Sloane Briallen

The tangle of limbs and bodies became too much, and I collapsed trying to reach the yellow spot, earning a round of cheers.

“Birthday girl is out!” Sharona shouted, reaching out a hand to help me up.

“Two feet on bottom red, one hand on blue, and the only yellow was up at the top,” I grumbled, taking her hand. “Absolute bullshit.”

“Can’t always be a winner, Sloane!” Bell called from where he was very comfortably spread eagle over the mat with two other guys.

I gave him the finger, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my other hand.

Leah swept into the room from the kitchen, long teal skirt swishing around her ankles. She handed me a bottle of cherry Pepsi. “Stay hydrated,” she smiled and winked before sweeping back into the kitchen where she was making drinks.

I started to crack it open before realizing Leah had already opened it for me. I smiled, taking a sip. The soda was cold going down my throat, but the fact that Leah had given it to me, already opened, filled me with warmth. The love of a real parent.

I turned to survey the room.

It was cavernous, the walls painted a warm terracotta, the floors tiled in rich brown. A couch, a love seat, and a recliner sat grouped in one corner. All were brown leather sitting atop a red carpet-rug.

Next to the grouping of furniture was the Twister game I had just failed out of. Part of the reason it had been so hard was the damned thing was happening on a hard floor. The tile dug against the bones in your hands after a while.

There was one group doing Twister, a couple of people watching them. Mauve stood in one corner with a few of the other parents, pointing to a signed promotional cover of a book she loved and telling them about the author and how she’d come to manage her.

There was only one person sitting on the couch. Mickey sat with Norton, our white German Shepherd. He scratched Norton idly while he watched the increasingly more complicated and intertwined game of Twister. He wore black cargo pants and a brown shirt that said Life is good.

I sat down next to him. He turned his head before his eyes moved away from the game. He smiled when he saw me. His dimples were killer, and I couldn’t help myself reaching out to poke one.

He batted my hand away, smile turning into a scowl. But the dimples were still there. It was more of a smile-scowl. “What are you doing?”

“Those dimples are fucking great,” I grinned. “Couldn’t resist the urge to poke them.”

He rolled his eyes, but a shy smile returned. “Yeah, well . . .” He shrugged.

“No Twister?” I asked.

“I have no interest in making an idiot of myself,” he said, looking back to the game.

I followed his gaze to see Bell trying to reach for a green spot far out of his reach. “Bell’s doing it.”

“Yes, because I want to be just like Bell when I grow up,” he said drily, looking at me with a flat expression.

I laughed. “Fair enough.”

“Anyway, it’s nice over here.” He scratched Norton’s head. “Fun to watch, but I can pull back.”

I felt an overwhelming amount of fondness then, watching him pet Norton, smiling gently down at the dog. Sitting here, with my brother, watching my other brother make an idiot out of himself, surrounded by friends—I had never expected to be in a place like this. Surrounded by love and comfort, while still being completely secure.

I wished I could have given this to my family in Phoenix.

The flood of emotion that came with that thought made me lean over and grab Mickey, hugging him tight to me.

“Sloane,” he hiccupped in surprise. “You okay?” His shoulder dug into my sternum, but I didn’t care.

“Just, let’s stay like this for a minute,” I murmured into his neck. I could feel the tears prickling at my eyes.

He didn’t reply, but he did adjust so that I wasn’t just hugging his side. He turned one shoulder until he could wrap his arms around my shoulders and hold me.

I sniffled. “I miss them.”

Mickey rubbed my back. “I know.”

“I know this is better for me, but . . . I can’t help them.”

He didn’t say anything. He just hugged me tighter. Which was really what I wanted. I just wanted to be allowed to be sad.

A cheer boomed through the room, and I quickly wiped my face on Mickey’s shirt, drying the tears before anyone could see them. He gave me one last squeeze before letting me go so I could look up.

Bell was standing up, running a hand through his short hair as he grimaced. “Ah, fuck.” He shook his head as Sharona wheedled him for losing. She was the keeper of the Twister spinner.

Bell caught my eye, and he patted Sharona on the shoulder, telling her he’d be back. She called out that he was a coward, but she was laughing.

Bell moved with an easy swagger towards us. His confidence had come to him in spades during puberty, and I still didn’t know where he got it all from. “Hey,” he said, crouching down the scratch Norton. He glanced at me. “Okay?”

I smiled, but it was watery. “Yeah, just . . . it’s a lot.”

He nodded, reaching out to pat my knee. “Yeah.” He glanced back behind him where there was a clock on the wall. “Oh, we should go get sticks before it gets too dark.”

“Oh, right,” Mickey said. He glanced at me, flashing another grin. “Marshmallows.”

I felt another burst of warmth in my chest. I had said I wanted to do s’mores. I hadn’t done them since my mom was alive. We had forgotten to get skewers, but we had the whole fucking forest behind our house. We could find some sticks.

Mickey rearranged Norton so that his paws were on the couch instead of on his thighs. Norton huffed in offense.

“Sorry bud,” he said, scrubbing Norton’s head. “I have some more important things to do.”

I started to stand up. “I can help—”

Bell caught my shoulder and pushed me back down. “Nope. It’s your birthday. Mickey and I will get the sticks.” He bowed, one hand behind his back, the other flourishing out. “M’lady.”

I snorted, shaking my head.

Mickey rolled his eyes, pulling Bell back. “Come on. Quit it.”

“Killjoy,” Bell replied. But he stood up. “Be back soon.”

“See you when you get back,” I called to their backs as they disappeared outside.

The last thing I saw was them waving over their shoulders.

I don’t know how long we laid there together. Long enough for my tears to dry. Long enough for them to have walked me through grounding exercises, things my therapist had taught me that I had taught them long ago. Long enough that I was breathing without my breath hitching. Long enough that the pain in my abdomen had dulled.

“What happened to me?” I whispered, gaze on the light the seeped into the room from around the blackout curtains. The clock on Mira’s bedside table told me it was close to noon.

“What do you remember?” Mickey asked from behind me. He had one arm under my neck, the other draped over my shoulders. I was facing Bell, who held both my hands.

I pressed my eyes shut. I could see Ava and Angus’s smiles. They were excited about killing me. They wanted to make me bleed. “Two vampires,” I rasped. “Th-they wanted to tear me apart. They injected me with dead man’s blood and th-then—” I didn’t want to finish. I shook my head. “Two vampires. Did you find them?”

“By the time we got there, they were gone,” Mickey said.

I sniffled.

“I’m not sure if you’re ready to hear it,” Bell murmured.

Something about Bell saying I wasn’t ready made me indignant. I didn’t want to describe it, but I still wanted to know. And he couldn’t fucking tell me what I could and couldn’t handle.

Mickey must have felt me tense because he moved his arm from draping around me to a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We can tell you until you can’t take it.”

Mickey always knew what to say to calm me.

I nodded, the anger dissipating.

So, they told me. They told me how they found me. Broken and torn. My heartbeat stopped. My breathing stopped. Everything stopped.

They told me about Karhi. How he refused to stop, even when Lunette tried to tell him I was dead. How he used his powers on Mickey to knock him silly when Mickey tried to stop him. How he had Lunette put me back together. How he put my insides back inside of me. How he gave me mouth-to-mouth only with blood instead of air. How he wept while he tried to bring me back to life.

How it worked.

But they had missed something. Something that belonged inside of me and didn’t make it back inside.

“Fuckers,” I snarled, tears rolling down my cheeks anew.

Mickey moved his arm back, hugging me around my shoulders and pressing his front to my back. He splayed one hand over my chest. Bell’s grip on my hands tightened. He put his forehead to mine.

They were so warm. So warm and inviting. The anger and sadness that raged inside of me eased just a little. I wasn’t alone. I didn’t have to handle this on my own.

Not like I’d had to.

“What happened to you?” I whispered.

I felt them stiffen against me. I heard their heartbeats speed up.

Bell was the first to answer. “We were scared.”

I blinked. “What?”

Mickey exhaled a fast breath that tickled the back of my neck. “Look we knew about the Underground because of you. But when we changed for the first time, it was scary, and we didn’t know what was going on. It was the night of your birthday, and our wolf minds took control. When we woke up the next morning, we were in Canada. Covered in snow and naked.” He laughed bitterly. “We were so fucking cold.

“It took us five days to find our way back. You know us. Shit senses of direction.”

I had spent a majority of our childhoods putting us all back on the right track when we were walking to the store or the beach or the park or anything. I was intimately familiar with their senses of direction.

“We kept getting angry at each other and transforming. Going barefoot in the snow but unable to actually be harmed by the snow? We were so frustrated and angry.

“And when we got back, you were in the hospital from exhaustion.”

Bell continued. “Our moms didn’t believe our story at first. You know Mauve, she wouldn’t stop harping. She didn’t believe us. And it just made me so angry. We had been so scared, and we hadn’t known where we were, and she just didn’t believe us.” He squeezed his eyes shut and I felt his nails getting sharper against my hands.

When he opened his eyes, he was okay again. “Sorry . . . it was just so frustrating.”

I nodded. His nails were back to normal.

“Before I could attack her, something rammed into me. It knocked me senseless. When I could finally tell my head from my ass, I was back in my human form. And there was someone else in our backyard. Mingan.”

“Mingan?”

“He turned out to be a werewolf that lived in the Olympic Mountains. He apparently came across us the night that we first changed. We tried to attack him and ran when he fought back. He used to be the leader of a pack. He didn’t want us hurting anyone and followed us. Then he followed us when we bumbled back home.

“He convinced us and our moms to let him train us, teach us to be werewolves.”

When they didn’t continue, I realized they were done with the story.

“And me?” I said, pulling my hands from Bell and pushing Mickey’s arm away. I sat up. “Why didn’t I get to know?”

“Mingan,” Bell answered, sitting up. Like that meant anything. “He took us on and forbade us from seeing you or anyone besides out moms.”

“But—”

“It was to protect you,” he said.

“Protect me from what?” I demanded. The back of my neck itched with the heat of anger. “I would have been better off—”

“Sloane,” Mickey cut me off. His tone was cold, barring interruption. He had also sat up.

I fell silent.

“You don’t know how scary those first few months were. Being a werewolf was terrifying. And we were out of control. It was like going through puberty again. Our moods turned on a dime. Stub my toe? Turn into a wolf. Bell’s phone didn’t have service? Turn into a wolf. Bell misheard me, and I had to repeat myself? Turn into a wolf. Any minor inconvenience, no matter how small, and our anger would flare out of control. And unlike puberty, we weren’t getting pimples or cracking voice, we were transforming into fucking wolves. We could have, and probably would have, killed you. It was better you didn’t know. You would have insisted on seeing us and we would have insisted on seeing you. It was better that way. We’d rather you be alive than dead.”

I snorted in derision. They took the choice away from me without even consulting me.

“When we first started shifting, it was uncomfortable and painful. We had to learn to master our emotions if we expected to stay human or retain our human consciousness as wolves. Otherwise, there was no way we could ever see anyone again. We could hardly see our moms over the first few months because we were so bad. Seeing you would have just made it worse.”

“It was bad enough with the kids,” Bell muttered.

My brow furrowed. “Kids?”

Mickey glared at him, but he answered my question. “Apparently, in families where the werewolf gene has been dormant for a long time, when it wakes up in one—in this case, us—it wakes up in everyone. So distant cousins also started to transform.”

Oh.

“Altogether, we had four cousins that transformed, too. Mingan warned our parents that this might happen, so they reached out to their cousins. When it happened, they sent their children to live with us. We had better control and helped them, but Mingan still had to reign us all in.”

The next question I thought of made my chest hurt. I didn’t want to ask it, but I felt like I had to. “Are you all like . . . a pack?” The words were reluctant to leave my mouth.

My question was met with stone silence, and I knew the answer before they finally had the courage to say it out loud.

“Yes,” Bell answered.

Of course they were. They had made a pack, a new family, without me.

“We never stopped thinking about you,” Mickey said, reached out to put a hand on my knee where it was bent in front of me. “Never.”

“Then why didn’t you try to find me?” My voice cracked and tears I hadn’t expected stung at my eyes.

“What the fuck did you think this was?” Bell shot back.

“It’s been almost two years!”

“Puberty takes anywhere from two to five years, Sloane. You think we mastered our anger overnight? It took almost two years for us to be okay enough to come searching for you.”

I paused. The tears continued but my emotions were holding for long enough to hear whatever they had to stay.

“We did the best we could with what we had,” Mickey said, pressing his hand into my knee, trying to press his sincerity into me. For the first time, I realized there were tears streaked down his cheeks, too. “It’s no excuse for what happened to you, but you have to know, you weren’t the only one suffering. We knew what we were doing to you and at the time, we didn’t think there was a fucking thing we could do about it.”

“Yeah,” Bell agreed. He wasn’t crying, but I hadn’t expected him to. “We had that dream, and it was what pushed us over the edge. We’re not completely in control, but we had to find you.”

Mickey snorted bitterly. “Come to find the irony, that we’re not the only ones who got magic.”

I looked down at the purple sheets on Mira’s bed. My head and my heart hurt. “I looked for you, you know.” My voice cracked.

They were quiet.

“For days. I looked for you for days and days. I helped with the search parties. Hell, I coordinated some of them because I knew the woods around our house just as well as the police. I barely ate for days, just chugging water and energy drinks. I finally collapsed from exhaustion the day after Christmas.” Apparently, the same day that they came back.

I clenched my teeth. I had walked and yelled until my throat was raw, and I was tripping over things from exhaustion. The chief of police had to forcibly remove me from the woods twice after I collapsed.

“Eventually I had to accept the fact that you two probably fell down a steep incline and got bruised and banged up badly enough to kill you or leave you immobile,” I said. My voice sounded hollow even to me. “I had to accept that coyotes probably got you.”

It had been a numbing experience. I had been exhausted and depressed. I honestly barely remembered the months after they disappeared.

“I never did accept it, and I left Washington shortly after graduation. Moved to a new place where I didn’t know anybody, and I could be alone.” I paused, debating whether to finish my thought before deciding, screw it. “Where I didn’t have to make friends and I didn’t have to get hurt anymore.”

The silence was heavy around us.

“We didn’t tell them we were coming,” Mickey finally said.

Something inside of me shifted. Something hopeful. I looked up between them. “What?”

“Mom and Leah have no idea where we are. Mingan or the pack, neither,” Bell said. There was a tentative smile on his face, like he was hoping I would return it.

I found myself chuckling breathlessly. I felt lighter than I had in a long time.

Bell smiled despite himself. A full on, toothy grin. “We want you to meet them soon. They don’t like vampires, but we do want you to meet them. Since we kinda hope . . . you know. To be a part of your life now.” The smile disappeared. “If that’s okay.” He said so fast that I took a second to parse it.

I stood up straighter when I finally understood. “Wait . . .” I trailed off. “Does this mean . . . we can be together again?”

They both stopped, staring at me. Mickey’s cheeks were tear-stained, and Bell’s were dry. But their eyes were both glassy.

“What?”

“Is that what you thought?” Bell croaked. “That after this, we were just going to peace out?”

I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t really know what I had thought. Everything about my time in Phoenix had felt kind of temporary.

Bell started laughing then. He buried his face in his hands, just laughing. It sounded dangerously close to crying.

“We are such a mess. We came here without a plan of how to talk to you.” His voice finally cracked, and he sniffled.

“I mean . . . I don’t know how to talk to you either. It’s a weird situation.”

Bell looked up at me. His cheeks were wet. I could count on one hand the number of times I had seen Bell cry since I had been adopted. Even as a kid he hadn’t been a crier.

“Why did you come to Arizona?” I finally said to cut the tension.

Bell buried his head back in his hands and didn’t answer.

“We knew you had moved to Minnesota, but you had stopped taking calls or responding to our parents,” Mickey finally said. “We had no idea where you were. So, we thought Mira might know. We still had her address from when you lived with us.”

I had visited Mira a couple times when I lived with them. I had given them her address so that they wouldn’t worry that I wasn’t coming back to live with them. Not that Mira would have allowed me to abandon them, anyway.

“I guess we just got really lucky with timing,” Bell said.

“Yeah. Mira didn’t know where I was until a few days ago, either.”

The silence fell again but this time it wasn’t so heavy. Or maybe I just didn’t feel heavy anymore. I understood better. They were here for me. Nothing else. Just me.

“Where are you with all this?” Mickey asked.

I shook my head. “I’m angry about the circumstances and I’m angry that you kept it from me. I’m angry that Mauve and Leah hid it from me when I still lived with them for six months after you disappeared. I’m angry that you didn’t come for me sooner.

“I’m not okay yet. But you’re alive. And for two years, that’s all I wished for. I wanted you to be alive. I wanted to laugh with you again. Cry. Fight. I wanted all of those experiences again.

“And I’m still angry at you, but I can be angry at something tangible. Not . . . ghosts.”

I heard a sniffle. I looked up to see tears streaming down Bell’s face. I glanced over to see that Mickey wasn’t much better off.

I touched my face and realized that I wasn’t one to talk either.

The door to the room opened suddenly, letting in unexpected light.

“Sloane.” It was Annie. She held the house phone in her hand. It was lit up, like she had just finished a call. “Mira’s in the hospital. Ilona took Karhi.”