It’s the first time someone invites you to a sleepover. It’s like your belly has filled with fizzy pop and you’re floating to the ceiling. Everything tingles. Everything’s bright.
You’re going on an adventure.
You’re on your best behaviour when you get to their house. You play outside all day. They have a dog, and it’s the best thing ever. You’re going to ask for one next Christmas and are going to take care of it, even if it poops in the house.
You use your inside voice when you’re inside. You take your shoes off and say please, like Dad tells you to.
Everything is good and bright and then you look out the window.
It’s dark outside. The sun has set.
You realize, suddenly, you’ll be sleeping here in this strange place. The dog sleeps downstairs, and you’ll be with your friend in his room. It’ll be silent at night. You don’t know if your friend has a nightlight. You’re too embarrassed to ask.
You’ve learnt about sedimentary rocks in school. They roll around the bottom of the sea and collect particles and grow and grow.
You’ve got a sedimentary rock in your stomach. It gets heavier by the minute. Your tummy hurts.
When you friend’s parents ask if you want to go home, you nod quickly.
You want to go home. You want to go home.
It’s weird, waiting for your parents. You feel bad. Your friend doesn’t understand about the rock.
When the doorbell rings, you race to the door. Everything is heaviness and then you see your mom and it turns to electricity and relief.
You hug her. She doesn’t say sorry to your friend’s parents. She just says thank you.
Your mom takes you home. You love the smell of your car. It’s so familiar.
Mom laughs when you ask about the dog. “Let’s see what Santa thinks when it’s Christmas,” she says. You think Santa will agree with you a hundred percent.
When you get home, Dad greets you with a, “Hey, kiddo. Have fun?”
You feel embarrassed. You shouldn’t have been such a baby. You shouldn’t have asked for Mom to pick you up.
Dad hugs you. “Proud of you for calling us, son. You should always ask for help when you need it,” he says. The relief you feel is like clean water washing everything away.
They tuck you into bed. It’s like any other night.
You don’t know the word unconditional yet. But you feel it.
***
Sometimes, late at night, when Damien was trapped in his bed, trying not to make a single sound, trying to dissolve into the silence and the dark, that memory would crack across the frozen lake of his mind. It would whistle across the icy tundra of his chest, a howling, mournful sound. It would split his lips and leave his eyes burning.
He’d imagine his door opening and his parents being there, haloed in light. They would untie him, baptize him from his worthlessness, cradle him in warmth.
The desperation with which he would wish this true could not reconcile with reality. It would seem ridiculous; they were gone forever. There was nothing he could say, or do, or bargain with—they were dead. The hopeless finality of it was absolute.
He’d stare at the shadow of his bedroom door, letting the solitude of it seep, pore by pore, into his soul.
**********
They said the moon had a call that even people could feel. In the wash of their blood and tide of their soul, they could hear it calling.
The full moon cast the forest in an underwater light. Everything that wasn’t darkness was green and silver. Damien was running through its depths, not chased but fleeing nonetheless. Away from the silence of the night, its ropes and creatures, the feel of the darkness swallowing him whole. He was running mindlessly. It didn’t matter where he ended up as long as it wasn’t there.
The forest seemed to be holding itself still for Damien to rip through. There were no birds calling, no wind rippling the leaves, no animals scuttling through the underbrush. All Damien could hear was his own ragged breaths and the noise of his clumsy feet on leaves and fallen branches, as if he were carrying his solitude with him.
He kept running past the burning of his lungs, the trembling of his knees. Not even being knocked down by darkened logs and branches, bloodying hands and knees, could stop him. There wasn’t even any fear; he was consumed by his escape. Until.
From the depths of the moonlight and the darkness, the air started howling. At first, he thought it was his own head, his blood shrieking inside him, but more calls answered the first. As if the sound had broken the spell keeping Damien going, he jerked to a halt. Disoriented and gasping for breath, he looked around. It was all silver and green and black. There wasn’t anything there…until there was.
Like the scene of a horror movie, two small figures appeared from the shadows. Damien stumbled back, reflexive fear electrocuting him into overdrive as the moonlight revealed the shapes. Two small children, dirty with mud and blood, their eyes glowing from faces that were twisted and monstrous. Damien struggled to breathe, swallowing a scream. Run, he thought. Run. But the sight had rooted him to the spot.
As suddenly as he had been alone, he was surrounded. Without the slightest sound, wolves seemed to coagulate from the very air around him, their eyes glowing preternaturally. Damien shied away, but they were everywhere, silent and still like the night itself. His legs gave out from under him, his hands scraping through the decay of leaves and dirt. Damien closed his eyes and breathed.
This was it.
The cold air of winter, the feel of the wolves’ presence, the hard ground beneath him, it all overwhelmed his senses and then faded away. He filled his lungs with the smell of the forest and looked up to see the largest wolf approach him. Its yellow eyes seemed to splice Damien open, revealing every exhausted inch of him.
The fear drained from him. He had meant to run away and succeeded. He wouldn’t have to go back. Instead, he’d be killed by a full moon night. Damien wondered if he would get to see his parents again or if this was his judgment, his punishment and execution, for the dark and the wrongness inside him.
Even if heaven existed, it was clear that wasn’t where these creatures were taking him.
“I’m sorry,” Damien whispered. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t. I tried but I…I’m sorry.”
He was so tired. He was sure that the wolf’s eyes could see every shadow inside him, stark in the glow of the moonlight. There was nothing that Damien could do now. He hunched forwards, head buried in his lap as he knelt before the wolf. His hands pressed against his ears, shutting the world out, making himself so small he was nothing at all.
A moment passed. Two. Damien jerked in surprise as a human hand touched his head, fingers stroking gently through his hair. Damien looked up, eyes widening in surprise as he saw a woman before him. Her naked body was hidden behind her legs as she crouched in front of him, long, dark hair spilling around her. Her skin was the colour of the red earth, her eyes black in the shadows.
There was no mistaking her for anything other than the wolf.
“Are you going to kill me?” Damien asked hoarsely.
“No, pup,” the woman said, and where there should have been relief was only frustration.
“Why not?” He whispered. The woman frowned, her hand stilling in his hair.
The wolves shifted around him, but Damien didn’t look away from her. Her frown deepened, and she shook her head.
“Let’s go,” she said gently, pulling him up with seemingly no force, as if Damien’s limbs were more under her command than his own. Damien choked on a sob. A fruitless, foreboding feeling rotted under his skin.
These creatures looked like monsters, but Damien was bound to so much worse.
**********
Damien sat on the couch he had been guided to, huddling under a soft blanket that was slowly heating up the cold that had snuck into his bones. He was alone in a large living room, the details of which were lost on him. He could hear movement and voices in other parts of
the house, most prominently the woman who had led Damien to the large house in the forest.
It had taken over an hour to get there, the woman steadying him every time his shuffling and uncooperative feet stumbled. He had walked as if in a daze, feeling nothing. Not the wolves, or the prospect of the McKenzies, or anything at all seemed to be able to bridge the divide between him and the world around him.
Damien lifted his eyes as the woman walked into the room, now dressed in a disturbingly normal pair of jeans and short-sleeved T-shirt. She placed a cup on the coffee table in front of Damien and sat beside him. He tensed and shuffled slightly away as the couch dipped. He wasn’t afraid of her, but the thought of being touched right now was too much to even consider.
“I’ve brought you some hot chocolate. The good stuff, too, none of that adding water nonsense. A hundred percent milk,” she said teasingly. Damien stared at the bribe. The thought of eating or drinking anything made the knot in his stomach tighten. “My name is Miakoda, but you can call me Mia,” the woman, Mia, said when the silence stretched uncomfortably. “Could you tell me yours?”
“Damien,” he muttered.
“Nice to meet you, Damien,” she said.
Her voice was so placid that it made hysterical laughter bubble out of his mouth before he could clamp his lips around it. It was rude of him, he knew, but his self-control seemed to have been completely shredded.
“Yeah, I guess this is a pretty strange situation, huh?” she said. Damien said nothing. “I wasn’t expecting to see anybody in the forest tonight. What were you doing out there so late?”
Damien knew that tone of voice. It was the friendly lilt adults used when they wanted a confession out of you.
“I got lost,” he said, which was a lie in spirit but not in letter.
“Okay. Can you tell me what you were doing there in the first place? I’m not telling you off, Damien. I’m just wondering.”
“Got confused,” he shrugged. Normally, there was a buzz of anxiety when he defied adults but now there was nothing at all.
“I see,” Mia said. “Did you have a fight with your parents?”
The ache inside Damien metastasized.
“My parents are dead,” Damien replied, surprising even himself with the flatness of his voice.
“I’m…I’m sorry to hear that,” she said softly. Damien shrugged again, though it felt more like he was hunching into himself. Like a collapse.
“Who are you living with now, then? Relatives?”
“No. Foster carers. The McKenzies.”
“Oh. McKenzies.…How long have you been living with them?” she asked.
“Eight months.”
“Did you guys have a fight? Is that why you were out so late?”
“No, I just do this type of thing,” Damien said, closing his eyes. Each question was growing more exhausting.
“What do you mean?”
“I do this type of stuff. Bad things. I get into trouble at school. I don’t do as I’m told. I…” I’m not good, he wanted to say, but she wouldn’t understand. “Can you stop asking me questions, please?” Damien asked softly, tilting himself away from her in case she got angry.
“Yes—sorry. I…Damien, sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. How about we give them a call, okay? They must be worried sick,” she said, and Damien managed to tamp down a snort, nodding. Despite her words, Mia remained seated. Damien could feel her eyes on him.
“Damien…about what you saw tonight. I think I should explain.”
“You’re werewolves, right?” Damien blurted, coming to life. Underneath the exhaustion, a whole hive of questions buzzed. Damien turned towards Mia, who looked surprised for a second before smiling.
“You’re pretty smart, huh?” she said, and Damien did snort this time.
“Not really. I’m failing most of my classes,” he replied offhandedly. Mia frowned, but Damien went on before she could tell him off. “I’ve read about werewolves. Well, I mean, probably not real werewolves, but they come up in comics all the time. Like, have you heard of Fables? It is so good, though don’t tell the McKenzies, okay, ’cause they don’t like me reading stuff like that, but the wolf in Fables is an ex-sheriff and he rips the head off a Nazi zombie! And then there’s another one called Wolves, and also did you hear that Captain America was turned into Cap Wolf for a few—”
Damien suddenly realized that he had started babbling manically and snapped his mouth shut, twitching apprehensively. He tucked his hands back inside the blanket from where they had been gesturing wildly.
“Sorry” he said, cheeks heating. He looked up at her. She was smiling.
“No, that was interesting. You sound just like my kid, Koko. She must be around your age, actually. Maybe you’ve—”
“Koko Salgado? Yeah, yeah, she’s pretty cool. Doesn’t take shi—I mean…I mean she’s pretty, like, strong. The other day a teacher asked her a question in the middle of class ’cause he thought she wasn’t paying attention, but she answered it straightaway. You should have seen his face,” Damien grinned. Mia snorted.
“Yep. Sounds like her,” she said before falling silent again. Damien stilled.
“I won’t tell anybody. I’m good at keeping secrets,” Damien said softly.
“What about your foster carers? Don’t you want to tell them?” Mia asked. Damien couldn’t hold back another snort.
“I’m not telling them anything,” he muttered. At Mia’s expression he straightened, correcting himself quickly. “I mean, they don’t need to know. It’s not like anybody would believe me anyway. I say a lot of stupid things and, come on, werewolves?”
“Somehow, I don’t believe you say a lot of stupid things, Damien,” Mia said seriously. Damien opened his mouth to protest but Mia went on quickly. “I appreciate your loyalty, but I want you to know that you don’t need to be scared of us,” she said, softer now. Damien frowned.
“Why would I be scared of you?” he asked. Mia looked at him for a moment.
“A lot of people would think werewolves are scary. That we’re monsters.”
“How does that even make sense? How are werewolves scarier than people?” Damien scoffed.
“Probably has something to do with the fangs and the claws and the glowing eyes, if I had to guess,” Mia said wryly.
“Yeah, but people have knives and guns. What can a werewolf really do that a person can’t? Like, in the really good comic books, evil and good are never separated by species or something, but by, like, motivation.”
Damien understood better than most that some people did bad things and some people did good things, and having claws and fangs wasn’t going to change that.
“It’s not about what people can do, but what they’re willing to do,” Damien said with surety. He looked at Mia cautiously. Her expression was open with astonishment before it melted into a soft smile.
“You know, Damien…that’s…that’s probably the smartest thing I’ve ever heard anybody say,” she replied. Damien blushed, feeling instantly uncomfortable. “How about we call the McKenzies, then?”
Damien closed his eyes and nodded.
He remained seated as Mia grabbed one of the cordless phones and sat next to him. He recited the McKenzies’ number, having memorized it along with their address and birthdays when he first arrived.
He fiddled with the edges of the blanket as Mia let the phone ring, having to call twice more before the McKenzies picked up. He listened as Mia gave a heavily edited version of the encounter in the woods.
“Do you want to talk to him?…Oh. Well, in any case, he’s safe.…No it’s okay, he hasn’t been any.…No, he.…Right. Okay, yes. That’s fine. We’ll be ready,” she said, putting the phone down and frowning, although she gave Damien a strained-looking smile when she caught him looking.
Mia tried to make awkward conversation, as adults often did. Damien shrugged and nodded in response to her questions, watching the living room doorway. People would peek in every now and again. He s
aw Koko’s glare briefly. Nadie, the eldest sister, asked if they wanted anything and was shooed away. Hakan, who Damien knew was two years older than him, appeared very briefly before disappearing.
Damien shrunk into himself, wondering if they could smell him. What if they told the whole school Damien was a freak, wandering the woods at night? Mia must have noticed his change in posture because she got up, ushering the others away and out into the garden. There was no going to bed during the full moon, Damien guessed.
“Sorry. Guess I kind of ruined your full moon…thing,” Damien said when Mia returned. She smiled, shaking her head.
“You didn’t ruin a thing, Damien,” Mia said, sitting next to him. “Right, tell me about those comics you mentioned before. I bet Koko’s gonna grill me about them tomorrow. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Hakan sniffs around as well.” She winked at the word sniff. “He’s more curious than we give him credit for.”
Damien had managed to speak in full sentences a few minutes later but was frozen into stillness as the sound of the doorbell cut through the house.
“Oh, I guess that’s them,” Mia said. She frowned slightly at Damien as he remained seated, staring at the direction of the front door. “Hey…you okay?” Mia asked softly. Damien nodded jerkily before getting up, shedding the blanket like old skin.
They walked together to the front of the house, now silent and devoid of anybody else. He tried to keep the quiet and the stillness of the forest inside him, but the moment the door opened fear lanced through him, his heart beating wildly.
What the fuck had he been thinking?
“Oh, gosh, I am so sorry,” Mrs. McKenzie started at once, reaching out a hand as if to grab him, but Damien didn’t move from where he stood slightly behind and to the side of Mia. Mrs. McKenzie frowned deeply, dropping the arm before turning to Mia again. “We just don’t know what to do with him anymore,” she said apologetically. She wasn’t wearing makeup and her hair was slightly mussed, as if she had attempted—but not quite succeeded in—taming it after sleep.
“It was no bother,” Mia assured, putting a hand on Damien’s shoulder. He flinched away from her. He didn’t want to be touched. Mia dropped her hand, looking at him. “He was just…distressed.”
In This Iron Ground (Natural Magic) Page 2
