“Kolobos. It means ‘mutilated.’ Some would say it's what Zeus did when he severed the first creatures who roamed the earth in two, condemning them to wander in search of their better half. But others believe he created divine beauty, for in severing the beast, he created man and woman.” That quote strikes a chord with me because, until I met Jimmy, I felt mutilated. And like I was searching for something that I could never find. There was part of me that was missing, and I didn’t even know what it was. When I was younger, I thought that it might have been my mother that was causing that feeling. I lost her when I was so young. But, once I met Jimmy, I knew he was the cause of that feeling. The other half of my soul that fit so perfectly. You didn’t come here to hear me ramble about my mate, though. You came here for my story. We’ve done this once before, but it was time to do it again. It’s been about 14 years since I’ve sat down and really written anything. At least beyond a few short journal entries anyway. So we’ll do this again, and maybe this time I can be more coherent. For those of you who have no idea who I am, I’ll introduce myself. My name is Lexa Artemis Miklos. I am, and have been, many things throughout my life. It’s been a very eventful life. But, most importantly, I’m the mate of Jimmy Marshall and the mother to some of the most beautiful children this world has ever seen. I’m also the daughter of Alexis Miklos. You’ll understand shortly why that’s so important. A few disclaimers now: 1.) This story isn’t pretty. There are subjects here that are sensitive, and may not be comfortable to hear about. If you’re going to have problems with that, then it might be best for you to go find someone else’s story to read. 2.) I’m an Ahroun. By default, that means that I’m not a very good storyteller. So I’m not going to make any promises about how good this is going to turn out. If you want to hear the wonderfully detailed and inspiring version of my life, then you should go talk to one of the Galliards in the caern. They’ll be better able to help you with that. Okay, now I realize I may have just used some words that you’re not familiar with. Ahroun, Galliard, and caern are not words that you hear in regular conversation. There’s a good reason for that. They’re Garou words. There’s another one you’ve probably never heard before. Garou means “werewolf.” Yes, I am a werewolf. We’re not the kind that you see in the movies. People who’ve been bitten and shift into humanoid wolves on the full moon. No, I was born into this life. I was born on the full moon, which is where Ahroun comes in. Ahrouns are the warriors of the Garou, born under the full moon, and full of Rage that allows us to battle the evil things in the world. A caern is a place where Garou live and gather. It’s a sacred space. And they can be found in both cities and wildernesses around the world. You just don’t know they’re there. Garou are very good at keeping The Veil intact. That’s the way we keep humans from knowing that we exist. The vampires call it The Masquerade. There are Garou, Vampires, Elves, Mages, Angels, and any number of other races mingling among the human race. And we’re all very good at keeping our secrets so that we’re not exterminated by scared humans. Very few know that we’re among you. Mainly, the only people who know we’re here are the people who either help us or hunt us. Hopefully, you’re just someone who’ll write me off as a nut job or something, and won’t send hunters after me and my family. Now, to get into the story. I told you already that I’m the daughter of Alexis Miklos. I said that’d be important, and it is. My mother is the reason that I’m Garou. She was an Ahroun, also. She’s also why I had such big shoes to fill. Well, it’s not all her fault. My whole line can be traced back to Ancient Greece and the goddess Artemis. That’s really why my mother and me had to be so impressive. But I digress. Mama was a legendary warrior in Greece before I was born. She was born into a pack of Black Furies. Basically, they’re a tribe of female Garou that are most densely populated in Greece. Sure, we’ve ventured out from there and spread around the world, but the majority of us can still be found in Greece. But Mama saved the Greek country from the Black Spiral Dancers back in the early 1980’s. Her and her pack were the ones who almost completely eradicated the Dancers from the country. The Galliards loved telling stories about my Mama. Her ferociousness in battle, and compassion at home, made her a great hero for their stories. It was because of her successes in battle, though, that she was allowed to pick a male kin from the tribe to marry. She chose a man by the name of Victor Savas. When they were married, he took her surname of Miklos. For about three years my parents spent as much time as they could together. They didn’t know each other at all before the wedding. My Mama just knew that he was an outstandingly handsome man that she would very much enjoy having sex with. Their whole relationship was based on sex from the very beginning. But, when you’re an Ahroun, sex is a vitally important part of the life. “Blood makes the grass grow. Sex makes the sun rise. Kill, fuck, kill.” That’s the Ahroun motto. So, when my Mama wasn’t in battle, she was at home with her mate, having sex and occasionally having a conversation. Then Mama got pregnant. She wasn’t expecting it. I don’t know why not, but she was honestly taken by surprise when she missed her period. She went to the doctor and they told her she was expecting twins. Mama wasn’t all that thrilled with the news. It meant that she’d have to stay home for the next nine months until her children were born. She wouldn’t be able to shift into her crinos battle form, or any other form that we’re able to take, for the duration of the pregnancy. Doing so would cause a miscarriage. So she grudgingly stayed home, stayed out of trouble, and got to know her husband better. She started preparing him for raising a couple of daughters. Daughters that she was sure would be true born. Mama went into labor on January 4, 1984. The doctors knew that she was having twins, so they went ahead with a c-section delivery. They didn’t want to risk her life or the babies lives by trying to have her go through labor naturally. My sibling came out first. And Mama was devastated when he doctor announced that it was a boy. He was big. I don’t know my brother’s birth stats, but he was much bigger than I was. Despite not wanting one of us to get stuck, I still managed to. It took a good 15 minutes of surgery to get me out of the womb. And I was much smaller. I was a meager 3lbs, 9oz and only 15 inches long. The doctors found that my placenta hadn’t been properly attached, so I wasn’t getting the nutrition that my brother was getting, and somewhere along the line before delivery, my umbilical cord got wrapped around my neck. The doctors weren’t sure that I’d survive the night, and if I did, they weren’t sure that there wouldn’t be severe brain damage. My Mama was absolutely devastated at the idea that her daughter might not live a full and vibrant life. I was taken to the NICU and put into an incubator. Mama came to stay with me as soon as she could. And shortly after that, she gave my brother to a Get of Fenris family to be raised by. They’re a lot like the Black Furies, except that they take both males and females. Both tribes are fierce in battle and have a lot of the same philosophies. But, after those first few hours together, I wouldn’t see my brother for the next 23 years. I spent the first few months of my life in the NICU. Both my parents were by my side the entire time. Mama refused to go back out into battle while I was in the hospital. She said that I needed her strength to get home and be healthy. It took a few months, but I did gain some weight and started showing signs that I was okay. They weren’t certain that I wouldn’t have cerebral palsy or something, but they were confident that I would most likely have a normal lifespan. Mama was so happy when they finally got to take me home. She stayed home with me for about the first six months, then she was back off into battle quite often. She did hear my first words when I was about 14 months old, though. I said, “mama,” and she did see my first steps when I was about 18 months old. I took them to her. But she didn’t get to see any of my other big milestones. It wasn’t because she was in battle. It was because she was killed when I was barely two years old. She was in battle and her pack was decimated. She went down in a blaze of glory that the Galliards are still talking about. And, knowing what I know about my Mama, I know that she wouldn’t have gone out any other way. After my mother’s death, my father didn’t know what to do with me. He knew that he was in no way prepared to raise a child into adulthood. He knew that he couldn’t raise me to become a good Fury the way another woman could. So he did what he thought was best for me. It should probably be noted here that my father could have handed me over to my Aunt Ayliana. He could have asked her and her lover to raise me, and they would have gladly taken me. Instead, my father decided that the best answer to not wanting to raise me himself was to kill me. Shortly after my mother’s death, he packed me up in the car one night at bedtime, drove me out to a dump, slit my throat, and left me for dead. I remember everything in vivid clarity. I remember my Daddy telling me that it was “better this way,” and I remember him kissing my forehead before he laid me across his lap on my stomach and ran the cold steel of a knife across my neck. I remember the sound of a gunshot, and the dull thud of my father’s body hitting the ground, and then world going black. I remember waking up in a hospital with doctors and nurses standing over me. The doctors said that I survived almost 60 hours out in that dump before I was rushed into the hospital. Two and a half days. They said I only survived because I’d kept my head down with my chin against my chest the whole time. It was the only thing that kept me from bleeding out. No one thought that I’d ever talk again. Again, I managed to surprise everyone. It took about three weeks after waking up in the hospital before I was talking in a hoarse whisper. By three months after my ordeal, I was talking fairly normally again. But I wasn’t in a very good place emotionally and mentally. I didn’t know where my Mama was and why she wasn’t coming to get me. I didn’t understand that my Daddy was dead and never coming back, either. I wanted my parents and I cried a lot for them. My Aunt Ayliana was there for me, but I didn’t really know her all that well. Her lover, Aunt Jasmin, was also right by my side. When I was released from the hospital, it was to go home with them. They were adopting me, even though Greek law doesn’t generally allow gay and lesbian couples to adopt. I guess it was special circumstances because I was an orphan, and Aunt Ayliana was my next of kin. But it wasn’t fun times for any of us. I wanted my Mama and Daddy, so I cried a lot for the first nine months that I was with them. Then, slowly, I started to smile a bit. Eventually I started calling them Mama and Mommy. Aunt Ayliana was Mama. We became a real family then. Life should have been good forever, but raise your hand if you know that nothing ever really lasts forever. I was raised as an only child throughout my life. My aunts wanted children desperately, and they were so pleased to have me, but the government wouldn’t let them adopt or foster any other children. So they did what they could to help children. Aunt Ayliana was a child psychiatrist. Aunt Jasmine was a social worker who helped children in bad situations. They both saw so many horrible things with the children that they worked with, but they wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of the children that they worked with. It made them happy to know that they were helping even if they couldn’t raise those children themselves. And, of course, they always came home to me. Although, I’m sure that was less of a pleasant experience as I got older. Don’t worry, I’m going to explain that statement. By the time I got into the equivalent of kindergarten, it became very clear that I had problems that needed to be seen to. The first was an anger problem. I got mad so easily and so fast. Then it was hard to calm me down. I’d just rage at everyone and everything that frustrated me. I think it was that behavior that told my parents that one day I would become Garou. Although I never grew up with stories of the Garou. My parents kept me very sheltered from all of that throughout my life. The second problem I had was that I was having a really hard time learning how to read and write. It didn’t take very long for me to be diagnosed as dyslexic. Then, by the time I was seven, I was being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder II. It wasn’t Aunt Ayliana who diagnosed me. She wouldn’t have done that. I was taken to an outside doctor and went through all the observations and conversations and everything that led to the diagnosis. But all of that meant that my parents didn’t feel that my school was capable of handling my special needs. They decided to send me to a school for “special” children. I hated that idea and fought against it tooth and nail. I knew that the other kids in the neighborhood would try picking on me for it. My parents didn’t much care. I was sent to my special school, and after school, I beat up any kid who dared to tease me about it. My parents did everything they could to try and manage me. I was enrolled in martial arts classes in an attempt to control my anger. They thought that if they taught me how to control my body and mind, that I would be better able to control my rage. It didn’t work, but I loved the martial arts classes. I excelled in them and impressed everyone with my ability. That was one of my few loves during my early life. I worked up to a black belt in Aikido, and then I moved on to Jiu Jitsu and other forms of martial arts. I’d work on one until I’d attained a black belt, and then I’d move onto the next that caught my attention. My hands and feet had to be certified as lethal weapons before I was even 12 years old. And, while I was learning martial arts, I didn’t use that when I was beating up other kids. It would have been easy to, but I knew that if I did, then my parents would take me out of my classes. I had a criminal record by the time I was eight for fighting at my special school. I was constantly in fights. But that school did teach me some things that would be vital for later in life. One of those skills was English. We had to speak English at school. The other was American Sign Language. By the time I left that school in the equivalent of fourth grade, I was conversational in both languages. But, as I mentioned, I left that school during my fourth year. I got into one too many fights and got kicked out. My parents were forced to send me to a public school. Public school wasn’t really any better than my special school. When I got there, I still didn’t know how to read or write very well. I got into fights all the time, and was suspended about once a month for it. I was missing so much school that my parents decided to get me a tutor to help me keep up with my classes. If I wasn’t in school, or at the dojo, then I was at home with my tutor. Eventually I did learn how to read and write well in Greek. English never made sense to me in the written form. I had fairly neat penmanship, so my teachers could read what I was writing, but once I learned how to use a computer, I learned very quickly that spellcheck was my best friend. As I mentioned, I was suspended about once a month at school, and I was being expelled at the end of the year. My parents always managed to get me back in before the beginning of the next school year, but it was always dependent on me going to summer school and making it through the courses that I was having to retake. I hated summer school so much. And it always made my anger problems even worse. Being stuck inside, doing schoolwork and spending time with people I hated, instead of being outside riding my bike or swimming with the few friends I had, always gave my hair trigger temper even more problems. By the time I got to junior high equivalent classes, teachers would groan the first time I walked into their classrooms. My reputation proceeded me every semester. Although, by then, my hormones were starting to really kick in and I was more interested in dating than I was in fighting. My first boyfriend was a guy by the name of Lucas. I was 14 years old and he was 24. We met outside the dojo after a martial arts class. I was waiting to be picked up, and he was just hanging out with some friends. We started talking and struck up a sort of friendship. He was always more interested in getting into my pants than he was really getting to know me, but that was fine with me, because I desperately wanted him in my pants. It didn’t take long for me to start skipping school so that I could go over to Lucas’ house and have days of fun sex with him. In my eyes, it was so much better than all that boring school work. Then one night I made the mistake of having Lucas over to my place while my parents were out. We got upstairs and made the bright decision to have sex on my parents’ bed. Of course they came home early and caught us. Lucas was sent running out of the house without his clothes, and I was dragged downstairs for a talk. It wasn’t the first time I was beaten for misbehaving, but it was the first time that I was grounded to my room without ANYTHING in it. I was grounded for two months. Two months of sleeping on the cold, hardwood floor with only a blanket at night. I wasn’t even allowed a pillow. Then I was also taking beatings on a regular basis from Aunt Jasmine. She’d call me a whore or a slut as she was hitting me. I never fought back, even though I knew I could have. I respected my elders and never would have retaliated. I also didn’t see Lucas for those two months. I was only allowed out of the house when I was at school or with my parents. Most days I sat upstairs in my empty room, working on my homework and reading the few books that I was allowed to have. I was so glad when my grounding was over. I immediately saw Lucas again and started skipping school again. He had another girlfriend by then, but I didn’t mind getting to know her, too. We had some pretty epic threesomes during the next couple years. I guess she either didn’t know or didn’t care about my age. But I learned then that I enjoyed women, too. Maybe even more than I liked guys at that point in my life. Two years goes by really fast when you’re getting into trouble, skipping school and sleeping with your boyfriend, and going to summer school. It was summer when my life was turned upside down. I had skipped out of summer school with a friend that day. We’d gone out to the lake and were chilling during classes. Afterwards, I walked home and saw cop cars outside of my house. I didn’t think I’d done anything recently to get into trouble, but I knew they had to be there because of me. It couldn’t have been for anything else. I tried to dodge away and go elsewhere, when a small Asian woman appeared in front of me. I tried to get away, but her grip on me was like steel. There was no getting away. She led me into the house, and the police told me that Aunt Ayliana had been attacked by some mob guys she owed money to. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I didn’t think Aunt Ayliana would ever borrow money from any mob guys, but I couldn’t convince the cop of that. The Asian lady offered to take me to the hospital to see my Aunt, so I agreed to go. I was worried about her and I wanted to make sure that she was okay. The Asian lady was supposedly an FBI agent from the United States. That made no sense to me either. But I didn’t know what was going on. I just wanted to see my parents. The “FBI agent” took me to my Aunt’s hospital room and I was shocked at how beaten up my Aunt Ayliana was. That’s when they told me about Garou and that I was possibly one of them. I seriously thought they were joking, or that Aunt Ayliana had been hit upside the head too hard or something. I was completely unprepared for the things they were telling me. Aunt Ayliana said that the Asian woman, Sarah, would take me to New York and I’d start my new life there with a new pack. I didn’t get any say in the matter. I did get to hug my Aunt, but then I was being dragged from the hospital and onto a private plane that took us to New York. That’s where I was introduced to Jimmy for the first time. He was 17, and the wiser, more experienced boy that I was going to have to trust. I didn’t know how experienced or wise he was, but I thought he was the hottest boy I’d ever seen. Our first mission was to rescue a girl from a warehouse where she was being kept. I didn’t know that it would be my real introduction to the world of the Garou. I will never forget my first change. Jimmy and me got to the warehouse and were looking for a way in. The doors were all guarded. I decided it’d be a good idea to go “distract” the guards so that Jimmy could slip inside. He agreed that it’d be a good idea, so that’s what we did. Except that the guard was a pervert who decided to put his hands all over me. I saw red when he started touching me, and the next thing I knew, I was eight feet tall, with claws and fur, and I was covered in blood and gore from the two guards that I’d just slaughtered. Somehow I shifted back down to my human form and found myself completely naked, as well. That was fun. I ran into the building and found Jimmy rescuing the girl we were sent to get. She seemed to enjoy seeing me naked, which just annoyed me. I was more interested in Jimmy’s reaction, which was stunned silence. He gave me his jacket, and we went back to the hotel we’d been set up in. The girl we rescued was another Garou. Her name was Logan Ashlocke. She was a Fianna. They’re an Irish tribe who’re good at telling stories and drinking a lot. At first Logan and me mostly just antagonized each other a lot. I was super into Jimmy, but there’s a law among the Garou that is all important. “Garou shall not mate with Garou.” It means that we can get into serious trouble for sleeping with each other. Although, there are exceptions to the rule. Like when women sleep together. We can’t get each other pregnant, and that’s mostly why the law exists. A Garou/Garou pairing results 100% of the time with a Metis child. A child that’s born in their crinos form and has birth defects that make them pariahs in the Garou community. The birth of a Metis child almost always also results in the death of the mother. That’s part of why it’s a crime, too. You’re stealing the life of one of Gaia’s warrior for the sake of a child. It’s highly frowned upon, although it happens surprisingly often. But I digress. Logan and me were always antagonizing each other. Until the day that we got back from a big battle and fell into bed with each other. We were suffering from battle lust and needed a release. She was still a virgin and she wanted to be with me. That was powerful to me. I couldn’t imagine wanting my first time to be with someone like me. But she did. We had sex that night, and I thought things were starting to change between Logan and me. Although I’ll never know what might have, or could have been with Logan and me. We were together for about four years, into our college educations, when I was awoken one night by a knock on my door. When I opened it, I saw a pack of Black Furies escorting Logan from her apartment. I was told not to look for her or there’d be trouble. They were my elders and I had no rank to challenge their orders, so I nodded and called Jimmy over. That night, Jimmy and me broke the Litany. I seduced him, and we slept together for the first time. That night I also became pregnant with our child. It was a challenging couple of days after our first time together. Jimmy wanted to go to the Black Furies and tell them that he’d raped me. He was afraid that I’d lose all my rank if he didn’t. I had to reassure him several times that everything would be fine. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. Eventually, he relented and agreed not to go to them. A couple weeks later, I discovered that I was pregnant, and we went to his parents to tell them. Sarah was there when we arrived, and she said that our child would be the Perfect Metis. A Metis child born in human form and without any flaws. She’d be the harbinger of the end times. Either the salvation or damnation of the entire Garou Nation. It was a lot to absorb. Jimmy’s parents weren’t happy with us. But they understood that we were in love and had been from the moment we met. We wanted to be together, and to raise our child together. To that end, they sent us off to the Canadian wilderness to start our own caern. We were allowed to take one pack and 10 kin with us on the journey to start the caern. My brother’s pack was in New York at the time, and he agreed to bring his pack with us. We didn’t know each other very well, but we were trying to get to know each other a bit. So off we went to Canada. I decided very quickly once we got to Canada that I wanted our caern to be a Memory Caern. A place where all the Fera (races) of shifters could come together in peace. A place where we could work together and remember Gaia in a way that we hadn’t in many generations. Everyone told me that I was crazy. Well, everyone except Jimmy. But we started building it anyway. We traveled around the world getting Fera from all over the place to come join us. It was hard at first. No one wanted to trust us that it’d work out. But, once we got a Bastet to join us, it started going a little bit easier. Bastet are the werecat shifters. Cougars, lions, tigers, animals of that nature. We never could get a couple of the Fera to join us, but I understand why they didn’t. Fera like the Rokea, the shark shifters, don’t belong in the Canadian wilderness. They belong in the ocean or on the beaches. And the lizard shifters don’t belong in the cold of Canada, either. They belong in jungles and rainforests. But, eventually, we got at least two of every other Fera to join us. Along with their families and kin. We went from a caern of 20 to a caern of over 100 within just two years. In the midst of building the caern, I gave birth a beautiful baby girl on March 1, 2007. We named her Shiloh Ayliana Miklos. I was expecting her to come for a couple weeks before she actually came into the world. I was having false starts. So, when I actuallly went into labor, I thought it was another false start. I didn’t realize it was the real thing until my water broke. Jimmy frantically called our doctor — a Wingrider from the Canadian community about 4 hours away — and he rushed to us. Thankfully they have vehicles that can get them anywhere in the world in about 20 minutes. Jimmy was watching Shiloh’s head crown when my doctor came in and finished the delivery. She was the Perfect Metis. Not a flaw or birthmark on her. Just perfectly pink skin and a strong wail of protest. She weighed in at 8lbs and 9oz, and she was 21 inches long. She was a big baby, but she still felt so small in my arms, And she looked even tinier in Jimmy’s arms when he held her for the first time. We were both in awe of the perfect little life that we’d brought into the world together. Shortly after Shiloh’s birth, Jimmy and me became a pack of four. Grayson was sent to us from New York. He was the sole survivor of another pack and he needed somewhere to go. So they sent him to us. He’d only been with us a couple days when he told us about what’d happened to his previous pack, and about the packmate who’d gotten trapped int he Umbra. I couldn’t leave another Garou trapped in the Umbra to die slowly, so we went on a mission to save Rowan. It was a treacherous journey, and we could have become trapped or lost ourselves at any time, but we eventually found Rowan and got her safely out of the Umbra. She became our fourth. Grayson is a Theurge, or a shaman. Rowan is another Ahroun. We don’t have the most balanced pack out there, but it’s solid and we all work together very well. It was also shortly after Shiloh’s birth that the four of us got captured by a company called Pentex. They’re one of the big evils in the world these days. They captured us, imprisoned us, and started doing experiments on us. We were there for about two weeks before we got out, and in that time their experiments did something to us to give us immortality. That’s the only reason we survived the apocalypse when it happened. I don’t want to go into details about the apocalypse. It was horrible and too close to Shi’s birth. I was still going through postpartum depression and trying to take care of a newborn when it happened. So it’s all really just a blur of emotions and horrific visions. But we survived it, and the world survived it, because of the Wingriders and all the Garou who answered their call to help prevent the end of the world. We lost a lot of lives during that battle, but it was worth it because I’ve gotten to watch my children grow up. Everything we lost was completely worth it. But, for the next seven years, Jimmy and me focused on building the caern and raising our daughter together. That was all we could do after the apocalypse happened. Sure, we went on the occasional mission with our pack, but for the most part, by then we were Elders and ordering other packs around. We were running everything at the caern and keeping peace between the Fera who lived there. I won’t say that I loved it, but it was better than running missions and putting our lives on the line every couple of days. It was the middle of July in 2014 when Jimmy and me started talking about expanding our family. We knew that we could’t have any more children together. The Perfect Metis is a one time deal. So we decided to adopt. I called up the caern in New York and inquired about any orphaned children. They had a four day old baby boy that we were interested in. That night, I went out to New York while Jimmy brought down Shiloh’s old crib and other baby supplies. Alexander Logan Marshall was born on July 11, 2014. He was also a beautiful baby, and surprisingly easygoing despite being born on the full moon. Shi was born on the full moon and she was hard to keep happy for the first six months. But Alex was the complete opposite. So happy and a good sleeper. He was sleeping through the night after the first week home. And, should he be true born, he’ll be taken into the Glasswalker tribe, since that’s what Jimmy is. We thought we had our family complete after Alex came into our lives. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Alex was four when Jimmy and me started talking about the possibility of expanding our family again in the future. We wanted to wait until the kids were grown, but we also wanted our child to be ours. Born of us. So we went to the Wingrider community to talk to my doctor. They have medical technology that’s way beyond anything that humans have. My doctor, Caleb McAllister, said that it wouldn’t be a problem to make our next child a perfect Metis again without the curse that comes with having a Metis child. It was while we were there that Jimmy and me started talking about moving there. We wanted to get away from Garou life. We wanted Shi and Alex to have a choice of whether or not they wanted to be a part of the Garou Nation. It wasn’t long before we moved to the Canadian Wingrider community with the kids. They didn’t really understand what was going on, but we had a plan. Jimmy and me took Wingrider citizenship to escape the laws of the Garou and the rules of the spirits that guide the Garou. We’d still be Garou, but we’d no longer be part of the Garou Nation. It was so liberating to know that I could sleep with my mate without incurring the wrath of the spirits. We also decided to get officially married. Jimmy’s parents walked me down the aisle since my own parents had disowned me by then. They didn’t agree with my life choices, so they wrote me and the kids out of their lives. It was all worth it, though, to have Jimmy as my husband. Shortly after the wedding our family expanded by two more. Max came into our lives while we were out on a walk. They’d just built the orphanage in the community and were moving children into it from elsewhere in the world. One of those children didn’t get the memo that this was a truly safe place. She went bolting from the building and ran directly into Jimmy and me. We found out almost immediately that Max was deaf, and it was because of my early education with ASL that I was able to communicate with her. Once the caregivers at the orphanage found out that I knew ASL, they asked if Jimmy and me would foster Max. No one else in the community could communicate with her. So we agreed. Then, later that night, Max asked us if we’d be her new parents now. That sealed the deal. We couldn’t just let this child get attached to us and then have her taken away. So we adopted Max. She was four at the time. Just a couple months older than Alex. They became fast friends and are still very close. Then we were introduced to Bodhi, a 13 year old girl who had run away from her family in Texas. She was nine months pregnant from incest, and Garou kin. They didn’t know if she was true born or not, but Jimmy and me were the best options for her because of us being Garou. We took her in under the condition that she give the baby up for adoption once it was born. She agreed, and Rowan and Greyson adopted the baby once he was born. We’ve had a family of six for the past two years. Shiloh went through her first change at 11. We knew she was going to go through it early just because she’s Metis. But we weren’t expecting quite that early. Initially she decided to join the Garou Nation. She had so much Rage that she needed to get out, and that was the best way to exercise it. But, more recently, we’ve found other ways for her to express that Rage without her putting her life on the line every weekend. Ways that I’m much happier with, because now I don’t have to get grey hair every weekend when she’s out with her pack. I get to keep my baby close and safe. At least I don’t have to worry about Alex for a while yet. But now, our family of six is expanding to a family of seven. I’ve been on birth control since Shi was born. Wingrider birth control at that. It’s 99.9% effective. But even that leaves a little room for error. Our luck ran out in October of 2020. We’re not sure if we’re having a boy or a girl yet, but we do know that we’ll have a new baby by the time the summer of 2021 comes along. Everyone is being cautiously optimistic about this pregnancy. Jimmy and me are just hoping for an uneventful pregnancy with plenty of rest and relaxation. Now, for loose ends. My brother and me never managed to get very close. We don’t talk often or anything. We know each other, and that’s about the extent of it. My parents still don’t want me in their lives. I’ve tried calling them when things change, but they refuse to talk to me, the kids, or Jimmy. So we’ve pretty much given up trying to tell them anything. They’ll come around when they’re ready. Or they won’t. It’s not much of a loss or gain either way. Especially now that my biological mother is back in my life. It’s complicated, but my Mama was brought back to life back in 2018. She’s now living in the Wingrider community, too. She’s got her mate, a man named Colin, and they have a daughter together named Lachlan. Finally, after 35 years, I became a big sister. I’m sure they’ll have more soon, but that’s their story to tell, not mine. But this is where we are now. I don’t know what else the future has in store of us, but I’m sure it’ll be exciting no matter what it is. Somehow, life always seems to be exciting for us, even when we don’t want it to be.