Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  “Let’s go,” Marguerite said. “It’s time to go.” Ruth thought to ask, “Where?”

  “Home.”

  They left the houses—where brick and studs were exposed now, where bones had lain exposed in the basements for a century, where plants would grow again and almost no one would know what to do with them. They vaulted the fence. Ruth felt a twinge of something—loss, maybe, or maybe just disruption—but her need to move, to run, and the pleasure of running in the company of her cousin overtook everything else.

  They had been running along for some time before Ruth realized they were in a part of the city she hardly knew, a western suburb. Golden, she thought, and then forgot again. Again she asked, over the rush of their running together, “Where?”

  “Home,” Marguerite answered again, misunderstanding the question. “The canyons.” Ruth didn’t want to leave the city. She wanted to go deep into it, to find and consume its heart. But she didn’t dare say so and didn’t know how to change direction.

  They were in the foothills then and ascending. It was chilly. No snow yet, but wind. Rock faces rose on both sides of them, colorless but with vividly shadowed striations. The pungency of evergreen made the thinning air so sharp that Ruth had trouble breathing it. Underfoot the ground became springy and pine needles scored the pads of her feet, layers of needles, the bottommost strata finally beginning to decay into mulch even in this dry climate, the surface still slippery with intact tubules from several seasons ago, from last year, already from this early fall.

  Ruth would never have been able to find her way alone. She scarcely could manage to follow Marguerite, kept losing sight of the huge form of her cousin against the dark cliffs and darker pines. It seemed to her that they ran for a long time and covered a lot of ground, but when they stopped the moon hadn’t moved in the sky at all and she wasn’t tired.

  Below them, back toward the city, the slopes were furred with growth, elfin timber at the up-slope edge like young around their feet. Stars washed down the slope of the sky, and there was the moving red light of a plane; the roar of its engine, so faintly audible that it was almost not a sound at all, buzzed in the back of her ears.

  “It’s time, cousin.”

  Suddenly uneasy, Ruth couldn’t ask what that meant. She thought she should know. She didn’t know.

  Her cousin came to her, single eye glittering, hump like another creature on her back. “It’s time, cousin. With you or without you, it’s my time. You have to decide. Now.”

  Ruth didn’t understand what decision she was talking about, or what time. Then she did: time to eliminate the mothers. Time to take over the family. A decision to act, now. Then, again, she didn’t understand.

  At their backs was a cliff. Marguerite turned her roughly to face it. From inside the cliff came sounds. Voices, human and wolf. Ruth thought fleetingly that it could have been some other prey—squirrels chittering, birds squawking—or some other predator—hawk, rattler, bear. But they were human and wolf voices, she knew. Human and wolf. She kept reminding herself of that, and each time she remembered there was a little stir of arousal that lasted long after she’d once again forgotten its source.

  Now Ruth was upright, exhausted, and shivering. She never seemed to dress warmly enough for the mountains, no matter the season, and even furred she was always cold up here. “Where are we?” she demanded, and immediately wished she hadn’t, hated the mountains, wished she hadn’t let Marguerite bring her up here, didn’t understand why but knew there was danger. Tried to remember or imagine anything that would help her understand, memory and imagination virtually indistinguishable.

  Marguerite’s yellow-moon gaze was on her. “You’ve been here before,” she snarled, and Ruth knew that was a trick, a trap, and then thought she did remember:

  Caves inside the mountains. Dens. Tunnels leading in from the surface and connecting the caves. Wolves everywhere, their pitched odors, werewolf bitches with yellow human eyes. Blue-green candle flame. Marguerite’s initiation, or the initiation of some other young woman of the clan, some cousin or cousin’s daughter.

  Had Ruth been here more than once?

  The sacrifice of a baby, his underground shrieks and the frantic chanting of his mother—Marguerite’s daughter? One of Marguerite’s daughters or nieces or granddaughters? Shrieks and chanting echoing, pressing so furiously through the stratified mountains that they must have sliced new strata, gouged fissures. The bloody new heart of the infant glinting blue in the prismatic blue flame. The fresh unguent like a primordial creature, quivering in someone’s cupped clawed hands.

  A younger woman emerged now from the surface opening, younger than Ruth and Marguerite but not young—they were old. Not old enough, not ancient, certainly not immortal; Ruth thought she would die soon. The younger woman said to Marguerite, “We’re ready.”

  “We have something to show you,” Marguerite said. “Go in.”

  Ruth followed the younger woman. Away from the city, the disorientation that had been steadily worsening for years now abruptly intensified. Maybe her name was Lydia—no, that was Ruth’s own daughter, her daughter Lydia was missing and her granddaughter Deborah and her unborn great-granddaughter, but she couldn’t keep her mind on them. Her mind scampered off like escaped prey.

  The woman ahead of her, leading her into the mountain, a squat silhouette in the diminishing light. Who was she? Did it matter who she was? Ruth thought she knew her but couldn’t find a name or an identifying impression. And where was she taking them, and why? Into the mountain, under the ground, along a tunnel that was rapidly narrowing, rapidly descending. Had she once known what was happening here?

  Her cousin Marguerite was behind her, coming close, blocking any possibility of escape backward out of the tunnel. Not knowing whether to be afraid of Marguerite or not, Ruth was, briefly, afraid, then just as fleetingly enraged. Marguerite’s breath was harsh and hot, and her claws clicked against the rock.

  Ruth dropped to all fours, too, and did find it easier. The dim underground light, growing steadily dimmer, was much easier on her eyes than the bright sunshine had been.

  “Lydia! Slow down!” Ruth complained. Irritation with her daughter was familiar, even comforting.

  Behind her, Marguerite said impatiently, “That’s not Lydia. You know that’s not Lydia. That’s Elinor.”

  Ruth didn’t know who Elinor was, didn’t think she knew, didn’t think she’d ever heard the name. Now, though, and painfully, she did realize that the woman leading them too fast through the rough tunnel—so fast that Ruth kept losing her footing and scraping her shoulders and shins—was not her daughter Lydia, couldn’t be, because Lydia was missing, was gone. So was Deborah. So was the baby.

  The baby. Her great-granddaughter, most likely the only one she’d ever have. Hope and scion of the family.

  Or, almost equally prized, a boy for sacrifice. It had been a long time since Ruth had tasted the sweet hallucinogenic tissue of a baby’s heart; she thought it had been a long time. Her mouth watered. It had been a long time, too long, since the salve had been renewed. Her skin was so dry, cracked, and always itching ferociously from underneath.

  The tunnel dipped, turned, and widened abruptly into a space like a long, low room. She had been here before. Alive with blue and green candles, blue-green hazy reflections off stone. Alive with cousins and second cousins, her aunt Hannah somewhere among them; their yellow and golden eyes.

  Something else, too. A human being. A man. Ruth’s hackles rose, itched.

  He crouched on the rock, which was so dark it looked colorless except where it picked up a suggestion of the candles’ glow. He was guarded by two women of the family, wolves, nearly wolves.

  She had stopped in the entrance to this room. Confusion made her dizzy, made her angry. The wolf ahead of her, who of course wasn’t Lydia because Lydia never transformed but whom Ruth still kept thinking of as Lydia, had vanished somewhere into the deep shadows. Marguerite pressed close, huge and warm lon
g before she entered Ruth’s peripheral vision, and murmured, “That’s your father, Ruthie.”

  “My father is dead,” Ruth protested automatically. “The family killed him before I was born. You know that.”

  “Wrong,” said Marguerite, and showed her teeth. “We’ve kept him here in the canyons for, what, seventy-four years. As a kind of pet. A kind of gigolo. We’ve all used him. He’s been part of a lot of rituals up here.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  Marguerite shrugged, and the hump between her shoulder blades danced ponderously. “Experimentation. Diversion. To see what it would mean to the family to keep a man around permanently. My mother no doubt was against it at first, although she’s never told me that. She’s against anything out of the ordinary, anything ‘impure.’“ Marguerite snorted. “Which will be her downfall.”

  “You never told me,” Ruth managed to say.

  Marguerite grinned. Her fangs caught moonlight or the distant red light of a passing plane, and glowed. “No.”

  “My mother never told me.”

  “No.”

  The man across the room made a sound, a sudden movement. His guards closed in. More woman than wolf, Ruth thought, and the name Olivia came uselessly to her. They pushed him down. Maybe fangs grazed him, maybe claws, or maybe a transformation took place before his eyes, for he cried out. Anger took form in Ruth’s chest, inside her rib cage, around her heart.

  “But now he’s too old to be of any use anymore,” Marguerite said, watching her. “He won’t be much good as a sacrifice, either—what little fat he has left is so worn out that it won’t have any power to speak of. Some of them wanted to kill him a long time ago, he’s trouble to keep, but I said to wait for you.”

  “Why tell me at all? Why now?”

  “He’s your chance to prove yourself.”

  Defiantly, Ruth demanded, “To whom?”

  Ruth expected her cousin not to reply, or to say something about Ruth proving herself to herself, which would just be more confusing and infuriating. Instead, she said evenly, “To me.”

  She had come very close to Ruth and was staring intently down at her with the single bright eye and the dark socket, which suddenly didn’t seem to be empty, seemed to be full of things and parts of things, teeming. Ruth was swept by intense vertigo, had the strong sensation of standing on the edge of a precipice, and thought to take a step or two backward away from it to save herself from falling.

  Marguerite caught her, claws in the side of her neck. Ruth yelled, couldn’t react instinctively, and couldn’t think fast enough to fight back. Marguerite pressed her angular face against Ruth’s face and growled, “You almost waited too long, Ruthie. He almost died on his own. That would have been a waste, wouldn’t it? Another missed opportunity for you.”

  Ruth became aware that the old man at the far end of the cave was wheezing, coughing. She tried to meet Marguerite’s variegated gaze. “He’s not my father. I don’t have a father, any more than you do.”

  “Well, then, you won’t mind fucking him, will you? Or eating his heart? Of course,” Marguerite added, shifting her weight in some slight way that was infinitely threatening, “if he’s not your father, none of that will be much of a test, either, won’t work as an initiation or a purification or anything. Won’t do you any good. So you’d better hope he is your father, Ruthie. You’d better prove to yourself that he is.”

  “No,” said Ruth, dazed, unsure what she was refusing or denying.

  A hand descended onto her shoulder, claws into her flesh. Her cousin loomed between her and the inefficacious moon, pushed her, hurt her, and Ruth tried desperately not to understand. But she did understand. “Don’t waste this, Ruthie. This is what you’ve been waiting for all your life.”

  Ruth stumbled, but crossed the littered floor of the den to stand in front of the ancient man Marguerite said was her father. He caught his breath at the sight of her, which made him wheeze; phlegm crawled out of his throat. Swaying on his feet, he fell; on his hands and knees he was still unsteady. He tried to get away from her, but his back was already against the flickering wall and he was restrained by the two wolf-women whose names and relationships to Ruth were lost.

  Ruth imagined that when he looked at her he saw—if he could see her at all, if his bulging eyes functioned—a wolf face with a woman’s eyes, a woman with the head of a wolf. Certainly he did not see his daughter.

  “Daddy?” she said, foolishly. She’d practiced the word in her mind all her life. Said out loud, it sounded ludicrous, impotent, meaningless. Almost meaningless.

  The man had collapsed. His emaciated limbs scrabbled at the floor, but he couldn’t get up. His ravaged body was speckled with gray hair—on his chest and back, on his arms and legs, around his penis. His penis was erect, engorged, and in the candlelight reflecting off the cave walls it looked purple. It occurred to Ruth that they must have found a way to maintain his erection all the time, and she was dangerously distracted for a few seconds by wondering what they’d done to him, whether it hurt, what his penis would feel like inside her, how his heart would taste.

  “Ralph?” she asked, foolishly. “Little Ralph Amoratti?”

  She thought she saw a slight twitch of the head in response, a flickering of the old eyes. She shouldered aside the guards and crouched in front of him, touched his shrunken belly with her claws. Meant to touch it gently, but drew blood. There was something around his neck.

  She reached for it, took it in the palm of her hand. Heavy. Warm from him. A cross. She turned it into the dancing candlelight, turned it again. At the intersection of the two heavy silver arms, a star sapphire, its star flashing in some angles of the light and then disappearing as she turned the cross again. And on the back of the cross, the initials RA.

  She reached for him then, in her disorientation misjudged the distance between them and slashed his neck with her claws. He wailed like an infant. His dark blood warmed the pad of her palm.

  “My father,” she acknowledged. Even now she was far from sure, but she wanted it to be true, willed this transforming chance. She bent over him and when his eyes widened she knew he was seeing her, fancied he knew who she was. Her long lips parted, and she kissed him.

  The wolves—the women of her family, her cousins, her aunt, not her mother or her daughter or her granddaughter and Ruth missed them, acutely—stirred, whined eagerly. There were far more of them than she’d realized.

  Then the candlelight shifted, swelled, and there were fewer. Hardly any. No one at all but herself and Marguerite, who might be companion or rival, ally or enemy, but who was watching her and judging her worthiness, after all these years together. Then, no one but herself and countless permutations of herself, younger, older, wilder.

  Then her aunt Hannah was standing apart from the rest of them, apart from her. Hannah’s long mouth, long tongue hung red. Her coat was burnished blue-green. Her yellow stare was intent, a blaze of attention that Ruth had never received before. Ruth found herself rising to it, and, at the same time, yearning to hide.

  There was no need to stalk or leap. Her father was only inches away from her. Ruth simply bent her head again.

  Her mouth touched his throat, which was pulsing as he made a mewling sound of terror and gasped for air. She braced one clawed hand on his back and one on his chest, trapping his heart between them. Its wild power vivified both hands, both arms, and the pulsing chambers of her own heart.

  She remembered or imagined killing her son. Devouring him. Taking his heart for her own. Taking the transforming power of his life for the power of the family. And, with a transformative rush, knew what it would mean to take her father now.

  “Please,” the man whispered.

  She felt the word on his lips moving under her own. Startled, she looked up into his face. There was something about his nose that was like hers, she thought, pleadingly. There was something about his cheeks, which were sunken and wrinkled now but still broad, like her own.

>   “Please,” they whispered together.

  They shared something. Ruth was sure they shared something. A recognition of each other, maybe, and of what they had missed.

  She couldn’t believe that. This man hadn’t missed her. In all the years she’d yearned for her father, this man hadn’t missed her once, his daughter.

  But he knew her, she was sure. He knew who she was. He raised his hand to the cross around his neck, touched with gaunt fingers the star sapphire and made its star burst. As if he meant to give it to her. As if he’d kept it for her all her life.

  Marguerite said, “Ruth,” but it was too late.

  Ruth said, “No,” and looked up to meet someone’s intent yellow eyes.

  Hannah dropped her eyes and broke the connection. The others in the den reconfigured themselves. A growl began, so low it was almost inaudible, and Ruth wondered pointlessly whether this man her father could hear it at all and whether if he’d heard it he would have known what it meant. Wondered if he’d ever know what she was doing for him, and knew he would not.

  She wasn’t sure she knew, either. But her heart stirred in response to it, the muscles in her hips and shoulders tightened, hardened, and the growl in her own throat swelled to a scream as she turned her back protectively to the man who might or might not be her father and met the family attacking.

  They overwhelmed her easily, quickly. There were so many of them, and her cousin Marguerite was so strong. She didn’t even know when they finally killed her father. He’d been dead since long before she was born.

  And she was given not a piece of his heart.

  Chapter 15

  The light changed on the pole across the wide triple intersection. In the glare of the setting sun behind her, Lydia saw motion rather than any color change, and dimly understood that it was some sort of signal to which she should pay heed. Uncertainly, she stepped off the curb. Cars were coming from every direction, with no discernible pattern and no interruptions; the traffic signal seemed to have no influence on the traffic. She didn’t care whether the cars hit her or not: this brown or maroon station wagon, this pickup or van. She just walked, vaguely trying to concentrate on tightening the muscles that would lift one thigh and then the other, dimly amazed by the kinetic impossibility of walking, of putting one foot in front of the other, of maintaining balance and forward motion at the same time. With every step, with every discrete motion in the multiple motions that went into every step, she all but forgot how to do it. The pavement turned uneven and the crown was unexpectedly high and not quite in the middle of the street; she stumbled.