Return to the Nine Kingdoms

(Part I) 1

                                                Rose
    My name is Rose and I live on the edge of the forest.
    Well, that's only half right. My name is Rose—more on that later—but since my parents are perpetual weirdos, I don't and apparently will never live on the edge of the forest. I live...
    I barely live anywhere, really. Where I reside isn't on the edge of anything and it's not in the middle of nowhere, anywhere, or any place. It's just there. Here. And living? I don't think anyone in this forgotten place actually lives. They just keep going through the motions. No living happening here. No thriving. Just barely surviving.
    The painful thing is that I know that I could be living, thriving, loving, jumping-up-and-downing—go with me on that last one—somewhere absolutely fantastic. Somewhere unthinkably amazing.
    Because my mother was the one that lived on the edge of the forest. The one who stumbled into this amazing world that I could only dream of.
    When Virginia and Wolfgang—Dad had to take on a more twenty-first century and entirely non-fantastical name—met in that magical place, they literally had the fight of their lives ahead of them. They spent weeks in terrible danger and experienced tragedy they have both told me they hope I will never endure.
    "Mon fleur," Dad cooed just after the first time he told the story of how he met the love of his life, the keeper of his heart, my mother, Virginia, "you mustn't think of this place with such awe. It is terrible and dangerous."
    "You'd be eaten by a goblin in a second!" Mom chimed in from the doorway even though it had seemed like she'd grown disinterested in listening to Dad tell the story.
    This, of course, was the first time I remembered hearing the story—they'd told it to me as a bedtime tale many times before—and so I may have been able to more easily recall the details because it was engrained in my subconscious.
    "Clayface? But...he was good, wasn't he?"
    I was sure that he was. Grandpa only visited every couple of years back then, but I remembered how fond he was of the goblin who had helped him escape the dreadful prison.
    Mom had a caught look on her face, then. She looked to Dad with a frown of surprise and he quickly recovered for her.
    "Of course, not Clayface," he said in that soft voice one might use when talking about fluffy puppies. "No, Clayface wouldn't gobble you up in a second. But one...of...his...brothers might!"
    He slowly punctuated every last word with a tickle to my ribs and then one final, double-handed poke under each of my armpits made me jump in surprise and giggle.
    "No, my little sweet flower," he almost never uses my name, even then when I was not yet old enough to read and depended on his wonderful stories in which he always spoke of Mom as if she were crafted of sunshine and sugar. "We wouldn't ever speak ill of your dear Grandpa's friends, wherever they may be."
    Grandpa. Tony, to those friends my parents told me about since I was old enough to listen. He's been gone for two years now. Word around the house is that he'd been given a State Funeral back there. A herd of golden retrievers howled out a mourning song for him and the King himself gave a moving eulogy. Back here we just had a regular old memorial service. The only attendees outside of our small family of three were two old detectives that had never given up looking for him.
    I'd like to see it, in person: the memorial King Wendell built for Grandpa on the grounds of his castle. Mom, in a moment of what I'm sure she would call weakness but what I would call love, described it to me as she had read in the letter from King Wendell.
    "He gilded it! The whole thing! From the flannel over shirt down to his work boots, your Grandfather," she always called him Grandfather, "is gold, just like..."
    "Just like in the story?"
    "Just like in the story." Every word was sad and she had a faraway look in her expression.
    He'd only been gone a few months by then, so the grief was still strong. Her mother she tried not to speak about, but Grandpa was always someone she wanted to share. More special to her after their reconciliation, that close bond they formed after the events of their adventure together, Grandpa was her wacky, eccentric, overprotective but still even a little self-centered Dad.
    "Grandpa will protect me! I want to visit him!"
    The terrified look on my mother's face at that moment will be forever caught in my memory.
    "Absolutely not!" She laughed, then, that nervous laugh that hinted at some kind of calculation she was doing in her head. I didn't catch it then, a kid of only a few years—maybe four or five—but I can analyze it easily now. I had been marginally closer than I'd ever been, right there, in my begging and pleading to visit that other world.
    Dad countered my demand with more tickles and threats of evil, poisonous witches visiting me, here in our safe little apartment deep in the heart of the city. But I remember a sharp intake of breath coming from the doorway as Mom moved away and whispered a goodnight, having already covered my face with kisses as Dad had ended his story. The mention of evil witches had hurt. But I was too giggly with tickle-recovery to notice at the time.
    "Goodnight my honey-pumpkin. My petals of pure sunshine," Dad nuzzled at my nose with the tip of his. "I hope you dream of brightly colored lambs and sweet, adorable, tasty, delicious..."
    He'd ended his thought in an abrupt snarl and glanced from my laughing face over his shoulder to the window. The moon had risen but in the city, you couldn't quite ever see it from my window. The glow was bright enough to warn Dad to keep himself together for the evening.
    "Looks like I might have to sleep downstairs, huh, darling flower?"
    He smiled that wolffish grin and I remember catching just a tiny hint of yellow gleaming behind those usual brown eyes.
    Downstairs actually meant the basement of our apartment building, and the basement actually meant the cage designed to hold left-behind belongings of old tenants. At certain times of the month—when the moon was set to be at its fullest—Dad would spend the night behind the mesh cage and enjoy a plate of his favorite meal, lamb, extra juicy and extremely rare. He'd fall asleep there and be up bright and early, bouncing, and pouncing with energy.
    Even now, I wonder how odd it must have been for the super. He must have been paid a little stipend—perhaps some gold coins from a certain Kingdom for his end-of-year bonus—just to keep silent about the weird guy who took over the basement once a month and occasionally left the bones from a rack of lamb behind in one of the cages.
    "He was so kind," Mom told me about six months after we'd moved from the city to where we are now. "He never asked questions, he never gave us any grief. It was kind of like he knew. He might've just figured it out and went with it."
    "He probably thought I was in the doghouse so much," Dad added, looking up from his book where he was reading on the couch.
    "Well...you were, in a way?" Mom smirked.
    They both shared a laugh that made it clear that it was only funny to the two of them—some memory they hadn't yet shared with me and I just rolled my pre-teen eyes at my lame parents.
    We had settled into our two-story house in the quiet little suburb in coal country and after six months, Dad's joke about "moving to Virginia, Virginia" had gotten bitterly old.
    "Dad, I'm not going to make any friends here...not with that kind of humor," I'd told him.
    "But your Mom's Virginia..."
    "And we moved to a state with the same name, yeah. Yeah we get it. Everyone gets it. The cats get it. The worms in the ground get it. The dead colonials that the worms are eating get it," Mom said. The full feeling of stop carried through every word.
    Dad was all-for living in the country. He hated being trapped in the city.
    "Like Snow White's Prison all over again," he nearly shouted at our old apartment building as the last of the moving boxes were loaded into the truck and it began to pull away. He said more quietly, explaining to me, "Well, fewer beanstalk foods, but near enough."
    Moving to the country had been his idea and he had a good reason: his only child was nearing the age of maturity and, even as a half-breed—actually a quarter-breed, but in the community, Dad says we're all half-breeds—his little flower would need the space to roam.
    "Feeling the pull of it, yet, my darling cub?"
    I knew exactly what he meant but I was not only pretty upset to be leaving the only home I'd ever known, my friends, my school, my favorite parks and places to visit, I was getting more and more angry with the idea that it was because of me that we were leaving.
    "No. And I won't. I'm more Mom than you." I'd said it in that snotty little kid who hasn't gotten what they want kind of way and it had hurt him. The world had never seen a man—a wolf-man—so excited to see what his child—cub—would become, yet she was so eager to deny it.
    "You will," he said, trying to recover. There was still a little whimper in his voice and a tiny whine passed from his throat.
    I was eleven then and I hadn't yet felt the pull of the moon, honest. And when I finally did about a year later, I had no warning. All three of us found afterward that we were relieved to have a house tucked into the back of a suburb with a backyard that faced wide open fields. While a forest—the edge of which we could have so easily lived on if our realtor had been better at his job—is nearby, I distinctly remember the night of my first moon-run and how I avoided it entirely so that I could run along the banks of the glistening river.
    I felt so free and so at peace that first night. But I felt the hunger too.
    "There are ways to control it," Dad told me as he held me in his arms the next morning.
    I'd awoken, covered in silty mud and with chicken feathers stuck to the corners of my mouth, curled up on the couch at home. I was clutching the remnants of a large red hen in my hands—I only knew it was naturally red because of the feathers I pulled out of my teeth, since every inch that remained was soiled with darkening blood. I'd screamed and Dad, who'd been pacing the living room in front of me, waiting for me to rouse, screamed with me.
    "I killed it?"
    Worry coated his face and he stroked tears from my cheeks. His fingers came away red.
    "Better it than the cats?" He suggested.
    Snow and Cindy, our white Persian and red tabby respectively, were no where in sight, even though I was sitting exactly where they'd most often be found. I nodded but still cried. I'd never killed anything before. A friend at school, a friend that I'd fought hard to make since I was the weird new girl, was a vegetarian and I'd deeply considered becoming one as well, and not just to fit in.
    "I don't want to kill things," I told Dad.
    Mom made a noise in the kitchen to let me know she was there. It was early, barely daybreak, and Mom has never been an early-riser, but I could smell something along the lines of a hearty breakfast.
    "Bacon?" She called through the pass-through window at the kitchen island.
    Dad's tail started thumping against the top of the coffee table where he'd finally sat down moments earlier. My own tail, just a little stubby thing, twitched.
    "I know how to heal a wolf's heart," Mom said brightly.
    "And I'm sure it died quickly," Dad assured me as he pulled the foot and what was probably a wing from my hands.
    "Ah—Don't even think about it," Mom said, waving a spatula through the window at Dad.
    He had a savoring look on his face and I smiled my tears away when I saw him lick his lips at least twice.
    "You had a run last month, you got your treat then," Mom reminded him.
    The green-paper posters offering a reward for the return of "Peppers" the long-eared pet rabbit had faded and warped in the weather after a month. Luckily, none of our neighbors came looking for it door-to-door, since Dad might've slipped up and told them Peppers was in a better place—and was very tasty.
    We ate bacon sandwiches on fluffy, heavily buttered bread, and Dad and I each drank two glasses of cold whole milk. Mom kept it light with a one-egg omelette for herself and only laughed when her twelve-year-old daughter and her grown husband growled in a play-fight over the last of the pound of bacon she'd cooked.
    I could tell that she was relieved, more than angry that I had, after all, become a wolf—if that's what I can be called. I'm only one-quarter, since Dad is half, but apparently the wolf part of my DNA is stronger than the bouncy, rock-music-loving other part. The pull of the moon doesn't affect me like it does Dad, other than that one night, my first moon-run. In other regards, I'm just like her. We both love food—well, all three of us love food, but for different reasons—and she's just about the best cook you can find, not just in our little village, but anywhere, I'd wager.
    It worked out best for her, the move. She was finally able to open a little cafe of her own, something she'd dreamed about since well before I came along, and she was happy. Really happy.
    Dad's lack of any real documents showing he's a real citizen has prevented him from settling down with any official job, but he does well with writing his own self-help books and publishes them under a pseudonym, Warren Wolfson.
You'd think that a twenty-year-old who still lives at home would just absolutely love the idea of always having food on the table, a roof over her head, and the full, loving, acceptance of caring parents, right? The pull of the moon may not tear so easily at my heart, but the longing for adventure sure does. The stories that my parents told me in my youth and the exciting tease that Dad let slip only once—that I'd been there, as a wee baby, and just the one time—was more than I could feasibly bear.
    "There's more than one way to skin a cat," I said out loud as I tapped multiple searches into my laptop one evening.
Snow, her white fur unblemished with time but the overhang of worn teeth showing her age, looked startled. "Figure of speech, Snowy, sorry."
    Cindy was curled around my neck and hadn't moved in the hour I'd spent on the couch. While I searched for any mention of strange, floating portals into other worlds—the crackpots on the internet aren't so strange when you yourself have a wolf-tail tucked into your leggings—my two closest companions kept a very terrible lookout. Mom and Dad were busy at the cafe, Mom with the cooking and general running of the ten-table diner and Dad with the floor management—greeting guests, chatting up tables, slipping hard-copies of his books within eyesight—but it was getting late and then cafe had closed at eight.
    My bus ticket to NYC was burning a hole in my pocket, figuratively speaking since it was a QR code in my email, but I hadn't been home for over ten years. Could I even make it to Central Park on my own? Would the portal—the mirror to the realm of the Nine Kingdoms—be there, waiting for me?
    "Come on, Internet dweebs! Tell me something. Shimmering air with a dwarf—"
    I looked up at Snow who was still giving me that perplexed look that only cats can give.
    "It's okay, Snow. We can say dwarf. We're actually talking about...dwarves. Like, the real...oh, never mind."
    She went on looking at me that way and I figured that she didn't care about it either way.
    "What's this?" I'd bookmarked a Reddit months ago that only talked about weird things in Central Park. It was usually nothing to write home about—not that I'd mention anything about the Nine Kingdoms to Mom or Dad—but today, one post caught my attention. It was fate. Or...it was fate?
    "Big trip, might've been the acid," I read aloud. Cindy purred in her sleep and the sound rose into a little chirp. "I swear I wasn't that high, but I think I met the King or something last night. Isn't it the Queen, though? Dude sounded English, but I dunno. He told me to leave real quick though. Said he wasn't looking for me. Dude practically kicked my ass back through this wobbly light thing. When I looked back, once I knew I was back in CP, the wobbly light thing was gone. But there was like a huge pile of snow on the ground. Pretty weird for June, amiright? Anybody else in the Ramble near the Arch see anything?"
    I had translated the nearly unintelligible gibberish the user, CPRangerBob, had written. Cindy and Snow pretended they hadn't cared or even listened to my careful decipher of CPRangerBob's encounter with what I knew, absolutely, was a Magic Mirror.
    "The Ramble. By the Arch," I smiled. I beamed. I sighed with relief. "Snow, you and Cindy are too old to travel, but it looks like I should pack for winter!"