Walking Wolf Road (Wolf Road Chronicles Book 1)

by Brandon M. Herbert

  Was he one of us?

  I shook the thought away; there was no way Fen or Loki would ever abandon a member of the Pack. Still, I couldn’t shake the uneasiness I’d felt when he’d met my eyes. My distraction drowned out everything else, so I’d walked a couple blocks before I realized I wasn’t alone.

  I glanced behind me and saw nothing but an empty street with gold and orange leaves trickling in the breeze. Still, the feeling would not relent. I imagined Jack watching me from the shadows, waiting to exact his revenge. My shoulders bunched and my phantom coat prickled. The streetlights along the block flickered and went off. I felt something out there, watching me…

  A fluttering sound drew my gaze up. I couldn’t see anything at first but gaunt tree limbs silhouetted against the deep navy sky, but then a shadow moved. The iridescent feathers made the immense bird look even more powerful as it tilted its head to the side and looked at me. A little relieved that there had actually been something real watching me, I nodded at it and turned back toward home. It cawed and then fluttered down to the ground ahead of me. My wolf stirred as the sight of the bird triggered some instinctual memory, but something didn’t feel right…

  I walked past it and it flew ahead of me again to watch, cocking its head in sharp twitches to keep track of me. I didn’t hear the rustle of feathers again.

  Just as I thought the bird had grown weary of me, a wash of air moved behind me, and a sudden weight landed on my shoulders. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked over my shoulder to see the huge bird perched atop my backpack, looking at me. It curled its talons around the handle to keep its balance and cawed, impossibly loud so close to my ears.

  “Well, hello…” I said awkwardly. It cawed again, its voice low and husky, and it tilted its head to the other side to watch me. I fought down the urge to run around flailing my arms and squealing, though my eyes followed the pronounced curve of its bill and an unpleasant image of him eating my eyeball flashed in my head. I turned my face away and resumed walking with my new ‘friend’ in tow.

  The temperature dropped fast after sunset, and I sniffed my runny nose. I smelled dry crushed leaves, compost, and somewhere nearby the tantalizing aroma of rotisserie chicken. But there was something very obvious I didn’t smell. I risked my eye again to turn my head and sniff at the bird, but it was like there was nothing there. I felt the weight, I saw him, but I couldn’t smell him.

  My class had gone to a raptor center in fourth grade; the smell of predatory birds was not easy to miss… Goosebumps rose all over me as my intuition screamed at me that this was very not right!

  Almost as if he sensed my unease, the bird croaked and fluttered off my pack. I glanced back but couldn’t see him, though I still heard his cries overhead. I turned down the alley and his voice grew fainter, but I still felt his eyes on me.

  I pulled the shadows around myself again like I had in the locker room. It was harder to do while walking, but I wanted it to leave me alone. It didn’t seem to have any effect though. Even after I walked inside I still felt watched. Eyes and whispers lingered as dinner came and went, as I finished my homework down in the dungeon, and tried to fall asleep despite the chaos inside my head.

  After an hour of lying in bed, frustrated and sleepless, I went upstairs and took some Nyquil. The vile goo eventually took effect and I forced myself to sleep; but that was when the real fun began…

  Shadows and fog…

  Shapes stirred and dispersed in the mist, a solid blackness beyond; I struggled through the nothingness adrift, lost… so lost… not even the moon graced me with her light any more… The abandoned one…

  Cursed…

  He… He’d abandoned me, though he stood right there, I knew he didn’t consider me Pack, how could he? I wasn’t what he wanted me to be. He was disappointed. He hated me. The humans ostracized me, and now the wall had grown tall and strong between me and… everything else… Everyone else… It was no way to live… Couldn’t even call it ‘life’ really… The life that I had practically begged him to steal from me…

  My human family didn’t exist anymore, so I’d pushed harder. I’d fought so hard to impress him, make him proud of me, make him want me in the Pack, no matter what I was… But it was all useless…

  As I stumbled blind through the fog, a room was revealed to me, a deep russet curtain, and a cluttered menagerie of things lying about in dusty piles, litter that looked like stage props. A strong melancholy, a smoldering anger… And a pit of darkness that completely consumed me inside… I wanted it over…

  No… I needed it over.

  A figure curled up in the shadows, weeping…

  It’s too hard… too damn hard for me… So much easier…

  No one will miss me…

  I lurched awake gasping as the darkness was broken with a blinding crack. My heart pounded like a caged beast until I finally recognized my own room and I wept quietly in the dark, rocking back and forth. The deluge of emotions that crashed over me swept everything away.

  “That wasn’t me, that’s not me…” I muttered over and over to myself as my pulse slowed. “And that won’t ever be me…” I sniffed and closed my eyes, pushing hot tears down over my cheeks.

  Was it just a nightmare? It felt too real though… too damn real… Were they somebody else’s memories, or… a glimpse of my own fate? God knows I’d considered it often enough, the easy way out, an end to the weary procession of pain called life.

  The sedatives in my bloodstream pulled at me, but I fought them, I didn’t ever want to return to that darkness again. While the dream held me, it felt like there was no escape, no reason for me to even keep breathing anymore.

  That’s what it’d be like if you let the dragon win…

  The thought raised the hairs on my neck, and stilled the frenzy of my thoughts. I glanced at the glowing green digits of my clock with despair. I’d have to get up for school soon, but I curled up and felt the drugs gnaw at me regardless, dragging me back into the darkness. As I faded back into a drug-induced oblivion, fear and uncertainty bloomed inside me.

  It’d been All Hallows Eve for four hours… plenty of time to dream of death…

  Chapter 8 – Day of the Dead

  My alarm roared to life at 6:30 in the morning, and I swatted at it. I forced myself from the warmth of my bed and fetched some coffee while blessing whoever put an automatic timer on a coffee machine. I made lunches for Jake and myself, and shoved an extra sandwich into my mouth for breakfast as I shrugged my jacket on and forced myself out into the cold grey pre-dawn. A chill wind blew swirls of dead leaves down the street, and extinguished Jack-o-Lanterns watched me from their porches as I walked back to school.

  I walked into the library just as they unlocked the doors. The familiar smell of old worn paper permeated the air, like the scent of knowledge to-be-had. I walked down the aisles of tall bookshelves and then scanned through the Natural Science section with burning eyes as I stifled a yawn and a red book caught my attention. I pulled it out and flipped through it until the warning bell told me to head for class. I checked it out and stashed it in my bag, then resumed page-crawling in Art.

  Fen’s mood seemed better, but he still guarded himself from me. I didn’t bring anything up about his tantrum yesterday, but I did tell him about the bird.

  Mrs. Ashcroft walked by just then and asked me what the book was for, and I lied that it was for ideas for our India ink assignment. My first attempt had been… miserable to say the least.

  I flipped through the pages, finally crossing the section on the black birds. I passed blackbirds, crows, magpies, and finally stopped. A large black bird with a thick curved beak perched in glossy color on the upper right hand of the page.

  “That’s it,” I pointed at the page so Fen could see. I flipped to the guts of the book. “Common Raven, Corvis Corax.” I turned the page, and continued reading. I finished the paragraph and then traced the little grayscale map of its range with my finger until it drifted through our area. />
  Fen slouched back and busied himself with his painting, his hand flecked black from rebellious droplets of ink. “A raven huh… why am I not surprised.” He snorted as he mulled it over for a moment, “You don’t usually see them in cities, but ravens and wolves have always had a special connection, both in mythology, and in nature. Would I be wrong to assume you saw some with Lupa?”

  “We were surrounded by them in my second dream.” I muttered as I remembered it.

  “And yesterday, you felt excited?” he prodded.

  “Yeah, but it creeped me out too. Why would it follow me like that?”

  Fen smirked and shrugged, “Maybe it sensed your wolf, as much as your wolf obviously felt it. Wolves get excited when they see ravens, because they lead them to food and sometimes they play together. Ravens and crows are extremely intelligent and curious, and with as much energy as you’re putting out right now, he probably just wanted to check you out.”

  “Hmm, my wolf was really active just then…” I didn’t mention anything about Jack or the shadows; I wanted to figure out exactly what happened before I shared. “But why couldn’t I smell it?” I thought out loud.

  Fen stilled, “You couldn’t smell it?”

  I shook my head. “It made my skin crawl; I remember taking a school field trip to a zoo in Boise when I was a kid. We went through the raptor center, and I can still remember that smell; dust and feathers and rotting meat. But yesterday, nothing. The damn thing used me as a taxi and I couldn’t smell a thing.”

  Fen’s stillness broke, but he stayed silent and hunched over his desk, his hand moved faster and sharper than usual, his body told me something he didn’t want to say.

  “What it is?”

  “Nothing, it’s not important…” he replied, a little too sharply.

  “C’mon Fen, spill it. This whole thing has me completely freaked out, and I don’t like thinking that you might be keeping secrets from me…”

  He shot me a look that was gone before I could quite catch what it said. Then he closed his eyes and sighed, and when he reopened them he wouldn’t look at me. “A couple years ago when I got my driver’s license, I borrowed Mom’s car and took Loki on a drive. Back then, she knew about me, but I hadn’t changed her yet. We were driving back from Denver on this little back highway in the mountains near Woodland Park. The full moon had just risen, and she was looking at the map to make sure we were going the right way. She saw a lake just off the road and suggested we check it out.

  “We pulled off the highway and at first it was just like any other campground, with tents and RVs and stuff parked off the side of the road. But once we drove past that, the forest grew dark, and something was… very wrong there…” He shook his head and grimaced, “there was something off about this place, like something didn’t want us there. The trees seemed to… loom over the car, and the air grew so cold. I felt the weight of the forest on me, like a throb of energy.

  “When we got to the lake we pulled right up to the shore and got out; and there was nothing within eighty feet of the car. The forest was dead silent and absolutely still aside from the water on the shore, and the moon reflected perfectly on the lake. So, I took a couple pictures and turned back to the car, and there’s this cat sitting there in front of it, just staring at us…” Fen’s hand stilled and the muscles in his jaw worked as he clenched his teeth.

  “So, what’s the big deal?” I asked as I sketched a few lines on a new sheet of paper, using the raven picture as a reference.

  “You might have noticed by now that we have very good hearing. Even before she was bitten Loki’s ears could almost rival mine; yet neither of us heard it, and it wasn’t anywhere nearby when we pulled up. It would have had to run full tilt to get to us from that building, but it was just sitting there staring, so white it seemed to glow in the moonlight… Loki and I were both startled, but we walked over to it anyway and she picked it up and started petting it. It didn’t purr or anything, it just sat there in her arms and stared right into my eyes. Cats don’t do that, especially not with wolf shifters, and that was when I noticed…”

  He looked at me, his eyes wider and darker than usual. “The cat had no scent… absolutely nothing… I could smell Loki, the car’s engine, even a fish rotting down the shore, but this… cat had no dander, no fur, no dust… like it wasn’t really there…”

  The hair rose on my neck and I stopped drawing.

  “We got in the car and backed up to turn around, I looked in my rearview to make sure I didn’t back over it, and it was still sitting there, washed red in the taillights. I glanced down for a second to shift gears, and when I looked back up it was gone. Loki and I both looked for it, but it just… poofed…”

  “So what do you think it was?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe the cat was some kind of ghost or something, but most animal ghosts act like they did in life. That cat, like your raven, did not. Whatever it was, it scared the crap out of us. Hell, it still creeps me out just remembering it…”

  Well, that might explain last night a little… “What does that mean then?”

  “I don’t know… Maybe they’re nature spirits or something?” Fen said, “Ravens are associated with the afterlife in European mythology; they’re a lot like shifters in that they walk between worlds. In their case, it’s the world of the living and the dead; they help guide souls to the beyond. A lot of the Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest usually see Raven as a trickster spirit, so no matter how you dice it, they have kind of a dual nature, just like us.

  “Anyway, I looked into it a while later and it happened within a few days of the spring equinox; the opposite end of the year.” Fen muttered and refocused on his assignment.

  “That’s another time when the veil thins, isn’t it?” I asked and Fen nodded.

  Great, all this fun, two times a year…

  Aside from the usual—disembodied voices and phantom eyes boring holes in my head—the rest of the day passed uneventfully. Jack and Malcolm weren’t in P.E. again, and I resisted the urge to flip off the locker room when I left for the last time, only too glad to get rid of the first quarter, and gym with it. I managed a decent mood until my brain melted as I tried to focus on my English midterm.

  After school, Loki met up with Fen and I in the hall as we went to pick up our assignments from Mrs. Ashcroft to work on over the weekend. All anybody around us could talk about was the upcoming football game, and our odds of winning without two of the teams’ best players. Loki looked drawn and exhausted; her eyes red and baggy like mine. Fen mentioned she had trouble with voices and visions this time of year. Visions… I wonder…

  “Hey Loki, can I ask you something?” I filled her in on my recent weirdness and asked her about what kinds of visions she’d had.

  “Honestly, I think Fen exaggerated my ‘visions’,” she made quote marks in the air with her fingers, “I’ve seen a couple things that ended up happening later. Sometimes… I dunno, I just sorta snap out of my body for a second and share somebody else’s.” She snapped her fingers and blinked repeatedly, “I see what they see, hear what they hear, then I flash back into myself and have to try and remember where I am… It makes it a real pain to study sometimes.” She chuckled and rubbed her temple. “Usually, the things I see just don’t make any sense at all, like living in an abstract painting. Honestly, I think the weird dreams are because the noise keeps us from shutting down and resting.”

  “So, the things you see don’t come true, right?”

  “Almost never.” She smiled at me and I smiled back. I already felt better just from talking to a kindred spirit. Fen glanced back at us with an unreadable expression as we turned the corner and I saw the auditorium doors ahead of us. “Why, did you have any sweet dreams of me?” she asked and batted her eyelashes at me.

  “Unfortunately, no,” I said, mirroring her sweet tone. “Just something about red curtains and dusty stage props.”

  We were just passing the auditorium doors, and Loki
stopped dead. Fen and I stopped and looked back at her, a muscle in his jaw twitched and he turned and stormed down the hall. Loki’s eyes widened and the color drained from her face.

  I stepped up and touched her. “Loki, what’s wrong?” She didn’t respond, she just stared out into nothing until I shook her. “Loki!”

  She startled out of her trance and looked around, disoriented. Then she shook her head and smiled shakily at me as an embarrassed blush flooded her cheeks. She looked down and hid her face as she brushed past me, “Sorry, I… zoned out for a minute there…”

  “Loki…” I began as I rushed to follow her.

  “It’s fine!” she snapped as she pulled a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I just thought I heard… never mind. Just some bad memories, the kind your dreams make you relive when all you want to do is forget.” My eyebrows creased with worry as we turned the corner. I wondered if her unease was connected to Corwin, whom she apparently knew, but I’d promised not to mention to her. “Can’t seem to get through to her”, he’d said…

  I scowled as a thought crossed my mind. If he was harassing her, in any way, I’d maul his creepy little ass…

  Just then, Loki grabbed my shirt and yanked me into the shadowed corner by a classroom door. Her hands tightened on my hoodie until her knuckles turned white and the fabric creaked in her hands as she buried her face in my shoulder.

  A streak of fire crossed my heart and almost brought tears to my eyes. I felt her pain like it was my own; some torturous agony I couldn’t even see the beginning of. I wrapped my arms around her, guarding her from the hallway with my body, and wished I could drain all her pains and throw them away forever. Something I could never do for her.

  I pulled the shadows around us without meaning to and she tensed against me. “What was that?” She whispered into my shirt.

  “You felt that? Sorry, I didn’t realize I was doing it.”

  “That was you?” She lifted her face to look at me, “What did you do?”