by R. Lee Smith
“With a strong pack, anyone can survive any land.”
“I’m not staying.”
Nakaroth blew a short, hard breath through his nose, not looking at her. “What have you left on your Earth that you would risk death to return?”
She hadn’t left anyone. No friends. No family to speak of. Not even a pet goldfish. Even now, months after she’d been kidnapped, she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure anyone had reported her missing. She had a long history of moving on and leaving no forwarding address.
“You don’t get to ask that,” she said curtly. “You don’t get to decide what’s enough and what’s not worth it. No, you know what?” she said suddenly, skidding around to face him. “You want an answer, I’ll answer you. There’s no one waiting back on Earth! No one. And you know what else? I’m happy being alone!”
“So was I, once. But we are not meant to run alone all our lives.”
“Oh, don’t give me that werewolf-sensei doggy-fortune-biscuit bullshit. Some of us do just fine on our own.” She moved further away from him and slogged on, fuming, catching at trees and boulders and anything but Nakaroth whenever her footing failed, which was nearly every step.
He let her stumble. When she inevitably fell, he stopped to wait for her to pick herself up, but didn’t do it for her.
“After their first Full Hunt, the wolves of Dark Water have earned the right to go beyond the pack’s borders,” Nakaroth said suddenly. “So I did, stretching to fit the skin of a hunter and warrior when I had been too long a cub. I was often gone for days, returning for a moon’s span before leaving again…until it was that I would be gone for moons and returning for days. So I am not sure now just when it was I left my pack. I lived some years alone, reveling in my own good company.”
She glanced at him, hunting for sarcasm, but she recognized his smile. She’d worn it a few times, on those rare occasions she had a reason to look back on the early days of her own independence. First jobs, first apartments, first cars—all the pride and pratfalls that come with stepping outside the lines for the first time.
“Now and then, I would bump up against like-minded rogues and we might run together for a time. Never long. And they were good years,” he told her. “Not my best, but good. I took scars. Ha! Less than that reckless pup deserved! Then came this.” He tapped the white crescent-shaped mark on the side of his throat. “Woodwyrm. I had hunted them before and never been stung, so, ha, I knew I never would be. Until I was. By the time my pack of rogues had found me, the poison was well-set in my blood and I lay as one dead, hardly breathing, hearing them and seeing them, but unable to move or speak. They howled for me. I heard my own death howl,” he remarked, flicking an ear with a hint of humor.
“How was it?” Nona asked.
“Too short.”
She smiled reluctantly, slipped in the snow, and grabbed at his arm before she fell all the way over. He supported her until she found her balance and they moved on together.
“I could do nothing that first night except wait for the scavengers to find me. A bad night. A bad day that followed. But as night fell again, my limbs at last began to loosen. By dawn, I had managed to drag myself to a little stream, where I passed three more days and nights of agony and uncertainty. As soon as I was able, I returned to Dark Water. My father let me rest until he deemed me healed and then he put me out.”
“You mean he threw you out. Just because you got hurt?”
“No.” Nakaroth thought about it and finally said, “Because he knew the difference between healing and hiding. This—” He rubbed his throat and shook his head. “This will never be fresh again. The fur grows in white as bone to remind me how close I came to death. It aches in cold weather. It always itches. I am not and never will be what I once was, but I am healed. My father knew. He did not put me out to punish me. He wanted me to find my home, not to stop looking.”
“Is that the moral of the story?” Nona asked, rolling her eyes. “God, just when I thought this wasn’t going to turn into being about me. Look, this is not my home. I don’t belong here. I don’t want to stay. Why do I have to keep saying that?”
“You think you are trying to convince me,” he replied, not without half a wag to show he knew it was supposed to be a rhetorical question. “I think you are trying to convince yourself.”
“Oh, is that what you think? Well, that’s understandable,” she went on, heavy on the sarcasm, “since I’ve been so indecisive up until now.”
“You say that as though you don’t mean it.”
“I don’t.”
“No? Our lord has said he will provide an escort to the lord of the valley or to the lord of the Aerie Domain, to join the humans in their keeping. You refuse, because they are humans of Earth. Our lord has said he will take you to one of the human settlements here in his land. You refuse, because they are not humans of Earth.”
“Don’t say it like that. Like I don’t have reasons.”
“I do not say you have no reasons. I say your reasoning is wrong.”
“Hey, once you’ve been kidnapped and dragged off to a goddamned alien world to be a fucking slave in a goddamn evil army, I will happily let you tell me what to think and how to feel. Until then, shut up.”
He said nothing.
They walked together.
The wind gusted, blowing chips of snow from the tall branches down into her face, whipping her with the beads of ice frozen into the tips of her hair. Her shoes crunched through paper-thin sheets of ice to slip in the slushy mess beneath. His feet were sure; his steps were nearly silent.
“I’m sorry,” she said, staring straight ahead. “I don’t…I don’t mean to be this angry all the time, I just…None of this is fair. Go ahead. Tell me what a stupid thing that is to say. Life isn’t fair. I’m not a fucking child. But…But none of this is fair. None of it.”
“No,” he said simply.
“Oh sure, like you give a damn. You love this.”
He glanced at her, frowning.
“Yeah, you do. You know I’m stuck here for the winter. You know I’m cold and hungry and fucking useless. You know I know it too. You’re worse than any of those other sons of bitches, because you’re not even trying, with all their looming and preening and shoving their stupid guts in my fucking face. Court me,” she sneered. “You don’t have to court me. All you have to do is wait. You think if I’m trapped here long enough, I’ll just give up!” Her voice was rising, getting louder and less stable with every word. She’d be in tears before the end of it if she couldn’t shut up. What was she even saying? Hadn’t this started out as an apology? Why was he just letting her say it? Why wouldn’t he just get mad, yell back, even hit her? Why was he just listening?
“Well you can forget it!” she shouted, right into his calm, untroubled face. “I’m not staying! Not for anyone and especially not for you!”
His ears tipped forward. “Why me, especially?”
“I said not you!”
“Yes,” he said, still staring intently into her face. “Why not me…especially me?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing!”
“What do you think I am doing?”
“You…You…You know damn well! You’re trying to trap me!”
“How so?”
“Stop it!” she shouted. “Just fucking stop! I know you want me to stay with you!”
“I do,” he said evenly. “But what is the trap? My feelings? Or yours?”
It infuriated her. She knew it was the wrong way to feel, but she couldn’t even separate the emotions blowing around inside her, much less stop them. Before she knew it, she was fumbling at her pocket, numb fingers as thick and unfeeling as gloves until they closed on her knife. It was solid, more solid than she was. She didn’t pull it, but she held it, squeezing it in her fist until her whole arm ached.
It was all she had to hold on to.
Nakaroth’s gaze finally shifted from her face to her trembling arm, then t
o her hand, buried in her pocket. After a long, long moment’s study, he raised his eyes to hers again.
Then he took her wrist.
He did it fast, giving her no time to react. His grip was leather and iron, unbreakable. He pulled her hand from her pocket, gave the trembling edge of the blade a thoughtful sort of glance, then locked his golden eyes with hers. His gaze never wavered, not even long enough to blink, as he dragged her struggling arm up and put the knife against his bare throat.
He waited.
The steam of their breath mingled between them—his steady, hers ragged—into one cloud.
He raised one hand, keeping the other firm and deadly at his neck, and put it on her throat. It wasn’t a chokehold. It wasn’t a caress. His thumb found her racing pulse, testing it. Then he pushed her head back, baring her to his kind of kisses. Each deliberate pass of his tongue was long and slow and almost unbearably hot until the wind turned it to ice. And surely it was the cold of it that made her moan, the cold that numbed her blue fingers until the knife she had broken in the mouth of a monster finally fell into the snow with a slushy, unimportant plop.
He stopped to look down at it. She knew it by the feel of his breath shifting to blow warm against her shoulder, but she couldn’t look at him. She shut her eyes and kept them shut where she could keep the tears sealed in. Tears. After everything else, this was how he broke her.
“I do not want you to give up,” he said, releasing her. He retrieved her knife while she stood shaking (with the cold, damn it, the cold) and pressed it back into her frozen hand. “I want you to run, my huntress, until you are running at my side.”
She ran, all right. She shoved herself away from him and ran all the way back to High Rock, stumbling and sliding through the snow until she burst out into the clearing, scattering sleeping Fringe-wolves, who dove out of her way and collided with other Fringe-wolves, creating a surge of snapping, snarling bodies. Heather let out a scream and bolted into the nearest cave. Laal dove behind Samatan in a comical attempt to hide her muscular body behind her friend’s much sleeker form, while Mika leapt up, brandishing the stone she had been using to scrape and soften hides. Ararro crouched over her now-crying cub, hackles bristling, snarling in all directions. Above all this commotion, distant howls could be heard—Kruin, demanding to know the reason for Heather’s scream—and there was Nona, alone at the center of a ring of baleful stares, still holding the stump of her knife in one trembling hand.
The howling went on, growing louder but more cacophonous to Nona’s untrained ear as more of the hunters responded to the unnamed threat at High Rock. Burgash finally answered—no blood, wait—and jumped down from the raised rock to calm his mate and their cub.
The lycan began to recover, growling to each other as they returned to their places. One of the Fringes sneezed in Nona’s direction. Burgash put a stop to that, only to fix her with his own hard stare.
“What is wrong?” he demanded, coming to stand beside Nona and search the trees. “Where is Nakaroth?”
She looked behind her. The path appeared empty apart from her own uneven footprints in the dirty snow.
Burgash nudged at her, lowering his voice to a grim whisper. “Was it Vru? Is it challenge?”
Bizarrely, Nona’s instinctive response to this reasonable question was a flare of anger and an indignant hiss: “I wouldn’t leave him in a fight!”
Burgash stared at her for a while, then put his head back and let out a high, ululating cry that perfectly conveyed his irritation along with the message no threat here. He finished by blowing an extra-hard breath through his nose and looked at her again, his eyes burning with an awful and wholly animal blend of sympathy and frustration. “I understand this cannot be easy,” he said quietly. “Do you understand you are the one making it harder?”
Her first response was a guilty blush; her second, a furious shout: “This is not my fault!”
“Your fault?” he echoed and for a moment, just stared at her. She got the distinct feeling if she had a muzzle or pointed ears or in way presented him with an identifiable target, he would have slapped her. “Your fault,” he said again, slapping with his tone alone…and that was enough. “Life is not for liking, human. You are not owed sweeter meat just because you don’t like the taste of that which you are given. Either spit it out and move on or swallow. Choose. Every moment you delay, your packmate goes hungry, and that is your fault.”
He turned around without waiting for an answer, beckoning to Heather as she peeked shamefacedly out of the cave she’d hidden in. “Come down,” he ordered. “You are a welcome traveler, but only that. Apologize to the bitches whose den you have invaded and do not forget your place again.”
“I’m sorry.” Heather emerged, blushing from her neck to the roots of her hair. She smiled over at Mika and the others, tipping her head back in a clumsy, stuttering approximation of wolfish submission while holding both hands up in a warding gesture. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…um…They…They jumped at me and…um…”
“Oh, go on,” Mika huffed, picking up her hides again and rolling her eyes at her friends.
Laal and Samatan echoed the sentiment and Heather fled, taking a ridiculous snake-like path around the clearing to avoid coming close to any of the lycan on her way to Nona. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying, until she could finally catch on to Nona’s arm. “I’ll never get used to them,” she whispered, still smiling, even with the tracks of tears on her face. “I know it’s silly, I just…I’ll never get used to them.”
“You don’t have to,” Nona said, but couldn’t seem to stop herself from taking a last backwards glance at the faceless woods. “We’re leaving in the spring. We just have to make it through the winter. And then we’re going—”
“Okay, okay,” said Heather, picking up a stick to stir at the ashes. “I believe you, okay? Okay. Just…stop.”
They didn’t talk much after that.
19. Dreaming and Waking
She dreamed of home that night and her dreams were terrible.
It began outside of her apartment. Nona stood in the parking lot, looking up through the snow at the light in her window, and even then she knew it was a dream, but it was still home. She ran inside (or thought she ran. There was no real sense of motion, in the way of most dreams, just a blurring of her surroundings), but once through the door, she was not in her apartment at all. It looked like hers. It had the same yellow-bone walls, the same ugly linoleum in the kitchen, the same warped closet door. It should have been hers, but it was full of someone else’s stuff.
“What did you expect?”
She swung around and there was one of the toy soldiers from the van, Mr. Too Fucking Real himself, with his gun sticking out of the front of his pants like the cock he probably wished it was. He gave her a sick/scared sort of grin and lit a cigarette. In the glow of his cupped hands, his face took on a sallow, corpse-like shadow that made it hard to look at him.
“You’ve been dead three months now, easy,” he said and took a deep drag. “Three and a half…maybe even four. Not sure how long the days and months are here, but it’s been a while, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m not dead,” Nona said. Her feet moved her slowly towards the kitchen, where the knives were, but she kept her eyes on him.
“You may as well be. I mean, even if it’s only been two months, that’s still two whole months!” He laughed a little, took his cigarette out and looked at it, then put it back to his lips and breathed it in. “You think anyone here thought you were coming back after two days even?” he asked, puffing words out in smoke. “Fuck that, you’re dead to them.”
Nona eased a drawer open. Her fingers touched the unfamiliar handle of a knife she didn’t own. She gripped it. Leapt.
She meant to stab him, but somehow that lunging motion became a slash across his throat, and not with the kitchen knife she’d had a second ago, but with the broken stump of a thing she’d taken away from her encounter with the
fellcat. A red gash unzipped his neck, but no blood sprayed out.
“So am I,” the toy soldier said, crookedly smiling. “Only I’m dead for real. And my folks aren’t ever going to know. I don’t expect you to cry too hard over that.” He took another pull off his cigarette. Smoke slipped out through the gash in his throat in a thin, grey ribbon. He watched it curl up into the air for a moment, his expression haggard and queasily fascinated, then he shrugged. “Fuck it, it was a good ride while it lasted. We could have had anyone we wanted, you know? We could have had Angelina-fucking-Jolie if we knew where she lived.”
“I’m dreaming.” Nona backed up a little, but kept her knife tight in her fist. “You’re not really dead.”
“Yeah, you are. Yeah, I am. The only difference is, you get to leave when it’s over. Want to see where I am?”
And without waiting for an answer, not that she had one, the apartment that wasn’t hers bled away, replaced by a frozen stretch of plainsland. The ground was invisible beneath a blanket of snow, broken by deep trenches where some heavy animal had passed by. It was night here, as she supposed it was night wherever it was Nona was asleep and dreaming all this, and she could see only a greyish hint of the world beyond this most immediate patch of nothing.
“That’s me,” said the…the dream. He kicked at the ground, but his boot left no scar in the snow. “They buried us. So that’s where we stayed. Can you see me?”
“No.”
“Yeah?” He looked at her, then took a last drag off what was left of his cigarette (Nona looked away before she had to see the smoke spilling out of his neck again) and flicked the filter away. It vanished into the snow without marking it either. “I can. They cut my head off, but I still know it’s me. I can see the body lying there…Nobody else, just me. How weird is that?”
