Chapter Eighteen - the Challenge

“Don’t you dare break the door down!” She yelled at them. “I know how to take a shower. What is it with werewolves and a total lack of boundaries? Haven’t you been around enough humans to understand the concept of privacy? Leave. Me. Alone! Get me some clean clothes if you need something to do. Put them by the door. Or what is it they say in all those old movies...go boil some water. Just leave me be!”

“If you pass out in the shower you’ll drown.”

“At least I’ll die at home,” she muttered.

“Lia honey,” David said softly with his forehead on the door, “we need to know you’re okay.”

“Stay the frig out!” She yelled when David began trying to pick the lock. “I’ll sing in the shower so you know I’m conscious. If I stop singing for more than a minute you can barge in here like a bunch of bafoons and save the naked princess from the evil shower monster.” There was nothing but silence.

“Lia?”

“I’m thinking! I can’t exactly take my phone in the shower for karaoke now can I? Nothing is coming to mind.”

“You could sing some children’s songs?” David suggested. There was another short pause before she started to sing. At first, the soft, melodic sound of her voice made Jake’s heart swell and a smile came to his lips. But the words soon took all the joy out of the moment.

“Silent Night, moonlight night.

Keep yourself out of sight

We’ll be safe from the wrath of the moon

if we hide and don’t come out too soon

Sleep in safety and darkness

Rest where the goddess can’t find us.

Moonlight Night, werewolf night.

Hunker down, hide from light

Werewolves are looking for us

We must stay in or they’ll find us.

Stay in the dark still and quiet.”

“Jesus,” David muttered to himself, running his hands through his hair. How had he forgotten that Selene had rewritten so many classic songs and taught Liana only the new versions? Every single one of them would be anti-werewolf and anti-goddess. Written to ensure Lia learned to stay away from all things werewolf.

“Twinkle twinkle little stars

one is Venus one is Mars

if the moon is shinning too

better run or she’ll see you

Werewolves hunting you this night

stay inside out of her light.”

“Are they all going to be like this?” Jake asked softly. He loved the sound of her voice, but the words were tearing him apart. She wasn’t just unaware of true werewolves, the way his human university friends had been, she’d obviously been taught to hate and fear everything about them right from infancy. Getting her to trust him at all might be impossible, and with only two weeks until the wolf moon, he didn’t think he had any chance of winning his mate.

“Dancing in the full moon

Goddess sees you too soon

Werewolves! Werewolves!

They’ll eat you up”

“Jump jump jump my child

jump into the water

let it carry you away

scentless in the water.

Float float float my child

still and silent in the river

don’t get out until you see

the Rogue’s sheep or the farmer.”

Jake wandered away from the door to find some clean clothes for her. Anything to get away from the mental image of his mate in the shower coupled with the soft, soothing sound of her voice contrasted acutely by the lyrics of those horrific parodies. He went to her room first, surprised and slightly annoyed to find she’d left so much behind. He had guessed she didn’t see the pack house as her home yet, but until this trip, he hadn’t really realized that she didn’t intend to stay in his home a moment longer than required. The creamy wool sweater and blue skirt she’d been wearing the first time he’d seen her caught his eye, so he grabbed those and got back to the bathroom just as the water shut off.

Lia stepped deliberately out of the bathroom, determined to walk past the two men without looking at them, but as she stepped between them she sneezed. Damn. Plants from the Aconitine family were the only thing that ever made her sneeze with that tingly feeling behind her eyes. One of them had been in contact with it too. She couldn’t in good conscience not warm them. She turned and stiffed at David, nothing. She turned to Jake, trying to concentrate through the humming purr as she sniffed his shirt. She sneezed again. “You’ll have to shower too,” she said, “you must have gotten contaminated when you refused to give me any room on the stairs. We won’t have any clothes big enough to fit you here. Maybe David can run to the farm and grab something for you to borrow.”

“Where are you going?” David called after her.

“Prince charming there didn’t bring me any underwear. After I get that on I’ll sit in the living room and work on my homework until you males force me to leave.”

On her way past the kitchen, Lia glanced to the chest by the back door and another of Gran’s seemly silly rhymes stuck in her head “Evil seeks evil and dust makes dust; if the bullet won’t kill them the poison must.” All Gran’s poisons were in that chest. Along with the loaded gun and the bullets that they coated with wolfsbane. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure David hadn’t followed her, then she went over to the chest, took the key out from its hiding place, and holding her breath so she wouldn’t sneeze, she slipped the gun from its hiding place and carefully placed it in her bundle. If they decided to keep her prisoner, she wouldn’t stay without a fight.” She had barely seated herself on the tiny sofa and opened the novel she needed to read for English when David came down the hall.

“You realize that you don’t actually have homework that needs to be finished. You start a new school on Monday, they aren’t expecting you to have anything ready.”

“No actually, I won’t be attending that school.”

“Lia-”

“You may be able to tell the schools I’m switching, you can even prevent me from actually getting to my own school, but you can not force me to go to to the new one. I’m over sixteen so no truancy law applies. If I can’t go to the school I’ve been in since I was five years old, then I’ll not go to school at all. You can probably physically force me to, I realize that, but you can’t make me participate so there really isn’t any point to that.”

“You’re being childish,” David growled at her. Lia bristled a little bit but took the time to think about what he was saying. She was being stubborn and had to admit that her voice sounded a bit pouty, but she was not acting like a child. She was just standing up for herself and refusing to let a pack of werewolves dictate every move she made.

“No, I’m not being the least bit childish, David” she replied, the calmness of her voice surprising her. “You and Jake just don’t like that I’m not submitting to you like a little wimpy little girl and obediently letting the two of you change the course of my life against my will. I’m nearly an adult. The moment I’m eighteen I can legally do whatever I want and you, dear legal guardian, won’t be able to do anything about it, at least not legally. This means that in about two weeks I’ll be back here, in my own home, sleeping in my own bed, going to my own school, and spending time with my human friends. Hopefully with my Gran here too, but either way, I’ll be leaving that place the minute the sun comes up on my eighteenth birthday.”

“But the wolf moon-”

“Not going to happen. Gran's blinds will keep the moonlight out. It's worked this long.”

“Liana, please just lis-”

“No. You listen. This is MY life and I’ve decided Gran was right. Werewolf males are nothing but power-hungry jerks. The two of you making all my decisions for me have just proved that. I’ll stay inside at night and avoid the moon, especially the full moon, for my entire life, just like Gran wanted. That way I’ll stay human, stay sane, be able to live whatever life I choose, and never have to mate some stranger or live with a bunch of monsters.”

“Lia we’re not-”

“Not monsters?” She interrupted him again. “You’re half human, half wolf. By human standards, which is what I grew up with, that makes you monsters.”

“You and Gran are werewolves too.”

“We can’t change our DNA, but we can choose what we do with it. We don’t have to shift,” she said, staring him straight in the eye. “We’ve gone this long without becoming wolves, we’ll just keep going as we have for years, as human as is possible for a werewolf to be. If you need different criteria for a monster, how about one of these:

1 – you are forcing me to leave the only home I’ve ever known. I’m not even allowed to visit it without a bunch of strange men following me around the place. You even wanted to join me in the shower!

2 – you are forcing me to quit school just four months before graduation, which is something I have been working towards and looking forward to celebrating with my friends for years now.

3 - you are refusing to allow me to contact any of my nonwerewolf friends, which is most of them by the way. Which is a good thing since all this mess means I don’t even trust my two best friends anymore.

4 – you want to force me to go to a different school, where I’ll be surrounded by monsters who can whip out teeth and claws wherever they want, in fact, they’ve actually been trained to kill with them and I have no means of self-defense.

And 5 - you’re attempting to make me agree to an arranged marriage, which is not part of my culture so I have had no expectation of this lack of choice.

In my mind, each and every one of those things is unforgivable and make you horrible, controlling, and untrustworthy monsters.

For all, I know this pack of werewolves is responsible for the poison being in my attic and you’re keeping Gran unconscious on purpose so she can’t have any say in what you’re doing to me!

“Liana! That is totally out of line and you know it! We’re doing everything we can to help Selene.”

“So you say.”

“I know this is hard for you but -”

“No more buts!”

“Your Gran trusts me.”

“No, she trusted you. Past tense. If she were conscious at the moment I’m sure she’d be telling you how shockingly wrong she was. None of this is what she would have wanted for me. She spent my entire life doing everything in her power to make sure this didn’t happen to me!”

The humm in her head intensified again and Lia knew Jake was getting closer despite nobody having brought him anything clean to wear. She scowled and looked past David to see a familiar black wolf padding quietly down the hall. He looked up at her with sad brown eyes. She felt a twinge of guilt knowing that she was the one to put that look in their chocolaty depths, but she refused to apologize. His moon goddess would just have to give him a different mate. One who wants to be a werewolf and a Luna, and live in his pack house and fill it with werewolf pups. That wasn’t what she wanted...was it? Lia nibbled her lip as she gathered her bundle of belongings and held it close, careful to know where the gun was. Not that she’d admit it, but aside from lack of privacy and lack of choice, none of that really sounded all that bad. It was a lot different from what she had planned, obviously, but it didn’t sound bad… except that she wasn’t really being given a choice. If she agreed to what they were asking of her now, would she be giving up the freedom to choose anything for herself ever? If she shifted, scented Jake as her mate, and mated with him, would she ever have any freedom at all?

Jake lead the way out the door and David followed behind her as if they didn’t even trust her to walk out on her own. As she followed Jake out the door she noticed his head and tail were both down. Was it her imagination or did his coat shine less than it had the first time she’d seen him? Was he smaller even? Maybe the larger-than-life, slick, and shiny animal she remembered had just been the effect of the moonlight and the shock of seeing her first ever wolf? As they walked to the truck she noticed his men were glancing at each other with surprised and slightly worried looks once he was past them. A few of them followed that up by an angry glare in her direction and she realized that his change in appearance was visible to them too, and also that it was somehow her fault.