She cackled again.
“Where were you tonight?”
“With my new friends.” She widened her eyes. “Cam is so cute.”
Oh, great. Cute. “What do you know about him, Till?”
“I know he has a big…personality.” She laughed like we were at a comedy club. “You should’ve seen how huge your eyes got when you saw him.”
“It’s been a week for huge eyes.” She didn’t know the half of it. Actually, she did but she wasn’t admitting anything. She was a daughter of the deny, deny, deny generation, and I’d taught her well. But this was me she was dealing with. And in this case, the student had not surpassed the teacher.
“Only thing missing was an ah-ooga horn.” She cupped her hand in front of her mouth and unclenched it as she made the sound.
“Very funny, Till.” We had more important things to talk about than her sound effects.
She wagged her eyebrows and stood, staggered to her room, and I followed, unwilling to let this go. Not again. She shut the door as I was about to walk in, and I would’ve knocked but this wasn’t a knocking kind of situation. This was a demand for answers. This was a mother taking a stand. This was a time to bypass the niceties and get to the nitty-gritty.
And the nitty-gritty was, “I know you’re a shifter.”
Her shoulders tensed and she rolled them, still not looking at me, though I could see her face in the mirror’s reflection.
“I also know that you’re the bunny that bit me and the pack you’re running with”—the big-personalitied Cam— “is trouble.”
She turned and looked at me. I expected defiance and petulance. Instead, her eyes watered with tears and her lip trembled.
“A bunny, Mom. I’m a bunny.” She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. “This is a lot and Cam is helping me.”
“A lot. Yeah.” I shook my head. “A lotis being bitten by your daughter and turned, too.” This was out of my area of expertise. I didn’t know how, as a parent, I was supposed to handle this. “And that pack you’re running with is bad news.” And just to reinforce my position, I lowered my voice and added, “Dangerous.”
She scoffed. At hermother.
I held my temper in check. I couldn’t afford to alienate her until we hashed this out.
“The pack is strong, and they want to take their place in society.” She grabbed me by the shoulders, gave me a shake. “Shifters are the supreme race. Why would we need to hide away?”
Oh, frick. This was some bad rhetoric. No one who said things like that was ever right. Shifter, a group of humans, it didn’t matter. Going down thatsupreme raceroad was nothing but trouble.
And it’d only been one day with that pack. Yet, somehow, she already sounded completely brainwashed.
I wished I’d asked the other ladies more questions. I’d been giving myself time to stew and wrap my mind around this. I’d been compiling questions to take back to the Fascinators, but now I wished I’d asked them already. I could’ve called.
I knew deep down the other packs couldn’t feel this way, or the whole world would know about shifters, and there would be pack fights in the streets. And yet, I didn’t have the tools to say what shifters were or were not, only what I knew about words like hers.
“Tilly. Listen to yourself. This is some serious Hitler shit.” I needed her to understand that.
“Mother.” Her voice was sharp, a sword in my brain. “I can handle this. I’m an adult. I don’t need your help or your input.”
What?She needed my place to stay. My food in the fridge. But my input was out of the question?
No. That was unacceptable. “After you bit me, I shifted too.”
Her eyes widened, like she hadn’t understood what I was saying before.
“I met a group of women who want to teach me all about being a shifter. They could teach you, too. You don’t have to hang out with a group of troublemakers for answers.”
Anger flashed in her eyes. “They aren’t troublemakers. I’ve seen them around town before, I just never made an effort with them. Probably because they tend to stick to their own kind, so they weren’t welcoming to me before.”
“The ladies warned me about them before I ever saw them.” Didn’t she understand what I was trying to say? Or was she being willfully obstinate?
