never leave the trail. Nyx be with you Cedar.”

The light flicked away as fast as that.

“Hello, young man, have we met? This is my littermate Cedar, have you seen my father? He was going to drive us to town?” Brenda asked Richard as we helped her to her feet.

Richard walked away and stood with his back to us near a clearing of trees. His posture was stoic.

The wolves and I helped Brenda into the car. She promptly pissed her pants again.

Which was fine because I was sick of all these feelings.

It was anticlimactic from there. Brenda fell asleep. Traffic was light. We didn’t talk much.

We found a store with towels, wipes and adult diapers, and I ended up wiping an old woman’s junk. Again. 

At the hotel Richard transferred the money and Knob confirmed and cut me my chunk, all in seconds.

“Thank you,” Richard said. His eyes changed into warm brown human eyes as he shook my hand. “For everything.”

Like that he was gone. They were all gone.

The sexy beast that I didn’t get to ride and his sad, sick mom.

Fuck them.

I was getting on a plane and getting the fuck out of this place.

But for some reason my car didn’t drive me to the rental return place, or the airport. It drove me back to Lake Francine, where my best friend, Natalie lived.

Maybe. 

She could have died or gotten dragged to hell.

Meh. Not my problem. If that bitch died or got dragged to hell, she’d have to fix it because I needed to see her. Talk to her. And maybe her kid. And Knob. Maybe Phelps.

They called themselves a family, which was stupid.

As I turned into the driveway, though, I felt the warm pressure behind my eyes, and my glamour sparked a little fake tear.

Yeah, making a family of random preternatural creatures was stupid. 

But I was feeling exceptionally dumb.

 

The End.