Seduced By My God-Father

chapter three

THE PULL:

There are things you can logic your way out of.

I am, generally speaking, a logical person. I believe in the cause and effect of things, in the reliability of patterns, in the comfort of a rational explanation applied to an irrational feeling. I had spent four years becoming this version of myself,the steady one, the sensible one, the girl who had taken her grief and her strangeness and her inability to shift like a normal wolf and quietly, efficiently, built a life around the edges of all of it.

I could not logic my way out of this.

It started small. The way I became aware of where he was in a room without looking. The way his voice, even from another part of the house, registered somewhere beneath my skin like a vibration on a frequency nobody else could hear. I would be reading or helping Mia with pack correspondence and I would know, with a certainty that had nothing to do with sight, that he had just come in from the forest, or that he was in the study, or that he was standing in the hallway outside the room I was in, not entering.

That last one I confirmed on the third night.

I was in the sitting room with a book I was not reading, and I felt it, that pull, warm and directional, like a compass finding north. I looked up at the doorway.

Nobody there.

I got up and went to the hall.

He was standing ten feet from the sitting room entrance with his arms crossed and his back against the wall and the expression of a man who had been having an argument with himself and was not winning.

He looked up when I appeared.

We stared at each other.

"Were you going to come in?" I asked.

"No," he said.

"Were you going to stand in the hallway indefinitely?"

A long pause. "Possibly."

I didn't know whether to laugh or to be frightened by how much I understood exactly what he meant.

"Roger." I kept my voice low, even. "What is happening?"

"Nothing is happening."

"Something is happening."

His jaw tightened. "Go to bed, Sera."

"I'm not tired."

"I know." He said it like it cost him something. "Neither am I. That is exactly why you should go to bed."

I held his gaze for one long moment, long enough that the pull intensified, long enough that I felt it move from behind my sternum downward into something warmer and more dangerous, long enough that I saw him register the change and make a decision.

He pushed off the wall.

"Goodnight," he said, and walked away down the hall.

I stood in the doorway and watched him go and pressed one hand flat against my sternum where the pull lived and thought: Well. That is definitely going to be a problem.

I found Mia the next morning and told her, in the careful language of someone who was not panicking, that I was possibly experiencing some kind of unusual wolf behaviour.

Mia looked at me with an expression I didn't like.

"Define unusual," she said.

"Awareness of proximity. A sort of pull. Directional. Warm." I paused. "Toward a specific person."

Mia set down her coffee cup very slowly and carefully.

"Sera," she said.

"Don't."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're making a face."

"This is just my face."

"Mia."

She was quiet for a long time. Then: "You know there's a word for what you're describing."

"There are several words for what I'm describing," I said firmly. "Stress. Proximity adjustment. Normal pack reintegration."

"Sera."

"behaviour that is completely explainable by...."

"Sera." She said it gently but it stopped me. "You know what it is."

I looked at the table.

I did know. I had known since the hallway last night, standing there watching him walk away, feeling the pull stretch like something elastic between us. I had grown up hearing the elders talk about it that rare, irrevocable thing that wolves didn't choose and couldn't explain and couldn't undo.

I had grown up thinking it was romantic.

I was significantly less charmed by it now.

"He's my Godfather," I said.

"Yes," said Mia.

"He was my father's best friend."

"Yes."

"He's thirty-four years old."

"Thirty-five next month."

I looked up at her. "You're not helping."

"I don't think help exists for this particular situation," she said, not unkindly. "I think you just have to...."

The front door of the main house opened.

Roger walked through it and stopped when he saw us at the kitchen table, and the pull hit me like a warm wave, and I watched something move across his face that told me with absolute clarity that he felt it too.

He looked at me for one second, two, and then looked at Mia.

"The eastern patrol found tracks," he said. "Ashvale. Half a mile past the boundary line."

Mia was on her feet immediately.

He looked at me again. Something in his expression had gone very controlled, the way a door looks controlled when someone is pressing against it from the other side.

"Stay inside," he said.

Then he was gone.

I sat at the kitchen table and thought about how thoroughly, completely, catastrophically complicated my life had just become.