APEX - Season 2

Ch. 18: Voluntold

Calla

There was something comforting about the fact that even as the world was collapsing around us, my younger siblings still found time to obsess over typical high school dramas.

I sat at dinner with them as well as my mother in our traditional spot near the hearth at the Howling Hound. Arla spent a good twenty minutes filling me in on her latest crush, a nonbinary werewolf named Rowen who had just transferred into her school. "They're cooler than I'll ever be," she said. "But I think I have a shot. I asked them if they wanted to go to a movie sometime and they said maybe. That's not a no!"

Spence snickered as he stared at his phone. "It's not a yes either."

Arla punched his shoulder, and he gave her his best death stare. "The truth hurts, doesn't it, sis?"

"The truth is," she said, "no one's ever going to want to go to a movie with you, or anywhere else if you don't start transforming soon."

"That's enough, Arla," my mother said in her best no fucks given mom voice. "You know better than to remind him of his deficiencies. The stress will lower his odds of becoming a fully functional werewolf."

"To what? Negative five million?" She crossed her arms and huffed.

I kicked Arla under the table. "Ow! What's your problem, Calla?"

"Mom is right about you adding to his stress." I hated having to side with Simone on this one, especially considering her last statement was just as callous as any Arla had made. "She shouldn't have called his dormancy a deficiency, however."

"Well, what else would you call it?" Simone asked, her cheek twitching like it did whenever I said something that contradicted her way of thinking.

"He needs to find his own path," I said, giving my brother a reassuring smile. "Whoever you're meant to be, Spence, you deserve the chance to be that, and it doesn't have to have anything to do with shifting or Crown. You can be a doctor or a street musician...or an artist. As long as you're happy, you're successful."

"That's not what mom says," Spence grumbled. "What I'll be if I'm anything besides an Alpha is a disappointment."

"Spencer Anthony, that is not what I said." She patted her lips with her linen napkin as she spoke.

"It was heavily implied." He went back to staring at his phone, and I resumed fuming at my mother. Talk about adding stress to the kid's plate, here she was insinuating that his worth was tied up with his ability to transform. Spence was a smart kid. He had more to add to the world than becoming an Alpha. I'd taken him on a weekend trip to the ocean over the summer, where he'd confessed to me as he buried his feet in the sand that what he really wanted to do with his life was to create video games—a career path Simone Bardot would never be able to wrap her head around.

The meal finished with Arla gossiping about the break ups and hook ups of her classmates. After listening to her drone on for ten minutes, my mother's patience had worn thin.

"Arla, take Spencer and wait out in the car with your guards. I need to speak with your sister."

"Is this about the murders? Or the referendum?" When my mom didn't answer her, Arla pouted. "Why can't I stay? Spence can go, but I want to hear what you two are talking about!"

"It's a private matter," Simone said.

"I'm not a child anymore. I saw that poor human's dead body and I want to know what's happening."

"You saw what?" My mother smelled the air as though she was about to sniff out her younger daughter's deviousness.

Arla slumped back in her chair. Revealing the clandestine trip she'd taken with me to an active crime scene wasn't her brightest moment. "I mean, I saw it on the internet. Someone filmed it before the police got there."