4 Ch 4 The Other Side of the Family (1/2)

I didn't feel like listening to another lecture, especially without mom around to keep things from exploding between me and my dad. I also didn't want to lose the camaraderie my dad and I had tentatively found. He sounded tired, like he was drained, but pulling on hidden reserves to get him through this.

The way he was looking at me wasn't his usual condescending smirking glare. Nor was it the demanding drill instructor, no-nonsense-tolerated, stiff-ass attitude I often got from him when he taught me anything about being one with the wolf.

I sat up. He had said ”like the man I was becoming”. It actually took me a second to realize he was going to try and speak to me like an adult, someone of equal standing. It was about time! I took a breath and leaned forward a bit myself. I didn't trust myself to say anything other than, ”I'm listening”.

Dad gave a small wane smile that proved to me he was going to try. I had a feeling his normal way of talking to me was buried just below the surface. I was sure it was ready to come out the second I acted immaturely enough in his opinion to blow it. His self-deprecating smile was an acknowledgment of what normally happened when we tried to have any conversation since Mom died.

”Your mom and I had many discussions in our time together about the wolf that is part of me. Our conversations covered history, spirituality, physiology and psychology, practicality, and sexuality.”

His eyes held a bit of humor with that last word as he looked at me. Shit, I think I knew where this ”adult” conversation was heading! As if I needed a talk on sex! I was twenty years old now! I bit back a sigh, trying not to roll my eyes or show any other sign of attitude, promising myself that for my mother's sake I would hear dad out. His grin only got bigger as he shook his head slightly.

”Let's start with history,” he said, surprising me. ”Specifically my history. You know I met your mother at college, and that I came over to the United States from Europe. I've told you my parents had passed away, and that's partially and probably true. You know my mother died giving birth to me. My father...”

I didn't understand the look in his eyes. Pain, sadness, compassion, I don't know. It was memory driven for sure as he thought about his past. He refocused on me and continued before I could figure out what to say.

”My father gave into the wolf. Like I almost had before you pulled me back. But before he gave himself over completely to the wolf, he gave me his history, what he knew of it.”

I wasn't sure I understood exactly what dad meant by giving into the wolf, but I wasn't going to interrupt his story to ask him.

”My grandfather had been found in the Black Forest as a baby, or well a toddler maybe. It was the end of the Russian revolution and soldiers were still about. There had been some sort of battle. He had been found in the ruins of an old deserted monastery. The soldiers had carried him out of the forest and left him with an old peasant couple in the first village they came across.

”It didn't take long before the couple figured out they had a demon child on their hands, one who could change into a wolf. They thought he should be drowned but couldn't bring themselves to kill a child.

”Needless to say, my grandfather grew up without much human contact, learned to stay in human form around humans. The old couple died while he was in his teens. When he got olderhe mated with the local wolves in the forest, not trusting human companionship. One day one of the half-grown pups started following him around instead of staying with the pack. That was my father.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had real wolf heritage in my blood? We were werewolves because a werewolf mated with actual wolves? No, that wasn't right, there was a werewolf to begin with. Or was that mating as incidental as being able to be human because of a werewolf mating with a human?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Where was the boundary between wolf and human? Or was there one? Was that lack of a boundary what made us werewolves?

My shocked speculation was noticed by my dad who just grinned slightly at me and kept on talking as if that little tidbit meant nothing.

”My grandfather taught him all he could about humans, which wasn't much, and everything he knew about living as a wolf, which was plenty. At some point my father's curiosity about humans outweighed his wolffish comfort in the forest.

”He found and married some young girl. They lived in the cottage once inhabited by the old couple that had raised my grandfather. My father was grief stricken when my mother died in childbirth. There was an older couple in the village that had just lost a child. The woman offered to nurse me. I lived with them, though my father was always near.

”My early childhood was pleasant enough I suppose, until I was about two or three years old and started experiencing pain. That's when my father took over the raising of me, moved me back to the cottage. I don't know how long the pain lasted. Days. My father force-fed me. I remember him dribbling water into my mouth. When parts of me would shift, he would shift those parts of himself, showed me what to do, showed me what I could become. At some point during the worst pain, I remember a big wolf standing over me, shoving me with his snout, sitting off to the side looking at me. That's how I met my grandfather.

”My grandfather was wolf more often than he was man, and didn't seem to understand why I preferred to be human more than wolf. My father defended me though, both in wolf and human form. He thought maybe my human preference was because I had a human mother.

”By the time I was in my teens, my own curiosity about the world was too much. I had learned as much as I could from the humans in the area, learned how big the world was, and longed to see it for myself.

”My grandfather had stopped coming around. Father took to the woods looking for him, fearing some sort of attack. Father was gone for a few days. He came home one night announcing he had found my grandfather dead in the middle of the old monastery ruins, natural causes we assumed.

”Father started to bury him there at the old monastery in the forest. His digging had revealed a small cemetery there full of a dozen or more skeletons that were obviously werewolves. Some were full wolf, who don't bury their dead, or part wolf and part human. All adults. We kept looking and found where the infants that never lived past a few months or maybe even survive birth had been buried. There was at least thirty of those infant graves!He took me there, and we made sure to rebury everything deep enough so there wouldn't be a risk to us by them being found.”