The Were Chronicles

By Alma Alexander

"Everything I knew about the Were was wrong"

 

 A Were of no fixed form, a Random, able to Turn into any warm-blooded creature it sees...

 

A young Random whose failure to Turn forces him into taking his destiny into his own hands, becoming full Lycan in the name of pride and fury, learning things he never thought were possible...

 

A true Shifter, the wild card, Turning into anything he chooses at will...

 

First Jazz Marsh Turns into something unprecedented, throwing her family and the Were authorities into a spin. Then her brother Mal, frustrated beyond reason by his own delayed Turn, takes matters into his own hands and chooses his own destiny, infiltrating the shadowy Lycan clan in order to help expiate his perceived guilt in his older sister's death. He's helped by his friend, Chalky, a true Shifter who is capable of Turning into anything he pleases unconstrained by the rules of Were kind.

 

Together, they work to turn back a shattering tragedy, solve a conspiracy-shrouded mystery rooted in their own kind, and work to preserve their own existence against a rising tide of superstition and hatred.

 

All they wanted to do, in the end, was save a life. Instead... they started a war.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book View Cafe
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781611388923

Alma Alexander

Alma Alexander was born in Yugoslavia and has lived in Zambia, Swaziland, Wales, South Africa and New Zealand. She now lives in Washington state, USA. She writes full-time and runs a monthly creative writing workshop with her husband.

Book preview

DEDICATIONS

RANDOM

This is the first book of mine that my father didn’t live to see published. In his memory, then, Thank you, Dad, for a lifetime of love and support. I hope this one does you proud.

WOLF

To all of you out there who know what it means to be lost, and to be found.

SHIFTER

There is no one person out there to whom a book like this can be dedicated. But we all carry a bit of my shifter in us – and it is to that fragment, broken, and damaged, and heroic, and glorious, forever young in some ways and wise beyond our years in others, that this novel is offered. In acknowledgment, and with thanks.

FOREWORD

Alma and I go back a long way. We have both had our long journeys to where we are now, me splitting my time between Taiwan and Portugal and Alma living in the Pacific Northwest in the USA. But it all started decades ago, at the University of Cape Town Microbiology Department, where she became my postgraduate student. When I met her, she was already writing – in fact, her first published fantasy novel (Changer of Days, which became the Hidden Queen/Changer of Days duology) was partly created at her desk in the corner of my research lab. She was a good research scientist, but writing was her passion, and that won out in the end. I am glad it did, as her books have given me great pleasure over the years. (Her research was great, but it took 30 years and a whole genome sequence to find out why we were having such problems with the genetics of Streptomyces cattleya – it has two chromosomes, unlike almost all other bacteria.) The Were Chronicles trilogy reflects that background to some extent. All that laboratory work means that when you read these books, you need to know that it was written with a hand that has used the molecular biology outlined in the books.

Why should her old Professor write this foreword to the trilogy? One simple answer is that there are sixty years of SF sitting in my library. Notwithstanding my overcrowded bookshelves, it’s because I want to emphasize that this trilogy is a rare SF treat. There two very rare types of SF. One is murder mystery SF (works like Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series). The other is Hard Fantasy, which is the category this trilogy falls into.

John Clute and John Grant, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, defined Hard Fantasy as a genre where magic is regarded as an almost scientific force of nature and subject to the same sort of rules and principles. This definition, and some of the examples that are suggested as Hard Fantasy, can be problematic (such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth books). But there is an Arthur C. Clarke quote that is highly relevant to both Alma’s trilogy, and to Hard Fantasy as a whole: Magic is just science that we don't understand yet. So I would change Hard Fantasy’s definition to a genre where magic is a scientific force of nature and subject to the same sort of rules and principles as all other science.

Alma’s were-creatures are a classic fantasy trope but we begin, in this trilogy, to understand how and why they exist, as well as how this works in terms of basic genetics, the latter forming an integral part of the story. They do not just jump out of the urban jungle fully formed, which is the classic approach to vampires, were-creatures, fairies, gods, etc., in modern urban fantasy. These books are a well-written, and a rare treat; there are few of this genre around.

Random, Wolf and Shifter are all coming of age stories. The first book tells us little about why were-creatures exist, but it explores more deeply the themes of displacement and bullying. Read this first book and sympathize with all the displaced children in the world who are different. In this it has some similarity to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it is darker, more realistic. Alma was born in a country that no longer exists, has lived in multiple countries on three continents before settling in Washington State with her husband. Most importantly, she went to various English medium schools in Africa before reaching my lab at the University of Cape Town. She may speak and write perfect primary-language English of the native speaker, but it remains her second language, which she had to learn and use rather like the protagonists in Random. What you get are insights that I think come from the heart.

Random is not overly Hard Fantasy but the premise is there if you look for it and Alma sets the stage for it in the second book of the trilogy. Wolf moves us from the more static world of Jazz and Celia to the more dynamic world of Mal. If you look closely, you can see Alma’s time in the laboratory reflected in this book and, as all researchers have always known, the back-and-forth and the frustrations of sheer repetition, the if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed dogged pursuit of elusive solutions, and the shock and disappointment of failures. We gain insights into why were-creatures exist as the story moves on. Finally, we take a small step back again and in Shifter look at the bigger picture in the story of Chalky, a true shape shifter and a hybrid. I might have reservations about the physiology of shape-shifting in general (how do you input the information from the target to be copied to the cells to be changed! But then, that’s where the magic comes in…), but I think the genetics is as good as you can get.

If you have never read Alma’s work before, these books are a good place to start, but do try the rest, they will always surprise you. Alma tends to write stories that play with the boundaries. The Secrets of Jin-shei, Embers of Heaven, and Empress push the edges of Historical Fiction/Fantasy, just like this trilogy does for Hard Fantasy. I particularly love Empress because I have a soft spot for Justinian. He was a good Emperor who had a major outbreak of plague during his reign and was never able to reach his full potential, partly because of the plague. Empress is a great story about how people react to real power, and it is – in the manner that Alma has made a trademark – based on fact. In these present plague years, there should be a particular level of sympathy for these two men and their particular trials; I look forward to seeing Alma tackle other stories that hold up mirrors to our realities, our past and present, our myths and our science.

Professor Ralph Kirby MA PhD LLB LLM

Professor Emeritus, National Yang Ming University, Taiwan.

THE

W E R E

CHRONICLES

BOOK 1: RANDOM

Prologue:

The Boy in The Basement

Vivian Ingram, the family caretaker and my babysitter, arrived just before the ascent of the full Moon, as usual – locking everybody except me (including poor Mal yet again) into their Turning Rooms in the basement and making sure everything was secure.

Charlie was with her.

The first time she’d brought him, he had been thirteen and I was only eleven. You’d think that a newly-teenaged boy would have disdained the company of a kid like me, but we somehow bucked the odds – we missed out on the standard boy-from-girl-from-boy recoil in response to unnamed cooties, and we had become buddies instead. Of course, he was going on sixteen now, and he’d Turned – at his proper new-Moon trigger, only a few months before – into a vampire bat, like the rest of his family.

My older brother Mal had glowered at Charlie as he was escorted into his Turning room in the hope that this time would finally prove the charm. Mal, almost eighteen, still un-Turned, visibly chafing at having to be marched off into yet another attempt at becoming an official adult in the Were community, being watched by a boy two years his junior who had already passed him on that road.

Charlie knew better than to offer any commentary while Mal was still in hearing range – but once my brother and his temper were safely locked away behind secured doors, he gave me one of his crooked smiles, half sympathy, half mischief.

Still no joy for him?

Nope. And he’s kind of running out of time. They’re not sure what they’re going to do if he passes his eighteenth birthday and is still… like this. Is it even possible for someone to un-Were?

What is he trying for this time?

Still a weasel. It’s been quite a come-down, really. He started out all gung-ho, with the wolverine, but after my folks had to keep hiring the wolverine for months it got…a little expensive. So he’s had to bring his sights down some. He wanted something with teeth, though, so – well – weasel.

And if that doesn’t work, what, a rat? Charlie asked.

Don’t be mean, I said sanctimoniously.

Shall we stay and see how he and the weasel are getting on? The Moon ought to be up by now – or is about to be, anyway. It should be fun.

I smacked him on the shoulder. You know how he hated seeing us peering in the last time.

We’ll be careful, Charlie said. Come on.

Vivian was busy – one of her other sons fortuitously picked a perfect moment to call her on the phone, and while she was talking to him she had momentarily lost track of Charlie and me. We hadn’t really bothered to check on the Moon’s status in the sky – it was close enough for our purposes. We stood jostling outside the door of Mal’s room, and I stood on tiptoe to peer inside through the glass window set into the door.

What’s he doing? Charlie asked, crowding in beside me, careful to keep to the edges so he could duck away if Mal showed signs of looking up and seeing us there.

Nothing, I said. As usual.

Mal was in fact sitting in the middle of the room, cross-legged and wrapped in his Turning cloak, staring with smoldering eyes at the weasel which stood with its back to the wall staring back at him. Other than the staring contest, which was a sadly familiar outcome of locking Mal into the Turning Room at the advent of full Moon, there was nothing of any interest going on inside – and it looked like Vivian would soon have to let him out, as she had done every Turn so far since he was fifteen, and he’d still be… Mal. The full Moon was up in the sky; if he hadn’t Turned by now, he probably wasn't going to.

I had already lost interest, but for Charlie, this was a train wreck he couldn’t stay away from. He was still staring into the room by the time I had turned away – from Mal and his continued failure, from the annoyed weasel in the corner – and I was actually looking at Charlie’s fascinated face when something began to impinge itself on my consciousness.

There was nothing going on inside the room. But out here in the corridor, outside… I was starting to feel distinctly strange. Ill, even. There was something deep in the back of my throat, an odd sort of nausea, but it didn’t feel as though I wanted to throw up – it was just… there… as though I had tried to swallow something, either too big or too disgusting, that I shouldn’t have even considered putting into my mouth, and now it was stuck halfway down my gullet and was making breathing difficult. My skin felt prickly and itchy and hot, like I was about to spike a fever or suddenly sprout an exotic rash; my eyes were watering and there was a tickle behind my nose not unlike those times when you desperately want to sneeze but the sneeze just won’t come. My bones felt… oddly liquid. It isn’t an easy sensation to describe but the closest I can come is feeling like I was about to change phase, like my solid flesh wanted to melt into a puddle, or evaporate into a gas; in a fanciful moment I imagined my hair going up in literal smoke, dissolving strand by strand into a strange fog which was swirling around me. It felt… well, the synonyms didn’t get any more helpful in clarifying matters, It felt odd. Weird. Strange. I had never felt anything like it before.

I realized that I had started almost panting, trying to get air into my lungs through my mouth, gasping mouthfuls of it – that my hands had closed convulsively into fists against the door – that my knees were feeling decidedly weak, and that if I did not sit down, right now, I would collapse into an undignified heap or, perhaps, dissolve into that puddle that I had already considered becoming. And just as I realized it, so did Charlie. He turned sharply towards me, dismissing Mal’s situation and sizing up my own instantly and completely.

Oh, no, he said unsteadily. Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Not now. Hang on. Don’t move. He backed away from the door, from me, until he was at the foot of the basement stairs and then, without letting his eyes leave my face for one moment, angled his head just enough to yell urgently up the stairs for his mother.

I pushed myself off the door, turning around, blinking rapidly at him, trying to figure it out.

What’s going on…?

"Did nobody tell you about this? Charlie said desperately. There’s a full Moon in the sky – you’re Were-kind – work it out!"

He glanced up the still-empty stairs, but there was no sign of Vivian. "There’s an empty room back there, isn’t there? Can you get there? Quickly? Mom! MOM! Now!"

It was starting to percolate through to my fogged brain. "Are you telling me… I’m Turning?"

"Dammit – get into that room – I can’t handle – where is my mother? Go on, back away – into the room – at least I can close the door and then we can deal…"

There was, in fact, a room behind me, a room that had been set aside specifically for this moment, for me – but it had not been prepared. Not yet. And it seemed as though it was too late for any of that. Way too late for that. That liquid sensation that I felt building up in my bones suddenly turned into an exquisitely sharp agony, as though I were pulling my own body apart and trying to reknit it back into a shape in which it didn’t belong – which, come to think of it, was precisely what was going on. I tried to obey Charlie’s instructions, I did – I took a precarious step in that direction, and my feet failed me completely. I crumpled bonelessly on the basement floor, feeling the cold stab into my legs and my butt from the bare concrete below the thin layer of linoleum that had been laid down over it, and then I couldn’t seem to move at all anymore.

But it’s… I’m… my fifteenth is still… I was finding it very difficult to speak, to form words with my lips, with my tongue.

I was Turning. I was Turning, and I was still two months shy of my fifteenth birthday, the traditional age at which the Were first Turned. And nothing had been prepared.

I whimpered and closed my eyes at last, allowing myself to fold into a little heap of misery on the floor.

I was a Random. The primary form of Adult Randoms was the animal they had become at their first Turning, if no outside stimulus had been presented to change that, such as another warm-blooded creature waiting to steal their form.

But I hadn’t Turned yet so I had no primary form. Nothing to fall back on. In fact… whatever I Turned into right now, at this instant, that would remain my primary form forever. I had thought about this, had planned to present myself with an animal of my choice come my fifteenth birthday, to control this Random thing as best I could – but there was nothing, nothing – unless someone simply assumed that Mal was not going to Turn again and barged into his room and stole his weasel – but I didn’t want to be a weasel – and anyway what if he needed the thing – and did it count that I had actually been watching the weasel through the glass insert in the door just before this started happening? But was the weasel the last thing that I had seen? What if some mouse had scuttled right in front of me as I had turned away from the door – we were punctilious about pest control in this house, for obvious reasons, but it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that the occasional mouse did find its way down here, it was a basement after all – would I really be stuck with being a mouse – but no, I hadn’t seen, hadn’t recognized, hadn’t registered – did that count…?

And then the pain became so incandescent that I actually screamed – and then it was all gone, as though it had never been. Wiped away. Wiped clean.

I sat there, my hands over my eyes, panting….

…wait…

…my hands over my eyes…

…so I hadn’t Turned after all?

What was going on here?

I took my hands away from my face and then several things suddenly began to clamor for my attention.

One, the hands that my eyes lighted on as they came away from my face were not my hands. I should know, okay? I’d been living with my hands for nearly fifteen years and had been observing them on a daily basis, and these weren’t it. They were Somebody Else’s Hands.

Two, Charlie’s face wore an expression that was a cross between open-mouthed astonishment and a rapt, wide-eyed fascination.

Three, more or less the same expression graced the face of his mother – Vivian had come racing down the basement stairs in response to the urgency in her son’s voice, but she had obviously been too late to prevent…

Something had happened. Something. Something was different.

What… I began, and then shut my mouth abruptly. The voice was not my own, either. It was a voice that had a high note, but which then broke into a lower register halfway through that single word I had tried to utter, like a teenaged boy whose voice was in the middle of breaking.

Oh, my giddy aunt, Charlie said, his own voice very faint. "Jazz?"

I examined my hand. It was more… robust than I was used to. Slightly bigger. The fingers were longer, flatter, the nails almost spatulate. The hand emerged from a wrist that seemed to be far too angular to belong to me, as if the very bones were knit differently.

I lifted that hand, and touched my face.

I did not recognize anything that my new fingertips trailed across. The nose was the wrong shape. My lower lip was fuller than I remembered it. My teeth felt different under my tongue. My hair…

It was shorter. Much shorter. And not curly any more, like mine. Short, and it felt straight.

More like Charlie’s hair than my own.

There will, Vivian said, her voice shaking ever so slightly, be hell to pay over this. Charlie, what were you thinking?

"It wasn’t my fault! Charlie said sharply. How was I to know that…"

I tried not to think the wrongness of my voice – and chose to whisper, instead, thinking that whispering at least would sound a little more like I thought I should sound. What’s going on?

Vivian gave a helpless shrug. Honey… you Turned. But it isn’t…

I put out a hand, tried to struggle to my feet – which hurt, as if they had been stuffed into shoes two sizes too small. My clothes felt strange on me, tight in all the wrong places, constraining… and then, finally, something clicked.

The funny voice. The bigger-boned hands. My hair. The sense of a different breadth of shoulder and of hip. The… oddness about my body.

I looked down at my crotch, and gave an inelegant yelp.

I had Turned, all right. But not into an animal. The weasel in Mal’s room had not been the last thing I saw at the crucial moment. Neither had that mythical mouse I had been briefly worried about.

The last warm-blooded creature I had set eyes on as I started to Turn… had been…

Had been Charlie.

I had Turned… into a boy.

Halfway up into a crouch, the thing was finally borne in on me in its full enormity, and I sat back down again, heavily. Something of the panic and disbelief that swept through me must have shown in my face, in my eyes, because Vivian suddenly took a deep breath and began to assert at least a minimum of control over the situation at last.

Right, she said. I would be willing to guess at a couple of things. You’ve changed into a form which still more or less fits your clothing, so you didn’t embarrass yourself by having it all shred off of you – but you must be less than comfortable right now. Can we borrow something from Mal’s closet for you to wear for now?

I guess, I said, unwillingly, using as few words as I could manage, hating the sound of my unfamiliar voice. My head was aching, and I felt dizzy and disoriented. How on earth did they manage, the others, if they felt like this when they Turned? How did any Were-kind survive their first transformation, out in the wild, if they felt weak as newborn kittens in the instant after they Turned? Wasn’t there supposed to be a built-in way of adapting to the change instantly and becoming what you had changed into…?

Or perhaps they did, and it was just my own weird switch into a differently gendered body that confused me so?

Get your shoes off, Vivian said. Charlie, help her up.

"Her?" said Charlie incredulously, and I felt myself blush like… like a girl.

"I’m still me," I said crossly, but my voice broke on the last word, slid into a squeak, and I felt the blush deepen. Trying to cover it up, I scowled, and bent to work on the laces of the really uncomfortably tight sneakers I wore on my feet. But I had been counting on hair to fall forward and hide my shame. My Jazz hair. A girl’s hair. That wasn’t there; no concealing curtain came to my aid. And the knots on the laces were defeating my unfamiliar fingers.

After a moment I felt Charlie thump to his knees beside me.

Here, he said, let me do it. They’re not your hands yet.

It was a very odd remark, and yet it made so much perfect sense that I simply did as he said, without hesitation. We didn’t look directly at each other, we couldn’t quite manage that, it was just too difficult to reconcile the fact that less than two minutes before this I was Jazz Marsh and I was a girl and none of this impossible stuff had ever happened with the inescapable fact that it did happen and that I was no longer Jazz Marsh and no longer a girl… or was I…?

My feet were foreign to me, too, when they were yanked out of the suddenly too-small sneakers which they had been stuffed into. One of the socks came off as the shoe was being pulled off, and I stared at my bare foot. I had never liked my toes, I thought they were small and stubby and ridiculous, but my new toes were preposterous by comparison – they were long and they had distinct joints and by the looks of them I could make them prehensile without too much trouble if I cared to try.

I’ve got weird feet, I said, wiggling those toes.

Charlie cleared his throat in an embarrassed kind of way.

Come on, Vivian said. Let’s go upstairs and think about this for a second.

What are we going to do, Mom? Charlie asked, lifting his head to look up at her, my sneakers hanging by their laces from his left hand as he came to his feet.

Vivian gave him a long helpless look. Honestly? I have no idea yet. It isn’t as though I have any precedent to go on. This is the first time, that I know of, in living memory at least, that somebody Turned into… into… She shook her head. Let’s go upstairs. I need some time to think. I need coffee. To be perfectly honest, I need a shot of brandy, but let’s not complicate matters. Come on, Jazz.

Don’t call her that, Charlie said quickly, impulsively.

My head jerked up and for the first time since I had changed he did manage to look me in the eye.

Sorry, he said, apologetic but unrepentant. You just aren’t. Any more. Not like this. Jazz is a girl, and you are not. You’re gonna have to pick a different name.

She just needs to come out of the basement, right now, Vivian said. Come on. Are you steady? Do you need a hand?

I had come to my feet but I was still woozy, as if I’d just come off a rollercoaster. But I shook off everyone’s offered hands and after a moment took a deep breath and then a step forward.

Yup, I still remembered how to walk.

I’ll be fine, I snapped.

Vivian climbed the fifteen steps ahead of me, turning around to glance back every few seconds to make sure I was still upright; I followed, clinging a little tighter to the banister than I usually did but otherwise steadier than I thought I would be; Charlie brought up the rear, still dangling my sneakers from his hand and looking shellshocked. When we got up to the living room Vivian made me sit down in one of the armchairs and sent Charlie into the kitchen to make me a sandwich.

I’m not hungry, I protested.

Oh yes you are. Or you will be as soon as you stop to think about it, or smell food. Trust me, I’ve been Turning for a good long time and you’re always ravenous just after you do it – it takes a lot of energy. And at the very least we have people food in the kitchen which at least is a little bit of a blessing – I can feed you, properly, in the wake of this.

Do I look that bad? I said, when she was done, because all this time she was kind of looking everywhere around me but not at me, and she blinked, and finally focused on me, managing a crooked smile.

Honey, she said, "I’d have more trouble feeding you if you had suddenly Turned into a saber-toothed tiger, but I could look at you far more easily than I can look at you right now. You do realize that you’ve just done something… that I don’t think many people – if any – have ever done before? And all the people I could ask what to do about this are currently cats or dogs or bears or ravens, and until the full Moon wanes and everyone gets back to being human again I have absolutely no idea about what to do with this thing that you’ve just dumped into my lap…?"

Here, Charlie said, coming back from the kitchen with an untidy sandwich dripping bits of chicken and cheese and dribbles of mayo on a paper plate with birthday balloons on it, eat something.

Vivian was right about that, at least, because the moment I set eyes on that sandwich I realized that I was in fact ready to devour half a buffalo if one had been set before me. I took the sandwich, mumbling a belated thanks to Charlie through a mouthful of chicken-and-mayo mush, and concentrated on trying to remember if I still knew how to chew my food what with the new jaw that I had to master. But after I was done with the sandwich, and feeling less hungry if not sated – I could have polished off at least three of these sandwiches if Charlie was willing to keep them coming – I finally pushed myself out of the armchair and stood up. I was surprised that I was almost taller than Vivian in this form.

Where are you going? she asked.

The bathroom, I said.

Mom, Charlie said urgently, but Vivian was way ahead of him.

You want to know what you look like, she said. Fair enough. Let’s go find a mirror.

I stared at myself for a few long minutes in the vanity mirror in the bathroom, clutching the edges of the sink with both hands. I had almost come to terms with the fact that I had turned into a boy – but for a while there I was afraid that I hadn’t turned into just any boy, that I had in fact turned into a copy of Charlie and that this was why he was so disconcerted by the whole thing. But no, I had turned into something different. Something else. Someone else. Into the boy I might have been if I had been born male.

I was taller than I had been as Jazz. My eyes were closer-set, and darker. My hair was an odd rich shade of chocolate brown, and yes, I did have that much fuller lower lip than I had had as a girl. I also had an Adam’s apple, which I’d never had before. I had good teeth, though. I bared them at myself in the mirror, trying a smile. It didn’t quite come off.

Really, Charlie said, watching me explore my new self, doing it with me, almost, you have to pick a name. A different name. A guy’s name. I can’t call you Jazz, not when you look like this, it’s completely ridiculous.

I had been thinking about this. I had been named Jessica. Back when I was much younger, they had tried calling me Jessie, and then Jess, and then I mangled that into Jazz, and then I liked the sound of that, and it stuck. But now I could go back to that old original name and change almost nothing at all.

Jesse, I said. Just call me Jesse.

That actually brought a smile to Vivian’s face, the first I’d seen since all of this had exploded around us. "Well, Jesse, she said, lightly emphasizing the new name, if you’re, if you will forgive the expression, starting to feel a little more human again, there will be a great many questions once everybody gets wind of this, and some of them you can only answer right now – so how do you feel about getting a few things down on paper so we’ll have something to show them later?"

Sure, I said. Although I don’t know what I can tell you. I really have no clue what hit me.

I’ve a notebook in my purse, Vivian said. Charlie – take her… take… take Jesse back into the living room – you want another sandwich?

I could eat, I said.

I’ll go make it, Charlie said. You’re almost out of mayo. But I’ll improvise.

I made my slow careful way back to the living room and the armchair where Vivian had first parked me – I was still moving very gingerly, I felt as I had only minimal control over this new and strange body, and if I flung out an arm or a leg too fast it would fly out at the wrong angle and start breaking things. And I was starting to be seriously cheesed off by my voice. If I’d had to Turn into a male of my species, why couldn’t I have kind of skipped this particular embarrassing stage of development? How long did I have to deal with talking like I’d been at helium balloons?

I tried to answer Vivian’s questions as best I could, through another large sandwich, but all I could provide were the basic visceral details of what things had felt like at the time of the change, of what they felt like now. I could offer no real insight as to why any of it had happened, or why it had happened at least two months prematurely, before anybody had even thought to secure me for a possible Turn.

My clothes were increasingly uncomfortable, and it was some ten minutes into this gentle interrogation that Vivian remembered her original idea to go raid Mal’s wardrobe in order to get me some more appropriate apparel.

It was right about the time that Mal’s name got mentioned again that we all became aware of a steady thumping sound from down in the basement, and Vivian suddenly threw down her notepad and her pen and pressed both palms to her cheeks.

Mal! she said. I’d forgotten all about him – I was going to go check on him – but then all of this –

He had still not Turned by the time we were looking into the room, I said.

"And Jazz… Jesse… did, Charlie said. Which means that the Moon is up, and if he’s hammering on the door, he’s probably still Mal, and he’s probably had time to work up a good head of steam…"

You’d better let him out, I said, but very carefully.

I was just starting to think the rest of this through. My still apparently un-Turned seventeen-year-old brother was about to be released back into a world which he was probably ready to cordially loathe and despise right about now, as usual – at least that had been the pattern for months now, for years. His mood was usually pretty grim when Vivian released him from that room, for very good reasons. And that was before – before he emerged to find a situation like this flung at him.

I counted it up, the insults that would be poured like salt into the wounds of the not-Turned-again injury – not only would he have had, in any event, to deal with the presence of fifteen-year-old Charlie whose very existence and properly Turned status were provocation enough, but now, suddenly, he would have to cope with the added pile-on – that his younger sister had Turned ahead of him -- and had Turned into… something… impossible…

How on earth are we going to tell him? I whispered, appalled that I was actually afraid of my brother but aware that I very definitely was. All of a sudden, I would not have been caught dead pilfering his wardrobe for more comfortable clothes, and was profoundly grateful that such a thing had not been accomplished already. He’s going to kill me…

Of course he isn’t, Vivian said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced, or perhaps I was just unable to hear conviction in anybody’s voice right now on this particular subject. I’d better go let him out. Wait here.

Charlie skittered after his mother and lurked at the top of the stairs, peering down the stairwell. The pounding stopped, and then Charlie, who had been eavesdropping earnestly with his head tilted to one side, loped back to the side of my armchair.

Uh oh, he said. Mal’s not happy.

We knew…

He asked what was for dinner. Mom just blurted she completely forgot about dinner. And then she started to explain…

That was all he had time for.

I could hear Mal’s heavy tread on the stairs, Vivian’s lighter running footsteps following; I shrank back into the armchair, wishing I had Turned into something small, really small. That mouse I had been so afraid of becoming was starting to sound really appealing right now – I could simply burrow into the back of the cushions and Mal need never see me, never know I was there…

I was expecting the fury that was on his face as he erupted into the living room. I had braced myself for that, could perhaps have handled that. What undid me was an added layer which I perhaps should have expected but which still managed to catch me by surprise. Betrayal. A bleak, horrible, bitter betrayal. There was something in the twist of his mouth that ripped into me like a dagger.

We had talked about Turning, he and I. His tardiness to step up to the grown-up table. What he would do, when the time came. What I would do, when the time came. In none of those conversations had we remotely touched on this, on what was happening right now, on what he was served up and had to deal with. It was irrational, I know, but I could not help a stab of pure and undiluted guilt. If I could have undone the events of the previous hour – well – I would have given worlds to have been able to do that right now.

What? he said, coming to a halt a few paces away from me, standing with his feet planted solidly on the carpet, his hands fisted at his sides. "What? WHAT!?"

Charlie shrank into a crouch behind the far armrest of the chair, trying to efface himself.

I cleared my throat, but Mal swiftly raised a hand to forestall anything I might have been about to say.

Let me get this straight, he said. The words were strained through clenched teeth, as if he was unable to unlock his jaw, as though he had been the one to have woken up to a new face, not me. "You… you… are Jazz."

My voice cut down into silence, I nodded.

You Turned.

I nodded again.

"Into this. Into a… into…. my sister is now my brother? What? This can't happen. This has never happened…. It's impossible! What are you… who are you really? And Jazz – "

I finally spoke. I had to. And my stupid, stupid voice broke again, right at the top it all.

"I am Jazz!" I said.

I don’t believe it, he said, flatly.

My hands clenched on the armrests. How am I supposed to prove it? You don’t ask Dad to prove to you that he was a cat for three days.

I know he is a cat. I’ve seen him Turn. I’ve seen my entire family… He stopped, swallowed hard. You… you aren’t even of age yet. It’s all – it’s all so –

His eyes suddenly slid away from me, as though he couldn’t bear to look at me any longer.

Have you called anybody? he flung tersely over his shoulder at Vivian.

Who? she said, throwing her hands into the air in a gesture of pure helplessness. Absolutely nobody of any importance in the Were Administration or hierarchy is actually available right now – the only Weres who are walking around in human form right now are the New-Moon kindred like me and Charlie, and you well know we have no authority to do anything. And we have no special wisdom to bring to bear, either. I have never heard of this happening before. Ever. To any Were-kind. Not Random; certainly not the Clans. It’s a whole new…

But there she is. The only Were walking human, Mal said. "There’s her."

Yes. She is the problem, though, not a source of counsel.

There’s me, Mal said, and his voice was suddenly very quiet.

You least of… Vivian began, and then clenched her teeth on her words even as I roused from my chair, trying to prevent her from going on. But Mal had already heard her. Too late.

He turned from me to rake Vivian with hot eyes. Me least of all? I know. I’m the problem, too. Well, then. How about the human authorities?

Vivian actually did a double take. The human authorities? The government agencies? What on earth would they know about any of this?

"Know about it – perhaps nothing. I’m betting they’d like to know about it."

Mal, no, Vivian said, and at the same moment Charlie found his voice, surging from behind the armchair.

They’d come get her, Charlie said. "They would. That’s what they would absolutely have to do, by the book. We’re all supposed to be locked away when we’re changed – and it’s easy enough to lock away someone like your parents, or like me – cats and bats – it’s obvious, right? There they are, the animals, there’s the cage. But her – Jazz – Jesse – they couldn’t know, unless they knew. There’s nothing on her right now that marks her as Were. She could walk the street and nobody would turn a hair. They’d come get her, and we would never see her again."

It would solve the problem wouldn’t it? Mal said. Quite neatly.

I felt as if the breath had been driven from my body, suddenly. As though he had kicked me right there, underneath the ribs, where the diaphragm was, and every last molecule of oxygen had been driven from my blood. I literally felt my head spin with sudden vertigo. Mal could be snide, and occasionally his practical jokes or commentary on things I did or said could be downright malicious – but this, this was not him. This angry, wounded animal, turning on me for no other reason than that something that I had done – something way beyond my control, which he knew, dammit – had ripped a hole in his soul.

But if I had been rendered speechless, others had not – and everyone had heard the same wild edge to Mal’s words.

"Solve… the problem…? Vivian sputtered, finding an edge of outrage, standing back and crossing her arms defiantly. She was a head shorter than Mal, but in that moment she looked as though she was looking down at him from a great height. Oh, fine. Then you go to the Were Council, in a couple of days when they’re ready to listen to you, and you tell them how you took one of our own and handed her out of our jurisdiction, to the people who are determined to own and control us all. You do that. You tell your parents that this is what happened, when they come out of the Turn in two days’ time. You tell them that you took your little sister and handed her over to the government. You tell them. They’ve already lost one daughter to the outsiders, to the others, to the humans."

And just like that, I suddenly understood a great deal more about this whole thing than I had done until now.

Vivian had invoked Celia.

The oldest of us. The one who had died. The one with all the secrets; the secrets at the heart of this family.

Celia was at once an open wound, and an old scar; either way, it hurt my parents to pick at it, and they had long abandoned me to it, they had turned away from my need to know, from any questions that I might have had about my own family’s past.

Celia’s diary. This had all started when I found Celia’s diary, and started to learn the truth about… about everything.

There was a good chance that this was what had stressed me into Turning prematurely.

Mal and I had never really talked about this. I had tried to, once or twice, but he had slid away from the subject, would never go there with me. Not even when I asked directly and specifically, at least once, about what he remembered about Celia. Perhaps especially not then.

Well. We’d all have to talk about it now.

I began to get up, out of the chair, and Mal actually took a step back, recoiled from me, and then turned away, gathering his Turning Cloak around him and stalking away from the living room into the corridor which led to his own room.

Where are you going? Vivian called after him.

To get dressed, he said, throwing the words over his shoulder like shards of broken glass. And then out. To find something to eat. To pick a fight in an alley. I don’t know. He paused, very briefly, just long enough to turn his head to look back at us, his face twisted in what was almost a snarl. "Don’t worry. I won’t go snitching. Not until my parents know. But I don’t… Jazz, whoever you are, right now, I can’t look at you. I don’t want to be under the same roof as… I don’t… He set his teeth, and a small pulse beat in his cheek as he clenched his jaws together. You’d better call the animal guy, he said to Vivian, in a low, blackly bitter voice. Tell him he can come pick up his weasel. Any time he wants."

And then he was gone, vanished down the corridor, and in a moment the door of his room slammed shut behind him.

Vivian buried her face into her hands.

Oh, God. This is a mess, she said into her curled fingers.

Over at the armchair, Charlie’s hand crept forward and gave mine a quick, reassuring squeeze, and then it withdrew again, helpless.

In the silence, I knew that there really was only one thing to do. I had to try and live through the next two days, and try and figure out how to adjust to this new identity that I had been presented with. I had to figure out what – and how much – needed to be explained to the Were-kind in positions of authority, who would have to be told about this when the full Moon began to wane and they all came back to their human forms. One way or another, when this full Moon was done, we would all be living in a world that was different to the one that had existed before the Moon was full.

All because I lived, and was changed. And because Celia had tried to change, and had failed. And had died.

Part 1:

The Girl at the Party

There had been a time when I had lived in a certain kind of ignorance and innocence. I knew the history and the lore of the Were-kind in far more detail than I ever knew the history and the lore of my own family.

Oh yes, I knew the broad strokes, I was still living their consequences, but that was kind of limited to the obvious. I knew that my family originated from Elsewhere and not This Place – and that inevitably we had brought over more baggage than it was considered appropriate to load a child with (which I was still very much considered to be).

I knew that there had been a changing of the guard – the family had started out with two children (Celia and Mal) who had existed when my parents immigrated here, and then there had been three children (Celia, Mal and me) for a little while, and then there had been two again, Mal and me, with a Celia-shaped hole in the middle of the family after she had died. But the details of all of that – well, if the matter was discussed with me at all, it was more or less a constant refrain of my being told that I would find out more when I was older.

But then I found the hidden diary that Celia had left behind, and I had begun to see all sorts of things far more clearly than I had, perhaps, ever wanted. And then came the blog. And then…well…

I don’t exactly remember where all of it began. Perhaps it was simply finding that diary. But if I had not started to blog about it and think about it, I wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time to rattle the world of the Were in the manner that I did. And if it hadn’t been for -clockwork-crow-, I would never have started that secret blog. I would have stayed Jazz and never become Echo, and if I had never become Echo I might never have become Jesse.

So maybe it all circles back to the Baudoin Solstice Party three months ago. And the night I really met Nell Baudoin for the first time.

The Annual Baudoin Solstice Party that year – a Ball in all but name – was remarkable only in that it was the first one I had been obliged to attend.

That had been Mal’s fault. Well, things usually were, that isn’t anything new, but this time it really did turn out that way. It was the usual drama – he was well past his seventeenth birthday and still a Turn virgin – and people knew it. He had gone to a couple of these parties over the course of the last handful of years, but he had been fifteen then, and sixteen, and only just barely past his Turn date… and then the months and years piled on, and here he was, once more. He loathed the idea of going to the party, yet again, as the one who would get giggled at, pointed at, discussed in lowered voices behind concealing hands, more pointedly than ever before. He was almost eighteen years old. He was from a were family of decent repute – a Random family, to be sure, lower on the social scale than some but by no means at the bottom of the ladder – and he had not Turned yet. He was almost eighteen. He would be the lightning rod for every titter and snark and stray piece of gossip that would be flying around that party – left alone lest his Turnlessness was catching, abandoned in a corner but scrutinized as an object of interest if not fascination, treated with a mixture of recoil and curiosity that probably made him want to rip someone’s throat out.

Well, I could at least understand that.

He was not given to smiling – he was the classic moody and misunderstood teen, or at least that was the face he showed the outside world – but at the merest mention of the Baudoin party any shred of good humor fled and he dropped right down into foul, to the point that he actually refused to entertain the idea of attending the party at all.

"You’re not taking her," he said, nodding darkly at me.

She’s not fifteen yet, Mom said, trying for patience, but the words coming out rather sharper than she might have intended. She hasn’t even Turned…

Neither have I, Mal said savagely.

"I’m not supposed to have Turned yet," I managed to squawk.

"And I am supposed to have Turned. I know, Mal snapped. Thank you so much for pointing that out."

Malcolm… My father never used the short version of Mal’s name. My brother had been allowed to choose it himself, when the family had arrived here from the Old Country, a new name for a new world, something to help him fit in better – but to his parents, our parents, the name was foreign and artificial, not the name they had given their son, and there was a kind of formality that Mal’s choice had introduced between them which never quite went away. Malcolm, the invitation is from the Baudoin family, to ours. To the whole of ours.

But I don’t have to go yet, I said, a little desperately. Heaven knew I had no real social life to speak of – but this was certainly not the sort of social life I’d had in mind when I had contemplated ever having one. I could think of nothing more stultifyingly boring than being forced to spend the evening at the Baudoin Solstice Ball. I’m too young.

But Mom had scented a compromise.

You do have that nice velvet dress, she said.

I knew that tone. The wheedling note in it. I had dug in before, in the face of it, and I prepared to do so again.

"The one you bought me when I was twelve? I said. No way."

It still fits you, Mom said reasonably.

Sure it did. I was small-boned and delicately built, and I hadn’t put on much in the way of height or width in the previous couple of years; what used to be the relatively loose-fitting top was maybe a little tighter than it once was across the bosom but I was far from busty and it wasn’t like I looked as if I were wearing a younger sister’s hand-me down. The thing still fit, that was hardly the issue, it wasn’t that the dress would be too tight, or embarrassingly short. It was just… that it was a child’s party dress, and I would be wearing it at a grown-up party, and I would get nothing but pats on the head and offers of candy like I was three years old and oh, it would be mortifying.

But Mal had found something to smile about. "If she goes in that dress I’ll go," he said.

It was becoming one of his little practical jokes, now, but by this stage my parents had taken the whole thing and were running with it. There was, short of throwing a tantrum fit for that three-year-old I desperately didn’t want to be treated like, no dignified way of getting out of this.

"I’ll get you," I managed to snarl at Mal as I was herded out of the room to see if the dress needed any modifications before the party.

He actually grinned at me, a pure victory smile. Let’s see you try.

So we all went to the party, and we were barely speaking to each other by the time that we did. Mom and Dad appeared to be distracted by things quite other than the party they were dragging Mal and me to; Mal was not quite in the foul mood he’d been in when this had started but was still lost in a definite blue funk; and I was stiff and uncomfortable in a dress of black velvet which crushed horribly the moment you sat down in it, which was unavoidable, getting to the party, and which in turn meant that I was going to make an entrance looking like something had chewed me up and spat me out, a messy kid tossed into the grown-up and immaculately turned out crowd like a Solstice Sacrifice.

We arrived at the huge and brightly lit Baudoin house and then the party split us neatly up. My father quickly gravitated, drink in hand and a bright smile on his face, to a knot of his colleagues and superiors, people who worked at Baudoin’s Bank. Mom parked me in a corner near the punch bowl and told me to behave, and was then swept away by some woman I didn’t know and never got introduced to – the only feature of hers I managed to register with any degree of certainty was hair of such an improbable red that the odds were good it had come straight out of a bottle, probably an hour before the party started.

This looked like it was going to be it, the whole night, skulking by myself in corners, owning up to my name if anyone asked, but pretty much passing the rest of the party wrapped in silence and solitude. As far as I could tell I was the only person my age there.

I had made a desperate stab at a congenial companion – I’d asked Dad if I could bring Charlie Ingram with me, as a sort of, um, date – but my mother had vetoed that idea saying I was way too young to be dating and in any event Charlie was not included in the invitation.

I’d already run the idea past him – and he was hardly overjoyed at the prospect but he hadn’t said no, not in so many words. I’d had to sort of uninvite him, after my parents nixed the idea, and it was hard not to feel just a little put out at the genuine relief that had been obvious just before he offered me his condolences.

I never saw Mal again once we came through the front door, of course – he had managed to make himself scarce in that way he had about him – he had a genuine talent at making himself disappear, and it was something that I found myself envying deeply as I stood in my corner, pretending to keep my eyes cast down but observing everything through a screen of lowered eyelashes, and kicking at the paneling behind me as savagely as I could while pretending I was doing no such thing.

And I was concentrating so hard on this that I completely failed to notice that somebody had stopped beside me until she tapped me on the shoulder. I was actually startled by it, and turned rather abruptly, and with a face less-schooled than I might have wanted to show. But the expression on it seemed to amuse my new companion, because she suddenly grinned at me.

We haven’t met properly yet, she said, sticking out a hand and obviously expecting me to shake it. I’m Ellenor Baudoin. You can call me Nell.

I’m… I began, but she forestalled the rest.

You’re Jessica Marsh.

Jazz, I said automatically. And then shook my head. How did you know…?

You’re the youngest here, except for me and for Bella, and I heard my mother talking earlier and your name came up, Nell said. You want to split? We can go up to my room if you like. Nothing down here except boring gasbags and fish eggs.

Fish eggs? I gaped at her.

She waved a regal and dismissive hand in the general direction of the far side of the room where tables groaned under platters of food.

Caviar, she said. My father thinks he is obliged to like it because he has the money to buy it. It’s still fish eggs. Come on, I’ve got better upstairs.

We didn’t really socialize with the Baudoins on a regular basis – well, not at all, to be honest, outside these annual parties – but of course I knew her. Or at least of her. Ellenor Baudoin was one of the reigning princesses of the Corvid clan, the youngest Baudoin child. I knew of her by reputation, from Dad’s stories about his employer, from her presence on the Net; I think we’d met briefly at some children’s function or other at a Company do, but nothing more than a glimpse across a room, maybe a word or two exchanged over our heads by our mothers, no more than that.

She had celebrated her milestone fifteenth birthday a few months before but she had Turned just before her fifteenth birthday, into her clan’s iconic raven. She was pretty, a true Were, and a major heiress. She was, according to Dad, already starting to be considered marriageable by families who might have an interest in gaining a foothold for themselves