Beastly Beauty: A Fairy Tale Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 2) Read online

“The man of the hour,” my cousin says.

  “What do you want?” Dad asks. His flannel shirt is rumpled above a pair of khaki shorts, and he’s still barefoot. I suddenly want nothing more than to curl up in his arms and cry, let him explain all this way, make my life good again. He could always do that. But he looks different now. He’s thinner, carrying only twenty extra pounds or so, and his beard is straggly and greying instead of neatly trimmed. I want to ask him what happened, but I don’t know if I could stand to hear the answer. I saw the shed where they kept him.

  “You know what we want,” my cousin says.

  “I can’t say I do,” Dad grumbles, scratching his head. His hair has also grown longer and is badly in need of a shampoo and a trim and a comb.

  “Then let me spell it out for you. We want the old hag back.”

  “I don’t know anything about a hag.”

  “Fair enough,” the skinny guy says. “We’ll make you a deal. You keep the witch, and we keep your daughter. When you give us back the witch, we’ll give your daughter.”

  Dad eyes me, and my blood runs hotter than lava. “What are you talking about?” I scream. “Dad, make them let me go.”

  “Ah, didn’t Daddy tell you?” my cousin asks. “He loves that witch. Oh, I know she’s an old crone now, but she borrows bodies all over the Three Valleys. Ain’t that right, Owen? You been shacking up with that witch for years.”

  “What is he talking about?” I ask Dad.

  “What, you didn’t want your daughter to know?” the other shifter sneers. “That witch is going to be pissed when she hears you’re ashamed of her.”

  Just then, something big crashes in the leaves across the road. The boys both sniff the air. Dad listens, his eyes narrowing.

  “I don’t have your witch,” he says. “I don’t know anything about her. Now give me my daughter, and you can go on your witch hunt.”

  I hear footsteps behind me and twist around in time to see a dark shape charging towards the porch. I shrink away as it passes, but the thick smell of it clogs my nostrils, making my eyes water. A second later, it leaps onto the porch, and in the light of the full moon, I see it clearly. It’s a bear, blood smearing its muzzle, a jagged hole torn in its shoulder, patches of fur torn off.

  Efrain.

  The sight of him sends my mind into a panic. With a growl, he charges Dad, slamming him to the ground.

  A scream tears from my throat, and I throw myself towards the porch. My cousin’s grip slips, and I fall to my hands and knees. All this time, I dreamed of my dad being alive. Only tonight, I found out that he was. They can’t kill him now. He is my savior, the one who’s going to get us out of here, back to the real world, where people were people all the time, not animals. I scramble forward as a bobcat streaks by, leaping onto my father’s prostrate body. Why isn’t he shifting? Why isn’t he fighting?

  The bear that is Efrain throws back its head and roars into the air. And then I see why Dad isn’t fighting. His face is slack, either dead or unconscious.

  “Take me,” I scream, throwing myself under Efrain, between him and my father. His shaggy fur is coarse and matted, and the smell of him nearly knocks me to the ground.

  Gravel crunches in the driveway, but I don’t turn to see who has arrived. I cover my father’s unmoving body with my own, shielding him from Efrain’s bloody teeth. “Leave him alone,” I scream. “Take me instead. Don’t kill him. Please.”

  Suddenly, a body thuds against Efrain. Twisting my head around, I see dozens of wolves streaming into the driveway, along the side of Dad’s truck. Shifters are emerging from beside Dad’s house, bears and bobcats, bucks and boars.

  Not this again.

  Efrain dives into a knot of wolves, throwing one with his massive paw. My cousin has disappeared into an animal form, though I don’t know which one. For a moment, I’m left unguarded. I jump up off Dad and grab his arm, heaving with all my strength. His body barely moves. Gripping his wrist, I try again, dragging him towards the door. If I can just get him inside and bolt the doors. Maybe he has a basement or somewhere safe to hide until he wakes up.

  A racoon leaps onto the porch, hissing and diving for me. Its claws slash into my dress. I kick it as hard as I can, and it falls back, but the pain in my ankle is so severe I can’t hold in a scream. The sound joins the howls and snarls and roars ripping through the air around me. Sobbing through my own pain, I throw open the screen door. Grabbing Dad’s wrists again, I throw all my weight back, dragging him to the doorway this time. But my scream caught Efrain’s attention, and his big head swings around.

  I scream again, this time in fear. All I want is to jump inside the house and slam the door and lock it. But I can’t leave Dad defenseless. As Efrain bounds towards the porch, I throw my body over Dad’s again. Suddenly, something sweeps over me, something so terrifyingly familiar that I can’t help but laugh. My body lurches as my muscles bunch and cramp and contract, the beginning of one of my fits. I’ve had these fits all my life, muscle spasms and blackouts and nightmares.

  But now is not the time to suddenly start hallucinating and pass out. Hysterical giggles flood from my mouth as tears drip from my eyes. I hunker down over Dad, praying he will wake up before it’s too late, before we’re both dead. But he remains motionless, and a second later, something hits me with the force of a club. For a moment, I’m stunned senseless, and all I feel is the weightlessness of flying through the air.

  I’m a bird, I think crazily. And then I slam into a tree, and my head thuds against the trunk, and the world goes dark.

  2

  I’ve been staring up at a dirty window for what feels like hours. Half-awake and half consumed by the throbbing pain in my head, I stir when I hear a muffled scraping sound. I thought I was alone in this cold, damp place of pain, so the noise startles me, sends my heart racing inside my aching ribcage. The scuffling sound repeats, and I cut my eyes in that direction, pulled from the haze of agony for the first time since I woke. This room is not the cluttered attic where I’ve spent the past two years, where I belong. It’s dim, cavernous, and dank with the smell of mildew and damp earth.

  With some effort, I push myself up to sitting, wincing like I’m an old woman instead of sixteen. My head throbs with each beat of my heart, an ache so big I think I’ll have to lie back down. But another sound stops me, this one a high whimpering sound. My fingers flex against the floor, not the wooden planks of my mother’s attic but hard packed soil. No steel chimney rises from floor to ceiling here, making me sweat with heat in the winter and even more now that it’s springtime. Here, my pale skin prickles with a clammy chill that my light cardigan can’t dispel.

  The scuffling sound draws my attention once more. With an optimism I shouldn’t still possess after spending the last two and a half years as a prisoner in my mother’s attic, I think at once that it must be Mrs. Nguyen, my old babysitter. She also happens to be a mouse and my guardian angel. I grope across the dirt floor for the glass lantern in which she was trapped the last time I saw her. If I was going to choose a spirit animal to watch over me, I would have chosen something big and fierce like a tiger, not a tiny grey mouse who could be imprisoned in a jar. But that choice was not mine to make.

  Testing out each muscle as I move, I clamber onto hands and knees.

  “Yvonne?” I whisper. “Is that you, Mrs. Nguyen?”

  No answering scuffle.

  But wait. I did see her after that. We rode on the back of a mountain lion who was also my dad. The thought is so ridiculous I know it can’t be true. But after missing Dad painfully for the past years, I can’t stop the hope that it was real. “Dad?” I try.

  I crawl forward, jerking to a halt when I kneel on my skirt. If I can find the lantern, I won’t be alone. Even if she’s not inside it, I could still light the lantern. I wouldn’t mind a little light or warmth.

  I attempt to stand, but a shock of pain pulses through my ankle when I put weight on it, and I fall back to all fours. Outside, thunder
rumbles somewhere far away. Far above. Blindly, I move forward, exploring what must be someone’s basement. I whisper Dad’s name, my voice tremulous. “Owen?”

  In response, I hear what is definitely a sigh. My skin prickles. That was no mouse.

  I’m not alone down here.

  But I’ve seen too much in the past two years, since coming to live in a community of werewolves, to be relieved. True, it might be someone I want to see—my identical twin, or Mrs. Nguyen in human form, or the father I thought was dead until last night. If it’s him, we could get out of here together.

  Or it could be an angry werewolf who wants me dead. Or one of the violent, lawless, shapeshifting heathens from the neighboring community. The odds are not in my favor.

  Remembering last night, I shiver at the image of a mountain lion towering over Harmon, who had looked like such a huge wolf until that moment. And then, a bear towering over my father. I almost lose my nerve and retreat to my corner under the window. If that is in here with me, I don’t want to provoke it.

  But another soft, pathetic whimper stops me from turning back and hiding. I have been hiding for two years. True, Mother didn’t let me out of the house much. But I could have fought harder. I could have found a way. Like I will find a way out of here, a way back to my father and the normal, sane life we lived in the real world, before he died and I was sent to live in this nightmare.

  He’s not dead, I remind myself. He’s alive. After only hours with him, I was ripped away again. But now that I know he’s out there, I will find him. I will find a path back to my real life, where I had friends, a family who loved me, a future. A place where a boy could love me without believing I’m my twin. A place where hope exists.

  When my fingers at last find warmth, I’m so shocked I jerk my hand back. It’s an animal, all right, but I don’t know which one. I want to run away, out of this shadowy basement. I want to curl up behind the potato bin and pray it doesn’t know I’m here. But what if it’s Dad, injured?

  Again, I reach for it, searching until my fingers sink into soft fur. I can feel it breathing. My hands begin to explore over damp, matted fur, a ribcage, down the thick coat, the hip. I’m certain it’s a wolf now, or a dog, but I’m not sure if that’s safer than a shifter. It depends on the wolf. It’s not as safe as a mouse, that’s for sure.

  Suddenly, my fingers aren’t touching fur. They are touching skin—human skin. I almost scream as I fall back, away from the wolf and the human intertwined in this corner of shadow and darkness. A scenario forms in my overactive mind in seconds. A wolf must have attacked a human, and the human injured the wolf, which I heard whining. Or perhaps the wolf was eating the human to regain strength. That’s what happens in the horror movies my best friend used to sneak from her brother’s room to watch while her parents slept. Or is it vampires that gain strength by feeding on humans? Do werewolves drink blood? Eat human flesh?

  Is this the shed where they kept Dad prisoner? If he’s here with me now…

  My heart constricts painfully. All the fear and pain of losing him, the anger at learning so many of his stories were lies, it all comes rushing back. Last night, when Mrs. Nguyen told me he was alive, I didn’t have time to think it over. I was trying to escape, to find him.

  When I found him, everything happened so fast I had no time to think.

  Escape the wolves. Save Mrs. Nguyen. Escape the shifters.

  He wouldn’t stop to answer my questions, and now, I’ve lost my chance to make sense of it all. Anger rises in me like a tidal wave. All that time, locked in solitude in Mother’s attic, and he was alive? If he’d told me the truth all my life, I would have known that he was alive when I found his body. I would have known he was in trouble, and I could have helped.

  Instead, he lied to me. He let me find his body and believe he was dead. He let the state ship me off to a cruel mother with her rules and her locks and her stinging blows. Mother, who made me believe that since I wasn’t a wolf, I was nothing. The anger swells. I don’t care who this wolf is, all tangled up with a human. The human might be my father. I give that human leg a shove, the thought that it might not be attached occurring to me only when it’s too late to take it back.

  Instead of tumbling away, the leg is drawn back. A howl of pain, a snarl, and sharp fangs clamp onto my hand. I scream in shock and terror. The wolf’s jaws unfasten from my hand, and I scramble back, hardly feeling the volley of fire shooting from my ankle up my leg. The new, fiercer pain in my hand is too immediate. I scramble back to my corner under the dim light of the window. Through the smudged, dirty window set high above, I can see only grey sky. Down here, I can see more—the punctured holes in my hand, the blood streaming out in rivulets like the rain on the pane above.

  I press my hand to my middle, curl around it, and let the tears come. Even my sister, when she was injured as a wolf and I had to care for her, never bit me. It hurts worse than I imagined it would. But at least it didn’t take my hand off.

  When the tears are gone, I sit up and work to tear off strips of the tulle gown I wore to Harmon’s ill-fated coronation. I wrap my hand until it’s fat with the stuff. Then I touch the tender knot on my head where I hit the tree. The ache of it is unending, a constant drain on my energy, a distraction from my thoughts of escape, as if only half of me is here and the rest is huddling inside somewhere, stunned senseless by the pain.

  Another whimper comes from the back of this basement dungeon, but I’m not making that mistake again. I try to ignore its suffering and my own, to listen to the noises overhead and determine whether they are thunder or footsteps. And if it is human footsteps, are they the violent outlaws who my mother has taught me to fear, or the wolves, who experience has taught me to fear? Which is worse? And what are their plans for me?

  3

  The next morning, I wake to the smell of food, a sweet, rich scent that sends me back to my life before this place, to Sunday afternoons in the kitchen with Dad. I push to sitting and grasp my heavy, pounding head for a minute, breathing through the pain. It’s not as bad as yesterday, but still makes me sway when I stand. My swollen ankle throbs as I hobble forward a few steps, checking the shadowy corner where the vicious wolf lay. I can only hope that it didn’t get rabies from one of the shapeshifters.

  This morning dawns brighter than the stormy day before, and I can make out more of the basement. A large freezer sits against one wall, but I’m not about to look in there. Everyone knows what happens to the girl who goes snooping around and finds out all her kidnappers’ secrets. I hop forward a few more steps, keeping my weight off my injured foot. The damp, musty smell has stopped up my nose, but I can taste the dank air down here. It is definitely not the shed where Dad was held prisoner.

  The floors and walls are packed dirt, with a recess below the window where a few dusty old pots are wedged. The room is larger than it felt when I was crawling around in it yesterday. I scan the ceiling for an opening and find shadowy, exposed beams held up by upright supports that look like peeled tree trunks, greyed with age. A few large wooden crates are built against one wall. They’re big enough to hide a human…or a wolf.

  I shiver and pull my sister’s filthy sweater tighter around myself as I take another step, searching the shadows beyond the wooden boxes. That’s where the wolf was, but even with the increased light today, I’ll have to go closer to see if it’s there, and I’m not about to make that mistake again. Instead, I look for a door. If there’s a way in, there’s a way out. At last, I make out a rectangular shape in one corner that must be a door, though it’s shorter than any door meant for humans. I wonder for a second if shifters can open doors in their animal form. I don’t like that thought.

  I hobble towards the door anyway, the growling in my stomach urging me forward. When I step onto an uneven spot in the pitted floor, I lurch forward, grasping at one of the pillars to stop my weight from falling onto my bad ankle. While I’m catching my breath, I hear rustling in the darkest recesses of the basement, where
yesterday the wolf bit me. Since I didn’t hear screaming in the night, I can only assume it hasn’t eaten its human companion. Or, if it has, the human was already dead.

  It’s so dark that I almost miss the rickety ladder leading up to another door, this one human sized. It’s right above the injured wolf, though, so I skirt around to the little door at ground level. I say a quick prayer, close my eyes, and grip the rusted iron handle. With breath held, I give a tug.

  Nothing.

  Of course they’re not just going to leave it unlocked, to let a prisoner walk out. I didn’t expect to find it unlocked. I told myself not to get my hopes up. Still, my body sags with the loss of even that slim chance. With a sigh, I hobble back across the room, avoiding the sight of the injured wolf. I sink down in my spot beneath the window and try to ignore the soft whining when it begins a while later. At last, I can’t bear to sit still any longer.

  I push myself to my feet and search the room with my eyes. When I find nothing new, I hop over to the freezer. I’m already a prisoner. They’re going to do whatever they want to me. Looking in the freezer is not going to change my fate. I heave the lid up and am greeted by a blast of freezing steam. Inside, white paper packages in various sizes fill the well of the freezer, each labeled in red letters.

  Ribs

  Roast

  Shoulder

  Hamburger

  I can only hope this meat comes from an animal. With a sigh, I close the lid and move on to the first wooden bin. Inside, I find a small mountain of round, dirty potatoes. In the second bin, I find a body.

  I scream. The pain in my ankle forgotten, I race for the ladder and scramble up the crooked, wobbly steps. I don’t stop until I reach the top rung. Grasping the knob, I turn it as hard as I can. Unlike the loose knob of my mother’s attic, this one is brushed steel and firmly set into the door. When it doesn’t give, I continue wrenching at it, sure that by the force of terror alone, I will rip it from its mooring, rip the door right off the hinges. When the knob becomes slick from my sweating palms, I begin pounding at the door, screaming to be let out.