Wolfborn by R. H. Wildewood
"You have no idea what you're talking about!" James screamed clear across the room. She felt the glass in Daniel's study tremor.
"You're out of line," The warning was clear in Daniel's tone to everyone but James.
"Where is that line?" James pushed, seventeen years of all aggression. "Huh? Is it at the beginning of Oakhurst? The border of town? Or the driveway of the house?" His words couldn't be more vicious if he tried. He stepped towards his father, nearly fully grown, now, he was almost his exact likeness, down to the exact shade of dark blonde hair, down to the stubborn streak.
"Watch yourself," Daniel warned like he could almost hear James's thoughts.
"Your fears are not mine," James hisses, only a step away from his father. "I won't be trapped here."
"James," Zane says, standing just behind him, calm to James's aggression, both seventeen, both terrified of what they were supposed to become.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, tired of this same song they'd been singing for nearly a month now. Like the peace that normally breezed through Hawthorne House had reached the end of its tether, that seventeen years had to be repaid in a single winter.
"Stay out of this, Zane," Their father warned, not unkindly, not dangerously, but warned all the same.
And it incensed James. "Yeah, two voices of reason are harder to block out than just one," He spits, "Or is it that you would actually listen to him?"
And that breaks the glass. Rebecca pushes off the couch she was sitting on, forces herself in the small space between them both Daniel and James had begun to close, over a head shorter than both of them, and she turns to James.
"He taught you to reason," She whispers, low and soft, because James was her brother still. "Don't be cruel to someone that has only showed you kindness," Because Daniel had taught her to reason, too.
But James's face twists, cruel and snarling, "Sure, little sister, maybe you should speak to him, he'll listen to you," He rasps, because Zane almost heard his thoughts before he'd spoken, and wrapped his arms around James from behind, pulling him back against him.
"Enough," Zane murmurs, close to James' ear, but they're pressed so close together, they all hear. "For today, James, that's enough."
And like Zane had pulled on puppet strings and loosed them, James sinks into himself, and pushes Zane off him with the last bit of his strength. They listen to James half run out of Hawthorne House. And they all flinch when the door bangs.
The driveway to the House was paved as little as possible, the stone laid so delicately it was like they crafted themselves from the ground. The rain soaked trees, autumn colours on the leaves, trying to hold the scents in place for as long as they could. Until the frost came.
Hawthorne House was old trees and aged stone, it was set right against the edge of Oakhurst Woods, the forest wrapping around the back of the imposing House, and when the mist passed through it clung to everything. And this she loved.
The Town was hundreds of years old.
There was a Bistro in the centre of the town, a library that was about the same size as the one at Hawthorne House, a flower shop with a flighty owner that was always about to close down, an apothecary that never had, a bed and breakfast in a House almost as old as Hawthorne, and an artesian store, Ink, Book & Candle, that sold all three things the name suggested in astounding quantities, and was her absolutely favourite place in the entire town, just after Hawthorne House.
And Hawthorne House was one of the oldest in the town. The kind of old ones, built with stone on the outside to withstand centuries, where the kitchen had ornate fixings, old ovens, where the glass was stained in patterns, where the sides of the houses curved around the edges, creating alcoves, where the walls were hung with mirrors and paintings and carved through with niches. And the mailbox outside resembled an ornate birdcage and locked with a skeleton key.
"I'm going to lock up," Daniel says eventually. Its an hour later than he normally would walk, checking all the gates and doors, making sure everything was locked up for the night.
Elizabeth shoots him the ghost of a smile, folding her piano closed. Its part of the tradition. Daniel walks around and locks up, Elizabeth plays at the piano. It marks her night, and she knows it like she knows the sun sets.
"Walk with me, changeling?" Daniel asked, calling her by Elizabeth's nickname, and it makes her fold.
Its colder, with James still not back. But they walk around the House, anyway, through the path that winds from the driveway, to the backyard, past the stables, the cobblestoned pathway lighted on either side by lampposts, her fingers trailing along the ornate metal as they pass it, and they end at Jargon's enclosure, larger than the stables that housed five horses, the Jaguar was beyond competition Daniel's favourite.
"What happened to him?" Rebecca whispered, lightly touching the animal's fur as it came up to them.
She'd asked this same question often, and Daniel always told her the same story, again and again, even now, almost a full decade later after she'd heard it, he told it to her again. She asked when she needed solace, when he did.
"He was hunted," Daniel answered, the animal encircling both of them, not as heart-stopping to her anymore as it had been the first time. "He survived, but just barely." He murmured into her mess of curls, pulling her against him.
"So he can't ever go back?" Rebecca asked.
Daniel shook his head, "He wouldn't be safe there."
They had become friends, over the years, her and the jaguar, Jargon.
"Born in captivity he hadn't grown to fear humans properly," Daniel loosens his hold of her, and turns to the jaguar as he spoke. "He'd been raised to be hunted, but he'd been strong, and resilient, and survived the attempt."
She knew the story so well she could recite it half asleep. But sometimes Daniel would bend to the animal, slowly, and it would come to him, and she would think the animal answered Daniel the way Elizabeth did, with all of him.
They had become friends, Jargon and her, but she was nothing to this wild creature, compared to her brother.
James that was all wildfire, took to the Jaguar like he took to everything else. With reckless ease, with tempestuous abandon. And Jargon had taken to him just the same.
Daniel came, every night, as he walked around Hawthorne House, making sure everything was locked and closed properly, to the Jaguar he couldn't let go. He came tonight, because James still hadn't come back.
"He'll come back to you," Rebecca murmurs, and she isn't sure who she's telling, but Daniel moves closer to the animal, and it to him, and they're both looking for someone else.
He always would. If days later, if weeks, he always comes back, and he folds right into Daniel. The older man leaves the fire he'd been stoking, and wraps his arms around his youngest child.
"'m sorry," James murmurs into his father, the rest of them can barely hear him, they don't hear what else he says, but Daniel's face bleeds calmer.
"We're gonna work this through, you and me," Daniel promises him. James's aggression, Daniel's tight hold, unwilling to back down either of them. It would be a lot to work through, though.
Rebecca turns to Zane, and she knew if she could hear his thoughts, she would hear a mirror of hers. Because it would be so much more, than just James's aggression, than just Daniel's unwillingness to let go. But neither of them press into a war that isn't theirs.
So Rebecca turns away from Daniel clinging to his son, and turns to her mother, instead. She sees Zane hold out watching them for a bit longer, willing to fight James's war for him, if he asked, then he turns with her.
"Tell me a story." Rebecca asks her mother. Elizabeth had thousands of stories, thousands more than her writer husband.
"How did you fall in love with Daniel?"
"Oh, that's a boring story," Her mother waves her hand. "Let me tell you how I fell in love with you, little changeling."
Her mother had taken to call her that, after she told Rebecca about the daughter, Anastasia, she'd lost years ago, and Rebecca told her she had seen the white flowers glowing in the moonlight that she followed right into Hawthorne House. Rebecca once asked her if she ever thought she would rather have her own daughter, than one the fey dropped at her doorstep.
Elizabeth shook her head. She told her if she could, she would take them both, but if she had to choose, she'll keep what she was given.
Rebecca settles into her side with Zane on the floor, his back pressed against the sofa Elizabeth and her are sitting on. The rain is falling in steady sheets, the thunderstorm that cancelled classes for the past three days showing no signs of stopping. James and Daniel are stoking the fire. But Zane is pushing against James with his foot, the younger boy turning to pull faces at him every other minute through Daniel's instruction that may just be falling on deaf ears.
"There used to be an empty space on the mantelpiece." The mantelpiece that used to hold only James' photograph that changed with the years as he had, and an old still of Anastasia that never did.
"But you came, graceful and wild, and everything became whole. My heart, my soul," She pressed into Zane's shoulder, his head leaning on her thigh. "Stuttered when I saw you."
James had given up pretending to listen to Daniel's instructions or his mother's story, and taken to lying across Zane's outstretched legs. Rebecca caught Zane looking at her, and grinned at him. Elizabeth spoke without saying anything of their origins.
Rebecca met them when she'd climbed in through James' bedroom window, about a decade ago, on one of the more severe nights in a winter as bad as theirs now. She'd seen the white flowers pale in the moonlight, crawling across wooden trellises that led from the ground right up to his bedroom window. James, startling out of his sleep, had been very accommodating. Pulling out his secret stash of biscuits, two flashlights, and some pillows and blankets under his bed, where they built a fort. They had both been all of seven years old. Elizabeth woke up to find what looked like either omelettes gone wrong, or two very colourful pancakes, and half her muffin tray finished between her son and a little girl wearing his clothes.
Zane was in London. James argued that it had been Rebecca's fault. Rebecca would swear that James was to blame. And Zane, never having been one to give credit where it wasn't due, said that while they both each made valiant attempts to make them deserving of all blame, it really had to be shared. They'd been thirteen then. Since James and Rebecca wasn't explicitly told not to leave the hotel room, and being very new at hotel rooms, hadn't thought they needed permission to leave.
So they left, and ended up at a bakery about five blocks down where they witnessed a fight breaking out, and promptly got involved. Someone threw a stone. The next thing either of them knew, they were running through boroughs, drenched through by the rain, till they collapsed on top of each other, against their hotel room door.
Elizabeth found her son and daughter a few hours later, laying on a double bed filled with food, and a boy wearing James' clothes laying between them, as though they'd known each other their whole lives.
And her heart stuttered again.
"You really should stop sharing your clothes with strangers, James," Elizabeth admonished as she always did, when she told the story. "But, whose fault was it?" Elizabeth asked, mischief in her eyes.
"James," Rebecca answered on the tail end of her mother's sentence.
"Rebecca," James frowned at her.
Both turned to Zane. Rebecca looks down at him from her sofa, hanging over the edge, and James looks up at him from the floor, laying across his legs.
"Switzerland," He raised his hands in surrender.
And this is them. Elizabeth's Irish Triplets.
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