Elena

I stare as sunset gives way to a dark, starlit evening. My reflection in the airplane window becomes clearer in this dark landscape.

I’m disheveled. My long dirty blond hair is pulled into a messy, loose braid with tendrils that have fallen free flying this way and that. My blue eyes are puffy and raw red from the tears that have now dried despite the deep pit inside me. It feels like I am losing a piece of myself, leaving that which matters most behind.

Erica, my mom…I know she isn’t the woman who gave birth to me. But she is the woman who raised me. My biological mother died when I was an infant. Erica didn’t want to tell me it was my fault, but somehow, I feel that it was. Erica has been my entire family for seventeen years. It was just the two of us in the suburbs of Los Angeles. All I have known was our life in the southern California sun together and now that is shattered and I am heading to a stranger in the cold North-East. 

Two weeks ago, Mom told me she had breast cancer and handed me the telephone to speak to a man I never knew existed, Adam Riley, my father.

“Elena?” His deep, smooth voice asked through the receiver. “Do you know who I am? Did Erica tell you?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You are the man who was my birth mother’s fated mate, you had sex, she gave birth to me after running away from home because her family wouldn’t approve. I don’t get it. If the moon goddess made you mates, shouldn’t that be respected?”

“It should be, but isn’t always. Some pack politics are complicated,” He sighed.

That was the first conversation with the man whose DNA I share.

I have had exactly two conversations with the man, but now I am going to live with him. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay with mom, but she wouldn’t let me.

Stage four, that’s what she told me. I told mom I wanted to stay and take care of her, to help her get better. But she told me it’s stage four and even operations and chemotherapy would not save her. I needed to live with my father. I cried, begged and fought to stay. Still, she put me on the airplane and kissed me goodbye. Tears streamed down my face and I knew she was choking back on her own.

I should have known something was wrong. She has been getting thinner and weaker. We haven’t been able to go on our weekly hikes in months. Her appetite wasn’t there many days. Why didn’t I notice sooner? Maybe we could have done something before she got this sick.

The tears start to fall once again as I think about the harsh reality that faces me. I will never see mom again and I am going to live with a perfect stranger! Mom doesn’t even want me to come back to California for her funeral. She told me I need to live my life and be with my own kind.

I have never lived in a pack before. I have only lived in the human world. While mom is human and raised me in the human world both of my genetic parents are werewolves and grew up in werewolf packs in New England. It is such a far cry from the existence I have known.

I don’t know why I need to live in a pack. I am wolfless. According to what mom told me, werewolves manifest their wolf at sixteen years old, but I am seventeen, almost eighteen and I still have no wolf. So, it’s pointless for me to live in a wolf pack. Do I even count as a werewolf no matter my DNA if I don’t have a wolf? I would think not.

I just…I just want to be with mom, not on this hunk of steel crossing the country for a place I have no ties to.

The airplane banks to the right and we get lower, flying so low over a small peninsula that it feels like we could touch the rooftops of the beach cottages and apartment buildings clustered together there. Then the water gets closer and closer as if we are landing on the ocean waves slapping against the rocks of Boston harbor, then the wheels hit the tarmac and the bounce and screech that announces our landing before we taxi into our spot to disembark.

I am not any happier about being on land than I was about being in the sky. I am still not thrilled to be in this cold place so far from mom and everything I call home.

I wipe my eyes and rub my face before standing to pull my carryon from the compartment above my head and sling my backpack over my shoulder. Mom sent the rest of my stuff in boxes this past week and Adam says it has already arrived and been placed in my bedroom, but he didn’t unpack anything so as to give me some semblance of a sense of privacy. I guess that is respectful. I’ll give the man that much.

“Welcome ta Bahstin!” A man with ruddy cheeks and blond curls in an airline uniform greets as we make our way into the terminal.

The thick Boston accent hits me like a slap in the face. It’s almost like a different language than what I am used to.

I know I told Adam I won’t need to claim anything from the baggage claim, but he told me he’d meet me there, so that is where I am heading.

I have never seen the man in my life, so tell me, how is it that the instant my eyes land on Adam Riley I know precisely who he is?

His piercing blue eyes and dirty blond waves are not the only thing. His button nose really makes him look like an older male version of me. Well now I know what I would look like if I were a forty-year-old man! I just hope I will have better taste in clothes.

Maybe Adam doesn’t dress up often, but the entire blazer with khakis and denim chambray shirt thing seems a bit dated. But his soft smile and the twinkle in his eyes make him seem younger than he is.

“So, I suppose there is no denying we are related?” I groan as he strides up to me with his smile growing.

“If I had known about you sooner…oh! You remind me so much of her in the way you hold yourself and the set of your jaw, but you get your hair and eyes from me,” Adam, my father, says. “I loved her, you know, but she rejected me and ran away.”

“Mom told me my birth mother didn’t want to reject you, but she did it to protect you and me from someone,” I sigh.

I have heard the story a million times. Like star crossed lovers they met and instantly knew. They spent a few steamy nights together and my mother was dragged back to her pack despite wanting to stay with her mate. She was forced to reject him by her controlling brother and was crying and in pain the entire way home. She felt like her heart and soul had been torn in two and essentially they had because when the moon goddess matches mates they share pieces of one another’s souls.  When she found out she was pregnant with me, she called her best friend, still grief stricken but determined to hang onto the only piece of her beloved that she had. They ran away to California.

The vehicle Adam drives screams ‘family man’ and I know he is. I have an older step brother and a younger half-sister and a stepmother. It is a far cry from what I am used to.

We climb into the car and start the long drive into the mountains of New Hampshire where the pack lives in a town mostly unnoticed by humans despite living amongst them.

The hum of the car’s engine and the tires on the highway lulls me to sleep despite my tumultuous emotions and when I awaken we are rumbling onto a dirt road.

“I am sorry,” Adam says. “Most of the pack live in town and as ranked wolves we have an apartment in the packhouse, but I prefer to live out here, away from thick of it, at least I have since the day your mother rejected me.”

We pull up to what looks like a large, modern wood cabin and are instantly greeted by a gorgeous brunette woman and a young girl who looks like a blend of the two adults despite the late hour. As I pull my luggage from the back of the car two super hot guys maybe a couple years older than me pull up in a beat up pickup truck.

“Good you’re home, maybe you would like to help Elena in with her luggage,” My father calls out to the younger men.

The tall dark haired man climbs out of the driver’s side and stares at me with stormy grey eyes that seem to illuminate in the moonlight flashing silver.

“It would be my pleasure, Delta Riley,” he says and smirks at me as he grabs my bag from me as if it weighs nothing.