Adversity (11 page)

“
I… what?” I asked, barely able to get out the
words.

“
She’s busy. Get lost,” said Tammie as she accompanied me from
the room.

“
I… that…”

“
Yeah, I know. Keep out of there, or they’ll never leave you
alone. Trust me on that one.” She shook her head, smiling. “Your
brother’s not so quiet, is he? They always say they’re the ones to
watch, eh?”

I rubbed
my temples, unable to figure out what kind of parallel world I was
in. Nathan almost turned into a werewolf in front of people. Tammie
was helping me. What on earth was going on?

As if she
realised the same thing, Tammie made some excuse and left me alone.
No longer hungry, I decided school was a bust and went to the
office to complain of a migraine. They didn’t send me home, but
they let me sit in a dark room until school ended. The principal
nodded knowingly at me. Why did life have to be so complicated in
normal ways when it was already so complicated in a dozen abnormal
ways?

After
school, I worked up the courage to talk to Nathan.

“
You okay?”

“
Sorry about today. I’ve been all over the place lately.” He
rubbed the back of his neck, and looked a little
sheepish.

“
I know. That’s another good reason why we should be looking to
get rid of this curse.”

He stared
at me. “I know that, Amelia.”

“
Did they kick you out of school?”

A rare
grin lit up his face. “No. The principal told me to take the rest
of the day off, basically. She’s pretty cool, for a
principal.”

“
At least that’s something. Why did you go off like that,
though?”

Groaning,
he paced in front of me. I could almost taste his stress and
realised that Aaron had been lucky as hell. “It’s not as if I
planned it. I’ve been on edge lately, and Aaron’s been asking for a
hiding since I got here. You know that, right?”

“
I might know it, but I thought you were over the fights. You
know fighting with you isn’t fair because you have this advantage
that they don’t. Besides, you’ve kept your cool for ages. I thought
you could control it now.”

“
So did I. Guess you can never trust a wild animal.” He gave me
a watery smile, and I felt a pang of something in my chest. I knew
he suspected our father of murdering our mother. And I knew he had
always felt as though he himself could never be trusted. But this
was the first time I had seen the evidence of his lack of control
in front of my face. I often felt left out because I wasn’t a
werewolf, but I was becoming ever more certain that I didn’t want
to be a werewolf after all.

***

Kali

“
What’s taking you so long to get home from the village every
day?” Drina asked her.

Kali
smiled. “I walk slowly.”

Drina’s
face paled. “Don’t do anything stupid, Kali. He won’t stand for
it.”

Kali
waved away Drina’s concerns. She wasn’t afraid of her father. She
was too valuable.

“
Our clan only wants the pure,” Drina reminded her. “Nobody
will remember you if you’re banished.”

“
I haven’t done anything to deserve that,” Kali insisted. “I
haven’t been touched.”

And she
hadn’t. Andriy had never tried to touch her, no matter how much she
wanted him to. Every cell in her body cried out for him, but he
never made a move. He only ever spoke to her if she spoke first,
which made him a good man, in her eyes. Knowing he couldn’t cross a
line. The knowledge made her angry, angrier than… his wife. Always
Kali’s thoughts returned to his wife. A loveless marriage and a
paleness to his skin meant she couldn’t have him.

The clan
might have accepted him, taken him in as an honorary member if he
had brought some use with him. But his having a wife was a step too
far, and her people would reject her if she took him for hers, even
if there was no love between the couple. Her banishment would mean
she didn’t exist to them anymore. But wasn’t that what she wished
for all along?

She asked
him questions, so many questions, and he spoke plainly to her in
those few minutes they stole together every evening. He told her
how his wife made him feel small, in his own home. He wasn’t
welcome in her bed, and he had no bed of his own. He was needed to
work the farm, while his wife embarrassed him by taking other men
into her bed. Kali listened to his every word and told him her own
stories. She was the next chovihani, and her destiny was linked to
protecting her clan from the dead. Her children would be respected
and revered because they would bear the curse of her
birth.

And he
listened. He didn’t seem to truly understand the things she said,
but he didn’t laugh or run when she told him her story. He didn’t
judge her clan’s beliefs or act like a coward when she talked about
the rising dead who tormented her people or when she talked about
the werewolves said to protect her people from the evil spirits
they so greatly feared. He held her gaze and listened to her words
and made her feel as though she might be worth more than the
happenstance of her birth, and thus, deserving of a different
destiny.

She fell
for him quickly. Fell hard. She knew there was no going back. She
saw the love in his eyes, returned it with her own, and they had an
affair of the heart and of the mind, but not the body. Theirs was a
sweet love that compelled her to keep stepping toward him, to keep
waiting for him to cross the line. She had little idea of what
might happen next, but she wanted more than anything to find out.
She lived for the promise the future held.

The rumours started again, courtesy of Andriy’s wife, but Kali
withstood them because she had him to rely on. They never
touched—not even her fondness for him quelled her reluctance to
cross her people’s
marime
taboos. He, in turn, was afraid of his wife’s
wrath. Their moments together were fleeting.

Nobody
could take away the memories they had created together. He had
given her a peace of mind she didn’t know existed and made her feel
valuable in a way that wasn’t bound to assets or riches. She saw
the pure beauty in what they had together because they loved
without taking, gave all of themselves except the physical part.
She saw their souls entwined, and she knew they could be so much
more together. He could cleanse her of the darkness within her, and
she could help him stand up for the things he truly
wanted.

Drina
covered for her, although she didn’t approve. Her father didn’t
care as long as she brought home the payment of the villagers, but
the heady summer sun would change everything. Kali felt it in her
bones.

Amelia

Nathan kept saying he didn’t care what
anyone thought of him, but I could sense his apprehension on the
way to school the next morning. We were late, and barely made it in
before the bell rang, again accompanied by that spine-crawling
awkwardness from the students in the hallways because of our
presence. The atmosphere remained tense and full of expectation, as
though everyone waited for another fight. Not that Aaron had a
chance. If he had any sense at all, then he would keep the hell
away from my brother. My own rage rushed to the surface suddenly,
and I clung to my bag to stop my anger from releasing. Nathan
frowned, and I knew he could feel what I felt. I waited for him to
comment, but he didn’t. Without a word he took a different route to
his first class, leaving me alone again.

I skulked into my own class, finding a
seat at an unoccupied table. Ger smiled at me, but I could only nod
in return. I thought it ridiculous to be stuck in school trying to
make small talk with completely normal people who didn’t have a
pack of werewolves after them. Byron kept insisting we squeeze in
the normal stuff, like school, with all of the danger and tension.
His plan wasn’t working very well.

I wasn’t altogether sure if there
really was a pack of werewolves after me. Nobody seemed to know
what the werewolves wanted, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t
tell me anyway.

A cold sweat covered my brow, and I
told myself I was putting myself under too much stress. I kept
twisting everything up in my head and making it bigger than it had
to be. So what if Nathan had a fight? One fight in extreme
circumstances didn’t mean he was going to accidentally kill anyone.
And so what if my grandfather was acting weird? He’d lost his mate
and that was huge. He’d lost the person who’d centered him, so of
course, he would take a while to find his balance again.

I rationalized everything in my head
all day, completely ignoring everything else that was going on. I
was so going to fail my summer exams.

At least it was almost time for our summer
holidays. We spent most summers in Germany or France, visiting
places my grandparents knew well. This year might be different.
Nobody had spoken about it, so I guessed travelling was off the
table.

I spent at least three classes trying
to remember every detail of my dreams in case they were part of the
key to ending the curse. Okay, that scenario wasn’t likely. Not at
all. But if my family members’ dreams led to soul mates, then why
not curses? But I could find nothing. Nothing useful about curses,
anyway. All I remembered was Kali’s distraction, and the focus she
had on escaping her life.

Sometimes I woke up wanting to slap
her. Her thought processes and the decisions she made confused me.
She was so dramatic. She barely knew Andriy, and she had convinced
herself she was hopelessly in love. She didn’t see that she was so
desperate for escape that she would have clung on to any option
that presented itself.

One minute she was noble and moral, and
the next she was running after somebody else’s husband. And she was
barely older than me. Yeah, she lived in another time, but her
actions still grossed me out, though not during my dreams.
Everything seemed normal and right while I dreamt.

The dreams had to mean something to me
or be relevant to my life somehow. I had been thinking hard, and
some of the hints she dropped added up. Kali would have werewolf
children. Did that mean she was a soul mate? Was Andriy one of us?
His surname was familiar. Ivaneska-Evans. Not a huge stretch. I
felt a little ill at the idea of being attracted to a possible
ancestor, but really, I was feeling the aftershocks of Kali’s
emotions. She loved the man, but there was no possibility of a
happy ending for her.

***

Before lunch, Abbi approached me. I
tried to smile at her, but something about her triggered my
suspicions. She wasn’t evil or anything, but I couldn’t forget my
first impressions of her.

“
Hey, Ams. Where’s your
brother hiding?” she said cheerily.

“
Here. Somewhere.” I
gestured vaguely.

“
No, seriously. I haven’t
seen him since this morning. He ran out of class after I told him
about Perdy.” She frowned.

“
What? What happened to
Perdy?” My lungs seemed to constrict, and dark spots flew in front
of my eyes. What had happened now?

“
Those wild dogs again,” she
said slowly, but I was already gone, looking for Joey. I sprinted
and found him in the first classroom in which I looked. “Where…
what happened?” I blurted, flustered beyond belief.

He looked up from his conversation with
Tammie and shook his head. “I should have known you’d be next. A
wolf tried to attack us at the hospital; another wolf protected
us.”

“
Another—oh. Is she
okay?”

“
She’s fine. I’ve talked
about this with your brother already, and he ran out of the school
as though the hounds of hell were after him.”

“
Oh.” I turned to leave,
then hesitated. Oh, crap. I glanced back at him. “Did you say
wolf?”

A smile twitched on his lips. “I
did.”

“
Did Perdita… say something
to you?”

His expression was blank. “Like
what?”

I bit my knuckle to cover my gasp of
fear. Could she have told him the truth about us? Would she really
betray us? I shook my head and left. “Like nothing,” I said over my
shoulder.

I made up my mind. I was going home.
Screw staying in school while the rest of my family was busy
dealing with… whatever. I was part of the family, too, and I
deserved to know what was going on. I snuck from school grounds
without telling anyone. I’d only miss a couple of classes, but I
didn’t want to deal with any questions. What could I tell them? I
needed to deal with werewolf business?

I made it home, still shaking from the
worry of another attack and the idea that people might know the
truth about us. Nobody was around except for Opa.

“
What’s happening?” I asked
him.

He refused to look at me. “Nothing.”
But his voice was strained, and I knew something had
happened.

“
Then, where is everyone?” I
demanded.

“
Jeremy’s following orders.
Your uncle left to find your brother.”