Chapter 43: Sheila

Sheila managed to catch a bus out of the city to her mother’s place near Sacramento. “I’m in hiding, I suppose,” Sheila said when she showed up unannounced at the door, the kid propped on her hip and a bag over her shoulder.

“Jesus, aren’t we all?” her mother sighed but she let her in and went about her day as if this was just another thing to happen.

Being on the lam, cowering a few hours away from San Francisco and the headlands entirely, wasn’t Sheila’s favorite thing to do but she couldn’t risk it anymore. The plans the men were coming up with were stupid at best and the fact that Helena agreed with them made it worse. Sheila had hoped Helena would be too much of a princess to go along for a dangerous ride like the one they were putting into motion when they let her go with Troy.

If anything went wrong, if the plan was thwarted in any way, Sheila knew the pack would be torn apart. Troy’s people were not the type to forgive and forget. There was a reason they lived as far out from civilization as they did: plenty of people, shifters and nonshifters alike, had vanished after crossing them.

“They wouldn’t kill a woman and her kid, right?” Sheila’s mother asked when Sheila told her why she was there. “We’re all aberrations or whatever but I’ve never known shifters to be straight up savages.”

“Troy doesn’t live by anyone’s rules. Not the human world’s or shifters.”

Sheila couldn’t be sure if they would kill a kid but she knew that the other option might be taking the kid with them and raising him as one of theirs, and frankly, she hated that almost as much. It was a sick thing to think, that she’d rather see her offspring dead, but the world Troy created was too violent and hateful for her to imagine. Plenty of packs had weird dynamics or unhealthy ideas of how everyone should be in relation to each other but Troy’s pack reveled in their bloodlust, in their ability to get what they wanted by any means necessary. It was how they were able to own a huge swath of land and get their hands dirty with people like Helena’s father. They had no scruples in what they did or where their money came from.

“It’s not like we’re much better,” Ryan had said once when they were discussing the Northern California packs, the ones that were invariably surrounded by a fetor of fatality. “We do low level shit and wind up stuck where we are. None of us are angels either but we’re dirtbags that don’t even make money with our crime.”

She hated that that thought might be in Ryan’s head at all. Too many times he had bemoaned the struggle of just trying to stay alive, and she could see a life like Troy’s pack being tempting to him. He might not be able to absolve himself from what he had to do, the blood he had to shed, but for the years he was on earth, he would know comfort, security. He might even get used to the feeling of always having to look over his shoulder.

When it got to be nighttime on the day Sheila had arrived at her mom’s house, she put the baby to bed and went outside in the backyard. There was woods between all the neighbors but she could see lighted windows through the trees and the undergrowth. Still, she figured she had enough privacy and there was only one thing she wanted to do right then and there. She stripped down to her skin, felt the heat of the night traipse across her body.

Sheila hunched over, breathing through her nose as the transformation process started. The bones in her feet and hands began to stretch and her spine curved from a bipedal upright posture to a creature on all fours. Prickles of hair pin pricked down her arms and legs; her jaw and nose extended forward and a rush of new, fresh smells became available to her. She fought the urge to howl, fought the urge to let every prey animal in the area know she was on the prowl.

The woods beckoned to her as her front paws dropped to the ground. She could see clearly, see scurrying critters that had been invisible to her as a human. Her instincts clicked in, and she took off into the forest, running the length of it then pivoting and running back.

Her ribcage flared and contracted as she breathed, as her wolf body dove between trees and thorns. She tore into shrubs, ripping out of them like a baby bursting forth in birth, pushing her face into the new air in front of her. She had felt like she was being hunted for so long but now she was the hunter, she was the predator loosed on the world.

There were sounds coming from one of the nearby houses. Sheila skidded to a stop, listening for what could be humans approaching to suss out what was happening in the woods. She heard voices in a backyard, humans walking along the tree line and calling to each other about how whatever it was making those weird noises, it seemed to have stopped.

It was too risky to keep going so in one last explosion of wolf momentum, Sheila sprinted on all fours back to her mother’s house. She collapsed onto the spiky grass in the yard, cut too short and close to the earth. As she let herself revert to human again, the grass poked into her skin like tiny needles.

Sheila lay out under the stars for a moment, enjoying the heat and the clear sky. There was no fog here like there was in San Francisco. She felt like she could see forever, felt like she could see galaxies and possibilities hidden from view in the city. Being naked wasn’t vulnerable the way it was in the pack house; she could stretch out sweaty and bare and not have to wonder if one of the men were staring at her, thinking about their lineage and how easily she had gotten pregnant that first time.

“I think I might stay here for a while,” Sheila told her mother once she was cleaned up and decent. “I’m tired of being part of the pack. I’m tired of being everyone’s mom and maid.”

“That’s why I left when I did too, kiddo,” her mother answered but she didn’t say no.

Sheila stared up again at the clear night sky, and for the first time all day, wondered if everyone back in the city was alright.