“Keep her in here,” snarled Cass. “I just got the carpets cleaned.”

Sandy backed into the cold expanse of a sliding glass door and fumbled at the latch; it was closed and locked tight. She slammed the glass, trying to break it, but glass is tougher than it looks and that only works in movies, and this wasn’t a movie.

If this were a movie, you would have seen a reverse angle of the sliding glass door and a scarlet spray across it.

The kitchen was very clean by the time they were done. Everyone was always careful to help clean up.

“Did you win?” Cass’s husband shifted over to make room for her. He’d taken their daughter to the movies, knowing neither of them belonged here on bunco night—not a scary movie, with blood across a window, but something with princesses, and spells, and little bit of death, suitable for a seven-year old.

“The hostess never wins,” she said, pausing to listen for her child stirring again before she laid her head on his chest, looking out the bedroom window at the blobby moon, small and insignificant, risen high above the trees.

He stroked her hair. “Your friend from work—Sammy?”

“Sandy.”

“Did she work out?”

Cass didn’t answer at first, and his fingers, twinned in her hair, stopped.

“No,” she said, finally. “She didn’t fit in.”

“Oh.”

“Some of the others think she cheats.”

“Oh.” His fingers were still.

“Cheated.”

He didn’t say anything and after a while he began stroking her hair again, and she blinked at the moon, her eyes green, then yellow, then green.

BLENDED

C.E. MURPHY

The pack had been born savages and had, almost to a man, died that way.

Almost: almost. She had been a whelp the day the hunters came, dozens of them on their thundering black horses with the pack fleeing before them. Her mother had thrown her beneath a long-dead tree, and she’d watched dark legs flash by, dangerous broad hooves kicking up the snow.

She had seen the blood, from her hiding place. Had seen it when the hunters rode back, triumphant despite their own losses. Stripped skins still steamed in the cold, making their horses toss their heads at the scent of death. She hadn’t known, then, that it was her family, her cousins and her friends, who lay strewn across saddles and stuffed into saddlebags. Not until she was much older did she come to understand what had happened. That her family had run until they could run no more, and then had turned to fight. Beasts, turning tooth and claw against the men who hunted them. Horses died; men died.

But mostly, wolves died.

Fear had held the whimpers in her throat, even when the smell of men and killing was gone. Only when the forest went black with night did she creep forward on her belly and put her nose out into the cold.

A man’s big hand caught her by the scruff and hauled her into the air. She had never seen a man so close: he was huge and completely without fur except long gray crackling stuff on his head, and unlike the men on horses he wore no coverings to keep himself warm. Her tail clamped over her belly, wet with terror.

He curled his lip back, showing long teeth, though the wrinkle of his forehead was like her alpha’s: hiding amusement behind more obvious exasperation. Cubs, that expression said, and was always followed by a pack-wide chuckle that was as much attitude of pose as vocalization. The tip of her tail relaxed from its clench to offer a tentative wag.

“Well,” he said, and it was the first time she ever heard a wolf speak so, aloud and with words used by men. His voice was light, a thinness to it that said its howl would pierce the moon. “One left, of a pack. But a young one, so perhaps there’s some hope you might listen.” He dropped her with the carelessness of any parent weary of carrying a wriggling cub. She scrambled back to the snow’s crusty surface and he crouched, brushing cold from her ears and nose. “Come, pup. We must teach you to survive.”

Then he turned, and before his hand touched the snow it was a paw, and his gray grizzling hair thick fur, and his tail made a beacon for her to follow as they ran from where their pack had died.

“No ward?” The question cut through polite murmuring, briefly silencing it. Markéta knew already not to turn; not to admit she’d heard. It wasn’t that anyone imagined the sharp words hadn’t reached her. It was merely that humans, inexplicable humans, pretended rudeness and gossip didn’t exist, as if by so pretending they could excuse their own bad behavior. Few of them would survive a week, within a pack. They would be cuffed, stared down, and ultimately rejected, if they played at the back-biting which was a figurative, if not literal, part of human society.

The pack had been born savage, Markéta thought dryly, but humans had taught her the real meaning of the word.

“But she is too young to be a widow . . . !” The woman—an older one, with breasts of a size to feed a litter of puppies for all that she had only two—modulated her voice this time, but it made no difference. She might have whispered, and even through the ballroom’s endless echoing chatter, Markéta would have heard her. It was not a gift, the retention of hearing and scent in her human-changed form; humans stank, and covered it with perfumes that worsened the original stench. Worse, they insisted on gathering in huge packs, where their sweat and nattering voices blurred into a nauseating background.

Still, she would have humans change, not herself. She had gone far enough already in becoming as they were, a truth she was reminded of every time another woman learned her story and spread it as a bit of titillating gossip. She was quite young, she heard it emphasized, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. Old enough, certainly, to be married—but if not married, much too young to be on her own. But her guardian, if he’d ever existed, had died, leaving her to make her way as an eligible female amongst society’s snapping wolves.

Markéta snorted loudly enough to cause comment, and thrust off societal grace to elbow her way out to the manor gardens. They were too tame, too controlled, but they were also as close to wilderness as she would find so long as she maintained the fiction of polite birth. She was aware—as a human woman would not be—that two men followed her, both trying harder to avoid one another than find her. One was older, in his forties at least, and the other hardly more than a whelp of her own tender years.

Which were far more tender than the gossiping women within could ever imagine. Wolves lived only a short span. It was an ancient beast indeed who saw fifteen summers. Markéta was three, breeding age to be sure, but there were almost no others of her kind left with whom to mate. The hunters had seen to that. The hunters, and her people’s determination to live the free life of wild things, no matter what the cost. The memory of scent rose up, bitter, black. The hunt’s leader had smelled that way, like hot tar sitting at the back of her throat. She would never escape its flavor.

“Miss Alvarez.” Her name sat awkwardly on a British tongue, but she’d had no sense of how human names were put together, when she’d chosen it. She’d merely liked its sound, Markéta Alvarez, and had only later realized that they were not two names that the English race expected to lie cheek and jowl. She might have been Margaret Allard and satisfied them, but by then it was too late.

Its advantage was that, like everything else about her, it offered no answers, but miles of gossip-satisfying questions. She was surely not dark enough for the Mediterranean descent her last name implied, nor square-faced enough to be from north of the Danube, as her first name suggested. Her eyes were distressingly yellow—a hallmark even the change couldn’t disguise—and her hair, shaggy and thick, was too many colors to be called one. Light, they tended to decide; she was light-haired, but sharp-featured as a Spaniard, and no one could name a family of merit whose bloodlines ran to such extraordinary lengths.

But meritous she must be, else men of various wealth and standing would hardly bother following her into the gardens. Markéta nodded to her suitor without turning his way: his scent was of more use in identifying him than sight. “Master Radcliffe. Surely you endanger my reputation by encountering me unescorted.”

“Surely I’m too old and dull for anyone to think your reputation in any but the safest of hands, with me.” There was not a single note of deprecation in the older man’s voice; he sounded as utterly sincere as any man could. But his posture, half-glimpsed, shouted amusement, announcing he didn’t for a moment believe himself. “If I were some handsome young rake, perhaps . . . ”

“And now I must protest your attractiveness, sir, a boldness which is no fit thing for a lady to do.”

“I should hardly ask you to belie yourself, Miss Alvarez. I have, in my time, made use of a mirror.”

Now she turned to him, smiling, though his attitude would still tell her more than his face ever could. “And what does the mirror show you, Master Radcliffe? A well-dressed gentleman still possessed of a leonine head of hair, whose face bears the wisdom of a man in his prime?”

“My mirror,” he said with a bow, “is not so kind.”