House, not Home
766 Words
The drive home from the pack clinic should only be a fifteen-minute journey, but I don't know how much longer I can hold my tears back, all I want to do is run to my room and hide. Pretend that this morning had never happened. When I woke up this morning I was actually looking forward to turning eighteen. I even knew how my day would go - tomorrow I would have been woken up by my Dad, my Mom and baby sister Tara, with hugs, a present and breakfast cake. School would have been a necessary evil, but my best friends Hayden and Riley would be there, and we've really become quite adept at dodging orders and insults from the higher-ranked kids. Finally, in the evening I would have gone with my family to the packhouse, bowed low to Alpha Andrew before shifting into my wolf form for the first time and introducing the pack to Esti, and our scent. As an Omega in the Frost-Moon Clan, your eighteenth birthday is the only time you are allowed to go to the packhouse without an invite or direct order. Don't be fooled though, this isn't a kindness from the Alpha. Once he has seen you shift, he decides what life of servitude you then have once you've graduated from high school.
Safe to say my servitude will start way before I finish school.
I force myself out of my woulda-should-coulda thoughts and glance over at my mother. Her red-rimmed eyes are focused on the road ahead, but I could tell she was in auto-pilot mode. It's a safe bet to assume she's mind-linking with dad, relaying everything Doc had said.
"What does Dad think?" I quietly ask her.
There's no answer from my mother, just the sound of the road underneath the tyres.
Nothing is ever mentioned out in the open, but in private all the pack parents fear the coming of age test. It's nothing more than a simple blood test, taken two weeks before a young wolf turns eighteen, in these two weeks our pre-shift hormone levels are off the charts, and it is at this point, and only at this point in our lives that a young wolfs blood cells show a deviation, otherwise known as an ability. I think that's right anyway. To be honest I wasn't paying too much attention during lupus biology one-oh-one that day. The only important thing I took from that lesson was the abilities very rarely show up in lower rankings, and are usually an inherited trait within Beta and Gamma bloodlines. When my parents talked to me and Tara about it a few months ago, they told us to imagine each blood cell having its own aura. Now I'm not lacking in the brain department, in fact I'm acing all of my classes apart from phys ed, but let's not get into that. However, to wrap my mind around what a special is I had to use caveman language; plain blood: good. Shiny blood: bad. Fast forward two months, and shiny blood, f*****g great!
The continued silence from my mother is not helping my current level of anxiety, not just because I need her to tell me everything will be ok, but because I seriously don't know how much longer she can drive in auto-pilot mode, as it is we are almost half-way home, and straight ahead is a usually busy junction. Today has already sucked, but to get crushed by tourist heading to the waterfront would really be the icing on the cake. I need to snap her out of it..
"Does Dad have a solution?" I say a little louder, but again there is no reply from her.
"MOM!"
As I open my mouth to call her name and ask the question again she looks over at me. I love my mothers face, she always seems to smile with her eyes, even when she's annoyed with me and my sister. In this very moment, there is no gentleness or smile in those eyes, her expression is blank.
"We'll talk when we get to the house," she says stiffly and returns her gaze to the road.
Her whole response catches me off guard, and I hear Esti whimper in the back of my mind. It isn't just that my gentle soul of a mother has just looked at me with no emotion whatsoever, but her words are echoing in my ears - we'll talk about it when we get to the house.
House, not home.
- Writer
