Hyacinth (7 page)

“Her pack killed
our family, Ellie,” Griffin said, as if she needed reminding.

Lucy glanced up.
“That poor girl has been through heaven knows what, under the thumb of her
insane twin brother. If Lila says she is telling the truth, that she did her
best to help you and us, then we owe her our lives.”

Griffin shook
his head. “Hugh? Alex?” He tried for male solidarity. “You see where I’m coming
from, right?”

Alex and Hugh
were on the couch watching a Broncos game and trying their darndest to stay out
of it.

They glanced at
each other. “Ah-hem…” Hugh coughed. “You see, Griffin, it’s…”

Griffin held up
his hands. “No, I can see you don’t. So don’t even bother trying.” He grabbed
his jacket and stormed to the door. “I’m going out.”

Adelaide laid a
small hand on his arm, making him pause. “You have to figure out how to forgive
Selene,” she whispered to him.

He jerked away
from her touch and felt a momentary pang of regret as rejection darkened the
young girl’s eyes. After years growing up with Ellie, he was still getting used
to Adelaide’s gentler and more sensitive nature.

“Sorry,” he
muttered and turned to the others. “And if you insist on being friends with Selene,
I don’t want to hear about it.” With that he banged out of the house.

Everyone was
quiet for a few moments.

“Ugh!” Ellie finally
exclaimed, throwing up her arms. “Stubborn. Idiotic. Obstinate… Grrrrr… Darn
brother!”

Lucy paused in
her stitching. She reached over and patted Ellie’s hand soothingly. “Just give
him time, sweetheart.”

“He has to get
to know her to change his mind.” Ellie angrily hopped up from the couch and
started pacing. “Time won’t help that if he’s avoiding her.”

“Don’t force him
yet,” Adelaide said.

Alex got up and
wrapped his arms around Ellie, pulling her close. His embrace calmed her in a
way she so desperately needed right then.

“Listen to Adelaide,”
Alex whispered in her ear.

With a big sigh,
Ellie nodded her acquiescence. “Okay… I’ll try. He’s just so dang stubborn I
could scream.”

“Come on, love…”
Alex linked their fingers together and gave her hand a squeeze. “Let’s go home.
Give Griffin some time to cool off.”

Ellie smiled up into
Alex’s twinkling silver-blue eyes. “Okay… okay. ‘Night everyone.”

They received a
chorus of goodnights as they headed out the door.

Selene wandered
through a wooded area. She was dreaming…. She knew this. But it was different
than before. The soft snow blanketing the forest floor hushed the sound of her
steps. She heard gurgling and realized that she was close to a river. She could
almost feel the chilly mist that rose up as the water bubbled over stones
rounded smooth by the passage of time and elements.

She felt as
though she was looking through a dense, grey fog. Her vision cleared a little,
but not much. Night blanketed the forest, almost swallowing it, but was pushed
back by the brightness of a near-full moon dropping through the tree branches and
casting silvery rays of light on the snowy ground.

Selene moved
stealthily, silent as a shadow. She entered a small alcove where the water was
still, not quite frozen. She leaned over to look and then recognized that it
was not shadow that she resembled, but moonlight. She was in her wolf form,
silver white.

She bent to lap
from the mountain-fed waters. But something was wrong. There was some dark
substance in the water as she drank. Looking down, Selene saw that her white
fur was covered in something darker. As a wolf she was colorblind, and it was
night, so she couldn’t see what it was. But she could smell… and she knew that
she was covered in blood.

Tons of blood.

Horrific screams
split the night air.

Selene shot up straight
in bed, gasping for air. Frantically, she ripped the covers away and ran her
hands over her body. There was no blood on her. Anywhere.

Another damn
nightmare.

These were
too
real. As much as she tried to convince herself that it had just been a dream,
Selene knew deep down that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

*****

Ellie jumped as something
slapped the kitchen table, just barely missing her bowl of cereal.

“That,” Griffin
pointed accusingly at the newspaper in front of her, “is why we can’t trust
her.”

Alex, freshly
showered from his and Ellie’s morning run, was toweling his black hair dry when
he entered the kitchen and caught the offending headline.

“Oh, shit!”

Ellie picked up
the paper and carefully read the entire article, while Griffin paced back and
forth like a caged animal. “This doesn’t prove anything,” she insisted once
she’d finished.

Griffin was
incredulous. “A
white wolf
attacked and killed a group of campers in
that motor home park at the bottom of Big Thompson canyon, and you think it
doesn’t prove anything?”

“I’m with
Griffin on this one, Elle,” Alex murmured, taking the seat beside her. “It’s
too much to be a coincidence.”

Ellie glared at
her fiancé and received an unapologetic shrug in return.

“Fine,” she said
after a few moment’s contemplation.

“Fine?” Alex
asked suspiciously, crossing his arms over his chest. “What does fine mean,
exactly?”

Ellie fished her
cell phone out of her purse. The two men watched as she searched for a number, dialed,
and waited for it to connect.

“Hi! It’s
Ellie,” she eventually said. “Have you seen this morning’s newspaper?” She listened
for a moment as whoever was on the other end talked for a bit.

Griffin
grimaced. “She’s blocking me from listening,” he muttered to Alex.

“Huh, well
you’re right about that,” Ellie continued, disgusted. “I have an idea on how to
handle this. Can you meet me at Hugh and Lucy’s place?” There was another brief
pause. “Trust me on this, okay?… Yeah… An hour? Sounds good. See you then.”

Ellie snapped
her phone shut and turned to Alex and Griffin with a self-satisfied smile.
“We’ve got an hour to get ready and get over to Hugh and Lucy’s.” Then she
exited the kitchen.

Griffin sighed. “You’d
better go after her, Alex. The mood I’m in, I’d probably say something I’d
regret. Much as I love her, my sister can drive me nuts sometimes.”

“I’ll go see
what I can find out, man.” Alex gave Griffin’s shoulder a pat on his way out
the door.

*****

An hour later,
everyone was gathered at Lucy and Hugh’s house. “Okay, Ellie,” Hugh prompted.
“You’ve got all of us here, so I think it’s time for you to explain.”

Ellie stood up
and addressed her extended family. “Everyone’s seen the newspaper article?” She
motioned to Ramsey who was studying the pages. He, Nate, Charlotte, and Dexter
had come over from the house next door when Ellie’d called.

Several yeses
were mumbled as everyone nodded.

“How many of you
think that Selene is the most likely suspect?” Ellie continued.

Alex covered his
laugh with a cough. His adorable fiancée never pulled her punches. It was one
of the many things about her that he loved so much.

Ellie, Lucy,
Adelaide, and Lila kept their hands down, but all the others raised theirs.

“Okay.” Ellie
nodded again. “Would you be willing to give her the same chance that you gave Griffin
and me?”

“You mean the
night of the first wolf attack?” Dexter asked.

When they’d
first met, the Jenners and Pierces hadn’t known that Ellie was anything more
than a normal human until the night a small band of Vyusher wolves had tried to
attack their house and Ellie had intervened, saving their lives. That was the
night they’d discovered the truth… Ellie and Griffin were
Svatura
, like
them.

Ellie studied
each face in the room, and everyone appeared willing to hear her out. Except
Griffin, of course. No real surprise there.

Hugh stepped
forward. “If even a fraction of what Lucy tells me about that young woman is
true, it’s worth giving her a shot.”

“We’ll do better
than give her a hearing,” Ellie said, smiling.

“What are you up
to?” Alex asked.

“I say we use
the same strategy that allowed me to show all of you the
Svatura
history.”

Everyone was
silent for a second, and then Griffin rose to his feet. “Ellie, we don’t know
all her powers. What if she manipulates this?”

Ellie gave her
brother a sad look. “You really need to learn to trust people, Griffin, or you
will end up leading a very lonely life.” She let out a disappointed sigh and
continued. “I know all her skills, because she’s already let me touch her. None
of the powers she possesses would allow her to manipulate this situation, even
in the future. And especially not against the collection of powers we have in
this room. She won’t be able to get past a combination of Lila’s ability to see
the truth or sense emotions, Lucy’s ability to see her intent, my ability to
control her powers when I’m touching her, Griffin’s ability to read minds, or
Adelaide’s ability to see relationships. Between all of us, there’s no way for
her to deceive us in any way. And if we’re all touching, I can show you rather
than just tell you, which clearly isn’t working.”

“But she can
block our powers,” Griffin murmured.

“How do you
know?” Dexter asked.

Griffin threw
him a cautious glance. Dexter was a quiet force to be reckoned with—the epitome
of the strong, silent type, with a stocky build and serious, dark eyes.
“Because she blocks my mind reading,” Griffin answered.

“She won’t block
any of our powers,” Ellie added quickly.

It was Ellie’s
turn to come under Dexter’s scrutinizing gaze. “Same question to you then,
Ellie.”

“Because she’s
agreed to that. And she’ll be here in a few minutes to put herself through the
hell of reliving her life, just so that we can all trust her.”

Last night Selene
had finally forced herself to sleep after waking from that nightmare and then
had been woken again at some ungodly hour by the ringing of the telephone. It
had been Ellie, alerting her of the night’s events.

Selene didn’t get
the newspaper, so she’d flipped open her laptop and went to a site that had
local news. There it was, in black and white… two campers had been killed by a
wolf. A white wolf. A third camper had survived.

And then Selene realized
why Ellie had called. “It’s wasn’t me, Ellie! At least, I don’t think. I mean.
Well… it
might
be. I’ve been having these nightmares.”

“Well, we’ll
have to deal with that. I have an idea on how to handle this. Can you meet me
at Hugh and Lucy’s place?”

“Sure… but I
don’t see how that will help, unless you’re planning on killing me when I get
there.” She frowned and briefly wondered if that wouldn’t be for the best.

After Ellie had hung
up, Selene sat for minutes, paralyzed. All she could think over and over again
was,
What if I did this?
She didn’t want to believe it. She’d never
directly killed anyone before. It didn’t make sense that she’d start now.

Griffin will
never, ever believe me,
she thought as she forced herself to get dressed.
He
already has reason to hate me. Doesn’t remotely trust me.

The anger in his
eyes when he’d looked at her had broken Selene’s heart. The connection she’d
felt with Griffin was undeniable—she’d felt it from the first time she’d seen
him. She’d visited him in his dreams for years. But he hadn’t known she was
real. And now he hated her.

As Selene pulled
up outside Hugh and Lucy’s house, her heart was pounding so hard that she
thought it was trying to beat its way out of her chest. After so many years of
living, she knew that moments like this—life-altering, road-less-travelled type
moments—were preciously rare. She’d never felt so petrified.

She raised a
shaky hand to the door and knocked loudly. Ellie answered, and Selene smiled at
the friendly face.

“Hi,” Ellie said
quietly. “Thanks for coming over.”

“Hi… sure,”
Selene mumbled.

“We’ve got a
little work ahead of us, and I’ll need your complete trust and cooperation.”

Selene nodded.
“You have a plan?”

“Yes, but it
depends on you.”

“Anything,”
Selene vowed softly. “Anything it takes.”

Ellie stepped aside
and invited Selene in. They stood in the hallway, and Ellie proceeded to
explain her plan in detail. Particularly Selene’s part in it. As she spoke,
Selene’s heart became heavier and heavier, turning into a rock in the pit of
her stomach. But she kept nodding. She’d meant what she said—she would do
anything.