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The man’s accusation triggered my mother’s outrage.
“This is revolting!” she hissed. “Why are you watching some tawdry science fiction show when you should be working? Ingratitude for the life your father provides is bad enough, but lazy is—”
“It’s real, mother,” I said, teeth on edge and my fangs starting to show. “Just keep watching and you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”
She shook her head in denial.
“Look at the woman,” I coaxed. “Don’t you recognize her?”
My mother remained silent, her head still moving in a narrow back-and-forth pattern as her throat muscles convulsed with a rough swallow.
“That’s Onyx Parry, or The She-Wolf Who Cannot Shift.” As I said it, I frowned at the unofficial nickname that had floated through the various communities of Midwestern shifters.
Onyx and I hadn’t known one another, not exactly, but her wolf clan in Champaign was only three hours away from the Rockford leap in which I lived. My mouth soured as it always did when I thought of the cat shifters my father controlled. As a blond-haired, blue-eyed leopard, he called our community a “leap.” Before that, it had been my maternal grandfather who ruled. A striking panther like my mother, he had called it a “claw.”
I called it hell.
“You’re mistaken,” my mother argued. “It’s just some trashy show created by humans. If it was real and Henric possessed a copy, I would have seen it already.”
That was crazy talk—pure delusion. My father tried to keep my mother in the dark about everything but the existence of his occasional playmates and Kitka, his longstanding mistress. He shoved his dalliances in Justine’s face almost as often as his hoes shoved their skanky snatches in his.
Oh, and he made sure she knew of his utter disdain for me.
“Look at the woman,” I demanded, pausing the video. “I’m sure of it. And you can hear they are both shifters.”
“A sound effect…”
I threw my hands up, then clasped them behind my neck, elbows bent and pointing at the ceiling as I prayed for patience.
“I know what I know!” I shouted. “And I know who that is! I’ve seen her more than you.”
As leader of the leap, my father often crossed into the wolves’ territory in Champaign for meetings. It was a sign of trust on such trips to take a more vulnerable family member with him. Only a beta, I was the token he took. While my mother occasionally accompanied us, she was far from a weak link. No one in our leap would voice the truth, but she was stronger than my father, stronger than any male who could claim leadership.
Too bad she only had a set of ovaries.
My mother continued to deny the possibility. “This wouldn’t be allowed. Her family—”
She fell silent as Onyx transformed in the video, the interrogator slicing and dicing with his taunts and accusations until the resulting furious mix of chemicals pushed the young woman to an alpha state. She slashed at the interrogator with claws turned deadly.
My gut clenched at the carnage with the same revulsion I had felt on my earlier viewings.
My mother seized the laptop. I knew what was playing across the screen based on the sounds coming from the speaker. Other shifters playing their roles rushed in to stop the carnage.
“No…noooo…no-no-no…” my mother said, each repetition softer than the one preceding it. Her grip tightened. Her nails grew longer and thicker until they curled to deadly sharp points.
She couldn't control her transformation. That NEVER happened, not with her.
“Does Henric know about this?”
I frowned at her using my father’s first name. Not that I liked admitting the relationship, but I couldn’t remember the last time before today that she had used his name in our private conversations.
“Presumably,” I answered. “It was on the thumb drive in the box that contained all the quarterly files. And it was just last fall when there was all that noise about something going down between the Champaign wolf packs and some group of shifters out of state. That was when someone disappeared Marcus and Kalchik threatened the Champaign wolves with annihilation if they didn't join the wolves under his command in Rockford.”
Studying her gaze, I realized my mother was terrified. I was completely ignorant as to why. I wasn't telling her anything she didn't already know. If anyone in the leap was the last to discover that something so monumentally important had gone down, it was me.
A thread of fear shivered through me as I wondered how bad something had to be to send my strong, powerful, cunning, intelligent mother who could scare the crap out of me with a side glance, into a panic.
Gently, I removed the laptop from her grip. I could feel where her claws had dented the aluminum casing. My flesh snagged on a spot where she had torn a hole in the metal.
