The More Things Change Read online

  The others had woken during this noise, and Maya was rubbing sleepily at her face. "What is it?" she asked, as Ryan flipped the top off the crate and stopped in surprise.

  It was food. And not just food, but some other sundries as well. There were two bags of beef jerky and a large box of granola bars—good, nonperishable food. Then there was a bottle of water purification tablets, three boxes of matches, a battery-powered lantern and a collection of batteries. Right on top there was a chocolate bar. Plain old Hershey's milk chocolate, wrapped in a piece of paper that read in chicken scratch handwriting, 'thank you for helping me.'

  Carmen unwrapped the chocolate, and the scent of it made all their mouths water. Things like candy were a luxury they just didn't get anymore. Not since the Donovans had taken over. They had to scratch the ground just to survive. Who had time for something like candy?

  With shaking hands, Carmen split the bar into four equal pieces and handed them out. They each accepted it and ate it in solemn silence. Gabby, who was only twelve herself, sniffled a little. Carmen cried too.

  They moved that night, and they hadn't seen or heard from Jackie in the intervening years, but somehow when she turned up at the warehouse the pack lived at, it seemed completely natural to them. And Ryan trusted her. Not because they had saved her, or because she had brought them supplies that had saved them. But because she had brought them a chocolate bar. Because she realized that just because they were werewolves didn't mean they weren't people. She had treated them like human beings.

  Stupid, Ryan thinks, staring at the ceiling while he listens to the pack bicker. He wonders where Jackie got it from. It sure as hell wasn't from her adopted father. Ryan closes his eyes and thinks of Nick Donovan, of his strong hands and straightforward demeanor and take-no-bullshit attitude. He thinks of Nick naked in bed with him, of the many times Nick had talked about what a terrible idea this was, but always swung back to Ryan like he was magnetic north. He thinks of asking Nick for help getting his family out of the rapidly building chaos in Cold Creek, and he thinks of Nick refusing, two days before Ryan's father and brother had been killed.

  No, Jackie is nothing like her father. Not in any of the ways that matter.

  *~*~*

  "Hey, Dad." Jackie drops her jacket on the back of a chair as she goes through the living room. She's cold and covered in mud and too tired to care about the look that Helen gives her.

  "Hey, long day?" Nick asks, looking over from where he's cleaning his gun at the dining room table.

  "Field exercises from dawn 'til dusk. When's dinner?"

  "About another twenty minutes," Helen says.

  "Cool. I'm gonna duck into the shower." She heads into her room and strips out of her muddy uniform, tossing it into the hamper. She hates the uniform almost as much as she hates the field exercises. But there's no help for either of those things. Mitchell Donovan runs his teams with military precision. The smallest screw-up and she'd be out on her ass, no matter who her father is. And if that happens, she loses all the access to information and supplies that she's been using for the last six months.

  She turns the water on in the shower but leaves it tepid. The Donovans might live in comparative luxury, given the conditions in Cold Creek, but there are limits. The town is completely cut off, and everything is run by gas generators now. They only get electricity at certain times of day, and hot water will only last about ten minutes. Helen will want it for the dishes after dinner, so if Jackie uses it up, she'll be pissed at her.

  Maya hadn't been wrong when she had said that she didn't have to worry about food or shelter. The Donovans control everything coming in and out of Cold Creek, so they get the best of everything. But even they only have so many luxuries.

  Cold Creek was nestled in the mountains of northern Colorado. There was only one road in or out, and it had been blocked off for years now. Things outside were bad, Mitchell Donovan warned the townspeople. The werewolves and supernatural creatures had taken over everywhere, killing for sport and taking what they wanted. Here, by the grace of the Donovans, the civilians were safe.

  Anyone who tried to get out came back in pieces. A casualty of the werewolf packs that roamed the forest and the mountains.

  Jackie had seen a few of those bodies. Oh, they came back in pieces all right. Mitchell even had a set of werewolf claws he used to do the job. Nobody noticed the bullet hole that had actually killed the person. But it had been a while since that had happened. Nobody tried to leave anymore. Jackie wonders sometimes how bad the outside really is. She wouldn't be surprised if supernatural creatures had taken over, if they had banded together to fight the humans who want to kill them just for being what they are. But she also wouldn't be surprised if they had been eradicated, and Mitchell just keeps Cold Creek isolated because he likes being a military dictator. Maybe when every last supernatural creature in Cold Creek is dead, Mitchell will release his iron grip on the city.

  She wants desperately to get in on one of the supply runs that Mitchell's son Leo makes, but that's an elite team of professionals and she's years away from that. Once a month, Leo leaves town with five or six guys, and comes back with food and supplies. Some of it does look pretty old and battered, and he can't always get what they want or need. So Jackie thinks that there are probably kernels of truth to Mitchell's tales of the outside world. She just doesn't know which kernels are true.

  Once Leo comes back, the supplies are distributed to the townsfolk. People who have reported supernatural activity get an extra share. Anyone whose tip led directly to the capture or 'disposal' of a supernatural creature will get a special gift. So the civilians of Cold Creek are always eager to help the Donovans and their militia hunt down their former neighbors.

  Jackie looks in the mirror and realizes that her lip has curled up. She stops and takes a deep breath, forces her expression back into calm. She's been spending too much time with the Callaghan pack. She should just drop off the supplies and go. But it's hard. She wants to spend time with Jared and Spencer and play basketball like regular teenagers. She wants to talk about the good old days with Marcus and Siobhan. She wants to—well, when it comes to Maya Callaghan, it's probably a better idea not to think about what she wants. There's a romance that's going to go nowhere quickly. Jackie is well aware of her grandfather's opinion on same-sex relationships. She has no desire to find out what Maya Callaghan thinks of them.

  From now on, she'll just give them the supplies and the patrol schedule and then go. And if they ask why, she'll tell the truth. She's getting too close, picking up too many mannerisms, and someone is going to notice. They'll understand that.

  She rinses the mud out of her hair, which she keeps cut brutally short, and then gives it a quick scrub with soap. They don't have any shampoo or conditioner at the moment, but people washed their hair with soap for centuries. She gets out of the shower and throws on a T-shirt and sweatpants.

  The civilians of Cold Creek piss her off sometimes, but she knows she can't blame them. They're frightened. They've bought into Mitchell Donovan's narrative of evil werewolves who will steal their babies, and that isn't really their fault. Mitchell's scaremongering tactics are a time-proven method of getting a populace on your side. Supernatural creatures are scary by default, and people want to trust their soldiers, their government.

  In any case, there's not much reporting left to do. Very few of the supernatural creatures even try to lead a normal life anymore. Hell, hardly anyone does. There's still school for children, but most of the people in town work directly for the Donovans now. There's no point in stores when everything that comes in is carefully rationed. They don't have the room to farm, although some people have their own gardens, and Leo sometimes brings in seeds. There are some professionals who still work in their old jobs—an electrician, a plumber or two, a barber of all things—but everything is done by a barter system now. A barter system that is, of course, heavily regulated by the Donovans. The rest of the town works for the militia—sewing
uniforms, doing maintenance on their trucks or weapons, or whatever manual labor the militia needs at the moment, whether it be repaving a road or building a new guard station.

  People still spot the supernaturals occasionally if they leave their haunts and will definitely report it, but most of the hide and seek is done by the militia itself. That's why Jackie joined. Knowing the patrol schedule has been infinitely helpful in keeping the Callaghan pack safe, among many others. And it's not actually that bad. Three days of training or field exercises, two days on patrol, and two days off.

  "Hey, Jackie!" Her sister Valerie greets her as she walks into the kitchen. She's setting the table.

  "Hey, what's up, do anything fun today?" Jackie asks. At Nick's insistence, Valerie is kept as far removed from the war as possible. She's home schooled, although Helen takes her into town twice a week so she can socialize with a few other non-supernatural teens. Like all of them, she reads a lot, because it's something to do, so she's smart as a whip. She's just completely indoctrinated into the Donovan way of life, and there's nothing Jackie can do to change that. Although Valerie is only a few months younger than Jackie, sometimes the gap between them feels more like a chasm.

  "I finished reading that book I was telling you about, the one about Vietnam?" Valerie says. "You'd like it. I'll loan it to you now that I'm done."

  "Okay, cool." Jackie helps her set the table and then sits down. They have spaghetti and meatballs and a salad. The lettuce is pretty wilted, but nobody says anything. It's a week until the next supply run, so the fresh food is getting pretty old at this point.

  "I don't like the fact that they're making you crawl around in the mud in this weather," Nick says, after listening to Jackie talk about the obstacle course she had spent most of the day doing. "You could catch a cold."

  "I'll be fine, Dad," Jackie says.

  The specter of illness looms over all of them. Leo's supply runs often come back with some basic medicine—antibiotics or painkillers—but a serious illness would basically be impossible to treat in these conditions. The Callaghans had wound up with a new pack member that way. Jared Cooper had been diagnosed with Type One diabetes at the age of six. When the town had gotten cut off, access to the medication he needed to live had dwindled. As his condition had worsened, his family had decided that he would have a better chance as a healthy, hunted werewolf than as a sick human.

  "Pathetic," had been Mitchell's opinion when he had found out about Jared's decision. Jared's parents had been part of the militia—his father as a soldier and his mother as a medic. They had defected and disappeared underground at the same time that Jared had.

  A cold, if left unchecked, could become pneumonia, and that could kill even a healthy teenager like Jackie. So she could see why Nick was worried. Personally, she wasn't worried. If she really got that sick, she would just leave and go to the Callaghan pack to be turned. It would suck to lose their inside man, but Jackie would prefer that to being dead. They had survived years without her help. They could do that again, if they needed to.

  The radio crackles before they've finished eating, and Nick walks over to get it. All communication is done by radio now. It's old-fashioned, but it works. Phone lines have been down for years, and the Donovans prefer to keep it that way, so the townsfolk can't talk as much among themselves.

  "Nick, you there, over." It's Leo's voice on the other end.

  "Go for Nick," he says into the radio.

  "Hey, just got a hot tip!" Leo sounds cheerful, edging towards bloodthirsty. Nick's brother, younger by five years and by far their father's favorite, is basically always ready to kill werewolves. "Someone spotted one of the werewolves rooting around in the dump. We're suiting up. Are you game? Over."

  "Leo, I'm eating dinner with my family, over," Nick says.

  "Suit yourself, old man," Leo replies. "Out."

  Nick rolls his eyes and goes back to the table. Everyone in the room—possibly everyone in the town—is aware of how much both Mitchell and Leo disdain Nick's choices. He still works for the militia, still runs patrols, but he sticks mostly to training now. He has two kids to look after.

  Jackie is also well aware that Nick never wanted her in the militia to begin with. But the fact that preteen Jackie had been a simmering ball of rage had been problematic for everyone. She had run away from home half a dozen times, had gotten into trouble, picked fights. Once she had gotten far enough out of town to almost get shot by one of the perimeter patrols, who had recognized her just in time.

  "The militia will be a good outlet for some of her energy," Leo had said at the time.

  Mitchell had been blunter. "Put her in the militia, or I'll put her down."

  Good times, Jackie thinks. Mitchell has always loved her.

  The feeling is mutual.

  But Maya's words that night had made her realize that the militia was the best place for her to be. The militia was where she could do the most good. So she had gone home that morning and told the truth about where the bruises came from—a couple werewolves had beaten her up but she had managed to get away—and said she wanted to join. She was so young that at first it had all been training. But she had been doing patrols since she had turned fifteen. And it had helped control her anger issues. Nick couldn't complain, but Jackie knew he didn't like it.

  Now she has a dilemma, though. She knows that the Cervantes pack has been living at the edge of the dump lately. They're sure to be caught.

  Sometimes when she gets wind of a raid, she can get away from whatever she's doing without arousing suspicion, sneak off the complex, and warn whoever's in harm's way. It takes Leo and one of his teams about twenty minutes to suit up, and Jackie knows every shortcut in town. But sometimes she can't, and now is one of those times. There's absolutely no way she could get out of the house right now without her parents wondering where she had gone and why.

  It's hard when this happens. It's the hardest part of her double life, when she knows that someone is going to die, but there's nothing she can do to stop it.

  "Jackie?" Valerie asks, and laughs when she jolts. "Earth to Jackie. You okay?"

  "Yeah, sorry," Jackie says. "Just really tired." She puts down her fork and forces herself to smile at her sister. Sometimes she hates Valerie, with her perfect life and her perfect skin and her perfect boyfriend. Sometimes she loves Valerie, who's always unfailingly kind to her. But mostly Jackie just pities her sister, who would fall apart if she knew even the slightest truth about the world they live in. "I think I'm going to go sack out with that book you were talking about and get some sleep."

  "It's your night for dishes, Jackie," Helen says, with her icy stare. Helen had been very firm that she didn't care if Jackie was in the militia; she was still a member of this family and expected to do her part. Ironic, given that her idea of being her mother had always been cold efficiency at best, so markedly different from how she treated Valerie, her biological daughter.

  "Come on, Helen, look at the poor kid," Nick says.

  When Helen didn't bend, Valerie says, "I'll do them for you tonight if you'll take my turn doing laundry this weekend."

  "Deal," she says, and she loves her sister again. She feigns a yawn and heads for her bedroom. She can't sneak out that way. There are bars on her windows—put there after the third time she had run away. Nick had wanted to take them down the next year. Mitchell hadn't allowed it. He likes Jackie knowing that she's trapped, even when she's on her best behavior.

  So there's nothing she can do for the Cervantes pack, beside close her eyes and hope that they manage to get away from Leo and his goons. And there's nothing Nick can do for her, because every time he tries to get Mitchell to soften up on his daughter, it only makes him harder.

  Jackie doesn't care. She's tough. And the day of reckoning for Mitchell Donovan is coming. That thought puts a smile on her face as she drifts into sleep.

  Chapter Two

  During the day, while the pack holes up and hides, or scrounges for food or sup
plies, Ryan wanders. Maya doesn't like that he does it, but Ryan is only nominally her beta. Maya rarely tries to give him orders, and Ryan seldom obeys even when she does. It's dangerous, Maya says, but Ryan maintains that he can take care of himself. In any case, he's terrible at staying in one place. He always has been. He thinks best when he's moving.

  He listens in on the patrols and he spies on the other supernatural creatures. He collects intelligence for no reason other than having it. He explores the ruins of Cold Creek and sometimes finds things that can help them. A few of the pack members have been working together to try to create a solar-powered generator, and sometimes he finds scraps that they can use.

  In any case, it's better if he doesn't hang around with the pack all the time. He makes them uncomfortable. He knows it and doesn't mind. It's due to the age gap. Ryan is thirty-seven to Maya's nineteen. He knows it would be easy for the pack to look up to him as an uncle or a father. He's neither of those things. He doesn't want that responsibility. So he remains apart, aloof, which is what he prefers anyway.

  Maya accepts this simply because she knows him. Sam Callaghan, one of the most prominent alphas in the area, had married Carmen when Maya was only eight. She had three younger sisters. Ryan was an adult by then, with a job and an apartment, and so were both his older brothers. He was glad that his father had found love, had remarried, but he had never been one for family dinners. Not until things had gone bad. Then he had moved in with the others, shortly before his father and brother had been killed along with two of the girls in one of the war's first, devastating attacks. Carmen and Ryan had taken Maya and Gabby and gone underground along with the rest of the supernatural creatures in the area.

  After Carmen's death a year later, the three of them had wandered on their own for a while. Ryan had thought about leaving them—had been desperately tempted at times—but never had. They might not have been related to him by blood, but Maya and Gabby were his family. Ryan hadn't been able to save his father's life, but he could at least honor his memory by looking after his two adopted daughters. Maya had only been sixteen, and despite having inherited the alpha power from her mother, she had no idea how to go about taking care of a pack. Ryan is still a beta in position, so he knows his older brother is alive, somewhere, but he was on the other side of the wall when Cold Creek got cut off. Ryan hasn't seen him in years.