Wild Hearts

by Bridget Essex

  Wild Hearts

  by Bridget Essex

  Synopsis:

  Ella Rivers hasn't been okay since the day her mother died.

  One wintry night, lost in grief, Ella goes for a long, cold walk. It's three o'clock in the morning, and she decides to duck into a gas station to get warm, and perhaps buy a cup of tea. But when the power cuts out, Ella's life is changed forever.

  Because, that night, she should have died. And she would have, were it not for the mysterious, white-haired woman who saves her life: Silver.

  Silver is more intriguing—and attractive—than any woman Ella's ever known. She insists that she knew Ella's mother, and that she can help Ella find out “who she really is.” But, while Ella is deeply attracted to Silver, how can she possibly believe what Silver says?

  After all, there's no such thing as werewolves.

  Ella's life is in danger, and the woman who holds the key to her survival is as mysterious as she is intense. Ella can't predict what's going to happen next... All she knows is that this gorgeous, wild woman might just change her destiny...

  "Wild Hearts"

  © Bridget Essex 2020

  Rose and Star Press

  First Edition

  All rights reserved

  No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Rose and Star Press except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews. Please note that piracy of copyrighted materials is illegal and directly harms the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication:

  For Jenn, always.

  And especially for Laura and Jen.

  Forever grateful you are not only our friends

  but chosen family.

  We love you, always.

  Contents:

  Chapter 1: What My Mother Said

  Chapter 2: Light and Dark

  Chapter 3: When Everything Changes

  Chapter 4: Impossible Things

  Chapter 5: Shadows

  Chapter 6: Waking Up

  Chapter 7: Wolf at the Door

  Chapter 8: Wolf

  Chapter 9: On the Way

  Chapter 10: One Good Deed

  Chapter 11: A Surprise

  Chapter 12: Trapped

  Chapter 13: Never Alone

  Chapter 14: Shadows

  Chapter 15: Safe for Now

  Chapter 16: Truly Wild

  Chapter 17: In the Whole World

  Chapter 18: Connections

  Chapter 19: Relations

  Chapter 20: The Lock and the Heart

  Chapter 21: Frozen

  Chapter 22: Warmth

  Chapter 23: Promises

  Chapter 24: What Love Can Do

  Chapter 25: The Heart

  More from Bridget Essex

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1: What My Mother Said

  My mother once told me she was cursed.

  And that I was, too.

  I didn't believe her. It sounded fantastical, impossible, a “curse.”

  It was easy to chalk it up to something I could dismiss, but I'm not so sure that's why I tried to dismiss it.

  Maybe I just didn't want to believe her.

  And anyway, it's not the kind of thing you want to self-own, you know? No one wants to be “cursed.”

  They want to be special, sure, yeah, but in a good way.

  There's nothing about a curse that's good.

  And, if I was cursed, maybe that meant there was nothing good about me, either.

  I wonder about that now. I never worked up the courage to ask my mother what she actually meant when she said it. She'd just bring it up at the harder moments of our lives, say “I'm cursed, you're cursed...both of us, cursed,” and that was it. She was always so sad, so tired when it came out of her that I just didn't have the heart to question her. The times she said this were always awful ones. I couldn't bear to ask more of her.

  But now...

  Now I'll never know.

  Because she's gone.

  I press my fingers to the deep grooves ground into the granite.

  The stone is cold to the touch.

  Everything here is cold.

  My mouth curves into a tight frown.

  Here, in the graveyard, no one would dare tell me to smile.

  I crouch on the ground in front of the headstone, and I stare blankly at it. The rain is coming down sideways, thin, sharp. There's a trace of snow in the drizzle, the cold of it trying to find an opening in my skin. Like the chill is trying to enter my body.

  But I ignore the rain. Just like I ignore the freezing temperature, just like I ignore my thighs that are yelling at me to get the hell out of this crouch. I've been sunk into this position here for twenty minutes, just like this. My right foot is completely asleep. It's going to be hell when I rise.

  But I don't.

  I don't move a muscle.

  I stare at the gravestone.

  I frown.

  And I think:

  Were you right, Ma?

  Are we...cursed?

  I close my eyes and listen to the wind. The way it moves through the trees, winding around the gravestones. It rustles the dead, sodden leaves, the gravel. Maybe it's my imagination, the suggestion of where I am; I don't know. But the wind sounds...mournful, almost.

  Sad.

  I dash the back of my knuckles over my eyes, grit my teeth. I'm not going to cry, dammit. I refuse.

  Not today.

  I rise, then, and my thighs ache, and my foot, fast asleep, protests mightily, but I shake it out. I stare down at the grave with the sort of uncertainty I hate, but that I've been feeling a whole hell of a lot lately.

  I don't know what to do.

  I don't know how to move forward.

  In fact, it feels like I don't know much of anything anymore.

  I used to. Back when Ma was alive. Because then, that's when I was alive, too. I felt it, felt the vibrancy thrum through me. You never really notice that you're alive, that you're living, not any more than you notice that you're breathing.

  But I noticed it.

  Ma had this sort of, well, way about her. She was bright. Not in an intelligent way, though that, too, was true.

  No...

  Ma was the kind of brightness that made the world turn, the plants grow. She was as bright as the sun.

  And, without her...

  The world is dark now.

  I stare at the gravestone. I don't have to, because I know what it says. I know because I ordered it, because I got the “okay” from the carver after he completed it. Because I watched them install it here in the graveyard. Because I read the gravestone over and over again as they lowered my mother's casket deep into the ground.

  This is what it says:

  My mother's grave bears her name, Anna Rivers. Below this, in a bold font, is transcribed her birth date.

  And her death date.

  And it says, beneath everything else, soft, cursive words ground down into the stone: Run free.

  Why did I put that there? In hindsight, it was pathetic of me, because it's that phrase, specifically, that always demands I shed a tear or two when I see it. It was stupid sentiment that I wanted her gravestone to bear it. Stupid, stupid sentiment.

  Because...is she running free, now?

  ...Is she?

  Or is she just...gone? Forever gone.

  It is unbearable to think that, when my mother took her final breath, her brightness passed from this world, this universe.r />
  That she simply disappeared, that who she was went out, like a spark.

  It is unbearable to think that, when my mother took her final breath, she no longer existed.

  I reach out and press cold fingertips to the top of the cold gravestone before I turn away. I shove my hands deep into my pockets and begin the long, winding path back through the cemetery.

  It starts to rain harder.

  My shoulders curve forward, as if the slant of my body can keep out the press of the chill, can keep out the incessant weather. I'm cold, I'm wet, and I'm numb, but it's not because of the chill that I'm numb.

  I've never felt like this before.

  Even when I had reasons to.

  I didn't feel this way when my father left, when I was six years old. When Ma took me to the ratty old couch and sat me down and told me I'd never see him again. Honestly, the only reason I felt pain that day was because Ma was so upset. I didn't care that he'd left us then, and I don't care now. He was never around enough for him to feel like an actual presence in my life, like I even had a father at all. His leaving didn't matter to me, just like he didn't.

  I didn't feel this way when my grandmother passed. I loved her, don't get me wrong. God, I loved her. When we had no place else to go after my father left, Grandma took us in with no questions asked. She made the little house on Haw Alley feel so warm and comforting. The apartment we'd lived in with my dad...it'd never felt like home to me, not from the few memories I still have of the place.

  But Grandma's house...that was home. She was home, too, or—at least—she gave me that feeling. I loved her almost as much as I loved my mother, and when she passed, I mourned her fiercely.

  I still do.

  But I didn't feel like this.

  I didn't feel like...what's the point to anything?

  If I had more of my druthers about me, I'd realize that this is a dangerous line of thinking. We've all got to have something to live for, right?

  We all need a “why.”

  But my mother...well.

  It felt like she'd taken my “why” with her.

  I close my eyes against the rain, just for a moment, and I stand still. The weather batters me, cold, relentless, but I stay still, take a deep breath, let it out through my nose.

  My mother and I were best friends. She loved me, was my entire family, after Grandma passed.

  Ma...Ma was magic.

  I open my eyes, and—for lack of anything better to do—I just...keep walking.

  It's night, and I shouldn't be in the cemetery. The graveyard is so close to my apartment, though, that when I let my feet find their own path, I end up here.

  I always end up here.

  The chain they have draped over the cemetery's entrance after dusk and before dawn just takes the smallest hop to get over, and if a caretaker sees me...they don't say anything, so no one bothers me.

  And graveyards have never spooked me.

  It doesn't matter to me that it's a dark and lonely hour. It doesn't matter that, if someone saw me, they'd think I was strange.

  It doesn't matter to me because nothing matters to me.

  Nothing at all.

  My hands are deep in my coat pockets, my shoulders curled forward, my head bent against the relentless wind. I step over the slowly swinging chain at the graveyard's gate, and I'm back on the broken sidewalk.

  The sidewalk is crumbling and malformed, because here, along the border of St. Paul Cemetery, there are tall oaks that rise between the road and the churchyard. Their relentless roots having shifted the sidewalk over many years because these trees are probably at least a hundred years old, older than the town of McKeesport itself. McKeesport keeps threatening to “cut the oaks down on Walnut Street,” but it's just an empty threat. McKeesport can't even repair the roads that are falling apart; they're never going to find enough money to fix the sidewalks.

  So I just walk carefully, do my best not to trip. I concentrate on my footing, climbing over exposed roots and jutting, sharp pieces of broken concrete because it gives me something besides my numbness to focus on.

  Getting to the cemetery and leaving it...those are the relatively okay moments.

  I don't think about anything else except putting one foot in front of the other.

  After that...well.

  After that is when the sadness settles over me once more.

  Cold and white and endless.

  Like a winter.

  When I reach the corner of Walnut and Twelfth, I take my phone out of my pocket, staring down at it with a frown. It's already three in the morning. Am I surprised? Yes, I have to work tomorrow, but I've had to work every day this week, and despite that, every night has found me wandering around in the dark like a shadow.

  I can't sleep. I can't stand to be in my apartment.

  So...I walk.

  McKeesport is a suburb of Pittsburgh, and yeah, there are bad areas, but I just stay away from those. I walk miles, every night, and I'm going to keep walking, even when the winter really settles in. I don't much notice the cold, and—even if I did—it'd mean I was feeling something.

  I don't know if I'll ever stop walking, each night.

  I don't know, because I can't plan for anything.

  Thinking about it hurts too much.

  The cold has curled up deep in my bones as I move down Walnut. There are no cars, this late at night. Everything is still. Somewhere close to me, a block away, the Youghiogheny River flows, but it's a quiet river. I can't hear it here.

  I can't hear anything at all, except for the silence.

  Recently, I've learned: silence has a sound, too.

  And I don't like it.

  This is how I walk up the street toward the convenience store: in my own numb world. The rain and snow mixture pelts into my skin, the cold slithers deeper into me, and it seems like nothing in the universe can pull me out of all of this, back into the land of the living.

  But then...

  Impossibly...

  Something does.

  I hear a rattling sound. Like metal: old trash can lids being banged together. We've got a raccoon plague going on right now in town, so it's not something that even really registers to me.

  Not until I round the corner.

  The convenience store is one block away. I can see its lights cutting through the wintry weather, a beacon of brightness in all the dark. I didn't really intend to aim for here, but now that I'm so close, the idea of a warm cup of tea in my hands sounds not awful. My fingers are frozen to the bone. I imagine the sweetness of the sugar, the pleasant unfurling of the creamer in the haze of black tea. This is a comfort that's almost unconscious, but I suddenly yearn for it, because I yearn for anything that feels ever-so-slightly better than what I currently feel.

  So I begin to walk purposefully toward the convenience store.

  Again, the sound of metal on metal, a soft clanging that almost doesn't stand out in the chill silence all around me. The rain and drizzle evolved into sleet, and now it's trying to evolve into snow, and everything is soft and hushed, including the small bang.

  But it makes me pause.

  Not because of the sound.

  But because of the scent.

  I've always had a particularly strong sense of smell. It's just one of those things, you know? Ever since I was a kid, it's odors that I notice right away, the first thing. Ma always said that our family had strong noses, and she'd tell me that while tugging mine gently and giving a little laugh. It was our joke.

  I remember that. I think about that as I turn, because when am I not thinking of her these days?

  But it's with the thought of my mother in my head that I turn, and I see...

  Well.

  A...dog?

  It's a dog. It's just a dog. Obviously just a dog. I'm in the middle of McKeesport, which is literally Pittsburgh and there is no world in which it could possibly be...

  I mean...

  I squint, the ice and snow swirling about me, the drizzle
having completed its evolution now. Snow falls all around me, obscuring my sight.

  I'd heard stories of coyotes forming packs on the outskirts of the city. They kill the occasional cat, small dog. Folks are told to keep their pets inside at night.

  And maybe what I'm looking at is a coyote. The photo that accompanied the online article about the “scourge of Pittsburgh,” (which I thought was a bit over the top, even at the time) was blurry. You know that photo they always try to pass off as Bigfoot? It looked a little like that. A shadow on four legs with a long snout, but blurry, impossible to make out any details. It could have been any four-legged animal.

  Maybe this thing here is a coyote.

  Maybe.

  Because it couldn't possibly be what I think it is, what the very first word my brain conjures into being...

  It couldn't possibly be a...

  Wolf.

  It's the scent of pine that surprises me. It's a blossom in my nose, instantly cold and serene, like the middle of the woods on a cold winter's night.

  I smell that, and I smell that here, at the entranceway of a little alley in the middle of McKeesport.

  I smell the scent of the woods in winter, and it makes me stagger a single step...

  Ma and I would always go hiking together.

  I haven't set foot on a trail, not since Ma got sick...

  I can't believe how much I missed it.

  In the alleyway, the shadow moves almost imperceptibly. The animal's sides rise and fall, and I can only see that small detail because the snows part for a moment, like a curtain pulled back. I can see the animal's eyes, bright, almost flashing red as a solitary car turns the corner. The headlights illuminate the alleyway, a light dusting of snow making all the garbage, the papers and lumps of debris on the ground, soft and uniform.

  The snow hides the ugliness, but the blossoming of light illuminates the layers of graffiti on the old brick walls, illuminates the open dumpsters, overflowing with junk and torn open bags of garbage.

  Illuminates...

  The dog.

  The wolf, my brain supplies, before I dismiss it almost with a laugh. I have way too much imagination.

  In fact, I'm almost angry at myself.