Author's Note
This book is based on the urban legend of the Adlet, a creature from Alaskan stories, so please bare with me. Also, this story has a boy x boy relationship with one of my characters- there will be heterosexual couples, but if you are so very opposed to this one ship- fret not, and turn back now.
Seventeen years later
The house was in the hinterlands of Alaska, hidden behind foliage of trees and hardly visible in the harsh storm of white fury. Incognito, the trilogy of a brick house was hidden beneath the feet of snow, and like a warning to any passerby- if strangers still existed, who knew, the world could fall apart and the home would never realize- the residence was locked down. Each and every opening to the outside world, aside from the chimney, were bolted closed- no visitors were welcome in the lonely home.
Inside, a boy stretched over his sister, tucking his arm beneath her head; letting the chill that only came with January dissipate between them. The house was heavily insulated, each window paned with three layers of glass, and the roaring fire in the room chased away the bite of frost, the two teenagers kept toasty warm even though outside it plunged beneath freezing.
The days were short in winter, the sun hasn't even showed its face in the entirety of two months. The boy misses it, the sun, in the frigid months from November to February. He wouldn't be able to see three feet in front of him without the aid of artificial light- he's grateful for the fireplace beside him, but the lights are out and the flames are beginning to reduce to embers.
"Rory," his sister whispers groggily. Her hair was long, and dark, and down, knotted from a night's sleep in the living room with her twin brother. Rowan Maverick was on the verge of being eighteen- an adult- and if she could pick any day to escape the miserably cold town of Covington, it'd be today.
The boy blinked up at the ceiling, long limbs outrunning the leather couch they had both squeezed onto, and groans as a reply. She's going to say it again.
"I hate this place," Rowan grumbled out, the same words she's elected as her own personal theme song ringing out of her mouth once again- for the fourth time this week. It's only Tuesday. "It's almost the fifth, Ro, three more days and we won't be legally confined to this place," she says it like they're living in a hell hole, which is far from what the home is.
Obviously, it can be boring- Covington is home to less than a hundred people- and even fewer who are friends to the Mavericks. And the wifi connection can suck ass, even on the good days- Rory will admit that when Rowan accuses it. And, as Rowan likes to muse, it is in fact freezing tits for what feels like most of the time.
Rowan reads too much- buys subscriptions to magazines from the states that arrive a month late and basically salivates at the warm oceans off the coasts of California and Florida. She pins up the pictures of Jeeps filled with swimsuit clad friends to her walls and waits patiently for her acceptance letter to Stanford to come- because it will. Rory knows it, and even if Rowan seems scared shitless of rejection, they are both well aware that she meets all the requirements for Stanford and then some.
"I'll take you to California," Rowan whispers the same promise she's been giving him for the last three years into the air. "And if you like it, we'll find a cheap flat and you can get a job- mechanic maybe, or even go to school- you want to be a teacher, you could be a great teacher, Ro."
Rory used to play along with her daydreams- imagine himself in the passenger seat of the secondhand Jeep she's going to buy the moment she lands there, applying as a waiter for a nice, little restaurant right on the ocean, and go to school to become an English teacher. He doesn't fantasize it for too long anymore, their mother needs someone around the house, so independent that it frightened Rory- she was a woman who was basically made to survive anything- and she'd be perfectly content doing it alone if she had to. That's exactly what scared him.
YOU ARE READING
Shiver
Werewolf"Didn't they teach you not to run from wolves, darlin'?" Before the western werewolf, before fear became a common friend, before humans were scared of the dark- there were the Adlets. Descended from the first shapeshifter, beast and man are conjur...
