Page 3 of Wolf Unseen
“No. She wouldn’t be that selfish, Felix.”
Even though Lorna and I hadn’t grown up together, I knew she would never be so thoughtless. Lorna didn’t have a selfish bone in her body.
I was unaware I even had a sister until she walked into the diner where I worked weekends and announced we shared a father. I hadn’t believed her at first. With her pale blonde hair and gray eyes, we looked nothing alike. And whereas I was a hybrid wolf shifter, she was a full-blooded feline shifter.
But it turned out she was telling the truth.
Lorna was in the city for a medical appointment; shifters rarely got sick, but our father had sent her to a shifter clinic for a fertility check. She’d stopped at the diner to eat, and her beast had recognized mine as family, which had been a shock for both of us.
Even though Lorna was three years older than me, our father had kept her locked away on pack lands for most of her life. I hadn’t understood why until she let slip his plans for her.
Felix remained silent as we took the exit for my trailer park. Strip malls became rundown tract housing and weed-infested vacant lots, and a short time later, we passed the peeling sign signaling the entrance to the Paradise Trailer Park.
The truck bumped along the pitted central road lined with trailers. Some were still lit up inside, but at my end of the park, there were no lights on.
Felix pulled up outside my ramshackle trailer. Weeds punched through the concrete slab in front of the battered door, and I grimaced at the sight of several empty liquor bottles on the stoop.
“Lorna wouldn’t abandon me, Felix,” I said after a minute, still angry he dared to suggest it.
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do.” He’d never met her, but the least he could do was trust my judgment. Lorna was blood; she wouldn’t abandon me.
Unwilling to listen to more of his attempts to make me give up the search for my half sister, I grabbed my bag and opened the passenger door.
The door to our trailer swung open before I could dig out my key; Mom had forgotten to lock it again. The rancid smell of vomit and liquor hit me the moment I stepped inside, my feet crunching over broken glass.
“Riley,” Felix hollered from behind me, but I ignored him. A volley of curses colored the air blue before a door slammed. “Damn it, Riles! Walking away when something pisses you off is—” He ground to a halt when he spotted what I’d just seen. “Ah fuck.”
2
Riley
“We’ve stabilized your mother,” the doctor with the wavy brown hair told me. “She’s lucky you found her when you did.” Or she’d be dead, was the subtext.
I nodded, unable to conjure up an emotional reaction to his revelation. Mom had always been a drunk, but in the last few years she’d started using drugs to numb her emotions, a habit facilitated by the cheap pills distributed by the shifter mafia.
I’d tried to get her clean, but it never lasted. Mom didn’t care enough to want to quit her addictions. About me or anything.
“Look, kid. I gotta be honest with you.” The doctor stared down at me with two bloodshot eyes, his pale complexion gray in the harsh lighting. The poor guy looked wrecked. Hardly surprising after a late shift in the hospital serving the city’s most deprived residents.
“If she doesn’t get clean, she won’t last much longer.”
“We can’t afford rehab,” I pointed out. Besides, Mom had no motivation to get clean. She used drugs to escape her demons, and those fuckers refused to leave her alone.
My asshole father had a lot to answer for.
“I’ll see what I can do to smooth the way,” the doctor said with a sigh, surreptitiously checking his watch. “There are some government-funded places in a rehab clinic in Silver City. I’ll put a call in. They might take her if you’re agreeable?”
“Silver City is for shifters.”
“Yes, but you’re a shifter.”
How did he know? He wasn’t a shifter. Perhaps he was a mage? They looked human. A full-blooded shifter could smell the magic, but my nose wasn’t that sensitive.
I took a step back, not trusting mages as far as I could throw them.
“Kind of,” I hedged. “Mom is human.”
