Ch7: Resemblance
I spent the rest of the day attempting to function through the shaking and cowering I could not control. I made myself eat with no appetite, and I made myself move without motivation, but I only left the guest room when Karen came for me.
When it got dark out and I was nearly ready for bed, I picked up my mp3 player from where it was lying on the desk and plugged a pair of headphones into it with quaking hands. I put the ear buds in my ears, and walked over to the bed. I turned off the bedside lamp and I slipped under the covers and curled into a ball. If Karen had come into my room right then, all she would have seen was a lump of blankets.
In the pitch black of my covers, I touched the screen of my mp3 player and brought it to life. I scrolled through my music indecisively and finally started a random playlist.
An upbeat pop song came on, and I felt my body stiffen as the magic fear ripped through me. I dropped the device and pulled my earbuds out of my ears. I could still hear the music so I scrambled to shut it off.
It took me a long minute to slow my racing heart. Was everything I enjoyed lost to me?
I decided to try again. I scrolled through my music library until I found the most melancholy song I owned. I put only one earbud in this time and I waited, ready to stop it if it provoked another terrible magical reaction.
The notes came through my earbud and I barely felt a ripple. I exhaled slowly, grateful that maybe I could manage to find a way to cope with this nightmare.
I spent the next hour huddled under my covers, holding Lizzy and sifting through my songs to find anything negative enough that I thought I could bear to listen to it. The whole time I listened to the one song I knew was safe on repeat; I was not ready to risk another fright.
Eventually I fell asleep.
* * * * * * * * *
I woke in the morning with my heart pounding like a drum, but no memories of what I had been dreaming to upset me so.
I could guess what my nightmares might have been, though. Maybe I had been doing something terrifying like opening my backpack or trying to slip my feet into fluffy bunny slippers.
I was rewarded for my internal sass with familiar shivers running outwards from the back of my neck.
I huddled back under the covers and waited for the magic to pass.
Before I had had time for the shaking to wear off, I heard a knock on my door and then the familiar second knock before Karen carefully came into the guest room. I pushed my face up out of the covers.
She was holding a roll of gauze and tape in her hand.
"Your bandages need changing, then I've got an idea that I want to try with you."
Well, that sounded as terrifying as bunny slippers, I thought with another cold shiver in response to my sarcasm. The curse really had no sense of humour.
I pushed myself up and turned so that my neck was accessible to her. I pulled the long mass of my hair out of the way.
I could feel her cool fingers on my skin as she pulled off the old bandage. It pulled out a few of my hairs, but I did not dare complain.
"It's looking much better. The wound is already closed," she told me. "I don't see any signs of infection or anything."
I waited while she squeezed antibiotic cream onto the bandage and then placed it on my neck and taped it down again.
"You should probably get ready and before you eat breakfast, then we'll try my little experiment."
I did as she suggested then walked out of the guest room as if I was being led to a hangman's tree.
* * * * * * * * *
I ate nearly my entire breakfast. I still had almost no appetite and it was still tasteless, but I knew she wanted me to and it did not seem the magic had picked up on my trick to stall the inevitable.
I spoke too soon, because my pleasure at my own wit froze over into a new round of anxiety.
Karen noticed I had stopped eating and cleared my plate.
"I've got it set up on the coffee table," she said.
I tried not to shake too much as I followed her over to the long brown couch in the living room. I sat down and she sat opposite me. I looked at the coffee table and tried to see what was on it without getting Karen in my line of sight.
All I could see was a square cardboard box, about the length of a standard ruler. The lid prevented me from seeing what was inside and I wondered nervously what her experiment might be.
"Go on, open it," she said.
I took it as an order and stretched my trembling hands out towards the box. I pulled it slowly closer and lifted the lid.
Sean's face grinned up at me, brown hair messy and brown eyes a similar shade to mine. He had an expression like he was trying to annoy the photographer. I instinctively glanced towards Karen for clarification, but my eyes fled to the corner of the couch and I inspected the matching brown pillow.
"Take the pictures out, please, and look at them," she instructed.
I brought my eyes back to the box of pictures. I looked at Sean again. It had only been a day, how could I miss my brother already?
I remembered that my false pack leader had told me he would be coming today. I almost smiled at the thought.
I moved the picture of him out of the box to the coffee table and looked at the next one. It was me, only in the picture I was about six or seven. I was running outside and my brown hair was streaming behind me. Had my mother taken this picture? I barely felt the throb of pain through the fear clouding me.
I set that picture in the pile I had begun.
The next photo was of someone I did not recognize. I looked at the man in the picture with sandy blond hair and blue eyes. I felt confused. "I-I don't recognize him," I confessed.
"I'm not surprised. He's one of our pack members, Bobby. He's a couple of years older than you."
I felt panic surge through me at her words. Should I even be looking at a picture of one of the pack members?
"Are you more afraid now that you know?" she asked. I could hear the guilt in her tone. I made me feel better somehow that at least she was not enjoying torturing me.
I nodded.
"Please look at the next one."
I picked up the picture of my false pack member and set it off to the side carefully. I looked at the next one and felt a jolt of fear at the unfamiliar person.
"I-I-I don't know them, either," I nearly whimpered.
"Try to calm down. They're not from either of our packs. They're Austin's," she told me, referring to the third leader of the Trifecta.
I felt my breathing calm slightly. I looked down at the picture that was still lying in the box, being sure not to look at Karen or at the picture of Bobby. The picture was of two girls posing for the camera. They both looked close to my age. One had a cute round face and her black hair was down and loose and the other had pretty sloping eyes and her light brown hair pulled up in a high ponytail. They seemed to have been caught in a moment of laughter between friends.
It made me miss such easy times with Matthias.
Karen spoke again. "The one on the right is Lacy. She's one of the few female warriors in our packs. I was told her friend's name is Jill, but I've never met her."
I nodded, wondering what significance these two girls had for me that Karen was having me look at the pictures.
Karen kept speaking. "I asked for donations of photos from the packs. Some are people you'll recognize, others are people from Austin's pack, and a few are pictures from my pack."
From the corner of my eye I saw her pull Bobby's picture across the table towards herself.
"I want you to really look at the people in these photos without being told who they are. I know you know, somewhere under the magic, that my pack is the same as yours or Austin's."
She paused, "Even if it doesn't work as well as I'm hoping, at least you'll know what the people around you look like."
I nodded, although I was not sure knowing would make it better.
"I-is y-your picture in here?" I asked her.
"It is," she said gently. "But I promise most are people who are not part of the pack. Only a handful, really."
I swallowed. I would not want to play Russian Roulette with a gun that may or may not have a bullet in it, neither was I keen to look through these pictures.
"I'll leave you to it, now. You can keep the box out here or in your room if you prefer. Serge won't care either way."
I did not want to keep this box of potential horrors in my guest room, but I also thought the curse might punish me for cluttering up his house, so my room it was.
I heard as Karen walked away. I did not want to do this, but it was what Karen had asked of me. I pulled the box closer and set it on my knees.
I looked down at Lacy and Jill and envied how relaxed and happy they looked for a long moment, before I took the picture and set it on the pile with my brother and myself. That could be the safe pile.
I went through the box systematically, looking at each face in each photo. Some were school photos, others casual, others group pictures. The group pictures scared me the most because the more people in a picture the higher the chance of someone in it being from my false pack.
I took the pictures of people I knew and put them in the pile with my brother. I found two pictures of Matthias, one of my dad on his own, another where he was fishing with Sean and I when we were younger, one of his wedding pictures with Moramay, and others from various members of our pack.
It had been a fun wedding, although there had been a small part of me that hurt that he was replacing my mother.
But I liked Moramay and I wanted my father to be happy so I did not protest, and really, it was nice not to be outnumbered by the guys in my family any longer. I could not imagine her surprise when she found out about my father's magic, but she was surprisingly relaxed that she had fallen for a werewolf.
Maybe after all the werewolf stuff in entertainment media, finding out we existed had been little more than a pleasant surprise. Hopefully she was not too disappointed by the normalcy of it.
I smiled a bit at the thoughts of my family.
My smile died on my lips at the sound of the door opening. At first I thought it was Karen, but I could hear heavy footfalls before he took of his boots.
I probably could have guessed it was him even without the terror pumping through me, flowing from the back of my neck to the rest of my body.
I froze and strained to hear his movements as his sock feet crossed the floor and out of the large open room I was sitting in. I could hear the scratch of animal nails across the hardwood floor behind him. I heard him say something low to whomever was with him.
I wondered if someone was visiting in their wolf form.
I did not wonder further, because I felt the magic shake me for daring to ask questions about my false leader.
It was a long time after his sounds faded to silence that I got the courage up to continue looking through the pictures.
* * * * * * * * *
By the time Karen returned I had sorted the pictures into piles.
I had two big piles. One was of my family and people I recognized from my old, or Austin's packs.
One was pictures of people I was not sure about.
There were two small piles, too. One had a couple of photos of people I recognized from my new false pack and I could not bear to look at them for more than a second.
There was only one picture in the last pile.
When I picked up that particular picture, I saw an attractive, smiling man, but his hazel eyes looked weary beyond his years which were probably only a few more than mine. He seemed to have been caught by surprise and had barely decided to humour the photographer with a fake smile as the picture was snapped.
His clothes were casual and it looked like he had not shaved in a day or two. His hair, a shade lighter than his eyes, looked slightly messy, as if he was too busy to worry about looking perfect.
That was the first thing that had tipped me off, because I had frequently seen my father in a similar state, especially since the eastern wolves had begun to hound us more fervently.
Then I realized he looked vaguely familiar to me and I accidentally threw the picture in my fright.
I saw what I had done and nearly dissolved into a panic before I forced myself to deal with my great transgression, throwing a picture of him onto the hardwood floor beside the couch.
It took me a full five minutes of shaky terror to force myself to pick up his picture. I wanted to put it upside down so the photo could not look at me, but it felt wrong to do so. Instead I put the picture in its own pile, face up, right in the middle, because the curse seemed willing to have it no other way.
That became the pile of pictures of people who had used a thrall curse on me and destroyed my life.
The curse slapped me with a bout of shaking for my criticisms of him and as punishment I kept the picture front and center while I went through the rest of the box.
I heard Karen stop as she looked at my piles.
"You sorted them?" she asked.
I nodded, but it did not feel like answer enough. "People I know, people I'm not sure of, p-people from y-y-your p-pack, and..."
"Your father said you'd never met him," Karen commented.
I shook my head. "I didn't, but I sort of remember h-h-his f-father."
"Oh," she said slowly. "There is some resemblance."
"And h-h-he l-looks strained, like my father sometimes does."
Karen was quiet for a long moment and I wondered what she was thinking. The curse sent fear down my back from the bite wound.
"I took it yesterday," she finally said.
I digested that fact. He did look upset, like Karen had told me. It made me shiver all over again that he might be suffering too, in this mess.
"Do you want me to take that picture away?" she offered.
Of course, I wanted it gone just like the picture of Bobby, but the magic swept over me again at the thought until I could not bear it.
I shook my head. "N-n-no, pl-please let m-me k-k-keep it," I stuttered.
The curse wanted to see only my suffering.
* * * * * * * * *
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