A rectangle of light opened at the far end of the room, not so bright as to be blinding, but enough to sting my eyes, which had long since adjusted to the dark. Three figures made their way inside, and they smelled of nothing, nothing but the cold. Their steps were soft as they walked across the room; predator’s steps, designed to make as little noise as possible. I had stopped walking like a predator long ago, preferring shoes that politely announced my presence to the potential victims around me.
The three waheela walked until they had come to the very edge of where the light reached, and stopped, silently waiting to see what I would do next. They were all male, with dark hair and eyes, and brown skin. Waheela could pass for Canada’s First People, when we had to, and in a way, I suppose that was not a lie. We had been there longer than most after all, as cold and unchanging as the glaciers.
I cocked my head. “Hello, Father.”
The tallest of the three figures nodded in return. “Hello, eldest of my daughters.”
I was not the firstborn female of my litter, but the dead are not the family of the living. After my sister was eaten, I became eldest. I looked at the shadowed figures behind him, and asked, “Why have you come here with my brothers? Why have you followed me down into the human lands? I went into exile of my own volition.”
“Your mother is dead,” he said calmly. “You are the eldest of my daughters.”
In the land of the waheela, the words he had just uttered made perfect sense. But this was the land of the humans, and I had been living here for a very long time. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying, what the words really meant beyond the thin veneer of his civility. They would have been easier in great-form, where nothing has two meanings: everything is only ever what it is, as cold and unforgiving as the snow.
Clarity did not come easy, but it came. I stiffened in my chair. “No,” I said. “I refuse. I am in exile.”
“You have exiled yourself.”
“But if Mother is dead, then I have the authority to exile myself. I am in exile. You must find another.”
My father growled. Even in man-form, it was a chilling, primal sound, commanding obedience from the tip of my head to the toes of my feet—my feet, which were still clad in my fine black boots with the heels that clattered when I walked. I rapped one of them against the floor, relishing the sound it made. I was Istas. I had run very far to become her, and I was not letting her go that easily.
“No,” I said, calmly. “I will not go with you.”
“Izzy?” Ryan sounded confused. I managed not to wince—showing weakness was beneath me, and here and now, I was my father’s daughter, whether I desired to be or no. “What’s going on?”
Even in the dark, I could see my father baring his teeth in a smile. “You refuse me, but you forget that you are not the only thing we hold. How loudly will your little toy scream, eldest daughter? How many limbs must we remove before you will see reason?”
I opened my mouth to answer, and then paused, rapping my heel against the floor again. It made a sharp, almost hollow sound. “Father, are we on the second floor?”
“Third,” he said smugly. “No one will overhear the screaming.”
“Ah. That is pleasing. Ryan?”
“Um, yeah, Izzy?”
“Are you ready to rock?”
Ryan’s surprised laugh was followed by the sound of a large, heavy object crashing through the wooden floorboards. My brothers shouted, rushing past me toward the hole that had suddenly opened up in the floor. My father snarled. I bared my teeth in a smile.
“I believe you have lost a prisoner,” I said. “Pity, that. Now what are you going to do to entice me?”
He grabbed the front of my dress, jerking me toward him until I heard the seams starting to give. Nose only inches from mine, he whispered, “I’ll think of something.”
This time, I couldn’t stop myself from flinching.
Waheela are not unthinking beasts, to be ruled by instinct. We are very thoughtful monsters, ruled by tradition, which is like instinct, only crueler. Once, it may have made sense for the eldest to rule in all things; once, it may have been fair to drag back runaway children and force them to rejoin a family they had chosen to leave. Those times are far behind us, lost in the distance of the past.
My father’s hand gripped my jaw, forcing me to look at him as he studied me. His lip curled in a sneer when he considered my ponytails. “You dress like a human,” he spat.
“You are wearing human clothing,” I countered. My brothers were gone, descending into the abandoned building as they searched for my missing boyfriend. I wished them all the luck in the world, including the greatest luck of all: if they were lucky, they would not find him. A fall from this height would doubtless have broken the chair that kept his chains in position. He would be loose. And most of all, he would be angry.
Tanuki are therianthropes, like waheela: shapeshifters whose power comes from within, unlike the poor, diseased wretches infected with lycanthropy. Ryan could transform his body in a variety of ways, including convincing his flesh that it was a type of stone far denser than lead. He could not move when in statue-form, but he could do a remarkable amount of damage to things like non-load-bearing floors.
“I am dressed for the sake of blending in,” said my father. “You are groomed. You have embraced the mockery they continue to pretend serves as a culture.”
I blinked at him, startled. And then I laughed. “Truly? You call human culture a mockery? Our culture is a hole in the ground! Our culture is your teeth in my sister’s throat! How did Mother die? Hunters? A blizzard? Or you, coming in the night with claws bared and temper blazing? We don’t have a culture, Father! We have a war that we’ve been fighting against our own kind for centuries, and there will never be a winner!”
His hand was hard against my cheek. I glared at him. He glared back, showing me his teeth.
“You will come home,” he said. “I do not care what you want. Desires are for the warm lands.”
“I left the cold.”
“The cold never leaves you.” This time, his hand against my cheek was a caress. “You are never going to be as warm as they are.”
I turned my head, fast as a striking snake, and sunk my teeth into his fingers. How he howled! And his blood was as warm as any mammal’s. There was nothing of the cold in him at all.
He yanked himself away from me, snarling. “Insolent bitch!”
“I told you, Father. I will not come home with you. You’ll have to kill me first.”
“So be it, then.” He primly removed his overcoat, tossing it off to the side. Then, without another word, he began to swell, human features first distorting, and finally vanishing beneath the onrushing force of the battle-form. He unfolded, shirt and trousers tearing away, until a great wolf-bear stood before me, fully eleven feet in height, with bearlike paws and claws the length of my palm. He roared, and it was the sound of an avalanche crashing down upon an empty valley. All the cold of Canada was in his bellowed declaration of dominance.
I looked at him calmly. “Yes,” I said. “I know. But what can you do?”
He stepped forward, barely bipedal, all-too-aware that the floor would barely support his weight; Ryan had made that very clear. Almost gentle now, he wrapped his paw around my chin, claws pricking the flesh of my cheek. He looked at me. I looked back.