Avalon Expandable Heart: The Wild Heart Series

by Shantelle McKinnon

  “It would make it worth way more,” Sam considers as he combs a hand through his hair.

  “Most popular movie of the decade for the ladies, Sammie boy,” Nat slaps him on the shoulder.

  “Huh, you should do the TP fire run with Sam for it,” Pop suggests with a chuckle. I turn my head to give Pop a look.

  “What?” He shrugs, “It’ll light up his best assets.”

  “Yes!” Nat laughs.

  “What is a TP fire run?” Sam asks. I note the ripple of wariness. Finally.

  “You stick toilet paper in your bum crack and light it on fire,” Chops says. D gasps. Everyone else’s faces are adorned with confused expressions not having understood a word Chops said, they turn those expectant faces on me.

  “It’s a… catalytic... running race,” I nod. “Of sorts.”

  Noah’s breath fans across my neck as he leans forward. “A catalytic running race?” He whispers in amusement. I shiver.

  Sam shrugs, “Okay, if it spotlights my best features.” He sounds half disappointed, not seeing the scope of the word catalytic.

  “Why doesn’t he run all the time?” D asks, bringing us back to the current conundrum. Chops shakes his head, from next to D, indicating he didn’t pick up anything either, although, he could have been a bit distracted while having an actual conversation with someone other than us, that can understand him.

  “I didn’t make any sense of it,” Harry said, “It’s like he just decided it when he got in the barriers at the start of his… obstinance and then it shoots dead south from there.”

  “Pretty sure he was off getting an acting degree in his spare time instead of training,” Nat snorts at the dead playing taking place yet again on the screen.

  “Maybe it’s his neighbours in the gates?” Flea tilts his head. We go back to each race and note which horses including colour and gender are next to him when he starts and doesn’t. No pattern. No luck either with track conditions or tracks themselves or the gate allocation.

  “It looks like we will have to visit Titan Stables after all,” Pop says with no hidden amount of enthusiasm.

  Noah

  There are things I’ve only just started to get used to; the feel of Avalon against me, the enjoyment and thrill of letting my fingers trail over her skin, kissing her, talking… but being squashed between Nathan and Sam with Chops leaning over us all, breath whistling in and out through the gaps in his cheek, is not going down as pleasantly as the previously listed. It’s a constant fight to stay put, to concentrate on the clips playing on Av’s phone all based on the theme of graverobbing. Never in a zillion years would I have ever thought I’d be watching this. The one we are currently riveted to is a gravedigging competition in Slovakia. Sam and I exchange a millisecond glance as Nathan’s competitive streak leaps out through his pen as he scribbles a time and the words before it need to beat.

  Sam has been overseeing the elicitation of the exact whereabouts of Harry’s family’s graves by ‘not exactly asking’. He came out of the house about fifteen minutes before with a sheepish look on his face. “I kinda got it.” Was all he said before settling in for the deluge of coffins and dirt.

  Even the viewing theme can’t stop the words from earlier replaying. The words Nathan uttered when he had caught me alone, after the vet had left and Av was busy with Outlaw. They still reverberate around my skull, as I try to grasp their hidden meaning. Struggle to glean if they were just an elaborate plan to scare me off.

  “I’ll leave you alone if you promise me something,” he’d begun, his shirtless body leaning against the gate with an air of complete familiarity. Like he belonged there. I had almost replied that I didn’t want him to exactly leave me alone, not with Av, not until I was confident of my reactions anyway. I needed him to be a presence my body was aware of. Wary of. But I didn’t, I just narrowed my eyes not sure if it was a trap of some sort and if it were, he should expect me to fight my way out of it.

  His blue eyes were steely, exactly like Avalon’s when she means nothing but business; dead serious. The stillness of his body was more telling than those eyes, and I had started to feel my heart rate slow in anticipation of … violence. I had half prayed it wouldn’t come to that because the fruit stairway thing was unexpectedly ruthless, and I was and still am physically drained. But on the other hand, maybe it would be good to get it over with. But after the hospital night, I thought, perhaps that we were past that. I doubt I will ever be sure.

  “Promise me,” he held my gaze, his massive biceps bunched as he crossed his arms, “that the moment you fear her, the second you realise that sensation unfurling and coiling tight around your spine is fear, that you turn and walk away. Don’t run, walk. Promise me that you won’t let her see it on your face, that you will go before she gets a chance. Then it’s all over. No nothing. And everything you have done, been and seen with her is to be taken with you to the grave. Not one word to anyone, ever.”

  I had shaken my head in confusion and a wry chuckle escaped my lips. Fear her? There’s no way in hell that would ever happen. My eyes had sort her form out, tiny against Outlaw as she hugged him after playing some strange game with his lips. She had displayed no awareness of this conversation. It was all Nathan. Nice try.

  So, I nodded. I’ll play. Nathan had held out his hand, I took it and had ground my teeth at the hold he gripped me with before returning the vice crunch back at him and the accompanying steely gaze. “If I see it, and believe me, of all people, I will know the second it happens and you don’t follow through with what I just said, I will kill you.” He had said it simply and I knew that it was a truth.

  “Done,” I had said, knowing that it would never happen, and I had let go of his hand, almost flippantly. His eyes narrowed for a second before he allowed relaxation to enter his body for the first time ever in my presence. There was something else there now, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It still pulled at me.

  “I also want to add something,” another voice had joined our small party. Pop. Nathan walked back and allowed the older man to step in front of me. I had expected him to smile or make a joke, but those grey eyes were as weighty as Nathan’s had been. It threw me off kilter even more than Avalon’s whiplash change of directions have in the past.

  “I want you to promise the same thing if you can’t see the good in her anymore; her actions or intentions, anything. I want you to walk away and not breathe a word… or… he will kill you.” He jerked a thumb in Nathan’s direction. He grinned wolfishly.

  My hands involuntarily raised like I was asking what the hell was this all about. I was but… “I don’t understand,” My voice had sounded raspy with a very sharp edge. I attempted to explain. “I’m the one trying to be good here, she is good. And, let me assure you,” my eyes flick to Nathan’s, “I can’t imagine any scenario where I’d fear her, ever! Fear for her, hell yes, but not fear her.”

  Pop had tilted his head on the side, very Avalon like, and said, “I see it, that you’re trying,” a small smile touched one corner of his mouth. “But if there comes a time when your good is different to her good…” he trailed off; his meaning clear as it hung in the air between us like a hawk before diving into my brain. For an instant, I was transported back to the night of the bonfire when I first talked, when Avalon had talked about monsters and the possibility of having a good bad monster. She often quotes her Nan but maybe that one came straight from this horse’s mouth; it makes sense.

  I was lost at the rest though, I still am, but I had reached out and shook Pop’s hand hoping it was just an initiation type of thing. I’d heard around the Clubhouse brothers and fathers do this stuff to prospective boyfriends. I had no desire to talk anymore, it felt like I had expended my oral quota in those strenuous seconds. “Done.”

  And it was, Nathan had been different from that moment. Accepting. Almost friendly. It was bizarre how his presence no longer radiated hostility. I gaze out to the dark paddock to where a tiny figure lies belly down on h
er now content bull, just visible in a square of yellow light from the house, sound asleep. An arm and leg draped over his side; the book dropped on the ground a good while ago. My brain struggles with even the minutest possibilities that I would fear her. Maybe, they didn’t know I’d watched her cut that guys fingers off, or that she had sliced me with her knife. Maybe he meant something like when she rode Amber on to my car. Perhaps, they had no inkling who I am.

  My stomach turns warm at the memory of my fingers meandering over her soft skin as I struggle to forget the whole thing, but Nathan’s words from in the kitchen resurface, “I know my sister.” My eyes slide to the right to take him in. It’s still there, that new thing. He reminds me of a wolf on a documentary my mother had turned off in tears. The wolf had been lounging on a rock, after playing with a member of its pack when a deer had moved into its vision. It remained calm because it knew what it was, what it was capable of. That it would be the victor. When it launched into savage motion my mother had gasped and turned the TV off. There’s this knowledge that something lies under his skin, closer to the surface than probably anyone else I’ve ever met and maybe, to an extent, it highlights that that something is present in Avalon too. Am I scared of it? Nope. Is he?

  I seriously doubt there is much that scares him, and the way Av loves him, the way they are when together, I doubt there has ever been anything between them of that sorts. Maybe, it happened to him? That would be the better explanation and he would never want anything to hurt Avalon.

  “It’s a twenty-year prison sentence,” Sam bites out, knocking me with a hand, urging me to speak up about it too. Little does he know I was just facing that.

  “Up to,” Nathan drawls. “Calm your farm, we’ve got this.”

  “But,” Sam leans back. “Is it really –”

  “—don’t say worth it,” Nathan interjects, turning to him. “And never let her hear you say that.”

  Sam blows out a long breath, I hide a smile wishing he had been privy to the Grim Reaper at work in the hospital, not the naked Av bit, but everything else. He maybe would realise just what magnitude of these human vortexes we had let into our lives. I try to blink away the exhaustion tingling at the end of my nerves.

  “So what way are we going to go?” Sam decides to change the subject and prove he is in, all at once.

  Nathan shrugs his huge shoulders. “I’m comfortable with either the Forensic evidence required… or the zombie virus,” he stretches, and it seems to invigorate his body. I’m almost envious. “I guess it depends on once we scout it out and whether we prefer day or night and whether we can get the props and words down pat enough.”

  “I prefer the zombie outbreak. Moaning and chasing people suits me way better than learning and actually rehearsing Cold Case lines to a live person, that could, again, put me away for twenty years,” Sam groans at the thought of jail time or maybe the practising, though I seriously doubt we will have to do anything but dig once Av and Nat are immersed in their roles. “I’m way too pretty for prison. Twenty years…” he moans.

  “Up to,” Nathan drawls yet again, this time rolling his eyes in the exact manner as Av.

  “What if they shoot first when they see a zombie?” I ask Sam.

  “Well, that would be better than twenty years in jail getting men hitting obsessively on my squat perfected butt,” Sam reveals his true fear.

  “Av had an idea that if you go riding for a good while first, you wouldn’t feel it. Get being someone’s bitch over with straight up,” I try not to smile at the horror in his eyes.

  “You really are fucked up,” Sam half gapes at me.

  “Did you complain while riding or something?” Nathan laughs.

  I glance at my watch, wishing I had the little minx next to me, even talking about that again. “It’s midnight,” I say quietly, the time we designated to go to the cemetery. Please let this be a quick drive by.

  Nathan sighs and rubs a hand through his hair, his eyes finally searching for his partner in crime in the dark. Not once has he searched for her form since she’s been with Frank, any other time, his eyes flick in her direction every few minutes. I notice that Nathan is much easier to read than Avalon in certain situations and have vowed to watch him more closely. He says nothing to us but shifts from the chair to the edge of the verandah. He sighs again. “Frank,” he calls softly, “bring her here, old man.”

  A white blob elevates in the darkness and then lowers with a huff we can all hear. Even I’m sure of what that huff means after the tantrum and wreckage he caused when she didn’t come to him fast enough after we’d finish watching Sparkly Cupcake’s nightmare footage. I’m positive that the odds of him giving her up are slim to none. I wouldn’t. Although, there’s a massive part of me that wants to attempt her retrieval… skip the grave scouting and reenact the hospital bed scene. I close my eyes remembering the touch of her trailing fingers over my abs.

  “How are we going to get her?” Sam asks, standing beside Nathan now to peer out into the gloom. I’m absolutely taken aback that I can stand to be on the same planet with Sam now and not want to turn his face into a smashed crab. It minutely helps that Av explained the whole story I had stalked into today and that Sam thinks she’s a total germ mega-factory. Seth, on the other hand…

  “She has a big day tomorrow, we’ll leave her sleeping,” his words are raspy like they are being pushed through gritted teeth. I smile. It’s a nice reminder that Nathan is scared of something.

  PILOT LIGHTS

  Avalon

  Awareness bleeds through my body from the points where I’m prickly and sticky with uncomfortable sweat. That’s pretty much everywhere, but mainly my entire front half that is plastered along the living furnace of Frank’s back and sides. My tongue feels like someone replaced it with a fat, hairy witchetty grub; it’s swollen and has more hair glued to it than the beard I ‘rescued’ Noah with. Teaches me to sleep with it open, probably drooling, dreaming of Noah’s back.

  I go to push up only to find I’m weighted down from above. Two bodies lie over me: one curled up half on my butt, half on Frank and the other draped over my back mimicking my position on Frank. Alby and Mangles move the second after I do, instantly ready to play. They bound off Frank after a cursory lick at my face and a pretend throw, I’m free to push up from Frank’s back which causes him to swing his large head around, I reach out and stroke it, “Sorry boy, that book was so boring I fell asleep. I’ll buy us a new one tomorrow.” It doesn’t come out very comprehensible due to my hairy grub mouth but as always, he’s happy with the gist it. The dogs have sprinted off somewhere.

  My watch illuminates the time as I raise my hand to rub my eyes; 2.43am. We were going to go scout the graves at midnight, so I’m guessing Frank didn’t want to give me up when the guys called out, or they just didn’t go. I half hope that’s the case for two reasons; I don’t miss out on the fun with Nat being here, and if Noah stayed, I can snuggle up to him, after I wash my mouth out, of course. Damn Sam for illuminating my hygiene practices… or apparent lack thereof. I hope Sam and Daryl never meet.

  Slipping from Frank’s back I relish the absolute lack of pain from my torso, I cuddle his big head, “You, Sir Frankenstein Colossal, are the best rib medicine in the world! I love you so, so much!” I squidgey his face. It could have been the dogs doing massaging circles on me too, but Frank doesn’t need to consider that. Frank sends his slimy tongue up the length of my arm, neck and head before gently head butting me. I shrug, giving up the whole notion of keeping myself free from animal donations of affection. Daryl says I should definitely never get sick with the amount of stuff that’s been introduced to my skin and that I should share my gift by donating my blood for those who can’t handle anything, Dad, of course, stares him down until he trails off and goes red. Those times are great because he tries to cook something mouthwateringly scrumptious to get back into Dad’s good books. I ponder on what they had for dinner last night for a good moment. I miss them all so much.r />
  I feel for my phone, wanting to answer Seth’s texts and to alert him about us doing the bull down the main street today. I come up empty; I must have left it inside. Yawning, I stretch while I debate that if I don’t see Noah’s car out front whether I should either grab the dogs and sleep in my bed or to find Amber and curl up in the stable. I need to get a few more hours in as I can’t resemble fresh roadkill on the news I plan to grace.

  The dogs chase things in the dark while we make our way up the paddock. Frank’s bulk ambles along behind me. Just before I see the glint of the gate, my previous question is answered as I hear the familiar, low rumble of Noah’s engine in the distance. There’s no accompanying crunch of gravel, so I search the length of the road and manage to detect the dim blur of park lights gliding unhurriedly to the front gate. Alby and Mangles slink around my legs emitting twin growls, I reach down to sooth the raised hair bristling along their spines, “It’s all right, kids, it’s just our two-legged beasts returning home. Maybe they bought you home a yummy leg or rib bone!”

  I head to the trough to at least attempt to rid my mouth of hair and my cheeks from bull and dog lick. The water is deliciously cool as I splash it over my face, neck and rinse out my mouth. The temperature here is a different heat than at home, I struggle with the temptation of immersing myself in the trough. Nat and I have often filled up wheelbarrows and slept in them when the heat got to us, once we tried to make a movie night of it like that place on the Gold Coast we saw on some ads. Jordan even got in on it and rigged up this rocking thing, I had to turn it off after a while as I felt seasick. Daryl was happy though; he has a thing about using the air con too much so actually provided us with popcorn. He reckons air-cons de-acclimatises us, therefore, creating workers that don’t work to their full potential. Please, Daz, whatever. Nat and I reckon he’s got all the ducts somehow diverted to his room on the sly.