The Things We Water

I wasn’t surprised they didn’t know what to say. What had just come out of my mouth sounded like something I’d hallucinated—or an excerpt from a fantasy novel.

But this was no fairy tale. No legend. Not even a bestselling novel being adapted into a movie.

It was reality.

My reality.noveldrama

So, I wasn’t exactly surprised either when my two best friends leaned forward, mouths slightly open, and said almost simultaneously, “Explain that again.” The only part they differed on was that Sienna called me “Nina” at the end of her sentence, and Matti didn’t.

I almost made fun of them for being that kind of married couple now. It was one thing to finish each other’s sentences, but for them to choose almost all the same words and have nearly identical expressions? It made me want to bear hug them and tease them at the same time.

But we didn’t have time for that. I could make fun of them later.

First, I needed them to understand. Needed them to help me. Help us.

The truth was, I couldn’t blame my friends for struggling to comprehend what I’d just told them. I had a hard time accepting everything that had happened over the last month, and I’d watched it go down with my own two eyes. I had lived it. None of us were strangers to unbelievable things, but this pushed the limit.

Dipping my chin like I hadn’t looked at the body sleeping in my arms at least ten thousand times in the past couple of years—a huge chunk of those peeks having taken place over the last few weeks—I focused down on Duncan for the ten-thousandth and one time. I smiled despite the uncertainty and near panic I’d been living on the verge of lately. Because he always cheered me up. Honestly, it was impossible not to be happy when the cutest thing I’d ever seen in my life snored in a way that reminded me of how my dad used to nap in his recliner after dinner.

In Duncan’s case, it was a lot of work being adorable; it was a full-time job.

And maybe it was better just to show them why I was here instead of explaining with words one more time.

This whole situation was half miracle and half Teen Wolf, Lord of the Rings, and Ancient Aliens combined, after all. It depended on how you looked at it and what you believed. But that wasn’t important either. They needed to see the big picture first.

In our case, I guess you could say the puppy-sized picture.

Peeling back the blanket I had him wrapped in—to hide Duncan, not because he was cold—I angled my arms so Matti and Sienna could get a better look at the ball of black fur that had turned my life upside down—not once, but twice now. I wasn’t mad about it. Overwhelmed and more scared than I wished, but not angry.

Unlike some people I knew, I didn’t believe that Fate was working behind the scenes, smoking a cigarette and planning people’s lives out before they were even born. For one, that was too much work with eight billion people on the planet. I didn’t have a second reason because I thought the first one was enough.

But sometimes things happened that made absolutely no sense in the moment but eventually turned out to be blessings. Maybe you cried before you saw the good in them, but that was hindsight.

I figured there were plenty of things in the world that weren’t easily explained, but it didn’t make them any less real.

Like countless beings in existence at that moment.

Like every person in this room, if you wanted to be specific, and especially like the small body tucked up against me, which was why I was here.

Without the blanket covering the majority of him, Duncan’s black coat gave the initial impression that he was a short-haired black dog, and his long ears gave the idea he had some kind of hound in him, but as I tugged the blanket away inch by inch, the poofy tail that could have belonged on a fox peeked out.

And so did the star of this whole shit show.

The moment would have called for spirit fingers if our situation wasn’t so dire.

“He has a flame on the tip of his tail now,” I told them like they couldn’t see it with their own eyes.

It was one of the two things on Duncan’s body that were a dead giveaway that he was no baby basset or bloodhound or even any kind of household pet—not that he’d ever been, but it hadn’t been so noticeable before. You had to have an excellent nose or be sensitive to magic to mistake him for anything else.

Six weeks ago, Duncan’s tail had solely been fluffy, and his eyes had been a bright brown. We had known he wasn’t what he looked to be—Matti and Sienna could smell it, and I could sense it—but now it was blatantly obvious, and they hadn’t even seen his eyeballs yet. In the span of a single night, he had gone from a believable black puppy with a mixture of breeds and a hint of magic in him to something else. Something undeniable.

Unfortunately, from the shocked glint in Matti’s dark brown eyes and the way Sienna’s mouth was hanging open even wider than it had after my crappy explanation, it confirmed that any hopes I’d had of Duncan being normal-ish were long gone.

Because normal-ish was the most I could ask for.

I had crossed every finger and toe on my body in hopes they were going to tell me he was a werewolf.Any kind of mythological wolf creature would have been perfect. Even a Cerberus would have been great; there were a lot of tales about them out there. But a werewolf would have been my first choice, if I’d had one. Wolves were some of the most highly revered creatures throughout history.

Sometimes even my brain struggled to understand what kind of universe we lived in that Duncan being one would have made life so much easier.

I couldn’t even begin to imagine explaining that to someone who didn’t know the truth about the beings that roamed the planet in plain sight. People could barely tolerate others exactly like them. You tell them that magic crashed into Earth thousands of years ago and that all the mythology and folklore that had been written about was based on reality, and that would send almost anyone into a fit.

There were countless movies and stories—fiction and nonfiction, if you counted history books with mythology in them—about humans that could shapeshift. There were stories about wolf shapeshifters that dated back to Babylonian times. I was pretty sure cultures on every continent had tales of them. I could remember sitting through a class on Aztec history and having to keep a straight face while the professor went on about the symbolism regarding the Aztec believing that some of their warriors were nahuales, shapeshifters.

I’d gone through a phase as a teenager where I’d read every werewolf romance I could find, and I knew the truth. What normal people weren’t aware of was that there wasn’t just one type. Off the top of my head, I could name several types of werewolves. There were the Amarok, a line of massive wolves whose ancestors inspired the Inuit stories. An iron wolf, from those found in Baltic tales. Someone had told me once that there was a rumor even Fenrir, from Norse mythology, had a sacred line still in existence. Most of the ones I’d known and grown up with had been descended from the Mexican wolves who traced their ancestry back to Mesoamerican myths.

It was easy now to look back and think all those ancient civilizations had nothing better to do than use their active imaginations to explain things like droughts and terrible storms as the work of beings with good and terrible gifts, but some people knew the truth.

They hadn’t been making things up.

The fact was, in a world of mythological legends that weren’t exactly fiction, being a person who could turn back and forth between a man and a wolf—it was their choice after all, and their size depended on their heritage—was a well-accepted concept by those aware of the magic that had permeated the world and its beings a very long time ago. The magical.

And if anyone knew what wasn’t as easily accepted, it was me.

“Nina,” Matti exhaled my name. He sounded like he was having trouble remembering how to breathe. His eyes were wider than I had ever seen, and we’d gotten into trouble together plenty of times as kids, so I’d seen them big. “How the fuck does he have a flame on his tail, and how the hell didn’t that blanket catch on fire?”

I snorted at his deranged tone. Wasn’t that the freaking question? “I was kind of hoping you two might know,” I answered him with a tiny shrug so I didn’t wake my donut up. “And the flame is magical. It only burns things when he’s scared or mad. Neat, huh?”

I knew Matti was transfixed when he didn’t respond; he always had something to say. Part of me was convinced he might not have even heard me. It was one thing to come across a man walking along the street, radiating magic that he carried in his cells and looking to the world like just a normal, tall guy when you knew in your gut—or through your nose—that he wasn’t.

But this was different. And I had known it to some degree from the moment that Duncan had come into my life. Now? I definitely had a better understanding of how unique he was.

So different that someone would try to hurt me to kidnap a puppy with red eyes and a blue flame on his tail.

Not once but twice.

But I was going to save telling these two about those incidents a little while longer. We had other things to get through first. I didn’t need Matti or Sienna distracted when there was nothing anyone could do about the past.

With the arm I wasn’t using to support his sleepy body against mine, I pinched the blue flame to show them. They gasped like kids on Christmas. I’d expected to get burned by it, too, the first time. That hadn’t happened, fortunately, or else doing anything with him would have been impossible.

“It doesn’t hurt?” Sienna asked in a voice I was pretty sure I’d only heard her use on the day she’d met Matti. Like she was in awe.

Me too, Sienna, I thought. There were magical beings—races that could trace their lineages back to ancient lore, who could look and act like normal people when they wanted to—and there were magical beings that looked like puppies. Specifically, a really, really cute puppy with big, innocent eyes and a sleek, soft coat.

“No.” I pinched the flame again to show her.

Her wide, pale green eyes moved from me to Duncan and back. This was as close as she got to being speechless, which said a lot because she wasn’t the quiet type either. It was part of the reason why we had become friends as teenagers and managed to stay such good friends for so long. We had never struggled to talk to each other.

Until now.

But I guess I could take responsibility for that. I had kind of blindsided them by showing up like this. There wasn’t much I kept from them, but I’d hidden this until now since they’d been in Europe for most of the time since all this had gone down. I hadn’t wanted to spoil their vacation.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered eventually, still stunned.

I bit the inside of my cheek, taking in her black hair and a shade of skin that was almost milky, no matter how much sun she got. She was the first person to say she wasn’t classically beautiful, but she was the cutest. Her round face and pink cheeks hid the fact she had super sharp teeth sometimes and an ultra-protective personality all the time. An hour ago, she’d opened the door wearing a fitted red blouse and black pants with her hair tied up in an elegant bun, and now, she’d swapped that outfit out for a sweater and pajama pants I would’ve bet my money she’d taken out of her husband’s drawer. This was the version of her I knew the best, but I loved Sophisticated Sienna as much as I loved Sweatpants Sienna.

And she loved me even though 95 percent of my wardrobe consisted of T-shirts I’d picked up in towns Duncan and I had visited, paired up with jeans or jean shorts. My three nice blouses were hand-me-downs from Sienna herself. She and Matti both thought it was “so cute” I had four pairs of shoes total: hiking boots, beige sneakers that matched with everything—and if they didn’t, too bad—Crocs, and one pair of sandals.

Then I looked at Matti, who I had known over a whole decade longer than I had her, since we had become neighbors at three years old. I took in the brown hair that used to be so long he’d had it in a ponytail for a while, but now he had a “real job,” as he called it, and had to keep it professionally short. His skin was on the medium spectrum of tan, and those features that I’d seen grow from a toddler to a thirty-two-year-old had gotten sharper with high cheekbones and a defined jaw. Plus, he’d gained around two hundred pounds over that period. And gained a mustache at some point since I’d last seen him; one I wanted to give him crap about, but he somehow managed to pull it off. He might be into clothes now, but he hadn’t lost the twinkle in his eye: the dead giveaway a mischievous little asshole still lived in his body.

They were such a beautiful couple. Such great friends. The best people I knew, other than my parents.

And you would never, ever know at first glance that they both came from old magic that allowed them to turn into something straight out of a folktale—a wolf, or a werewolf, as some chose to refer to themselves. And by werewolves, I meant the “real” kind: giant wolves, not some hybrid bipedal monster like in most movies.

To “normal” people, people born without magic—the word almost everyone threw around as an explanation to what gave certain folks the ability to become something out of a tale—Matti and Sienna didn’t look any different, other than the fact they were both considered taller than average in most cultures. But to those with sensitive noses or feelings—me included—who had been born with a magic-heavy bloodline, you could just tell there was something else in them. Some people liked to say they were “blessed” when they referred to their ancestries.

Like being different and having to lie about it your entire life was easy.

It wasn’t. Secrets were a burden no matter their size. For some people, it might be easier, but it was never easy.

“It doesn’t burn anything when he’s calm,” I went on about Duncan’s tail. “He caught a few things on fire at first, but we haven’t had an incident in almost two weeks.” I thought I could still smell burnt hair if I tried hard enough. It brought back memories of the time when Matti and I had tried to start a bonfire when we were eleven because our families hadn’t wanted to take us camping. We had gotten into so much trouble, especially when our parents had seen our eyebrows. Matti’s right one had never grown back in the same.

“When you said you had something you wanted to show us, I thought you’d gotten a tattoo or bought a new trailer, Nina,” Sienna admitted while staring at Duncan’s flame.

It wasn’t that I wished that were the case, but it would have made life a hell of a lot less complicated than it’d been lately.

Less dangerous too.

My sore neck silently agreed as I snorted, getting more comfortable on the couch we were sitting on in their living room. Unlike the small, rural town where I’d met them both, they now lived in Chicago. In an apartment. On the tenth floor.

They were the least werewolfy werewolves I’d ever met, I swear. But that was one of the many reasons how and why they had ended up together—their own small pack of two, though Duncan and I were honorary members by default.

I pressed the little button that held his collar together and watched them both take deep inhales.

There was no recognition on either of their faces, but there was even more surprise on them. I clicked the snap back on. No way was I leaving it off.

“How?” Sienna leaned forward a little more. “You woke up, and he was….” She waved her hand up and down.

“I don’t know how,” I told them honestly with another shrug. “We went to bed, and the next morning, he was on my chest, his head right there, looking at me. His eyes were red, and then he started wagging, and I thought his butt was on fire.” I had tried to put it out with water, sand, and dirt, but nothing happened. It had been pure luck that we’d been at a mostly empty RV park, and that I hadn’t started yelling like I had the time he’d carried a rat into our travel trailer. “It hasn’t gone away. His flame changed when he got scared right after it appeared, and it got even brighter.” That was when he’d lit things on fire. I’d tested it out with my fingers first.

RIP to my favorite hoodie and some of my hair.

And then there’d been the times he’d experienced a different kind of fear, but I’d share that tidbit with them later. We had to focus on the big stuff before we could get there.

“I had really hoped he had a little wolf DNA in him to explain all of this, but you’re both looking at him like he’s an alien, so that’s not it, huh?” I kept going, still hung up on that dream.

They stared at me.

Matti and Sienna should have known about Duncan, of course. We had just figured that Duncan had been too young to express any of the noticeable traits that came with their kind of mythological being. They had both been five years old when they had gone from normal children to being able to turn into a puppy. On the other hand, my own nature… magic, whatever you wanted to call it… hadn’t made an appearance until I’d been a teenager. But that was like comparing steak to chicken breast. They were both proteins, but not really the same at all.

In the end though, that was exactly what had happened. Duncan’s true nature had revealed itself, at least in the form of his tail and eyes, right after his second birthday. Days later to be exact. Except his changes weren’t of the werewolf-kind. But to be fair, my friends’ lives, like mine, had started with us as normal, human babies.

My donut’s had not.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you said he wasn’t, but I still hoped,” I grumbled. I was an optimist, and they knew it. I still held out hope that my favorite boyband would get back together, and the McRib would come back. “I thought maybe we were all wrong and he was some kind of werewolf hybrid.”

The snicker that came out of Matti’s nose…. “A werewolf hybrid?” He made a smug face.

He didn’t need to make it sound like I was dumb. “You thought Santa was real until we were thirteen,” I reminded him. “Maybe you aren’t the best person to make fun of me for dreaming. Weirder crap has happened.”

He gave me a look as Sienna snickered. She knew that story already, about me having to lie to him for two years after I’d found out the truth about ol’ Saint Nick. “I’m not, but… have you been watching Underworld again?” he scoffed.

“Maybe, but only because I was looking for clues.”

To be fair, I had already known the folklore in the movie was all off and there was no way anyone who had worked on the movie was one of their kind because they’d gotten it so wrong, but I had been desperate, couldn’t sleep, and the storylines were entertaining. I regretted nothing.

And peeking down at the still-napping puppy on my lap reminded me of exactly why that was the case. I couldn’t believe he’d slept through our trip up to Matti and Sienna’s apartment. I couldn’t believe he was still asleep now. He loved them. There was no reason he should have been so exhausted, but my gut said something was there. Something that had nothing to do with him being sick.

He was stressed, and I blamed myself.

“I don’t know what to do,” I told them, my childhood best friend and teenaged-Nina’s best friend. “I’ve done so much research, and I still don’t know what he is. But now, I can’t hide him anymore, during the day or at night. It’s too obvious he’s different.” Which was why I was in this predicament of panic and helplessness. Why I was considering doing what I was considering doing.

Why I was here.

The expressions on both their faces said exactly what they thought about me not telling them about this change in him until now, and I was positive they were going to give me shit over it later, which was fair enough. But you had to put out the fire before you figured out what started it.

Just like I could read their faces, they could do the same to mine. Plus, they could smell my feelings. I could count on one hand the number of things I’d ever been able to hide from them before this. The fact I’d made it this long was only because I hadn’t seen them in person or talked to them on the phone since they’d gone on their trip.

Now that they were back, I needed advice. We needed help. I had to be realistic about our situation. Duncan and I couldn’t keep going the way we’d been going before, that was a fact.

I knew in my heart that our time traveling around in my RV, just the two of us, while I worked remotely, was over.

I had spent the last couple of weeks thinking and thinking, then thinking a little more, trying to figure out what our options were and why 99 percent of them couldn’t work. What it all came down to was this final act of desperation. The only idea I could come up with that might work long-term.

Life hadn’t been the same since I had found my furry donut, and now it was changing again. And I could either ride this new reality out with him because he had attached himself to my life and my heart like a cherished barnacle that gave me the kind of love that I’d become addicted to or… I could do something that I would never be able to live with.

There wasn’t even a choice to be made. The only thing I wanted to do was make sure they couldn’t think of something I hadn’t been able to first. Just in case.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but I have to figure something out,” I told them, trying to stay neutral. “He’s gained four pounds since his tail happened. He was eight pounds up until then. I can hide him in a blanket right now, but barely. What about in a month at the rate he’s going? In six months? How big is he going to get? What else is going to change about him?” My voice got higher and higher with each sentence, and I had to clear my throat by the end.

There were too many variables, and Duncan wasn’t the only one stressed out. I hadn’t even gotten to the part about his telepathy. “He can’t live out in the world anymore unless he pulls a Pinocchio and turns into a real boy.” That was the best way to explain what Matti and Sienna, and every other nahual, or shapeshifter, like them could do: go back and forth between their fairy-tale body and their human one.

It was such a weird concept if you thought about it. To be human one second and something so totally different in the next, still fully aware of yourself—or so I’d been told. It was kind of a miracle, depending on how you looked at it.

And a curse, sometimes, in some ways, for some. For people who weren’t likable werewolves. Or nine-tailed foxes revered in so many different mythologies. Or unicorns—everyone loved a unicorn. Or dozens of other beings like that, that were cute or honored or respected.

But there was a reason why civilization after civilization had equally worshipped and feared certain entities, as my mom used to tell me. There was the good, the bad, and the tales of beings who struck sheer terror into so many hearts, their stories continued being told throughout the centuries. I knew a lot about the latter.

“And he might not ever be able to, I don’t know,” I kept going, laying it all out there in a ramble. “The problem is that I don’t have a safe place for him to be himself if he stays like this. He can’t live his whole life not ever being able to go outside. And what if he needs more people around him than just me?”

Some people and beings were fine being solitary, but so many weren’t. There was a reason why werewolves, ogres, and centaurs raised their children in communities: for safety and for family ties. You had to learn to be a functioning magical being in a modern world from someone or someones. Kids were a handful under the best conditions, and add a magical chromosome with the potential of scaring the crap out of the majority of humanity?

Honestly, it was incredible the cat hadn’t been let out of the bag after so long.

Magical beings had managed to remain a secret.

I had thought about moving back where I’d grown up, a small town in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico that had been rich with magical beings when I’d been young. It had mostly been the wolfy kind, but there had been some ogre families too, plus a couple of others who I had never known, for sure, the truth about; they’d been so secretive.

Or maybe they hadn’t known what they were either. I’d never thought about that possibility before.

But things had changed over the last decade, and the town wasn’t what it had once been. The population had dwindled as businesses closed, and the elderly, who had held the community together, passed on, leaving the younger population to move away. Matti’s parents were gone. My parents weren’t there either. Sienna’s had moved after we’d graduated, and they lived in Wyoming now. There was no one left that was worth putting up with the heat for. Going there would only bring more attention to us at this point.

“Letting him out to pee and play has already given me a few grays,” I told them.

I was scared now every time we left my trailer. The entire way up to their apartment had me sweating bullets. What if I slipped on a recently mopped floor and he fell out of the blanket? What if I moved my hand too much and someone happened to see his tail? What if his collar broke and popped off? I’d lost a lot of sleep worrying about all those scenarios.

“You already had gray hairs before,” the smart-ass I knew and loved replied, his brown eyes flicking down to the mystery in my arms as I touched the “collar” that I’d gotten for Duncan last week. It was basically a bracelet with a clasp so I could put it on and remove it easily, if I needed to. “Is that obsidian like on your bracelet? Is that why we can’t smell him anymore?” He rubbed his nose. “I didn’t notice I couldn’t sense anything other than his shampoo and his breath until now.”

At least my savings had been well spent. If Matti couldn’t sense him, no one else should be able to either.

“Yeah,” I answered. After the two incidents, it just made the most sense to hide as much as I could about Dunky. Looking back on it, it’s what I should have done from the beginning, butttt… I couldn’t turn back time and make wiser decisions: like paying for overnight shipping. Fire obsidian wasn’t cheap or easy to find, unless you ordered it. “Better to be safe than sorry.” Even though that was kind of a lie. We hadn’t been safe, and we had been sorry because of it.

But since I couldn’t rewind time, and my regrets wouldn’t do a single thing, all I could do was do better. Duncan needed me, and I wouldn’t let him down. Not again.

All three of us glanced at the legs that stretched out from beneath the blanket. There was a small paw with shiny black fur, dark paw pads, and short black nails.

And then a flame, a little bigger than the kind you could find on a lighter, on the tip of a fluffy black tail slipped out from the blanket too.

Sienna sucked in a breath like she was surprised all over again.

Matti made a grunting sound in his throat that honestly sounded foreboding, and I wondered if he’d already come up with the same solution as I had.

His eyes slid in my direction.

My favorite woman on the planet, beside my mom, blew out a breath before scrubbing her cheeks with her long, slender fingers, oblivious to her husband side-eyeing me. “Honestly, Nina, I got nothing.” She shook her head. “I thought you could build a cabin out in the woods, but that’s not safe unless you bought a thousand acres. The chances of being caught would be too high, and that doesn’t solve the issue that Duncan might need a pack. We talked about that.”

We had. I remembered that discussion right after I’d found him. That conversation had been a lot like this one, except now I had an idea of what I was doing and what I was willing to do for him.

When we first met, I would’ve probably done anything for him.

Now, there was zero doubt in my mind I would, and I’d do it with a smile on my face.

“Every option I think of has a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t work. You can’t hide what he looks like. You’re in danger every time you travel. What if you break down and have to pull over? What if someone looks in the window of your truck or trailer and sees him when you’re not around?” Sienna went on, her round face scrunching up.

That was exactly what had gone through my head too. Nothing worked. At least not long-term.

Matti cleared his throat. “I have an idea.”

We blinked at each other.

My oldest friend might be a different gender, a different species of magical being, and his own complete person, but so many times throughout our friendship, I’d thought there was something that tied us together. Maybe we’d been twins in a different lifetime. Maybe just siblings. I didn’t know, but there was something that had bonded us together.

And with just that look, I knew we were on the same page.

“You know what I’m going to say,” he warned.

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure I do, but go for it.”

The next words out of his mouth were exactly what I’d expected them to be. “You need to go to the ranch.”

I smiled, and it wasn’t a happy smile exactly, but it wasn’t a bad one either. Two weeks ago, there was no way that would have been my reaction to his solution. To what it meant. Much less what it required. At this point though, I’d already convinced myself of all the reasons why the ranch was the only choice Duncan and I had.

It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t necessarily what I would’ve chosen if I had a few million dollars to buy a thousand acres of land, but… I was at peace with it. Life had thrown enough wrenches at me, and I had dodged, ducked, dipped, and dived them all, time after time.

Maybe it was time to start throwing some wrenches back at it.

This was my choice. My future. Our lives.

I’d had a decent idea of what I might be signing up for when I had kept Duncan instead of finding someone else to care for him. No one knew better than I did the kind of sacrifices you might have to make to care for a child with secrets even they didn’t know they carried. It wasn’t just the least I could do, paying the favor I’d been given forward; I liked to think it was my destiny. If I had one.

“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” I admitted and earned myself a satisfied, almost smug nod from him. There was a certain amount of pride you could have when you knew someone almost as well as you knew yourself. That was almost thirty years of friendship for you.

“Wait,” Sienna cut in with a wave of her hand. “Whose ranch? What ranch are we talking about?”

I raised my eyebrow at Matti in surprise, and he winced. “It’s where I lived with Henri for a few years after my mom passed away,” he explained vaguely.

It was the mention of Henri that had me glancing up at the ceiling.

Sienna picked up real quick on his word choice. “You’ve never really talked to me about that time in your life, Matti,” she said slowly, squinting a little. “And I’ve never brought it up because it was a painful time for you, but now I think I’ve missed something important.”

“Not important,” he emphasized that word, “but I don’t like talking about it because of Mom.” There was a beat of silence after he brought her up. He rarely ever did, and that went for both his parents. Matti cleared his throat. “I had to move hundreds of miles away to live with my cousin, who I barely knew back then”—I was pretty sure he still barely knew him, but I kept that thought to myself—“and had to deal with this new life I didn’t want,” Matti explained, seriously. “I wasn’t supposed to talk about the ranch while I lived there or after I left it.”

That got me a side-look from him.

There were a lot of things Matti hadn’t been able to talk about that all revolved around one side of his family. Some of them he had kept to himself, and other things had slipped through. The ranch being one of them.

I drew my fingers across my lips and tossed them over my shoulder. I’d never told a soul and never would. I hadn’t even shared its knowledge with Sienna, and she knew the intensity level of my monthly period cramps. Plus, it wasn’t like he’d shared any information that valuable with me anyway—at least I didn’t think so.

“You knew?” Sienna asked me, and I nodded.

“Just a little bit, and he did it on the phone a couple months after he got there. We’ve never talked about it again since,” I clarified, knowing she wouldn’t be upset about it but still not wanting to risk it. There had never been any weird feelings between us where Matti was concerned. Even if I hadn’t always talked about him like he was my best friend, she had always been able to sense with her nose that there was zero sexual attraction between us. It was the same with Matti and my friendship with Sienna. I loved them both differently and equally, and that love was reflected back in the same way.

My favorite people were married. Mated. I got to see them both at the same time. It was a win-win.

Fortunately, Sienna’s reaction didn’t let me down. She made an understanding but squinty expression. “Okay, so why would living at ‘the ranch’ work?” Sienna snapped her fingers. “Wait! He owns a lot of land in Colorado that we’ve never been invited to but that he inherited from someone.” She snapped again. “Is that the ranch?That’s where you lived back then?”

He nodded.

“Ahh. You haven’t brought it up much, and the couple times I’ve seen Henri, he’s… oh.” It dawned on her. “I see. It’s a secret. Is there that much acreage there? Is that why we’re talking about it? If Henri doesn’t want us to visit, why would he let Nina move there?”

There was that mention of Henri again. I was well aware that Sienna had met him a few times and that she thought he’d been standoffish and “a little cold.” That had been one of the few mentions of Matti’s older cousin I’d heard in years.

My oldest friend sat up and angled his attention to focus on his wife. “There’s enough acreage that there’s been a village of magical beings who have lived there for hundreds of years, and no one bothers them. Henri inherited it from his dad’s side, which is my dad’s side. Except my dad gave up his rights to the ranch when he moved away permanently, and I did the same when I left too. I had to sign legal paperwork. Now it’s all Henri’s. He doesn’t live there by himself,” he said all matter-of-fact, like it was a suburban subdivision with a billboard off the highway.

From the look of her face, I wasn’t the only one who thought he’d framed that explanation loosely. “Aren’t those ‘magical communities’ cults? Like communes?”

Everyone who had any kind of mythical ancestry in them had heard of the kind of communities that were whispered about in small circles. The places where magical beings lived in homesteads of sorts, out in tracts of land where most normal people had no interest in living or visiting—at least that’s how those places had been explained to me. Places where privacy was affordable, or had been at some point.

It was a place for beings who wanted to live near others similar to them, so that they didn’t have to pretend to be something else. The closest to that I’d ever found had been where I’d grown up, and even then, there had been a certain level of hiding because it hadn’t been a strictly magical place. There hadn’t been walls or security, just people who knew how to keep their mouths closed and were really good at pretending.

“It’s not like that. It’s… a village, and some people work for it, and some who live there work outside of it. But everyone there is magical, and they’re all expected to participate in running it and maintaining it.”

“Still sounds like a commune,” she argued, shooting me a look like she was expecting me to agree with her.

And I mean, it kind of did with just the small amount of information he’d shared just now.

“It’s not,” Matti assured her. “It’s as self-reliant as they can manage. It’s also supposed to be a secret. How people keep their favorite vacation destinations to themselves so that everyone doesn’t start going there and ruin it.”

“If it’s so great, what’s wrong with it then? Why did you leave?” A thought occurred to her. “Why didn’t your mom and dad live there to begin with?”

“My dad said it was too much responsibility. He left as soon as he was old enough.” Matti’s throat bobbed. “There’s nothing wrong with it, but it never felt like home when I lived there, and I like the city. There’s a small town close by, and there are a lot of people like us who live in it, but….” He shrugged. “The residents like their privacy and don’t want strangers constantly trying to move in and mess up their balance.”

“So they aren’t friendly,” Sienna muttered, casting me another look.

“Friendly-ish.”

I laughed. “You’re blowing this so bad I think you might be talking me out of it, and it was my idea to start with.”

“I swear….” Matti groaned but collected himself. “The point is: it’s secluded, and Nina and Duncan would be surrounded by people who are more likely to understand them than anywhere else would. It’s as safe as you can get because everyone’s objective is to live in peace, in secret. It’s on a big piece of land.” Matti paused and blew out a breath. “You can run until you get tired and still be well within the perimeter. It would give Duncan space to stretch his legs and grow up. I wouldn’t have been happy anywhere back then, but it was good for me while I was there.”

I’d kind of blocked that period of time out in my memories: when he’d left after his mom had passed away. His cousin, Henri, had picked him up one day while I’d been in class, and he’d been gone—his room cleaned out, the house basically abandoned—by the time I’d gotten home. It had been IMs that kept us in touch afterward, where he’d vaguely explained that his cousin had taken guardianship of him, and he was going to live in Colorado from then on.

It had been devastating. First his dad in a terrible car accident, then his mom, and finally him. Each loss had been sudden and unexpected.

I’d only heard from Matti once a month after that and never details about where exactly he was, no matter how much I asked. There had only been that one conversation where he’d revealed more than he should have. And in the years afterward, Matti had been real cagey about talking about that time. I’d never brought it up. If he’d wanted to talk about it, he could have.

He hadn’t.

“The majority of the residents have Amarok or iron wolf in them.”

Nina perked up at the mention of her iron-wolf ancestry. There weren’t many of them left after all. Matti himself was a blend of Amarok, on his dad’s side, and Mexican wolf, on his mom’s. Like my parents were.

Matti kept going. “You know werewolves love kids, it doesn’t matter what kind they are.”

We both knew that from experience. But he didn’t need to sell me on it. I had already sold myself on the community. The ranch.

My chest, though, still felt tight at the idea. I hadn’t lived around people like us in years, not since I’d moved out of my parents’ house when they’d finally retired. Of all the places I’d ever been, my childhood home had been a safe haven back then, and I knew exactly how lucky I was to have been raised around the people I’d grown up with.

Now, I knew that some beings sent others screaming at just the scent of them. At the potential they carried in their bodies. I touched the bracelet around my wrist on purpose.

Being different was hard. I didn’t care what anyone said.

Sienna snapped her fingers again and pointed at Matti. “It’s not a bad idea, baby.”

“I never have bad ideas” was his reply.

Her eyes slid to mine, and we both scrunched up our faces. “Yeah, okay,” I muttered before snickering. She leaned over, and we high-fived. We looked at each other, cackled, and then high-fived again.

I loved her.

He ignored us. “Something Henri mentioned the last time we saw each other made me think there are sasquatches that live there⁠—”

That got me. “Did you say sasquatch?”

Matti nodded, like referring to the big, hairy mythical creatures was no big deal.

Which I guess it wasn’t since he was a big, hairy creature that belonged in folktales too.

Then he said the one thing that would have won me over more than anything. “You know how wolves are toward people we consider to be members of our pack.”

I did know firsthand. I’d been raised by them. Adopted by two of the best ones. I used to stay up at night and wish and wish and wish that I was like them too, even though no one had ever made me feel bad about being different. My parents used to try and sell me on how lucky I was to be special—like I even knew what that meant. I missed them so much, but thinking about them reminded me of my duty.

And that was to do what they had done: do the best I could for a child that might not be biologically mine but was in every other sense. In every way that mattered.

That meant moving to a place with a strong wolf presence. They didn’t mind me and the way I smelled. Neither did ogres. But werewolves were as overprotective, possessive, and family oriented as books and movies made them out to be, especially around children and family members. Most screenwriters had gotten that part right.

There were worse things in the world than a group of people who all took it upon themselves to raise every child in their proximity as their own.

“You haven’t brought up the ‘but,’” I pointed out to Matti. “Tell her.”

Sienna’s face lit up. “There’s a ‘but’? What is it? Do you have to shave your head to live there? Animal sacrifice? Are they polygamous? Because I can’t see you having sister wives.”

My eyes strayed to Matti’s. He smiled, and then I smiled.

“I was getting to it.” He was being so ominous I was grateful to already be aware of what was going to come out of his mouth. He met his mate’s gaze. “She would have to join the pack. They won’t let her live there without a commitment to them. It’s how they’ve kept it a secret for so long, and part of the reason why they don’t have beings constantly trying to move there.”

She scrunched up her face again. “What kind of commitment are we talking about here? It can’t be that bad if you still see Henri every once in a while. They aren’t keeping him hostage there, are they?”

“You think someone could keep Henri hostage?” Matti scoffed.

If he was anything like how I remembered, that was going to be a negative. My memories of him had been stored in some part of my brain that I had locked up. Most of them had been neutral, some positive, some very positive, and then there were the parts that hurt. The ones I’d clung to until I had been old enough to process them and understand why Matti’s cousin had done what he’d done.

She snickered and shrugged her agreement. “So, what’s the catch?”

Matti side-eyed me again like he was testing to make sure I was prepared for his answer.

I smirked at him, because I knew. The tuna-sized catch had kept me up at night wondering if I could go through with it. Testing the boundaries of how much I loved Duncan. How much I would be willing to do for him.

And if me agreeing to do this didn’t tell the universe that I adored my boy, I wasn’t sure what else could.

Matti had a gleeful little glint in his eyes as he dropped the explanation that would’ve driven a less desperate person away from moving to a secret ranch. “Nina’s going to have to get married.”