Unlikely Magic: A Cinderella Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 1) Page 9

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Mother asks, towering over me. “Are you trying to make a fool of us? Make people think we’re mistreating you?”

  “What are you doing to Elidi?” I ask.

  “I’m not doing anything to her.”

  “What are they going to do to her?” I ask, brushing my tangled hair out of my eyes.

  “That’s up to them to decide,” Mother says. “We don’t lie to each other here. The community falls apart when we started keeping secrets and deceiving each other.”

  “What’s she lying about?” I ask, scooting further back.

  Mother stares me down. “I think you know.”

  For a moment, neither of us speak. “You can’t let them take her away,” I say at last. “It’s not her fault.”

  “What isn’t?” Mother asks, her words clipped.

  “None of it,” I say. “You’re right, I do know. I’ll tell you everything if you tell me. Truth for truth.”

  I expect her to laugh in my face, but she gives me a long, calculating look instead. At last, she steps into my room and closes the door.

  “So what do you have to tell me?” she asks.

  “You first,” I say. “What are you? And is everyone here…whatever it is.” I can’t say the word. It sounds ridiculous even in my head.

  “Whatever you think we are…” she says slowly. “Whatever you think you saw, that’s what you saw.”

  “Ditto,” I say. “You saw what you think you saw.”

  “So you were in the woods that night,” she says. “It wasn’t Elidi. I knew it. I could smell it. I just didn’t believe she’d lie to me.” She sinks onto the arm of my couch and rubs her temples.

  “Tell me the rest,” I say, my voice firm. For once, I have power here. “Tell me why I can’t leave. Is it because of the wolves? Because of you, all of you?”

  “It’s not us you need to be afraid of,” she says, still rubbing her temples. “This pack, we take care of our own. But across the mountain, in the next valley, there’s another community. They’re wild, dangerous. Not like us. We’ve tried to make peace with them, but they break every pact. They can’t be trusted. And if you even stepped into their territory…if any of us did…we wouldn’t come back. They’re corrupted by greed, selling off their land to loggers and starving their own children when the hunting ground is gone. What do you think they’d do to one of our children?”

  I can’t believe she’s telling me this. Talking to me. I don’t dare speak, in case it reminds her who I am.

  “We know the boundaries,” she says. “Even the children. We know the woods. The edges of our valley. But you, Stella… You’re only lucky you didn’t make it too far. Our valley lies between two others, and in them, there are more than wolves. There is every kind of dangerous creature, every dark magic.”

  I watch in awe as goosebumps prickle the hair on my mother’s arms. What could scare this vicious monster with a heart of stone?

  And wait…did she just call me one of them? She said our children, as if that included me. I remember then, the juniper tree that grabbed me. The vision that flashed into my mind when it did.

  “Magic that can make you see things that happened before you were old enough to remember?”

  That gets her attention. Her eyes snap back from her own memories, homing in on my face like a scientist dissecting a new specimen. “What did you see?”

  For a moment, I want to hold back, keep what little power it gives me. But I can’t see anything I could gain from it. She’s in a talkative mood today, and maybe I will learn some piece of information that is the key to my freedom. Like I’m adopted, not her real child, anyway.

  “A woman leaning over my crib when I was a baby,” I tell her. “She didn’t look like me, but she said she was my mother. If she really is, maybe she’s out there somewhere. Maybe you could find her, and you wouldn’t have to keep me here anymore. You’re always saying I’m a burden, and you didn’t ask for this. So let’s find her.”

  “Doralice,” she whispers. Her skin pales, and that’s when I realize how ridiculous I am. I look just like her, except for a few minor details. She’s obviously my biological mother.

  “Who’s that?”

  She shakes her head, her jaw clenching, her expression hardening to its usual scowl. “No one,” she mutters. “Your father’s first wife.”

  “First wife?” I ask. That makes two wives he didn’t tell me about. “Is she my mother?”

  “No,” she snaps. “I’m your mother.”

  “Then why did I see that?”

  “They say she’s buried there,” she says with a shrug, as if it’s unimportant. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother had murdered her.

  “But why did she say she was my mother?”

  “You ran into the Enchanted Forest and got a taste of the nightmare. That’s good. Maybe you’ll learn not to do it again.”

  I throw up my hands, frustrated by her vague answers. “But how does her ghost, or whatever, how does it know who I am?”

  “The Enchanted Forest sees inside you, shows you your greatest wish, and then rips it away from you. The only aim is to hurt you, and if that’s the best way to do it, it will know. Stay out of it.”

  With that, she stands, her face dark with emotion. I wonder if knowing that my deepest wish is that she wasn’t my real mother actually hurt her feelings. But no. That would require her to actually have feelings. “Happy now? Did I answer all your questions?” she snarls.

  I straighten my shoulders. “No. What will happen to Elidi if she says that’s her necklace?”

  Mother’s lips tighten into a grimace. “We’ll just have to hope she’s smart enough not to.”

  “What will happen to me?” I whisper. “Will they… sell me to the enemy tribe?”

  “No,” she scoffs, pushing up from the couch. “They wouldn’t do that. This will blow over. If it doesn’t…” She stops at the door and looks at me, her expression slowly changing back to its usual hard, emotionless state. “You were warned. You defied me, and you will pay the consequences. This will not fall on your sister. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” I whisper.

  “You are not to leave this house again. I can’t protect you from your own stupidity, Stella. I hope you’ll remember that the next time.”

  “I will.”

  And then she’s gone. It’s real. It’s all real. My mother is a wolf. My sisters, their friends, everyone here. They’re right. I’m not one of them. I’m a human, and I want to go back to my human world where everyone was normal. Where I had a best friend, and we were going to be models one day, and my Dad made me macaroni and cheese when we watched movies together. Where my biggest worries were that I wasn’t allowed to date and that my dad didn’t really care for my best friend and her influence on me.

  But even I know I can’t do that. The world I knew isn’t just gone. It never existed at all.

  9

  For a few months, things seem to settle back to normal. The new normal, in this crazy world where people are animals and I’m the freak for being only human. The rest of my family goes to the lunar meetings once a month, and I stay home and clean the house or do dishes. While I finish the fence around the backyard, I look over my shoulder at least once a minute, jumpy at the slightest sound—a twig snapping, squirrels chasing each other up and down the tree trunks, an armadillo rooting in the dry leaves.

  When the fence is finally finished, it’s a relief not only because I can go back inside, but because it makes me feel safer to have an enclosure around the back, where I have to go to use the outhouse. I read all the books in the attic room and think about what my life is now, hiding here until I’m eighteen. But what then? I go back to Oklahoma City and try to get into a college though I’m homeschooled, and not very well at that? Pretend this was all a nightmare?

  And then one night, I have a real nightmare. One of the ones I had before blackouts, with pain and haunting, disconnected images.
Dr. Golden never figured out if the nightmares caused the blackouts and the hallucinations and the seizures. They’re all part of the same thing, interwoven with the nightmare. When the blackouts came, they were always a relief, an end to the terrifying feeling of not being in control of my body.

  I don’t know it’s coming until I wake up screaming for the first time in years. I can’t even remember the last time, just that they went away a year or so after we moved to Oklahoma. Eventually, they faded into memory, the way bad things do.

  Until now. I thought I’d outgrown this, like night terrors. But here I am, shoving a scream back into my mouth, trying not to wake my sisters and my mother. If they thought I was a freak before, this will confirm it. My shoulders cramp up, the pain drilling down the tendons there, up my neck, until it’s burning like fire. I bite down on my pillow, scream into it, tears streaming from my eyes. My spine cracks as my back arches involuntarily and my legs shoot out, going stiff.

  Vaguely, I remember having a class with a kid who had epilepsy. Our teacher went over what to do when someone had a seizure. I try to remember what to do when I have my own. But my head is spinning with terror, pain, everything but the knowledge of how to resolve this. How can I get through one of these without my dad?

  My body relaxes, and I try to breathe through my sobs, shaking so hard my teeth rattle together. I curl up into a ball and wait for the next one. It comes too soon, while I’m still tense with fear and dread. I try to squeeze tighter into myself, to hold it back, but it won’t stop. A red-hot poker rams itself up my spine from my tailbone to my neck. This time, I scream.

  I think I’m going to black out from the pain, it’s so consuming. I don’t know how I lived through this as a child, how I could have blocked out the intensity of it. When it abates and I open my eyes, my mother is kneeling beside me, her golden hair lit by a candle, her plaid nightdress rumpled. Am I dreaming? I don’t know what’s real anymore, if this is happening or if it’s a wish, a memory…

  “Let’s get you back up,” she says, hooking her strong hands under my arms. She heaves me onto the couch from the floor, where I’ve fallen as I writhed in pain. I look up at her, too scared for smart comebacks, terrified of the pain and more terrified that she’ll see me have another one. She stands over me, looking concerned for once. A crease wrinkles her forehead as she waits with me.

  It happens again, and this time, I use all the energy left in my body to fight it. But it’s no good. My hips and shoulders feel like they’re wrenched out of their sockets with the force of this one. The pain consumes me so completely that I have a moment of black, empty panic. When this one ends, I start heaving while I sob, clinging to my mother’s shoulders. She’s on the couch with me now, not snapping at me for getting snot all over her nightgown as I hold onto her with bone-crushing force.

  She holds me just as tightly, rocking me back and forth like a baby. And now I know the answer to that question I wondered the first day, if she ever held her daughters. And somewhere, I know this isn’t the first time she’s held me, either.

  Zora and Elidi appear in the doorway, both blinking sleepily. They stand together, watching with stricken expressions until the world is erased by the pain ripping through me.

  “What did your father do?” Mother asks me when I fade back in. I shake my head, not wanting her to think this is his fault. But she grabs my shoulders and pulls me straight to face her. “How did he stop this?”

  “Tea,” I manage to choke out.

  “Get the tea,” Mother yells to my sisters. Then she mutters, “Of course. The tea.”

  “What tea?” Zora asks.

  “Just bring the whole tin,” Mother says, waving them away with an urgency that frightens me. The look on her face, her own fear, only makes mine worse. Dad always remained calm, urging me to suck down the tea until the fits slowly subsided and I could sink into the black.

  The next one brings the added joy of hallucination. I’m looking at my mother, but she’s not my mother. She’s a stranger who looks the same but I have no recognition of her now. She’s someone I’ve never met, just a woman whose face is stretching into an elongated mask of terror. And all I want to do is kill this person I don’t know, this freak with a stretched-out face and panic in her eyes. I love the panic I see, want to relish it longer. But when it subsides, she’s my mother again, the person I know. Not a stranger, not an inhuman puppet.

  “Get the sheets,” she says to Elidi in a sharp, scared voice. I want to tell them not to pick up the old dust covers, to stop them before they discover the little nest of shredded paper I keep for the mice. But I’m still gasping for breath when Elidi comes running with an armload of them. Mother drags me off the couch and thrusts me onto the bedframe, now complete but still lacking a mattress.

  “What are you doing?” Elidi asks for me, because I’m breathing too hard to ask, gasping for breath between sobs.

  “Hurry up,” Mother says, grabbing a sheet and twisting it into a fat rope before catching one of my hands and clamping it against the bedframe. My struggle is pathetic at best. Because I remember this nightmare…or one like it. I remember opening my eyes and seeing my wrists bound together by rough rope. At least this one is wide and soft, though she’s tied me tightly. “It’s for your own good,” she keeps saying, over and over. When I look up at her, helpless, her face is streaming with tears.

  She doesn’t seem to notice. Her mouth set with grim determination, she binds my feet quickly, securing them to the bed. Elidi stands back, her hand over her mouth, tears streaking her cheeks, too. “Can we let her go?” she asks as a new wave of pain starts.

  I have a second to wonder if she’s asking my mother to untie me or let me die, but then the seizing starts again. This time, when it ends, Zora is standing beside Elidi, and I don’t know when she arrived.

  “Here,” Mother says, opening a tin box. She digs a rolled up package from the bottom and dumps the contents into a cup of steaming water with shaking hands. What comes out of the packet looks like raisin-sized balls of crumpled cardboard, and my mind loops back on itself, such a strong feeling that I’ve seen these before that I can taste them before Mother dumps the scalding water into my mouth. After I swallow, my throat burning like fire, I’m left with a mouthful of the things. They taste about like cardboard, too, coated in sugar.

  Nightmare images flash through my mind the moment I taste them—screaming as my hands were wrenched behind me, clutching handfuls of long golden hair, a dark bedroom, a deer’s feet with blood on the ankles, my father saying, “Shhhh, shhhh.” Dr. Golden holding out a handful of what looked like crumpled scraps of a paper bag. Lying back and looking up at Dad, hearing him saying it was all going to be okay as I drifted into blackness.

  Already, the warmth is spreading through me, but I’m shivering from the swirl of memories. “Here, finish it,” Mother says, urging the cup against my trembling lips. “It’s for your own good,” she says again. Maybe she’s right. She must be, because the next time my body starts to writhe out of my control, it only lasts a few seconds. And Mother is there, stroking my hair back, crying.

  Maybe she never wanted to let me go. Maybe my dad wasn’t just a liar. Maybe he kidnapped me. Because I remember the taste of this tea from before. From when I was younger, even before the accident. From here. I always had these fits, even before we moved. They weren’t caused by the fall. They caused the fall. And Mother has the tea that stops them. So why did we really have to leave?

  10

  It takes a couple days for the muscle soreness to go away, and a couple more for the bruises along my arms and my ankles to fade. The humiliation, though, lasts longer. I had a complete fit in front of my entire family, as if they didn’t look down on me already. Now I’ve given them a reason. I avoid their eyes for as long as I can, until the questions bubble up inside me one evening, and I have to say something.

  I’ve thought about asking Elidi, but it’s Mother I really want to confront. At last, I work up my ner
ve when she brings my food one evening. I’m too nervous to eat, so I set my tray on the table and face her squarely. “Mother,” I say. “I want some answers.”

  See, that wasn’t so bad. She doesn’t even look mad yet.

  “I thought we talked about this a few months ago,” she says, already heading for the door. “I told you what you wanted to know.”

  “Who am I?”

  She hesitates, her hand on the door frame. She drops her head and sighs, but after a second, she turns back to me. She still doesn’t look mad. Squaring her shoulders, she says, “You know who you are, Stella.”

  “Am I a…werewolf?” It sounds so silly that I rush to add, “Or whatever you call yourselves.”

  “No,” she says flatly.

  “The other night…I’m sorry about that, by the way.” I’m blushing so hard my whole body is hot. “I thought, because Elidi said something about letting me go, that maybe…?”

  She shakes her head, her lips in that tight line, and I know I need to tread carefully. “How many times do I have to tell you, you’re not like us?”

  Defeated, I sink down on the arm of the couch. Not that I wanted to be a freaking werewolf. I mean what the hell? But it would have been nice to be part of something, even something so weird I can’t wrap my head around it, even months after finding out. “Do you know why I have those fits?” I ask, picking dirt from under my thumbnail.

  “I’ll get you more tea,” she says. “I’ll send away for it next time I’m in town. They don’t have that kind of thing in Kingston.”

  “But what’s wrong with me?” I ask. “If you had something to stop the fits, they must have happened when I was little. And if you could help, why did we have to leave? Dad said it was so we could be near a doctor, but that’s not true, is it? Because you had the cure.”

  “It’s not a cure,” she says. “You had to leave because…you’re not safe here, Stella. You’re not like us, and the enemy tribe, they’re very…aggressive. We’re able to maintain our territory, but only barely. They’re sneaky in their attacks. They aren’t above any dirty tricks. Kidnap, calling the law on us, accusing us of mistreating our children…anything they can do to drive us out.”