Chapter 1

Clementine

I was in a very wet forest. I smelled the moss and lichen growing on the trees and heard the creek at the bottom of the leaf-littered slope. My body itched and burned as I jogged. I heard a guttural growl that shook every cell in my body. My running shoes pivoted as I looked back to where the sound came from.

What the hell was that?

The crunching sound of my shoes resulted in the forest turning deathly quiet. Dad promised me that this track was safe to run, but as the light glittering through the trees dimmed, I began to think that maybe he had been wrong.

I heard the growl again, picked up my pace. The loop I was on went up toward the river, turned, then circled past some old hunter’s cabin and then back toward home. As I passed a tree with an old broken ladder that went up to a dilapidated tree stand, I heard it again—that growl. Then, out of nowhere, an ethereal howl echoed and bounced off the trees.

Shit, run!

I sprinted as a large tawny wolf came out of the treeline and started to chase me. There was no way I could outrun a wolf. I was dead! The tawny wolf snapped at my heels as I sprinted down the path. I felt his body slam into mine as I crashed into the rotting bark of a tree. I felt it crumble against my body, then suddenly, I was flying—no—falling. I fell hard and fast, over the cliff’s edge that led to the river below.

***

I woke up with a start. It was always the same dream—one that has continuously haunted my sleep for the past five years—of a wolf chasing me and me falling to my death. When I first started having the dream, it had been a pitch-black wolf giving me chase through the city of Vancouver. Recently, it had changed into a tawny-brown one with a forest as my new surroundings. I still didn’t know what was scarier; the fact that wolves were chasing me in my dreams or that I was out jogging in the first place. I hated exercise.

“Vincent!” I heard my father yell as I rolled over in bed, sticky with sweat. “Vincent, hurry up! You are going to be late!” Bang. Crash. “Clementine, you should get up too.”

My mother named me Clementine. Yup, like the orange—a pretentious and unforgiving name, really. I reached out my hand and picked up my glasses from the bedside table, placing them onto my pug nose. My eyes were turquoise in colour and too large for my round face. The glasses made them bug out even further, so they looked like two large turquoise pools. My hair was long and a rich shade of black. I tried to keep it around my shoulders, but I was forever cutting it as it tended to grow super-fast. The same could be said of my fingernails and body hair.

“You get it from your father,” my mother had once told me when I complained about the girls making fun of me in the locker room.

“It’s disgusting, Mom. I’m disgusting.”

“You, my baby girl, are beautiful.”

“I don’t feel beautiful.”

“What would make you feel beautiful?” I smiled shyly at her and pointed to the paper-thin models in a magazine. She shook her head at me. “They aren’t real. You are real! And you are much prettier than they are,” my mom had said sincerely.

Mom had been the best. She really was. She always tried to find a way to boost my self-esteem. And that was how our regular mother-daughter beauty appointments started. My mother would take me to get waxed and groomed, and we got mani-pedis if only to stop the locker-room bullying.

My mom was my best friend—my only friend. When Mom got sick near the end of my second year of university, I stopped going to our beauty appointments. It didn’t feel right doing it without her. My hair grew rapidly, both over my body and on my head. I shaved now and again, but mostly I just wore pants. The growth was never-ending, and my hair had grown down to the top of my ass-crack, an onyx colouring, dead-straight, and thick. Regardless of this, I still hadn’t returned to the hairdresser. Instead, I chose to sit next to my mom’s hospital bed, as the chemo turned her green in colour. And my textbooks sat forgotten on the table as I supported my mother while she hurled.

I got out of bed and stretched. It was an impressive stretch, or as impressive as the whole five-foot-fuck-all of me could muster. I went to the bathroom and removed my coke-bottle glasses to wash my face. Without my glasses, I could barely see four inches in front of me. I placed my thick frames back on before I dry-shaved my legs. I combed through my hair and braided it to the side—the hairband ending about two inches above my ass when I threw it to land at my back.

I returned to my bedroom and put on a pair of shorts and a simple blue t-shirt. Unhooking my mother’s necklace from the edge of my bedroom mirror, I placed it around my neck before I Dad hollered out once more.

“Clem!”

“I’m coming!” I shouted. “Keep your wig on, old man,” I mumbled.

“I heard that,” he growled.

My father had this uncanny ability to hear me even when I was mumbling out of typical earshot. I knew that he was not actually hearing me. He knew me so well he simply figured I would be muttering something under my breath, so he often called me out on it. And he was always right.

We had moved back to my dad’s hometown after my mom died, and I hated it. We had been here less than a week, but I knew I didn’t want to give it a chance to grow on me. And it probably literally would grow on me. There seemed to be wet flora everywhere. Blackfern Valley was a small town in the middle of British Columbia—a small town nestled far into the forest where it was super damp, both physically and on my mood.

When my dad met my mom twenty-five years ago, he moved out of this pokey little town and settled in Vancouver to live their happily-ever-after. My parents suffered three miscarriages before I was born. And another five years after that, my annoying little brother Vinny arrived. 

We had a lot of love and laughter in our little family before Vinny started acting out. Dad watched Vinny like a hawk, and the “Dad Law” had come down hard lately. Then, my mother died six months ago, and Vinny got worse. Before we knew it, Dad had packed us up and shipped us off to the middle of butt-fuck nowhere.

Don’t get me wrong, Vinny wasn’t a bad kid; he just started acting out as every pubescent teenager did. On top of the standard hormones and testosterone that ran rampant through his system, he had also lost his mother to cancer, and the grief made him lash out. It was hard being fifteen.

At twenty years old and being an adult, I didn’t have to move with my family to Blackfern Valley, but I couldn’t leave them. Not now. Dad told us that this town had once been good to him growing up. In Blackfern Valley, he would have support with Vinny now that Mom was gone. He tried to convince me to re-enrol at the University of British Columbia—UBC—move into a rental property, and kickstart my life again. It sounded good in theory, but...

Once upon a time, I studied medicine. When my mother got sick, it all hit too close to home, so I dropped out. Being a doctor didn’t interest me anymore.

I entered the poxy little canary-yellow kitchen and looked at all the boxes that had yet to be unpacked. Vinny sat at the small round dining table and scowled into his cereal.

“What’s up, jerk?” I asked.

“Dad is riding my ass.”

“What about this time?”

“I got into a fight at school.” We’ve been here three days. How the hell had he gotten into a fight already?

“Again? Vinny, this is a new school! You’re supposed to try and make friends.”

Vinny made a scoffing noise at the back of his throat. “You’re lecturing me on making friends? You haven’t had a friend in your life. You’re the biggest loner I have ever met.” His green eyes were red-rimmed and glassy. He looked like shit.

“What have you been smoking?” I growled under my breath so as not to alert our father.

“Nothing!” His eyes shifted away from me.

“So, drugs and fighting, huh? Wow, kid, you are going places!”

“Back the fuck off,” he snarled.

“Grow the fuck up,” I countered. “You realize Dad moved us here for you, you little punk. You were getting into too much trouble back in Vancouver that he uprooted our lives to bring you here, give you a fresh start, and you’re throwing it in his face.”

“I didn’t ask him to bring me here!” he shouted angrily.

“Well, tough shit.” My dad entered the kitchen from the mudroom. He looked at both of us with an exasperated expression. Tucking his hair behind his ear, he closed his eyes before opening them again.

I looked at Dad and noticed how old he appeared—his grief hadn’t helped any. His pitch-black shoulder-length hair was covered in grey. His emerald eyes looked tired and were ringed with a subtle silver. I noticed it more when he got upset; the silver seemed to sparkle then. He had a scruffy stubble and deep wrinkles by his eyes. He looked his son directly in the eyes and gave a deep sigh, pressing his forefinger and thumb onto the bridge of his nose.

“Vincent, we can talk about this later. Hurry up. You are going to be late for school.”

“You expect me to go back there? There are only a few weeks left, Dad! I’m not missing out on anything!” Vinny questioned.

“Yes, I expect you to go back to school regardless of how many weeks are left. And Clem is going to take you.”

“I am going to what now?” I looked at him incredulously. I wasn’t walking my toad of a brother to school. He was fifteen, not five.

“I am too old for a babysitter,” Vinny snarled.

“If you started acting more your age, I wouldn’t need to assign one,” Dad levelled with him. He turned to me. “Please, Clemmy. I don’t trust he isn’t going to ditch.”

“Me walking him won’t stop him from ditching school, Dad. He’ll just wait for me to leave, and then he’ll walk straight out the front gate.”

“Oh no, he won’t.” Dad’s tone held a warning that made Vinny shrink in his seat. “Josiah has informed me his son Sean will hang out with him from now on. And trust me, Vinny won’t be able to shake him.”

“Who’s Josiah?”

“You may meet him one day. He’s an old friend of mine,” he said evasively. I sighed. Dad had been acting weird ever since Mom’s passing.

“Come on, you little asshole, let’s take you to school.”

Vinny stood up and called me a name under his breath before he picked up his schoolbag and headed for the front door.

“Oh, Clem.” Dad stopped me. “Um, please be careful. You are allowed to be here, and if anyone tells you otherwise, I want you to let me know, okay?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” he rushed out a little too quickly. “Just… I know how hard it is for you to make friends and how you tend to be bullied. I’m just reminding you that you’re allowed to be here.”

I steeled my emotions. I was an adult now. There was no way anyone was going to bully me.