Red by Kait Nolan Page A

the
country. Right around that time, it came out that she was pregnant.
She was married to some other guy in a hurry. Sabine’s husband was
a good guy by all accounts, a widower with a son by his first wife.
When Sabine’s daughter was born, he took her as his own, and
everything was hunky dory for a while.
    But the daughter, Brynne, was wild, even
more so than her mother. By the time she was fifteen, she’d gotten
involved with some guy. She was brazen about it, which really flew
in the face of the morality of the time. Her stepfather decided to
put a stop to it, and I don’t know what exactly that he did, but I
can guarantee it wasn’t some emotionally touchy feely intervention
Dr. Phil style. Things got physical and she . . . well, she
changed. That went over like a lead balloon and he attacked her.
According to the journal, she killed him in self defense, then left
her village alone, scared, and—like her mother before her—pregnant.
It pretty well went that way from generation to generation—not with
the killing part, but with each generation bearing a daughter who
also reached sexual maturity and turned into a werewolf. I’m really
not clear where the whole idea of a curse entered into things, but
the story perpetuated in various versions throughout the journal
was that Brynne was Sabine’s punishment for her lack of virtue.
    Nobody really talked about love until my
mother.
    According to her, she and
my dad were a Romeo and Juliet, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, love
story. They fell in love in high school—a blistering,
lightning-strike, love-at-first-sight kind of thing. They kept
their relationship quiet because their families would never have
approved. When Mom got pregnant, she went through hell keeping my
father’s name a secret, no matter what her dad said or did, she
held her silence, and they planned.
    She was supposed to give me up. It’s what
her father was expecting. One of those private adoption deals to a
couple in another town. Her mother, of course, wasn’t around
anymore to issue an opinion. But instead of some strange couple,
she handed me over to my father. He took me, left town, and waited
for her. She was supposed to take a Greyhound bus to meet him a few
days later, once she was out of the hospital. But she never
showed.
    He told me she’d died from complications.
That’s less scarring, I suppose, than telling your child that her
mother slit her wrists, which is what I found out after some
unauthorized snooping in his room turned up the newspaper articles
about her death. I was ten. It was kind of hard to keep believing
the illusion of their love story after finding out she’d made the
choice to leave us. The fact that Dad still believed it made him
seem kind of sad and deluded. I didn’t have the heart to bring it
up. But even he didn’t know the real truth. Not until the letter.
Now I wonder if he wishes he left me behind.
    I knew Dad believed. Or believed enough that
he was willing to uproot us and force me into this fringe existence
where the most important Rule was to remain unnoticed. He’d been scared after we got the letter and the journal. He’d never
told me why. I’d gone along with it because it’s what he wanted. I
figured I would pass the age that Mom died and he would finally
accept that the only thing that was being passed down the female
line was some kind of mental disorder. Because, seriously, which is
more logical: that I was the latest generation of a curse that
follows the female line of the family because some long distant
ancestress couldn’t keep her skirts down or that my mother was a
raving lunatic?
    I’d been all prepared to admit my own
insanity if it came to that. Because surely if I’d begun to think
that any of these physical changes were truly happening, it would
be nothing more than a delusion.
    But I couldn’t argue with what I’d done
today.
    Apparently great-great-great—however many
greats—Grandma Brynne had passed on something worse