Shadows of the Past

Nine

I stared at the ceiling while I laid on the guest bed. It was after midnight, and I had been in the room the luna took me to since nine. Sleeping outside of my home in a strange bed under a strange roof was hard for me. My body just wanted my own bed, with my green comforter and white pillows. My bookshelf—silhouetted in the dark against the wall next to the en suite bathroom's door—with picture frames and childhood memories on its shelves. The white curtains adorned with silver stitching hanging across my windows.

This room was bland. Which was understandable since it was a guest room. The most personalized thing in there was another oil painting depicting a wolf in the forest at autumn time. It hung on the wall across from the bed, which was covered with a white bedspread and grey pillows. A small gray throw-blanket draped over the right corner. I was sprawled on top of it all, not really caring to crawl into the blankets yet, or fluff the pillows to my liking. I just laid there in silence, thinking about the discussion we had after dinner.

The Menai Moon Pack was complicated, and closed off from the rest of the world.  At least it felt that way. Tally's last visit to us was when I was eight or nine years old. I couldn't pick her out in the crowd if she stood right in front of me. And we never visited her. Which was beginning to make more and more sense as I learned about Mom's connection to the pack.

Why didn't they ever tell me Mom was supposed to be the next queen? What else were they not telling me? I thought my parents trusted me. Maybe I was wrong.

I hated being kept in the dark like I was still a pup.

I rolled over to my side, my eyelids finally getting heavier. I wondered if my parents would answer me directly if I just asked them specifically about my grandmother. They often didn't even like speaking her name, but I wanted to know what she did that was so awful they never even told me about her. And I wanted to know why my mother acted like her gift was a curse. She only ever used it for good things, so why did she hate it so much?

She also hated shifting. I wasn't sure if I could ever be able to understand that. Shifting was freeing to me, it let you become an entirely different species for a little bit, to see the world in a new perspective. Mom just couldn't ever seem to get comfortable in her wolf's body. The only time I saw her seem happy in wolf form was when I first turned and she shifted with me. Dad joined us too, as did Skylar and her parents and we romped around the woods together, playing and tumbling and running. The one time I saw Mom letting herself be carefree in her wolf.

With a sigh, my eyes got the better of me, and I drifted off with the image of Mom's bright white wolf burned against the back of my eyelids. A howl seemed to echo through my ears.

Sunlight filtered into the room, given to me in slices, as I stretched my legs out and sat up. I had fallen asleep still on top of the sheets, but I must have gotten cold at some point in the night, for the grey throw blanket now wrapped around my feet. Kicking it off, I stood up from the bed, the light patterns adjusting over my toes.

There wasn't a bathroom connected to this room, so I grabbed my small toiletry bag from my backpack and ventured out into the hall. Sure enough, at the end of the hall—opposite to the stairs we came down last night—was a door that swung ajar, tiles peeking from underneath it.

Lucky for me, no one else seemed to be waiting to use it, so I was able to close and lock the door and take my time with my business.

I brushed my teeth and then raked a comb through my hair. It didn't lay as naturally flat as Mom's, but at least it didn't always frizz and multiply the volume by three when I brushed it like Skylar's did. I tied the top half into a little knot, leaving the rest to hang over my shoulders, before I went back to the guest room to change.