Get It 10

I am out of his bed and through the bathroom door before the second set of footsteps reaches the landing. The shower runs cold and I scrub until my teeth chatter and none of it helps—my skin still holds the map of everywhere he touched.

Sweats on, wet hair knotted up, color pinched into my cheeks. My reflection looks like someone who crawled out of wreckage—which, as self-assessments go, is generous.

When I open my bedroom door, Mom is three feet away in the hallway. Her face wears the patient mask she keeps for verdicts already decided, but her eyes move across me like fingers checking fractures.

“The glamour is thin.” Her voice barely clears a whisper. “I can feel it from here, Kylie—stretched to almost nothing. Tell me what happened.”

“I had a fever.” My pulse drums behind my ears while I shape the lie. “Hit around two—sweating, shaking. Rode it out and slept badly.”

“A fever.” She holds the word the way she holds everything she’s about to take apart—slowly, turning it in the light. “And the glamour just thinned on its own?”

“I didn’t say thinned, you said thinned.” My wet hair drips cold onto my collar and I cling to the sensation. “Bodies get fevers, Mom—it’s not a conspiracy.”

Her gaze stays on me for three full seconds. Then she steps into my bedroom and closes the door with a click that carries more weight than a slam.

“Sit on the bed and don’t move.” She pulls the desk chair opposite me and rolls her sleeves to the elbows. “This is going to take a while, and the more you fight it, the worse it gets.”

The magic starts at my sternum—always there, the center of the cage. Mom’s hands hover two inches from my chest and the air thickens into something heavy pushing inward.

“Breathe through it.” Her eyes close, concentration carving lines across her forehead. “Slow and steady.”

I breathe. I sit with my fingers draining white on the mattress and let my mother compress my own nature into something too small. My wolf thrashes behind my sternum—not sound, but vibration that rattles my teeth.

“She tried to surface, didn’t she.” Not a question. Mom’s hands press deeper. “I can feel the damage from here—the barriers are shredded.”

“She stirs sometimes during fevers.” My jaw aches from how hard I’ve been clenching. “It must have pushed her.”

“You’re tenser than usual.” Her hands shift and the magic bites deeper. “What’s different tonight?”

“I don’t know.” The lie coats my tongue like copper and I swallow around it. “It just hurts more than usual.”

“I had to handle a situation last week.” Mom tries to distract me, adjusts her hands between my ribs like she’s tuning an instrument. “Darlene Mason, at the market. She caught a flicker in my scent during a conversation—asked me an odd question about it.”

“What kind of question?” I manage the words through the pressure behind my collarbone, each syllable costing more than the last.

“The kind that goes away with coffee and scones.” Her voice stays conversational, unbothered. “I visited her the next morning, sat in her kitchen, and by the time I left she remembered a lovely chat about the farmers’ market.”

“No flicker, no question.” I exhale as the magic tightens and my vision swims. “Just Darlene being Darlene.”

“Exactly.” Mom opens her eyes briefly, checking her work. “It’s what I do, Kylie. One conversation, one morning—and the problem doesn’t exist anymore.”

She describes erasing someone’s reality the way you’d describe fixing a squeaky hinge. My mother drinks a woman’s coffee, rewrites her memory, and comes home to start dinner—I should put that on a Mother’s Day card.

“Almost done.” The compression peaks—white-hot—and a gasp tears out of me, fingers clawing the mattress. Then the wolf goes silent, muted to almost nothing, an echo pressed behind thick glass.

The familiar emptiness floods back—dulled senses, muffled everything, the world viewed through gauze. I should add mourning return of magical sensory deprivation to the list of things that are absolutely, completely fine.

“There.” Mom flexes her fingers, rolls her wrists, examines her work with the quiet satisfaction of someone who just sealed a door. “How does that feel?”

“Like I swallowed a grey fog.” I test my senses and find nothing—no heightened hearing, no sharp smell, no wolf behind my ribs. “Same as always.”

“Was Max home tonight?” Mom straightens in the chair, watching me with the focus of someone scanning fine print. “Did he hear anything? Notice anything?”

“He was in his room.” My voice comes out flat, the performance of a lifetime—a girl who spent the night alone. “I didn’t see him.”

“You didn’t see him.” She lets the sentence sit between us with its teeth showing. “The concerned stepbrother didn’t come check on you through the wall?”

“Walls are thick in this house, Mom.” I stare at the wet spot my hair has left on the pillow because her eyes right now are a trap I cannot walk into. “He sleeps like the dead.”

“And nothing happened tonight that I should know about?” Her thumb traces her own wrist—the calculating gesture, the one that means she’s running numbers. “Nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all.” Each word a door bolted between my mother and what happened twelve feet from where she’s sitting.

She stands, smooths her blouse, returns the chair to the desk. “The current suppression isn’t strong enough. Your wolf pushed harder tonight than she’s ever pushed.”

“So what does that mean?” My stomach turns itself inside out and my nails press crescents into my palms.

“It means I need something more permanent.” She pauses in the doorway, selecting words. “Something that won’t thin every time your body decides to react.”

“More permanent how?” My nails find my palms inside my fists. “What are you going to do to me?”

“You remember what happens when the wolf comes out, Kylie.” Her voice goes gentle, which is when it does the most damage. “You remember the blood. You remember whose body was underneath your hands.”

My fingers dig into my thighs. The memory rises—small hands slick and red, warmth draining from something beneath them, a sound that wasn’t human and wasn’t anything a child should produce.

“Every time she surfaces, you risk becoming that girl again.” She tucks a strand of wet hair behind my ear—tenderness and blade, always both, always at once. “The suppression, the glamour, this marriage—all of it keeps you from being her.”

Same words, same cadence, same devastating softness. But tonight they press against skin still carrying someone else’s warmth, and the distance between what she calls protection and what freedom tastes like is enormous.

“I understand,” I say, because I’ve been saying it for thirteen years and stopping now would cost more than I can pay.

“Good.” She studies my face one final beat, then pulls the door shut. Her footsteps fade down the hall.

I sit in the muted silence of a body compressed again, my wolf barely a whisper behind glass so thick I can hardly feel her breathing. An hour ago she was surging, tasting air for the first time—and Mom is going to make sure she never tastes it again.