Fate Succumbs

by Tammy Blackwell

  Then, Liam changed tactics.

  “Do I really need visual aides?” I asked as he handed me a tattered sheet of paper. “I’m having enough bad dreams as it is.” Which he probably knew from the noises I woke myself up making. Every day featured a new story, and every night I saw it unfold in my dreams. I had stared into the face of more dead little girls than I could handle. I really didn’t need to add another to their number.

  “Her name is Ananda,” Liam said, taking the chair opposite me. I tilted the paper towards the lantern to see the image of a girl with big brown eyes and two thick black braids. She was sticking out her tongue and pulling up her nose to make it look like a pig’s snout. The page was folded down the middle and I flipped it over to another picture. In this one she was wearing a pink feather boa, a giant green beaded necklace, and a giant, floppy purple hat.

  “She was a Shifter?” Knowing the little girl who appeared so full of life in these pictures was murdered made my stomach hurt.

  “Nope. She’s a Seer.”

  Well, this was new and interesting.

  “She’s still alive?”

  “Yep.”

  “And not a Shifter?”

  “Nope.”

  Okay… “So, who is she?”

  Liam handed me another piece of paper. There were several pictures on this one of the girl, people who were obviously her parents, and another familiar face.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ananda is Sarvarna’s little sister. They adore one another despite, or maybe because of, their fifteen year age difference.” He tapped on a picture which showed an Olan Mills-style family portrait. “When Sarvarna became Alpha, she insisted her family move into the Den. She eats dinner with them every night and makes time to either watch a movie or play board games with them at least once a week.”

  The Sarvarna in the pictures didn’t look like a baby killer. She looked like an average girl with an average family who she loved. I felt a heavy weight in my chest and told myself it was just frustration over Liam wasting my time with this.

  “I’m assuming you have a point?”

  “The point is for you to understand who Sarvarna is. She’s a person, Scout, just like us. She has a family and friends. She feels happiness and pain and sadness. She’ll bleed when you stab her, and cry when she’s hurt.”

  In my head, I saw Talley’s vision, but in reverse. The knife was in my hand, and I was sliding it into Sarvarna’s gut. I saw the blood blossom across her shirt, heard her screams rip from her throat, and even smelled the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you need to know. You need to understand how she truly, honestly thinks she’s doing the right thing. You need to see her as something other than evil incarnate, and still want to kill her.”

  I scrubbed my hands against my face. Once upon a time I would have worried about smearing what little makeup I wore, but I hadn’t worn any in so long I forgot what it felt like. Since July I had been living out of a single duffle bag. The selection of clothes may have changed two or three times, but the maximum number of outfits I had to choose from at any one time was four, and that was matching different tops with different bottoms. I've never considered myself a girly girl, but I realized there was something about putting on a nice outfit and taking the time to make sure you looked as nice as possible that made you feel more human, more connected to society. Sitting in a cabin, God only knows how many miles from civilization, wearing the same flannel-lined jeans, thermal, and sweater I wore the day before, I found it hard to remember how the real world worked. Normal people didn’t have blood stains on the cuffs of their sweater from dinner preparation. Normal people didn’t train night and day to the point of obsession. And normal people didn’t look at a picture of a smiling family and think about how easy it would be to kill one of them and leave the others to suffer.

  “How do you do it?” My voice was muffled by my hands, which were still pressed against my face.

  “How do I do what?”

  I let my hands fall away and took a deep breath. “Push it all out of your head. How do you kill someone and not let it kill you?”

  Liam’s face went blank, and his tone was lifeless. “How many people do you think I’ve killed, Scout?”

  “I don’t know. How many people have you killed, Liam?”

  He sat perfectly still, save the clenching of his right hand. “One.”

  “One?” But that would mean… “The first time you killed someone was that night by the lake? When you killed Hashim?”

  “What? You thought I was a serial killer or something?”

  I flinched at the anger in his voice and immediately felt horrible. Of course I hadn’t thought he was a serial killer, but for some reason I assumed he had killed others. Why was that? And why did I suddenly feel as though I had been unfair to the boy sitting across the table?

  Instead of addressing the issue of me being an assuming ass, I turned the conversation back to my original topic. “Do you still think about it? About what happened? About him?” When Liam didn’t respond, I pushed on. “I can make it through most days without thinking about him now, but in the beginning, when we were doing nothing but driving around for days on end, I couldn’t get Travis's face out of my head. I know I did what I had to do, but I still feel guilty.” That didn’t seem strong enough a word, or really encompass the chaos of emotions just uttering his name caused. “Sometimes I’ll get this queasy feeling in my stomach and not know why. Then, I’ll realize that I was thinking about something that reminded me of him. Like sometimes, right before a snow storm, the sky will turn the same color as his eyes. And even though I’m not actually thinking, ‘Hey, that sky is the same color of Travis’s eyes,’ I get the achy, queasy feeling anyway and have to work out why it’s there.”

  Liam’s face still didn’t betray any emotion, but his shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch. “I can hear him scream. It was just a short burst of sound, but it’s like the vibrations are trapped in my ear, constantly bouncing around, making it where I’m unable to escape the last noise he ever made.”

  The flickering light from the lamp caught a sheen of moisture on his eyes. I swallowed hard and dug my fingernails into my palm to keep from breaking apart.

  “What if I can’t do it?” I trailed a finger over the picture of Sarvarna and Ananda. “What if I do it, but I can’t live with myself after?”

  The silence stretched out forever. Just when I thought the conversation was over, Liam spoke.

  “I keep thinking about his family. He was married. Had two kids.” Unable to look at his face while he spoke, I watched the flickering shadow thrown on the wall by the lantern. “Maybe he deserved to die, maybe he didn’t. But this is war, and he was a solider for the other team, so I killed him like I was supposed to. And I’m okay with that part, but his family…” The shadow rubbed the back of its head. “Those kids don’t deserve to grow up without a dad. His wife doesn’t deserve to be a widow. This isn’t their war, but they’re the ones who have to live with what I’ve done.”

  God, I had never even thought about whether or not Travis had a family. I didn’t think he had kids or anything, but surely he had parents. It’s not like he could have sprung fully formed from Stefan’s head or anything.

  “I can’t do it.” My hands were shaking, and I thought I might have to make a mad dash to the outhouse to regurgitate my tuna fish dinner. “I can’t kill her, Liam. I just… I can’t.”

  He moved around the table to stand in front of me. “Look at me.” I stared at my shaking hands instead, certain I could see blood embedded in the fingernails. “Scout, look at me.”

  I felt the tears fall as I tilted my head up. “I can’t, Liam. I can’t.”

  Grey eyes held mine. “You can.” He steadied my hands in his own. “You will. You have to.”

  “Why? Why me?” It wasn’t fair. I didn’t ask for any of this. “Why do I have to do it?”


  His gaze was gentle, as was the squeezing of my hands. “Because no one else can.”

  “You’re not going to give me some crappy line about it being my destiny or fate or whatever?”

  The corner of Liam’s lip turned up, but it wasn’t a smile in the classic sense. “You’ve got the wrong brother. I’m not much for all that pre-destined crap. I’m more of a responsibility and greater good kind of guy.”

  “And killing Sarvarna is for the greater good?”

  “Overthrowing the Alpha Pack is for the greater good. Killing her, and anyone else who opposes us, is the unfortunate way we achieve our goal.”

  “And the responsibility… It’s all mine? I have to be the one to go all Thunderdome on Sarvarna? And then the rest of the Shifter world?” I remembered Jase’s reasoning for Liam not taking on the task himself. Was I just a weapon, like Liam had said? “Where will you be while I’m bathing in the blood of our enemies… or getting myself good and dead? Watching from the sideline? Maybe waving a pom-pom, spelling out my name and trying to convince the world if I can’t do it, then no one can?”

  Liam’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Gee, Scout. I’m going to get a big head with your high-as-the-sky opinion of me.”

  Refusing to let him intimidate me, I leaned forward. “I believe in the cause. I understand the necessity of fighting. What I want to know, is why do I have to do it alone?”

  “Why the hell do you think you’re going to be alone?”

  “Why the hell would I think otherwise?”

  He lunged, and my body reacted before my brain could even process the movement. By the time my mental faculties caught up, I was sitting on the table instead of the chair, my legs wrapped around Liam’s waist. One hand was bunched in his sweater, while the other held his head to mine. Even then I entertained few thoughts other than the feel of his lips and the taste of his tongue. A growl rolled through the room, and I had no idea from which of our throats it originated, nor did I care.

  His hands, whose span had been clinging to my outer-thighs, traveled up and around to my lower back to nudge me closer, as if it was possible. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel the cold. All I could feel - all I could smell, taste, or see - was Liam.

  Then, it ended just as it began - much too abruptly for me to realize what was happening. One minute he was there, pressed against me, sending tiny electrical storms of sensation all over my body, and the next he was striding out the door. I waited until I heard him moving through the trees, away from the cabin, before sliding off the table and onto the floor. I spent the rest of the night in that spot, my fingers trailing over my kiss-swollen lips, waiting to see if happiness, lust, embarrassment, guilt, or betrayal was going to win out as the dominant emotion.

  Chapter 20

  Liam didn’t come back that night. Some time shortly before dawn, I crawled in the bed and dozed off. When I woke up, freezing cold from sleeping alone, Liam was sitting at our one and only table, a can of peaches by his elbow as he sketched something on one of the papers he gave me the night before.

  I’ve been in many awkward and uncomfortable situations in my life, but sitting there, wondering how I was supposed to act around Liam after the most amazing kiss anyone ever kissed in the history of kisses, was by far the most awkward and uncomfortable. It might have helped if I managed to figure out exactly how I felt about the whole situation, but I was still filtering through about a million different emotions a second. Maybe if he was someone else, if I hadn’t loved his brother first, it would have been different. Maybe I would have called after him last night, begged him to stay. Maybe I would have told him how much I missed him when he wasn’t right beside me or how his smile could instantly make my day happier.

  Then again, maybe not. Maybe I would have still wondered if it was actually Liam who made me feel all sorts of warm, fuzzy emotions, or if I was just reaching out to the only other person in my tiny, cabin-fevered world.

  I was in one of those emotionally-wrought, my-soul-is-so-filled-with-angst-I-can’t-breath places the emo kids are so fond of. I’m talking listen to bad country music and wail along in despair kind of thing. Would it have killed him to at least pretend he was feeling something?

  “By my estimate,” he said, apropos of nothing, “there are at least a half dozen men who will stand beside us, close to two dozen who might, and more than fifty who will support us once we’ve established new Alphas.”

  “Okay…”

  I jammed my feet into my boots and got out of the bed, pulling on another sweater as I made my way across the room. I dropped into the chair opposite Liam in what I hoped was a clearly apathetic heap.

  “A half dozen to the Alpha Pack’s twenty-four? Good odds.”

  Liam rubbed the back of his head, still messing with the names on his list. He would scratch one off of one column, and put it in another. Then, he’d do it again. And again. And again. I sat on my hands to keep them from taking the pen away.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” I said after he moved Silas Elliot’s name around for the eighth time. “We’re not prepping for a battle, Liam. I’m issuing a Challenge. It’s not a a group effort.”

  Liam moved Kirk Cates to the “Maybe” category. “It does matter.”

  “Why?”

  Serious grey eyes met mine. “Because no one should feel like they’re all alone.”

  That day we trained harder than ever before. The next, even harder. We still only had a tiny space in which to work, but we got creative. Somewhere in amongst all the push-ups, drills, and attempts to Change when the moon wasn’t full, the kiss went from the center of my thoughts to a faded memory. The first few nights after it happened, bedtime was a tense affair, with one of us making it a point to be asleep before the other crawled under the covers, but eventually we fell back into our old routine. And after a few weeks, I got so comfortable I started titillating conversations most good, sane girls knew better than to even think about. But snuggled up under the covers, the heat of Liam’s back sinking into mine, under the disguise of darkness, I couldn’t help myself. The desire was too strong.

  “I would kill for a cheeseburger,” I said into the night. “The kind with a really thick, juicy patty sitting on a fresh bun with crisp lettuce and a sweet tomato.”

  Liam’s voice drifted across the bed. “I would assassinate the President of the United States for a steak, with a baked potato covered in butter and sour cream.”

  “I would take out the Queen of England for a salad. One of those huge restaurant affairs with chicken strips and honey mustard dressing.”

  “There is literally nothing on this earth I wouldn’t do for a sandwich.”

  “French fries! French fries! My frozen Canadian kingdom for a single freaking French fry!”

  “I want tacos.”

  “I want Mexican rice.”

  “Fajitas.”

  “Lasagna.”

  “Spaghetti.”

  “Pie.”

  “Cake.”

  One night I actually cried because I craved a Mello Yello with such a raging desire I thought I might die without it.

  Every night we would talk about food until we drifted off to sleep, and every morning we would eat our ration of canned fruits and vegetables and wild game as if we were perfectly satisfied with what we had.

  I told myself any parallel I noticed between our food situation and any other situation was completely in my head.

  As the winter drug on, I found myself talking less and less. There were no more questions about the various Shifters who were aligning themselves against the Alphas, no random thoughts or insights, no clever quips to try to coax a smile out of Liam. Back home there was a commercial from a local mental health facility which provided a depression checklist. From what I could remember, I had them all.

  There were times when it got exceptionally bad. The sun wouldn’t shine for days, the snow would keep us imprisoned in the cabin, and there would be nothing to occupy my mind but fig
hting and blood and death. When it got to the point where I thought I would break, my lifeline would come from the great beyond while I was asleep. My meetings with Alex were never long, nor did anything significant happen, but for a few moments I would get to stretch out under the warm sun and laugh as Nicole tickled my hand or neck with her little puppy tongue while Alex talked about anything and everything just to keep the conversation going.

  In March the weather started getting warmer. It wasn’t like March down in Kentucky, which would herald in the wearing of flip-flops, but the temperature did transition from frozen-river-in-the-inner-ring-of-Hell cold to normal cold. Liam and I were able to be more active outside, which was great. However, we weren’t the only ones.

  The first time I realized we might have a problem I was crouched on the ground two nights before the full moon, cursing Liam and wishing for horrible ends for all his descendants. I was no closer to being able to Change at will than I had been in the fall, but he still had me spending ten minutes out in the cold without my knickers on just in case. To keep me from getting frost bite on my naughty bits, I was stationed by our outdoor fire pit, the giant flames keeping one half of my body a reasonably warm temperature. I was watching the shadows the fire created dance across the forest when I noticed something in the snow. Grabbing any excuse I could find to pull on my clothes, I found it necessary to investigate.

  I didn’t realize I knew exactly what both Liam’s and my paw prints looked like until I was standing over the markings.

  “Liam.” It came out as little more than a breath. I pulled more air into my lungs and tried again. “Liam!”

  I was shaking all over by the time he arrived, and not from the cold. I knew I was panicking, and I knew I really shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. Someone had found us already, and I wasn’t ready. I needed more time to train and prepare. It couldn’t start now. Not like this.

  “What’s wrong?” He came running up from behind the cabin. I had to throw out an arm to keep him from running over my evidence.