Asanni (3 page)

“Bleithast, she-wolf, blaidd, he-wolf and
blaidd-dynion, which means wolf-people, are words from our old
language, close to the humans’ Old Welsh, and not often used
anymore. Vampires rarely call themselves Tel-Urugh these days, even
though they aren’t actually vampires, in the human sense of the
word. Similarly, you don’t say asyr, asanni and asyngaer for
wizard, wizardess and wizard-kind either. Vampire, wizard,
werewolf, or simply wolf, are more practical terms.”

“We all adopted human languages, which make
sense. We live among them. Wizards use Prakhart, our
lingua
franca
, only for spells—you can’t cast a spell in English, or
Chinese, or Arabic.”

“Back in time when they still believed in our
existence, humans had a name for werewolves, vampires and
wizards—Langaer, which means The Tall People,” Jack said.

“Until they caught up with us in height.”

“That’s good because it helps us to blend
among humans. You can call it natural adaptation.” Jack’s eyes
found Astrid’s. “Why does being a bleithast trouble you so much,
Astrid? You’re certainly not new to things beyond the ordinary.” He
steered the conversation back toward a more important subject: the
girl who, after a single touch, had suddenly become the centre of
his universe.
Oh, God!

Astrid took a moment to formulate her
thoughts. “No, I’m not. And you’re wrong. I don’t have a problem
with what I am. What truly scares me is the fact that I don’t know
what’s happening to me during the transformation. I have no
recollection afterward. My grandparents described the process to
me. They were with me most of the time, except when I insisted on
doing it solo. And then I was attacked. Since then Tristan and
Livia have been watching over me. When I change, I don’t remember
anything, I only know that I black out and that I have chunks of
time when I have no idea what’s happened.” She shrugged. “As far as
I know, I could be suffering from ‘split personality
disorder’.”

Jack leaned forward. “I can help you go
through it the next time, and every time after that, as long as you
need me. You’ll have memories, you’ll be able to connect time. You
have to learn how to control the change. It’s easy and natural for
us.”

“None of you are a half-wizard.”

Jack ignored her remark. “Do you change every
month? No exceptions?”

“It was irregular at the beginning, every
three to four months, but I always knew when it was coming... Look,
can we stop here now? I have to be at the hospital at six thirty
tomorrow morning. I need at least one hour to go through the
patient’s file. I should sleep a bit, too. I’ve kept my promise.
I’ve been open, haven’t I?”

Jack stood up. “You know, if you decide to
come home, you can still be a doctor. We also need occasional
medical attention. Not too much, but still…”

The corners of her lips curved into a tiny
smile. “I’m an MD, Mr. Canagan, not a veterinarian.”

It flashed through her mind that he might
feel offended, but Jack laughed heartily. “I’m sure most of us
would risk it. By the way, where am I going to sleep?”

“In the spare room down the hall. I apologize
for not having it ready, I didn’t expect visitors. The bed sheets,
pillows and the blanket are in the closet. I believe you have your
pajamas and toothbrush with you.”

They stood across from each other, with the
coffee table between them.

“I have a toothbrush.”

Astrid noted that he didn’t mention pajamas.
“I have just one bathroom, and I’ll need it between five thirty and
six. After that, it’s all yours.”

“Yes, ma’am. My car with my toothbrush is
parked a block from here. It’s going to take a minute to get there
and back. Don’t get into trouble in my absence.”

“I’ll do my best, I promise,” she said and
walked toward the kitchen.

“Astrid?” He was a step behind her.

“Yes?” She stopped and turned to him,
surprised to find him so close. She took a small step back. Jack
reached for the cups she was holding. “Let me help you with that.”
His fingers lightly brushed hers. The same warm sensation she’d
felt when she’d touched his throat earlier that evening ran from
her fingers through her entire body.

“Why Rosalie Duplant? Why did you choose that
name?”

Astrid smiled. “She was a famous opera singer
from eighteenth century France. Good night, Jack.”

WHEN JACK insisted on driving me to the
hospital the next morning, leaving no room for negotiation, I
briefly reconsidered my unannounced decision to go with him after
my next change. I had less than two weeks before the next full
moon, but that would give me enough time, I’d calculated, to do the
surgeries that had already been scheduled.

Now I realized that I was stuck with him in
my house for the time being. I felt ambivalent about his visit. On
one hand, it was a relief. I did need help. My uncle knew that, and
I’d been expecting him to step in. On the other hand, my life here
in this small city in the Pacific Northwest had been relatively
safe and pleasant, and I was reluctant to change it. It was a slow
and quiet life, but I’d come to like its unhurried, familiar
routine, and the way I blended in among its inhabitants. Who would
look for me here? Who would make a connection between Dr. Rosalie
Duplant, a local surgeon, and Astrid Vandermeer-Mohegan,
half-wizard, half-werewolf in hiding?

Tristan and Livia, my vampire friends, had
come to this remote place with me, appointed by my grandparents as
my protectors.

I’d moved to Rosenthal a year ago. I’d
accepted the position of trauma surgeon that had to be reposted
three times before I applied for it. At that moment, it seemed to
be a nearly perfect solution. I bought the smallest house I could
find in this town of wealthy retirees and amateur golfers, and a
nondescript car—a two-year-old cobalt blue Honda Accord, which I
almost never used. The hospital and pretty much everything else in
Rosenthal was within ten to twenty minutes’ walking distance from
my tiny house at 228 Bergamot Drive, depending on whether you were
in a hurry or not.

Of course, I missed Seattle, Ella and
Arnaldur—my grandparents and the only parents I’d ever known—my
previous job at the ER, my few friends. And the rain. Not that it
didn’t rain a lot in Rosenthal. But even when it rained in earnest,
it still wasn’t that magnificent curtain of water that was possible
only in Seattle.

I was aware that this ordinary little town
was a temporary solution, but I couldn’t pretend that my life was
ordinary anymore. Not since I’d turned twenty-three. Before that,
as I’d briefly tried to outline to Jack the night before, I’d been
aware of my abilities. I was an asanni, a wizardess. I grew up with
my skills, I knew how to control them, yet I seldom used them. If I
needed to light a fireplace, matches worked just fine. I didn’t
have to do it with the power of my mind or a movement of my
hand.

My grandfather was a prominent human rights
lawyer, my grandmother a well-known pediatrician. Arnaldur
currently worked as the Secretary of the Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination with the UN and Ella was the
Pediatrician-in-Chief of the Children’s Hospital in Seattle.
Wizards often chose medicine or law as their profession. My
grandparents trained me to bring my unusual talents under perfect
command. That was an important part of my upbringing because we had
to learn from an early age to never purposely draw attention to
ourselves.

As for my parents, I knew that my father had
died when I was a baby. Much later I learned that he’d been a
werewolf. For reasons known only to she, my mother had left me in
her parents’ care when I was one year old and then disappeared from
our lives almost completely. She’d married another werewolf, Seth
Withali, the leader of the Copper Ridge clan, but they didn’t have
children. And that would have been pretty much all I ever wanted to
know about her if the Copper Ridge clan, for some reason, hadn’t
wanted me for their purposes. Did my mother have a role in it? Or
was she trying to protect me somehow? And from what exactly? She
wouldn’t let anyone harm me, would she? Why had she never contacted
me? These were the painful questions I preferred not to think
about.

By the time I was a teenager, Arnaldur and
Ella had carefully explained to me that soon I would likely start
changing into a werewolf on a regular basis. Having had a werewolf
for a father, there was only a slim chance I wouldn’t change. But
year after year had passed and when nothing had happened, I started
to believe that somehow, as in some sporadic cases of wizard and
werewolf offspring, I hadn’t picked up that particular trait from
my father.

In fact, I was a late bloomer: my
metamorphosis had been just a few years overdue, and for a reason,
as I learned later. And then one fine morning, when I was just two
months shy of twenty-three, I suddenly felt horrible pain all over
my body, as if something or somebody was trying to turn me inside
out. I didn’t remember much more than the pain, that ripping,
dislocating horror inside my body. Darkness came to the rescue that
first time, and had every other time since.

The next thing I knew I was lying naked on
the moss. Ella covered me with a blanket and carried me in her
arms, like a small child, back to the house.

FOR REASONS I’d just started to understand,
my grandparents and Uncle James had kept me more or less ignorant
of my Red Cliffs family. Immediately after my first change,
however, Arnaldur had contacted my uncle and asked for help. They’d
agreed I would have to go to Red Cliffs and stay with my father’s
relatives until I learned how to get my new abilities under
control.

Angry with my grandparents for keeping me in
the dark for so long about my clan, I also felt betrayed by my
father’s family who’d waited—or so I thought—to see if I would
become one of them before accepting me. Terrified of the experience
of my first transformation, I refused to go. The asyngaer
Grandmaster Arnaldur and James Mohegan, Red Cliffs’ Alpha, or boss,
or chief—I was never sure about his official title, but he was a
big gun there—combined their methods of persuasion in an attempt to
reason with me. I put up such fierce resistance that Red Cliffs was
quickly taken off the agenda.

Grandpa and Grandma helped me to cope with my
transformations as much as they could, no doubt, following advice
from my werewolf family.

Two years of random shifting had taught me
how to recognize the symptoms. I nicknamed them PWS (pre-wolf
syndrome) or
paws
. It helped me disappear in time, hide, go
through the change and come back. In the meantime, I finished my
schooling by going to England to complete my postdoctoral degree,
and fell in and out of love several times.

THEN THE change had gradually become more and
more regular. Needless to say, I hated it. I hated being weak and
unable to control my body and mind. Having black holes in my
memory. Waking up naked, on the cold earth of the small cave on our
Silver Spring ranch near Seattle, hastily purchased because of that
cave. Feeling different, even smelling different, although I could
live with that particular part. The scent, no matter how hard I
tried to dislike it, wasn’t unpleasant at all. On the contrary. I
didn’t tell Jack, but that’s how I had known he was there the
previous day. It was that familiar, both similar and different,
pleasant, musky, spicy scent that gave him away.

The wake-up call had come last March, when
I’d shifted back to my less furry form to find myself in the
presence of two unknown men, my hands and feet neatly tied with a
thin, silky rope. My vision was still hazy and all my senses
dulled. One of the men jerked me to my feet, the other one reached
out with his hand to touch my naked breasts. That instantly
sharpened my senses. I used all my energy to translocate far enough
to get away from them. Still dizzy and weak from the change, the
tranquilizer they’d used on me, as well as from translocation, I
climbed up a tree and I watched them searching for me. They were
ugly, they smelled bad and they were mad with rage for losing
me.

Soon after that, Tristan and Livia entered my
life. Tristan is half-human, half-Tel-Urugh. Livia is a pure
Tel-Urugh. And we were all doctors.

We quickly became friends.

WE ALL knew who had been behind the attack,
and that was the reason why Uncle James had sent another
babysitter, that Jack Canagan. I wondered if he was my relative,
too: my cousin, my great-great-great grand-father, my second uncle
twice removed… With werewolves you could never tell. Arnaldur said
that they were virtually an immortal species, and that they always
appeared to be in their prime.

Blood relatives or not, I would say we were
somehow connected: when I’d touched him, first his neck and then
his fingers later, I’d felt some sort of strange warmth rippling
through my body. I’d never felt anything like it before. It was not
only pleasant, but it also significantly smothered my edginess
caused by Jack’s sudden appearance.

Going to Red Cliffs with Jack might indeed be
the best solution. “They didn’t betray you, Astrid,” my grandfather
often said. “We thought it was best for you. Once you get to know
your family, you’ll like them a lot.”

Well, I thought, soon we’d see.

A PART of me was relieved when I finally
dropped her off at the hospital.

Before last night I hadn’t even been sure if
I believed in werewolf bonding. I’d always thought that it was
wrong to be left without a choice. There was nothing great about
some random, unknown power ruling one of the most important aspects
of your life.