The three harpies stared at me before turning to address one another with only their eyes. After a few moments, Lapis and Salis gave a short nod to their sisters and Lapis gave their answer to the rest of us. “Either Lapis or I will stay back during that attack. Eonza has already sacrificed so much for our flock by bringing forth this little one. She deserves to be there to rescue our mother.”
“Okay,” I said, glad to have that tiny piece planned out. I decided since we were at it, I may as well plan a little more. “I was thinking we’d strategize and train for a week. Then go north to rescue the rusalki sisters in captivity. We can save the North Carolina complex for last.”
Eonza cocked her head. “Save my mother for last?”
Good point. But I knew she’d come around when I explained my reasoning. I leaned back onto the yellow fridge. “I’ve made mention that the Hunters are involved with human trafficking.” I waited for signs the others in the room were following before I continued. “I’ve recently learned that they’re funneling their victims through their North Carolina complex. I realize on the east coast we’re dealing with older, more established brotherhoods, but the North Carolina complex has that plus visiting Hunters from other compounds. The Hunter I fought back in Oregon mentioned the complex being too full. I assume he meant it was full with victims they were trafficking, but it stands to reason they’ve also inherited a few Hunters from other states to help keep order and act as guards and protection from the outside until they get the women transported out of the country.”
“So you’re saying,” Aleksander said, showing a hint of support with his slow nod and thoughtful eyes, “we won’t be simply rescuing one Wild Woman from that complex, we’ll be rescuing many human women as well?”
“Yes,” I said. “Human women who are more than likely very close to eighteen, and the newer victims could still be heavily sedated. They’ll be scared and lethargic. We’ll need your energy skills as well as the succubi’s.”
“It would be an honor,” he said, giving a slight bow, reminding me his real age did not match his appearance.
His show of chivalry went unnoticed by the others in the kitchen. I didn’t think he cared.
“I can connect with a few guys in the brotherhood in Maine and we can start planning from there,” Marcus offered. “Get a little information first.”
I shook my head. “You’ve been outed, babe. That’s not a trick you can pull from your hat anymore. The Hunters helped land you that job; I’m sure they’ve already taken it away. I bet your work has already left a message on your home answering machine telling you they’ve let you go with some poor excuse.”
Marcus rubbed the stubble on his chin. “True. I should call my messages and check. Then I’ll see if Rod has any connections. I don’t think they know about him yet.”
“So then, are we all in agreement that we visit the Maine complex first, and then the North Carolina one?” I asked.
Various forms of agreement met my question.
“Wait,” Oliva chimed in. “When is your flock’s next check-in?”
“We did it shortly before the rusalka came and told us to head to Oregon,” Eonza answered. I swear her voice was lighter and happier, which tripped me out, if I had to be honest. “So not for another three weeks.”
“How does that work with one of you having to stay at the nest with the egg?” Renee asked.
The harpies looked at one another, clearly realizing this difficulty for the first time. “I suppose,” Lapis answered for her group, “we will have to have taken the complex down before then. Because sending word that one of us is nesting would cause the Hunters to possibly move the date up or change the rules altogether.”
Something else we had to take into consideration. Another timeline we had to adhere to.
No one spoke for a breath or two, as though each person waited for the next roadblock to be announced on our path to freedom. Thankfully, we had the succubi along with the foreign Wilds this time. But without the mermaids, and missing a harpy member, we weren’t operating under ideal conditions.
Aleksander straightened his blazer over his button-up shirt and exhaled loudly. “Well, now that that’s taken care of, how about we go see what we can feel in that tunnel of yours?”
“I’ll be right there,” Marie said through the phone. She hung up.
Ready or not, it was time to go meet some possibly pissed off Wild ghosts.
Marie brought two of her succubus sisters with her and left the rest back at their temporary home to take a breather and enjoy the peace of their nature-filled surroundings. One of the two happened to be Heather, which meant her incubus mate, Mason, tagged along as well. Fine by me. The more energy workers we had, the better.
Although Celeste and the succubi leader were inseparable from the moment she walked into the house, once the brick wall door to the tunnel opened to expose its hidden contents, the succubus became all about business. Celeste hung back with me and our coterie, while Marcus, the two incubi, and the succubi forged ahead into darkness.
“The sadness here is palpable,” Marie said quietly.
Aleksander grunted in agreement.
The tunnel felt more cramped than before as supernaturals crowded under the stone curved roof and between the narrow carved-out walls. I crept along behind the succubi and incubi, waiting for the scent of Gabrielle to smack me in the face again.
“Can you feel the difference between sadness and death?” I asked to whichever energy-sensing being cared to answer.
“Yes,” a succubus said, the very serious blonde Wild with tattoos and a half shaved head. “Death doesn’t feel sad, or of any emotion, really. At least not in and of itself. Death feels either entirely heavy or entirely weightless, depending on the circumstances surrounding the passing of the person. Emotions are layered.”
“When we say sadness,” Marie picked up where her sister left off, “picture a whole circle of swirling unmet desires and hopeless thoughts, with sadness being the outer shell. It’s something like that. Much more layered than the word would suggest.”
“Perfect way of explaining it,” Aleksander complimented.
The succubus only nodded.
We walked for another ten minutes in silence, waiting for another comment on the energy or a new revelation.
And then it hit me. That scent. The salty sea smell of my fallen friend who ended up being a traitor to our kind. The mermaid who touched my life during a time when I was waking up to the reality that nothing was as it seemed; the mermaid who helped usher in my new skills and the old ways of accepting them.
“She’s here,” I whispered, stunned into stillness. “Gabrielle is here.”
“There is death here, though it’s old and faded,” Aleksander started, turning to me with a raised eyebrow. “And also life, which feels more recent. But there are no spirits present.”
“I disagree,” Marie countered. Her sister grunted in approval. “No offense, Aleksander, but I’m not sure you’ve felt spirits other than those of incubi and humans.”
Aleksander did not confirm or deny her assumption of him.
Marie went on, “There are certainly spirits here, but only wisps of their energy, as though they aren’t stuck here, as though they come and go as they please, which makes me feel like they’re older spirits, beings who passed some time ago. But I do not feel your mermaid spirit.”
Marie closed her eyes and concentrated. “I think I am feeling what you’re smelling, though.” She turned toward the darkness ahead, with eyes still closed, and opened her arms wide. I assumed she was inviting the energy in, opening herself to feel it more deeply.
The echo of a pebble hitting the stone wall maybe a quarter of a mile deeper into the tunnel made us all jump. Marie twisted and ran to me. She gripped my upper arms and stared into my eyes. “I know this energy. I’ve felt it before,” she said with a serious and somewhat shaky voice.
“What is it?” I asked, my mind blurring through possible superna
turals she could have encountered that I’d only heard about in my mother’s stories or popular folklore.
“The mermaids,” Marie said, turning to peer down the tunnel and then back at me. “The mermaids are back.”
Five
“Really?” I asked the succubi leader in shock.
“Yes, living mermaids are here, underground, in this tunnel,” Marie confirmed.
I peered at Marcus for all of a second before I let go of his hand and ran toward the scent, toward the mermaids. I couldn’t be sure if I sped toward friends or foes, toward the Wilds who sold us out to the Hunters or the ones who had no idea their sisters were double-crossing us. And I didn’t care. I pushed my boots into the stone and dirt, propelling myself forward. I heard the people I’d left behind shout my name, urging me to come back. But their requests only partially registered. And now I had to run even faster, in case the mermaids heard their shouts and tried to get away.
I had questions for them. I needed answers. They couldn’t get away. Not again.
I followed the bend in the tunnel to the right, and soon after, to the left, until just as my legs couldn’t carry me fast enough, they also couldn’t stop quickly enough. I nearly pummeled into a small group of mermaids like a bowling ball into pins.
I caught myself before knocking over a red-haired Wild Woman. She instinctively held her arms out to protect herself from the incoming huldra. Recognition registered in her expression and the mermaid shifted her posture from preparing to push me off her to pulling me into an embrace.
“Faline!” Sarah exclaimed, squeezing me tightly before releasing me enough to look at my face. “It’s so good to see you!”
Two smiling mermaids stood beside her, though none requested a hug from me. I didn’t remember their names and I doubted they remembered me much other than the short time we trained together on my coterie’s property. We hadn’t even attacked the Washington Hunters’ complex together; the mermaids insisted on accessing the complex through a creek, didn’t show up until the very end of the fighting, and then lit the place on fire and hightailed it out of there.
We hadn’t heard from them since the celebration ritual the night of the attack, and some assumed the worst, that the mermaids had abandoned us to our fate. The mermaids gained their freedom from American Hunters long ago, living off-grid on a remote island off the coast of California. Until the Hunters attacked their island. Still, it made sense that they’d be able to swim to a new land and live in peace and freedom, off the grid once again. And with the revelation from the foreign Wild Women about our continent being the last occupied by oppressive Hunters, it made sense that the mermaids would find a new place to call home.
“Where’s Elaine?” I asked, secretly sniffing the air to detect any other mermaids nearby, just in case the Wilds I’d nearly run into weren’t as friendly as they appeared.
Elaine was Sarah’s partner. I’d met them during my short time on their island, before I attended their beach gathering where an elder explained my role in all of this, and I learned the truth of Wild Women for the first time since my mother’s whispered bedtime stories when I was a child. Before the Hunters landed from helicopters onto the mermaid’s island, wearing night vision goggles in a surprise attack. Before my first Hunter kill that night.
Together, Elaine and Sarah raised a little girl. Their little family lived in a room that shared a bathroom with the room I’d been shown to in the mermaid shoal’s sprawling home. We’d met when we both tried to use the adjoining restroom at the same time. They’d asked to touch my bark and offered a feel of their scales in return. Despite my mistrust for mermaids as a whole, I held a fondness for Elaine and Sarah; the two who accepted my bark with awe rather than fright at a time when even I feared my inner huldra.
Sarah peered back down the tunnel before answering. “Ah, Elaine had to stay back at the house with our daughter. This isn’t the safest place for a little one.”
I rested my hands on my hips and looked around at the stone walls. “What is this place to you?” I asked. Maybe not the most eloquent of questions, but I figured she’d know what I was getting at.
“We’ve come back to rescue our sisters,” Sarah explained with a smile and an upturn in her voice, almost as though she were sharing good news with me.
Her good news confused me. “Your sisters were captured?” The only captors I could think of were of the Hunter persuasion. Why would they need an old bootlegging tunnel extending from a basement to an old carriage house to rescue their sisters from a Hunter complex?
“No,” she said with an even bigger smile as though she was about to gift me with a surprise. "For you! For all the American Wild Women.”
I mulled over her words and her smile dropped. I hadn’t given the response she’d hoped for. We could travel just as well on land. Why would we need a tunnel? Was she proposing we leave the states? Hide away like bottles of illegal alcohol in a car or van to a ship dock or airport?
“I’m confused,” I admitted.
Her smile returned. “Oh, well, see, we did some research and learned that this tunnel used to be for bootleggers to transport moonshine.”
“I know that part,” I said. “I’m staying in the house where the moonshine was made.” I didn’t tell her who the house belonged to.
“Well,” Sarah went on. “We spent time away and some of us just didn’t feel right leaving our Wild Women sisters behind. We came up with a plan to sneak you through the tunnel and to a ship that’ll take you to Greece. It’s a beautiful area where Hunters don’t have complexes and it’s where we’ve started calling home. One of the islands off of Greece.”
I nodded that I understood, but her plan still made no sense. “Why sneak through tunnels when we can drive around? We flew from the west coast to here, got out of the airport, and drove to the house we’re staying in. No one stopped us.”
Wait. How did they know we were all in the area? We’d just arrived.
“Just because you weren’t stopped doesn’t mean you weren’t noticed,” she responded. “It doesn’t mean your presence hasn’t already been reported to Hunter authorities. Our plan will keep anyone from knowing you’ve left.”
“Have we been reported to the authorities?” I asked assertively.
Her demeanor changed from inviting to defensive. “How would we know?”
“That’s a great question,” I said. “How did you know all the American Wilds were in the area?” For a split moment I entertained the idea that a rusalka told them in a dream or something. But then I remembered the rusalki claimed they had no contact with the mermaids, and I believed them a hell of a whole lot more than I believed the mermaids.
Sarah peered at the wall before meeting my gaze. “We’ve been tracking you,” she said quietly.
I rolled my head back, closed my eyes, took a cleansing breath, and rolled it forward to stare her in the eye. “For how long?”
“Mermaids were sent to your coterie’s home as well as the succubi’s home,” Sarah explained. “They reported back that both were empty, called us from homes left unlocked and uncared for. We figured we were too late, but we decided to see if maybe we could find you at an east coast Wild Woman’s home. Since the Oregon Hunter complex was leveled to the ground, we hoped you’d just moved eastward. Especially seeing as the east coast complexes are fully intact. First we tried the harpies, deciding to leave the place of our sister’s death as a last resort. When the harpy home was empty too, we thought to leave, but then one of us spotted a van full of Wild Women, so we figured you all were hiding out here somewhere the Hunters wouldn’t find you.”
“Okay?”
She went on, “We moved quickly, searching through historical archives until we learned about this tunnel and decided to come down and check it out. And here we are.” She paused and tried to gauge my blank expression. “It’s not like we made this tunnel plan on the fly. Before we even returned to the states we came up with a few possible scenarios depending on where we
found you.”
Her plan didn’t make the best sense, but part of me wanted to thank her for the thought. Another part wanted to ask her about Gabrielle’s double-crossing and how the shoal felt about it after they’d had some time to let it sink in.
“Thank you for the thought,” I started, thinking deeply on what to say next and how to phrase it.
Marcus and the others made their way around the bend in the tunnel and stood behind me. My coterie had to have heard the mermaid’s plan.
“But we aren’t going to run away from the only home we’ve ever known,” I finished.
Sarah’s face contorted like I’d just said the dumbest thing ever. “What kind of home is this that you have to hide in the homes of others?”
“That’s only temporary,” Shawna backed me up. She walked to stand beside me and link her arm in mine. “It’s a means to an end.”
I thought about the old grandmother trees the rusalka had told me about when she’d taught me to connect to the roots of plants to gain poison and energy from them. I thought of the park where she revealed the old ways my ancestors died, how they’d cross over from a huldra existence to that of a tree, opening the trunk to house them for eternity. I’d gone over this in my mind multiple times since then, puzzling the unsaid pieces together.
The huldra were protectoresses of the forests. If my ancestors encased themselves in trees, then really the huldra were protecting their ancestors, the wisdom of those women who’d gone before them, seeing as they could connect to the tree’s roots to communicate with the tree and gain her wisdom. They had been protecting more than the forest. They had protected their way of life, their sacred circles of life and death and rebirth. The rusalka said I wouldn’t find such trees in the states, but something in me said she was wrong. Whether we knew about it or not, and despite its difficulties and dark moments, our history was on this continent. Our home was here. Our grandmothers were buried here. We would not leave and allow the Hunters to win again.
Wild Women Collection Page 54
