Chapter One Hundred and Five

Havermouth, Five Years Before

Aislen’s legs gave out in the bedroom, and she sat heavily on the bed. She should be happy, she told herself. She should be overjoyed. It was, as everyone in the tiny kitchen had repeated time and time again, an amazing, incredible opportunity, an act of generosity by the school and Zeus Forest Works, that she would have been a fool to turn down.

Why did it feel so wrong?

She knew why, she answered herself. Because Rhett had told her not to go to Rideten. Because going to Rideten meant leaving the Triquetra behind in Havermouth.

In less than a month, the Triquetra had turned her life inside out and upside down. Somehow everything had become focused on them, their presence dictating how her days went, what she did, how she dressed, what she ate, where she slept…

She did not know now if she could separate herself from them and survive it. She did not know if she wanted to do so.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Tiffany said from the doorway. “It is the right thing to do, Aislen, it is. This is your way out. Out of this situation, out of this town. This is your opportunity to do something with your life, something significant, something important.”

Aislen looked up at her mother and her mouth opened.

“Those boys,” Tiffany guessed. “They are why you’re hesitant. You cannot give up on something like this for a teenage romance, especially one like this. The rumours going around this town, your behaviour Aislen… This relationship is not a good one, it is… It’s the destructive type of relationship. It’s as if you have joined a gang…”

Aislen closed her mouth with a click of her teeth. Tiffany just didn’t understand, she started to herself, immediately on the defensive. Tiffany just didn’t understand about the Triquetra, about the whole situation with them, she didn’t know that they were werewolves, or that werewolves even existed…

“I’d better get dinner on,” Tiffany stepped out of the doorway. “Anyway, you might want to look around and start thinking about what you want to take with you to Rideten. One week isn’t long to do everything that you need to do. You’ll need to pack, and will probably need art supplies… A car…”

Aislen looked around the little room. She had only just unpacked the last box three weeks before, she thought, and here she was packing it back up again.

Was she going to go?

Was she going to stay?

She groaned and flopped back onto her bed, covering her eyes in a pose similar to that which Rhett adopted so often at school, as if so bored by the lessons, he stumbled out of them to sleep in the grass.

She picked up her phone and turned it over in her hands. She didn’t even have their numbers in her phone. She had never called them. They would probably be on their way to the pack meeting about the party, anyway.

And, she admitted to herself, their relationship, if she could even call it a relationship, had never been the sort where she could talk about her feelings openly, where she could call one of them and talk about the scholarship and what it meant to her and her future.

Would they even care if she went? If she told them, would they immediately begin looking for her replacement? No, she decided, she wouldn’t tell them. She wouldn’t say anything and would finish off her final week at Havermouth High as the Triquetra’s Whore, rather than their discarded sex toy.

She stood and looked around the room at all the things that had seemed so important just a couple months before when she had packed them to move to Havermouth. She went through to the kitchen and edged around Tiffany’s dinner preparations to get the garbage bags. In her bedroom, she began a ruthless cull of her possessions, dragging two full garbage bags through the house and out to the rubbish bin.

She took down her suitcase from the top of her closet and opened it on the bed, and began to pack any of her clothes that she wouldn’t need in the coming week. “It’s just three years,” she told herself, as she folded and rolled her clothes into the case. “If this means anything…” If this was more than just sex… “If it means anything, they’ll wait for me.”

“Oh, wow,” Tiffany stepped into the room and looked around. “You can leave some things here, Aislen, for when you visit,” she told her. “You don’t have to throw everything away…”

“I haven’t thrown everything away,” Aislen replied. “Just the stuff… that was too young for me. I don’t know why I even brought it here,” she admitted. “It was stupid.”

“Aislen,” Tiffany sighed, and walked in to put her arms around her. Embraces with her mother had become so infrequent that Aislen had forgotten the feel of Tiffany’s body against hers, the scent of her hair and skin, and it took a moment before memory took hold and she relaxed and returned the hug. “A lot has happened in the last month since we came here. Adults forget sometimes how quickly things change when you’re a teenager. But don’t throw away your childhood in such a hurry. You don’t have to become an adult overnight. There isn’t a deadline set as to when you have to complete the transition.”

“But there is,” Aislen replied, releasing Tiffany slowly and easing back. “There is a deadline, and it’s a week away.”

Tiffany laughed ruefully. “Oh, darling. Rideten will open your eyes to so much more than you can even imagine. The independence of living out of the family home, having your own car, deciding what to eat, and when to eat it. Being responsible for the first time in your life for your own safety, for making the right decisions for yourself… I envy you,” she sighed wistfully. “I had a glimpse of that sort of freedom when I first entered the pageant… It’s like they say. Youth is wasted on the young. If I could only do it again… I would do so much different.”

“Not had me,” Aislen muttered.

“You are the one thing that I don’t regret doing, Aislen,” Tiffany replied. “I just wish you’d come along a few years later than you did. Marriage and children… They put boundaries around a woman that last for years. Men will never understand how much that is so, as marriage and children open doors for them, rather than close them. But it is a truth. Do as much as you can before you settle for a man, Aislen, and… as you wouldn’t buy the first dress that fits you, try different men on for size. When the right one comes along, you won’t hesitate and you won’t wonder, you will know.”