die rote Nixe

That night, Brett did not so much as glance at the second cot that Satomi laid out for him next to Lori’s in the apologetically small but warm room at her house. Curls plastered to his forehead and shower water still drying between his shoulderblades, he beelined for Lori’s cot and curled up, cat-like, around her, with his spiky elbows digging into her ribs and his unbearably cold nose twitching at the junction of her neck.

She usually bitched at him about his knobby joints when he got too close. Sometimes she made fun of his nose or his teeth, too, because she’d never been a particularly kind child, and neither had he, but they hadn’t spoken for the last twenty hours and counting, and she wasn’t about to break that silent streak now.

Even the phantom stench of their parents’ blood under his fingernails—an incongruity, when they had never even had the chance to cling to their mother’s and father’s corpses—could not make her unclench her little jaw and open her mouth to speak to him.

Maybe the fact that that was the first time she had shifted, and she didn’t dare show the pathetically small fangs digging furrows into the vulnerable trenches of flesh inside her cheeks, played a factor in that quiet.

Mama, mama, Brett’s voice woke her like a hollow knell some hours later in the night.

He was no longer behind her. She didn’t know how she had missed the absence of his heavy arm, now that she was blinking wakefully into the unfamiliar gloom of a room that seemed to tilt at an angle. Where she was burning up before, the wolf howling and clawing at her chest from the inside, now the sensation of ice stole over her fingers and throat and chest with the weight of a cement block.

Mama, Brett said again, passionless and mumbled.

He was standing in the doorway, his ten-year-old silhouette simultaneously taller and smaller than anything Lori had seen on him before.

“She’s not here,” Lori rasped. It figured that the first time she would acknowledge it, there would be no tears to cry.

Mama… Brett’s voice trailed off this time in a whimper so animal-like that Lori flinched.

“Come back to bed,” Lori hissed. “Ms. Satomi will hear you.”

Brett did not obey. Instead, his shadowy figure moved soporifically out of view, as though stepping further into the hallway.

Lori flopped back onto her spine and stewed directionlessly at the ceiling for several minutes. Her brother’s footsteps shuffled up and down the hallway. Let him wake everyone up in the house, then, Lori thought with a furious and irrational eight-year-old anger. Let him be the one to get caught by Ms. Satomi and receive the tongue-lashing for trying to wander around where he wasn’t welcome.

But then more words started slurring out in her brother’s voice, too inhuman for her to ignore, and Lori had to fling off the comfortable floral patch quilt and stumble on foal-like knees after him.

When her eyes had swiftly adjusted to the shadows of the evergreen-painted hallway, she found him standing stock-still at the end of it, facing a blank wall.

“Brett,” Lori hissed again. “What are you doing?”

He never replied. He never moved, not even in a nod or a shake of his head or an impatient and rude gesture as he sometimes did when he thought his little sister was asking too many questions and he really wanted to employ a foul word but couldn’t because Pops was near.

Lori crept closer to him. As she halted at his side, she realized that his eyes were wide open, but unnaturally so: they seemed almost pinned into place, lashes fanned out wide over the tops of his eyeballs, never blinking. The moonlight bounced off the silver of the irises they shared and reflected back at her like eerie, blank pools.

“Brett,” she called to him softly. And then again: “Brett, stop it. Come back to bed.”

She called his name seven more times. At last, coming to some befuddled understanding that this was one of those times her older brother would not deign to answer her, she gave up.

The incident would repeat itself infrequently but markedly enough a few more times over the next few years in Satomi’s care. Only when Lori was eleven, and it had happened a total of eight more times, would she realize that the blank wall at the end of Satomi’s hallway faced south, the direction of the house where they had last seen and heard their parents alive.

—

Lori did not make a habit of getting up out of bed and following her idiot brother every time he decided to go for a nocturnal stroll. In fact, when she was just turning thirteen, she rather thought it an annoying and extra trait of his.

She may not have had the ability to shed a tear since their parents died, but at least she wasn’t abnormal enough to get out of bed and make a horrendous dill and mustard sandwich at half past three in the morning. That had only happened once, and Lori had admittedly eavesdropped on Brett stumbling around the kitchen as he did it, but it sure as heck had been both entertaining and off-putting.

She’d almost clambered off the mattress to slink down the hallway and watch him, actually, until she heard another heartbeat in the house picking up and then Satomi jerking into wakefulness. Something about the break in Brett’s routine—the soft clinking of jars, maybe, or the sharp aroma of the pickles he’d opened this time—had alerted her when none of his other sleepwalking escapades had.

Satomi’s steps were always forest-silent, too quiet for even a born werewolf like Lori to pick out. But she knew Satomi had found her way to the kitchen when she discerned the older woman’s dulcet voice saying something to Brett.

As she lay there counting the glowing stars on her side of the ceiling, Lori figured that Satomi would be holding an awfully one-sided conversation with her brother.

It came as a surprise to her, then, when five minutes later, she heard Brett’s voice rumbling in some indistinct but unmistakable reply.

After another thirty minutes of sleepy, indiscernible trails of unimportant conversation, Lori tracked Brett’s heartbeat as it traveled down the hallway and then passed their room and shifted in the direction of Satomi’s bedroom instead.

Lori was just fluttering her eyes closed in a semblance of sleep when Satomi materialized in the darkened doorway. The alpha was not fooled for a second.

Satomi at least had the grace to wait for Brett to climb onto the mattress in the other room and settle down a bit before she spoke in a whisper. “How long has your brother been sleepwalking?”

Lori shrugged. “A while.”

“He could have hurt himself, handling knives in the kitchen like that.”

That got Lori to blink her eyes open in defensiveness. “He’s never gone to the kitchen before.”

Satomi pursed her lips. “Then where does he go? When he’s like this?”

“Nowhere,” Lori said. “He goes—nowhere.”

Satomi paused there in the doorway with all that pent-up movement coiled inside her like a spring, or not unlike a jaguar. She moved forward a few steps to press the palm of her hand against Lori’s brow where the girl hadn’t noticed until just then that the skin was clammy and still.

“Do you want to come sleep with us?” Satomi asked her softly.

Lori shook her head. Her mop of hair rasped across the pillow. “You’re not supposed to wake people up when they’re sleepwalking.”

“Sometimes,” Satomi said, regarding her from above with mundane patience, “somebody’s got to.”

—

The sleepwalking happened exactly one more time after that, ending once again with Brett crawling under the covers of Satomi’s bed. It was the sound of his quietly hitching breaths that reeled Lori out of the room like a wriggling fish on a hook, resentful and worried at once, and then she found herself in the doorway of the master bedroom, being beckoned over by a crimson-eyed Satomi.

And then she was being folded into her adoptive mother’s arms on the other side of the bed, both she and Brett avoiding each other’s gazes over the hill of Satomi’s chest but inexorably finding one another anyway.

After that, Brett ceased to sleepwalk entirely until just before his seventeenth birthday.

—

Lori knew more than she let on. She also knew more than she cared to comment about, but let the record state that she knew about her asshole brother’s unwieldy, violent crush on the new boy, Liam Dunbar.

“The little shit showed up to practice first again and started doing drills before everyone else,” Brett complained over their Mario Kart match. He was chewing on dried wasabi peas like it was the only Olympic sport he had any hopes of winning.

Lori scoffed. “What, you worried he’ll steal your captain title in two weeks?”

“He’s not going to steal anything. He’s a smug little upstart and he’s like two and a half feet tall.”

“You keep going on about his height and he keeps getting shorter and shorter every time. Like, I’m starting to think you’re hallucinating a gnome or something.”

“I’m not.”

“You been doing shrooms?”

“Fuck off, Lorilee.”

He wasn’t pissed enough to fully government-name her; when he did, and he pronounced the Rohr with a mocking lilt like he was imitating her preteen lupine growl, that was when a full day of ensuing silent treatment was inevitable. This was how Lori knew that Brett’s fury at the new kid was several shades more complex than simple jealousy or intimidation.

“Maybe you want him to do shrooms with you,” Lori pressed, as she casually ran him off the desert course onscreen and finished first.

“He doesn’t do shrooms.”

“Oh, so you’re saying that you—”

“Nobody does fucking shrooms, Lori.”

“Maybe you want him to do other things under the bleachers with you, then.” Lori had her eyes trained on the screen as it loaded up another round. She was a master at playing it cool.

“Yeah, like come out there after practice so I can bash his fucking arrogant little acne-less face in.” Bingo. “Seriously, little rich doctor’s kid has all the skincare in the world. His cheeks are, like, fake-ass Botox levels.”

“You stare at his bare ass cheeks? Dudes in locker rooms are fucking weeeird,” Lori deadpanned without a shred of guilt for how Brett gaped at her for the purposeful misunderstanding.

She had the small mercy of the game distracting them, but from then on it was an incessant peppering of Liam Dunbar-centric commentary into their daily routines.

The little Dumbar fucker had two assists in the second game. Un-fucking-believable.

So you won? What’s the problem?

The problem is that he’s showing me up and I hope his shits are nasty tonight for doing that to me in front of the whole school, Brett sneered at the ceiling with his head thrown back on the couch in his post-game ice pack routine.

Then, in the midst of them wrestling half-shifted in the back yard: Bet that sniveling William Eugene Dunbar wouldn’t last ten seconds in a headlock if I got him cornered like this.

And then, ruining the middle of their rare lunches together when they both had an early lunch period on Thursdays: Can you believe Tanner McMillan was talking to little Lee-Lee and the runt had no clue he was flirting with him? One of these days that kid is going to end up in a hole or a ditch out somewhere and he’ll be fucking dead before he realizes what the hell happened to him.

Lori had to frown reproachfully around the udon noodles she was slurping from her travel chopsticks. Stop it. You make me sick to my stomach sometimes.

—

Just a few days before his seventeenth birthday, Brett sneaked out of the Ito home at half past two in the morning. It was the first time, to Lori’s knowledge, that he had ever left the premises during one of his episodes.

Truth be told, he hadn’t crept out of the house so much as he had strolled out of it, moon-quiet in that way he and Lori had learned since birth to walk on the balls of their feet like their animal selves. He had no shoes on, only those underwashed athletic socks he wore to bed: Lori’s first clue that he was very much unconscious and unaware of his surroundings as he left that night.

She waited, crouched behind the door of their room left ajar, as he slipped out the kitchen door and into the back yard that bled seamlessly into the woods. The proximity of Satomi’s house to the forest was a boon to their wolves on most days, but tonight Lori could not deny the twinge of concern in her chest at the notion of her brother blindly navigating that unpredictable terrain.

After waiting another three minutes, she popped her old Converse on over her sockless feet and hopped out the window of their room. Brett’s lanky silhouette was long gone, but his scent, which went unmasked when he was asleep, permeated the air in an unmistakable trail of cedar and sweat and teenage idiocy.

She tailed him for close to half an hour, snapping a few twigs underfoot in her haste and lack of familiarity with the route. Even Brett bore the light smack of a branch to his shoulder or arm as he trudged on. Nothing seemed to shake him from his stupor.

When they finally broke through a thinning tree line, she had to glance about in consternation and orient herself. There were artificially constructed rock faces and battered-down structures, from what her supernatural vision could pick up in the night.

Were they at the abandoned zoo on the other side of town?

Brett traversed a short slope and pulled to a sudden halt. He reached forward and pushed at a metal door—one made of creaking steel bars, Lori realized—and then he was in the middle of a roughly rectangular enclosure. Lori crept closer, leaning on her haunches, and peered over the brow of a natural boulder to watch what her brother would do next.

Brett stood still and silent for so long, only slightly swaying on his feet, that Lori jumped at the sound of his voice as he began to mumble.

None of the words were discernible, save for little fucker and beat you and shut the fuck up. Amid the torrent of inaudible ranting, more expletives rang out clear as bullets, ricocheting off the rock faces around him.

And then the rest happened so swiftly that Lori had little time to react: Brett windmilled his arms around, swayed, seized the low-hanging branch of a tree that had overgrown its bounds into the cage, and with a crack like thunder he snapped it off and brandished it.

And then he raised it high over his head and began beating it against the dust so violently that the blood froze cold in Lori’s cheeks.

It didn’t take long before the butt of the branch was slamming into Brett’s own feet. The sound of wood against flesh was so unfamiliar that Lori could not place it at first. But then it grew louder and clearer, and then Brett’s unprotected toes bloomed with stark red against the white of his socks, and then another sickening crack of bone splitting down the middle preceded Brett stumbling back and falling on his ass.

The branch, streaked with blood at its splintered end, flew from his grasp and rolled across the ground in a series of thuds.

Lori’s heart beat wildly in her throat. Her mouth tasted metallic.

“Shit,” Brett moaned. He sounded more awake than he had all night.

He slumped forward and his shoulders shook with tremors. The next thing Lori knew, all his bones were snapping and his animal had consumed him.

In his place, amid a pile of abandoned sleep clothes, there crouched a river-gray wolf.

It blinked once in the direction of Lori’s hiding spot. She froze, not knowing whether the wind had shifted in her direction.

Then the wolf shook off the crimson droplets from its hind toes and pawed at the ground, and it shot off into the distance.

For the next several minutes, Lori agonized over whether to collect his tank top and sweatpants and bloody socks or leave them there to rot.

—

Lori couldn’t go back to sleep. She was awake, or some bare approximation of it, some indeterminate amount of time past five in the morning when Brett slipped naked into the kitchen through the back door she’d left unlocked for him.

She was staring dispassionately at his muddy dick and thighs, uninterested in the mug of tea she’d made and left on the counter, when Brett cleared his throat.

“Went for a run and lost my clothes in the woods,” he said in a low voice. His vocal cords sounded like they’d been dragged over a cheese grater.

Lori blinked and lifted her gaze to his eyes for a few seconds. What did you do to the new kid? she thought. Do you know you broke your own fucking foot trying to beat the dream version of him to death? Do you even like who you are anymore?

But what her mouth said instead was, “Great. Less stinky shit for me to wash, then.”

“You don’t even wash. Okāsan does it.”

“I do a lot of other shit for you,” Lori mumbled.

He sidled up to her and reached for the mug on the counter. She never drank tea; only Brett did, because he liked anything Satomi liked, even if it was the slightly horrendous-tasting imported green tea that she special ordered from LA.

“Thanks for the shit you do,” he murmured with a tired and humorless grin around the rim of the black mug.

After a beat, she offered him the week-old blanket around her shoulders that was supposed to be going in the wash tomorrow, anyway. He took it without a word.

She wondered how many other things would have to sit unsaid between them before he sorted himself out.

—

Liam Dunbar showed up to school walking funny for the next few days.

Lori was a smart mouth and an independent thinker, but one of her worst qualities was that she was a coward when it came to her brother and the things that mattered. She confined herself to slipping a sleeve of her favorite Korean barbecue-flavored seaweed snack through the slats of his locker. Another day, she told him offhand but truthfully during English class that he had a knack for interpreting symbolism correctly. He blinked at her, unsettlingly blue-eyed and stunned. His embarrassment smelled like cherries, which she realized on the heels of that interaction was pretty much what he smelled like all the time since that day that something happened to trigger Brett to beat his own foot to splinters in his sleep.

She was planning to ramp up the weird consolation prizes by approaching Liam at lunch—largely undeterred by the cloud of simmering rage that followed him—but then he decimated the coach’s car, got hauled out of Devenford by two burly security guards, and then fucked off to G-d knows where on the other side of Beacon Hills or beyond, probably.

And then the war came, and Satomi died, and it all went to shit.

—

Lori woke with a start to the disorienting view of a popcorn ceiling with a rattan fan overhead.

This, in and of itself, was not unusual; she had been sleeping fitfully ever since the violence in Beacon Hills abruptly tapered in the wake of Monroe’s disappearance, and Derek Hale of all people scooped her and her brother up metaphorically by the scruffs of their necks and deposited them in one of his old and cozy apartment buildings. The place was too rife with ordinary, domestic noises like an invisible leak dripping under someone’s bathroom vanity on another floor and door hinges creaking when no other heartbeat in the building was conceivably moving in or out of the entrances. Satomi’s house had never been deathly silent, but it had always felt deliberate, muffled to the comfort of Lori’s and Brett’s supercharged senses. Though she was never old enough to understand and appreciate it enough to ask Satomi about it before the older woman died, in hindsight Lori is fairly certain that their adoptive mother must have had work done or at least spelled to lay a comforting cloak of quiet over their shoulders at night.

Lori grumbled in her waking. This was another new thing: there was no adult around them to chide them for making noise in the middle of the night.

Technically, Brett was eighteen years old with the spark of an alpha. An adult, and a leader in his own right.

But then again, he hadn’t shifted since Satomi died and he got poisoned by Gerard and Monroe and their maniacs and they had both nearly become roadkill if Liam hadn’t sprung out of the manhole at the most opportune moment.

So: more a boy than man, and definitively in no shape to call up his own wolf, much less that of his sister or anyone else around him inspired by his survival.

“Dude,” Lori mumbled into the back of her hand. “Turn the fan off, please. You always leave it on so cold.”

Brett didn’t answer. She fell more than stepped out of bed. She should have known; it was only a matter of time before the sleepwalking escapades began again.

Tracking his scent led her straight out the front door, which was left ajar enough to allow a silver stream of moonlight across the foyer. She stuffed her feet into her purple rain boots and jogged after him.

She knew even before she approached the real thick of the woods that her brother’s unconscious footsteps were taking him down to the Nemeton. Satomi had trained them there a handful of times. Lori didn’t appreciate the eerie stillness of that clearing any more or less than Satomi did; their okāsan harbored deep respect for the semi-sentient ley lines of magic by which Beacon Hills bore up against foes time and time again, but she made it no secret that her wolf distrusted the tree stump even as it was drawn to it.

Seconds before she made it to the trees lining the clearing, Lori already felt her suspicions were correct. Sure enough, as soon as she approached near enough to have a more or less direct line of sight, she glimpsed his figure from the side, sitting cross-legged on the tree stump.

His head was bowed. The movements of his hands were sluggish but measured. She could not spy exactly what it was he had in his grasp, but his fingers appeared to be moving in some sort of pattern. His breaths, slow and deep, pushed his shoulders up and down in gentle hills.

The cedar of his scent was twisted with rot. When Brett was sad—when either of them was—petrichor deepened the signature of their scent, made them feel and smell more animal. But tonight, the rain in his smell was deeper than bone.

Then Brett stood.

His hands reached out and made a flinging gesture. Rope flew, ribbon-like, in an arc from his hands to the branch of the nearest and tallest tree.

And like the snap of the wing of a hawk before the kill, Lori understood.

Sometimes, someone’s got to be the one to wake the sleepwalker.

“Brett!” she screamed.

A blur rocketed out of nowhere from the side of her vision and barreled into Brett. Flesh and bone met the solid core of the Nemeton with a sickening thud.

The tangled mass of limbs struggling on the stump became less of a wrestling match and more of a limp fish writhing under a harpoon. Brett’s arms splayed out, long and ungainly and for the first time lacking strength of grace, and his head shook and his skull rolled back and forth across the wood as the figure—the boy—Liam, sitting atop his chest, snarled and pinned his shoulders down with clawed hands.

“What the fuck, Brett? What the actual fuck are you doing?” Liam growled through his fangs.

Brett bucked underneath him. For all his muscles and the force of a born werewolf, grief made him weak as an infant.

“Snap out of it!” Liam drew back his hand and smacked him, palm-first, across the face.

A high, lupine whine erupted from Brett’s throat. An answering cry keened out of Lori.

Liam’s head snapped up to where Lori was halfway across the clearing, frozen and quaking in her purple boots and rat-nested hair. His eyes were still gold. Infinitesimally, by degrees, the amber burned away to a tired blue as he took in her presence.

“You’re gonna need to help me carry him,” Liam said, at the exact same time Lori blurted out through numb lips: “Did you at least stalk him with a car?”

—

Liam was snoring his exhaustion away on the futon in the living room by the time Brett dared to emerge from the steaming bathroom. Lori was curled up on the kitchen counter with her back against the cabinets, knees tucked up to her chest and elbows resting against them so she could grip at the neglected ends of her hair and stare into nothing.

Brett tiptoed around the peninsula. There was his green tea, poured into an ugly rainbow mug, the farthest thing from the black one from Satomi’s collection that they used to use all the time before the war.

“I don’t really drink green tea anymore,” Brett said quietly.

Lori didn’t blink. “Then fucking don’t. I don’t care.”

“It’s too…”

“Throw it out if you don’t want it. I literally don’t give a shit.”

“I never liked the taste,” Brett rushed to explain, like this was news to Lori. “But I wanted…when she…”

This, out of everything, made Lori’s shoulders soften. She slumped forward, head in her hands and knees bowing out in a lotus position.

“I know,” she murmured to her lap. “You’ve been eating all that bland shit lately.”

Chicken breasts without sauce or pepper. Soup from the can with most of the bigger patches of herbs dumped out. Salads stripped of all personality, chewed and tolerated between dutiful teeth as Brett pretended to enjoy literally any of the food he picked up from the grocery store for them.

That colorless version of Brett, she knew, was not really him, either. He was somewhere in between the lifeless grains and the tongue-flaming wasabi sauce. He’d always been somewhere between jumping off the cliff to go diving naked, and curling up in a secret room in a cellar without uttering a word for eighteen hours as their mother and father bled out upstairs.

“I’ll…fix up the grocery list,” Brett said flatly. “Get some better ingredients.” He swallowed down the tea, anyway. “You’re…well, you deserve some flavor.” And then he tacked on, incongruous to his nature: “Sorry.”

Seconds bled by, and then Lori’s shoulders shuddered and a huge, gasping sob, for the first time in eight years, ripped out of her.

Brett was there in the blink of an eye to scoop her up in her salty-eyed, mealy-mouthed weariness and crush her to his chest. She wrapped her spindly arms around his ribs and locked her hands at the small of his back and crushed him right back.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she panted inarticulately into his chest.

“Lori—what?”

“I knew. I knew, all these years…since Mama and Papa…I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” She hiccuped and gulped. “Okāsan knew. She said I should have taken the responsibility of waking you up when you got like this. But I couldn’t—I couldn’t. I don’t know, I was scared or some shit. I only ever just followed and watched.”

His arms winched tighter around her. Heaving and gasping, cheeks flaming and wet, she melted into the pressure.

“I was going to wake you up tonight, I swear. I swear. But Liam—” Liam got there first, for some unfathomable reason. From what she’d parsed in the car between bouts of fading in and out of awareness, Liam had been patrolling the woods restlessly at night, heading their puppy pack more seriously and selflessly than anyone credited him for in the absence of Scott McCall.

“Shh, shh,” Brett whispered into her hair. “Riri, it’s okay.”

It’s not, it’s not, her chest ached to say. They never found the body afterward. They never got to hold their mother or their father, and the bodies were cleared away by Satomi’s pack or ravenous coyotes after she had to whisk them away from the danger, and then Satomi was shot point blank and Lori and Brett never got to go back for the body and hold her one last time.

Now they were both drawing patterns on each other’s spines, nonsensical figures with their fingertips: Lori, with a promise that she meant to unfreeze herself and run to him in the woods that night; Brett, with the unspoken assurance that someone else was there to take care of them today.

The latter revelation felt like opening the secret hatch in the cellar for the first time when Satomi found them. It felt like falling down a well and finally seeing the rocks at the bottom, and knowing your leg would break in three places as you struck it, but looking up and knowing the pinprick of brightness awaited you at the end of the impossible journey upward.

Lori chanced a glance up at her brother. His eyes were silver, ringed with gold. His face was pale even after the shower, but something about the pulse of his blood below the skin of his temple seemed more alive than it had been in months. It was like staring directly into a floodlight on an empty pitch after dark.

And maybe Brett felt the same way, looking down at his little sister crying for the first time in eight years, because for once his mouth moved honestly.

“I wasn’t asleep,” he said to her. “I’m sorry. I was awake.”

When she only hiccuped again and didn’t respond, he shook her shoulder gently.

“I was awake. I was awake. I’m so sorry, I was awake.”