THE CONSORTS

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SUMMARY: Ione Heaton is an adopted “werewolf” skimming through her last year of high school. Already an adult in the eyes of the world, she is waiting for the engagement ring to rear its ugly head from her loyal, hopelessly romantic boyfriend of two years, Rowan. The problem: she has no plans beyond graduation day and Rowan does not know that she enjoys running through the woods on four paws all night. However, when two wolves like herself wander into her usual running grounds, she’s hit with the devastating realization that she is not alone. This sends all her non-plans askew and she begins to ask questions. Where did she come from? Who are her real parents? Why can’t she remember the first eight years of her life?

When Asher, the proud male of the pair, asks her help in finding his lost mate, Ione inadvertently takes in a permanent running buddy with infinite clashing views. He’s a wolf first and man second, and he doesn’t bother with little human things like roofs or personal space. After various fascinating arguments over the necessity of pants and how to avoid crashing into trees, Ione admits to herself that he is as close to a brother as she’ll ever get and tries to bring him into her human world, with hilarious and devastating repercussions. Will Asher ever stop loving his mate long enough to notice the reluctant love in Ione’s eyes? Will Rowan still want her after he finds out what she is? What happened to Asher’s mate and will Ione be able to save herself from the same fate?

Story is inspired by Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate.

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CHAPTER: 1of 36

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I didn’t usually sleep, except when I was with Rowan and had to keep up my pretenses. I would close my eyes, draw in closer to his warmth, and play human. Then, without even realizing it, my conscious mind would slowly fade into the darkness and the dreams would start. The few memories of my youth I still retained would break through the dreary emptiness and I’d be back in the forest, walking towards civilization.

I sat up quickly, startled to find myself in a bed and not the forest floor. The disorientation was only momentary but the trauma of the memories would last all day. That was the worst part about waking from memories, not dreams. I could not comfort myself with the usual lie: that dreams meant nothing. These faded memories were a part of me, a part I could only touch when I let the darkness take me. And, as much as I liked to think otherwise, I was not brave enough to venture into a past I had rightly labeled forgotten.

Rowan’s gentle fingers touched mine and I jumped in our bed. My free hand shot to my heart as he sat up beside me.

“Bad dream?” he asked, his eyes partly open. He yawned and looked out his bedroom window in search of light. There was none. It was after midnight and I had missed the beginning of my usual nightly run. But, when Rowan wrapped his arms around me, the night did not feel lost, merely repurposed.

“Just old memories,” I answered as his hand caressed my spine. I moaned softly for his sake. He did not know how truly numb I was to his touch. I often wished I could tell him to scratch harder, hold me tighter, but the words would never form.

He kissed my forehead, almost a farewell, and climbed out of bed. “Staying over or do you have plans?” he asked, so often now that the words had lost meaning.

I always had plans. The forest was always waiting for me, the best kind of affair. My eyes drifted across the room at the posters of cars tacked carelessly to the walls, the model airplanes hanging haphazardly from the ceiling, and the old replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night I’d given him last year now thrown in a corner with little regard. A smile blossomed on my lips at the memory of that Christmas, all the sweet memories he had given me over the last two years. As much as I loved his room, as much as I loved the smell of his sweat and the smoothness of his hair when I ran my fingers through it, I let us go.

“Yea, I think I’ll walk home actually.”

I hated his face when he heard I was leaving. He was hardly angelic. His hard-set eyes beneath bushy eyebrows and badly cropped hair, as was the style, made him seem less than appealing to anyone else. Maybe even menacing. But I knew, from the first moment he opened his mouth to speak, that he was a kinder man than most I’d known.

And though I knew I had not hurt him yet, every time I chose the forest over him, I hurt myself.

“I can walk you, you know. I hate it when you go alone.”

It only made parting worse when he said such things. I smiled crookedly and reached for my shabby green dress thrown carelessly over the back of his desk chair. He went to turn on the lights but I gestured for him to stop. My eyes were keener than his and any sudden, intense shift in light would blind me.

“I know. But I’ll be fine. My house is two blocks away and I know all the best shortcuts. You’d just slow me down.” I felt like I always had to remind him, as if anything dangerous ever happened in Tyne City. I was the most dangerous thing on these streets. He knew by now not to worry. Though he did not know of my strength or my speed or the true ferocity of my bite, he believed I would always be safe through sheer stubbornness, as if I could talk a mugger into submission.

We dressed in the bare essentials and he walked me to his front door, talking about plans for the weekend. He wanted to go see some new action movie. I wanted to go kayaking in the lake. We’d probably end up staying home but we liked to pretend that we led more interesting lives than we really did. It was a human trait I was happy to acquire. It meant doing very little but feeling very fulfilled.

I turned in the doorway and kissed him goodnight, one of my usual kisses cloaked in sadness. Five hours ago, I was kissing the man I would gladly spend the rest of my nights with. Now, I was kissing him like I had better things to get to. I made myself sick sometimes, especially now that I had turned eighteen and was no longer a child. The possibility of spending my life with this boy was starting to become a bit too real for comfort.

“Give me a wake-up call around noon?” he asked, hidden in a yawn, knowing I wouldn’t go back to sleep.

I nodded and was on my way with my panties in my handbag over my shoulder and a strange cold feeling rising up my arms. The instant I was out of Rowan’s sight, I swerved left and headed to Burke Road, a market street full of privately owned little stores built over old houses.

Most were crammed together. I had few options to enter the woods behind the shops. The closest to us was beside Little Promises Baked Goods, a bakery run by Martha Devaraux, a half-deaf old widow, and her tragically sheltered daughter, Amelia. They lived on the second floor but since my usual escapades were so late, I slipped by the side of the bakery and into the forest with minimal interference.

I let my overnight bag hang from my favorite branch of my sanctuary tree and undressed again, replaying the events of tonight in my head and grimacing at the thought of tomorrow, of responsibilities and tasks. As my hands slipped the straps of my dress off my shoulder, I thought of Rowan’s soft kisses tracing the lines of my bones over heated skin. I closed my eyes and replayed us in my head from start to finish, sending all the worrisome tasks to rest.

When I was with him, all I could do was think of the world and its problems, not even my own. Then, when I was in the woods, I would think of him and he would ease away the panic. Cruel irony of my being that I could never be content in the moment. Every muscle in my body relaxed and I shed the image of normalcy, the desire to be like them. I reopened my eyes and fell forward onto two front paws, furry and clawed and eager to run. I was much more sensitive to temperature changes in this state, which sent a heavenly shiver all down my body. I shook it off and, without a second thought, ran as far as my legs would take me.

As I let the wolf instinct take over, my human mind retreated into its safe little corner of consciousness where my memories came alive again. And I remembered what little I could of how it all began…

It was perhaps the familiar scent of the pines that grew by the highway or another scent all together, a sight or site my memory had pulled from the shadows to comfort me, that led me to Tyne city. The city itself was foreign though not very different. I had seen cities before, this I knew. Most had the same components, as did forests. Much like a forest was just a wasteland without flora and fauna, a city had to have steel and noise and the occasional crowd to be worthy of its name.

When I saw them for the first time, I realized what had drawn me to the noise. It wasn’t the smell or the height of it all, which made my neck ache as I stared up at the shiny glass of a law office in awe. It wasn’t the grandeur or the collective ego which made cities believe they were immune to nature’s presence. Even without a single clue as to my location, it was obvious to me that this city, like all the other cities I had known in some past life, was the home of sin.

A small part of me believed that this was where I belonged. With them. The wicked, swarming people. Something told me that if I wanted to hide, I had to dive into the swarm and learn to fly amongst them.

They were all different superficially but I could hear their heartbeats beneath their flimsy layers of skin. I could see the sweat on their brows, the tears threatening to form in their eyes, and the fear that threatened to drown them. And though I knew I was not like them, I longed for an explanation to my existence, which had seemed pointless as I had wandered through the forest on my two very weary human legs.

I didn’t care that I wasn’t like them but was strangely fearless and terrified at the same time. I knew I was safe because I was surrounded by nature everywhere I went – there was not a place on this Earth that could make me forget where I came from for long – but these people all stared at me with such wide eyes… I didn’t know if this was how people were supposed to look, if they were always so scared. I hoped I belonged here but I couldn’t quite face the fact that I might not be welcomed.

Was it because I was new, I wondered. Was it obvious that I was not like them?

Seeing their faces and the way they dressed and spoke, even from a distance, I knew I could never truly imitate that. I didn’t see a point in imitating it at all in that moment. All their little ticks seemed so pointless, a façade to hide their desires and their natures. I looked down at myself, my tiny naked form surrounded by giants wrapped in cloth. So different, I realized.

I raised my hands to my eyes, expecting to see blood but finding short, delicate fingers instead. I didn’t quite understand where the memory came from, if it was even mine, but I knew it was wrong to expect such things. Even the image of fingers seemed wrong and unnatural to me then.

Of the crowd that gathered around me, this little naked child drenched in water, a woman was the first to step forward. I knew this was a woman, a mother by the tenderness in her eyes and because she did not fear me, a child so bizarre.

“Are you okay? Are you lost?” the woman whispered, gently bending to caress my little arm, a gesture of safety. But I only smiled at the new sound. It was nothing like the chirping sounds of the forest, or the indescribable, collective racket of the city. This sound was directed at me, only me, and it made me feel like I belonged simply because I was approached and spoken to.

The woman’s eyes were large and brown and kinder than the mob’s. She smiled and fully knelt by me when I gave no answer.

“Do you have a name, sweetheart?”

I shook my head but I understood what was being asked of me. I wasn’t sure if I could speak, didn’t quite remember, so I kept quiet as to not offend. I would have to listen, I told myself, and learn to speak as they did. Even at such a tender age, I understood the importance of their dialect. I had to belong.

Even if I could never keep their shape for long, I had to belong. This was my mission. I had no real memories, only the faint but assured knowledge that this would have to be my new home. My old home was lost to the dark abyss that swallowed my memories. It was as if someone had commanded me away because I did not feel abandoned. Because I had my mission. I had to belong.

The woman took me to a police station and from then on, it was a blur of rooms and people, all looking to poke and prod at me. Their machines were fascinating but as soon as they tried to wheel me into an MRI machine, the growling began. Snarls unlike anything they’d ever heard from a child. I scratched at the machine and left my mark. That was the last time they tried to cage me or tell me to hold still.

Sitting was an odd thing because I was full of immeasurable energy. I learned to stop walking after a few months of observation with my new family. They were strange people who didn’t quite realize I was there. The Rutgers family, though the concept of family I knew from my shadowed mind did not seem to fit their description, were controlled by avarice so strong that it overrode the sense of family I knew to be true.

They were already a large family, six in total. They gave me a name but I didn’t remember it because it didn’t matter. Three months in that corner of the kitchen, sitting and observing them, I had learned the proper way to eat at a dinner table, watch television from the dinner table, and yell across the dinner table. Though fascinated by their angry ways and fully aware that this was their nature and not my own, I found myself longing for the forest again.

Three months, two days, and sixteen hours after they first dropped me at the Rutgers’ doorstep, I decided to stop staring silently out the window and return home to the forest if only for one night. Though the feeling of belonging was not there – I later realized it was because I was alone in my walk – I found no hurry to return to the Rutgers.

Two days and three cop cars later and I was being sent back to whatever agency had taken hold of my future, labeled a “rebellious runaway” by my social worker who hated the fact that she could not make me talk. The next family I would know as my only family for a decade.

The Heatons.

They were kinder. I was their only ward, a “foster child” as I had learned to call myself in my head. It still didn’t fit. They gave me a name too, one I would never forget because of the love in my new mother’s voice when she said it.

“Ione,” she whispered as she hugged me for the first time. Her husband, Benjamin, hovered over her, waiting for his turn to embrace my little frame. They had agreed on the name the instant they heard how I had walked into the middle of a plaza in midday, naked and sodden and carrying a purple flower in my hair. I learned later that my name meant exactly that: purple flower. I also learned it was a peculiar name and found that made it strangely suited to me.

I tried to speak because I could tell from the wide eyes and bright smiles that greeted me that it would make them happy. I wanted to make them happy. That was the first realization that this was going to be my family for a long time. So I tried.

I opened my mouth and tried to move my lips but all that came out were garbled sounds. They could tell I was trying and I managed to give them an apologetic look for not being able to greet them as they were used to. They understood and what’s more, they helped me. Benjamin went off to talk to the social worker by the white front door, asking my age and the date I was found in the plaza, as the woman – one I would learn to call Gale and much later, Mother – tried to sound out my new name for me.

“Eye-oh-nee,” she pronounced slowly in a single, fluid breath. I stifled a giggle because frankly she looked a bit ridiculous all enthusiastic and wide-eyed. Every time I smiled, her heart pounded on her ribs and she reached out for Benjamin’s hand to stop herself from crying. I would love toying with her but mostly, the fact that she even bothered to make me smile made me take an instant liking to her.

I quickly shrugged at the name and didn’t really want to try again, only to fail. She knelt down to look up at me when we were alone and said soothingly, “You’re home now. You can take as long as you want. When you want to learn, we’ll be here to teach you.”

From then on, time passed differently with the Heatons. I was rarely alone or ignored. It would become almost suffocating after the first week but I got used to it. I liked people, I learned. They all looked the same but each had an origin I was most curious to understand as if it would mean understand them. Maybe then I would find a story for myself, one that at least sounded familiar or one that I could adopt as easily as I did my family.

And at night, my new father would put me to bed in my new blue room of the one-story house and tell me stories about people. He started with how he met Gale at college and I realized I liked his romantic stories the most. I didn’t know what romance was but I liked that people devoted themselves to each other.

This was love as I knew it. Selflessness.

But I had not yet learned the meaning of love. Perhaps, I never really would.

The change in me started at thirteen, as far as I knew. My exact birthday was unknown so the Heatons had given me the date I was found – January 26th 1998 – and assumed as they all did that I was born in 1990. I didn’t envy people with birthdays until that date in April when the change began to brew within me and I knew more than ever how truly different I was.

By then, it was hard to get me to shut up and I wasn’t always polite, more blunt and clinical than anything. I had become acclimated to my new life, had met my first friend, Hart. When it started, it started small with dreams of the forest. They haunted me in the daytime, at school, the image of the trees blurred into greens and browns by my speed. It was so relieving to retreat into those dreams. I was aimless but I was free from a cell I didn’t know existed: my human form.

I can’t remember if maybe there was a trigger that woke the dreams in me then or back at the Rutgers’. I hadn’t really dreamed before then. I knew there was something different about me because of where I came from but the word wolf had never really sunk in, its meaning the same to me as any human. It was an animal, a wild and dangerous animal that lived far away, as unreachable as a fairytale.

It was a relatively small city, trapped between a crescent stretch of wilderness, Tyne Woods, and Miranda Bay which sat on the Atlantic. Only the highway let cars escape though it was almost abandoned at night. We lived close to the highway, to the edge of the forest.

That night, the night I escaped my beloved home for the freedom of the run, the highway was completely empty. I had jumped out of my window and landed on my two, scrawny human legs, making my way to the edge. I didn’t really time myself then but it was a 20-minute run to meet the trees. I was not fast but it was still far.

All I’d taken with me in my rush of adrenaline was a light green sweater over my favorite pair of warm flannel pajamas. I hadn’t bothered with shoes. Maybe a part of me knew what I was returning to and thought I didn’t really need to bother. My feet had always been rough and scarred. The social worker had told my parents it was because I had probably walked a great distance on hot concrete, not that I was abused. I always was a bit self-destructive so they believed it. Now, as I walked to the forest edge, I believed it too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got there. I hadn’t been to the woods, not even out of the city, since I escaped from the Rutgers. But of course, I could always count on the woods to be there, never changing. I went to a tree, leaned up against the bark of the first one I found and slid down to the ground.

I didn’t dare go past. My damn human preconceptions of the dark were ruling over me. I was only thirteen after all. I was still small and my muscles had not been put to work in much time. The empty streets of Tyne at 4:00 a.m. were not comforting in the least. A ghost city, but I had it all to myself.

I hurried back at sundown and snuck back into bed before my parents realized I was gone. The next night, I waited for my parents to turn off the television in their room and returned to the same street by Little Promises Baked Goods in search of the same tree. I picked up a pointy rock, most likely a left-behind piece of concrete, from the edge of the road and carved a large S on the bark.

S is for Sanctuary, I joked in my head.

I knew I had a purpose for coming there but I still couldn’t risk going into the woods. Against my better judgment, I sat down on the root of the otherwise seemingly ordinary tree again and fell asleep curled up in a ball. I rested my head on the raised roots and I realized most of the roots were like seats, beds. I had to watch out for ants but otherwise, it was one giant nursery and I was its only charge.

“This really was my first home,” I said aloud to no one in particular. It was unconventional but I liked to think that the forest was one large being made up of many parts, all connected by these unsightly roots springing out of the grounds, and conscious of every word or thought that left my head. I imagined the inside of the forest was one giant playground where no human would venture, my own little place with built-in jungle gyms and monkey bars.

The next night, I did the same. I easily slid out my first-story window and walked all the way to my sanctuary tree. The more I visited, the easier I could see in the night, like my eyes were remembering their prior strength. All the little details were clearer now.

The base of the tree was an oval-shaped basinet that had spilled over, welcoming me in. Like before, I fell asleep in my tilted basinet and I let the dreams take me. I was running deep into the woods. I could feel the wind on my face, stinging my skin. My lips grew dry as I breathed faster and faster. Such a vivid dream! But I couldn’t even fathom the idea that it was real. My human mind denied it.

I propelled myself from one tree to the next, first pulling myself with my arms and later by jumping from root to root. I couldn’t tell how many hours had passed but it was still night. When I looked down, I realized I had completely given in to the wilderness and was crouched down on all fours. But, as I took my next calm step into the darkness, I noticed my eyes were as sharp as in daylight. I could see through the dark woods, infinitely and effortlessly.

And worse, I noticed my legs. My legs and my arms had been replaced by furry paws which I brought up to caress my face. My nails scratched me but I didn’t care. The pain was tiny for such a vivid dream. I didn’t have to look further to know what I was. It all became clearer in that instant.

I was a wolf by nature and a human by choice.

This was no dream. I never dreamed before. They were memories of the change, of running and running through an endless field of trees. Now, every choice I ever made would be harder. How would I hide this from my trusting parents?

The truth was I didn’t want to. They had always taught me to be tolerant of others. Okay so maybe I wasn’t black. Maybe I was a wolf. Oh who was I kidding? I was a freak. And I was alone.

When I realized that, I knew I couldn’t tell them. I couldn’t tell anyone. I would keep my silence as long as I could.

Yea, it didn’t last long.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE (A/N): Chapter 2 of 36 coming in a few minutes. Chapter 3 is coming tomorrow. Thank you for reading this far and please REVIEW. I appreciate all criticisms and favorite quotes.