“Hey, Ora, check out this word!” my fourteen-year-old sister exclaimed, rushing over to the counter where I was balancing the furniture store’s tally for the day.
`She wore the same modest blue dress, white apron, and prayer covering as me. But she had that horrible dictionary in her hands, and she was speaking in English—not our pack’s preferred German dialect. So, I suspected the next words out of her mouth would not be modest.
I suspected right.
“Shit,” she recited with great glee. “It's another way to say feces. It’s vulgar slang that you can use to indicate a contemptible or worthless person or thing. Also, unpleasant experiences or treatment, your personal belongings, or any psychoactive drug!”
“Tara …” I also spoke in mostly English to warn her, “Now is not the time for your Wörterbuchspiel. There's a full moon tonight, and Maem and Daed will be here any minute to pick us up.”
Tara had been playing her dangerous Wörterbuchspiel—dictionary game—for months now. Ever since she found the word “ass” in the old English dictionary that our Ghanaian father kept below the counter. And our parents could not find out about it. If they did, they might reverse their decision to let me man the store alone during harvest time.
The unseasonably hot harvest time. Despite it being fall in Ontario, a thick sheen of sweat coated my forehead.
Tara continued on as if I hadn’t said anything about our parents. “Do you think those are all the swear words? It couldn't be, right? There’s still T, U, W, X, Y, and Z. Ooh, I bet there’s something really naughty in the X part …”
She started flipping straight to the "X" section.
Sigh. Leave it to my obstinate younger sister to track down the only swear words to be found in our otherwise wholesome store.
Tara loved to swear. I wouldn’t know any vulgar slang if she hadn’t scouted them out in the dictionary and then insisted on sharing them with me, no matter how much I protested.
I might have protested too much, though. Like Queen Gertrude said in that Shakespeare play from Daed’s old England in Literature university textbook. I lean forward over the counter, a hypocritical curiosity making me want to discover what was in the X section too.
But no, no. I made myself lean back before she reached X. I was the older sister. The one in charge. It was my job to protect Tara from her wicked urges, not encourage her. “Put that dictionary away. It will only get you in trouble.”
“Oh, I’m not the one who’s in trouble.” Suddenly, Tara froze in place with the mischievous smile still pasted on her face. “You are.”
“No … I'm not … what are you talking about?”
I was so confused. Not to mention burning up.
Of course, we didn’t have air conditioning in our store—such things were against the St. Ailbe Ordnung. We couldn’t even accept credit cards. But I don’t think the store had ever gotten this hot. Especially during harvest time when the weather outside had grown cooler.
“Why is it so hot?” I mumbled.
Tara still hadn’t moved for some reason. She was a moment, frozen in time. Yet, I could hear her voice telling me, “Do you even know what I look like now?”
“I know … I know what you look like,” I insisted. For some reason, it felt as if I was lying, even though I was staring right at her. “You’re my sister.”
More sweat dripped into my eyes. But I couldn’t lift my hand to wipe it away. It was like there was a weight I couldn’t see on my arm, holding it down.
“You’re hurt,” Tara told me in that weird, unmoving picture way. “Burning up with fever.”
“What? No, I’m fine,” I insisted, even as I realized that I didn’t feel fine.
Actually, I didn't feel fine at all. I couldn’t move my arm to deal with the sweat dripping into my eyes. And there was pain somewhere below my knee, razor-sharp and radiating with its own heat. I was so hot, yet I began to shiver. It felt as if someone had encased my body in a cold layer of slime.
A new fear began to pool in my stomach.
“Where’s Maem and Daed,” I asked my frozen picture of a sister. “They were supposed to come at—”
I broke off when I glanced toward the store’s front window to see if my parents had arrived yet. It had been light and bright out a few moments ago when Tara was telling me the definition of “shit.”
But now snow flurried on the other side of the glass. Even though the store was hotter than noon in July.
“Maem … Maem … please wake up,” a voice said. But it didn’t belong to Tara. It was smaller and way more fearful than my sister’s.
What was going on here? Again, I asked Tara, “Where are Maem and Daed?”
“No one else is coming to save you,” Tara warned me, switching back to Wölfennite German. “You are not sixteen anymore, and you must give over to your wolf.”
As if in total agreement, my wolf surged forward, trying to break the surface of my human skin.
“No! No, I must not turn!” I gasped.
I pushed the wolf back down with alarm bells jangling inside my swollen brain. I was so confused, but there was one thing I knew for sure.
It didn’t matter how much pain I was in. Somehow, I knew I had to hold onto my wolf. I could not give over to my wolf. Not here, inside our family’s furniture store.
And there was another good reason not to turn too. I tried to remember that specific reason. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The sweat continued to drip into my eyes while the intense pain burned like a piece of coal below my knee.
“Maem, Maem, the full moon! I think it’s coming, and I don’t know what to do. I can’t leave you here …” Not Tara’s voice sounded again. It begged me, “Please wake up!”
I struggled and failed to open my eyes. But her voice reminded me why I had to hold on to my wolf.
No, I couldn’t turn … couldn’t let my wolf hurt her.
Meanwhile, my sister remained frozen in time, but her face became a somber shadow.
“Soon you won’t have a choice,” she told me in the same prophetic voice that Joshua used in his church lectures to remind us helpmates of the coming judgment day.
Wait … Joshua … Prince Edward Island … DORIE!
I woke up to the sight of my daughter. She was rocking back and forth with her hands wrapped around the arm I hadn't been able to lift to wipe away the sweat.
“Dorie …” I said—tried to say. The sound came out more like a rasp wrapped in steel cotton. I swallowed and made another attempt. “What …”
I trailed off when I saw our surroundings. A large room with a single couch, stone walls, and flames blazing in a hearth-like fireplace. But the fire wasn’t why I was burning up.
“You fell, Maem …” Dorie explained in a rush. “You fell into a river. And you wouldn’t wake up. I think your leg broke. It looks … bad. I found this cabin, and I tried to warm you up. But you’re still cold. I can’t get you warm.”
That was when I realized the source of the slimy feeling. The black dress I wore was completely sodden with river water. How long had I been lying here in wet clothes? With a broken leg and the wounds on my back from Joshua’s last reprimand not fully healed yet, no wonder I was running a fever underneath the slimy cold.
Dorie should have stripped me naked as soon as she got me to the cabin. But why would she even know that? She'd grown up even more sheltered than me.
Saint Albert she-wolves didn’t read books featuring tragic Danish princes. They didn’t work with money or interact with the outside world as my parents had allowed me to do. Young females like Dorie kept to themselves and were mostly raised to serve.
In my Ontario pack, we had all voted on things together. But that wasn’t allowed in the Saint Albert Discipline. I'd embarrassed Joshua soon after my arrival in SAV when I tried to raise my hand to vote nay on an issue brought up at the monthly town meeting.
"Don't ever do that again!" he'd yelled at me afterward, his entire face turning a mottled red. “We act in accordance with the old ways,"
Oh, my gosh. Joshua …
The memory of my last sight of him rose like bile in my throat. Joshua lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, one eye open and glazed over with incoming death.
Meanwhile, pain radiated ominously across my back and down the bottom half of my right leg. Dorie was right. I must have broken something.
“I don’t know how to help you,” she said, her small voice filled with woeful apology. “And now the moon’s about to come up.”
Yes, the moon. Beyond the fever, beyond this pain, I could feel the prickles of my wolf rising to the surface.
A wolf who would tear any living thing she found to pieces when she took control.
Including my innocent daughter.
All my fault …
This was all my fault.
If I hadn’t tried to send that letter to my sister …
If I hadn't panicked after the terrible fight with Joshua …
If I hadn't just grabbed the cash box from Joshua's desk and run with Dorie with nothing but the clothes on our backs …
Because of me, we’d barely had enough money for emergency passports and last-minute tickets to Scotland. The one place I knew the Saint Albert's pack wouldn’t be able to reach us.
I’d had only the address on the envelope and a map I purchased at the airport to guide us after we landed. And unfortunately, I didn't have enough money left to get us all the way to our destination. Which was how we’d come to be walking on foot when …
Actually, I wasn’t sure what had happened. Only that Dorie had somehow saved me.
Broken—that was what the other SAV villagers and even Joshua had called Dorie when it came out that she was toothless.
But Dorie could still see like a wolf and hear like a wolf. And she’d obviously been as strong as a wolf if she'd managed to not only dredge me out of the river but also get me to … wherever here was. I hauled myself up on one elbow to look around the cozy-but-sparse space and spotted a door.
A bathroom! Hope sparked in my chest.
“There’s no lock on the toilet’s door,” Dorie told me before I could instruct her to lock herself inside. “I already checked. There’s no lock on the outside door, either. That’s why I was able to get you in here.”
The hope sputtered out of my chest as fast as it had sparked. And a sense of doom took its place.
“You should have left me by the river and gone on to the kingdom village,” I said, my heart filling up with so much regret.
“I wasn’t going to leave you to die, Maem. When you fell asleep in the river, I thought …” Her chest hitched underneath her black dress. “I thought …”
I knew what she thought. I wasn’t the only person with that last image of Joshua seared into her head.
But not only had Dorie saved me and managed to get a fire going in the cabin we found, but she'd also refused to leave my side.
A sad pride filled up my chest.
“I’m so proud of you. You're such a good daughter. The best daughter a she-wolf could ever wish for," I told her.
Then I pushed myself up into a seated position on the bed.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Ignoring the question, I tried to rise to my good foot. “After I make it outside—”
I broke off with a sharp intake of air when a scalding pain leapt up my leg like a hungry fire.
My stomach pitched, threatening to make me sick all over myself. And my wolf surged again, taking advantage of my weakened state to compel another bid for dominance.
No! I pushed both the wolf and the vomit back down to instruct Dorie. “After I get outside. Push something against the door. The bed. Or that big chair. Anything. You’ve got to protect yourself, Dorie …”
“Maem …”
I doggedly hopped, ignoring the pain as I pulled my broken limb behind me. “We don’t have time to argue about this.”
“Nein, Maem, goock, goock mal!”
Goock mal—Look!
She pointed towards the cabin’s front window, and I looked up to see a huge red-haired man in a kilt. Coming straight towards us.
My heart stopped, and I froze in place with a memory.
Back in Ontario, a bookstore sat next door to ours. A nice outsider human named Barbara owned it. And she let us use her landline phone on the rare occasion my parents needed to follow up with a customer.
I'd once risked a glance at the three sets of shelves marked “ROMANCE” when my parent's backs were turned …
And had immediately become entranced by the cover of a book featuring a bare-chested man in a plaid skirt. I could still remember the name of it. Her Scottish Laird.
The bare-chested man on the cover had been clean-shaven with flowing black locks. The male stalking toward the house wore a black t-shirt and a jacket over his plaid skirt. Also, he had red hair and a large, thick beard to match.
Yet he struck me … he struck me as a Scottish romance cover come to life.
Until I saw the shotgun he carried.
Panic snapped me out of my staring trance.
"Come here, Dorie!" I whispered. I had to protect her! "Get behind me!"
But Dorie didn't get behind me. Just the opposite, in fact.
She dashed away from me toward the wood fire stove.
"I won't let him hurt you!" she whispered back. Then she grabbed the rounded handle of the fire poker resting against the hearth with the roaring flame.
Oh no, oh no, oh no … my stomach dropped with a sick thud. Yes, Dorie was much more sheltered than me. She'd grown up exclusively in Saint Albert without any knowledge of wolves. She didn’t know … she didn’t know about guns.
“Dorie, nein, nein! Du musst nicht …” I cried out.
But it was already too late.
Before I could stop her, she stormed out of the house with the fire poker raised above her head.
To face down the large male with a shotgun.