Spell Bond: More Tales From the Old World Page 3

  As a parent myself, that’s something I think about a lot. Which is why, although I cycled through a lot of possible titles for this story, I eventually settled on “Blowback.” As Will says, Sashi does the best she can with the information she has, at every step, and so does he. But they manage to hurt their kid anyway, and as we’ll see in “Birthright,” Grace isn’t going to forgive and forget.

  Blowback

  Will Brighton

  Boulder, CO

  On a sunny Saturday morning in March, I found myself kneeling on the floor of our new condo in Boulder, digging one-handed through a very full cardboard box. We’d arrived in town with the U-Haul less than a week ago, and walls of identical boxes still lined the condo.

  I’d picked this particular box because it was labeled Immediate Essentials, but it seemed to be mostly the things Sashi would need for work: her favorite stethoscope, a durable lunch bag, comfortable shoes, and a travel case containing a few pieces of nice but replaceable jewelry.

  “Are you sure you’re okay to go?” Sashi asked over my shoulder. She wasn’t helping me with the search, probably because I’d made it clear that I didn’t want her to do things for me just because it was faster with two arms. “Your blood pressure—“

  “Is going to be fine,” I promised, though I was focused on digging to the bottom of the box without letting the contents at the top collapse inward. I hadn’t found what I wanted: the bright blue water bottle that had been a Christmas gift from my daughter Grace. I used that particular bottle all the time, but now that I really needed it, it seemed to have vanished from existence.

  Finally I had to sit back on my heels, looking up at my wife. “I don’t think it’s in this one either.”

  Sashi frowned down at me, rubbing one eye like a child. We were both used to a near-nocturnal schedule, so six a.m. on a Saturday was very early for us. I was dressed and ready, but Sashi still wore a shin-length silk robe, and at least a third of her black hair had escaped the scrunchie she’d used to pull it up last night. My wife looked tired and vulnerable, and I felt a great rush of love and gratitude. I wasn’t used to this level of intimacy with anyone, and the fact that I got to have it with her….

  “Wait, weren’t you drinking from it during the drive up?” Sashi asked, interrupting my train of thought.

  I made a face. “Yes, I was. I better check the car again.”

  I put my hand on the carpet to push myself to my feet. Sashi took a step back to give me space, though I did see her take her free hand out of the robe pocket in case she needed to spot me.

  “We do have about seventeen other water bottles,” she said halfheartedly.

  “I want to bring the one Grace gave me.”

  Grace, our nineteen-year-old daughter, had texted the day before to invite me–and only me–to go hiking this morning at Chautauqua Park. I’ve only seen Grace in person a handful of times since learning I was a father, and the two of us had never been alone together. This was a big deal for me.

  It was also the perfect opportunity to show her how much I liked the water bottle. It may not have been a particularly sentimental or personal gift, but I cherished it more than any of the meager possessions I’d managed to smuggle out of LA after my “death.” After all, the bottle was the first present I’d ever received from my daughter.

  Hell, just those words—wife, daughter—still sounded so strange, even in my own head. I’d always had a pack family, but never dreamed I’d get the chance at marriage and a child.

  “Are you sure you’re okay to do this?” Sashi asked, not for the first time.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  I started down the hallway, with Sashi trailing behind me. She was trying to seem casual, as though she just happened to have a reason for entering and exiting rooms with me, but the effect was ruined when she said, “Will, your BP hasn’t really stabilized since we got here. I’m worried about strenuous physical activity.”

  “It’s just a walk in the woods.” I’d wanted to sound reassuring, but the words came out a little impatient.

  Sashi didn’t answer, but the fact that she was still following me around spoke volumes. It seemed like she was going to escort me all the way out to the garage in her robe, so I said over my shoulder, “I can check the car by myself, Sash. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  She stopped, looking embarrassed. “Right. Sorry. I’ll get dressed.” Turning, she practically sprinted back toward the bedroom, probably in an effort to leave me alone for as little time as possible.

  I sighed, though I couldn’t blame her for worrying. My body is…well, it’s been through a lot. I spent most of my first twenty-six years in and out of hospitals battling leukemia. Sashi and I actually met in an oncology ward, while I was in remission. Within months, though, the cancer returned, and my doctor—Sashi’s mother—conspired to have me…well, “infected with werewolf magic” is probably the nicest way I can put it.

  After that incident, I spent nearly twenty years in the Old World. When you become a werewolf, your body is the one thing you don’t have to worry about. We—I mean, they—have a hard time regulating emotions and impulses, and there’s an intense craving for the other form that can become dangerous. But werewolves can also eat anything they want, drink anything they want, and heal very quickly. They never get sick, and they don’t have to worry about things like blood pressure or even massive physical trauma. Sure, I exercised regularly back then, often with other pack members, but that was more about mood regulation than physical wellness.

  I’d always assumed I would die as a werewolf, but then, abruptly and unexpectedly, Scarlett Bernard….well, did something…that took away all the magic. I still don’t really understand what she did, but it left me the shocked owner of a newly human body, one that barely survived a battlefield amputation and the resulting blood loss.

  In the months since, physical health had been a moving target for me. Some of it was expected: I felt much weaker than I used to, of course, and my senses were duller. I caught a cold a few months ago, and it seemed astonishingly awful. I immediately regretted every time I’d let a human employee at the bar keep working when they had the sniffles.

  But all of that, even the colds, made sense for a human body. What I hadn’t expected was the intermittent fatigue and mild fevers. My blood pressure tended to spike and drop, and sometimes my pulse raced for no discernable reason. Sashi, who can communicate with my body on a cellular level, didn’t have a good explanation for any of this. She insisted that my body was telling her I was healthy—yes, I know how weird that sounds—which only seemed to worry her more.

  None of this troubled me too much, not really. I was supposed to die at the Wild Hunt—I would have died, if Scarlett hadn’t intervened. Every moment that I yawned or smiled or even breathed was a gift. But my wife saw it differently.

  Sashi was probably the most powerful thaumaturge witch on the continent, and my overall wellness was her passion project. It was frustrating for her to not understand what was happening in my body, even more so because there was no one she could ask about it. Any experienced werewolf can help you understand what fusing magic to your body will do to it, but no one, Scarlett Bernard included, can explain what happens when all that magic is suddenly yanked out by the roots.

  I do know one other person who went through this, but Eli is hard to reach these days. More importantly, he became a werewolf again pretty quickly, without the amputation or preceding cancer. The few times we’ve been able to connect since my “death,” he didn’t really have answers for me.

  My own best guess was that humans just aren’t made to first graft with, and then completely detach from, werewolf magic. Add in the sudden loss of an arm and relocation to a much higher altitude, and my body simply had no idea what was going on most of the time. I hoped that all these symptoms will resolve after my body’s had some time to recalibrate (for lack of a better term) to the recent changes.

  In the meantime, though, the whole situati
on was eating away at Sashi. Neither of us was used to spending the night with other people, so in sleep we usually reverted back to our own sides of the bed. Yet I often woke up to find my wife glued to my side, asleep, one hand under my shirt and resting over my heart. She had woken in the night and fallen asleep talking to my cells, making sure I was healing and staying cancer-free. Although she never said it out loud, I knew that was her actual greatest fear: a relapse of the cancer that plagued my childhood.

  Today, after a week of getting things set up in the new place, she would prefer that I stay home and take it easy. It was a perfectly reasonable request, and if anyone else had invited me out, I would have declined. But it was Grace. My daughter wanted to see me.

  And we needed to leave soon if I was going to be on time.

  I went through the kitchen and out the door leading into the garage. Sashi keeps her SUV pristine, so it only took a second to see that the bottle wasn’t in any of the cupholders, and another minute to look under and between each seat. No water bottle. I cursed, feeling a surge of irritation that surprised me—because it was so manageable. Human emotions are a hell of a lot easier than the kind that come with fur and claws.

  When I went back into the kitchen, Sashi was just entering from the hall, dressed head to toe in expensive yoga clothes— her version of casual outdoor gear. Her hair was pulled into a sleek bun, but she hadn’t bothered with makeup or jewelry, other than her wedding ring.

  I must have been staring, because she smiled at me, her face full of love and concern. But she said was, “How’s your stump today?”

  I threw my head back and laughed. “I never know if the first thing out of your mouth is going to be from you or your inner doctor.”

  “Inner physician’s assistant,” she corrected. It’s important to my wife that no one mistake her for an actual MD, even though she can heal damn near anything a human body can suffer. This is one of the many things I love about her.

  “My stump is fine,” I assured her. “I put the cream on, and I made that appointment to meet the new prosthetics doctor in two weeks.”

  “Good.” Sashi nodded to herself. “I’ve been talking to your skin, and I feel confident about the healing there. It’s the blood pressure that troubles me. I’m just not sure about hiking in this altitude.”

  An idea struck me. “Did I put it away in one of the cupboards?”

  “Will…”

  Turning, I began searching the shelves from left to right. Opening and closing all the cupboard doors felt a little awkward with only one hand, as most things still do, but I could look fairly quickly since the shelves were almost empty.

  “Perhaps you could just postpone for a few days,” Sashi suggested, hovering a few feet away. “Your BP was a little better this morning than yesterday. Maybe your body just needs a time to acclimate to the new elevation.”

  “I’m not going to postpone, Sashi,” I said, unable to hide my impatience. I knew I was being stubborn, and my wife was only trying to look out for me. But that didn’t stop me from adding, “Our daughter invited me to go for a hike. That’s huge for us. You of all people should know that.”

  Sashi didn’t say anything, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her lift her thumb to her mouth and began gnawing on a cuticle. I knew her well enough to recognize the guilt and apprehension on her face.

  Then I realized what I’d just said.

  My sudden appearance in Grace’s life last year had only widened a growing rift between her and Sashi. As I understood it, Grace had been furious with her mother for breaking up with John Luther, the closest thing she’d ever had to a stepfather, for no explainable reason. In fact, because Sashi had decided not to tell Grace about the Old World, there were many aspects of their shared life she couldn’t explain…and that was before her long-lost father came on the scene.

  I have never once faulted Sashi for the decisions she made, even her choice not to tell me about Grace. We couldn’t be together when we were two different Old World species, but it was more than that. Twenty years ago, Sashi watched the man she loved get torn apart by a werewolf, a few feet away. She’d been barely out of her teens at the time, a young witch with a controlling, unloving mother and a complicated relationship with magic. I understood why she thought she should protect Grace from that world. When I became a werewolf, Sashi had been young, pregnant, and completely alone, with almost no resources. In order to keep herself and our daughter safe, she’d done the best she could with the information she had.

  But Grace didn’t know any of that, and she resented the hell out of her mother for making choices that seemed senseless to her. Especially for refusing to reveal any information about me. Although she accepted the necessity of check-in phone calls and texts as a condition of her college tuition, she refused to see her mother in person. She wouldn’t even come to Las Vegas for Christmas, which broke Sashi’s heart. I received the water bottle in the mail.

  Even today, Grace had agreed that Sashi could drop me off at the ranger station (I didn’t have a Colorado license yet, and was waiting until I got a prosthetic arm), but she wasn’t supposed to get out of the car or even park and wait for me. I doubted that Sashi would ordinarily go along with a set of conditions from her own daughter, but today she’d agreed to all of it—for me. She was putting my chance to spend time with Grace above her own hurt and longing.

  And I’d just thrown all of that in her face.

  “I’m sorry.” Abandoning my search for the damned bottle, I turned around to lean against the counter. Before I had even opened my arm, my wife was inside my reach, wrapping herself around me. “You’ll be late,” her muffled voice said into my shoulder.

  “I’ll text on the way and let her know. It’s fine, sweetheart.”

  I held her closer, resting my cheek on top of her head. We had spent a lot of time like this in the last few months, just reminding each other we were together. That it was real. Automatically, I breathed in the scent of her shampoo. My sense of smell is diminished as a human, but I’m still in the habit of collecting information that way. Besides, I didn’t need werewolf senses to recognize that the smell of Sashi is the smell of forever-home.

  Once again, I marveled at our long journey to this moment, to being together. Sashi and I fell in love twenty years ago in Minnesota, and then spent almost all of that time apart. Renewing a relationship after so much time should have been complicated and nearly impossible, but falling back in love with Sashi was probably the easiest thing I’d ever done, like tossing a gallon of lighter fluid and a pile of logs on a flame that had never gone out.

  Part of me wanted this to be enough, these moments of holding Sashi tight and breathing her in. But I couldn’t escape the restless feeling that something was missing. This had been the one constant in all the months since the battle with the Wild Hunt. It was why we moved to Boulder. When Sashi first brought me back to Las Vegas, she took two months off to help me heal. Then she finally returned to work, but I couldn’t seem to settle into a life in Vegas. Sashi would often come home to find me poring through her photo albums, trying to memorize all the moments I had missed. I would quiz her on the smallest details about our daughter’s life—how old was Grace when she got her first tooth? First fever? Where did you go on vacation? What makes her laugh? I wanted to know all of Grace’s favorites: food, activities, music, TV shows, on and on. My poor wife must have felt like she was on a very strange game show, where the only prize was more questions. It must have hurt to talk about our daughter so much, when Grace refused to even come home for our wedding. But I couldn’t help myself—I had to keep asking.

  Finally, Sashi came home from work one morning and told me that we needed to make a change. Our daughter may have been barely taking Sashi’s calls, but my wife knew how much I needed to know Grace. So Sashi proposed that we uproot the life she’d spent all those years building in Vegas and start a new one, closer to Grace.

  I don’t know how long Sashi and I stood like that in the k
itchen, but eventually I dropped a kiss on her head, and she pulled back just far enough to see my face.

  “Maybe she’ll take it easy on me,” I offered.

  She gave me a wry smile. “Trust me, our daughter is way too competitive for that. She’s going to need to show you how strong she is.”

  There was a sudden lump in my throat. It might have been because Sashi knew our daughter so well and I didn’t know her at all. Or maybe it was because my wife was the strongest person I’d ever met, and I was pretty sure she would insist the opposite.

  Sashi’s face clouded over again. “Will, what if your temperature spikes? Or you might get dizzy and pass out. Or brush your stump against a tree and the skin could open—“

  I kissed her, a light brush of contact. “If anything happens, Grace will call you. She might be angry, but she’s still your daughter.”

  Sashi let out a shaky breath, nodding. “I just…”

  “I know. But you’re not going to lose me again, Sash,” I promised. “Not ever again.”

  Her nose wrinkled as she sort of squished her face at me, and I felt a rush of love so strong that I didn’t know how to speak for a moment.

  Then Sashi disentangled from me and reached over my shoulder, opening the last cupboard in the kitchen. It contained just one item: the blue HydroFlask water bottle from Grace. “Ta-da!” she sang.

  “You hid it from me?”

  “I did not hide it,” Sashi looked affronted. “I simply knew where it was and neglected to come forward. Besides, this gave me the chance to observe how you’re moving today.” She beamed up at me, and all I could do was smile. God, I loved her.

  “You can take my blood pressure again in the parking lot if you want,” I offered.

  Seeing that she was forgiven, Sashi reached up and took my face in her hands, pulling me down for one more brief kiss. “Like you even have a choice.” I laughed, and Sashi stepped away from me, turning toward the hall to our bedroom. “I’ll grab my purse while you fill your bottle?”