Page 2 of Glass
I have to get Paxton on board; I need to know he won’t stand in my way.
“My first thought is the letter could have been to Greg. If anyone was going to take over raising new pups, it would have been him. He had a mate and practically took over where our parents left off anyway.” Paxton’s face contorts, his mouth and forehead scrunching.
After all the pain Greg caused the rest of us, he’s better off dead.
“But…” Paxton tilts his head and squints at the letter. “I always suspected Greg was still in contact with our parents after they fled. He spent a lot of time telling us how they would want everything, as if he’d gotten their opinions directly. This is written as if she’s making contact out of the blue. And if that’s the case, I suspect this letter wasn’t to him.”
“It could have been Brian.” I think back to my second-youngest brother’s tumultuous relationship with our mother. He held that grudge tightly in his grasp all the way up to the moment of his fatal car accident. “Probably not, though, huh?”
“It’s not likely.” Paxton shakes his head and presses his lips together in a flat line.
Which means he’s right. If I take this letter at face-value, then my mother was confident there was still another Glass sibling in her pocket.
The only question is… who?
* * *
I wrap my arms around my waist as a cool burst of wind whips around me. Long purple wisps of hair blow around my face. I had my hair done in Chicago before I picked my way west. And if I hadn’t gotten a call from Leah to guide me this way, I probably would have stayed in the city even longer.
For a couple weeks, I felt normal while I was staying with the North Wind Pack. I went to visit an old friend, David, and the pack gave me temporary asylum among them. It was nice to return to the pack I once called home.
When the family split, David took me in for a while. In another life, maybe I would have never left. His mother is a shifter hairdresser, one of the few of her kind. She’s perfected coloring my hair in a way that makes it easy to overlook the colored strands when I’m in shifted form. It would be a little hard to overlook a wolf running around with all purple fur.
Monica became like a second mother to me when I lived with their pack years ago, and leaving this time was almost as hard as the first.
But as much as Monicafeelslike family, the shifters I’m looking for are blood.
“I think the last time I saw someone staring this hard at the Ponderosa Pines, it was an arborist out here interested in their growth patterns.” Val is good at sneaking up on me, she carefully lowers herself to the ground at my side. “They’re just trees, dear,” she teases.
I smile in spite of myself.
When I think about the kind of people that once fell for my parents’ corrupt ideals about parenthood and power, Val isn’t what I picture. Leah is the reason I came here after she told me she had a vision that this place would hold answers for me. But Val is the one who let me stay.
“Are you going to ask me?” Val’s voice softens.
I glance over at her, but she’s still looking out at the view of the trees. “Ask you what?”
“There’s still an elephant in the room, isn’t there?” She lets out a soft laugh tinged with a hint of bitterness. “Maybe it’s presumptuous of me, but every time you get quiet, I worry you’re thinking poorly of me. After all, I’m sure I seem normal enough. How could someone like me ever end up intertwined with people like your parents?” There’s more than a hint of bitterness now.
“People are allowed to change.” The words stick like sawdust in my throat.
Val turns her head to face me, but I quickly turn away again. I don’t want the eye contact as much as I thought I did. Not for this conversation.
“Most packs don’t have a lot of leniency for young, unmated mothers.” Her voice is so low I barely hear the words before the wind carries them away. “The only thing I wanted in this world was to exist somewhere where no one looked at my little girl like an abomination. So when I moved to town and a coworker introduced me to your mother, it was easy for her to say all the right things.”
I can see Val shaking her head from the corner of my eye. “Of course I wanted motherhood to feel powerful. I fed off that energy.”
A wave of nausea turns my stomach. The only power my mother ever saw in parenthood was its usefulness in building her own small, personal army. That was it, the whole basis of the cult she built alongside my father. The higher their procreation rate, the stronger they could be. And enough people fell for that crap to make my family name infamous.
My parents broke so many shifter laws that I can’t even name them all. The thing that drew Val to them was an ugly lie.
“Your father must have sensed I wasn’t committed to a big family,” Val continues, dragging me out of the pit that always seems to swallow me whole when I think about how it felt to grow up raised by monsters. “He refused to let me step foot on the compound until I committed myself to having more children.”
I take a deep breath and turn to meet her steady gaze. The dark circles under her golden-brown eyes confirm the weight of what she’s been carrying emotionally. I can only imagine how long she’s waited to have someone to talk to.
As much as I don’t want to hear any of this, I don’t have the heart to ask her to keep carrying this, buried inside her.
“And that’s why you never saw the kids for yourself,” I add for her, giving her an opening to know it’s okay for her to keep talking.