Eonza cocked her head slightly and narrowed her eyes. Not being rude, just trying to gauge the meaning of my question. Huh, the fact that I knew that much meant I’d picked up a little knowledge about this flock.
“A rusalka appeared beside our pool as soon as the sun set,” Eonza began. “She told us the succubi galere had been detained by the Hunters and the huldra would need help retrieving them. We flew through the night and day to reach you. Before we reached the apartment complex, we were told to adjust course to this location.”
I cleared my throat as my eyes filled with tears. The support from a known Wild group hit me in the heart and filled me with a deep gratitude from out of nowhere. I thought better of asking if I could give her a hug—when they’d stayed at our common house I’d noticed the harpies weren’t much for physical contact. They just dropped everything to come help us, to come help the succubi, to assist their fellow Wild Women. I hadn’t been giving these women enough credit, but that was changing now.
“We really appreciate you coming. I mean that,” I said with as much inflection as I felt, which was a lot.
“We are tired,” Lapis announced. Her square shoulders released their flex and bent forward.
“And hungry,” the third harpy, Salis, said as she turned to view the kitchen.
“By all means,” I said, motioning to the refrigerator. “There’s a few condiments and sandwich fixings in the fridge and also some non-perishables in the cabinet, but whatever is there you can take.”
The three harpies wasted no time in raiding the fridge and cabinets. Abigale cleared the laptops from the dining table, giving the harpies a place to sit and set their food. Harpies did not eat like birds. The women shoveled cold cuts and cheddar cheese slices into their mouths—a deconstructed sandwich.
“I wonder how many calories it took them to fly all the way here?” Renee, ever the nurse, asked. “How many calories they’ll need to consume to make up for that.”
“It took us over thirty-five hours to travel here from our home in North Carolina,” Eonza said between bites of meat and cheese. “And that is not including rest stops.”
Marcus said, “Wow,” on a breath and the three faces, full of food, jerked to peer at him sitting on a chair pushed to the far corner of the living room.
They had to have seen him when they came in, but now they watched him as though they’d just noticed his presence.
“I see the Hunter still resides with the huldra,” Lapis said, returning to her meal. Her sisters resumed eating, too.
The tone of her statement didn’t request an answer.
Eonza answered her sister anyway. “I am not interested in mating with a Hunter, but I would like to discuss a possible mating agreement with the incubus.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, trying not to laugh at the harpy’s insistence on getting pregnant. Before she’d left my house after we’d rescued Shawna, she’d assured me she’d wait to conceive a little harpy until after the Hunter complexes, all of them in the United States, were destroyed.
Eonza looked up at me. “Any will do. I’m not particular.”
Her sister Lapis added, “She’s volunteered to make the sacrifice for us. She has every right to decide who she will mate with. And if we can form an alliance through this, it will be more beneficial for our flock.”
My coterie watched for my response. Celeste suppressed a laugh.
I had so many questions, but one kept pushing its way to the front. “Why the incubi, though?”
Lapis fielded this one. “We are small among the Wild Women groups,” she started. “Our daughters will need any advantages we can bestow upon them. To have the protection and possibly the abilities of an incubus only seems logical. Our ancestors were logical in choosing with whom they mated. We should be as well.”
I couldn’t fault them there. But a small part of me broke for their logic. They may not have realized it, but they were forming a back-up plan, in case the Wilds weren’t successful and their small group needed protection. I wondered if this had anything to do with the weak state we’d recently found ourselves in. Would it become a situation of each Wild group for themselves, as it had in the past?
That one strategy of theirs brought forth the tornado of self-doubt I’d been trying to hold back through research and creating new plans. Plain and simple, I wasn’t adequate for the job. And the harpies, the most direct Wilds of the bunch, knew it.
I glanced to Marcus. Is that why he was considering being changed to an incubus, to be able to better protect me because I was too weak and unable to protect myself and my coterie? Did he want Aleksander to change him because of me? Maybe his explanation to be changed so that Aleksander will no longer pursue me held less water than I’d thought. No way was I going to let him go through such an unknown thing because of my inadequacies. First though, I needed to blow the Aleksander-wants-me-as-his-mate excuse out of the water.
“Eonza,” I said, still looking at Marcus. “I happen to have the incubi leader’s phone number. His name is Aleksander. Fair warning, though. I’m told they can’t procreate with humans, not sure if that extends to Wild Women. But if you’re going to align with an incubus you may as well do it with an old and powerful one.”
“Yes?” she answered.
Marcus tilted his head, just slightly.
“I’ll call him and invite him over to meet you. Would you like that?”
Eonza stood so quickly the chair she’d been sitting in scraped along the floor and filled the otherwise silent kitchen. I turned to her. Her blank face reminded me of a woman preparing for battle, steeling away her true feelings of fear and disdain for bloodshed.
“Yes,” she said solidly, tilting her chin up in decision. “I will do this for my sisters.”
Twenty-Four
Since meeting underwater with the rusalki, my dreams had been more the stuff of enlightenment and less the stuff of odd mental knots unraveling their subconscious selves. Tonight’s dream held no difference. I strolled through a temple, its stone walls an orangish color with only candles and moonlight streaming through the narrow openings in the outer walls to light my way.
A woman ran past me, holding the hem of her linen robe to keep from tripping. As she passed, she yelled for me to hurry, they were coming and we didn’t have much time. I picked up my pace to follow her. She led me to a small alcove of a room, potted plants lined a round pool in the center, a pool I instinctively knew cleansed away past hurts. I also knew the woman was a high priestess. So was I.
“She Who Is will be here shortly,” the high priestess exclaimed, motioning for me to get into the water. “We must prepare ourselves.”
“For what?” I asked blankly.
Her brows furrowed as she studied me. “For her breath of life, of course.”
A head of auburn hair slowly rose to the surface of the pool. The woman eased her way from the water, pulling her naked body up over the edge. The rusalka Drosera stared at me, her body dripping and her hair long, straight, and clean.
I spun to take everything in and clear up my confusion. “Where are we?” I asked the rusalka. “I thought I was dreaming.”
The priestess peered at me like I was crazy, talking to myself.
Before the priestess had a chance to remind me of anything, Drosera answered my questions. Her words whispered into my brain like unspoken outside thoughts. “You are dreaming. And I am here to wake you. My physical form waits outside your door. Now, you will wake in three, two, one!” She clapped, an unearthly sound, and I shot up in bed.
Marcus shifted beside me, but the movement failed to wake him.
I crept from our bed and eased open the bedroom door, expecting an auburn-haired rusalka to be standing naked, dripping wet, waiting for me. The dark upstairs hallway was empty and quiet. I rushed to the front door and unlocked it, swinging it open without worry of waking those of my coterie who slept in the other bedrooms.
A shadow moved, just slightly, under the darkness of the porch
steps leading to the walkway and driveway. Yes, I could see in the dark. No, I couldn’t see through stairs. I jogged down the five steps and peered around the front yard. “Drosera?” I whispered. “Is that you?”
The rusalka, clothed in animal skins, wearing a crown of woven branches and vines, stepped from under an oak tree in the center of the yard. Her green eyes struck me first, they nearly glowed with light, but not in a radioactive way. She smelled like lake water and birch leaves.
“I am,” she responded. “I have come with a message.”
I yawned and stretched, no longer on the defense at the idea of dealing with a possible intruder. “Anwen called me,” I said. “They should be here tomorrow.” I looked back to the closed front door. “Or today; I don’t know what time it is.” Streetlights nearby poured across the wet grass. Early morning dew settled like a crisp mist above the ground.
“I have come to tell you that we spoke to Marie, the succubi leader,” she began.
“How were you able to contact her? You went onto the Oregon Hunter complex grounds?”
She shook her head. “No, we are unable to transport ourselves there for the same reason the succubi are unable to leave.”
“Because there are Hunters guarding it?” I asked.
“Our sister, Azalea, has explained to us the red stones used in the Hunter’s cabin, the ones lining the steps to the attic where your own sister was kept—these blood stones, the very same stones adorning their daggers, inhibit our abilities. It is why my sister had not been able to use the stairs and rather chose another mode to get into the room with your Shawna, weeks ago. Even from the hall they’d weakened her abilities. They weakened yours as well. It is why you were forced to fully unleash your huldra to fight off the Hunter. It is why you blacked out.” Drosera paused and looked to the side of the house. I followed her gaze, but saw nothing.
“Marie has told us that her and her sisters chose to attend check-in because some did not agree with the new decision to hide underground,” she continued. “They believed the decision too large to make at such a moment’s notice and thought it best to discuss it further. Attending check-in would give them that time.”
“The incubus said as much,” I told her. “I didn’t know whether to trust him or not, though.”
“He is trustworthy,” she explained, “in the way a housecat can trust a lioness. The two may seem connected, but they come from very different worlds. The house cat is aware of her bondage, the lioness lacks the knowledge that such a thing exists.”
“Still,” I muttered mostly to myself. “It feels good to know the succubi galere, at least some of them, didn’t really want to abandon us. And now they’re imprisoned for that choice to hold off on going underground.”
Drosera squinted at me. “You take too much into yourself. The decisions of others directly reflect their beliefs about themselves, not their beliefs about you.”
I waited for the feeling of a brain massage to enter my skull, but nothing came. “Can you not read minds anymore?” I asked.
“We can, but if unnecessary, it is best that we save our energy. I must finish my message and leave,” she said.
I waited for her to continue. After looking around and watching the side of the house again, she spoke. “The succubi believed they would be able to thwart any opposition from the Hunters by using their abilities. They assumed that after helping with the Washington complex, there was a chance that they would not pass check-in.”
I almost asked why they hadn’t mentioned that to me when we’d discussed the topic, but I let her finish because she seemed as though she were on some sort of timeline. I didn’t know much about rusalki ways and figured maybe she lacked the energy to stay very long and still return to her sisters. Also, I appreciated Drosera’s forthright explanation. In the past the rusalki would explain concepts with parables. Tonight Drosera seemed to find a way to get to the point.
“However,” she continued. “They planned to use their power over energy to persuade the Hunters to allow them to pass through check-in and release them. They did not foresee the Oregon Hunters covering their classroom walls with blood stones.”
I closed my eyes and let out a sigh. My stomach twisted. I remembered the way I hadn’t been able to smell past the red stones, how I’d felt weaker and unable to grow my bark or vines. The succubi were rendered helpless. And so would any other Wild who entered that complex to retrieve them. The acidic urge to throw up rose from my stomach and I swallowed it down. My knees threatened to give out. I leaned against the outer portion of the stairwell.
“How do we get past them, then?” I asked, a new level of hopelessness carving its way into my heart. I had a whole galere of Wilds needing to be freed, and no way of saving them.
“The blood stones only affect those who bleed monthly, Wild Women who are still in their fertile years.”
I jerked up to meet her eyes. “The stones are linked to menstruation? That’s why you’re calling them blood stones?”
She gave one short nod. “The monthly blood is powerful, potent, and misunderstood. For these reasons it is feared.”
My mother had been right when she’d hinted as much in her stories of temple priestesses acting as oracles during their bleeding times each month. Had she known about the blood stones, too?
“So then we have to send in men and children?” I asked. “The incubi have already turned us down and human men aren’t strong enough to go against Hunters. Mermaids are the only group who have young children, and we can’t get ahold of them. Plus, we’d never ask them to send in their daughters, that’d be wrong on so many levels.”
“Gabrielle’s death has caused dissension among the mermaid ranks,” Drosera said as though she were talking about the weather. Gabrielle’s name so casually on her lips still stung to hear. “They have been displaced and split to seek out support. At this time they are unwilling to lend help.”
“We’re screwed. Why are the nagin even coming, then?” I thought out loud.
“They have sent their elders,” the rusalka said. “Those whose experiences no longer bleed from their wombs for the good of their kind, but rather now store up their wisdom within them to guide the younger ones.”
Nothing in Anwen’s voice led me to believe she’d reached the years past fertility. I questioned my own assumptions of her age and put a pin in it later to ask myself why I assumed strong Wilds were younger Wilds.
“Two members of your coterie are able to assist as well,” Drosera reminded me.
My heart nearly seized. My two aunts, Patricia and Abigale, had already gone through menopause. Patricia could hold her own, I had no doubt. But Abigale was still in a fragile state over the trauma of her daughter, Shawna.
I gave a nod. Drosera didn’t need to read my mind to know I hesitated at the idea of sending my aunts to face a complex of Hunters alongside Wilds they’d never met. But to ask Wilds from other countries to fight this battle for us, and not include our own warrior women, would be unthinkable. It’s not that I feared whether or not my aunts would agree to the task. I knew they would. I didn’t want to have to ask them in the first place.
“Tell me,” Drosera asked, peering at the side of the house again for a quick second and lowering her voice even more. “Do you believe your aunts incapable of protecting themselves?”
Her question caught me off-guard.
“Of course not,” I answered automatically, not sure how much I believed my answer to be true.
“Well,” I started, correcting my shoot-from-the-hip remark. “I do worry about them, that they’re not as experienced in combat with Hunters.” Even that response didn’t feel right on my tongue. Hadn’t my aunts fought beside me and the rest of the Wilds at the Washington Hunter complex and then again at the Oregon winery? They were just as experienced as my sisters, and yet if my sisters were called on to attack the Hunter complex without me, I’d worry, yeah, but I wouldn’t fret the same way.
Drosera didn’t dignify my last
asinine remark with a response.
So, naturally, I kept going. “They just grew up in a different time, learned to follow more than lead.” I could just imagine my inner huldra shaking her head as I spoke. I didn’t know how much I disagreed with myself until the words were out of my mouth and had no way of returning. I gave up. “I’m ridiculous,” I said. “Of course they’re capable. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
The left corner of the rusalka’s lip lifted. “You are the inexperienced one and yet you underestimate those who have experienced harder days, those who have raised daughters in a world full of sons.”
I didn’t quite catch what she meant by that last part, but I was too ashamed of myself to ask.
“Have you ever taken the time or interest to ask your elders of their struggles?” she asked.
I pursed my lips. Point taken.
“One elder took the time to share her experiences with you, what she’d learned, what she’d believed, what she’d hoped for,” Drosera said.
My mind went blank before I realized who she referred to. “My mother.”
“Would you not say she is your driving force?” the rusalka asked, urging my thoughts to follow the path of breadcrumbs she lay before me.
I stared at the old oak tree. I hadn’t thought of it that way, my mother being my driving force in all of this. I’d just figured Shawna held that title. But Shawna was with us now, safe, and yet I still pushed ahead. I desired freedom not just for Shawna and the Washington Wilds, but for all American Wild Women. I desired justice. The sense of justice my mother knowingly fed to me through bedtime stories and hypothetical questions that it turns out weren’t very hypothetical. My mother raised the future liberator of Wild Women, maybe even the future liberator of herself. Had she done it knowingly? And if so, how did she know?
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