Dawn to Dark

by Halston James

“Grandma!” I scream, an awful primal sound raging from the deepest depths of my soul.

  Both she and the wolf pause for a microsecond, all eyes on mine. Grandma’s scrunched up pain-ridden eyes are filled with a deep fear. Blood smears the entire right side of her face. The wolf’s amber eyes stare with bottomless hunger and rage.

  “Run, Red! Run!” Grandma yells. Her wail jolts the beast back into its savage attack with a yelp of frustration. But I do not run. Cannot. I stand, stunned and as silent as forgotten secrets, as the pair wrestle on the ground in a blur of white fur and fangs. Grandma’s gray hair is stained as red as mine as she rolls and struggles through puddles of blood on a threadbare rug.

  And finally, my body springs into action and my thoughts disappear.

  Fur is warm within my clutches. Hard, lean muscles beneath my palms. Teeth snap. Warm musky breath—with the metallic twang of Grandma’s blood—hits my face. I roar, grappling to pull the beast away. It growls in anger, and mauls my arm. Fangs splitting skin, bone and sinew. And I howl, recoiling for but a moment before I launch at it again. This time, the beast charges at me, slamming me onto my back. It growls and yelps, and for a moment I am glad for its blood-stained fangs gnashing inches from my face for it allows Grandma to save herself. But she doesn’t move, no matter how much I will her to stand. To run. To live.

  The wolf grabs at my wounded arm as I protect my face with my hands, its teeth puncturing skin once more. The pain is exquisite, a sensation reminding me how fragile souls are trapped within our breakable bodies. And I see nothing but those glowing amber eyes. The twilight hour has crept through the windows and doors, and the crackling fire glows brighter in the descending darkness. Above me the wolf’s shadow looms high and large on the wall, flickering with the flames as I flicker from conscious thought to nothing but the sensation of fangs sinking into my flesh.

  Time passes. I lose myself in a black hole of nothing—no pain, no fear.

  The grandfather clock chimes, waking me with a start and rousing my consciousness.

  The pain and fear now double.

  The wolf is no longer above me. It grapples over Grandma’s body once more. Blood covers the beast’s white fur and a furless black scar akin to a question mark follows the animal’s spine. But the only question I can think of is will Grandma survive this vicious attack?

  The clock chimes again, a deathly tick tock, counting down the seconds of Grandma’s life.

  Crimson stains my fingers, a warm thick fluid chilling my heart as I scramble to my hands and knees. There’s no time, despite another chime. There’s nothing I can do to save her. I’m too late. Too weak…

  “You can never have her,” Grandma moans. Resilient, even as she stares death, and the savage wolf, in the face.

  A guttural howl explodes, dancing from the walls and low ceiling of the cottage. Trapped. Like Grandma under the wolf’s fierce claws. Trapped, like me, paralyzed in my body as I brace against a noise I cannot escape—the curdling of Grandma’s blood stuck in her ravaged throat as she dies.

  I clamber to my feet, rage propelling me to the small kitchen bench. A knife is in my hands before I have time to think, and I launch myself at the white beast speckled with red. The knife slices straight through its flesh and muscles as easily as puncturing an overripe fruit. It howls—a grotesque sound full of fury and anguish. The beast knocks me down, turns and lopes away, leaving me rasping on the floor—the knife still wedged in its flesh.

  I take one look at Grandma’s dead body and wish I hadn’t. And then, with no reason to stay, I pursue the wolf into the darkness.

  3

  Darkness wraps itself around me, and despite the low set moon offering little light, it is not hard to follow the wolf’s path. The red stains in the snow are like some gruesome fairy-tale trail leading to a house made of gingerbread or some other cruel witch’s abode. And I wonder where this wolf will lead me.

  Perhaps to my death.

  My wound pulses to the rhythm of my feet slowed only by the depth of new snowfall. A squeaking softness now, a sound akin to chewing cotton wool, a God awful sound for a God awful night. And though I should not curse, what else is there to do? Wolves have killed my mother and grandma both and I can only believe it is a curse.

  I continue tracking the bloody paw prints and speckles of blood leaking from the knife wound. Through the woods I track the beast, where trees loom over me, their skeletal branches laden with snow grasping at my very soul. Over the frozen timid brook I follow, hoping my weight will not break the cold touch of ice and frost and hopelessness, and send me crashing into the water that dares flow beneath the surface.

  I freeze. Short, shallow breaths balloon in front of my face. My wound smarts in the cold and I grasp it as I squat to inspect the paw prints on the ground. Next to them rests my knife, tip first in the bloody snow. I pick it up while considering the paw prints—they’re changing, elongating, morphing.

  I can only assume the beast is faltering, slowing—unsteady on its weakening limbs. Good. Perhaps the one knife wound was all it needed. But this thought does not bring me relief or joy as I continue to stalk, because the prints are morphing still, and this time it is undeniable.

  They have turned into human footsteps…

  And the footsteps lead directly toward Blaxton’s homestead.

  There are moments in life when reality and fantasy combine, and for several fractions of a second, I suspend my disbelief and consider the possibility of what my eyes can see but mind can’t fathom. Nothing makes sense but the erratic beat of my heart hammering against my ribcage. The footsteps do not go to the door, but around the house to the barns and stables. A deeper concern now surfaces.

  Blaxton.

  I cannot lose the only two people I love in one night.

  Neither candlelight nor fire in the hearth shines from the windows of Blaxton’s homestead. Instead, the wooden dwelling seems to place a finger over its mouth of a door and whispers an urgent shhh. My clumsy frozen toes stumble up the three steps, and the crash in the otherwise silent night sends a murder of ravens cawing into the nighttime sky. They soon flutter back onto branches of the old oak that hovers over the house. And they watch me, waiting, perhaps, for their spoils. In the summer, the old oak looks like a safe warm promise. Tonight, with its empty spindly branches, and a murder coolly considering me, it looks only like a threat.

  I rap on the door, though I am certain Blaxton is not inside.

  “Blaxton,” I whisper, because on a night like this, a whisper is all I have. “Blaxton?” And I learn even a whisper can sound urgent and desperate.

  A howl, savage and wild, cuts through my thoughts.

  My eyes clench and I clutch at my wound, blood seeping between my fingers. Nausea grows to my throat, and I breathe a measured breath to gather myself.

  Forget the pain, I urge myself. Forget Grandma’s pale and lifeless eyes. Forget…

  Now a scream slices through the air. The ravens scatter, black wings and feathers. This time they do not return. Another scream, and I spin around, and around again. The sound echoes across the valley and it’s hard to discern from which direction. And in that moment, with the kitchen knife still clutched in my hand, I wonder whether I should be running toward or away from the scream that cries out one last time.

  A gunshot.

  A thud.

  I need to breathe but fear grips my throat like cruel fingers.

  Footsteps stalk behind me. I have to dare myself to look around, but cannot.

  I have to rouse myself to raise the knife, but I do not.

  The footsteps near and I can neither distinguish if they belong to man nor beast.

  I count down from three, steel myself and spin toward my stalker.

  The knife clatters to the ground and I scream.

  4

  I back away and stumble over a log basket, sending firewood spilling across the veranda. The front door balances me, stopping me before I fall.

  “Blaxton?” I whi
mper, a sick sound even in my own troubled mind.

  He reaches for me, though he is nowhere near touching distance. I want him to stop. I need him to stop, right there, and not come any closer. But words stick in my throat and all I do is shake my head under my red hooded cape.

  He is covered in blood, from head to toe, and he is not alone. Beside Blaxton stalks Woolsey, he too is blooded yet he smiles at me in a way that makes me try to back further into the wooden door pressed hard against my back. And I can’t fathom my own thoughts because what I think cannot be true.

  Blaxton reaches the steps and his friend has the decency at least to wait below. Still, I feel cornered.

  “What… What?” I stutter, cursing myself for my incoherence. But I can’t piece the parts together.

  The paw prints turning to footprints. The howl. The scream. The gunshot and the blood.

  “Red?” he asks, and the softness of his voice makes me see, truly see, what is in front of me. White tracks stream down his blooded checks from his eyes. He’s crying. And I take his out stretched hands.

  “The old mare, Betsy,” he said, shaking his head. “A wolf, it got to her, she didn’t stand a chance—mauled her in seconds. I was there, I tried to fight it off but if it wasn’t for Woolsey suddenly turning up from nowhere when he did…”

  He turns to his friend who has yet to take his hungry eyes from me. I spare Woolsey a quick glance, and subconsciously my eyes trail to his side. There is no knife wound, no blood, and I chastise myself for thinking the impossible.

  Things slowly begin to make sense, pieces of the puzzle beginning to fit. The howls. The screams belonged to poor Betsy, the lovely old carthorse who was as soft as she was strong. But her strength would have been no match for a vicious attack. There are many types of strengths, after all.

  “The gunshot?” I ask, because I need to know to set my wandering mind back onto the correct path.

  “That was me,” Woolsey says and I detect more than a hint of pride to his supercilious tone. “The mare was dying in agony. I shot her, and the wolf disappeared out of sight.”

  Blaxton nodded, agreeing with the tale that somehow sets my chattering teeth on edge. Then his blood stained face morphs into a different expression. He notices my wounded arm, my paler than pale complexion, the not rightness of my being here in the dark, in the snow, and his own thoughts of wolves and Betsy are overtaken. I can see it by the way his honey eyes melt.

  “What’s happened? What—” he grabs my arm to better inspect my wound. “What happened to you?”

  And I want to tell him. I want to tell him everything. The fight. Grandma dead. The knife wound in the wolf’s side. The changing paw prints in the snow.

  But the bite mark pulls all of myself into those puncture wounds, like my entire self is now centered around those four marks leaking crimson onto Blaxton’s pale, white hands. A startling contrast I have seen before when life was neither gruesome nor painful.

  The pain grips me, pulls me, yanks me from my body and mind. I drop, feeling the scattered logs digging awkwardly into my body as I tumble deeper.

  “Red?” I hear Blaxton call but his voice sounds so far away.

  “What the hell?” I hear Woolsey, a tone full of anger that disappears far away. Their heated voices dissolve into background muffled sounds—then silence.

  And for me, my mind goes as blank as the snow-filled landscape. There is nothing but a void, and I tumble down its gaping hole.

  Interlude – White Hot

  Ice white fills my veins—a freezing burn blazing through the labyrinth of my body. It twists and turns through the million minuscule tunnels crisscrossing from brain to heart to lung and sinew. And there is nowhere to escape the sensation. Nowhere to escape the pain. It grips my heart in a vice, squeezing the life from me but I cannot yell out. I am not here, yet experience it all the same. The pulling, the purging, the persistent grab of claws and fangs. The only place that does not pulsate in agony is the four puncture wounds beckoning me to solace. The four tiny spaces I try to crawl into, to find peace and sanctuary from the burning madness. I just want to stay here, in these four tiny spaces. Safe from the pain.

  5

  I have passed out many times since the attack, and the dreams only get worse. I call them dreams because the real nightmare begins when I open my eyes. The stark truth as blinding as the winter sun blazing on the crystal-tipped snow before me. To my right is a pile of black soil. It must have been a hellish job for the gravediggers in the hard frost of winter. The undertaker said she would keep—Grandma—she would keep, because the weather was so cold. And I could not help myself but to think of a pail of milk sitting on the kitchen counter. She would say the same thing in the winter, it will keep a long while yet before it spoils. But I didn’t want Grandma to spoil any further than she already had; to curdle or go bitter or grow mold on her mangled skin and flesh. So, no, I told the undertaker, she will not keep, she will be buried, and here I am, watching the cheap timber coffin—the best I could afford—lower into the ground.

  Blaxton squeezes my hand, though I wish he wouldn’t. I can barely contain my grief and any ounce of care or concern or pity cast my way could break the dam walls and my tears would flood the land, though I doubt it would thaw the snow or my thoughts. So I busy myself with distractions and look around at the mournful faces of the few who knew the body sinking into the depths. She was old, too old to have many friends. She had already seen them pass. What is left are the relatives of once friends, people of goodwill who wish to support a woman who earned so much respect in the village, and the others. The others who come to watch the spectacle—to watch me. The lone survivor of the lone wolf’s attack that has taken my mother and hers too.

  They think I can’t see through the facade of pity, but I feel it all right. Their darting, nervous eyes. Their whispers behind black silken gloves and shifting eyes veiled beneath black lace. But for all the people to show, it’s Woolsey who irks me the most. He, with his pack of friends pretending to show respect. Woolsey stares at me, his eyes gorging over my body but I do not give him the satisfaction of returning his gaze—but I do stare down the girl hovering tightly to his left. The peculiar creature glares at me with her beautiful sharp features, her striking eyes; one gold one blue. She all but snarls, taking a possessive step closer to the boy whose eyes have not left my own. Her siblings step forward, six, maybe seven boys ranging from ten to twenty years old, silently warning me to back down from their sister.

  I feel exposed, suddenly vulnerable. So I squeeze Blaxton’s hand instead and for a small moment, I feel safe.

  People asked me if I wanted to hold a wake for Grandma, but I decided against it, for there is nothing awake about the dead. And I feel mourning is a private activity, best savored for lonely, solo moments when the world cannot see the tears or hear my howls of grief as I kneel, broken, on the threadbare rug that still bears Grandma’s blood. I haven't washed out the stain and I do not intend to—really, it is the only thing I have left of her, any real tangible thing, because memories cannot be touched and therefore do not count.

  The funeral party—if such a gathering can be referred to as a party—disperses and the gossip begins to circulate as the good people line neatly behind one another to wait their turn to tell me how very sorry they are, and how they are here for me if I ever need anything. But I hear the others, the whispers that are not so much whispers in the increasing murmur of the small crowd.

  “There have been more wolf attacks on the border of the eastern village did you hear? Terrible tragedy.”

  And

  “It ain’t no natural thing, this. Strange for a wolf to hunt alone. Strange indeed.”

  Or

  “You heard of the ancient moon curse and the moon bitten?”

  At this, Blaxton swears and blasphemes to the Gods, and pulls me into him, protecting me from the worthless tittle-tattle. Even Woolsey and his friends look uncomfortable with the fever pitch of gossip beginning to bab
ble and overflow like the brook in early spring. All except the girl, Kaya, by his side. Kaya covers her smile with her slender hand, and feigns a cough to cover her laughter. Woolsey whispers something in her ear though it’s me he watches, and the smile slides from her face like melted candle wax.

  With the gossip and the looks and the pain pulsating in my arm, I cannot help but show the scowl I’ve been hiding behind my composed facade. It is not that I expect respect from anyone, I just thought they would at least wait until I was out of earshot before they began their raving ramblings. And I can’t help but feel my private promise—my vendetta—rising to the surface as yet more details of attacks are discussed behind cold, cupped hands.

  “I’m going to kill this wolf,” I involuntary call. Everyone looks as surprised by my outburst as I feel, but I cannot stop the anger from pouring from my mouth. “I will hunt it, and kill it, if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Red,” Blaxton urges me to stop. But I have their attention now. Now they are not talking about me. Now, they are listening to me. I wriggle under his grip.

  “I won’t stop hunting it until I kill it dead, even if I have to rip the beast apart with my own teeth,” I growl, shocked by my venom.

  “Red?” Blaxton says, surprised this time. He widens his eyes, urging me to stop.

  Several women cross themselves as their men pull them away, disgusted. Good. Having their disgust is better than having their pity. I shirk from Blaxton’s hold.

  “I need to be alone,” I say. I need to mourn, I need to feel the pain and emptiness of my home without Grandma’s body keeping inside as it has been. Blaxton nods, and kisses me once firmly on the forehead.

  “At least let me walk you home?” he asks but I turn him down.

  “The walk will clear my mind, and it’s daylight. I have nothing to fear but the insidious gossip. Please,” I say, and so he nods and reluctantly follows the funeral party away. Though he does turn his head over his shoulder to offer a weak smile. My own smile is too late arriving and so he misses it, lowering his head and shoulders like a scolded dog as he leaves. He knows when he is beaten, and I curse myself. He’s the only thing I have left in the world and I’m pushing him away—pushing him away because I can’t stand the thought of one more ounce of pain my future could hold if he is taken next.