Of Wings and Wolves

twelve


Summer connected the battery to the archaic computer and flipped the switch on the back. Fans whirred to life. A blue light shone within the case, and a white “UKA” logo flashed on the monitor.

It worked. Great.

So why wasn’t she excited?

Worry had lodged in her throat, like she had failed to swallow the rotten pit of an avocado, and she couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong. Something even worse than scary angel-monsters and scarier ex-wives.

Summer had tried to catch up with Abram outside the garden earlier and never managed to find him. The guards said that they had seen him going for a walk, but nobody knew where. Nash said that he didn’t sense any other ethereal creatures in the area, so the chances that Abram had been hurt were low. Nothing to worry about.

Nothing aside from potentially being murdered by Nash’s ex-wife, anyway.

She tucked her feet underneath her on the chair and scooted closer to Nash’s desk. She kept glancing at her cell phone where it sat beside the keyboard, hoping that Abram would call, but it remained silent.

Summer distracted herself by clicking through the computer’s files as soon as the operating system loaded. The directory structure was surprisingly familiar. Although the hardware was antiquated, the software wasn’t all that different from what she used in school. It only took a few minutes to become comfortable with the navigation, and soon, she found herself digging into the code itself to look around.

There was little information stored on the computer itself, since most commands called back to a networked database. But an old copy of what the last user accessed had been archived on the computer’s memory. She found a few hundred thumbnails and a lot of plain text files, which referenced unfamiliar locations. Denver? Boulder?

Summer spent hours absorbing all of the information that the computer carried in its memory. She pored over every article until it felt like her brain couldn’t hold any more information, and then she leaned back in his chair and stared out the freshly-washed window. The black, stormy waters of Lake Ast roiled below.

How was it possible for these files to reference so many countries that Summer had never heard of? Italy. France. The United States of America. Canada. New Zealand. She tried to fit them together in her mind like pieces of a puzzle.

Where did Hazel Cove fall into that world? Which country were they in?

She dug deeper into the directories. In addition to text files, there were images attached, too. Summer clicked through to see them.

Most of the photographs were boring—some kind of visual inventory of equipment, apparently. But there were surveillance photos, too. It looked like the cameras were mounted high, and the pictures had been taken without the subjects knowing about it.

Summer went through them one by one. Even though the images were blurry, she could make out a few faces. A young man with white hair. A guy with a strong nose and broad shoulders. And there were wolves, too. Wolves that looked a lot like Summer did when she wore her second skin. A lot of those wolves were around humans, none of whom looked worried to be around such massive beasts.

And then Summer found a picture of a gray-haired old woman with twin braids and a cowboy hat, and she forgot how to breathe.

The door opened.

She looked up, expecting Nash, but it was Gran who stepped through. “Where have you been?” Summer asked, minimizing the window.

“Just been chatting with the maid. Nice lady. I like her. You got the computer working?”

Summer’s tongue was dry and heavy in her mouth. She nodded mutely.

Her grandma sat at a chair on the other side of the desk, and Summer brought up the last picture again. That was definitely Gran in the photo. She hadn’t aged a day since the picture was taken. And she was in the company of a young pregnant woman, maybe Summer’s age, with long blond hair and a huge stomach.

How did her grandma’s photo come to be on an archaic computer?



“What’s wrong?” Gran asked. She couldn’t see the monitor or the photos from her position on the other side of the desk. “You’re making faces like you ate a lemon.”

Summer took a breath to steady herself. “What do they look like? My parents.”

The speedy change in subjects seemed to surprise Gran, and she sat back in her chair. “Oh, well, they look a lot like you and Abram.”

That was the kind of answer she had always given in response to Summer’s requests for information about her family. What did her parents do for fun? Oh, a lot of the same things you and Abram do. Where did her parents come from? Oh, pretty much the same place you did. It was the most frustrating non-answer Summer could imagine getting.

“Was my mom blond?” Summer asked.

Surprise flitted across Gran’s face. “Oh,” she said, and then, “yeah, actually.” At Summer’s expectant look, she breathed out a long, low sigh. “Your mama looks a lot like Abram, in the face, but she has gold irises—that’s the wolf in her. Skinny legs. Nice smile. She’s about as white as I am and as blond as I used to be.”

Summer closed her eyes and tried to imagine Abram as a woman—a skinny woman—with long blond hair. It was kind of a hilarious mental image. It also matched the blond woman in the photo pretty well.

“You take more after your daddy in most ways,” Gran went on. “You’re tall, like he is, and his skin’s darker. He’s kind of a mean-looking guy. Very scary. But he’s good on the inside, just like you are on your outside.”

It was the first time that Summer had been able to form a clear mental image of what her parents looked like, where she had come from. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “How did they meet?”

“They met because your mama—Rylie—was dating your daddy’s brother. The fact they got together was an accident of fate.” Gran sighed. “It’s not much of a fairytale, babe.”

Dating her father’s brother? Summer’s stomach flipped. She clicked to the next picture. There were a couple of men talking to one another, and they both kind of matched Gran’s description. Obviously brothers, even in such low-quality surveillance photos.

Was she related to them? It was too hard to tell.

“So I’m an accident,” Summer said.

“You’re a happy product of circumstance,” Gran said.

Summer couldn’t bring herself to speak anymore. She dropped her hands into her lap and stared at the monitor.

Gran circled the desk to look at the picture.

The office was dead with silence.

Summer’s lips moved wordlessly as she searched for the right questions to ask. When she finally managed to speak, her voice was tiny. “What are pictures of you doing on this old computer?” Summer asked. She swallowed hard. “And who are all of these people?”

“That’s… Well, that’s Levi and Bekah right there, and probably Pyper in the back. Hard to tell,” Gran said. Summer went to the previous picture. “Those are the witches—uh, James and Stephanie and Brianna. Barely knew any of them.” Another click. Gran’s fingers trembled over her own lips, almost like she had to pull the words from her own mouth. “And that’s Seth and Abel.” She sucked in a hard breath. Her forehead wrinkled. “God, it’s been years.”

“Who are these people?” Summer asked again.

Gran’s finger traced the figure on the left. “Abel’s your daddy.”

Summer couldn’t look at it anymore. She pushed back her chair and stood. “It’s not…this isn’t possible. This computer’s hundreds of years old.”

“Babe,” Gran said gently, touching her shoulder.

Summer pushed her off. “You’re immortal, but you’re not that old.”

“No, I’m not.”

“So what is going on here?”

Gran sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”

Wasn’t it always?

Summer needed air. She flung the office door open, rushed down the stairs, and kept going. She didn’t care that they were supposed to stick together for safety anymore. She needed to get away.



Nash knew something was wrong the instant that he returned to his office and found only Summer’s grandmother inside. His feeling of dread grew when she didn’t leave the moment that he entered. For all of their short hours together, both Abram and Gwyneth Gresham had been obviously avoiding his company—not too strange, considering the intimidating effect angels had on mortals. Most mortals, anyway, if one excluded the occasional beautiful, irrepressible shapeshifter.

“Where is she?” Nash asked.

“Summer’s gone,” Gwyneth said without lifting her eyes from the computer monitor. “Abram too, near as I can tell.”

Nash’s fists clenched at his side. “Where?” he asked, his voice dropping into a dangerous growl.

She only shook her head and kept staring at the computer that Summer had assembled. He moved over her shoulder to see what was so fascinating.

It was a photo of Gwyneth Gresham herself.

“What in God’s name is this?” Nash asked, wrenching her around to face him. “Are you a spy? Tell me how you came to be here!” There was a command in his voice that could not be denied. Not by any sane mortal.

“I don’t respond to orders, boy.”

He gathered himself to his full height. Ethereal energy crackled in his fingertips. “Boy? Have you any clue who you’re speaking to? Hold your tongue or I’ll cut your—”

A shock of pain across his cheek silenced him instantly, but it took several heartbeats for him to realize what had happened.

Gwyneth Gresham had slapped him.

The instant urge to hit her back was almost overwhelming, especially when she jammed her finger in his sternum.

“You don’t threaten me,” Gwyneth said. He tried to step back, but she grabbed his chin in a crushing grip and jerked his face down to look at her. “I once shot a man who held my life in his hands just because he threatened my family, and I’d do the same to any other. I couldn’t care less if you’re an angel or Lucifer himself. You watch your mouth and show some respect.”

Nash didn’t have a mother, but if he had, he imagined that a scolding from her would have been very much like being in Gwyneth Gresham’s sights.

He pushed her arm away, but she didn’t back down.

“For the record,” she said, a little calmer than before. “I respond perfectly fine to please and thank you.”

Was this mortal joking? Please and thank you?

The ethereal energy built around him. The computer monitor fuzzed, the lights dimmed, and something distant gave an electrical pop. If he didn’t calm himself, he was going to knock out the power in his entire house.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The energy went with it, and the lights came back on.

“Explain how your current appearance is identical to these photos,” he said. And then, with no small effort, he added, “Please.”

“I’m a zombie. Necromancy. You know how it is.” She shrugged. “The other side’s gotten ugly. There are people in the government trying to regulate things like us. They wanted to take babies away from preternatural parents. Split families. Register, divide, recruit. So we planned to come here in order to stay together.”

“The other side,” Nash echoed.

“Earth,” she said. “You think I don’t know where I came from? I know this world is a Haven.”

In truth, he had assumed that Summer’s family must have been natives to the area, and as clueless as she was about the other side. An idea blossomed inside him—a tiny, hopeful spark that was in danger of consuming him. “That doesn’t explain why you’re in the photo,” he said.

Gwyneth gestured to the monitor. “This computer belongs to a group called the Union. They must have been spying on us as we planned to move over.”

“So you came here deliberately,” he said. “Which means that you know how you got here.”

“Sure, I do,” she said. “The real question is, how did you get here?”

“I chose the wrong side in a war. I was betrayed and exiled by my kind.”

“So you’re a victim.” But the old lady wasn’t stupid. She tilted her head to the side to study him. “Why do you want Summer, Nash? She told me how you talked her into the internship. The dresses, the scholarship. You wouldn’t have done that for just anyone.”

“I hoped that she could tell me where the doors to Earth are located. Obviously, if she had come through, she must know where to go back,” he said. “But I was wrong. She knows nothing.”

“That’s because she was only a baby when I brought her over.” Gwyneth sighed. “I think I should show you something.”