Wolf Sirens Fever: Many are Born, Few are Reborn (Wolf Sirens #2)

by Tina Smith

  The sun had set an hour ago. I needed to flee. I pulled the gun out of the wet zip lock bag and replaced the lid. Briskly I left through the back. I dashed out and then took off full pelt through a gathering of a few people outside the hall who were, judging by the glowing embers, smoking. Avoiding eye contact I sprinted away into the dark scrub. I found the spot I had hidden the rifle in the branches of a Tea Tree. I snapped it together hurriedly, slinging it over my shoulder as my heart galloped. I felt there wasn’t time to load both guns, they would check for me soon. I needed to put some distance between us. I ran as far and as fast as I could into the scrub, stopping after a few minutes to load the rifle and cover my clammy body in cold mud from the mangroves to mask the smell of my sweat. I pulled the rifle strap back across my chest with dirty hands. I heard the sound of branches breaking in the distance. Something was coming up fast. Before I could point the gun in the darkness it lunged for me and automatically, just as I had been trained, my arm swept fast to combat the attack and my handgun made contact with the creature’s skull. Everything I had dared not think about became a reality. This time I was fighting for my life. I would not go back. I hadn’t ever believed it but I would kill her if it came to it. In that second I was a warrior fighting for my life, my freedom. The metal of the gun had delivered a brutal knock. I lunged with all my ferocious power at the beast causing it to hit the ground and with my arms, I beat with all my might on its body as it wriggled under me frantically. Then I clamped my hands about its writhing thick neck and bore my weight down as hard as I could, strangling the life from the creature. Suddenly my knees, that had a second ago pressed over the animals rib cage and its legs, now balanced me on dirt and I felt off kilter as the neck I gripped shrank deceptively fast. His arms, like soft tree roots, twisted desperately.

  I gathered my wits and placed my hands on the sticky human skin trying to press him down as his hands gripped and flailed across my rigid arms. Jackson - it was Jackson, it had been his watch. He choked a feeble strangled croak and with my strength I pushed down harder on his neck until all of a sudden he went limp as a doll. I released my fingers from his flesh and reached for the gun that lay nearby, tossed in the struggle. Then I heard it – more were coming up fast, and I found my feet and began to run before my mind could even register what I did. I stumbled in my fright and the coarse bark of a fallen log grated my shins, but I didn’t feel the burning of scraped skin, just my heart pounding inside my chest as I fled. I hoped I hadn’t thought too much about my direction. Something told me she would be able to see it.

  At lightning speed I navigated the trees, as wind brushed my ears. I panicked they would smell the tiny smear of blood on my shin. As far as I could tell no one followed me. My soaked shoes were useless in the sand and mud, so I threw them in a different direction. Hopefully it would confuse my trackers. With shaky hands I stripped off my black dress and loaded the bullets in the handgun; I filled the magazine and I put the others back in the zip lock bag, hurriedly.

  The dirt was washed off as I headed across the inlet at dawn through the dark water, in my underwear, rifle strapped to my back, searching the bank on both sides for them, eyes alert. My breath steamed across the surface and the air I drew in burnt my throat. My dress and handgun almost fitted neatly into the zip lock bag and I held it up awkwardly with my left hand as I swam with my right, kicking my legs, as the tide dragged me through the tannin-stained salt water. Surely they would be tracking me now. I knew it wouldn’t be long ‘til Reid and Cres found me.

  Once on the other side I checked the handgun was working and struggled on as though I was in a marathon, my breath drawing heavy and shallow. Along with the distant sounds of birds this was the only thing I heard as I stumbled into the sandy mangroves. I hurriedly slipped my damp dress over my wet skin. Wolves were notorious for their stamina. They chased down their prey and eventually ran them down and tore at them with raw aggression. This was their game; I had to think outside the box. I was not the hunter, but the hunted. It was going to come down to a fight, one in which they did not want to kill me. But I was not going back without a struggle.

  I prayed Cres would help me, that she would leave it a while before she raised the alarm. I prayed she would stall the search, send them in the wrong direction. I had no idea how I was going to escape them, but I hoped Cres had helped me - even if it was only to turn a blind eye to the missing weapons, to take too long to guess where I headed. If I could evade them for long enough, maybe I could steal some clothes and a car at night and get far away, where they couldn’t smell me out or track my prints. I thought of Cresida ambushing me, letting me struggle in vain, only to meet me worse for wear, using her gift to predict the moment and the location. I tried to not think about where I was going and jogged on.

  Raw brown muddy crab sustained me for two more days as I kept on the move, bitten by sand flees, dehydrated and slathered in mangrove sand, which reeked of seaweed and dead crustaceans. I slept for only a few hours at a time up in the trees, waking with ants on me. In my dreams I saw her again. I could hear her breathe, the girl I had seen in her nightie, in the dream my first night in Shade. But her hair was red over the white night dress, and this time she had Lily’s nose and when she looked at me, her eyes glowed green. I awoke with a jolt with my cheek against the bark of a tree. Thirstily I sucked the condensation from the zip lock plastic bag that I had tied on the leaves of a tree branch. Stuffing it in my pocket, I prepared to run on.

  I was terribly thirsty. I neared a campsite. Stumbling on through the sand, I decided to bide my time nearby, until nightfall when I would steal food, clothes and try to get a car. I was chilled to the bone. My nerves, on edge for so long, now settled upon the hope of finally evading Reid and Cres, and leaving the valley. I closed my eyes again listening to the campers. I made out the sound of the ocean waves in the distance and another familiar noise, a road.

  I wasn’t sure how long I could evade them. Bare foot and suffering exposure.

  15. The First Cut is The Deepest

  Cresida James was the most popular girl in Shade High School. She had a capacity for being nice to everyone. This was undoubtedly due to her upbringing. Her parents were old hippies and she was raised with a good sense of community and a level-headed fondness for diplomatic discussion. She felt like she belonged in this home community, and she had been less so accepted at Shade primary school because of her alternative roots which had singled her out as different. She was a shy and intelligent student without a mean bone in her body. By the time she came to high school her star sign had reached a Leo phase and she emerged from her shell.

  Cresida saw high school as a new start. She smiled at everyone she met, figured out what was cool and what wasn’t and changed her clothes to cool and casual, different from the daggy sweats she wore in primary school. She talked her fair-minded parents into giving her a reasonable clothing allowance and she dressed how she envisioned herself: in low riding jeans and crop tops. She was wise enough not to deviate from what suited her. She stopped at earrings and accessories.

  She ceased biting her nails and on a couple of occasions even painted them. The biting was a bad childhood habit, something she had done out of boredom because her parents didn’t allow television or computers. Their home was an owner-built mud brick and wood hut amongst the trees in the bush kilometres from anywhere, close to her parents’ friends’ land and all their children. They grew up together and had their own society of sorts. They played in the gum trees, went on bush hikes through the surrounding bush land, swam in the cold river, fresh from the melted snow which trickled down from the Snowy Mountains. They had movie weekends as a special treat and rode bikes, had pet goats, cows and organic vegetable gardens. She spent one fondly-remembered summer with measles eating homeopathic pills with the other infected kids from the nearby properties.

  Cresida caught the bus to school for the thirty-minute drive down the dusty road, while the other local kids arrived at school with their mot
hers in four-wheel drives, from only two or three streets away; those kids who ate McDonald’s and went to dance classes and played competitive sport. The ones that ridiculed her.

  When Cres hit high school she shed the old friends she had clung to in the early years of primary school and hatched, like a moth from a cocoon. Everyone knew her, and better still, everyone liked her. She was good looking, had unusual features. Some throwback in her genetics had given her almond-shaped eyes, black brows, blue eyes and blonde hair (which her parents assured her would turn dark brown one day but never did). She was almost instantly one of the most popular girls in high school. Cresida hung out with the cool kids of that era, those first few semesters in Shade High. She frequented their houses with girlfriends and tried her share of drug experimentation with them under their parent’s unsuspecting noses. She devoured magazines, read between the lines and learnt how to give head from Marie Clair magazine, stolen from the doctor’s office. She explored the outside world through Cosmopolitan, copied the fashion from Dolly magazine, played alternative music and read the ‘cool’ novels.

  Cresida passed her exams, started to wear minimal make-up. At the beginning of one semester she had her heart broken by a popular boy who she was seeing on the quiet, who broke up with her by publicly dating another popular girl – something she never forgot. That day was pivotal, the first day she cracked a little, after she’d seen it for herself, his arm around her. It was a slap of rejection. Cresida cried in the toilets after she’d heard the ‘exciting’ news. After that she was fine, back on the horse. She never forgot that first sting. The next boy she dated she wasn’t all that keen on and he had a girlfriend at the time. They had their fun and one night after their relationship was made public she broke it off with him, much to his surprise - and she didn’t care. His ex-girlfriend was furious. It was after that Cres began to withdraw. Though she didn’t recognize it at first, Leo was leaving her sign and wouldn’t return.

  She lost weight, caught the eye of a particularly handsome older boy – after all, she had cut her teeth on younger boys – and he seemed to like her. He was a prize. When she spoke to him he smiled with his glistening blue eyes, though he seemed unfortunately intertwined with a new blonde girl with perfect teeth. But Cres was surprised how quickly she swayed Sky’s attention. Some nights, despite the distance, he would show up at her house and they would run off into the bush. She was amazed at her energy. If it was hormonal it wasn’t like anything she had experienced. One evening on a picnic blanket under the stars late at night they made love. The affair was short lived.

  Her parents were surprisingly open-minded. After it hit school they were an item, she invited him over. They were free to do as they pleased in the comfort of her bed and she honed her skills under the doona, her curtains open to the surrounding bush. She remembered her parents calling out before approaching and knocking loudly before opening the door, to inform her of the day’s plans. They didn’t kiss her goodbye under the awkwardness of the situation and instead bade her a pleasant farewell as they were often inclined to do. And like always, she smiled and wished them well. They walked away down the hall and never returned. She remembered her mother waved before closing the door.

  The police told her later, once the news had been broken, that dirt roads were dangerous, more so in the dry.

  A car had driven out in front and they had skidded to avoid the inevitable collision, hit and tumbled. Later, she learnt the sedan had slid on the gravel and careered down an embankment. The woman in the other car was injured, but not seriously. She expressed her guilt and remorse. Cres was numb, however, and she had a small brother to care for. Her neighbours, who had known her since she was a baby, comforted her. Cresida wasn’t present however. Grief does that to you, and the tears are like medication. For a time she was a walking ghost. Her aunt came, organized the funeral and didn’t talk a lot about it. Aunt Tabetha was horrified at the distance they lived from town, and promptly moved Cresida and her little brother from the bush to the inner part of Shade to a box-shaped house and did her best to mother them. Her clinical compassion was far from intimate, however, and simply filled a job vacancy which any middle-aged woman who cared could do. Flowers and well-wishers and condolences flooded from the small town, a small pinprick of comfort.

  Trees no longer surrounded her room. Cresida took to running to find an outlet for her energy. She ran mostly at night and gradually increased her distance, barely breaking a sweat. One night she ran half way to her house in the bush but turned when she realized she didn’t want to see it.

  Cres was acting dangerously to numb the pain; maybe instinctually she knew it the most destructive thing to do. The next night after drinking a stolen bottle of Beefeater Gin, and smashing it on a head stone, she ran to Sky’s place in the cold night air, to see him – to feel anything but the pain she felt. Anything to distract her from the nothingness her parent’s deaths left in her life, in search of some kind of comfort. She had withdrawn since the loss and perhaps she would have pushed him away but Sky had disappeared after the news. The long driveway was edged with a stone and cement wall curving up toward the house, rimmed with flowers. She walked in uninvited, in the night. The house was quiet, eerily so. Cresida felt the intensity, the apprehension it caused inside her as she approached the living area. She was drawn to it. Sam was there, waiting for her and after a struggle she bit Cresida hard. Sam did not wish to kill her, only phasing to attack and bite. Cres fell stricken to the carpeted floor, smearing it with blood from her scratched arms. When Sky found her in a state of shock, of course it was too late.

  She hoped she would die, as he carried her to a room. She could hear arguing, a fight and some raised voices…

  She opened her eyes when the metamorphosis was complete. Awoken in dried blood-stained sheets. She wasn’t dead, but born again. Her already supernatural body seemed to cope with the venom in an almost too compliant way. Though the scratches healed they remained as ugly scars swerving down her arms. Sky was there in the morning and he brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear.

  “What brought you here?” he asked gently.

  But she never answered him. She never let him in.

  Sky filled her in on all of it, he said he would help her, that he felt guilty beyond words; his eyes were rimmed with red. She knew remorse was worthless.

  Cres felt strange, as though she had known it would happen, as though it were deja vu. Like a bad dream that had come true. Maybe she should have screamed but she didn’t.

  Cresida James then went on a bender; she drank alcohol from her aunt’s brandy stash, raided the local liquor store and wasn’t caught. She met with her old friends, or acquaintances of dodgy friends, and had marijuana and a few pills, paid for with stolen money; dropped acid in a milk shake. She was surprised how easy it was. There were no sexual favours expected as long as she brought cash. She kept a gun on her from the liquor store counter, a sleek, black light Hammerli. It was well hidden tucked behind the faded picture of Jesus in the hall, slotted on the inside of the frame. She felt as though the dogs were after her and she had to run, though she wasn’t coherent. After a few weird weeks she turned up in a real state at school and the office staff had her aunt and a counsellor drag her to the local hospital and then rehab. The students had no idea about the details; all they heard on the gossip vine was that she was a drug addict. The staff kept mum because of the sensitivity of the situation, not even discussing it around the dinner table with their husbands. The fact was, Cresida James, the girl whose parents had been buried in a double funeral, had suffered too much to even deserve small town gossip.

  On return to class she was told by the student counsellor that her “episode”, was the unhealthy result of her withdrawal from the grief process. She had to see a therapist fortnightly until she assembled some act of normality to satisfy them. So she hid her violent streak, partly so she wouldn’t have to suffer the drive with Tabetha to his office. She apologized for the scars with an ev
en expression as though she had inflicted them herself. The adults were fooled, maybe because they wanted to be, however the student body was not. This wasn’t Cres. She was avoided, invisible and now she liked it. She passed her urine test, she complied.

  Cresida was in the death throws of the wolf venom, which she seemed almost immune to.

  It rattled her bones and began to infect her soul. Draining the last of the happiness left buried inside her. She shaved her head and was sent again to the counsellor. She had done it at the hairdressers, although she didn’t mention she had to do it herself as the woman employed to cut it stalled, unconvinced it was a good idea. So her new look was put down to rebellion. Her aunt was assured it would grow back and Tabetha tried to stifle her tears with a tissue over her mouth. Once the meeting was complete Cres was allowed back to class. Nothing mattered anymore.

  She gained weight from eating irregularly and developed acne, something she had avoided under her hippy parents’ roof, grazing on tahini and salad. Her friends from the property, her neighbour’s kids, most of whom were older or too young to understand, had moved away to cities or finished year twelve and didn’t know what to do with her, though they kept in contact. Slowly her hair grew out which had never been past her shoulders – ever, due to her grandmother’s genetics. But she kept the same expression. It was hardened and angry. In fact her hair grew long, so long it touched her buttocks - an unbelievable growth in a very short time. The girl inside Cresida hated to cut it, but it drew stares during daylight hours in the street and caught in hedges at night. She wondered after she hacked it off with nail scissors in the bathroom, if it would ever grow back the same and then remembered how useless and unnecessary it was; human worry. Useless concerns. It had occurred to her she was not real anymore. Nails sprouted from their stumpy beds, her hands were foreign to her and she awoke in a nightmare of scratched and torn sheets. When she was bothered, she tried to gnarl the nails back down, but the next day they sprouted back. It became a sport. Nightly she chewed them down and daily she cut her hair.