by J L Aarne
“You smell like a horse’s ass,” Owen said. “You never heard of showering before coming to the table?”
Maiven picked up her fork and said, “You smell like you just had your ass fucked. The shower didn’t really help.”
Owen’s mouth fell open in surprise. He tried to reply in kind but ended up spluttering and turning bright red in the face.
Between them, Sam laughed. Maira walked by them to set a plate down on the counter for someone to take it and she sighed. She didn’t scold her daughter, though she wanted to. Maiven and Sam were both too old for such mothering to do anything but cause embarrassment and their status within the pack was such that it demanded respect, but she gave them both a disapproving frown as she went by.
“Sorry, Mama,” Maiven said.
“You should be. People look to you to know how to behave,” Maira said. She took Sam and Owen’s empty breakfast plates to the sink. “And you do smell like a horse’s ass. Next time you’ll shower before you sit down at the table. Show some respect.”
Maiven sighed, swiped the last of her waffle in a little puddle of maple syrup and ate it then stood up. “Yes, ma’am.”
She left and Sam reached over for her glass and finished her orange juice. Owen lit a cigarette. Before he’d taken his second drag off it, Maira walked over, took it from him and extinguished it in the pulp at the bottom of the orange juice glass.
“You can do that outside where the rest of us don’t have to smell it, dear.” She picked up Maiven’s dishes and took them to the sink. “Don’t you boys have things to do in town today? Best get going if you want to get anything done.”
Owen and Sam looked at each other before they slid off the barstools and went to get their wallets and jackets. It was five miles to the edge of the city from the house, and though both Sam and Owen had licenses, neither of them had a car, so they walked. It wasn’t a long walk and the cool weather made it pleasant. They got bored occasionally and would chase each other for a little while along the shoulder of the highway, but they had to stop that when they got to where the highway inclined up a steep hill as they entered the city. The incline was sharp enough that at a brisk pace even they were a little winded when they got to the top.
They went inside the truck stop at the top of the hill and bought sodas, then walked across the parking lot past the big rig trucks all filling up their tanks. The truckers hardly glanced their way.
Once they were closer to town they could catch the bus and ride it over the bridge to the downtown business section, which was where all the little shops were that were right that moment putting up signs advertising Christmas sales, begging shoppers to buy local and wishing everyone happy holidays.
Sam and Owen had gone to public school, so they weren’t completely unfamiliar with humans, but both of them had dropped out at sixteen without any interest or intention of pursuing higher education. It wasn’t forbidden and occasionally someone’s son or daughter would go all the way through high school or get their GED, then leave home to study at college, but it was discouraged among their kind. Those who left for college rarely came back again, and if they did come back, they didn’t stay. They built lives for themselves in the human world and felt trapped by the world they had been born into. They weren’t shunned the way Sam had heard some human subcultures did to children who chose a different path, but their human lovers and spouses, their human-born children, were not welcome among the pack, and that was unacceptable. Sam and Owen weren’t ignorant of the human world, but their exposure to it and to humans had mostly been out of necessity, so they still stared and wondered and were thrilled and amazed by so many things the people around them seemed to take for granted. They received some very strange looks from people passing by them on the street or sitting near them on the bus.
Sam couldn’t take his eyes off a black girl who sat down beside him on the bus because of the number of piercings she had in her ears. There were so many rings and studs in her ears that they jingled and tinkled faintly whenever she moved her head. The girl stared straight ahead and pretended not to notice, but her odor subtly changed, and Sam became aware that he was making her uncomfortable.
Then he was sorry, but because she was a little afraid of him, he didn’t try to apologize.
Owen made Sam go into a tattoo shop with him and they walked around inside the little building looking at all the flash art on the wall. There were some of clowns and harlequins that Owen avoided and flipped past quickly. To tease him, Sam flipped the page back again and they came very close to fighting about it before Sam gave up and moved on to something else. They also did piercings and Sam put his nose inches from the glass cases as he looked at the hand carved wood, horn and bone pieces, which were beautiful, but looked like they would be painful to wear. The people in the tattoo shop were friendly, though they seemed to find Sam and Owen amusing.
They walked through downtown, past restaurants and shops selling nothing but Christmas ornaments, past flower shops and coffee shops and ice cream shops, past shops selling athletic wear and shops selling shoes. They went into a bookstore and walked around looking at all the books, the extravagantly bound journals and the people behind the counter at the in-store coffee bar who had blue and pink and purple dyed hair. Then they left without buying anything.
They had lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the bookstore called Pete’s Pancake Place, which served a lot of things that were not pancakes, but also had really great pancakes all day long.
They rode the bus across town to a jewelry store and Owen asked Sam to stay outside while he went in. Sam did, though he knew precisely what Owen was buying. He put his hand in his own pocket and felt the ring he had gotten for Owen already. It was white gold done in a pattern of knots. The jeweler he’d bought it from had called it a Viking braided wedding band, but it just made Sam think of tree roots all twisted together. Roots, like theirs, which ran so deep. Sam didn’t know a lot about jewelry, and he hadn’t shown it to anyone yet except for Maiven, who had said Owen would love it. She had also added that Owen was an idiot if he didn’t love it, which made Sam feel pretty good about his choice.
When Owen came out of the jewelry store, he had his hands in his pockets and looked very pleased with himself. “You can’t see it, so don’t even ask,” he said.
Sam grinned and caught the front of his shirt to pull him in close. He kissed him right there on the sidewalk in front of the jewelry store. “Ditto,” he said when he let Owen go.
It was almost five o’clock by then, so they caught the bus and rode it back to the edge of town as far as the buses ran, then began to walk home along the side of the road. There were small, secluded towns and townships for hundreds of miles around Hellgate where there weren’t many businesses and groceries were expensive, so a lot of people made weekly or monthly trips into the city on the weekends to shop. There was a lot of traffic on the highway that time of the evening as the people who had made such a journey started the trip back to their respective homes. Sam and Owen kept an eye on the traffic, but they weren’t that worried about it. It wasn’t the first time they had gone into the city together and walked along that same path and nothing had ever happened to them. They saw homeless transients walking that way all the time and they had never come across a dead one. Sometimes in the news there was something about a wreck involving bicyclists, but those happened in the city with people riding their bikes side-by-side with cars and trucks in the bike lanes.
It happened fast. Sam was walking backward, watching Owen who was going a little slower than him and Sam was teasing Owen about being such a slow-poke and Owen was trying to get him to slow down just a little.
Neither of them would ever be so fearless and invincible again.
The truck didn’t come out of nowhere. People say that a lot and Sam had heard it before when people spoke of highway accidents, but the truck was there and he saw it, there just wasn’t enough time. Then it swerved toward them and he saw that, too
, and he saw where it was going; it was headed right for Owen.
Owen didn’t see it because his back was turned, he was looking at Sam. Sam didn’t have time to warn him, but Owen saw it on his face. He saw something in Sam’s expression, and he started to turn toward the oncoming truck, but he was never going to make it.
Sam didn’t stop to consider it, he just moved. He was fast, too. Faster than any human, which made him fast enough to save Owen, but not fast enough to save himself. The truck was one of those huge Dodge pickups with the grills made for pushing cattle out of the way or hitching drag chains to and the grill hit Sam center mass. He heard his leg break but didn’t feel it. The world flipped and he flew over the roof of the truck, slammed into the tailgate, which sprang open and spilled him out onto the highway. He heard the snapping of his bones, felt the impact of metal and tarmac, the breath pushed out of his body that refused to be sucked back in, the crack of his head on the ground. Horns honked, tires shrieked and Owen… Owen was somewhere… Owen screamed his name.
He’s okay, Sam thought. He didn’t get hurt. If he can scream like that… he’s okay…
Then Sam went away for a while. He fell into the darkness like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. He thought he was dying, but that was all right because Owen was going to live.
When he woke up, he was in a room so white it hurt his eyes. He tried to turn his head and found that he couldn’t. There was some sort of cage-like contraption around his head preventing him from moving it side to side. His right arm was in a cast, there was something else, similar but not quite the same as the head cage, around his waist and his right leg was in a cast, too.
“Owen,” he said. His voice came out soft and cracked.
Someone on his left moved, scraping a chair across a tile floor, and he tried to turn his head again. His mother pulled herself up close to his bedside and looked at him. She looked tired, he thought. She brushed her hand over his forehead through his hair and Sam realized even that felt different.
“I thought maybe I was still asleep and having another dream,” Maira said.
“Mom—” He stopped talking and swallowed. “Water,” he said.
“Oh, of course.” Maira got up and retrieved a bottle of water she’d had for herself, opened it and held it to Sam’s lips to drink.
He drank a little, coughed and drank some more. Then he was tired and sagged back in the bed. “Where are we?”
“We’re at St. Pat’s hospital, baby,” Maira said. She sat back down beside him. “Do you remember what happened?”
He did. He remembered the truck and he remembered shoving Owen out of the way. He remembered the glass windshield shattering when his body slammed into it. “Owen,” he said. “Is he…? Where…?”
“He’s here, Sam. Take it easy,” Maira said. “He went to get something from the kitchen. He’s… It’s been a week. There were days when… At first they said… I mean…”
She couldn’t form the words to say it and covered her face with her hands as she started to cry. Sam’s left arm wasn’t in a cast, though his last two fingers were splinted. He lifted his hand and rested it on her head. It was little comfort and Maira only cried harder. Sam let her.
He felt like crying himself. He didn’t need to talk the doctor to know that he wasn’t going to be the same after this. Not even if he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, which was very unlikely. This wasn’t the sort of injury you recovered from in a few days. It wasn’t the kind of thing you bounced right back from. He was going to need surgery. More than he had already had from the looks of things. He was going to need time to mend. Then when he was mended, he probably was never going to be as strong as he had been, he might always hurt a little, he might never walk the same or run as fast or as far. He wouldn’t be able to lead the hunt. He would fall behind. He would always be vulnerable. Always have weaknesses.
His body was broken and like other broken things, it could be mended, but it would never be the same. It would always be weak in the cracked places.
His mother wasn’t thinking about that, she was crying because at some point a doctor or a nurse had told her to prepare for the worst. They wouldn’t come right out and say it like that, but Maira was smart and as wolves they were used to reading body language more than humans when interacting with people. Even if they had lied to her, she would have known. So, she cried because he wasn’t going to die after all.
Sam closed his eyes and felt tears slide down his cheeks. “What happened?” he asked.
“I thought you said—”
“What broke? What happened to me? Am I going to…?”
“You’re… You’re going to be okay. The doctor said you… Well, they thought—we all thought—you weren’t going to live. But then you started to come around.”
“Mama, just tell me.”
Maira sighed and wiped her eyes. “Your leg broke in several places from the impact. They put a small plate in your thigh bone with screws and… to hold it together. They say that will have to stay and I allowed it because you needed it and it… it shouldn’t cause any problems when you… when you shift because it’s so small. Your pelvic bone was cracked when you hit the windshield. You had a compound fracture in you right arm. They had to do surgery for that and… but it’s going to be fine. You fractured some ribs and one of them punctured your left lung, but they did surgery for that right away when they brought you in and it seems like it’s going to be okay. You, um… You hit your head pretty hard. You had a concussion and some scalp lacerations and you… you slipped into a coma for a few days so we… I ah…”
Sam didn’t need to hear any more and his mother was already starting to weep again. He sighed and left her alone while she did. He lay there with his eyes closed and tried to picture a way, some magical, miraculous way he could come out the other side of this with the same life, the same future he’d been looking at before. He couldn’t. He had nearly died and he had been in the hospital long enough that his mother had begun to pick up phrases like “compound fracture” and “scalp lacerations” and despite the odds, he was going to live and his brain wasn’t scrambled mush, so he was lucky. Except he didn’t feel lucky.
A loud crack and a splash of liquid startled Sam and his eyes flicked toward the sound to see Owen standing in the doorway. He had gone somewhere to get coffee for himself and Maira then dropped both cups when he saw Sam was awake. He stood frozen and staring for a second. Then he rushed into the room and went to the bed.
He took Sam’s hand and Sam winced. “Sorry,” Owen said. He kissed Sam’s face, trying to be gentle because of the bruises and scrapes. Then he kissed his hand and he didn’t squeeze it anymore, but he didn’t let it go either. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe you’re awake.”
Sam shushed him and gave his hand a little reassuring squeeze. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“The fucking guy—the driver—was drunk,” Owen said. “He—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sam said.
“You’re going to be fine,” Owen said fiercely, lifting Sam’s hand to kiss his fingers again. “I’m going to take care of you.”
Sam started to shake his head, was reminded again by the contraption holding it still that he couldn’t, and said, “No.”
“I am,” Owen insisted. “When they send you home, of course. They still have to—”
“You can’t,” Sam said.
Owen frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
Sam raised his hand and made a beckoning gesture with his fingers for Owen to lean in close. Owen did. “Everything changes now,” he whispered. “Everything is… different.”
Owen sat back looking troubled. “But you’re awake,” he said.
“I’m broken,” Sam said.
“But… you’ll get better.”
Sam sighed and didn’t bother to argue with him about it. He was tired and he didn’t want or have the strength to fight. It was over though, that was what he should have said. It was what h
e meant. Everything was over.
To be continued…
