Ice cold rain sluiced down his face, dripping from his scalp and the ends of his hair until it ran in uncomfortable rivulets down his back. Hands jammed in his rapidly dampening pockets, Brennan snuck a glance across the dark, pothole-ridden street and shrugged his shoulders higher. The weather, typical for the transition days of spring, was the least of his problems.
Splashing through another hidden pool of murky water on the sidewalk, he snarled a curse. The lingering frigidity of winter painted itself in the bite of the wind that drove the stinging rain into his skin, even through his hoodie.
A dark car drove by, sending further spray consisting of the dregs of melted snow and dirt in a dispersed wave over Brennan. He held his temper in check, despite the cold in his toes and fingers, the burning at the tip of his nose and the numbness of his cheeks. The headlights of the passing car illuminated the quiet street as it passed, broken streetlights and empty houses aside. Brennan cast sharp eyes around.
It could have been the cold, or the driving rain, or the whipping wind that had goose bumps littering his pinched skin, but whatever was making the hair at the back of his neck rise had been there for longer than this unfortunate turn of the weather had been. There, and yet not.
He had neither seen nor heard anything to indicate that someone was following him. Even so, that strange itch in his mind never faded, teasing at the shadows that danced in his vision, bending them out of proportion and into the monsters that were there for one moment and then not the next. Brennan supposed that it was all part of the unfortunate secret that made him who – or rather, what – he was.
And that secret had only become an increasingly frustrating burden to carry.
It was because of that clandestine fact that the house – once a home, his home - Brennan was returning to would be borderline empty. Slowly but surely, bureaucracy, democracy, fear – whatever it was, had caught up to them. The grace period had fallen away, disintegrated as the hype faded and human nature reasserted itself.
“How are we supposed to protect ourselves against them?”
“How can we tell if we’re dealing with a werewolf?”
“Why is the government letting them roam free, unidentified and unsupervised?”
“What about the full moon? What is the danger there?”
“What steps are the government taking to ensure our safety?”
It wasn’t that Brennan hadn’t expected the sudden outcry for order. Fear bred the need for order, for orders. A clear direction. He’d just… well; he’d just hoped it wouldn’t happen – at the very least not quite so soon.
It was law, now, that werewolf status was displayed on all legal documents: birth certificates, passports, and drivers’ licenses. Fraud was what it was if you didn’t declare it, if any government official found out. Brennan didn’t doubt that the blood tests were amalgamated by places like the facility he and Rebecca had rescued Stephanie from.
Not that anyone had found out about that for certain yet.
He was still waiting for the day that they would, even though the search parties had suspended their time. Scouring the Breadloaf Wilderness in winter was not a feat he was sure anyone would accomplish if they didn’t know exactly where the doors were buried in the ground. Searching it in spring, or any other season, wasn’t looking very promising either.
Brennan’s new passport and driver’s license had come through that morning. He’d had to declare it to his employers – that, too, was law. Tomas, as intimidating as he was, had looked at him with pitying eyes even as he informed Brennan that he would have to let him go. Brennan hadn’t expected anything less. It was more of a formality than anything. Tomas’ workforce had declined exponentially since the laws came out.
One by one, day by day, like lambs to the slaughter, someone walked out of the back door into the alley and didn’t walk back in the next.
Brennan knew that Tomas didn’t care one way or another whether his bartenders or waitresses or cooks were human or werewolf or flying monkeys, as long as they worked hard. Work hard they did, but interest in the restaurant waned. People refused to come in unless there was proof that the staff were all certifiably human.
Even David Lindsey, the young man who single-handedly kept the place afloat, had been “let go”. Brennan didn’t much want to think about it.
So when Brennan headed into the restaurant to inform Tomas about his new circumstances, he had no illusions about what would happen next. He left, head held high, against the stares of the human staff that knew without being told what was going on. No one dared say goodbye or wish him well.
It was over and done with, nothing much else to discuss or stick around for.
Even having had more preparation time than most, he found that he couldn’t quite get his head around it all. He didn’t want to go back to a rapidly emptying, draughty old house. There was nowhere else to go.
So, despite the awful weather and the pervading dark of night, Brennan took the long route to the house (when had it stopped being home?) and struggled not to bare his teeth at the feeling that something, someone, was watching him. However hard he tried to shrug it off, it persisted.
Halting in his tracks, he looked out from under his hood and cast a cursory glance over the neighborhood. Nothing moved, and he was nearly soaked to the bone. Frustration colored his movements as he set off back down the street, a low growl endured under his breathing and the pitter-patter of rain on cracked pavement.
Not fifteen minutes later he found himself across the street from the house, sagging ashamedly against its own foundations. Water pooled in weak, bent slats on the roofing, no doubt dripping through the ceiling and onto an already damp, ruined wooden floor. In a part of town that had seen its prime past many years ago, the house had stood proud – warm and illuminated against its abandoned, condemned counterparts.
Only one light shone amber in it anymore, from the entryway. That light spilled onto the crooked porch down onto the stairs that had seen better days. Silhouetted in the doorway stood Lydia, arms crossed, figure rigid. Brennan sighed and jogged across the street.
As he neared her, his step faltered, taking in the suitcases behind her, the taped up cardboard boxes. The darkness from the other rooms of the house spoke volumes, cold and impersonal. They were the last two left.
He didn’t even have to tell Lydia what had happened. He only raised the last paycheck he’d ever receive from Tomas in a flag of defeat before he shoved it back into his pocket.
“All right, then,” Lydia sighed and picked up a box, presenting him with it. “Let’s get it all loaded up in the truck.”
Brennan hesitated, and then took the box out of her hands.
“We’ll stay with my mom awhile,” she said. “I called her and she’s fine with it.”
“Thank god for your family,” Brennan said.
The bitterness in his voice only conveyed his thoughts on his own family. Adelyn, his mother, he understood. With the weight of everything that she’d carried, she hadn’t been ready for a werewolf child. Her family, however, held less excuse than her. They’d cast him out, encouraging her view of her own child – an abomination, a child with the devil in him.
Lydia frowned, looked as if she was going to say something, but just turned away to pick up her own share of boxes.
Brennan slid boxes into the bed of the truck, taking them out of Lydia’s hands as she brought them, and put the suitcases on the bench seat in the cab of the ancient pickup. They strode up to the house together and Lydia tossed him a change of clothes, giving him a pointed look as he dripped rainwater everywhere.
“Get changed and then we’ll get going,” she said.
He nodded and she went out to the car. Stripping off his wet clothes and drying off as best as he could with the towel she’d given him, he got re-dressed and stared at the house that he could barely recognize without the people in it that had made it home.
They’d all gone. It was too conspicuous, too dangerous to have such a hotspot of werewolves in one accessible place. It made sense. But as each person had filed out, disappearing without a realistic chance of ever meeting again, he’d felt like his family was leaving.
He was being abandoned, again.
He looked out toward the idling truck where his sister was sitting in the weak cab lighting and flicked off the last light in the house. Shutting the door behind him and racing to the truck to avoid the worst of the rain, Brennan left behind the place that had once been the most diverse, secure of homes, and had now joined the ranks of the perpetually forgone – dilapidated.
“Oh, Brennan,” Lydia sighed, but hers didn’t feel like the only eyes on him.
“We better get going,” he said. “It’s a long drive to Tempe.”
Her face looked pinched, worried, aging her in a way that reminded Brennan that they weren’t the same kids they had been. There were some things that Lydia couldn’t save him from. He just wished that he had the strength to make her leave him, too, with everybody else.
She was human. This wasn’t her cross to carry. Right now, she could have a permanent home, a husband, kids, a job – but she stayed to keep an eye on her younger half-brother instead. Brennan couldn’t make himself bring it up verbally. Lydia was perceptive enough to have gotten the message in the lines of his face and the set of his mouth, but she wasn’t having any of it.
There had to be a line, he knew, of how far she would let herself be defined by him, by what he was. This move? This loss? It was only the beginning. A word printed in bold across all of the documents that validated him as who he was – well, Brennan knew that it was just a precursor for what was to come.
“So, we’re picking someone up?” Lydia asked.
He smiled, faintly, as he pulled out onto the street. He remembered the conversation they’d had on an early morning in December before he had gone out to meet Rebecca on a back road in Vermont to pick up the werewolf who had changed it all in so many ways and then none all at the same time.
“Yeah,” he said. “On our way. We’ll make New York by morning.”
“Never change, Benny,” Lydia sighed, a light smile curving on her face.
His gut twisted at that, because sometimes he wished he could. If only he just wasn’t – wasn’t what he was, or just hadn’t happened at all – then Adelyn May Graves would be a woman who got married and had normal human children, instead of living out her days in an institution, broken by the hand that fate dealt her. Lydia wouldn’t have to worry about him. It was the greatest guilt that he carried with him, that he’d taken the lives of the two women he loved the most, despite his mother’s bid to kill him.
If all he could do to remedy that was help other people along the way, then he’d be damned if he forwent that to make life easier for himself.
Lydia turned on the radio, listening quietly as they drove, lives stowed carefully in the bed of the old pickup truck. Not long later a noise of disturbance came from her and Brennan didn’t have to look over to prompt her to tell him.
He tuned out the radio more often than not these days.
“They want to tattoo a sign on you all,” she said. “So that it’s obvious what you are, wherever you go.”
A hollow feeling opened up in Brennan’s chest, and he sighed because that’s all he could do.