state, a Werewolf is not the fiend over which picture books dwell and little children quail. No one in my pack is the type of slathering beast dreamed up by the special-effects department on a Hollywood lot. Once turned, my Weres actually look like large wolves. Some of them are pretty, some of them are sort of ratty looking, but all of them are furry.
Fae are never furry.
And here’s a final fact: we don’t walk around nude in public. Did I say that already? Well, let me say it again. We do not prance around buck naked no matter what stage the moon is in.
Cordelia stood tall, her head tipped back, allowing the moon’s light to touch her face with silver fingers that must have felt damn good, judging by the discreet shudder that went through her bony frame.
A cool wind whistled through the trees.
My roommate flicked a glance toward the three pines that anchored the edge of the ridge, and then visibly recentered herself.
“Go away,” I mouthed to the glowing shadow flitting from pine tree to pine tree.
Stalker-ghost melted behind the nearest pine. But half a second later, her head—nothing more than an indistinct, wavering bluish blur capped by floating serpent trails of long hair—popped out from around the trunk.
“Are you paying attention?” said Cordelia, a tetch acidly.
“A hundred percent,” I said.
“The more light you let on your skin, the faster you will change.” Cordelia began to unbutton her shirt. For the last few months, I’d shared a twenty-seven-foot trailer with her, but this was the first time I’d seen her disrobe. I didn’t want to be able to report on whether or not she had a full package, even if there was three hundred and seventy-five bucks riding on it. But she’d offered to show me the ropes. Or maybe it had been another group decision. I tried to remember. She cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes at me, bringing me back from yet another mental detour.
I didn’t have any buttons. I hauled my cotton sweater up and over my head, and then looked for a dry place to place it. Suppressing a shiver, I bent to drape it over poor little Samuel’s thin, worn marker (1744—1745, BELOVED SON).
“Are you hurrying?” Biggs’s voice was strained. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”
“He’d bloody well better hold,” Cordelia muttered as she unzipped her skirt. “One of us needs to be in two- legged form to escort you back to the trailer if this doesn’t work.”
Did they really think it had come to that? Unseen danger all around me? Ever since that damn letter arrived, I couldn’t even walk to the compost pile without an escort.
Cordelia was down to her underwear. She had no waist. None. I could count her ribs under her dead-white skin. She looked at me steadily, and then her lip twisted into a lopsided sneer as she reached behind her back for her bra fastenings.
I partially turned away from her and stared at a tree as I fumbled with the rest of my clothing. I owed her more than I could ever repay. The least I could do was grant her privacy as she shed her adopted sexual identity. As I slid my jeans down to my ankles, I heard the soft friction of fabric on skin and out of the corner of my eye I saw something light and lacy land by Cordelia’s feet.
A few feet over to my left, beyond the cedar hedge, I could Biggs bouncing on the balls of his feet in jittery anticipation. “You’ll have to hurry, the Chihuahua is getting anxious,” Cordelia said. I shed the rest of my clothing, with the last item—one medium pair of Hanes pink cotton panties—landing on Absolom (1746—1747, LAMB OF GOD). Folding my arms over my chest, I turned back to Cordelia.
She was facing the moon. Her raised arms were outstretched, as if she were trying to embrace it. “You can feel its call inside you,” she said in a husky murmur. “The moon will summon your inner wolf. Let its warmth run over your skin. Trust your body. Trust your instincts. Trust the moon.” My roommate snapped me a look over her shoulder. “You have to surrender to it, Hedi. You can’t go through another moon without showing your other nature. You have to give it to us. Or there—”
“Won’t be any ‘us,’” I filled in.
“Come hold my hand. Feel it through me.”
Sometimes I wondered just who was the minion and who was the Alpha-by-proxy. I tiptoed over, readjusted one arm to cover my boobs, and reluctantly bared my nether regions to reach for the large, well- manicured hand extended my way.
Cordelia lifted our clenched hands to the moon. “Can you feel it?”
I could feel the cold. I could feel the dampness of the ground under my bare feet. I could feel embarrassed and incompetent and all sorts of esteem-lowering thoughts, but I couldn’t feel the moon.
“Yup.”
“Good.” She tipped her head really far back, so far I could see her Adam’s apple. “Now, let it happen.”
She held my hand tight, even as she started to change, as if, what? As if she could pour a little of her Werewolf essence into me? I felt her skin start to move, courtesy of the bones beginning their stomach-churning, morph-into-a-canine thing. Kind of gross. She pulled me down with her as she fell on her knees.
I slid my hand out of hers, my skin crawling in an all too mortal way at the feel of hers moving under my grip.
A light low moan slipped from her lips, just before she thudded onto her side in her chosen bed of fragrant maple leaves. The tight, well-moisturized skin stretched across her cheekbones began to look like a pot of bubbling cream of chicken soup.
I turned my head away. She’d only just begun if her bones sounded like castanets.
My inner-bitch was restless. She kept pacing inside me and leaking distress into my bloodstream. I heard a whimper. A small whine. I looked around for its source, and then—oh Goddess—realized it was me. That was good, wasn’t it? I’d whined. Was the change going to start with my jaw? Was it elongating? I opened my mouth wide—another deep-throated whine slipped out—and tested it, contorting my jaw from its habitual position of just hanging there below my lip waiting for the next cookie to come its way into something more resembling a hungry alligator. I held it like that until my saliva dried on my teeth.
Sea-slurping noises came from Cordelia’s bed of leaves.
There, thinking that wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be.
Inside, my inner-bitch grew frantic. She kept bouncing off the ball of Fae magic that sat in my gut beside her, and each time she did, my magic sparked, adding sharp exclamation points of Fae annoyance to the internal writhing that was going on. I pressed both hands flat across the swell of my stomach. Goddess, now that I’d given her full leave to explode, my inner-Were was past mortal logic, past even rudimentary communication with me, her half-bred host. She was all panting “go, go, go” like a pooch who’d spied a squirrel.
“Let’s do this without smacking my Fae, okay?” I whispered, darting an anxious glance at Cordelia. “Leave her alone.”
“Hedi?” asked Biggs in a strained voice from the other side of the hedge. “Is there trouble?” Two shaking hands parted the shrubbery. The moon was working its mojo on him. His jaw was longer and his mouth a misshapen, stretched thing.
I slapped my hand on his forehead and shoved his heated face back through the cedars. “Stay there!”
“Okay,” he mumbled.
My Were did another lunge inside me. This time she hit my ball of Fae head-on, and I experienced the sudden exhilarating leak of its magic into my blood. My mother’s gift raced up through my heart, built into a pressure at my throat, divided at my collarbones, and then ran hot, a stream of sizzling glee surging through my veins until it came to my hand where it split into fragments that fattened the ends of my fingertips.
“Crap,” I said, flexing my swollen digits. I hadn’t accessed my Fae magic once over the summer. No, not
