Wild Women Collection

by Rachel Sullivan

  “My coterie, Marcus, and me, yeah,” I answered.

  “You still have that Hunter dropout hanging around?” she said with contempt.

  I almost told her to watch her mouth, that Hunter dropout was my boyfriend. But then I realized Marcus and I had never actually had that talk. That morning before I met with the harpies, when we’d spent the night together in the dank hotel, I’d promised him we’d discuss the topic of us after I got my sister back. A pit formed in my empty stomach. When would Marcus collect on that promise?

  Thankfully, Marie didn’t have the ability to read my emotions over the phone. “What should we do with the bodies, Marie?” I asked, changing the subject from Marcus to dead Hunters.

  “How should I know? Succubi give life, not death.”

  If she were standing in front of me, I’d shoot her a level gaze. Come on. “Seriously, Marie. I know you know people.”

  The line was quiet for a few breaths before she answered. “I’ll send a crew out. Once they arrive, you should leave. Are there humans present?”

  “Celeste is keeping them company in the back room,” I said.

  “Perfect. My sisters will wipe their memories. Where are you, exactly?”

  I eyed the line-up of wine bottles that were supposed to be our selections for tasting, six bottles that ranged from a dry chardonnay to a sweet dessert wine and a few different pinots and red blends in between. The gold label read Sass. “We’re at Sass Winery. It’s a small winery, in a warehouse overlooking vineyards. You have to go up a gravel road to get here and their only sign is an old oak barrel with their name on it.”

  “Okay, my sisters are on their way.” The line went dead and I slid my indestructible phone back into my jeans pocket.

  “I think,” Shawna said in a far-off voice, “that whatever the Hunters gave me to suppress my huldra had something to do with me being able to carry a child with Hunter DNA. They were trying to suppress my body’s nature to only birth females.” She set the cat onto a huge square plastic vat of wine. The cat walked back and forth under Shawna’s hand for pets, arching its spine with each pass.

  We all shot each other looks as though one of us could explain what the hell was going on with Shawna.

  “That would make sense,” Marcus said, nodding. “Wilds only give birth to females. Hunters can only be male. If they’re making hybrids, they’d need to come up with a way to bridge that gender gap. Suppressing the huldra probably wasn’t the goal as much as suppressing the female-only Wild genes.

  Yeah, what Marcus and Shawna were saying made absolute sense. But what shocked my sisters, aunts, and me, was the fact that Shawna was even saying such things—discussing her experience with the Hunters. It was as though fighting back today cracked open a scab and now she processed the pus flowing from the wound, wiped it away to reevaluate the damage.

  “Do you think I could be pregnant?” she asked calmly, gazing at the purring cat.

  Renee’s chin snapped up and she shook her head. “Let’s hope not. But either way, we won’t know for a few weeks. It’s too soon to tell.”

  “Do you remember them doing any other procedures to you, rather than inserting the IV?” Olivia asked.

  Shawna thought for a moment. “No. But there were times when I woke up from a drug-induced sleep and hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep. So I wasn’t coherent the whole time.”

  Renee, always the nurse, prodded, “Faline told us the substance in the IV was green. Do you remember anyone coming in with a syringe to put something else into the IV drip? Something that wasn’t green?” She turned to address the rest of us. “They could have given her a numbing agent via the drip and completed the procedure without her knowing.”

  Whether the “procedure” meant through her abdomen with a long needle or vaginally, I shivered at the thought.

  “When we leave here, I’ll find us an herbal market and pick up some black cohosh. It’s powerful stuff and can induce a miscarriage. Just in case.” Patricia, the acupuncturist, pulled her phone out to browse herbal shops within driving distance.

  And that’s how the next hour played out. Long stretches of silent minutes, followed by an uncomfortable truth spoken from Shawna’s trauma, followed by more silence, followed by someone’s attempt to fix it. How Celeste kept the two winery workers occupied in the back, I had no clue.

  Shawna was my partner sister—not partner as in the same sex relationship kind, but as in we were born at the same time on purpose so we’d have someone to help us raise our children. Huldra didn’t marry, for many reasons. Her health, both mental and physical, meant the world to me. And if talking helped her, I’d sit and listen for days on end, no matter how hard it hurt to know that while I was trying to build a Wild Women army, my sister had been enduring her own personal hell. I wished they’d taken me instead.

  She quickly shut up, though, when a black van full of succubi parked directly outside the open roll-up door to the warehouse. Eight succubi jumped from the van. Gravel crunched beneath their combat boots. They all wore black and each had some sort of snake tattoo on their bodies. Even if I couldn’t see it all under their black tank tops and tube tops, I knew it was there. It was the symbol of their Goddess.

  I didn’t have to tell them anything. Despite our teaming up only a week ago and having fought a battle together, they didn’t act like old friends. The blonde succubus with the thick braid and a snake tattoo weaving from the back of her neck and around her left ear seemed to notice Shawna for the first time and offered a lingering smile. Shawna smiled back.

  “Where’s the humans?” the blonde succubus asked my partner sister.

  Shawna lifted her hand from the cat and pointed to the short hallway beside the makeshift tasting area made up by one black countertop with bottles, crackers, and a stereo resting atop it. “Back there, with Celeste in the office. It’s the last door on your left, I think.”

  “Thanks,” the blonde said before ducking into the hallway.

  The others quickly went to work loading the bodies into the back of the van. They allowed Marcus to lend a hand and soon the rest of us joined in. Couldn’t let the ex-Hunter make us look bad, even if he did weigh enough in sheer muscle to make two of us.

  Once the bodies were loaded, a raven-haired succubus brought out a bucket of powder from one of the van’s side doors and a short-handled broom. She poured the powder onto every blood spot, waited a few minutes, and then swept the clumpy, red powder into the bucket.

  “What should we do about the stain?” I asked. Yeah, the substance of blood was gone, but traces of red remained.

  “We don’t usually work with blood,” the succubus responded as she heaved the filled and now cumbersome bucket to the van.

  Succubi may not deal with blood very often, but huldra most certainly had these days. I grabbed the open bottle of merlot we hadn’t gotten around to tasting yet and poured a little on each blood stain, letting the liquid splash and splatter the nearby areas.

  “Genius,” Olivia said as she walked to the counter and grabbed a stemmed glass. She held it out for me and I poured merlot into her glass.

  I shook my head with a laugh and went back to work.

  The blonde succubus reached her head around the corner to the hallway and eyed me making a wine mess. “Um, so this doesn’t fit with the story I gave them to remember.” She disappeared back down the hall and returned only minutes later. “Okay, the guys believe that you’d just started your tasting and the cat freaked out, saw a mouse or something, and accidentally knocked over a couple bottles of red wine. You guys helped them clean up the glass.”

  Within seconds of her hurried explanation, the owner and his adult son moseyed toward us without a care in the world, followed by Celeste, whose smirk filled me with questions. The blonde succubus must have gifted them with happy energy when she wiped their memories and gave them new ones. Did she also give Celeste a little energy hit? The owner didn’t seem to notice the blood stains a few of us carried on our clo
thing. He either assumed the stains were caused by spilled wine, which some were, or the blonde succubus had kept him from noticing somehow.

  “I am so sorry we were detained,” the older man said. He hurried to the tasting counter and began pouring full glasses of pinot noir as though it were a perfectly normal afternoon. “This is usually a favorite of guests.”

  Before the last glass sloshed with light red liquid, the succubi group were in their van and barreling down the gravel driveway. The winemakers behaved as if they’d not even seen the extra women. I wondered what would become of the Hunter bodies and made a mental note to ask Marie when I saw her at our upcoming meeting at the harpy complex.

  I took a sip of wine and decided this varietal was a favorite of mine too.

  Shawna held the cat in one arm and drank wine with the other. “It’s delicious!” she exclaimed, happiness filling her eyes in a way I’d yearned to see since she was taken.

  “I’m glad you like it.” The owner motioned to his son. “Grab some fresh oyster crackers for our friends here.”

  The son reached into a nearby cabinet and pulled out an unopened bag of little white circular crackers. I admired the tattoos covering both of his arms as he did so. He poured the crackers into the recently emptied—hey, I said I was hungry—wooden bowl and pushed the bowl toward me. Hint taken.

  Ready to go eat actual food, I finished my glass and expressed my thanks to the owner and his son for a delicious tasting. “How much do we owe you for the tastings?” I added.

  “Nothing. I appreciate you helping me clean up the place. We love that cat, she’s a great mouser, but sometimes she lets the hunt take over her mind.”

  I knew what that felt like.

  “Here,” the man said as he searched a shelf behind him. “Let me give you a gift, for your troubles.” He didn’t find what he was looking for, so he told his son to grab the magnum. Whatever that meant.

  The younger man returned with a 1.5-liter bottle of pinot noir. He handed it to his father, who handed it to me.

  “I appreciate it,” I said, feeling more than a little guilty that the winery owner was handing over a hundred-dollar bottle of wine to people who’d stained his cement floors with Hunter blood. I decided to send him a check in the mail for his troubles.

  I held the cool bottle and another thought pushed the guilt out with a swiftness. I wondered if Salem had any restaurants with bottle service. Another thought followed that one. I’d just promised Marie a favor, and knowing her, she’d call in a doozy at the worst possible time.

  Three

  Salem, Oregon did, in fact, have a restaurant with bottle service. Marcus and my coterie made quick work of the magnum-sized bottle of pinot noir. While finishing off the last drop of red deliciousness, we decided to head home after dinner. Yeah, we’d forfeit the amount we’d paid for our hotel rooms, but it was a small price to pay to avoid another unprepared Hunter run-in.

  Marcus wiped his mouth with the white cloth napkin and placed it on the empty plate in front of him. “We need to figure out how they knew where to find you.”

  I automatically looked at Shawna to gauge her reaction to the topic. Nothing. She took a bite of mashed potatoes and gave me a closed-mouth smile when she noticed I was staring.

  “You’d know better than us. You’ve spent more time with them,” I said.

  “I do have a couple ideas,” Marcus answered.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  Marcus looked around the table and then leaned in. “I don’t know a whole lot about the other complexes. I did a short trip with my father, before going to the police academy, and toured the complexes of the United States. But we only spent a day or two at each location, so I can’t tell you anything about their tactics or training.”

  “Then what can you tell us?” Celeste asked. She pulled lipstick from her purse and slowly applied the color like an expert—no mirror needed.

  “Our women don’t work outside the home,” Marcus started.

  I bristled at the term “our women,” and he noticed.

  Marcus grabbed my hand under the table and squeezed. His way of giving a tender apology without letting the coterie know. They accepted him for Shawna’s sake. Not for my sake. “Sorry. The women of Washington Hunter families don’t work outside the home. And the men usually take jobs that suit the brotherhood. But what if the Oregon Hunters don’t operate that way?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Celeste asked. She pushed her glass of water away from her. After a new coat of lipstick, smudging was not an option.

  “What better way to monitor the coming and going of out-of-town visitors than to pour wine at one of the many local wineries? Especially a popular one?”

  He had a point. The first winery we visited was huge. It sat atop a hill, overlooking rolling hills covered in vineyards. The open tasting room, complete with a fireplace, brown leather couches, and water stations, led to a terrace where people ate meals from the winery kitchen while taking in the spectacular view. A definite tourist stop. Hell, we’d made sure to stop there. The front desk woman at our hotel suggested it, said they’d just finished a multi-million-dollar remodel.

  Renee called the waiter to our table and asked for the check. He took a few plates and left to follow her request.

  The dark wood walls and floor-to-ceiling windows gave the restaurant the feel of fancy meets relaxed, if that was even a thing. Upside-down wine bottles filled with twinkle lights replaced chandeliers. Framed cork art decorated the walls.

  “You think we were served by a Hunter or a female from a Hunter family?” I asked. “Did any of you talk Wild speak at that place?” I canvassed my coterie.

  Wild speak wasn’t a scientific term, exactly. More like my own way of explaining the act of discussing topics that aren’t appropriate to be mentioned around humans. Stuff like back bark, and finger vines, and oh I don’t know, burning down the Hunter complex.

  I received a bunch of noes and head shakes. Someone must have said something without realizing.

  As though on cue, my phone rang.

  I didn’t want to look at it.

  “You going to get that?” Renee asked.

  Bossy pants.

  “It’s probably Marie,” I answered.

  “Then answer it. She may have hit a snag with the bodies or something.”

  I doubted it. Marie had a pretty tight handle on things, which was probably why she was calling.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket, and sure enough. I cringed and swiped the screen. The woman was going to hit on me, I just knew it. The more I had to talk to her, the more inevitable it was. She didn’t care that I’d made it clear I wasn’t interested or available. No wasn’t in her vocabulary. “Yes?”

  “You aren’t very good at hiding your excitement,” Marie responded.

  “Excitement?”

  “No one will know. You can admit it.”

  “Admit what?” I asked, knowing full well Marie was pulling me in like a fish to a worm-covered hook.

  “My voice. It calls to you. I assure you, my moans are better.”

  Ah, yes. Sexually free succubi leader. That’s Marie.

  My whole coterie overhead Marie, but only Celeste laughed. I covered the receiver. “Wait ’til she hits on you. Then tell me how funny it is.”

  “I hope she does,” Celeste quipped. Did not see that coming.

  I returned to my phone conversation. “What can I do for you?” I waited for her to make a joke, or maybe not a joke, about doing me.

  “You owe me a favor,” she said, which happened to be the other response I was expecting.

  “For earlier today?” I asked.

  The waiter handed Renee the check and she promptly gave him the total in cash.

  “And for the help we gave your coterie last week,” she answered.

  “No, no, no. We’ve already discussed this. All of us came to an agreement.” I looked around the restaurant and then lowered my voice. Marcus’s theory made too much se
nse for me to ignore. “They’ll be expecting us to hit the Hunter complex in your area next. Probably why they were so quick to catch up to us today. Thought we were here to attack them. The east coast complex won’t be expecting us. We go there next. We rest and regroup. Just like we planned.”

  The waiter gave Renee the receipt and removed an armful of dirty dishes from the table. My coterie pushed their chairs out and stood. I followed them out of the restaurant and toward the minivan we’d rented. Hunters would never look for a group of Wilds in a minivan. Also, that’s all Enterprise had on short notice.

  “Come, stay at my home tonight,” Marie offered. “We can discuss it here.”

  I waited for Renee to unlock the van. “Absolutely not,” I said. “After what happened this afternoon, we’re heading home.”

  I sat on one side of Marcus, on the middle row bench, and Shawna sat on the other side. So, she was feeling better, but still needed Marcus. Good to know. This last week I’d noticed myself taking Shawna’s emotional temperature on a nearly constant basis. I hoped she didn’t notice. I couldn’t begrudge her needing him. He was the first person she’d seen when we came to, her rescuer in her eyes. And if it made her feel more secure to have him close by, I was good with that.

  “Put me on speaker,” Marie insisted. And I did. Not because she told me to, but because my coterie deserved to have their say.

  “Welcome to Portland, Oregon, huldra coterie,” Marie announced like she hadn’t just demanded a return favor.

  “Thank you for sending help,” Patricia responded. “We owe you.”

  I gave her a hard head shake. Not the smartest thing to say to a succubus.

  “I was hoping you’d feel that way,” Marie said, a smile in her voice. “I realize we had a plan, and I am still willing to continue with it, but in the meantime I need your help here.”

  “What kind of help?” Olivia asked.

  “I’d prefer not to discuss it over the phone,” Marie responded. “In person is better.”