Adopted by the Owl Read online

  “See you next time, Miss Davies,” the man said cheerily.

  Emily feigned a smile. She tipped him and said, “Thanks, Mr. Walter.”

  The taxi dropped her at the outskirts of the city where she usually got a bus that would take her to her hometown. Specifically, Emily usually took Bill Thompson’s bus to the city.

  Today, Bill Thompson was there waiting for her. His bus was already half full when she got to the bus stop. She paid her bus fare and entered, locking eyes with the friendly old driver as she ascended the step up.

  “Everything okay, Kid?” Bill asked as she passed by.

  “Peachy, Bill,” Emily replied. She sat silently in the back of the bus. Bill remained at the bus stop for another ten minutes before beginning his journey to and through her hometown to his final destination of Houston.

  The Owl remained silent all through the journey, which was just fine as far as Emily was concerned. Even so, Emily could feel The Owl’s indignation. How could she miss it? She could feel it like a wall of heat within her body.

  As usual, Bill stopped the bus a block away from Emily’s house.

  “Thanks, Bill,” Emily said as she stepped down from the bus entrance onto the sidewalk.

  “Now, you be careful, Emily, and don’t go looking for trouble, okay?” Bill said with a fatherly wink.

  “Okay, Bill.” Emily bobbed her head in agreement, pursing her lips and closing her eyes as she always did when she needed to keep up appearances after such an exhausting excursion. Bill thought himself Emily’s protector in a way. He didn’t know what she was. She wondered if he’d still feel protective of her if he knew.

  The front door creaked softly as Emily entered her house. The place was dark and silent. She could hear Dad’s slight snore in his bedroom upstairs. Emily went to his room first and kissed him lightly on his forehead before going to her bedroom.

  She was so exhausted that she kicked off her shoes and collapsed into her bed, still fully dressed. She was inches away from sleep when she heard her phone vibrate. She looked up at her bedside where she left her phone earlier in the night.

  She picked it up and checked. It was a text message from an unknown number. Curious, she opened the message.

  Emily froze in terror as she read the four-word sentence: We know your secret.

  3

  Emily stirred for the umpteenth time in her bed. This time it was already dawn. She’d been restless all through the night. Finding sleep after learning that your closest-held secret had been found out was immensely difficult.

  In fact, it was a miracle Emily hadn’t freaked out yet. After reading the text message the previous night, she’d stepped out of her house to see if there was anyone around. The street had been as dead as a doorknob.

  It took a large amount of effort not to panic. To remain still. To even lay down in her bed. Her body was all fidgety, and her mind was going all shades of paranoid.

  When sleep finally came, it was nowhere near the blissful sleep she’d always enjoyed in her home. It was actually a cacophony of nightmares and snapping up in bed expecting a crew of vigilantes with knives ready to slaughter her like a pig.

  At one point in the night, she’d actually gone to the kitchen to drink cold water in hopes it would calm her nerves. She would have taken some of her dad’s pills, but she knew he needed them more than she did. She would be selfish to slip into his room and pilfer a few. Besides, those pills were pretty darn harsh. Who knew what damage they would do to her body? Not worth it just for some sleep.

  The cold water didn’t exactly calm her nerves. However, it cooled her body enough for her to slip back into the bed and hope for sleep. She was awake for a few hours, thinking of how someone could possibly know her secret.

  She spent her sleepless night considering all possibilities. Who could this be? What could they want? Why were they reaching out? If they were reaching out, then they probably wanted something from her.

  Was this going to be one of those situations where she would be blackmailed into doing things she didn’t want to do? It wasn’t as though they had money. Yeah, sure, they lived comfortably. She had a car, paid for by her dad’s retirement funds which were in the healthy high-hundreds of thousands. But you couldn’t call them rich. Not really.

  Emily finally fell asleep around five in the morning. Now it was barely dawn. She’d had two hours of uninterrupted sleep. As she laid in her bed, underneath the sheets, she still felt the pinpricks of exhaustion in her eyes. She blinked a few times, trying to uncake the mascara that built up in the crevices of her eyelids because she shifted and then went to bed with her makeup on again.

  Usually, transformation takes quite the toll on the body. That’s why she did it in the night, so she could rest up all the way through to morning. Even after that, she still found she’d be very, very tired during the day. But she always fully recovered before the next day with a lot of food and water and periods of shut-eye.

  Now, however, that she had barely had any sleep, she was dreadfully fatigued. Her joints still ached. She was so raw she could feel The Owl’s presence stronger than before. So strongly, in fact, she became apprehensive that she might transform unknowingly at any moment.

  If you do transform, it wouldn’t be my fault, just so you know, The Owl said, ‘cause you’re awfully fond of blaming me for every terrible thing that happens to you.

  “Oh, so now you wanna talk?” Emily grunted. She wasn’t even sure why she was angry that The Owl had kept quiet all through her ordeal in the night. It wasn’t as though they talked often. It was just that since they’d talked so much in Dallas, she expected The Owl to offer some words of advice for her predicament.

  Would you prefer me silent? The Owl asked.

  Emily didn’t reply. What she preferred was not to deal with this text message. She grabbed her phone from the bedside table and read it again.

  We know your secret.

  There was no signature after the text. No indication of who it could be. There was no number to call; it had been sent from some four-digit number—impossible to reply to. It just popped into her phone very late in the night as she slipped into her bed. It couldn’t be coincidental. Someone had to have been watching her. Maybe that same someone had followed her to Dallas, where she shifted.

  Maybe they saw me transform! Emily thought with a gasp.

  She snapped out of bed on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Okay, let me stop you there! The Owl shrieked so loud in Emily’s head, Emily instinctively clamped her hands over her ears. I really don’t like where this narrative is going. Whatever you do, you mustn’t have a nervous breakdown.

  “Why?”

  Because it makes us look bad.

  “Us?” Emily asked, curious. “I thought there was no ‘us’?”

  The Owl took some time to respond to that. There’ll always be an ‘us’ as long as I’m in here. Plus, if you get sliced up by those knife-totting miscreants who call themselves the vigilantes, I’ll be out of business, too. So . . .

  “This problem includes you, too.” Emily rolled her eyes. If that was supposed to make her feel better, it didn’t. Really, what was The Owl going to do?

  You don’t know me well enough to know what I’m capable of, The Owl replied.

  “Just what are you capable of?”

  The Owl kept silent.

  “Fine, don’t tell me.” Emily slipped out of her bedroom and went about getting ready for school. It was Wednesday, which meant they’d close school early to allow for extracurricular sessions. That’s cheerleading practice and football practice out on the pitch. It was the perfect guise to either do some snooping around or go home early.

  She was in favor of snooping around, because even though she was dog tired, her apprehension would allow her no sleep until the culprit was found. The culprit had to be someone who had her number.

  There were too many options. She had to narrow down the field. Maybe it was someone in her school? It had to be. No one else would be interested in her. At least, not that she knew. Perhaps there were three or so people who suspected there was something up with her.

  Emily stood in front of her bathroom mirror as she carefully applied a thick layer of pink lipstick. She pursed her lips together not only to even out her lip color, but also because she was deep in thought.

  First and foremost, there was Jamie King, her boyfriend. The previous month, she’d delayed giving The Owl her five minutes for two weeks. The results were catastrophic. She was on a date with Jamie when she started to transform. She had to skedaddle out of there and later explained to Jamie that what he saw was not what he’d seen.

  She shuddered at the memory as she finished lining her hazel eyes with black eyeliner and dabbed on some purple eyeshadow. Then she exited the bathroom and sauntered down the hall back to her bedroom in only her jeans and a black lace push-up bra.

  She wasn’t sure Jamie had bought the explanation she’d given. But he hadn’t talked to her since then, though he went on being her boyfriend. Could he be the one taunting her now?

  Or was it the chief of the vigilante group’s son, Michael Winter? The guy was as snoopy as his father. And he, too, was in training to join the vigilante group. She’d had her own fair share of brushes with Michael. Also, Michael was different from Jamie. Michael was trained to look for signs of supernaturals.

  And Emily’s brush with him, three days earlier, was more than enough of a sign to pique his interest. Could he have sent the message? She bit her lip as she pulled a purple halter top over her head.

  This explanation made a lot of sense because ‘we’ in the message could refer to the vigilantes. But why not come after her? Why not move in immediately if they knew she was a shifter?

  Except th
ey don’t have concrete proof and need to get some, The Owl offered.

  Surprisingly, it made sense. The Owl was correct. If Michael and the vigilantes had irrefutable proof that she was a shifter, they would have come for her, right?

  Yes, they would, The Owl interrupted Emily’s thoughts. They suspect it’s you. They want to rattle you. They want you to slip up. They probably have you under surveillance. So don’t give them what they want. Don’t give them a reason to hunt you down.

  “I won’t,” Emily assured The Owl. She, for a moment, experienced an intense instinct to protect The Owl, like The Owl was her prized possession and Emily would never allow anything to happen to her. It was weird. But the moment passed as quickly as it came.

  She said nothing about it, and The Owl was gracious enough not to say anything about what Emily felt either. Even though Emily knew for a fact that The Owl had sensed something.

  When Emily finished dressing, she grabbed her leather jacket and her backpack and left her room.

  4

  Part of Emily’s daily morning routine was helping her father go through his morning ablutions right before she left for school. She had about two hours before first period. This was enough time for her to cater to her father’s morning needs.

  She walked across the small hallway to Dad’s room. The door was slightly ajar. The room smelled of smoke. Emily felt her heart leap into her chest. She barged into her dad’s room.

  “Dad, we’ve talked about this!” she shrilled. She swooped past him to the window, heaving the window up to allow the smoke to pass through. She turned around and glanced at her father.

  He was an old-looking man with a greasy spray of white hair and bald forehead. He had sad, gray eyes and a plump form. His eyes were vacant, and they stared right through her to the window behind.

  He had managed to get out of his bed, leaving the sheets scattered, and get into his wheelchair. He was still wearing his clothes from the day before and reeked of urine. Emily didn’t have to guess why that was.

  You see, Dad was practically a vegetable. Something fundamentally tragic had happened to him to render him immobile. It was the death of her mother. While she’d cried her heart out, the event had been so tragic for Dad that he suffered a major stroke.

  His mind was fried, they’d told her. He would remain like this; needing care, needing help.

  It was a painful experience—seeing her father the way he was. At the time of Mom’s death, he’d been a man in the height of his prime. He’d been a senior VP at a mid-level tech company in Dallas. But now he’d been reduced to a man who urinated in bed—a poor, sad invalid with little will to live.

  At first, it had been suggested that she employ a nanny to take care of him. The town had offered to pay the nanny’s fees for the first three years, at least until she started working to pay the fees as well. Emily had refused. She believed her dad could recover from his current affliction if she took care of him herself.

  If he had to see her face every day, if he had to see how much his situation hurt her day in and day out, he would have the strength to fight back. He would have the will to live.

  John Davies sat with a cigarette parting his lips. He pulled in absently and puffed out in the same manner.

  “Where did you even get the cigarette from?” Emily asked, exasperated. She waited for him to respond. He just stared vacantly through her, pulling and puffing.

  “I remember cleaning out your stash, Dad,” Emily said again.

  No response.

  “Did you have it hidden somewhere else?”

  Dad’s eyes wavered. It was a slight indication that he had concentrated on what she said for a moment. Then he went back to staring at nothing.

  Emily sighed. If she said conversing with her father (if you could call this conversing) wasn’t frustrating, she’d be lying.

  “So, there’s another hidden stash?” The strain was evident in Emily’s voice. “Dad, you know how I feel about your smoking habits. The doctors said if you’re going to get well, you must eat healthfully.”

  She reached out and plucked the cigarette from his lips, then paused, hoping for some sort of reaction. At that moment, she would have taken anything. Even a hostile response.

  Dad remained morose in his wheelchair, staring at nothing.

  “Really? Nothing?” Emily asked.

  Dad sat there in silence. He didn’t even look up at her. He just sat there, vacant. The doctors said he could hear and understand just as normally as he could before the incident. They said that his brain was responding just as it should. He just chose not to respond anymore.

  It wasn’t a matter of inability. It was a matter of will. He just didn’t have the will anymore, since Mother died. Emily had hoped that after maybe the first month, or the first three months, he’d recover from his shock or whatever he was going through. But, no. He’d been like that for more than a year, and if he was improving, she wasn’t seeing it.

  It hurt Emily on so many levels. This felt like an abandonment. Was it that Dad didn’t care about her? Did he only care about Mother?

  Sometimes, Emily wanted to give up. Throw in the towel. If Dad didn’t care about her, why should she care about him? But then she saw him in his wheelchair—a man stricken down by grief, literally. How could she abandon him now in his time of need?

  Tell him about the message. See his response, The Owl whispered.

  Horror flashed across Emily’s mind.

  What? The Owl replied, sounding embarrassed. Let’s see what he knows.

  “I know we’ve not really spent much time talking with each other, so you might not understand what my dad’s going through,” Emily muttered to herself.

  That got Dad’s attention. His eyes focused, and he looked up at her.

  Emily’s heart froze.

  See? The Owl said.

  “Dad?” Emily spoke.

  Dad didn’t reply.

  Tell him! The Owl prompted. Now that you have his attention.

  Emily struggled with what The Owl was telling her to do. She didn’t want her father worrying about her safety. Plus, she didn’t want him wondering what secret she was keeping. It wasn’t like they’d discussed much since Mother’s demise. He didn’t know she had inherited Mother’s cur—um, condition.

  The Owl’s indignation radiated through Emily’s mind.

  “Sorry . . . ,” Emily muttered. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was actually getting used to the fact that The Owl was a second consciousness in her mind. And after the harsh words The Owl had said to her—accurate words, unfortunately—she’d made a subconscious decision to be better. To do better.

  Tell your dad. Stop stalling.

  “Dad, I got a weird text message last night,” she finally admitted.

  If Dad was listening to her or understood what she said, he showed no sign of it. He only looked into her eyes.

  She pulled out her phone from her pocket, checked the time, and saw that she had to hustle to school. She pulled up the text message and read it out loud. “We know your secret.”

  For a moment, Dad’s eyes widened in apprehension. His breathing even ceased for a few seconds before leveling out.

  He knows something, The Owl observed.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Emily murmured to herself. “Dad?” Emily leaned in close to her father, looking him square in the eyes. “What does it mean?”

  “S-s-see . . . creet?” Dad’s voice was very hoarse and scaly. This was the first word he’d spoken to her since the incident. She was terrified at how different his voice sounded.

  “Dad? What does it mean?” she asked again.

  Dad shook his head. He was terrified of something. “B-Ber-Bernice,” he stuttered.

  “Mom?” Emily tilted her head to the side in confusion. “What does Mom have to do with this?”

  Dad shook his head more violently now. Emily knew this was her cue to stop, but Dad had opened a can of worms that she wanted to get to the bottom of.

  “Bernice . . . ,” he muttered again, beginning to thrash.

  Maybe back off a bit? The Owl sounded shaken up. He’s going to have a seizure.

  “Bernice?” Emily knelt down at her father’s feet. “Did she get this message, too?”