Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Science-Fiction,
Fantasy,
Mystery & Detective,
Crime,
Paranormal,
Short Stories,
Fantasy Fiction; American,
Detective and Mystery Stories; English,
Fantasy Fiction; English,
Detective and Mystery Stories; American,
Parapsychology in Criminal Investigation,
Paranormal Fiction; American
heâd killed his wife. Sheâd been twelve and now she was a grown woman with silver threads running through her kinky black hair. The last time heâd seen her sheâd been still a little rounded and soft as most children areâand now there wasnât an ounce of softness in her. She was muscular and leanâlike him.
It had been a long time, but heâd never have mistaken her for anyone else: she had his eyes and her motherâs face.
Heâd thought you had to be bleeding someplace to hurt this badly. The beast struggled within him, looking for an enemy. But he controlled and subdued it before he pulled the car to the curb and unlocked the automatic door.
She was wearing a brown wool suit that was several shades darker than the milk and coffee skin sheâd gotten from her mother. His own skin was dark as the night and kept him safely hidden in the shadows where he and people like him belonged.
She opened the car door and got in. He waited until sheâd fastened her seatbelt before pulling out from the curb. Slush splattered out from under his tires, but it was only a token. Once he was in the traffic lane the road was bare.
She didnât say anything for a long time, so he just drove. He had no idea where he was going, but he figured sheâd tell him when she was ready. He kept his eyes on traffic to give her time to get a good look at him.
âYou look younger than I remember,â she said finally. âYounger than me.â
âI was thirty-five or thereabouts when I was Changed. Being a werewolf seems to settle physical age about twenty-five for most of us.â There it was out in the open and she could do with it as she pleased.
He could smell her fear of him spike and if heâd really been twenty-five, he thought he might have cried. Being this agitated wasnât smart if you were a werewolf. He took a deep breath through his nose and tried to calm downâheâd earned her fear.
âDevonte wonât talk to me or anyone else,â she said, and then as if those words had been the key to the floodgate she kept going. âI wish you could have seen him when I first met him. He was ten going on forty. Heâd just lost his grandmother, who had raised him. He looked me right in the eye, stuck his jaw out and told me that he needed a home where he would be clothed and fed so he could concentrate on school.â
âSmart boy?â he asked. Sheâd started in the middle of the story: heâd forgotten that habit of hers until just now.
âVery smart. Quiet. But funny, too.â She made a sad sound, and her sorrow overwhelmed her fear of him. âWe screen the homes. We visit. But thereâs never enough of usâand some of the horrible ones can put on a good show for a long time. It takes a while, too, before you get a feel for the bad ones. If he could have stayed with his first family, everything would have been fine. He stayed with them for six years. But this fall she unexpectedly got pregnant and her husband got a job transfer . . .â
Theyâd abandoned the boy like he was an old couch that was too awkward to move, David thought. He felt a flash of anger for this boy heâd never met. He swallowed the emotion quickly; he could do that these days. For a while. He was going to have to take that run when he got back home.
âI was tied up in court cases and someone else moved him to his next family,â Stella continued, staring at her hands, which were clenched on a manila folder. âIt shouldnât have been a problem. This was a family who already has fostered several childrenâand Devonte was a good kid, not the kind to give anyone problems.â
âBut something happened?â he suggested.
âHis foster mother says that he just went wild, throwing furniture, breaking things. When he threatened her, his foster father stepped in and knocked him out. Devonteâs in the hospital with