“It took forever to get Justin ready, Mom.”
“Well, go put yours on now.” Gwen picked up Justin, perching him on her hip, while Maria zoomed off around the corner of the house.
“Wait’ll you see her costume,” Gwen said. “It took me a week to make it. She’s a fairy princess bride. It was really hard getting the wings right.”
Justin stared at me with wide eyes. “Twick or tweat?” he tried again.
I patted my pockets. “Sorry, Justin, I’m fresh out of candy.” I really should try to remember to pack a few lollipops or something when I go to see Gwen’s kids.
Maria peeked around the corner of the garage, then stepped out. She didn’t look like any fairy princess bride I’d ever seen, but then I didn’t have a lot of experience with such things. She was still dressed all in black, but she’d added a double holster with two toy guns and a plastic dagger stuck in the belt, and there was something on the back of her head.
Gwen stared at her daughter as Maria walked shyly toward us. When she got to the edge of the driveway, she turned around, showing the plastic lion mask she wore on the back of her head.
“Maria, what on earth—?” Gwen began.
The girl turned back to face us, beaming. “I made it myself, Mom. Don’t you get it? I’m Aunt Vicky.”
Uh-oh.
The enthusiasm in Maria’s voice picked up as she explained. “See, on this side, I’m a demon fighter.” She drew a gun, made shooting motions, then holstered it. She turned again to reveal the lion mask. “And on this side, I’m a shapeshifter. Pretty cool, huh? I found the mask at the church thrift store, and that gave me the idea.”
“What about your bride costume?” Gwen’s voice sounded strangled.
“Oh, I gave it to Brittany.” Brittany was Maria’s best friend. “She likes that girly stuff.”
“Young lady, you are not going to—” Gwen glanced sideways at me. “We’ll talk about this later. Now go change Justin back into his play clothes.”
Maria’s face crumpled, and a tear leaked from the corner of her eye. She blinked rapidly, then turned to me. The elastic from her mask made a line across her forehead. “You like my costume, don’t you, Aunt Vicky?”
Oh, boy. How was I gonna answer this one? My options seemed to be upset Maria or make Gwen mad.
“It’s a great compliment, Maria. I’m really flattered.”
Maria beamed at me, then flashed her mom a look that was half triumphant and half an acknowledgment that she was in big trouble. She lifted Justin out of Gwen’s arms and led him around the garage toward the back door. Justin gazed back at me, looking like he was still trying to figure out why the magic words had failed to produce any candy.
Gwen watched them go, arms folded, her mouth a tight line. Then she turned and marched up the front steps.
Wonderful. I’d been here five minutes and had already caused an argument. Ah, the joys of family.
I SAT IN MY SISTER’S LIVING ROOM—COLONIAL-STYLE, a Wedgwood blue sofa, two beige wing chairs by the fireplace—while Gwen banged things around in the kitchen. She said she was making coffee, but mostly she seemed to be taking her feelings out on her appliances. A cupboard door slammed hard, and the floor vibrated under my feet.
I knew why Gwen was angry about Maria’s self-made costume, and I couldn’t blame her. Well, I couldblame her, but I could also understand. Ever since Gwen’s firstborn had turned out to be a girl, she’d been terrified that the child would grow up to become a shapeshifter. Just like Aunt Vicky.
Among the Cerddorion, only females have the ability to shift. And that ability manifests with the onset of puberty. With each year that went by, Gwen grew a little more afraid that Maria was going to turn out to be one of the monsters.
Well, not a monster, not really. A demi-human. That was the official classification for Gwen and me both. The only difference was that I was classified as demi-human (active) and Gwen as demi-human (inactive). That meant she no longer had the ability to shift; she just had some funky stuff going on with her DNA that could create more demi-humans down the line. So Gwen had all the rights of any norm—she could vote, travel freely, live outside Deadtown—and I had all the restrictions of a PA.
Gwen hadn’t always been ashamed of what we are. She’s four years older than me, and she’d started shifting before I could. And she loved it. In fact, hardly a month went by when she didn’t use up all three shifts. PAs weren’t out at that time, so she had to be discreet, but Dad encouraged her to experiment. Even Mom, always the worrier, remembered the early thrill of shifting and loosened the tight leash she normally kept on us girls.
Gwen’s favorite shift was a seagull; she adored soaring over open water. But she also tried out life as a cat, a squirrel, a deer in the woods. She even shifted into a baby elephant to do an undercover exposé for the school newspaper on animal cruelty at the circus—her English teacher couldn’t stop praising her for how vividly she’d imagined the life of a circus animal. Everything was great until Gwen landed the lead in her senior class play.
They were doing Our Town; her role was Emily. For weeks, all she could talk about was acting, the theater, how she was going to major in drama and become a Broadway star. She lost interest in shifting—which I thought was grossly unfair, because I’d just started. For stagestruck Gwen, though, nothing compared to the thrill of the theater, and she spent all her time at rehearsals and hanging out with her acting-crazed friends. I missed her. I volunteered to help backstage, but for the first time ever Gwen treated me like the pesky little sister, tagging along.
On the play’s opening night, disaster struck. My sister got stage fright. She walked confidently onto the stage, then froze up, her eyes wide and glassy. Her mouth opened, closed, opened, but all that came out was a piteous squeak. Then she shuddered and bent double, her limbs twisting, as though she were having a seizure.
I realized what was happening and ran to close the curtain, yelling at the other actors to get off the stage, to give my sister some room. Mom and Dad were with us in a flash, emerging from the audience to hold the teachers at bay.
Gwen writhed on the floor. Fur covered her face; her ears slid around to the top of her head. Her nose lengthened, and she sprouted whiskers. The shift’s energy field blasted out, billowing the curtain and shredding her costume to ribbons. All the while, she shrunk smaller and smaller. Soon, all that could be seen of her was a rustling inside the remnants of Emily’s dress. Gwen had changed into a mouse.
I scooped up my sister and carefully slipped her into my pocket as Mom gathered the scraps of costume. Dad spoke to the teacher who had directed the play and convinced her we’d already carried Gwen out to the car. The director made an announcement that Gwen had become ill and the scene started over, with the understudy thrilled to step in. No big deal. The audience thought Gwen had fainted. Back in those days, most norms had an enormous capacity to ignore what they’d seen in favor of what they’d prefer to believe.
But Gwen was inconsolable. Her life, she insisted, was over. She refused to go to school for a week. And when she finally returned, it was to be shunned by her former friends. They blamed her for ruining the play, and someone—we never found out who—had seen something of Gwen’s shift. Rumors flew around the school, most of them even crazier than the truth. Gwen was called a freak, an alien, a mutant. Maybe if the monsters had been public then, kids would have thought she was cool. Maybe if Aunt Mab had taken on Gwen as her apprentice demon-fighter instead of me, my sister would have felt like there was some point to shifting. As it was, she felt like everything she’d ever wanted—her friends, popularity, a career as an actress—had been ripped away from her. Because she was Cerddorion. And she’d die, she insisted, if anyone ever found out.