Christmas in Dogtown Read Online Free PDF Page B

answer. On some level, she’d always known, even if she’d chosen to disbelieve until someone shoved the truth in her face. This was her uncle, shoving. “Uncle Aim? Is that you?”
    The bear sat back on its haunches and looked at her a moment before the air around it shimmered. Its fur and skin melted and reformed and changed in seconds until, instead of a bear, a white dog sat before her. Not a special, huge, magical white dog, but a mutt. It watched her with a steady intensity, no wagging tail or bark of recognition.
    Yet she recognized it. Much as when she’d first entered the prep room at Madere’s, Rese’s mind buckled under an avalanche of memories. That dog had been around a lot when she was a kid. She and Chan had played with it more than twenty years ago.
    Resa and the dog stared at each other a long time before she turned her back and walked toward the house. “When you get ready to come in, I’m ready to listen.”
    She was sitting in the living room, in her grandmother’s old blue armchair, when Uncle Aim came in the front door. He sat on the sofa facing her, his brown eyes somber. “I’m sorry I had to do it that way. There’s no time to ease you into it. We should have told you a long time ago. Your daddy wanted to but I kept telling him to wait until you were old enough to decide what you wanted. But time’s running out.”
    Resa’s heart thumped as she acknowledged the doubts, questions, and fears she’d lived with her whole life—or at least her life in Dogtown. “Tell me now.”
    “We are what the people around these parts call rougarou. We carry the genes of the shapeshifter.”
    Resa nodded. The bear at the crossroads. The name of the community. She should be shocked, reeling, hysterical. Yet on some level, she’d known. She’d just been willing to ignore it until someone forced her to acknowledge it. “By ‘we’ you mean the Maderes?”
    Uncle Aim leaned back against the sofa cushions and scratched distractedly at his beard. Resa bit back the urge to ask him about fleas. “The Maderes and the Caillous. Two parts of a whole. For seven generations, we’ve been here. Before the Grand Dérangement, we were together in Canada . Each generation produces a shapeshifter.”
    “My father? Was he..?”
    Uncle Aim shook his head. “The shapeshifter has to come from the union of a Madere and a Caillou—no other way. I was the firstborn of the last Madere-Caillou union. But there were no Caillou women in my generation, so I never married.”
    Understanding slowly bloomed in her gut, and Resa had trouble breathing. “What happens if there are no more Madere-Caillou unions?”
    “The rougarou dies out. We become like everyone else. We get sick and die like everyone else. Do you understand what I tell you, niece?”
    Uncle Aim had been sick. Chan was sick.
    “This is why everyone has pushed Chan and me together.”
    “You and Chan are the first Madere-Caillou couple—the only one—of your generation.” Uncle Aim chuckled. “Oh, there was rejoicing in Dogtown when you were born, niece. After that whole string of boys, here finally came a pretty little curly-haired Madere girl, just six months behind Chandler Caillou.”
    Resa couldn’t speak. “Is Chan going to die?” Are you going to die?
    “Eventually, but probably not right now. His daddy said he has a cold is all.” Emile Madere, sausagemaker and part-time shapeshifter, looked out the window, into the woods. “But we’re near the end of the cycle. Six ty years without a new union, and the magic dies.”
    Chan’s words, the ones he’d spoken on that first day outside the White Castle , came back to her. Sometimes we’re born into situations , he’d said. We have to decide if we’re gonna be a part of it or if we’re gonna put an end to it .
    “He came back to be a part of it,” she whispered, fingering the end of her shoelace, where the plastic tip was coming o ff. She’d have to buy new ones.
    Damn it. They’d put