Howl For Me

Chapter Two — Ghosts in the Playroom

The problem with growing up in a house that prized perfection, Iris decided as she scrubbed a phantom smudge off the chrome faucet, was that the ghosts weren’t in the attic—they were in the playroom. And they wore aprons.

The lunch dishes were done, gleaming and sterile under the recessed lights. Her mother had retreated to her study for her afternoon “administrative hour,” which involved staring at spreadsheets and making other packs feel inferior via perfectly worded emails. The silence in the house was a living thing, thick and watchful.

Iris’s task now was “constructive leisure.” This could mean sketching (landscapes only, nothing abstract or emotional), practicing her French (useful for treaty negotiations), or reviewing pack lineage charts. Today, it meant organizing the hall closet, a tomb of neatly stored seasonal decor and childhood relics.

She pulled out a plastic bin labeled “Iris – Age 7-10.” The dust made her nose itch. Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was a collection of porcelain dolls. Their faces were serene, painted with delicate pink mouths and wide, unblinking eyes. She’d named them once. This one was Lady Beatrice. That one was Countess Seraphina.

A memory, sharp and sudden, cut through the quiet.

She was eight. It had been raining for days, and the wolf-energy inside her, then more of a puppy-ish fizz, was bouncing off the walls of her small body. She’d been playing with Lady Beatrice in the formal living room—a forbidden zone—making the doll ride a fierce, imaginary wolf through the cushion-mountains of the sofa.

Her mother had appeared in the doorway. Not angry. Never angry. Anger was common. Her mother was… cold. A glacier in a pearl necklace.

“Iris,” she’d said, her voice cutting through the playful growls Iris had been making. “What are you doing?”

“The Countess is fleeing the… the mud-slide of doom!” Iris had announced, too keyed up to register the danger.

Her mother had walked over, her steps silent on the Persian rug. She’d plucked Lady Beatrice from Iris’s hand. “Dolls do not ride wolves,” she said, her tone calm, instructive. “They sit. Gracefully. They observe. They are still. Do you understand?”

Iris’s lower lip had wobbled. The puppy-wolf inside whined, feeling the shift in the air. “But… it’s more fun if she has an adventure.”

Her mother had knelt then, bringing them eye to eye. Her perfume, a blend of iris and ice, had enveloped them. “Fun is for children who can afford the consequences,” she said, her green eyes holding Iris’s. “You cannot. You are not just a child. You are an Omega Vale. Every action is a brushstroke on the canvas of our family’s reputation.”

She’d placed the doll back on the shelf, positioning its hands just so. “Wildness is not becoming. It is not safe. For you, or for us.” Her voice dropped lower, a confidential, terrifying whisper. “I need you to understand this, Iris. I will help you. I will shape you. I will beat the wildness out of you if I have to. I will beat you to near death, or I will birth a new you from the ashes of the old. Which will it be?”

It wasn’t a shouted threat. It was a promise, delivered with the gentle certainty of someone reciting a grocery list. The words didn’t feel like a slap; they felt like a door slamming shut in a dark room. The puppy-wolf inside her didn’t growl. It folded in on itself with a tiny, terrified yip, and went very, very still.

The little girl she had been chose the new self. The ashes sounded quieter.

Back in the present-day hallway, Iris realized she was holding Lady Beatrice in a death grip. She carefully loosened her fingers, placing the doll back in the bin. Her chest felt tight, the old, familiar ache.

“Dramatic,” she whispered to the empty hall, trying to shake off the chill. “She really had a flair for the apocalyptic metaphor, didn’t she?”

But the joke fell flat, even to her own ears. The ghost had done its work.

That was the day the rules had crystalized, shifting from vague “be good” directives into a full-scale survival manual. Emotion is a liability. Desire is a strategic weakness. Joy is a distraction. Anger is a grenade with the pin already pulled. The goal was not to feel, but to perform feeling appropriately. A smile at a greeting. A look of polite interest during a dull conversation. A modest blush at a compliment. Nothing more. Nothing real.

Her wolf had learned faster than she had. It was smart. It heard “ashes” and decided the best way to avoid becoming cinder was to play dead. It stopped nudging her to play tag with the wind. It stopped whining at the scent of the forest beyond their manicured lawn. It became a silent, watchful shadow, pacing the confines she built for it, learning that every whimper, every scratch at the door, only made the walls thicker.

Iris closed the bin and shoved it back into the closet. The past was a neatly organized storage unit. Best to keep it locked.

She wandered into the sunroom, where a single, anemic ray of sunlight was struggling through the clouds. She plopped onto a window seat, tracing a finger through the condensation on the glass.

The wolf inside her stirred again, not with a whimper, but with a slow, deliberate stretch. It sent her a new image. Not of running, but of the polka-dotted socks from yesterday. A little splash of secret chaos against the skin.

See? it seemed to murmur, its voice in her mind feeling less like a ghost and more like a friend waking up from a long nap. We kept those. We hid those. We have those.

A faint, real smile touched Iris’s lips. It felt less reckless today. More like a secret.

Maybe the new self birthed from those ashes wasn’t the finished product. Maybe it was just a draft. A first attempt. And maybe, just maybe, the old self—the one who wanted adventures for her dolls—wasn’t completely gone. Maybe she was just in timeout. A very, very long timeout.

From down the hall, the soft chime of her mother’s computer calendar echoed. “Administrative hour” was over. The present was calling.

Iris stood up, smoothing her sweater. The ghost of the eight-year-old girl and her wobbly lip faded. The ghost of the mother’s promise lingered, a faint cold spot in the air.

But as she walked back into the heart of the silent, perfect house, she made a decision. Later, she would find her secret sketchbook—the one with the weird, twisty tree she’d been drawing for months. And tonight, she would wear the socks with the tiny grinning skulls on them, the ones she’d ordered on a midnight whim.

They were small things. Insignificant rebellions. But rebellions nonetheless.

The wolf inside her didn’t pace. It sat. And for the first time in a long time, it waited, not with desperation, but with a quiet, gathering kind of curiosity.