Metal Wolf (Warriors of Galatea Book 1)

by Lauren Esker

  "I think on Halloween, no one is going to look closely enough to notice." Sarah twirled, making the skirt and the pink wig stand out as she spun. The flashes of her legs, winking up to the thigh, left Rei dry-mouthed. "What do you think?"

  "I think I'm glad nobody got a wild hare to drag me along on this foolishness," Gary grumbled, but he was grinning. "You kids have fun. I won't wait up. Just be careful."

  Sarah grabbed a jacket off its hook in the kitchen, then hesitated. "I can't put this on over my wings. For that matter, I can't drive with my wings on. We'll have to take them off in the truck and put them back on when we get to town."

  "Last chance to back out!" Gary called from the living room.

  "No!" Sarah called back. She looked at Rei over her shoulder as he helped her with the straps on the wings. "Unless you want to. We could call it off."

  Rei shook his head. "I'm looking forward to seeing your world."

  "Me too," she said shyly, and then laughed at herself. "With you, I mean. I've seen it before, of course."

  "I know what you meant." He kissed the corner of her mouth lightly before turning to open the door.

  The clear weather had held for the past couple of days, and they pulled out onto the farm road in crisp autumn sunshine, the truck's shadow as sharp as if it had been cut with a knife. Rei looked around curiously. He'd been on the road a couple of times now, but always at night. He had to suppress the urge to duck down in his seat when another vehicle passed them, shaped like Sarah's truck with a pile of squared-off hay blocks in the back.

  Sarah leaned over and tapped the buckle next to his leg. "You should put your seatbelt on. Half the people around here don't wear them, but it is, technically, the law. Trust me, I'm not driving a half mile over the speed limit with you in the truck. No sense taking any chances."

  Only some of that made sense, but he looked at how she was wearing the shoulder strap across her chest, and reached to find his own. Sensible, that the vehicle came with a restraint device in case of accident. It took him a few tries to figure out how to fit the buckle into its receptacle, but it was similar enough to the seat restraints on Galatean ships that he could figure it out.

  Sarah turned on another road and they began passing more houses. There were people now, the first ones he'd seen outside of pictures in books and glimpses at night. Aside from their unusual color and foreign clothes, they weren't so different from people back home. A woman was walking two small bouncing moplike animals on leashes; an old man raked leaves in the yard of one of the houses. A girl passed them on the side of the road, riding on a high-stepping horse that looked even more Hnee-like than the smaller and more roly-poly horse back at Sarah's farm.

  Sarah slowed the truck and made another turn. "And this is Sidonie," she said. "My hometown."

  The buildings here were close together, some of bare red brick, others painted neutral colors. Most were one or two stories tall. The stores bore signs in the script of Sarah's world, which Rei's implant didn't give him the ability to read. Many of them were decorated with garlands of autumn leaves, bunches of straw, colorful fruits with faces carved into them, fake displays of small flying and crawling animals, and skeletons. It was eerie and primitive and fascinating, and for the first time he realized that this Halloween holiday of Sarah's was a harvest festival. His childhood village had done similar things in the fall, though the details were different.

  Sarah drove slowly through Sidonie until the taller buildings gave way to scattered houses again.

  "Don't you want to stop there?" Rei asked.

  Sarah shook her head. "I think it's better not to. Everyone knows me, and that means they'll be wildly curious about you. What I was thinking is, I can drive up to Eau Claire, and if you see anything along the way that you want to look at, just tell me to stop. I'll take the scenic route so you can see as much as possible. And then we can get dinner in Eau Claire and maybe see a haunted house or a movie or something, and then come home. If we only get one night, we should make it count, right?"

  Her enthusiasm was infectious. She loved this place, Rei could tell. And it had been a long time since he'd had someone to lift him up like this. The most optimistic and cheerful members of his sept had died years ago. It had just been himself and Lyr and Rook for awhile now, and despite their efforts to support each other, they'd made a dour triad.

  "I'm looking forward to it," he said, a little surprised to find how much he meant it.

  Sarah put out a hand on the bench seat between them. Rei laced his fingers through hers, blue on pink.

  He hadn't prayed to the gods of his youth in a very long time, and had never found comfort in Galatean religious beliefs, but he offered up a small thought to whatever gods might be listening: Let us have this day. Let Sarah have this day. Perhaps I don't deserve it, and you may take what you wish from me later, but she's helped me a lot and she deserves one day to be happy.

  ***

  If this was to be their last good day, Sarah thought—before he managed to miraculously fix his spaceship and left, before they were discovered, before her father relapsed or some other terrible thing happened—then she couldn't have asked for a better one. She couldn't imagine being happier than she was now, Rei's warm fingers twined in hers, driving through the rust and gold of a Wisconsin autumn.

  The harvest season was winding down, the roadside stands gathering in their baskets and shuttering their signs. Gourds were still out in force, row after row of pumpkins on tables or on their vines behind U-PICK signs, and fall mums added a dash of color to their drab wooden stalls. Homemade cheese and apples were also advertised in abundance.

  "Just let me know if you want to stop," Sarah began, and then braked suddenly at a sign reading FALL FESTIVAL! CIDER & CORN MAZE! HAY RIDES! 0.5 MI! with an arrow pointing off to the left.

  "What's this?" Rei asked as she turned onto the side road.

  "An important tradition of my people. I thought you might like it."

  She parked in a dirt lot with an array of other farm trucks mixed with the odd SUV or dirt-covered minivan. It was clearly all locals. Rei helped Sarah with her wings and started to reach for his spear, then looked at the kids running around and put it back in the truck bed.

  The kids were mostly in costume, and some of the adults too, like the middle-aged lady with cat whiskers painted on her face and a pair of ears nestled in her piled chestnut curls who dipped hot cider for them. "Well, you sure went all out this year, honey," she told Rei. "What are you supposed to be?"

  "He's an alien," Sarah said. "And I'm a fairy. We're up from Sidonie."

  "Well, you two enjoy the fair, now."

  Sarah curled her hands around the warm paper cup. The lightly spiced sweetness of the cider took her straight back to her childhood. "Do you like it?" she asked Rei quietly, and he nodded with a smile.

  The advertised corn maze was kiddie sized, the corn no higher than Sarah's chest. She and Rei sat on a bale of hay and finished their cider. Sarah pointed to a hay wagon rocking in from the field behind the corn maze, pulled by two draft horses, with raucous kids scrambling all over the hay. "Want to try that?"

  "How does one do it?" he murmured, leaning close to her so he could speak without being overheard.

  "Do? Well, you just sit in the hay and ride around, mostly."

  Rei gave her a look of bafflement.

  "Maybe it's more fun when you're five. What can I say, I'm young at heart." She tossed their empty cups into the nearest trash barrel and pulled him up by the hand. "Hay ride! Come on!"

  They scrambled onto the hay wagon, trying not to crush Sarah's wings. Most of the other passengers were teenagers, a couple of them holding onto little siblings.

  "Cool costume," one of the girls told Rei. She was dressed like Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, complete with a stuffed Toto in a basket. "Avatar, right?"

  Rei smiled and nodded.

  "That's like my favorite movie ever."

  "It's so lame," one of the boys comp
lained, and the teens' conversation turned to movies, most of them involving science fiction or superheroes. Sarah noticed Rei looking intrigued but confused, and felt a little lost herself. She'd seen few movies in the last decade. Sidonie had never been big enough for a movie theater, and she'd lost touch with most of her high school friends as they had drifted in different directions; driving up to the city to go out to the movies by herself seemed like too much of an indulgence. Most of the movies she watched these days were old westerns, comedies, or sports movies—stuff her dad liked.

  Is that all I do anymore? she thought, lying in the hay with her head in Rei's lap and looking up at clouds gathering in the blue bowl of the sky above her. Take care of Dad, take care of the farm, make sure I get good grades in my classes ...

  The classes, at least, were something she was doing for her own enjoyment. But at some point it had stopped really feeling that way. Even driving up to the university had turned into just another part of her daily responsibilities.

  At least she still had her stargazing. If Rei stayed, she would have to teach him all the constellations. They could look for meteors together.

  And there needs to be more of this sort of thing. More living for me, less wrapping my life around other people ...

  She turned her head to watch the teenagers cheerfully quarreling over a candy apple that one of them had brought onto the hay ride, which was now, predictably, covered with hay. Someone had also spilled cider on someone else's costume. It seemed so long ago that she'd been that young, with one foot in childhood and the other tentatively feeling out the footing of young adulthood. And then her mother had gotten sick and suddenly she'd had to be the grown-up of the household.

  Rei plucked a piece of straw out of her hair and bent over to murmur, "I think we're done?"

  "Oh." She sat up as the laughing teens slid out of the hay. "I zoned out for a few minutes there."

  Rei gave her a strong hand back to the ground and leaped down himself, a graceful catlike leap from the top of the hay pile. There were some appreciative cheers from the teens.

  The clouds were starting to amass in earnest, blocking the sun, and the breeze had grown cool enough to cut through Sarah's light dress. She bought Rei a candy apple from a table selling them to raise money for the local 4H and they walked back to the truck arm in arm, while she tried not to watch the distracting way he was licking and nibbling at the apple, displaying little flashes of his purple tongue. The first drops of rain were striking the windshield as they pulled out of the parking lot.

  "If it's doing this in Eau Claire," Sarah remarked, "we might have to forget about any more outside stuff. We'll get soaked."

  "I don't mind being wet."

  "Yes, but people might notice your greasepaint isn't washing off." She reached over to pluck a piece of straw off his sweater. He was covered with it; they both were. "So now you've been to a Midwest corn maze. Did you have anything like this back home?"

  "We had an autumn festival in my village." Rei's voice was soft. "I remember there was a lot of food, and footraces, and lanterns with shapes cut in the sides, so they made patterns dance on the walls of the houses. We didn't dress in costumes. Usually the children would shift and play under the tables." He laughed quietly. "I haven't thought about that in years."

  "Do you mind talking about it? Because I—"

  "No." He finished the candy apple with a crunch, and Sarah realized too late that she'd forgotten to tell him not to eat the core. Oh well, it didn't seem like it had bothered him. "It's good to talk about it. I don't think about that time in my life very often. Perhaps I should more often." He took a breath and looked out the truck window at the passing woods and fields.

  They drove in and out of patches of sun and rain. Sarah stopped at a U-Pick pumpkin farm and a bemused Rei trailed her as she examined the picked-over gourds.

  "What are we going to do with this?" he asked quietly. There was no one else around. It wasn't actually raining, but the ground was wet.

  "It's another tradition of my people. You can't do Halloween on Earth without picking your own pumpkin."

  "Yes, but ..."

  "We carve a face into it and put a candle inside." Crouched beside a large pumpkin, she looked up at him with a grin, enjoying the look on his face. "Yes, I know it sounds insane. Just wait. It's fun. I'll show you tonight when we get home."

  He helped her load the pumpkin into the truck. The farmer had helpfully hosed it off for them when they brought it to be weighed, so at least it wasn't muddy.

  "In Eau Claire," Sarah said, "we'll probably see more of the actual Halloween side of things. Part of Halloween is making things fake-scary for fun, like jack-o-lanterns and ghosts and skeletons and stuff, but you get that more in the city than in the country."

  "Your world is strange."

  "Oh come on, tell me your people didn't have strange holiday customs."

  "The Galateans certainly do. They have a lot of Empire-wide civic and religious holidays. I never really minded those, since slaves get a half-day off on every holiday, and a full day on the religious ones."

  Sarah bit the inside of her lip, hard, managing not to say anything about the implication that he didn't get days off otherwise. Instead she said, "Which holiday was your favorite?"

  "Caruza," he said promptly. "The highlight of the Caruza festival is a fireworks display—do you have that here? Fireworks?"

  "Colored lights and explosions, that kind of thing?"

  "Yes." His smile was bright and a little wistful. "In the fleet, it's the pilots who do the fireworks. We release them from our ships. The cohorts compete to come up with the best display, the most striking and unusual, something the fleet would be talking about all the next day. We brainstorm and practice for months beforehand."

  Sarah wondered what time unit he was actually using when she heard "months" through the translator. "That sounds really cool. I wish I could see them."

  They compared notes on holiday customs all the way into Eau Claire, as the weather settled heavily around them, the clear bright morning turning into a severe gray evening. Unlike the holidays of Rei's homeworld, which mostly involved feasting and dancing, the Galateans tended to have holidays focused on fasting and contemplation.

  "We're both warrior cultures," Rei said, "but while we Polarans like to enjoy our bodies and the gifts the gods gave us, their culture is more into things like staying up all night meditating or whole cycles where you eat nothing but a certain wheatgrass that grows only on their homeworld, that sort of thing. Lyr really got into that. He did all the fasting and cleansing rituals, every last one of them, while the rest of us mainly just did the ones that are required by law. I think for him it was similar to how he grew up. The dragons are a lot like the Galateans that way—well, actually, Lyr's people consider the Galateans very hedonistic and self-indulgent, so for him, the ritual fasting and all of that was the absolute bare minimum for responsible adulthood." He grinned. "Meanwhile Skara would sneak the rest of us sweets while everyone was supposed to be fasting. He'd almost always get caught, because Lyr's a telepath, so hiding things from him took a lot of concentration. Which is one of the things Skara was never good at, especially since his people are a little bit telepathic too."

  "I can picture them so clearly when you talk about them." And she could. It was easy to imagine Rei and his sept-siblings as kids, giggling in the dark, sneaking each other treats.

  They couldn't all be dead. It was too unfair.

  ***

  They drove into Eau Claire in the aftermath of rain, banks of dark clouds scudding south and eastward to leave the wet pavement glistening in late afternoon sunshine. The world was a watercolor dreamscape painted in shades of purple and gold.

  Downtown swarmed with kids in costumes, running in and out of businesses designated as part of the town's municipal trick-or-treating event. For the first time since they'd left the farm, venturing openly out in public with Rei disguised only with the barest touches of cardboard
and glue, Sarah felt herself starting to relax. They fit in here. She could feel it. The biggest Halloween parties would've been on the weekend, but there were still college kids and young adults dressed up for bar-hopping or partying. She and Rei slid right into the mix. No one gave them a second glance, beyond a handful of people offering appreciative comments on Rei's costume.

  She didn't try the bars, since they couldn't risk Rei being carded, but they wandered the streets as the watercolor afternoon slid into a chill dusk. Despite having to leave her jacket in the truck because of her costume's wings, she wasn't cold; the air itself seemed charged with energy, lights driving back the darkness and Rei's warm fingers wrapped in hers. Since they couldn't partake of the free Halloween chocolate that was being handed out everywhere, she bought them both pumpkin spice lattes, after having a quick Google on her phone to make sure pumpkins and cinnamon weren't poisonous for dogs. (Coffee apparently wasn't, since he'd been drinking it for a week with no ill effects.)

  Rei looked nervous at the prospect of sitting in a restaurant to eat, surrounded by people, so Sarah bought them takeout burgers and fries. They ate standing up—the benches were too wet—in a waterfront park watching the lights glimmering on the river.

  "The funny thing about seeing a place with someone new is that you see it as tourists do, and it's almost more fun that way," Sarah said as they wandered along a bike path after dropping the takeout boxes in the trash. "I've lived nearby all my life, but I've never seen downtown on Halloween before. Actually, I haven't really gone anywhere in Eau Claire except campus and the box-store shopping sprawl along the freeway in, I don't know, years? It used to be a big treat, going into the city to shop, especially around Christmas. Now it's just routine. I look forward to the days when I don't have to drive into town, but then when I'm out on the farm I think about the places I'd like to go in town. Which of course I never do, because once I'm here I just want to finish up what I need to do and get back home."