Deadtown

couldblame her, but I could also understand. Ever since Gwen’s firstborn had turned out to be a girl, she’d been terrified that the child would grow up to become a shapeshifter. Just like Aunt Vicky.

Among the Cerddorion, only females have the ability to shift. And that ability manifests with the onset of puberty. With each year that went by, Gwen grew a little more afraid that Maria was going to turn out to be one of the monsters.

Well, not a monster, not really. A demi-human. That was the official classification for Gwen and me both. The only difference was that I was classified as demi-human (active) and Gwen as demi-human (inactive). That meant she no longer had the ability to shift; she just had some funky stuff going on with her DNA that could create more demi-humans down the line. So Gwen had all the rights of any norm—she could vote, travel freely, live outside Deadtown—and I had all the restrictions of a PA.

Gwen hadn’t always been ashamed of what we are. She’s four years older than me, and she’d started shifting before I could. And she loved it. In fact, hardly a month went by when she didn’t use up all three shifts. PAs weren’t out at that time, so she had to be discreet, but Dad encouraged her to experiment. Even Mom, always the worrier, remembered the early thrill of shifting and loosened the tight leash she normally kept on us girls.

Gwen’s favorite shift was a seagull; she adored soaring over open water. But she also tried out life as a cat, a squirrel, a deer in the woods. She even shifted into a baby elephant to do an undercover expose for the school newspaper on animal cruelty at the circus—her English teacher couldn’t stop praising her for how vividly she’d imagined the life of a circus animal. Everything was great until Gwen landed the lead in her senior class play.

They were doing Our Town; her role was Emily. For weeks, all she could talk about was acting, the theater, how she was going to major in drama and become a Broadway star. She lost interest in shifting—which I thought was grossly unfair, because I’d just started. For stagestruck Gwen, though, nothing compared to the thrill of the theater, and she spent all her time at rehearsals and hanging out with her acting- crazed friends. I missed her. I volunteered to help backstage, but for the first time ever Gwen treated me like the pesky little sister, tagging along.

On the play’s opening night, disaster struck. My sister got stage fright. She walked confidently onto the stage, then froze up, her eyes wide and glassy. Her mouth opened, closed, opened, but all that came out was a piteous squeak. Then she shuddered and bent double, her limbs twisting, as though she were having a seizure.

I realized what was happening and ran to close the curtain, yelling at the other actors to get off the stage, to give my sister some room. Mom and Dad were with us in a flash, emerging from the audience to hold the teachers at bay.

Gwen writhed on the floor. Fur covered her face; her ears slid around to the top of her head. Her nose lengthened, and she sprouted whiskers. The shift’s energy field blasted out, billowing the curtain and shredding her costume to ribbons. All the while, she shrunk smaller and smaller. Soon, all that could be seen of her was a rustling inside the remnants of Emily’s dress. Gwen had changed into a mouse.

I scooped up my sister and carefully slipped her into my pocket as Mom gathered the scraps of costume. Dad spoke to the teacher who had directed the play and convinced her we’d already carried Gwen out to the car. The director made an announcement that Gwen had become ill and the scene started over, with the understudy thrilled to step in. No big deal. The audience thought Gwen had fainted. Back in those days, most norms had an enormous capacity to ignore what they’d seen in favor of what they’d prefer to believe.

But Gwen was inconsolable. Her life, she insisted, was over. She refused to go to school for a week. And when she finally returned, it was to be shunned by her former friends. They blamed her for ruining the play, and someone—we never found out who—had seen something of Gwen’s shift. Rumors flew around the school, most of them even crazier than the truth. Gwen was called a freak, an alien, a mutant. Maybe if the monsters had been public then, kids would have thought she was cool. Maybe if Aunt Mab had taken on Gwen as her apprentice demon-fighter instead of me, my sister would have felt like there was some point to shifting. As it was, she felt like everything she’d ever wanted—her friends, popularity, a career as an actress—had been ripped away from her. Because she was Cerddorion. And she’d die, she insisted, if anyone ever found out.

Gwen never shifted again. She gave up her college plans and dropped out of high school. My parents objected. They pleaded. They even tried a threat or two. Gwen wouldn’t budge—stubbornness is a family trait. She found her own tiny studio in Medford and took a job at a pizza place near Tufts. And her mission in life became finding the right guy to get her pregnant. When a Cerddorion female gives birth, she becomes inactive, losing the ability to shift. Once being “normal” became Gwen’s driving force, she set out to catch a norm, with the intensity of a hunter stalking big game. Within three years, she’d married Nick Santini and gotten pregnant—not in that order. Nick was exactly the catch she was looking for. A Tufts grad who worked in finance, on campus for his five-year class reunion, he fell in love at first sight with the pretty waitress at the his old student hangout. Gwen was twenty-two years old the spring Maria was born. And with the birth of her child, she dedicated herself to out humaning all the human moms in her picket-fence suburban neighborhood.

Dad and I saw Gwen’s embracing of normhood as a rejection of everything that we were. Mom had a different view—after all, she’d made the same decision once. “Don’t judge your sister too harshly, Vicky,” she’d told me. “Maybe she’s not pushing her heritage away so much as she’s reaching toward something else.” I had no clue what Mom was talking about. All I could see was that Gwen wanted to be a norm.

Now, as if to prove that she was indeed the epitome of norm homemaking, she appeared in the doorway carrying a tray loaded with coffee and various pastries. All home-baked, I was sure. Gwen would rather die than have a store-bought cookie in her house. She smiled as brightly as any TV mom, kind of like Carol Brady, Clair Huxtable, and June Cleaver all rolled into one.

She put the tray on the coffee table and poured me a mug. We both like our coffee the same way, strong and black, but Gwen had set out a creamer and a little bowl of sugar cubes, complete with tongs. In the Santini household, appearances counted big-time. I warmed my hands around the steaming mug, breathing in that wonderful fresh-coffee scent.

“Gwen, about Maria’s costume—”

“Don’t worry about it. I overreacted. It’s just that I put a lot of time into the bride’s costume.” That wasn’t it at all, and we both knew it. She sighed. “I’m glad that Maria looks up to you. It’s just . . .”

“It’s just that you don’t want her to be me.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but it crept in anyway.

“I’m so scared that she’ll turn out to be Cerddorion.”

“What’s so awful about that, Gwen? I’m not the only Cerddorion around, you know. You’re Cerddorion, Mom’s Cerddorion. If Maria’s one of us, so what?”

“Each year, she grows up a little more. She’s ten already. In a couple more years—”

“In a couple more years you’ll know whether or not she needs some specialized guidance. If she’s Cerddorion, I can help her.”

“You know, I married Nick partly because he’s pure Italian. I was hoping that that would . . . I don’t know . . . dilute my DNA or something.”

“Maria will be fine, Gwen. She’s a great kid. That’s what counts.”

Gwen looked at me dubiously. She was about to say something else when the doorbell rang, and the expression on her face changed to a strange combination of guilt and hope. Uh-oh. I’d seen that look before.

“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure. A friend of Nick’s said he might drop by.” She checked her watch. “He must have gotten off work early.”

“Gwen, you didn’t.” Even as I said it, I knew she had. No matter how many times I asked her not to, my sister was always—always—trying to set me up with a human boyfriend. She didn’t approve of my dating a werewolf. Can’t imagine why.

She got up and started toward the front hall, smiling sheepishly—but not quite sheepishly enough to hide her delight. “This guy’s great. His name’s Andy. He just joined Nick’s investment firm. He’s really cute—and he went to Harvard. As soon as you said you were coming, I called Nick and told him to invite Andy for dinner.”

“I’m not—” But she was gone. Damn. I did notwant to sit there and play nice on some blind date I didn’t even know I was having. So I did what any self-respecting, happily single woman would do. I ran and hid in the bathroom.

I closed the door, locked it, and leaned my forehead against the cool tile wall. How was I going to convince Gwen to stop doing this? The last time she’d fixed me up with one of Nick’s friends, I’d agreed, reluctantly, to meet