I wedged it in behind the others, making sure it looked like part of the group. Hopefully whoever was doing the loading would be so tired by the end that he wouldn’t notice a weight difference. I needed my barrel to be loaded close to the end, so I wouldn’t be trapped behind all the others inside the truck.
It wasn’t exactly comfortable inside the barrel, though. The rough wood was hard against my elbows and knees and spine, and after a while, my legs were numb and cramped. I waited all morning, sure that the truck would come to load me up. By midday, I had to climb out and stretch my aching limbs and relieve myself. I ate a few apples and sat on another barrel, listening for approaching engines. Every time a car passed, I was sure it was time.
Finally, towards evening, the loud motor of a truck approached. I climbed into my barrel and slid the lid on, my heart pounding when a door slammed outside. Footsteps approached, and the barn doors opened. This was it.
I was really getting out of the Third Valley. Out there, Mother said there were every kind of unimaginable creature, not just humans. There were things that lived in the Enchanted Forest, although most of them hid so humans wouldn’t eradicate them. Faeries and goblins, witches and warlocks, imps and nymphs, elves and trolls. But outside, there were even more creatures—wizards and sorceresses, satyrs and centaurs, Merfolk and sirens, dragons and beings we couldn’t even imagine.
Footsteps scuffed across the floor, and male voices sounded. I thought I might recognize a few of them, but I couldn’t be sure. I knew most of the men in the valley by sight, though I hadn’t talked to most of them. Mother and I kept to ourselves, and I didn’t have many friends at school.
I was the weird girl with the disabled mother, the girl with the outsider father who was sure to get drunk and cause a scene if we ever joined the other shifters at an occasion in the valley, which was seldom. We didn’t participate in the few events our pathetic excuse for a king tried to organize, as if that would somehow engender shifter spirit. It was like hosting a pep rally to boost the morale of a perpetually losing team.
At first, I was so nervous that I shook as I waited. But after a while, I got bored again. It was warm inside the barn, which had sat in the sun all day, and stuffy inside my dusty barrel. My feet grew numb again, and I had to fight an almost uncontrollable urge to stand up and stretch my legs, to move them, to do anything but sit cramped in the wooden barrel another minute.
Finally, their footsteps began to scuff the packed dirt floor closer and closer to me as they removed row after row of barrels, carrying them out and loading them onto a flatbed trailer.
“Five more barrels, boys,” a voice said, almost directly over my head. Startled, I bit back a gasp and tried to steady my breathing. The barrel in front of mine scraped against the wood where my knee rested. I was so close. So close to getting out of there forever.
Every sound was magnified—the scuff of shoes, heavy breathing from the exertion, the grunt as they each picked up a heavy barrel, the strained voices when they talked while carrying the weight. I gripped the inside of the lid, praying they wouldn’t look down through the seam around it and see white skin and black hair instead of red apples. But they walked away, and I was still there. Suddenly, my heart was hammering with dread.
Had they skipped this barrel? Was there a mark on the ones they were supposed to load, and I’d missed it? Had they somehow known this one wasn’t full of apples?
I listened to their grunts and cheers as they loaded the last few barrels. Maybe the trailer only held an exact number—the number already sitting in the barn, ready for them. I fought the urge to scream and kick my way out of the barrel. Of course I couldn’t get out of this shithole as easy as that. I’d be stuck there my whole life, just like my mother, probably dependent on some sicko just like she was.
Just as I pressed my eyes into my knees to keep from crying, though, the now-familiar scuff of shoes against the floor approached. It couldn’t be. I didn’t dare to hope. But maybe, just maybe, they’d come back for me.
I gripped the lid of the barrel again and held my breath. Suddenly, the barrel tipped—so suddenly, I almost yelped in surprise. My heart raced, and adrenaline shot through me so abruptly I almost vomited. Everything around me slowed to an excruciating pace.
The barrel turned on its point of axis, and I squeezed my eyes shut, sure it would fall onto its side and I’d give myself away somehow. His breath came so close to my face that I could almost feel the heat of it as he exhaled, and then I was lifted up in one swoop. He swore under his breath, and lifted me higher, onto his shoulder. His hand clapped the side of the barrel where my back was pressed, and he began walking towards the door. The door that led out of this valley, out of this life.
From some distant place, I heard voices calling, telling him to hurry up, they were done at last and let’s get out of here and do something tonight…
A mixture of exhilaration and terror tumbled through my veins, and suddenly, I had to stop myself from bursting into hysterical laughter. I was hyper-aware of how close I was to this man, that just on the other side of a slat of old, greyed wood was a man’s hand, a man’s shoulder and neck and face. And on this side was me, but he didn’t know it. Only I knew it.
Tears began to leak from the corners of my eyes at the effort of holding the tension inside me. And then the light filtering through the slats in the barrel changed from dark and muted to a softer, bluer light as he stepped through the doors of the barn into the outside world. A creak sounded, followed by a thump, a scrape, and a metallic clank as someone closed the barn door and latched it.
I was seconds from the truck, from freedom.
The barrel began to tilt as he moved to set it on the trailer. He was setting me upside down, on my head. I started to panic. Couldn’t he see the lid? I clung to it, sure it would slip off at any moment and fall to the ground, revealing the girl inside.
Instead, I slipped. The barrel was almost vertical before my weight shifted, sliding towards the top end of the barrel.
He swore again.
The barrel tilted, then righted, then tilted again as he tried to manage the unwieldy, uneven weight. He stumbled forward a step, cursed when his legs hit the edge of the trailer. And then he dropped me.
The barrel fell onto the trailer, and my arms flew out by instinct to keep my head from smashing against the floor. The lid flew off the second my grip released. Then the barrel bounced off the trailer and onto the ground. Everything happened so fast, I was overtaken by the disorientation of flipping upside down and then hitting the ground hard enough to knock me breathless.
For a second, I was so caught in the action of the moment that my mind was gone, like a blackout.
And then it was back, and I was staring up into Owen’s face. Hands on his knees, he was leaning over me as I sprawled on the ground, my legs still inside the barrel. I threw my hands over my chest as I took in the three other men—three of Owen’s friends, all of whom I recognized from school or around the valley.
A slow smile spread across Owen’s face as his eyes moved over my exposed body. “Well, boys,” he said, straightening up and clapping his hands once. “It looks like we got ourselves a little reward for all our hard work.”
3
I was at my locker after school on Monday when I heard a guy calling my name. Until that moment, I didn’t know Owen knew my name. He didn’t pick on me like some of the others at school, including his friend Ira, but he never spoke to me, either. I didn’t want to look up, but I couldn’t help it. Owen was a natural leader, and not just because his father was the shifter king. He was the kind of person that others obeyed without question, a person who took control of every situation by simply stating what he wanted.
So when he said my name, I wanted to hide behind the door of my crappy bottom locker with the layers of paint chipping to show the previous layers of paint and the bent grating in the door. I wanted to hide my reddening face, to pretend I hadn’t heard him. Instead, I looked up from w
here I was kneeling in the hall, my stomach heavy with dread.
It wasn’t that we’d done something no one had ever done before. Shifters weren’t exactly keen on monogamy, especially at our age. But that didn’t mean they weren’t going to say something about it, brag to their friends, call me a whore, and, apparently, torment me about it.
“Hey, Doralice,” Owen said again, arriving at my locker flanked by two of his friends.
“Hi,” I said, dropping my gaze and shuffling books so I didn’t have to look up at him.
He leaned his hip against the bank of lockers and crossed his feet, just standing there grinning and waiting for…something. At last, I couldn’t fake interest in my books any longer, so I slowly closed my locker door. I was staring directly at his crotch.
I stood and hoisted my backpack onto my back. Then I just stood there like an ice sculpture, because girls like me didn’t walk away from guys like Owen. Hell, girls like me didn’t even talk to guys like Owen. At our small school, everyone knew where they belonged. People were casting curious glances our way. I was frozen in place, my skin breaking out in a cold sweat.
He let me sweat for a minute before he spoke. “So last night was fun,” he said, pushing off the locker beside mine. God, he was tall. And big. He could have killed my father with his bare hands, just like in my fantasies. “How about next weekend? Same time, same place. We’ll see you there.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
With one last grin, he sauntered away, taking his sweet time, as if daring someone to ask him why he was talking to that loser girl who wore Wal-Mart shoes and obviously hadn’t bothered to brush her hair that morning. I stood there watching him walk away, my heart hammering in my ears so loudly I barely heard the cute girls snickering, barely saw the dirty looks they cast my way.
Owen had talked to me. In school. In front of everyone.
Everyone except his girlfriend.
Owen had been dating Willa Golden, the smartest girl in school, for over a year. She was so smart that she’d graduated a year early and gone off to college in September. I knew better than to think he’d want to date me, but maybe, for a minute, I entertained the fantasy. As I climbed onto the bus and scrunched down in a worn, brown seat to stare out the window, I told myself how stupid that was. I couldn’t let myself have those fantasies, ones that ended happily. I wasn’t fated for that kind of life. Girls like me didn’t get happy endings.
It was one thing to imagine him murdering my father. It was equally impossible that he’d want me, and yet, that fantasy had taken hold in a deeper place, one that was dangerously close to hope.
All he wanted was a little fun while his girlfriend was away at college. I’d known that the whole time. And as he’d loomed over me on the ground outside that barn, I hadn’t been madly in love with him. It hadn’t been anything like my fantasy. I’d been scared. It wasn’t like when my father did what he did, but it hadn’t exactly been enjoyable, either. I might have wanted Owen, but not like that, with all his friends waiting in line.
One of them had been an underclassman, and though he was a shifter, I didn’t even know his animal form. He was a sophomore, short but stout, with blonde hair and bad skin. He’d been hooting and hollering the whole while, slapping Owen’s back and dancing around at the prospect, giving everyone high-fives. And then there was Galon, a guy I’d barely even seen before, an outsider who had come to the valley the year before. And then there was Ira.
I didn’t know any of them well, though I’d admired Owen from afar since childhood. Ira was always by his side, until one day during his junior year, Ira disappeared with his beat-up old truck. Everyone figured he’d gone off to make trouble in some bigger city where there were more people to torment and less chance he’d have to face the consequences of it the next time he ran into them. No one had expected him to finish high school, anyway, and not even his family was sorry to see him go.
Then a month ago, he reappeared just as suddenly, looking at least ten years older. And he was not alone. Where he found another bobcat, no one knew. People kept their distance, not sure whether to approach the trailer Ira had dragged back with him and parked on a piece of empty land. After meeting Ira’s companion around town, people speculated whether sweet, stupid Galon had come of his own volition, but no one wanted to cross Ira to find out. Judging by the constant smile on his face, Galon was the one person in the world who found Ira not just tolerable, but loveable. And since his company made Ira at least marginally less hateful, and Galon himself had a smile and a kind word for everyone, no one was clamoring to save him from Ira’s clutches.
I was pretty sure that neither Ira nor Galon had the slightest interest in me or any other female, but that didn’t stop them from participating in the male bonding ritual. No one had protested. When Owen said something was going to happen, that’s how it happened.
Now, as I climbed off the bus and checked the mail, I pushed those thoughts aside. They wouldn’t do me any good. But I already knew I’d go back the next Sunday. Owen was the kind of guy you just obeyed. It didn’t matter what he wanted. And it wasn’t like I was some virginal innocent he was corrupting. It was better to be his little whore than my father’s.
4
I went back the next weekend, though I was a little scared they’d bring some more guys or the entire senior class, which numbered less than a dozen boys, but still too many. When I arrived, though, it was just the four of them again. They did their thing, and I didn’t complain. I went back the next week, and the next, and the next, even though the apples were gone by then.
Thanksgiving weekend, my father came home. I hadn’t seen him since that night, and the magnitude of it all came crashing back at once—his request for me to go with him, how he’d tried to kill me, and how I’d turned into a bird in his hands. How I’d shifted into a rabbit and fled. I didn’t know how to act around him, if I was supposed to pretend it hadn’t happened. I was a little surprised he came back at all, after seeing his daughter turn into a raven right in front of his eyes.
Sometime Friday morning, my father started drinking. By noon, he was stretched out on the couch with the whiskey bottle tucked between him and the cushions. My mother sat in her chair, sharing the ash tray with him as he lay there, cigarette in one hand and remote in the other. I’d never asked her what had happened after I ran that night, what he’d told her and what she’d told him to make him stay. In return, she’d never asked me where I’d gone.
While they were busy watching whatever was on TV, I snuck out. Before shifting, I stepped behind the trash pile that squatted in the corner of our yard—two old cars my father had insisted he would fix up one day, a bedframe, a box spring, an old couch, and a cracked toilet, along with a collection of rusted out paint cans, whiskey bottles, and disintegrating milk jugs. Once I’d stripped off my clothes, I took my animal form and hopped onto the top of one of the old cars.
A part of me hoped my father would look out, see a raven on the roof of the car, and remember that night. But he didn’t come, and soon, I got bored with waiting. I took flight, beating my wings hard until I was swooping through the chilly November sky. It was one of those wet fall days when the air was heavy with cool moisture, the clouds low, and the wind gusty. I spread my wings and soared.
As a raven, I was in my element. Though some people were comfortable in either form, I knew the raven was my true form. The human form was secondary for me. I never felt comfortable in my human body, but when I was a bird, I could float above the valley for hours, wheeling through the sky or letting the currents take me where they wanted. I suppose I could have left the valley as a raven. But somehow, I knew I couldn’t.
I drifted down to the valley floor, hovering just above the trees, and glided along for a while, not really looking for anything, just flying. And that’s when I saw Owen and Willa Golden, sitting on the rocky bank of the creek with a blanket wrapped around them. I could have gone on, probably should have, but I was drawn to Owen. What gi
rl wouldn’t watch her crush if she could get away with it?
There was a beauty in the tragedy of it, in the pain and longing I felt as I sat in a nearby tree, watching them.
At first, they just sat there. They talked, and then they lay the blanket down and started kissing. I knew I should leave, but I couldn’t. I stayed for the whole thing, torturing myself with it. It wasn’t like when we were together, when the underclassman would be cheering everyone on. He wasn’t so bad, though. He only took a couple minutes. And it didn’t matter. I always had Owen first. I could close my eyes and pretend with the others, with the younger guy and with Galon. It was Ira I didn’t like—the way he’d snap at me to turn over so he didn’t have to see my face, his bony fingers biting into my sides hard enough to leave bruises.
But it was Owen I went back for, who made it all worth it. Owen, who was silent and passionate when he was with me, who looked at me the whole time, like it wasn’t about the other guys, but about me. About us. Owen, who would stroll by my locker and tell me to come by again that Sunday. Owen, who smiled at me in the halls now, like he didn’t care what other people thought of me, or what they’d think of him. Of course he didn’t. He could do anything, have anyone.
But when Willa came back, it was about her. There were no other guys around. It was just them. And that’s what I wanted.
Even after they gathered up the blanket and walked back to the road, their arms around each other and the blanket draped across their shoulders, got in Owen’s car, and drove away, I stayed. I stayed, and I thought about what I could do to become Willa Golden.
The Raven Queen: Fairy Tales of Horror (Villain Stories Book 1) Page 2
