Chapter 7 – Ghosts at the Kitchen Table
1128 Words
By the time her shift finally spat her out, the sky over Riverside was a dirty gray smear and her bones felt hollow.
Lupa parked two blocks from her parents’ place and finished the walk on foot, letting the familiar human neighborhood soak into her. Brick townhouses, narrow front yards, the smell of fried onions and car exhaust. A dog barked three doors down — real dog, not one of hers, its joy uncomplicated and loud.
Her parents’ house was the same crooked two‑story it had been her whole life, paint peeling a little more around the windows, flower boxes stubbornly clinging to late blooms.
She didn’t bother knocking.
The bell over the auto shop door chimed as she slipped through the side entrance. The bay smelled of oil, rubber and her father’s particular brand of grumbling.
“Shop’s closed,” Corin called from under the raised hood of a sedan. “Come back tomorrow unless your wallet’s heavier than your common sense.”
“Wow,” Lupa said. “Customer service really thriving, huh?”
He jolted, thunked his head on the hood and swore. “Lupa. Damn it, girl.” He backed out, wiping his hands on a rag. “You trying to send your old man to an early grave?”
“Pretty sure the cholesterol’s doing that already.”
He gave her a look that was ninety percent exasperation, ten percent relief. His hair had more gray in it than the last time she’d really noticed. The lines around his eyes were deeper.
“You eat?” he demanded.
“I came straight from patrol.”
“So that’s a no.” He jerked his chin toward the house. “Your mother made enough food to shame an army. Go before she decides to come drag you herself.”
Mara was already at the kitchen doorway, apron on, hands on hips. “Too late,” she said. “You look like you lost a fight with a garbage truck.”
“Just a raccoon,” Lupa said automatically, then winced at the half‑truth.
Mara’s eyes softened as she took her in — the shadows under her eyes, the stiffness in her shoulders. She stepped forward and pulled Lupa into a hug that smelled like rosemary and dish soap and home.
For a moment Lupa let herself sag into it, wolf settling, restless edges dulling.
“Sit,” Mara ordered, releasing her. “Eat. Then you can tell me which part of ‘be careful’ you didn’t understand this week.”
The kitchen hadn’t changed. Same mismatched chairs, same scuffed table, same magnet‑covered fridge. A new photo was wedged among the old ones — Nyla, grinning shyly beside Lupa at some pack event, Mara’s handwriting looping names along the edge.
Lupa’s throat tightened.
She sat. Mara shoved a plate in front of her: roasted chicken, potatoes, something green trying to pretend it wasn’t healthy.
Corin thunked down into the opposite chair with a plate of his own. “Heard on the human news there was another ‘wild animal incident’ by the river,” he said around a mouthful. “That anything we need to worry about?”
“Handled,” Lupa said. Technically true. For very fragile values of handled.
Mara arched a brow. “Handled like last time, or handled like when you came home at seventeen smelling like burned ozone and wouldn’t look either of us in the eye for a month?”
The fork paused halfway to Lupa’s mouth.
Old air pressed in: antiseptic and fear and blood she hadn’t earned. A boy’s voice calling her name and then nothing at all.
She forced the bite down. “That’s a very specific simile, Mom.”
“Specific memories make specific mothers,” Mara said softly.
Corin scowled at his plate. “Those old stories don’t help now.”
“They help me,” Mara said. To Lupa: “We didn’t forget what it did to you. Whatever they told you to bury.”
Lupa stared at the pattern in the wood grain, jaw tight. “I’m not seventeen anymore.”
“No,” Mara said. “You’re a grown woman they still try to drag into their circles without asking. That doesn’t make me sleep better.”
Corin cleared his throat. “Your alpha treating you right?” he asked, too roughly. “Still giving you decent shifts? Not sending you into crap alone?”
Alder’s face flashed in her mind: steady eyes in rain, his hand hovering a breath from her skin. The way fear had spiked through their bond when she’d gone down under the monster’s blow.
“He’s… doing his job,” she said. “Keeping us breathing.”
“And the forest one?” Corin’s mouth thinned. “They said on the grapevine he’s back in town.”
“Dad.” Lupa’s voice sharpened.
“What? I can ask. Man breaks my girl’s heart, I get an opinion.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” she muttered.
“It never is,” Mara said. Her gaze turned inward for a moment, as if she were sifting her own old scars. Then: “You remember the story of the twin‑bound wolf?”
Lupa almost smiled. “The one who loved a river and a mountain at the same time? You used to tell me that so I’d stop crying about choosing between track and tree‑climbing.”
“And you always picked both and came home covered in mud,” Corin said.
Mara’s eyes met Lupa’s, suddenly very serious. “In the oldest version,” she said quietly, “the story doesn’t end with her choosing one and losing the other. It ends with her changing the path the river takes and carving steps into the mountain. Elders cut that part when they decided fate should look tidy.”
Heat pricked behind Lupa’s eyes.
“I don’t have a river and a mountain,” she said. “I have a city with too many ghosts and a forest that wants me back like a missing limb.”
“And a girl at my table who thinks she has to bleed alone for everyone’s peace,” Mara replied. She reached across, covering Lupa’s hand with hers. “The Moon doesn’t make mistakes, Lupa. But elders do. Don’t let them make another one on your back.”
A name rose in Lupa’s throat unbidden. Iven Rhys. The boy who’d gone into the circle and never come out.
She swallowed it with the last of her potatoes, tasting ash.
“I’ll try,” she said.
Outside, somewhere between river and trees, something that remembered fire and promises shifted in the dark, listening.
- Writer
