Chapter 36

CHAPTER 36

“ M om?” Paige called.

Her attempts to cajole an inconsolable Hetta out of a locked bathroom cubicle had been a resounding failure. In the end she’d had to give up, leaving Hetta’s dad to wait for his daughter to be ready to come out and talk.

And in the meantime, apparently, her own family had completely disappeared. She couldn’t find Conleth either, or any of her campers. Most of the kids were still out in the fields playing camp games with their families, but there had been no sign of her own pack. She was starting to worry that something had happened.

As if this day needed any more disasters.

Since she was running out of other places to search, she tried the girls’ cabin. “Mom? Anyone? Is there anybody here?”

She was answered by a sniff. “Just me, ma’am.”

“Beth?” Paige went into the girls’ dorm room. “You should be with your mom. What are you doing here all by yourself?”

Beth huddled on her bunk, face puffy from crying. “Uncle Conleth sent me away to think about what I’d done. I said something really horrible to Archie, ma’am.”

Paige sat on the bed next to her, a little distance apart. “Are you sorry about it now?”

Beth nodded vehemently. “I know he wasn’t really trying to cause trouble. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

“Everyone loses their temper sometimes. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to take it out on other people, but if you apologize, I’m sure Archie will understand.” She sighed. “Especially under the circumstances. We’re all under a lot of stress today.”

Beth fidgeted with her blanket. “Parents’ Day isn’t going to plan, is it, ma’am?”

“No, it isn’t,” she admitted. “In a lot of different ways. But it’ll be okay, Beth. We’ll get through it somehow.”

Beth didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, in a tiny voice, she asked, “Are you going to reject Uncle Conleth?”

“What?” Paige exclaimed, honestly shocked. “No, of course not. Why would you even ask that?”

Beth’s green eyes were huge and worried. “I know this whole Parents’ Day thing is some plan of Uncle Conleth’s, ma’am. And I know the two of you aren’t really mated. Not properly, with the mate bond and everything. If you were, Uncle Conleth wouldn’t be running around like he’s preparing for an audit. I thought—I thought maybe you still weren’t sure how you felt about him.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Paige reassured her. “It’s true that we aren’t, uh, fully mated yet. But that doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. We just need to figure out some practical stuff before taking that final step, that’s all.”

Beth looked fractionally happier. “So Uncle Conleth didn’t set up Parents’ Day in order to have a chance to impress your mom?”

“No, honey. I did want her to meet him, but that wasn’t the main reason.”

“Then what was?”

“That doesn’t matter now,” Paige said, thinking of her mom’s less-than-enthusiastic response to Thunder Mountain. “The point is, I wasn’t testing Conleth. And I’m not about to suddenly break up with him. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Beth let out her breath in relief. “Good. Can I go find Archie now, ma’am? I owe him an apology.”

“Of course.” Something occurred to her. “But first, can you use your power to locate my mom? I can’t find her anywhere.”

Beth straightened with pride at being asked to help. “Yes, ma’am. My talent is pretty strong. As long as she’s within the campground, I can find her.” She turned her head, eyes going vague. “She’s…huh. That’s strange.”

Surely her mom couldn’t have left the camp. “What is?”

Beth refocused on her, brow creasing. “She’s in the laundry room, ma’am.”

“The laundry room?” Paige couldn’t think what her mom could be doing there. “Is Archie with her?”

“No, ma’am,” Beth said, sounding just as puzzled. “She’s by herself. Maybe she got lost?”

“Maybe,” Paige said dubiously. She got to her feet. “You go find the others. I’ll catch up with you later.”

The laundry room occupied one of several plain, functional units set some distance away from the other buildings. Prominent signs clearly stated Staff only - Campers keep out. With everyone busy with Parents’ Day, the whole area was deserted.

Without Beth’s guidance, Paige would never have even thought to look here. She pushed the door open, squinting into the shadowy interior. “Mom?”

After the bright summer sunlight, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness. Industrial-sized washers and dryers lined the walls, currently switched off and dormant. A rack held baskets labeled with cabin names; some empty, others filled with neatly folded clothes. The air smelled strongly of laundry soap, with a faint hint of sweaty socks.

For a moment, Paige thought Beth must have been mistaken. Then she heard a faint, swallowed sob, coming from a shadowed corner behind one of the washers.

“Mom?” Paige fumbled along the wall for the light switch. Incandescent bulbs flickered on overhead. “Is that you?”

“Oh!” Her mom quickly stood up, though she kept her face turned away. Her voice took on a bright, brittle note that Paige knew all too well. “There you are, Paige. I was looking for you.”

“Behind a washing machine?” Paige came in, leaving the door cracked open behind her to let in some fresh air. “Mom, what are you doing in here? Why aren’t you with Archie?”

“Oh, you know.” Her mom made a vague gesture, smiling apologetically. Her fingers trembled. “I just needed a moment to myself. It’s so busy out there. So many…people.”

Paige’s heart skipped a beat. She could see the signs—the dilated pupils, the ragged breaths. She couldn’t imagine why , but her mom was teetering on the edge of a full-blown panic attack.

“Mom.” Paige took her hands, gripping them tight. “It’s okay. We can stay here as long as you need. Breathe with me.”

Her mom’s eyes locked onto hers as though seizing hold of a life preserver. Paige kept her breathing slow and steady, never looking away.

Slowly, the shudders shaking her mom’s shoulders eased. With a wobbly smile, she pulled her hands away. “I’m all right now. We should get back to Archie. I don’t want him to worry.”

“In a minute.” Paige guided her mom to sit on an upturned crate. “You said you’d been having a tough time this summer, but I didn’t realize things were this bad.”

She hadn’t seen her mom fall apart so publicly since Archie had been tiny. She’d thought taking her brother away for the summer would give her mom time to rest and nurture her mental health. Instead, Mom seemed to be sinking faster than ever.

“I shouldn’t have left you on your own for so long,” she said, repressing a selfish, sinking feeling of disappointment. No matter how much she wanted to spend the rest of the summer at camp with Conleth and the kids, her mom had to come first. “I’ll tell the camp director there’s a family emergency, and I need to go home early. He’ll understand.”

“No, don’t do that!” her mom protested. “Really, there’s no need. I’m fine.”

“Mom, you’re not fine. I could tell the moment you stepped off the bus. You’ve been barely holding it together all day.”

“I’ll be fine once I’m back home.” Her mom knotted her fingers together in her lap, knuckles whitening. “It’s just this place. All these people.”

That didn’t make any sense. Paige had seen her mom plow through Wal-Mart on Black Friday like a bargain-seeking missile. “You don’t normally have any trouble with crowds.”

Her mom attempted another wavering smile. “They aren’t normally made up of people like this.”

“You mean shifters?”

Mom’s chin jerked in the slight, shamed nod. “There’s so many of them here. And you can just tell that they’re not like normal people.”

Paige remembered when she’d met Buck and Honey, or Zephyr; that immediate, indefinable impression of power. “Yeah, I suppose some of them can be a bit disconcerting to us humans.”

“Not just some of them.” Her mom’s breath started to take on a ragged edge again. “Don’t you feel it? The, the energy, like sandpaper on the inside of your skin? It’s hard enough when it’s just Archie. When there’s hundreds of them, not even trying to conceal what they are—animals shining behind their eyes—just like, like?—”

She doubled over as though gripped by a stomach cramp. Paige grabbed her shoulders, holding her tight.

“Mom! Mom!” She crouched, trying to see her mom’s face. “It’s all right, I’m here, it’s okay!”

“No!” Her mom flinched away, voice rising in panic. “No, I can’t, I can’t . Keep them away, don’t let them look at me, I don’t want to remember!”

And looking into her mom’s eyes—pupils wide and unseeing, trapped in the past—Paige finally understood.

“Oh God,” she breathed. “The problem isn’t that you’re stressed about Archie’s lack of control over his shifting. It’s that he shifts at all. Something happened the night you broke up with his dad, didn’t it? You found out he was a shifter.”

“I don’t know,” her mom whispered. “One moment, everything was perfect. He said he wanted us to be together forever. I was so happy, I thought my heart would burst. And then everything changed. There were screams, and teeth, and—and that’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, I was three blocks away, running as fast as I could.”

Teeth? Maybe Archie’s dad had been her mom’s mate after all, and had attempted to bite her to complete the bond.

“He must have shifted in front of you,” Paige said, putting the pieces together. “And you were so traumatized that you repressed the memory. You can’t stand to be around shifters because they remind you of him. And every time Archie turns into a bear, it brings back all the pain you’re trying to forget. That’s why you’ve been spiraling ever since he started shifting.”

Her mom’s gaze shifted slightly. Paige felt her freeze, her whole body locking in horror. Her lips moved, shaping a single, silent word:

Archie.

“Mom?” said a small, scared voice.

Paige whipped around. Her brother stood in the doorway, silhouetted by sunlight.

“Archie!” She scrambled up, trying to block his view of their mom. “You shouldn’t be here. Give us a minute, okay?”

Her brother didn’t move. “Mom, is that true? I’m the reason you’re sick?”

Their mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Her stricken silence spoke louder than words.

“Archie,” Paige started, but he was already turning, running, as though he would never stop. “ Archie! Wait!”