If you kept heading up the hill, you’d pass old man Lou on the left and the Donavans on the right. Isla and Bob. They were like pure sunshine compared to the Zielinskis. We were welcome there anytime, too. The snacks weren’t as good, but they came with nary a bark, a bite, or a scolding. In fact, if you were feeling a bit down on yourself, the Donavans was the best place to be. Fifteen minutes at their place and you’d come out of there feeling like you were best in show.

Jules lived next door to the Donavans, across the way from our place and two doors down. There were a few more empty cottages, and our place was right at the top of the hill. Mrs. O’Malley’s place was directly across the way from us.

She was a strange one, Mrs. O’Malley. She looked like the type of grandmother that you’d expect to see in a commercial for farm butter or fabric softener. Round, smiley face and curly gray hair, but believe me, that’s not what she was. The magick was strong with her. She was definitely strange. Her place was strange, too. It kind of gave me museum vibes. It had done ever since I was a boy. Almost everything in her house was covered in some sort of plastic. The sofas were wrapped in it. The dining table always had a cheery yellow-and-blue-striped tablecloth on it with a clear plastic table cover over it. Even the carpet in the hallway hadn’t escaped. It had one of those plastic runners that made a “zooff zooff” sound if you dragged your feet on it.

Aside from that, I liked her house a lot. It always smelled clean. Like she’d just used beeswax wood polish. She had by far the best furniture of anyone in the pack. Some of her things were part of a matching set. She also had art on the walls. No one else had that. As you walked in, she had a whole lot of ink sketches of various animals framed and hanging in two perfect rows at the entrance. A deer, a coyote, a mountain lion and a grizzly, a hawk, a harrier, a Great Horned owl and a house wren.

When I was little, I used to love standing in front of the drawings and trying to get as much information out of her as possible about each animal. Mrs. O’Malley was special. She was what we called a shifter of yore. She shifted to a wolf, like our whole pack did, but that wasn’t all she could do. Rumor had it, she could shift to just about any animal you could ever imagine.

“How do you do it?” I used to ask when I was a boy.

“It’s magick,” she’d say with a wink.