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“I can’t let it go,” she said. “I can’t. I need to know where I came from, why I’m here, why y’all can’t even walk past a wolf in the grocery store without going on high alert.”

Now Dad looked away from her too, and the severing was a knife twisting inside her. She held her tears inside, but her throat tightened around them.

“Please,” she said, but the word came with a sob. “Dad, please.”

Dad met her eyes again and seemed to see her for the first time since she’d ventured the topic. Slowly he began nodding. His final nod was firm and short. He had decided.

“Debra,” he said to Mom. “It’s time.”

“We weren’t going to do this,” Mom said. “Not ever.”

“When we didn’t know what it was doing to her. Now we know. Now it’s time to break the silence, Deb. For Leslie.”

Mom hid her face in her hands, then lowered them and finally, finally met Leslie’s eyes. Her frostiness had melted, and she looked smaller somehow. She leaned against Dad as though her whole body was trying to bear up under the weight of the story, many tons heavier for her than it ever could be for Leslie.

Mom said, “Derek was my cousin. Edmund was my uncle, my father’s brother. They were murdered by a wolf pack.”

Twenty-Nine

Mom’s words seemed to punch straight through Leslie’s chest.

When they dissected the news stories, both she and Ryker had concluded the “bear” must be wolves—and not the kind that were part of the animal kingdom. But at the time, despite seeing Mom’s maiden name in print, the victims that shared it had felt sort of removed from Leslie. She’d never even known this extended family existed. Now, though, the names of the victims came with a long-buried sadness in Mom’s eyes, in the bowing of her posture.

“Do you know what the motive was?” Ryker’s voice was kind, though he wouldn’t back down from the details.

“A land dispute,” Dad said. “The vampires were there first.”

“The wolves were so aggressive.” Mom’s voice gained a little volume as she spoke in facts. “They broke laws all the time, any time they wanted something, even little things like parking regulations. For generations my family shunned them, and they shunned us back, and that was that.”

When she didn’t continue, a tense hush settled over the room. There was so much more to tell. But Leslie bit her lip, forced herself to wait without pushing any further than she already had.

Ryker didn’t follow suit. “That was that, until…?”

Mom nodded as if checking in with herself, that she was okay to tell the rest. “A new alpha took over the pack a few months before Uncle Edmund and Derek were killed. He’d grown up there, and when he came of age, he killed the pack alpha. He was vicious, violent.”

She hesitated again, and Dad took up the narrative. “Under his control, the pack became vicious and violent too. He wanted to expand their territory, and who would a wolf pack most want to get rid of?”

The resident vampires, of course. In comparison, humans were weak opponents for a wolf pack who didn’t bother following human laws.

“When those wolves murdered my cousin…” Mom shook her head. Her hands were still tightly clenched in her lap. “We knew then it wasn’t about eliminating only the vampires who held land deeds. Derek was barely twenty years old, and he owned no property at the time. But he would’ve inherited Uncle Edmund’s.”

“Was that the only violent incident?” Ryker said.

“Far from it,” Mom said. “They liked arson. And they liked to gang up on a single vampire.”

Dad was nodding, and something flickered in his eyes, the candle flame of a difficult memory. “They really do track and chase down their prey like wolves in the wild. If you got caught out alone and they picked up your scent, you were in trouble.”

Leslie tried not to picture his description like a movie scene, but she couldn’t help seeing it, and in her imagination, the targeted vampire was… “Dad? Did they hurt you?”

“Took their fists to me one night,” Dad said. “Your mother had been asking me to move, but after that, she was determined.”

“I was stubborn,” Mom said. “But so was your dad.”

“No wolf pack was going to run us out of our own home. I wanted to stand strong. Thought I could outlast them, which was pretty stupid now that I look back.”

Yes, Leslie could see it all. How very like Dad, to dig his heels in against a lawless threat; and how very like Mom, to value his safety more than he did.

“I know I’m jumping ahead here,” Ryker said, “but after what you’d been through, why did y’all settle in Harmony Ridge of all places? I’d expect you to stay far away from wolves.”