“I know.”
“I’m just saying. If they find out later…I mean, if heisan apex…”
“Not an apex in general.” They might as well be clear and precise. “I could date a vampire, and they’d have nothing to say.”
“I guess not.”
“Not a guess. Come on. They couldn’t care less that Aunt Jen remarried a vampire. I think Mom finds it kind of…gosh, I don’t know, edgy. But good-edgy, not danger-edgy.”
“But lupinesaredanger-edgy,” Saffron said around a mouthful. She sipped her coffee, then shook her head. “I mean, the parents can be weird about some things, but this particular thing? They’re not wrong.”
“They’re a little over the top.”
“But for reasons, Willow. Lupines are legit deadly.”
“So are vampires, if they want to be.”
“Well, and that’s the difference.”
Willow sipped her coffee and tried to figure out how much to say to her sister. She loved Saffron, trusted her, yet Saffron wouldn’t be above going to Dad and Mom if she felt Willow needed an intervention. It was the two-edged sword of a close-knit family, or at leastclose-knitas the Fitzgeralds defined it. Sometimes that closeness wrapped Willow up like a comforting blanket. Sometimes it itched against her back like a cheap sweater. She longed for the day she could move out from under this roof into her very own apartment. First things first, though. She had to finish college. Dad and Mom didn’t have the means to help, but she was allowed to live at home rent-free until she earned her degree.
“It seems to me,” she said slowly, watching Saffron’s eyebrows, watching the set of her mouth, ready to redirect her sentence if needed, “that the bad lupines can’t possibly outnumber the good ones. Or we’d hear more about their crimes. Since it’s…well, popular not to trust them.”
Saffron sipped her coffee. She broke off the edge of her cookie but didn’t eat it. At last she met Willow’s eyes. “Sure, there are less-bad lupines. That doesn’t mean there are actual good ones.”
“None at all?”
“Some might seem to be, but it’s probably because they’ve never had a real opportunity. For…you know, for crime, or violence, or whatever.”
Willow imagined herself gripping courage in both hands. Saffron was twenty-two; she was twenty-three. It was about time they talked through this stuff. About time Saffron faced that not every view of Dad’s—or of certain folks in Harmony Ridge—was shared by Willow.
“What?” Saffron said.
“I just don’t believe that,” Willow said. “I don’t believe they’re slaves to their genetics. I think it’s harder for them, they’re predisposed to aggression. I mean, there’s got to be research for that; it’s in textbooks. But I think a lupine who wanted to could make other choices. Could be really good, if he wanted to be.”
Saffron shook her head. “So, what, we give them the benefit of the doubt?”
“Gosh, Saffron, isn’t that what we do for people every day? Isn’t that what you do at work, at the grocery store, at college, everywhere you go?”
“But those are humans.”
“So what?”
Saffron rolled her eyes at the stupidity of the question. “So, duh, lupines aren’t human.”
The bristling hair on the back of her neck, the clenching of her teeth, the heat in the pit of her stomach—it all flooded Willow’s body before she could think. She wanted to yell at her sister, wanted to upend the plate of cookies in Saffron’s lap. She drew a deep breath. Where had that come from? Saffron wasn’t entirely wrong, just flippant.
“Willow?”
“Sorry. I just…I don’t know.”
She wrestled down the fury that made no sense. She tried to say again,I don’t believe that.She tried to say,lupines are people too. Human, no. More than human, yet their personhood wasn’t diminished by their apex biology. She was almost sure of this. She needed to be completely sure.
Four
OnFridayEzrawasup with the sun. Not unusual for a wolf, even on a weekend. His body was tuned to natural rhythms in a way he took for granted but that didn’t seem true of his human coworkers, some of whomenjoyedpartying all night and sleeping all day, and most of whom struggled desperately with something as simple as daylight saving time. (Apparently most humans based their sleeping and waking not on the sun but on the clock’s digits. He really didn’t get that one.)
Today his instant wakefulness was sort of a problem. He now had hours to fill before he could leave for the fair. Hours to overthink.
