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An hour or so out of town, Michelle gets hit with an almost incapacitating wave of oh my god what have I just done.
Her phone’s been ringing off the hook since she left Seattle; about forty miles back, she finally remembered she could turn the sound off. At some point, she knows she’s going to have to answer her brother’s calls, because if he doesn’t shut up and listen to her for once, he may end up calling the cops on her, and while a week ago, a short stint in the local clink for the sake of justice wouldn’t have been much more than inconvenient, now she has some real incentive to stay out of trouble. And that incentive also happens to be the exact reason why she might get arrested in the first place.
“I guess I kinda stole you, huh?” she says aloud with a short, slightly hysterical laugh. The werewolf curled up on a pile of blankets on her front seat raises his head, ears pricked intelligently. He gives a low whine, and Michelle corrects herself, “Kidnapped you. I kidnapped you, didn’t I, Reggie?”
Reggie the werewolf pup barks happily and settles back down on his makeshift bed as Michelle exits off the PCH. Her phone lights up again, Michael’s contact picture (an enlarged Vomiting Emoji) flashing across her screen, and she reaches over to decline the call. She’ll return it when she gets home, probably. After she gets Misha on her side about the whole situation. It’s not like Michael’s going to do anything drastic on a holiday, anyway.
It’s hard to imagine that less than 24 hours ago, Michelle had been sitting at her sister’s kitchen table, reading a text message from the brother neither of them had heard from in almost ten years inviting them to Thanksgiving dinner. Misha had refused immediately with a half-baked excuse (“Flynn, sweetie, can you have the sniffles for me, please?” “Okay, um. Sniff.” “Thank you, baby”) and a self-satisfied smirk, but Michelle felt that as the middle child, the one who’d been closer to Michael growing up, and the one without kids or a husband to work her schedule around, she had some sort of obligation to go. To at the very least give Michael and his trophy wife the benefit of the doubt here.
“Maybe they’re really turning a new leaf,” she’d told her sister over the phone as she packed up her car this morning. “Maybe he’s finally pulled his head out of his ass and wants to make amends.”
“Maybe Mom and Dad stopped agreeing to watch his bratty-ass kids and he’s gonna swindle you into babysitting,” Misha had returned, and Michelle hadn’t had any kind of confident response to that.
But she went, and she held her tongue when Michael’s wife Lisa made ignorant comments about Michelle’s hairstyle, and she hugged her wretched little niece and nephew even though they immediately got paint and glue and something unidentifiable but undeniably sticky on her favorite pants, and she even made them a casserole in her good casserole dish with real mashed potatoes instead of the pre-packaged ones, and she was determined to be a polite guest no matter how much the evening sucked.
But then she’d looked up from her politely forced greetings, and there was a puppy in the living room, staring at her, head tilting back and forth, eyes bright with intelligence. And she was eighty-five percent sure it was a wolf.
“I study werewolves, you know,” she says now, conversationally, to Reggie as they enter town. “Not officially—I mean, I don’t have an agent or a whole lot of funding—but I’m writing a book about them. Similarities to us humans, mostly, reasons why the government should get off its xenophobic high horse and stop treating them like second-class citizens. I’ve managed to get some really good interviews, but not a lot of people are willing to connect their names to them, so it’s hard to get much credibility.”
She glances over—Reggie’s watching her with that same intelligence she first noticed that convinced her he really was a werewolf and not just a wolf or a wolf-like dog, that made her say to Lisa, I didn’t know you had wolf blood in your family, and almost got herself banished from the dinner table because her sister-in-law was just so offended by such an awful implication.
“You really understand me, don’t you?” she says, even though she knows he does, not just from her research but from the way he followed the back and forth at dinner, eyes moving from person to person, ears folding back whenever someone raised their voice, tongue darting out each time Qarly and Jauschwa dripped cranberry sauce off their plates. “You’re not scared?”
Reggie whines, reaching a paw over to rest on her leg, and pants contentedly.
“No,” Michelle decides. “You really did want to come home with me.”
Only a few minutes later, she pulls into the driveway of her modest townhouse on the outer edges of the city and shifts the car into park. Reggie sits up on all fours, tail whacking the back of his seat, to peer out the windshield. Michelle retrieves her phone from the divot under the dashboard and thumbs away all the missed call notifications, opening a text message to her sister.
Thanksgiving was a DISASTER. Who’s surprised? Not me. Call when you can, I HAVE to talk to you.
She doesn’t expect a quick response—it’s late; Misha’s probably putting her kids to bed right about now, and seven-year-old Flynn always takes a good hour longer than her brothers because she’s of the perfectly respectable opinion that one bedtime story is just not enough—but she stares at the screen for a minute or two anyway, stalling getting out of the car. Once she and Reggie cross the threshold of her house together, all this becomes real. There’s no going back.
Something cold nudges her wrist—Reggie’s wet nose. She tears her gaze away from her phone, and her heart instantly softens at the fuzzy face looking back at her—scrappy black fur, wide green eyes, teeth that could probably kill her with very little effort spread into the cutest smile.
“We’re home,” Michelle tells him, and means the we more than she’s meant just about anything in her whole life. Reggie pants, tail wagging excitedly. “Do you want to change? I probably have some clothes inside that’ll fit you.”
Reggie’s tail goes still a moment before his head tilts to the side in confusion. He gives a low growl, arching his back as he stretches across the front seat.
Michelle takes that as a no. “Okay,” she says gently. “I know it’s probably scary, shifting for the first time in front of someone new. You just take your time, okay, sweetie? Take as long as you need. You’re safe with me, no matter what.”
She hopes Reggie believes her, because he doesn’t shift out of his wolf form, not even once they’ve gone inside and Michelle has set up the guest room for him. She brings in the supplies her niece obliviously helped her steal, but seeing the stained dog bed, fancy dog food, and metal crate laid out on her living room floor makes her slightly nauseous, so she puts it all back in the garage. She puts fresh sheets on the guest room bed, instead, and lays out a plate of leftover casserole for Reggie to devour.
He’s just finishing his meal when Michelle’s phone buzzes with a text from Misha: Oh no. Ready when you are.
“I have to call my sister,” she says, standing from the kitchen table. “Are you—?”
But Reggie’s curled up on the floor next to his licked-clean plate, fast asleep.
Michelle huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. You had a long night, didn’t you? Good night, Reggie.”
She calls her baby sister from the couch, deciding she’d rather be close-by in case Reggie wakes up and needs something. Misha picks up not with the traditional Hello but by jumping right into it with, “So what did Michael do?”
Michelle opens her mouth, and the words fail her for a moment.
“Shell?”
“He adopted a werewolf,” she finally manages. It’s the first time she’s actually said it out loud, and her eyes suddenly well up with tears.
“I’m sorry, he did what?”
So Michelle explains it to her: how she’d asked her brother, point blank across the dinner table, where Reggie had come from, and Lisa had said, “Oh, he’s our werewolf, they’re way more work than they tell you,” and Michelle had almost physically fought her over it. How she’d kept probing her, asking how old Reggie was (“We got him when Qarly was born, so, 8 or so?”) and where they got him (“Special ordered, he cost us a fortune—they’re supposed to be intelligent, you know, but I think this one’s defective or something”) and they were defensive and awful and Michelle couldn’t believe someone related to her could be so stupid not to realize that the “thing” they adopted as a pet was a person , a child with a brain and a heart who needed love and care just as much as their half-human, half-demon kids did.
“He kicked me out, of course,” she says to Misha, and she’s pretty sure she’s crying, “said I couldn’t speak to his wife like that, not in their own house, and I went to get my stuff and go and I was so angry , Mish, I was so mad at him for leaving our family for that woman, and I felt so awful for this little boy they were doing horrible things to—they treated him like a dog, Misha, like he was their pet, a half-human werewolf! And when I turned around to leave, there he was. Reggie, sitting there, watching me. And he was so smart, and so intuitive. I asked him if he wanted to come home with me, and he… he followed me right out to the car.”
She falls silent, all her words spent. Her sister’s quiet on the other end—a rare feat—and then after a moment, Misha breathes, “Oh, my god, Shell. You kidnapped Michael’s pet werewolf?”
“No,” Michelle insists, gaze drifting toward the kitchen. “No, Misha, that’s exactly it, I didn’t. I… I think I adopted a son.”