“Yeah,” he said, distributing an unbent coat hanger and two marshmallows to each of them. “Okay.”
“Aunt Em’s going to cook?” Quinn said.
“Yep.”
Quinn gave a raucous cheer that must be heard by the neighbors. “Thank Olympus!”
“Uh, what?”
“He got that from Claire.” Ember rolled her eyes.
Aaron’s posture stiffened but only for a few seconds.
They stayed out for hours while Quinn ate what should have been a nauseating volume of chocolate and marshmallows. He groaned when Ember told Aaron about his petting-farm exploits as a two-year-old, toddling into a shed and eating goat sweet feed until Poppy and Ember found him.
“That’s weird now,” Quinn said. “Goats would run from me, wouldn’t they, Aaron?”
“Yep.”
“But when I was little, they didn’t know I was a wolf.”
“Well, one theory is you weren’t yet.”Quinn stirred the ashes with his coat hanger. “Aren’t we born with it? With wolf DNA?”
“Mmhm.”
“Then we were always wolves. Since we were born.”
“I don’t know, pup,” Aaron said. “It’s above my education level, I can tell you that.”
“Wait a minute.” But maybe Ember shouldn’t ask. She sat quietly so long, Aaron and Quinn began to stare at her. “Sorry, I—I might be overstepping with this one.”
“Go ahead,” Aaron said.
She shifted in her chair, and it rocked on the uneven ground. She held her chilled hands out to the flames Quinn kept stoking. “I’ve heard different explanations of…um, the bite. Are you saying none of you are…?”
“Are wolves because we were bitten? No, that’s not how it works.”
“I never thought about that,” Quinn said. “I did hear in school about the bite. Even one of my teachers said that’s one way it happens.”
“You want the long story or the short story?” Aaron said.
“Long,” Ember said as Quinn said, “Short.”
Aaron chuckled. “I’ll try splitting the difference. So… First of all, no study has ever indicated the bite does anything to DNA. Sure, some folks who’ve been bitten—their family line produces a wolf at some point. But it’s just as rare for them as it is for other humans. That’s what the studies showed. And this is according to Ezra’s study of our genetic traits, back about five years ago. His brain’s a giant vault of information, so I trust his research chops, and he didn’t go in with a predetermined desired result. He just got curious.”
“Unlike vanilla scientists?” To perpetuate a myth deliberately…one that bred fear for no reason…
“Well.” Aaron shrugged. “Anyway, as far as how itdoeswork… People used to think to create a wolf pup, both parents had to carry the gene. But now we know it shows up as a dominant gene in some people and a recessive gene in other people. That part is still baffling to scientists, but they’ve pretty much proved it. In humans the gene is recessive. In wolves the same gene is dominant.”
“Then your children would all be wolves, even if their mother wasn’t,” Ember said.
“Not necessarily. I have human genes to pass on as well. The catch for me is the wolf gene being dominant, if I pass that one on then the kid wouldn’t only be a recessive carrier. He’d be a wolf.”
“You don’t mind talking about this?”
“Nah,” he said. “It’s just science.”
She could hardly believe the extent of information he’d just given her. Maybe she could have found some of these facts online, but she’d also have found multiple denials and multiple embellished versions, with no way to identify good and bad sources.
