“Let’s go back,” Damien said, sitting forwards.
“What about…” Hakan hedged.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, not wanting to let Hakan know how easy it had been to sway him, but when he looked at Hakan the boy was smiling. Damien stuck out his tongue. Hakan rolled his eyes but smiled, which was what Damien had been aiming for.
Everything is going to be okay, Damien thought as they walked through the forest. Everything is going to be okay.
If he only repeated that enough times, maybe it would come true.
**********
Damien could hear Nicola trying to contain her excitement when he called her the next day to tell her about his change of heart. It almost made him smile through his queasy stomach. It was nice to know he had someone in his corner, even if she was excruciatingly naïve.
Each conversation thereafter was worse than the last. The other kids at the foster home barely reacted, nodding and making jokes. Jack patted him on the back.
“Let’s hope this one’s your forever-home, huh?” It sounded sarcastic and bitter, but Damien saw through him.
Koko, to Damien’s great surprise, had hugged him. They had become close, but she was one of the least tactile members of the Salgado family, especially when it came to overt shows of affection.
“Now we don’t have an excuse not to start that comic book, eh?” She’d played off the hug by slugging him in the arm. Damien had been speechless with emotion.
Nadie was off to university, but Hakan relayed her message of excitement. Hakan himself looked genuinely happy. He’d grown a lot the past few months, not only vertically but laterally, his broad shoulders and square jaw giving him a football player look that would be intimidating if his quiet demeanour didn’t make his nature obvious. His broad, square face split into the widest smile Damien had ever seen on him when he was told the news. The hug that had followed had enveloped Damien completely.
The conversation with Mia and Cameron, however, had by far been the worst.
They hugged him too, but these hugs were different. They were parent hugs. Family hugs. Hugs from people that say that they care about you, that want you in their house, that still don’t know. That don’t even suspect what Damien was like, at his core. The expressions on their faces was so distinct. It was caught in amber instantly. When the end came, he’d be able to compare their faces to the ones that would come. The exhausted, disappointed ones. The ones that said, “I just can’t do this anymore.”
All Damien could do was enjoy the feeling of flying before he hit the floor.
**********
On the day of the move, Damien was a mess. He’d actually learnt how to calm his heartbeat and breathing in an attempt to avoid his fears and anxieties being detected by the Salgados, but this time it was impossible. He sat in the front seat of Mia’s car and stared blankly ahead, feeling the creature of his fear truly awaken as they turned into the forest.
There was no turning back now.
To his horror, everybody rushed to greet him outside as if he hadn’t been there countless times before. Koko yanked his duffel bag out of Damien’s hands with a “Hey Dorkus Maximus,” before traipsing into the house as if the bag weighed nothing.
Nadie, who was visiting from university, took the small box containing the rest of Damien’s possessions out of the back seat, balancing it with one hand so she could ruffle his hair with the other.
“Hey!” he protested weakly, but she was already walking up the porch stairs. Mia smiled at him.
“Welcome home,” she said. Damien closed his eyes.
It would have been less painful to have her claws in his stomach.
Hakan stood back. Damien could feel his face twitch with panic, but Hakan didn’t react. He simply watched, a sentinel.
Cameron put his arm around Damien’s shoulders and pulled him towards the house. For a moment, Damien was reminded of that day in school, when he’d seen Cameron use this exact gesture on Hakan and Koko. They’d tried to escape the hold, used to it, but Damien let himself experience the foreign feeling in this suddenly foreign land.
Damien walked up with Cameron to his new room. He had already seen it, but the sight of it then still sent his heart into a gallop. The room was beautiful. Peaceful green walls, wood furniture, and a soft, cream-coloured rug over the same wood panelled floors covering the rest of the house. The white colour, Damien thought dreadfully, was bound not to survive Damien long.
He looked at the waiting shelves, at the wardrobe with an overly optimistic amount of space inside. The first time they had shown him the room, Damien had looked around, barely passing the threshold. He felt like an intruder.
He unpacked slowly. Every piece of clothing hanged, every possession placed tentatively on a shelf, felt like a handful of dirt on his own coffin.
When he had collected himself enough to go downstairs, everybody made up for the staged welcome with a normal flurry of activity. Koko pulled him aside to show him a new game she had found online, collapsing with her laptop on the collection of humongous beanbags puddled on the living room floor. It took thirty seconds for the twins to pile on them.
“You’re gonna stay here forever,” Lallo said as he crawled over Damien, all knees and elbows. Damien’s eyes flicked towards Hakan, who had followed but not joined them, sitting on the couch instead. Damien didn’t reply, simply running a hand through Lallo’s hair.
Dinner was a similar affair. Damien helped out like always, setting the table and helping carry things from the kitchen. The meal was its usual mess of voices and plates and laughter. Damien got so caught up in the normalcy that he turned to Cameron when the washing up was finished to ask when he’d be driven to Oak House. The words died in his throat as the reality, starker than ever, hit Damien.
The Salgados had fostered him. He was staying there to sleep that night, and the next, and the next. “Welcome home,” Mia had said.
Home.
He didn’t realize he was panicking until a warm hand fell on his shoulder. Damien looked up to see Cameron’s understanding face.
“How about we take a breath of fresh air for a moment?” he suggested. He was already steering Damien through the patio doors as Damien tried to get a hold of himself.
They walked until they reached Jurassic Park. It had become a familiar sight, but never at night time. Damien breathed deeply. The scent of the garden had uncurled its petals into something rich and deep.
Cameron walked him towards the centre, where a large, straight tree stood, an odd sort of cactus spiralling around its trunk. Damien felt his mouth drop open as he caught sight of the large, white flowers perching on the cactus. They seemed to glow in the moonlight. Their yellow filaments moved slightly in the breeze as if they were alive.
“Wow,” Damien said. The panic inside him turned to crystalline water. Even amidst all the other plants, the scent of the white flower was fragrant, filling Damien with each slow breath.
“Meet the Queen of the Night,” Cameron said quietly, his hand still warm on Damien’s shoulder. “It blooms only one night a year, did you know? I’m not surprised it chose tonight.”
Damien looked up at him, uncomprehending. Cameron smiled, and Damien had to look away from the openness, the affection.
“The natives from the Mojave Desert have a story about this flower. They talk about ancient tides that flow across the world constantly. They are pulled by the shifts in balance, the equilibrium between give and take. Between order and entropy. The flow of energy. Of Ousía.
“A lot of people have lost the ability to listen to these tides, to what they are telling us. But the world still speaks to us. It is not bitter or vengeful. It reaches out to us constantly. And the Queen of the Night is a soft hand on our cheek saying, look. It blooms in the heat, when resources are rich. It’s a sign of good tidings.”
Damien looked at the flowers. A feeling unfurled inside him, as fragrant and soft as the desert flower.
“I used to
think that the way the Salgados love can be almost…intimidating. When I first met Mia, when I first got invited into the fold, so to speak, family didn’t mean the same to me as it did to her. To them, pack is everything. Nothing else could ever come first. For me—I was never particularly close to my parents. I mean, I loved them, of course, but they had held old-fashioned ideas about too many things. And there was never a big stress on family life—we didn’t do things together, you know?
“When Mia formally invited me to the pack, to start our own branch of it, I was scared,” he confessed. Damien looked up at him avidly as Cameron gazed, lost in thought, at the desert flower. “I was scared that I lacked something, some sensibility, some sort of…I don’t know, an innate knowledge of how to be family, how to be pack. Especially with something as foreign as werewolves were to me then, I was afraid that I could never reach their understanding of pack. Could never live up to their expectation of what it meant.
“But pack…pack is like this flower. Or like the earth, like the forest. It’s meant to grow as much as it is nurtured, to give what it is given, to flourish. At least, that’s how the Salgado pack works. I know they can be intimidating, but they return tenfold whatever they are given.”
Damien understood that the situation Cameron was describing was not completely synonymous with Damien’s, as Damien was being fostered, not joining the pack. Damien had learnt there was a large disparity between the two. Just because he was invited into someone’s home didn’t mean he had the quality of family, maintained by the omnipresent fact that he could be discarded at a moment’s notice. When he had accepted the Salgados’ offer to be fostered, he had known exactly what he was accepting and exactly what he was not.
Still, Damien thought he understood what Cameron was really trying to say.
Welcome.
Damien nodded, smiling tentatively at Cameron. Cameron returned the smile. Turning back to the flower, Damien took a fortifying breath.
It smelt like a rich, desert night.
CHAPTER SIX
There was pressure all around him. Inside him. He was bones buried in the dirt. The mud was filling his throat even through clenched teeth. He was—
Gasping into darkness, he could feel the ropes around his wrists, his legs.
He was at the Salgados’. They had tied him down, he knew, he knew—
He jerked up, the damp, acidic foam of the sheets swaying around his waist before he stumbled out of bed. He could still taste the soil in his mouth. He could still feel the raw burn around his limbs. Every breath he took was smaller and tighter than the last.
Oh, God.
He buried his hands in the cream rug where he knelt, pressing his face to the side of the bed, trying to suffocate the awful sounds his throat was making.
Calm down, he thought to himself viciously, calm—
The door opened. It was a soft, ominous sound. All of Damien’s muscles bunched up, knotting painfully. He whipped his head to look and saw the tall silhouette of an adult. Mia.
Damien scrambled onto the bed. His heart was pounding in that familiar drumroll that preceded danger. He tried to tense his chest and tighten his throat to stop the gasping.
“Damien…?” Mia’s soft voice said as she stepped into the room.
“Sorry,” Damien said automatically, clutching the sheets as Mia walked towards the bed. He shrank into himself as she sat carefully at the edge of the bed. “Sorry. Sorry, sometimes I just, I’m sorry for waking you up. It won’t—” he choked on the lie, happen again. Not only would she find out soon, she would smell it on him. “I could sleep outside. Or, or, you could put something in my mouth or something just, could you, just not the tying. I don’t, I can’t—” His breath was short and fast again.
Mia shushed him quietly. Damien tried not to make it obvious how he shifted away from her as she moved closer.
“Damien, listen to me,” Mia said, her voice still soft and quiet, but firm. Her features were washed in moonlight and she looked like a scene from an old, black-and-white movie, the nostalgic remains of something Damien didn’t really have anymore. “I will never, ever tie you down. Ever. There is nothing you can do, and nothing you can say, that will make me hurt you. Nothing. As a Kephalē, as your foster carer, my role is to protect you. And I know that that’s hard to believe, but I’ll keep telling you, and keep showing you. That’s my job.”
There was a moment of silence. The words took a moment to permeate his skin, to calm the rushing of his blood. He took a breath. Another one.
He knew Mia. He trusted her. But his animal side had learnt not to trust the hand that feeds you.
“You’re like my foster Kephalē,” Damien blurted.
Mia smiled, her shoulders relaxing. “Exactly. And, as my foster cub, there is nothing anybody can possibly do to break my life-long code of protection.”
Damien relaxed against the headboard, letting the silence stretch before quietly confessing. “I make noise at night sometimes. I get out of bed and have to walk around after a nightmare ’cause it’s like, I don’t know. I know it’s stupid but it’s like that’s where the nightmares are and…”
“That doesn’t sound stupid at all. After my mother’s death—she was my Kephalē, too—I had quite a lot of nightmares. When I woke up, I always had to go make myself some tea. I always have the same blend of tea, one my mom showed me,” Mia shared gently. “How about tomorrow we go buy it and make an ice version of it? It has no caffeine and it’ll cool you down after a nightmare. We’ll keep the leaves stocked to make warm when it gets colder.”
Damien didn’t know what to say, so he nodded. “You don’t have to come out every time. I can handle them,” Damien said.
Mia smiled almost sadly. “I understand. But I can’t promise I won’t come out sometimes, especially at the start. It’s in my instinct. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to change the sheets?”
“No, it’s fine. They’re barely damp. I’ll just change my shirt.” He touched the sweat-dampened cloth.
Mia nodded. She waited as Damien changed and then crawled back to bed. “Do you want to try a little relaxation technique my dad showed me? I used to get anxious when I was a kid and he would walk me through it until I could do it myself.”
Damien nodded through the spark of nervousness at Mia sharing something so close to her heart with him.
“Okay. Get comfortable and close your eyes.”
Damien nodded again and then slid down so his head was on the pillow. He could feel the slight dip in the bed from where Mia was still sitting. Hesitantly, he closed his eyes.
Mia began to talk.
It is a full moon night. The moonlight is soft and silver. You are in an open field, and everything glows around you. The silky grass comes up to your waist, swaying in the breeze like the waves of the sea. You stroke your hand across it slowly, its greens and its silvers, the soft strands of it against your palm.
You take a deep breath. Deep, deep. You let it out slowly. Your lungs fill with the scent of the night. The rich earth, the fresh air, the smell of the forest. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. With each breath, you can feel yourself filling with moonlight. It is casting its kind glow on all the shadows inside. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly.
You walk forwards. The grass and dirt are soft beneath your bare feet. You wade through the grass. Everything is calm but filled with life. With the tranquil energy of the moonlight. You look around. This place is yours. You belong to it as it belongs to you. You are safe here.
You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly.
As you look around you realize—you are part of this land. You are the moonlight that streams down. You are the grass that sways. You are the leaves that murmur. You are the earth and you are the air. You are no more and no less than it.
You have been filling yourself up with problems and fears. With I shoulds and shouldn’ts. But here, you see how simple i
t really is. You are the force of the raging river, the might of a mountain, the strength of a tree. You do not expect more or less from them than what they are. Their existence is enough. So is yours.
You are a creature of the moonlight. You are a creature of the earth.
You let yourself be with that feeling. With that knowledge. That power. That at the most fundamental of levels, you are the same as the earth around you. You are another creature, free to live in balance with itself and the world. You have no duty here. You are not that important. You are important enough to let yourself live. Let yourself be.
You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly.
You fill yourself with moonlight. With the calm it brings. The peace. All the pieces of you that have been rattled through the day are settled at night.
You take a deep breath. You let it out slowly.
You feel the moonlight. You are what it is.
You take a deep breath.
You let it out slowly.
**********
The full moon fell on the second Saturday after his first night at the Salgados’. Damien had been tracking the moon for months, so it wasn’t a surprise, but this time he felt it ramp up as the energy of the house magnetized. All of the Salgado children became both more playful and irritable. Even Mia would sometimes become more easily exasperated, although this never escalated into screaming or hitting. It was a clean, organic energy that filled the house, like the tense, electric calm before summer rain.
Despite the contagious energy in the house, Damien couldn’t help but be nervous at the notion of being left behind all alone that night. The assumption that he couldn’t join the run, however, was broken as Mia very casually told him about the night’s plan. A run through the forest, the werewolves in wolf form except the twins, who weren’t old enough to fully shift.
“But I’m human,” Damien had replied dumbly.
In This Iron Ground (Natural Magic) Page 12
