Reagan considers herself to be a fair and just daughter of Emma Austen, so when she's showed the dirty underside of werewolf communities, it's difficult to wrap her mind around it. Stray alpha wolves start to cause havoc around her father's town in...
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"Don't forget to call your mother tonight—she isn't exactly thrilled about leaving you out here." I glanced over at Uncle Gavin then, recognizing that aching look on his face as if he made it every day. He seemed to realize I was watching him, so he looked briefly at me before sighing. "Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like your sister. And don't act like I can't see you back there," he called out, rising his voice so Rosanna heard him over the music spilling through her headphones. She released a bubbly laugh that coaxed a smile onto my lips as I tucked a finger to my lip and teeth, grinning devilishly at Uncle Gavin again.
My elbow propped up on the open window, and I scrunched up my nose at the side mirror where I could see Rosanna planning something dubious, no doubt. She clamped onto my seat and pulled herself up close, so her chin rested on my shoulder. "You'll send me pics, right?"
"Of what?" I retorted jokingly. "I'll send you a photo album of nostril shots."
"Reagan, don't you dare!" she whined, shoving my shoulders forward so I almost face planted into the dash.
"Hey, no fighting," Uncle Gavin said, releasing a hand from the wheel to push Rosanna back. The two of us shrieked for him to keep his eyes on the road—we were in the middle of the mountains, dammit, we didn't want to fall off the side of a cliff.
Despite all the bickering that ensued, and Uncle Gavin's attempt to drown it out with good old fashioned classical music, a nostalgic cloud drifted over me. In the gray of Canada's mountains and unsustainable-sunny climate, I could squint and pretend as though it was a rainy afternoon in Stonecroft back in Texas where we lived. The chances of seeing Uncle Gavin and Rosanna in the next few months were growing slimmer the farther we drove—it was just too long of a journey for any of us to make more than once a year. It was getting increasingly harder to believe that I might never fully move back to Stonecroft.
At the thought of home, my heart began to ache even though I willed it not to during our entire extravaganza of a field trip. Stonecroft was so extraordinarily distant from British Columbia, and the fact that Rosanna's lilting voice would be the last southern one I'd hear for a while made my eyes burn and my lips tremble beneath my fingers. Uncle Gavin tried his hand at a southern accent a few times, but it all came out wrong. I sucked in my lip and turned away from the side mirror so Rosanna wouldn't accuse me of getting emotional.
After arguing with Uncle Gavin over how long we had before reaching the place, Rosanna looked at her phone and, based off of the few signs we encountered on our stretch, determined Redborough was no more than half an hour away. "You could get murdered this far out in the middle-of-nowhere," she said, her voice hauntingly crisp in my ear. "What goes on in Canada-"
"-Stays in Canada," Uncle Gavin finished, and spooked me with his hand gripping my shoulder.
I covered up the fact that I actually jumped by jerking away from his hand and saying, "If any murdering is going on, it'll be by my hand and it'll start with the both of ya."
"Maybe that's why Mom's sending you away—so ya don't end up killin' Luke for being such a dick all the time," Rosanna said, and the two of us snickered under our hands and Uncle Gavin rolled his eyes. He wasn't particularly fond of the neighbor kid Luke, either. He always gave Rosanna a hard time and purposefully confused the two of us. He was spectacular at calling me Rosanna, and I wanted to strangle him for it every time. But at the end of the day, Rosanna always sighed adoringly at the thought of him.
Bringing up Luke was the perfect segway into her constant request: "Update me whenever you encounter a hot guy and don't start kissing anyone until I know who they are."
"Unbelievable," Uncle Gavin blurted out. I mutely agreed with him.
"My hot-guy radar isn't exactly up to par with yours," I reminded her. "And besides, I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to win."
He held out a fist for me to punch and said, "That's my girl." Rosanna whined from the backseat, crooning over outlandish Canadian lumberjacks in flannels and hiking boots. Just as she was producing some poetic prose about hatchets and axes, we spied our first sign indicating any sort of civilization beyond that point.
Redborough was a town boasting under five hundred residents—impressive considering the sort of people who lived around there. We watched as the mountains gave way to a valley carved by the sound to the right of us. Rosanna and I pushed our noses against the windows to look over the rickety garter rails and down to the surging water. Dad once said a kid fell in and died the year before.
My eyes adjusted to the glaring white sunlight ricocheting off the ocean water beyond the valley. It broke through the mountains and sustained an inlet where all of Redborough flourished and the houses bloomed on flatter grounds a mile from where the cliffside road dissolved into forests.
We passed through the downtown area that lined the entry road, and Rosanna awed, "Look at how cute it is! Is that a ferry?" she asked, pointing out the window to it.
"Yeah—your father said it connects to the other side of the sound," Uncle Gavin said, and just then the ferry let out the deep, rumbling sound of a bassoon as it pulled away from the loading dock.
I tried to lean out the window then, but my uncle reached over and grabbed me by the shirt, yanking me back down as he turned down the next road that ducked into the town..
There was a single supermarket, and what appeared to be a cafe, restaurants, and the usual occurring in a small tourist town like this. Uncle Gavin stopped at the gas station, assuring us that it'd only take a minute—Rosanna and I counted five. There weren't too many people out and about, and there was only a single car other than our own that sat in that gas station parking lot. A man stood just outside it, smoking a cigarette until Uncle Gavin came out. Just as we were getting ready to move out, the cashier lady exited the shop and scolded the man. He stomped out his cigarette just as we exited the parking lot.
"You better not pick up smoking while you're here," Uncle Gavin said.
"Smoking isn't even legal in public places here," Rosanna said. I glanced back at her in mild shock, and she shrugged. "I did some research."
"Oh yeah? What else did you learn?" he said.
"The province flower is dogwood." That's definitely something Ros would look up, I mused as Uncle Gavin let out an amused laugh.
As the final stretch of our journey found us leaving the suburbs of Redborough, Rosanna leaned over and swapped the CD disk for one of Uncle Gavin's classics. We sang at the top of our lungs to avoid feeling the effects of separation anxiety. But I knew the reason why I was staying here and not Rosanna—she'd never be able to cope with leaving our family behind in Stonecroft. She wouldn't be able to last a week with homesickness.
Some say the first two weeks are the worst of it. I just hoped I'd be able to last that long out in the middle-of-nowhere British Columbia where anything could happen.
