Page 11 of Crave

The problem was nights like these where there was no one else around but the two of us, the warm glow of heat emanating from the ovens, an undeniable something twisting up my stomach until it resembled a loaf of challah every time the silences between us grew too long.

Because that was the thing about kryptonite. It came in many forms.

While Dallas dug in my freezer for the carton of vanilla bean, I plated up a generous wedge of cherry pie to share and we settled at the little table by the window in front. From here there was no missing the Christmas lights bedecking every nook and cranny of The Spoke, from the custom longhorn carved into the doors to the old-fashioned rusted rooster wind vane twisting up on the roof.

I dug a fat scoop from the carton of old-fashioned vanilla, dropping it on top of the pie so cherries and cream melted together in a sugary river. Just the way we both liked it.

Dallas carved off a bite the size of the Grand Canyon, swirling it through the ice cream. “You know if this is what you want, I’ll support you one hundred percent.”

“It’s not that simple.” I picked at the edge of the crust.

“Nothing ever is. You really think your mom would be better off in another town?”

I poked at a cherry. “Blood Moon holds a lot of bad memories for her.”

My mother was a web developer who worked remotely for one of the big tech firms out of Austin, shopped organic, and had successfully petitioned Blood Moon to start a city-wide composting program. She was smart, competent, attractive, and put together. To pass her on the street you probably wouldn’t pick up on the thread of anxiety that lived below the surface now, and had every day since the night I went out to a party nine years ago in high school.

And never came home.

The night I was changed, Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell handed me a burner phone and wrote down what I had to say to ensure my mother wouldn’t try to look for me. I was seventeen and still in school, my knowledge of werewolves limited to having read Twilight and screaming when Dallas’s younger brother River shifted into a wolf in front of me ten minutes before. Given the volatile combination of the lycan virus and teenage hormones, I would have to stay sequestered away from the human population for an entire year to ensure I didn’t lose control and kill anyone.

Experts said that during a traumatic event, spikes in heart rate caused tunnel vision. Auditory hallucinations. Blackouts. Memory loss. What I remembered from that night were three things: the hard plastic edge of the phone digging into the side of my thumb, the corner of the Caldwell’s Turkish area rug where a terra cotta flower swam in a sea of cream, and the sensation I was slowly drowning as my mother pleaded with me to come home.

And I had no choice but to tell her no, knowing that if I gave in and admitted the truth, I would be condemning her to certain death.

Numb with shock, I wanted to pull the covers over my head in my own bed and wake up in the morning to find it had all been a terrible nightmare. I wanted my mother to drive me to school while we listened to podcasts and debated current events. I wanted to feel her arms around me as she squeezed me tight, telling me whatever it was, she would make it better with Stars Hollow and samosas. That nothing could ever go wrong as long as we were together. And I wanted Dallas, who had been torn away from me by his father the moment we reached the Caldwell ranch. Dallas, who I had not seen nor heard a word from since, as if he had disappeared off the very face of the earth.

And so I made the choice to save the one person I still could.

Back when I was little, when it was just me and her, my father having never been a part of the picture, I had a little purse from the secondhand store. It was full of glittery stickers, a mood ring that had been hers as a girl, a fat rubber eraser shaped like a strawberry, and a tiny sample spray card of perfume—every secret stored inside a hidden treasure. That was another lifetime, back before I was old enough to realize secrets could be a poison that ate you alive from the inside, a cancer no doctor could see until it was too late. That secrets could destroy any relationship if given enough time.

No one ever told me if what happened that night was because of my failure to tell a convincing enough lie, or if the Southern Territorial Council simply didn’t leave things to chance. But when Sofia handed me the burner phone a week later and told me I could call my mother again, I immediately sensed something was off.

Neural manipulation was like going in with a weed whacker. You might pulverize everything on the surface, blank out images, words, the sort of concrete memories you could post to social media or joke about with friends over margaritas. But memory didn’t exist only in what we could consciously understand, physically touch or put into a medium so formal as words. It was the ghost of lilac on that card of perfume. The funky retro dress printed with tiny pale violet strawberries that you saw in a thrift store and loved for no particular reason. And there beneath the soil would always remain the deeply knotted roots of what had existed before. A phantom echo. A face that haunted you with its familiarity. And while the most powerful werewolves on the planet might have overwritten my mother’s conscious memory with lies, erasing my failure, erasing me, there was no silencing the far more powerful instinctual voice in the back of her mind whispering that her only child was in danger.

I’d started lying to my mom that night. And I hadn’t stopped since.

“There’s no way to know what the dynamics would be like in a new pack. Brody’s a good Alpha. The pack structure here is progressive, and everyone has a voice even if he makes the final call. I go somewhere else,” I gestured with my fork out at Main Street where the stoplight was flashing amber, “and I’d be on my own with an unfamiliar Alpha, unable to tell my mother if I got into trouble because she isn’t a shifter.”

Dallas nodded, fork slowly stirring through the syrupy lake of melted ice cream and cherry filling. “But?”

“But how can I say no? What happened to her—”

“Don’t,” he said in a low voice. “What the Council did to her, what happened after, none of it was your fault.”

And for the space of a breath, the room seemed to shrink, no one left outside of it but the two of us. I’d been asked countless times over the years how come I didn’t hate Dallas Caldwell. It was a fair question. And believe me, that first year, I’d worked through my fair share of pent-up rage at a world where I’d been infected in a freak accident, then had the first boy I ever loved sent away for a harm he never meant to inflict. How did you explain to someone who’s never had to live with the guilt of having caused an accident that it was possible to feel anger and love in the same breath? Could anyone who hadn’t lived this understand that some nights you ached with resentment and longing so palpable you thought your bones would shatter from the strain, that it was possible to twist yourself up in a knot so tight that unraveling it seemed impossible without forfeiting a piece of your soul? I wanted to tell them all that at times it felt like no one else but the two of us understood the crushing guilt that came with being the one responsible for hurting someone you loved, for changing their life in a thousand immeasurable ways, for wishing more than anything there was some way to go back in time, turn left instead of right, not get in that car, not accept that kiss.

But life didn’t work that way. You either found a way to move forward, or you let the past consume you like the flames of hell licking across your skin.

I’d made my choice.

“I keep asking myself if I shouldn’t just come clean.” The timer dinged again and I got up to pull more pies from the ovens. “About the party. About that night. Why I couldn’t come home. What they did to her.”

“Only two ways to reverse neural manipulation,” Dallas said from behind me. “The Council will never agree to send in Tracers. And regaining tampered memories without intervention is practically unheard of in humans.”

I moved a velvety orange pumpkin pie to the cooling rack, inhaling the scent of nutmeg and cloves. Usually the effort of trying to force the buried memories back up caused migraines and blackouts, which were enough of a deterrent to keep her from trying again for a few weeks.

“I’d have to change her.”