Wolf Marked by Alexis Calder

23

The trailer park was about two miles from the barn. The route was familiar, something I’d done a hundred times or more. A life spent avoiding others had taught me all the less traveled paths and given me an edge at staying invisible.

I kept my head down and walked past homes and stores. I knew enough to act like I belonged without making eye contact. My fifth-grade teacher walked past me on the street. My pulse raced, worried she’d stop me and say hello. She didn’t even acknowledge me.

Soon, I was out of the shopping area and cutting through neighborhoods and parks. In the distance, I could make out the trailer park that had been my home my whole life.

Some of the residents were outside this morning. Ethan McIntyre, a regular of my mom’s, was sitting in a blue plastic kiddie pool with a can of beer in hand. I wrinkled my nose. How my mom was willing to even let him in her bedroom, let alone between her legs was a mystery to me.

A dog barked and ran toward me, only to be pulled back by a chain. Fuck. My heart was racing and I felt like a criminal. Sure, I was after something that didn’t belong to me. That was if it even existed. But I was sneaking into my own house. It wasn’t like my mom would give a shit if I took anything. She’d likely not even notice that I stopped in.

Finally, I arrived at the shitty trailer I’d grown up in. Rust covered the exterior and the places that still had paint were chipped and peeling. Everything about it was even worse than I remembered. What was with this place? How was it that it all got even more run down in the week I was away?

Deciding it didn’t matter how I entered, I went for the front door. It was less noisy and my mom would probably think it was a visitor. I figured I could be down the hall and in my old bedroom before she got to the living room to check.

Carefully, I turned the door handle and pushed the aluminum door open. It creaked a little, but nothing like the back door had last time I’d used it.

I stepped inside and froze. I wasn’t alone.

“I told you never to come back.” My mom was sitting in a chair in the living room. She blew a cloud of smoke from her lips.

“I’m not staying.”

“I don’t have any money if that’s what you’re after,” she said.

My jaw tensed. “Real nice, Ma. Like I don’t know that you don’t have any money.”

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“What happened to you?” I couldn’t help it, I had to say something. “You were a good mom once. You cared for me. Unless I imagined all of that.”

“I did the best I could,” she said.

“No, you didn’t. You gave up. You had a child to take care of and you quit. You quit on yourself and you quit on me.” I was louder than I meant to be, but I was furious. All these years, I’d held back my resentment. Living with her might have been worse than living on my own. Yet, I couldn’t run from Wolf Creek. I’d been a prisoner here with a mom who didn’t give a damn about me.

“You have no idea the hell I’ve been through. You’re alive and you were out of here. That’s all I wanted for you. I wanted you to have a better life than I did. A chance at starting over. I told you to leave. You can’t even do that right.” She took a drag on her cigarette.

“You want to help me?” I demanded. “Fine. Here’s your chance. I need whatever was left behind by my grandfather.”

She coughed, choking on the smoke she’d just inhaled. After catching her breath, she smothered her cigarette in the ash tray. “What are you talking about?’

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I know what he did and why he was cursed. All the things you hid from me. I also know his curse was his alone. Not yours, not mine. I could shift if I didn’t have it in my head that I couldn’t.”

She pursed her lips and didn’t deny a damn thing.

“You knew?” I’d never felt so betrayed in my life. “How could you?”

“It was better this way,” she said. “If you shifted, you’d draw attention to yourself.”

“I drew attention to myself by not shifting. Did you not notice my black eyes? The broken ribs? The bruises I came home with every day from school? How was that better? What the fuck were you protecting me from?” I demanded.

“You think you know pain but you don’t know what I spared you from.”

“Then tell me,” I said.

“If you shifted, it was a matter of time before your father found out about you,” she said.

“So what?” I cried.

“He can’t know about you,” she said.

“You said he didn’t know you were pregnant. How would he even find me?” I asked.

“He’d find you,” she said.

Rage bubbled inside me. I clenched my fists in frustration. We were getting nowhere with this and I was wasting my time. “Are you going to give me any actual information I can use?”

“About your father? No.”

“Then we’re done here. If you care about me at all, I need whatever you have about the toxin. Then I’m gone for good,” I said.

She reached for her box of cigarettes and pulled one out. Her hands were shaking as she lit it.

I wanted to feel sorry for her, and there was a tiny part that did. She was my mother after all, but she hadn’t protected me the way a mother should.

She took a long drag, then blew out the smoke slowly. I winced and turned away from the cloud. She knew I hated it but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was getting to me.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked. “That information is worth millions.”

“Then why didn’t you sell it?” I asked.

“I know you think little of me, but even I have standards,” she said. “That toxin is the most dangerous thing ever created for wolf shifters. In the wrong hands, it’s been used to wipe out entire packs.”

“Funny how you worry about other shifters when you couldn’t give a damn about the one shifter you gave birth to,” I snapped.

She stood. “It’s okay if you hate me. I made my choice and I can live with it. Now, it’s time for you to decide if you can live with yours.”

She walked over to the ratty couch that nobody ever sat on and started pulling cushions up and tossed them on the floor. There was a bed inside, folded up. She tugged on the handle and opened up the mattress.

I expected to see something on the bed, but other than a mattress covered in questionable stains it was empty. This was just a wild goose chase. “Are you stalling for some reason?”

“You think I’d turn you in to those assholes who call themselves leaders? I’m not a traitor, Lola,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure about that. She’d kept the fact that I could shift from me my whole life.

She held the cigarette between her lips and walked to the kitchen, returning back to the couch with a large knife.

“Do you need help?” I asked.

She glared at me, then shoved the knife into the side of the mattress. Dragging the knife through the fabric, she tore a huge hole in the side.

After tossing the knife on the ground, she shoved her hand inside the destroyed bed. A moment later, she emerged with a leather-bound journal.

She took another drag on her cigarette as she walked over to me, the book held out.

“This is it?” I asked as I took the book from her.

“That’s all I got. Whatever you’re doing with it, I hope it’s worth it,” she said. “You should go. Whole town’s been warned to keep an eye out for you. Something about you being a traitor to the pack.” She looked down at the book. “They catch you with that, they’ll have all the evidence they need to kill you on sight.”

I slid the journal in the waistband of my shorts, then covered it with the back of my shirt. “Thank you.”

“Good luck, Lola,” she said.

There were a million things I wanted to say to my mom, but none of them would come out right. I ended up nodding, then made my way to the door. I wasn’t willing to spend another second here. The sooner I broke that mating bond, the sooner I could get on with my life.