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Seth Mays

Can you come home early?

Elliot Crane

Is something wrong?

It’s

Complicated

I’ll be there in two hours or less.

Elliot was out installing a new custom bar—the bar itself, shelves, counters around the room—in Green Bay.

He’d hired a couple people to help: Shira Walkingbear, who was the tallest and most jacked human woman I’d ever met, and Hank Redcreek-Watie, a barrel-chested man barely into his twenties who grunted more than he spoke.

Both lived on the Menominee Reservation—Hank had come up from Oklahoma to live with his great aunt, Lonnie, and avoid some kind of addiction problem, but Shira had lived on the Reservation her whole life and worked with Elliot pretty often when he needed a crew.

Shira and Hank were the only reason I felt like I could ask Elliot to come home, because I knew Shira could handle an install. And Hank.

That’s actually not true. I just wasn’t going to feel like a horrible person because I knew Shira and Hank were there to help.

This wasn’t the sort of thing you want to deal with on your own.

It really wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to deal with on my own.

In fact, I wasn’t even sure I could .

I needed Elliot.

I didn’t even know where to start. I didn’t think Elliot would have any answers, but if he was here, then I could at least manage to focus long enough to figure out what to do next.

It was kind of alarming just how much I’d come to rely on him—how much I needed him to feel like I was in control of my life. Especially since I’d gone out of my way to be independent… before giving up a few months later and moving into his house.

Our house. He called it that more often than I did, but he was doing his best to make sure that I had input into any decisions—like the new carpet in the living room, the design of the brand new four-seasons patio that had replaced the broken patio door, and the redesign of the gardens and the herbalism workshop we’d just put in the foundation for.

Even if it still seemed like his house to me, I at least felt like I belonged. Like I was loved.

Almost as much as I loved him. Not because I thought he didn’t love me—I just couldn’t imagine that anyone could ever love anyone as much as I loved Elliot Crane.

Which is why I needed him with me now.

And, honestly, Elliot might be the only person I knew who might actually have real advice for me, given the circumstances.

I was still staring at my phone, lost in the fog of my own bitter thoughts, when I felt his familiar warm hand on the back of my neck. I looked up.

“Hey.” I didn’t know what else to say. How to start. How to explain.

Elliot moved around to crouch in front of me, putting his hands on my arms. He knew me too well to think I’d called him home for anything good. “What happened?”

I focused on the details of his knuckles, the copper skin of his fingers dark against the paler skin of my arms, dotted with freckles thanks to the amount of time I’d spent outside in the sun helping him work in the garden and on the new building.

“My parents are dead.”

It was weird to say it. Extra weird because I literally hadn’t seen them since I was fifteen, when Noah and I had left without looking back. It felt like I should feel something. Grief. Horror. Maybe relief.

Nothing. Not even the tiniest twinge.

Elliot’s hands tightened on my arms, his features creasing into concern.

“Well,” I corrected, before Elliot managed to say anything. “My mother is. My father is missing, presumed dead. A lawyer called.”

“Seth, I’m so sorry.” His hands squeezed my arms again.

“I’m not.” It sounded callous, and I knew it.

But I’d been all but pretending they were dead for the better part of the last sixteen-plus years, so it wasn’t like their actual absence from the world meant anything profound—other than the fact that I now had to go back to the tiny-ass town Noah and I swore we’d never set foot in again because…

Well, I still wasn’t clear why I had to do that, but that’s what the lawyer had said.

I’d looked him up, so I knew he was actually a real lawyer.

And then I’d texted Hart and asked him to look into it.

He’d confirmed that James Humbolt was in fact a real lawyer and that my mother, Sarah Mays, had been found dead yesterday morning, and that my father was missing and presumed dead, as well.

Hart had started to awkwardly express his condolences, but I interrupted him to ask what found dead meant, and he said it could be anything from murder to suicide to accidental death—or that the authorities didn’t actually know what had happened.

I really, really hoped my parents hadn’t been murdered.

Because other than being annoyed that I had to deal with the aftermath, I honestly didn’t care that they were dead, but if they had been murdered, that was going to make Noah and I look like potential suspects, and that was a headache that neither one of us needed.

Okay, it wasn’t true that I didn’t care at all.

I did feel a slight sense of relief, honestly, now that I’d had a few hours to process the news.

And also annoyance that I couldn’t just get on with my life without even the shadow of them in it, because now I had to go deal with whatever mess they’d left behind.

Maybe that made me a bad person. But I really just wanted to go back to pretending they’d never existed.

“Did you not get along with your parents?” Elliot asked me, and I realized that I’d never talked about my childhood with him.

Because it wasn’t something I talked about.

Ever. Even Noah and I didn’t talk about it—we didn’t need to because we’d lived through it.

And because both of us preferred not to have to think about it any more than we already had to.

“That’s… putting it nicely,” I answered him, still feeling strangely hollow.

Elliot’s dark eyebrows rose, but he didn’t ask the question out loud.

I knew he wanted to know. If this was going to be even half the nightmare I was dreading, he was going to find out about at least some of it anyway.

And it would be better if it came from me.

Also, that’s what you were supposed to do in a relationship with someone you loved and trusted—tell them about the nightmare gory skeletons living in the darkest corners of your personal closet.

I still didn’t want to.

“They… were extremely devout evangelicals. Not the ordinary kind who go to church, but the tent-revival kind who force their kids to fast in order to purge themselves of sin. Who demand multiple days of prayer with no sleep. And send their kids to conversion camp.”

“Conversion… camp?” He clearly had no idea what that meant. Or he just couldn’t believe people actually did that.

“Like… anti-gay, anti-trans conversion.” It sounded banal when I said it out loud. Flat. Nothing at all like the horror it had been.

Elliot’s hazel eyes went wide. “Oh.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That… didn’t end well.” Possibly the greatest understatement of the life I’d tried to end there. “And when Noah got sick, they weren’t going to take him to the hospital because they could pray him better.”

“Oh, no…”

“I called an ambulance when he started screaming. My parents tried to refuse, but because it was clear that Noah was going to transform into something , they took him anyway.” Thankfully, the fear of Arcanavirus was high enough that there had been and still was an exception to the parental consent law in the case of a clear Arcana transformation—because the transformation could put others at risk if the patient shifted or became an orc, ghoul, or vampire.

That’s what saved Noah.

And what ultimately saved me, by extension.

Sitting on the edge of the couch, Elliot’s hands having fallen to my knees, I told him the story.

How I snuck out of the house that same night and walked more than five hours to the hospital—and promptly got caught by an orderly who took pity on me when I burst into tears and explained that my twin brother was there.

Shifter transformations aren’t smooth. I’m sure transforming into an elf or an orc or a faun also isn’t exactly a picnic—growing that much or having your legs reshaped has to hurt like hell—but shifters…

Our bodies get out of control. You shift half a dozen times in an hour, or more.

Everything hurts. Every sense is so sharp you feel like your eyes and nose and ears are bleeding.

I didn’t know any of that as a terrified fifteen-year-old.

I only knew that when they let me look through the tiny window of the room where Noah was, I watched my brother turn into a monster—then a wolf—then back to a monster—then back to himself… screaming and sobbing the whole time.

I begged them to let me in. To let me hold his hand.

They refused, of course. Because as a wolf Noah could have taken my hand off—or ripped my throat out.

They did let me stay by the door, though, probably violating easily a dozen hospital regulations and more than a few laws. I would forever be grateful for that.

I spent the night curled up in a ball, sitting on the floor, one hand and my forehead pressed against the door. Sometime during the night, Noah crawled over and lay on the other side, probably smelling me through the crack underneath.

I stayed there for sixteen days. The nurses would feed me when they fed Noah.

Nobody asked me where my parents were or why they hadn’t come to get me—or to see Noah.

I’m not sure if that’s because they knew who our parents were—and that they would have viewed their newly-Arcanid son as an abomination who had been judged as unworthy and cursed by God for being their son instead of their daughter.

Or maybe it was just because they’d seen enough kids be thrown out of their families for daring to get Arcana and become something other than human.

As for me, I’d proved my own unworthiness to my parents by standing by Noah—and probably also by liking boys instead of girls.