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Clarence died at three o’clock that morning. We were dozing, or pretending to, when the machines went haywire. Mrs. Smythewhite folded herself across Clarence’s body as if she could force his soul back inside it, her keening stifled by fabric. There at the end, pity warred with my relief.
Later, while we waited for her cab and Luke’s arrival, she thanked me. “If you need anything,” she finished, “I’m here for you.”
The words cut deep into my gut. This was my fault, every inch of it proof of my fallibility.
If I’d realized what was going on from the beginning, could Clarence have been rehabilitated? Could I have returned the pelt to Bastion in a more gradual manner that wouldn’t have drained away the last of the teenager’s health without reinvigorating the cousin I loved?
“No.” I shook my head. “Don’t thank me.”
Whatever she saw on my face made Mrs. Smythewhite raise one hand to brush hair away from my temple. Aunt Promise had soothed me just like that. She’d also always managed to know far more than I hoped.
Just like Mrs. Smythewhite.
“It’s obvious there’s more to this story than Clarence falling while hiking.” The tiniest hint of a smile rose on her lips as she added the clinching fact. “My boy doesn’t know a carabiner from a crampon.”
I shut my eyes. No, Mrs. Smythewhite was nothing like Aunt Promise. She was an avenging warrior. I deserved her recriminations. I braced myself for the blast.
Braced myself so long, in fact, that silence forced my eyes back open. Mrs. Smythewhite was watching me with tear-stained cheeks but with the aspect of a mother. Only when she gauged I was ready to listen did she continue.
“I need my memories of Clarence to be good. Please, don’t tell me any different.”
In the silence that followed, the cab arrived. My ex-employer disappeared with its taillights. Moments later, Luke stepped out of the shadows where he’d been waiting for who knows how long.
The questions on my face were silent but he answered them anyway.
“Bastion is still with us,” he promised. “It’s time for you to come home.”
***
HOUSES AND CITIES WERE bad for Bastion. Or so Justice and I gathered when we carried our comatose relative out to lie in Luke’s backyard the next day.
“No, not there,” Justice told me when I began to set our burden down on a soft patch of grass in the shade of a maple. “In the sun.”
He was right. I could tell the moment early morning light struck Bastion’s features. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of an eyelid, but I felt Bastion soaking up sun strength the same way I knew that Luke was hovering in the shadows, making himself available while at the same time giving space to our family.
The warmth of Luke’s presence provided leeway for me to brainstorm. “Do you think it’s worth taking him home?” I asked Justice.
It had been years since the four of us spent more than a day at the farmhouse where we’d been raised, so ragweeds and goldenrod were likely as tall as the porch roof. Still, despite the dust and emptiness, there was peace there. Trees older and wilder than the ones sunlight dappled through here in the suburbs. A richness to the earth that my gut said would help Bastion heal.
Justice shook his head, stating the obvious. “It’s too far.” Ten hours in the car with Bastion comatose.... The first few minutes would suck away whatever earth energy Bastion was currently gathering. We couldn’t risk it. This piece of greenery in the city was our best bet.
Or...maybe not. Luke’s voice came from inches behind us. “It’s half an hour to my other property. The place is a camp. Cabins, cold water. But there are trees, sun, room for wolves to roam.”
I started to nod, but Luke wasn’t done listing off the downsides. “It’s isolated though,” he continued. “Spotty cell-phone service.” He paused, his voice lowering. “I can open the place up then leave.”
This was what I got for hesitating to send him to Bastion after my cousin and his pelt were reunited. How to explain that my initial reaction had been ingrained due to decades of secrecy? That it had nothing to do with Luke himself?
“Will there be other sk—” I caught myself, used Luke’s own language “—other werewolves? At your camp?”
“No.” The word was firm, dependable. Still, Luke elaborated. “Once a year, I invite campers. But not until September. No one would dare trespass now.”
“Then that sounds perfect. Thank you. The camp and you both....” I tried to imbue all of the trust I felt for Luke into my answer. Then I backpedaled as I remembered the obvious flaw. “But Grace would be furious.”
After all, my twin had pulled me aside mere moments ago to remind me that a twin held veto power over mate choices, the implication being that she hated Luke enough to stoop to the level of tearing our incipient partnership apart. Perching in a Luke-scented den where she could call a cab and escape into the city whenever she got claustrophobic was bad enough. Isolating ourselves on Luke’s country estate would be akin to giving a cat a bath.
I expected Justice to agree with me. After all, he’d been watching our conversation up until this point like a kitten at a tennis match.
Now though, he reached out to grasp Luke’s shoulder in a gesture that was almost brotherly. “My twin, my decision,” he told both of us. “Thank you. We accept.”
***
LATER, I HOVERED OUTSIDE the kitchen window, keeping one eye on Bastion while eavesdropping shamelessly on Justice breaking the news to my sister. Grace wasn’t a morning person, so her reaction was about what I’d expected. What I hadn’t expected was the conversation’s abrupt left turn.
“Okay, but if I do this for you then you have to back me up about the scheidung.”
I took a step away, nearly falling off the edge of the flowerbed in the process. There it was, the term I’d been dreading. My sister wanted a twin divorce.
If Bastion had been awake and present, he would surely have rejected Grace’s suggestion. But Justice wasn’t my biggest fan.
“You realize the position you’d be putting Bastion and myself in. We’d have to make a very permanent decision.”
He sounded like a lawyer. Cool, calm, and collected. As if he wasn’t speaking about cutting off all contact with a cousin. As if Grace wouldn’t be breaking our family apart.
I couldn’t listen any longer. All I could do was return to Bastion, run my hand across his brow, take comfort in the fact that the skin there was no longer gray and sweaty. Was he getting better? I could only hope so. Other than sun, nothing else had made any difference in his health.
Well, the sun and his pelt. I twitched Bastion’s fur to reposition it...or tried to. But the leathery underside clung to his body. My fingers trembled. Could he possibly be beginning to shift?
Bastion’s torso was already naked to improve contact with the pelt. So all I had to do was rip away his jogging pants, avert my eyes as I pulled down his boxers.
And...he changed. Not as fast or as smooth as he used to. Instead, this was a slow, painful grind of bone against bone.
Bastion’s agony infused me. It was never-ending. Perhaps he wasn’t ready for transformation. Perhaps....
Then Luke was present like the sun-warmed version of a shadow. “Shift. It might help him.”
I shed my clothes right there, where any neighbor could be watching. Slipped beneath my pelt. Burst into the form of my wolf.
And Bastion came right along with me. Eyes still squinched shut, his lupine body was nearly as ragged as the moth-eaten pelt he’d been covered by.
But he’d shifted. Inside me glowed a kernel of hope.