Tarnished by Rhiannon Held Page A

think we’re doing it for the same reasons humans do, but it’s stronger and deeper than that. Impossible to ignore.”
    He watched the road with focused attention the way her mother always did, like he had to be as aware of every hazard as the driver. It always annoyed Susan, like a vote of no confidence in her own observational skills.
    “Is it really like you have a wolf inside you? That, you know, wants things your human self wouldn’t?” Susan winced. She hadn’t meant to ask that. But that’s what it was like in a good portion of the books and movies she’d found. She imagined that side of Edmond, lurking in him even when he was a baby.
    Dare snorted. “You’ve been reading human fiction, haven’t you? Don’t. We don’t have some separate wolf mind any more than you have some autonomous self that’s the mother, and the rest of you isn’t. You are a mother. It shapes your whole self, even if it’s not everything you are.”
    Muscles relaxed in Susan’s shoulders. She hadn’t even realized they were tense. That seemed much more comprehensible. Just people, even if they were people with strange instincts and customs. “I asked John what it felt like a couple times, but he said it wasn’t something he could put into words.”
    Edmond started to fuss and Susan flipped the rearview mirror down to see his little face screwed up with frustration. “His toy’s in the bag,” she directed Silver, and then had to look away again, though she heard rummaging sounds. When she next stopped at a red light, Silver had the yellow plush rabbit, but she was holding it between two fingers like it stank. Edmond grunted in frustration as he grabbed impotently for it.
    “What? What’s wrong with it?” Susan twisted a hand back and Silver dropped it in. She sniffed the toy, but it just smelled like clean plush.
    “It’s food,” Silver said. “Didn’t Seattle get him a proper puppy?”
    “At least a bear would be better. Isn’t that what humans usually give their children?” Dare’s voice held a rumble of amusement at Silver’s phrasing, but he seemed relatively serious about the subject.
    Susan dropped the rabbit into her lap. “You guys are freaking kidding me. You mean there was a reason they kept giving me stuffed dogs all the time? I thought they were like baby shower gifts.”
    “Not dogs.” Dare snorted. “Human children have bears and blankets. We have wolf pups. Puppies.”
    “Well, I have half a dozen. There should be one all the way at the bottom of the bag.”
    Silver rummaged deeper and pulled one out, a dark, steely gray. She wiggled it in front of Edmond, and he grabbed hold. Susan flicked a glance at Dare. “They didn’t say anything, they just kept pushing them on me. I didn’t know what they wanted.”
    “That one I don’t think they were keeping from you on purpose. They probably didn’t realize there was anything to explain.” Dare gave a short laugh, ironic for no reason Susan could figure out. “Not spending much time with a pack over the past few years threw me in more with humans. I think I probably know more about them than many Were.”
    Susan wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. Was knowing about humans a good thing or a bad thing? Silence settled over them as she turned into her neighborhood.
    “There,” Dare said as they pulled away from a light. He pointed. The park she and John liked to take Edmond to showed as flashes of primary-colored metal among mature evergreens. “The seesaws. If you want to understand shifting for a Were, imagine one of those.”
    Susan glanced over before returning her attention to the road. She’d seen the seesaws at that park plenty of other times anyway. She murmured a noise prompting Dare to continue.
    “In the new—the new moon—it’s like all the weight’s on your side. You have to really push to get anywhere, and then the weight switches and it’s still all on the wrong side when you try to get back. In the full, it’s