She Had Been Thanking the Wrong Daughter

The form had been sitting in my mother's inbox for four days.

When she finally picked up, my fingers had locked into claws around the phone. I laid it flat on the kitchen table and bent close to the mic.

"Mom."

Papers rustled on her end. Keys clicked.

"Callie?" She was irritated before I'd said a second word. "I've got two minutes between meetings. What is it this time?"

I swallowed. Even that hurt. "The form... I sent you."

"What form?"

"I'm donating my body. They just need... a next-of-kin signature. So they can call you. After."

It took me nearly a minute to get that out. My brain didn't send clean orders to my mouth anymore.

She went quiet. Then she said, "Here we go again. Another emergency, right when I'm busy."

I pressed my wrist against the table to stop the shaking. "My wolf's been dying for three years, Mom."

She laughed, short and sharp.

"Three years? Callie, wolf decay doesn't drag on for three years. And the last time I saw you, you had more color in your face than I've seen in ages."

That was the cruelest trick the disease had. When a werewolf's inner wolf starts dying, it fights to the end, pushing every drop of blood it can spare up to the skin. Pink cheeks. Bright eyes. Everyone tells you how good you look. Doctors call it the bloom.

Nobody sees your bones hardening from the inside.

I knew all of that from my mother's own papers.

Someone called from her hallway. "Professor Hart? The department chairs are waiting."

Her chair scraped back.

"Fine. I'll sign your form," she said. "But you'd better actually be dying this time."

She hung up.

A minute later, my phone chimed. She'd signed the form online.

I couldn't tell which was worse: that she thought I was lying, or that she might believe me and still not care.

I put my forehead down on the table.

My twentieth birthday was three days away. Once, I'd pictured spending it in a white dress under the old live oak on Grandma's land, with Grandma crying because I was all grown up and Mom pretending she wasn't crying too.

Instead, I was counting the seconds between breaths.

Over my bed, the crack in the ceiling looked wider than it had yesterday. I stared at it until it went blurry.

Then I closed my eyes.

The next morning, before the hospital, I asked my caregiver, Mrs. Dalton, to drive me out to Grandma's place one last time. There was a tree there I needed to say goodbye to.

She didn't argue. She got my coat, wound a scarf around my neck, and lifted me into the passenger seat like I weighed nothing.

It was an old live oak at the edge of Grandma's land outside Pine Hollow, its trunk split low into two halves.

When I was little, Mom used to sit with me in the crook between them and spin stories about the first packs. I'd curl up against her and believe nothing in the world could touch me there.

I laid my palm on the bark. I couldn't smell the wet dirt anymore. I could barely feel the ridges under my fingers.

"Ready, honey?" Mrs. Dalton asked after a while.

"No."

"I know."

She waited some more.

Grandma's house was half a mile up the road. I didn't look at it. I couldn't let her see me like this.

By the time we got back to Bayou University Hospital in Houston, I couldn't sit up without straps holding me in place.

That night, the pain broke through everything they gave me. Wolf decay feels like something scraping out the marrow of every bone you have while you're awake for it. It took two doctors and a nurse to hold me down. Mrs. Dalton kept her hand on my shoulder until the drugs dragged me under.

I died before dawn.