Irish Melody (3 page)

“It was all her fault!” Hannah shouted.

Ippy gasped and simply stared at her. She rarely yelled, especially not around him, and doing so to their alpha was just wrong. He quickly got out his notebook, intending to write something that would defend his best friend. But he couldn’t think of anything. Saying that she hadn’t meant to would be a lie. And Sara had started it, but he didn’t know what she’d actually been doing, so he couldn’t exactly explain that part either. So instead of coming up with an excuse he simply asked Samson not to be mad at her. He held up the paper for his alpha to see and averted his eyes.

Samson sighed loudly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why not, Phillip?”

Ippy wasn’t expecting to get a response and so it took him a moment to figure one out. Finally he chose honesty, because that was the only option for him. Because he loved her. He showed the paper to his alpha and didn’t know why Samson’s eyes got really big and his mouth opened as he looked between Ippy and Hannah.

“You love her?” he asked Ippy.

He nodded. Why did Samson look confused? Of course he loved her. Hannah was his best friend and had been so for most of his life. He reached his hand out to her, wanting her touch, and she held her hand out for him, letting him touch her as much as he wanted to, but not demanding to touch him. He smiled at her and she smiled back at him. Her cheeks were a dark pink. He was about to squeeze her hand, but then she looked away when her dads came up beside her.

Liam crossed his arms over his chest and Travis rocked back on his heels. “All right, Hannah, tell us why you were fighting with that girl,” Liam demanded.

Ippy tried to keep holding her hand, but she pulled it out of his as she turned away. Rejected, he put his hands on his lap and looked down at them.

“She was touching Ippy,” Hannah snapped, sounding angry.

Ippy nodded without looking up. She was touching him. And he hadn’t liked it at all.

Samson leaned forward. “Hannah, I know you like helping Phillip, but you can’t just jump in whenever you want. He’s got to learn to stand up for himself sometimes.”

Ippy pressed his lips together. He could have done that, if she’d let him get out his phone. He wrote that down and held it up, but no one was looking at him.

“But he can’t,” Hannah countered, her voice sounding strained.

Ippy shook his head. She was wrong. He could do some things for himself. He wasn’t helpless. He liked that she was here, liked that she was always around. But he could do some stuff too. And suddenly everyone was looking at him strangely, some with worried looks, some looking annoyed. Their eyes got closer together and their mouths did that funny line thing when they were annoyed with him. Hannah had taught him that. Hannah was looking upset, but he didn’t know why. Until she spoke.

“Ippy, you’re screaming,” she told him. Only it was just her lips moving and he read them because he couldn’t hear her words until he realized that the awful noise he was hearing was himself.

He took a deep breath and tried to calm down, like she’d shown him. It worked. It took a few minutes to kick in, but it did work. That might have been progress. He wasn’t sure. His parents had stopped tracking his outbursts in the last year. They said that he just had too many of them for them to keep up. He didn’t think he was really all that bad. But maybe he was.

Love you,
Ippy told her once he was calmer.

She smiled at him, but it looked tight. Like her face was too dry to smile fully. Like how she was supposed to smile at him.

You love me too. Say you love me too,
he demanded.

Her gaze flicked to her dads and then to Samson and Christopher before coming back to him. “Ippy, I…I can’t. You know I care about Caelum. And you’re my friend. I can’t have both. That wouldn’t be fair to either of you and—”

He was out of his chair and running down the driveway before any of them could stop him. He didn’t care that he was screaming or that Hannah was yelling after him, telling him to slow down. He ran home as fast as he could and when he got there and his dad grabbed him by the arms he kept screaming. His mom yelled at him too but it didn’t get through his screams and then his dad shook him and he was dragged up to his room and put in something called a time out. He didn’t know what they were but his parents had been using them for years. He ran to his bed and curled up in a bright patch of sunlight.

“Hey.”

Ippy hadn’t realized that he’d fallen asleep, but the rocky coast he found himself on was the same one that Hannah had often described to him when Caelum came to visit her in her dreams. He sat up and saw Caelum across from him. The boy had grown in the years since Ippy had seen him. Not just up, now he was bigger too. More filled out. Ippy gave him a little wave.

Caelum stretched out on the lush green grass and Ippy copied him, getting comfortable as well so that he could see the boy with the shiny black eyes, too. They were only a few feet apart and it nearly felt like Caelum was right there with him. No wonder Hannah looked forward to her dreams.

“Hannah said you were having trouble,” Caelum told him. Ippy searched his pockets for his phone or a notebook and, finding neither, wanted to cry as he buried his face in his forearms that were crossed in front of him. His shoulders shook and Caelum was suddenly closer and putting his arm around Ippy’s shoulders. “Hey, what’s wrong?” He sounded so sweet, so caring. No wonder Hannah liked him so much. Ippy did, too. It was hard not to like Caelum. Even after having not seen him for years, being this close to him, even if it was just a dream, felt good to Ippy. Like he was supposed to be here with Caelum. He only wished that Hannah was there, too. She was supposed to be. It should have been the three of them. Like Hannah had promised him.

He shook his head. He couldn’t tell Caelum what was wrong. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t speak. But then he remembered something critical. He could mind speak with Caelum. He only could with two people and he hadn’t seen Caelum in so long that he’d actually forgotten that he could with the other boy. “Hi,” he spoke into Caelum’s mind as he lifted his head.

Only his word came out of his mouth and he was speaking. He shut his mouth tightly, afraid of the new noise. Caelum smiled at him. “Mind speak doesn’t really work here. I don’t know why, but I asked my cousin about it and he said that it comes out like words. Maybe because there’s no one else around that you’d have to worry about hearing our conversation, so there’s no point in using mind speak.”

Only that was the whole point for Ippy, his only way to talk without his phone or a notebook. At least it had been. He tried again, this time speaking with his mouth the way everyone else did, but still using his mind speak. It felt funny, but if it worked he wasn’t about to argue with the results. “Caelum?” His eyes got big and he covered his hands over his mouth as surprise coursed through him.

“Yes, Ippy?” Caelum said, leaning closer to him.

He dropped his hands away from his face. “Is that…” he licked his lips. “Is that my voice?”

Caelum shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ve never heard you talk outside of my mind. But it sounds close enough to what I heard inside my head when we were together. So…maybe.”

Ippy nodded and smiled, feeling excited. He had a voice, a real voice, for the first time. He could hear what he sounded like now. He could “Wait. How’d you know about Hannah and me? I was just with her and then I was here and asleep.”

“She’s nearly perfected being able to fall asleep to come see me. I can feel when she’s asleep. Something switches on in me and I pop into her dreams. Really simple. Normally we spend a few hours talking. But she said I had to come see you. I didn’t know that you even wanted to hang out with me, or else I’d have come sooner. Sorry about that. And I thought I was going to have to wait for a while to come talk to you, but you were asleep when I came out of her dream, so I came to see you. Like doorways. It’s easier than you’d think.” Caelum turned over and Ippy lay on his back as well as they looked up at the clouds.

“So what happened with Hannah? She said that you were upset.”

Ippy instantly felt sour. “She asked you to talk to me.”

Caelum nodded. “Yes. But I’d have come anyway.”

Ippy looked over at the boy and wondered why that would be. No, actually Caelum wasn’t a boy anymore. At four years older than him, Caelum was a man now. And Ippy had to start thinking of him like that. They weren’t kids rushing off to go save Hannah’s selkie anymore. She was an adult now, so was Caelum, and he was still him. Forever too young and trying to catch up to his best friend. “I told her I loved her.”

Caelum looked surprised. “What’d she say?”

Ippy turned his head to stare up at the clouds, refusing to look away. “That she cared about you and it wouldn’t be fair. I don’t understand. We’ve always said that we loved each other. Why is this time different?”

“Maybe because you love her as more than a friend?” Caelum offered him.

Ippy frowned. He didn’t know what kind of love that was. He’d always loved her. Always wanted to spend time with her. How was that any different now? “I don’t understand.”

“Me neither most of the time,” Caelum admitted. He sounded like he was laughing and Ippy turned his head to look at him. He was laughing, and his smile was big enough to take over his whole face.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Caelum said, sitting up and quickly getting to his feet above Ippy.

“I want to stay like this,” Ippy countered.

Caelum smiled and slowly shook his head. “Wish we could, Ippy. But you’re about to be woken up.”

And just like that Ippy found himself pulled out of the dream and roughly shaken awake. Bleary eyed, groggy and irritated, he looked up at his mom as she stood over his bed. He reached for his notebook, sticking out of his bag where he’d left it, but she laid into him before he could even start to ask her what she wanted.

“Your teacher called,” she said.

Ippy flinched. That was her angry voice and he could figure out what was coming. Grounding, extra chores, more homework—

“You are not to see Hannah Glass outside of pack functions anymore,” she quickly said, her voice stern as Ippy stared up at her, not believing her words.

This time he did go for his notebook and quickly scribbled out that she was his best friend. His mom looked at the message before shaking her head, making Ippy’s stomach do really strange things.

“I don’t care. She’s a bad influence on you. I thought you two would have grown up and hopefully even grown apart since that stunt she pulled when you were just a child. Kidnapping my son. She should have been thrown in jail. But no, of course precious little Hannah Glass didn’t face any real consequences. And now she’s fighting at the alpha’s house and you aren’t paying attention in class. Well, Phillip, I’ve had enough. This is over. No more friendship with her. She’s not even a wolf. You should be friends with people like yourself. Like other wolves. She’ll never understand who you are. I should have done this a long time ago. I just never thought it would get this far. Well, that was my mistake. And now I know better. No, Phillip, this is final. You are not to see that girl again. I will not have her and her father’s beliefs being pushed onto you. Inclusion. Really. And this used to be such a good pack once.” She was still muttering and shaking her head as she left his room with Ippy staring after her.

His hands shook in his lap and he reached for his phone, intent on texting Samson and telling him that he needed to do something about this, that he couldn’t lose Hannah. But as he held his phone between trembling fingers he couldn’t make them work. If he told Samson, then his parent’s beliefs would get out. Samson got rid of people like his parents, and he’d have to go with them. It wouldn’t just be about not being friends with Hannah. It would be not seeing her ever again. He curled onto his side on the bed and cried until his father picked him up and made him come down to dinner an hour later.

He didn’t want to eat, especially not when it was salmon. He hated salmon. Hated all fish. They tasted weird on his tongue. Too much salt. And he was never full after eating them. His mom knew that he hated eating fish and she’d made it anyway.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” his father asked him.

Ippy shook his head and pulled out his phone, quickly typing a message before showing it to his dad. He didn’t like fish.

His dad started eating and shrugged off his note. “Too bad. This is dinner. Your mom has gone through a lot of trouble for this meal. The least you could do is eat it.”

Ippy crossed his arms over his chest and hung his head. He didn’t want it. He wouldn’t eat it.

His mother banged a spoon on the table to get his attention. He glanced briefly at her before staring at the fish in front of him that was making him sick with its smells.

“Now, Phillip, you’re going to eat this meal or you can go upstairs and not eat dinner,” she told him.

Fair enough. Ippy got up from the table and walked right back upstairs. He didn’t close his door behind him. That wasn’t allowed in the house, even when he was alone. But he hadn’t understood why his mom had insisted on that when Hannah came over either. He could hear his parents talking downstairs and put on his headphones and some music to ignore their words. People lied all the time, maybe they were lying about what they were saying about him too. He didn’t like lying or liars, but if they were saying the truth, if they really meant all those words—he turned up the music and closed his eyes. Moments later, his parents were gone from his present.

“You’re back early.”

Ippy got to his feet and went to where Caelum was standing with his back to the surf. The ocean was a dark blue behind him, an impossible blue, like the kind seen in paintings. Ippy stared at it for several long minutes before turning to look at Caelum.

“Do you love her?” he asked Caelum, dreading the answer because he knew the truth behind what Caelum would likely say.

Caelum crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Ippy.