by Tisha Wilson
Her mother had early onset Alzheimer’s and most days she was lucky if her mother didn’t ask her why she was rolling around in a wheel chair. In her mother’s mind Miranda was still the head cheerleader in her high school. It was always hard to see the look of dismay on her mother’s face when she had to explain the accident to her all over again. Sometimes it was easier just to tell her that she was resting her legs and back in preparation for the next competition. She had been a fierce competitor and her mother wouldn’t argue with her logic in wanting to rest, ridiculous as it may have sounded.
“And in other news coming out of Madison, Wisconsin, West Point graduate, Katie Jamison, and her family were killed in a car accident on their way home from her West Point graduation ceremony late yesterday afternoon.”
Miranda’s head snapped up and she hit the volume button. Her mouth fell open as they flashed her sister’s picture in full dress uniform across the screen. The scene then flashed to her minivan. It was overturned and… on fire! Her eyes blinked a few times as the newscast went on.
“Apparently Katie Jamison, Miranda Jamison, her sister, and Donna Jamison, her mother, were on their way back to Madison when they were side swiped by another vehicle, flipping the van into a stand of trees where the van burst into flames. It is not certain if it was the accident or fire that killed the occupants of the van. Police are searching for any information on the other driver or vehicle involved in this tragic hit and run accident. In other traffic news…”
Miranda looked away from the television and did her best to breath evenly. She could hear her blood rushing in her ears. She had seen her sister disappear with her own eyes, and she was sitting here in this chair, and her mother… her mother hadn’t even gone with her to the graduation… right? She began to feel herself hyperventilate again. Had she died? Was this some type of freaky world in-between death and the afterlife?
She rolled to the door and pulled it open. Night was coming on quickly. “What did you do to my mother?” she screamed out loud.
Feeling her temper rise to boiling, her legs came under her. She stood up and went to the kitchen table. She grabbed the keys that sat there and strode purposefully out towards the truck. She felt a chill run up her arms at the bite of the night air, but she ignored it. She paused when she reached the truck. She lifted her nose to the breeze and caught a whiff of… death.
The hairs rose on the back of her neck and adrenaline was dumped into her blood stream. Her nails lengthened and her eyes became more sensitive. The sun sunk behind the mountains but it was still shockingly bright outside. Something moved in the trees. She turned and, nearly before she could think about it, she was there. She could feel something… a low grumble sounded in her throat and her teeth felt funny. She ran her tongue over her extended K-9’s in amazement. She felt coiled, ready to spring.
“What were you planning on doing with my truck?”
She spun and crouched. He stood there amongst the foliage looking like a part of the forest itself. He was so still when he wanted to be. The only thing that gave him away was the eerie glowing of his eyes. She leapt at him and he ducked her easily. She tumbled like she’d done so many times as a young cheerleader. She spun and was on him again.
This time he grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into the soft grass. He got so close to her that she could smell the mint on his breath. He brushed his teeth? She felt his hand begin to cut off her breathing so she clawed at his arm. She felt a rush of satisfaction when she took flesh and he growled. He lifted her up and slammed her down again, hard.
“She’s all right. They relocated her to a mental facility.”
“I… want… to… see… her,” she managed before she landed a kick to his mid-section. He flew away from her and she gasped, chocking for air.
“You cannot go to her.”
He was standing before her again and she leapt at him. Her fangs landed in his jugular and she bit. He slapped her down and she hit the ground roughly. She felt her leg break, the bone going through the skin. She grasped her leg and closed her eyes as the pain coursed through her but… to a lesser degree than it should.
She took a deep breath as she focused on the broken leg. The pain decreased the more she concentrated on it. He was there then , pushing her bone back into the skin and setting it straight. She screamed, but only because it was what she would do if he had done something like that to her when she could feel the full force of it.
It hurt. It hurt like hell, but slowly… she took a deep breath and continued to concentrate. She could feel the inside of her body in a way she never could before. The same way she could wiggle her toes and be sure they were alright, she could move the marrow in her bones. It was almost as if she could feel every molecule of blood, every cell, every atom. She moved the healing to the place where it was needed most and when she looked to her leg…
There was nothing but an ugly bruise where the bone had gone through. She looked up at him in amazement. She heard something scurry behind her and she turned over in a crouching position. It was a housecat. The cat hissed and bounded off into the trees. She heard an owl hooting in the distance. She heard a leaf fall from a nearby tree.
Again, something on the breeze caught her nose and she looked off towards the north. There was something out there. There were a lot of them. They were running away from them. The instinct was so strong to run after them, to find them, to hunt them, to kill them, that she found herself pawing at the earth. The feel of the cool earth in her hands was curious. She was momentarily distracted from the chase as she felt the soil slide between her fingers, beneath her extended nails. She could feel it with every pore of her hands.
He shifted behind her and she remembered her purpose in coming out here. She turned to him baring her fangs. “I want to see her.”
“Come,” he replied as he turned and strode towards the house.
She was tempted to not follow. She had his keys. She could drive into the nearest town and… what? Ask people to help her find her mother? If they had her, the people who had shown up on the scene of the accident, then he was the only link she had to finding her. Rage seethed up in her as she realized she didn’t even yet know his name. She had to have more information before she just went running off down the mountain. Besides. Without him to piss her off, her legs might stop working and she wouldn’t be able to do anything with that giant truck besides wish it would go with the power of her mind.
She walked quickly after him and felt a rush of warmth at the feel of her legs beneath her. They felt powerful, solid… if anyone had told her that she would walk again she would have laughed in their faces. Yet here she was, whole. She felt guilty for feeling so good about having her legs back when her little sister was most probably dead and her mother was God knew where, but there it was. She always could see the good in the worst situations.
He was opening the lap top when she closed the door and came to sit beside him. Something powerful arched between them. It was like electricity. She nearly jumped off the couch again, but forced herself to stay put. He readjusted himself as if he felt the charge as well. He moved just that much further away from her. Finally he had something up on the laptop and he turned the screen towards her.
All the fight fled from her as tears entered her eyes. She knew it the moment her legs were gone again and she lamented the loss. Her mother sat out on a porch near the ocean. She was smiling and happy as she looked over the roiling sea. A woman that looked suspiciously like Miranda’s dearly departed grandmother approached with a glass of lemonade and said something pleasant. Her mother held fast to the woman’s hand for a moment before giving her an adoring smile.
“She’s in Maine,” Miranda said softly. Her mother had grown up in Maine in a little cottage by the sea. The house in the camera image was much larger but it was a similar build and color.
“I got the call moments before I heard you cry out for me. I was going to show you. Saul had her relocated and settled in a way that would keep her happies
t. He’s always good at that. He’s human so he knows a few things about sentiment that I wouldn’t.”
So her mother wouldn’t grow old in a nursing home. She would grow old in her happy childhood home, at least for as long as she still had memories. Miranda knew with a sinking heart that her mother would never have another thought for her or her sister or her father again. It was good for her mother, heartbreaking for her.
“You’re right. She’s better off where she is. She probably won’t even miss me.”
*
He saw the heartbreak in her eyes and felt that unfamiliar pang inside him again. She was not the huntress right now. The electricity had stopped sparking between them, but he still had the urge to reach out and pull her close, to comfort her. Strange.
“Maybe not, but there will come a time when she will… return to creation and remember. Your time together, as mother and daughter, will always exist outside of time.”
She shook her head. “In the end of days right? Because I can’t die, like you. I’ll never see her again until after the last wolf is dead.” A small sob hiccupped from her soul but to her credit she didn’t break completely down. The reality was setting in on her now.
“I will always be honest with you because lies are a waste of time. You heal like me yes, and in most likely hood you are immortal like me, but… you are still human too. I don’t know what will happen. Your human self might still grow old and return to creation.”
“You mean go to heaven?”
“I don’t know that there is a heaven or hell. I only know this existence.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She looked so lost and he knew that he wasn’t one to give direction since he had nearly lost himself, but he would give her what he could.
“I only know that humans are born and then they die but it is not this flesh that makes a human. Humans are more than flesh and like there is the evil force that is darkness, the force that makes up the wolves, there must be light. They balance each other. Do I think there is some city with streets paved in gold like the Christians do? I don’t know. I only know the life force… creation.”
“So where does that leave us as hunters. We are not part of the darkness and we cannot create life right?”
He shrugged again. “No. Like the wolves we do not create life, neither were we born of darkness. As I said, all I know is this existence. If not for my journals I wouldn’t even know if I had come from creation. Sometimes I feel like I walked out of the mist.”
He heard what he was saying and had to wonder why he cared enough to tell her these things. He hadn’t ever told anyone these things. Even with Dawn he had kept some parts to himself. With Miranda Jamison… he just had this overwhelming desire to please her, to see her smile. He hated for her to wail and sob the way she had done. It grated on his nerves. He would move mountains if she would just be at ease.
“What is your name?” she asked.
He hadn’t even realized he had not told her. “Braden Saarikoski.”
“Braden. The name suites you. You were a Viking then?”
“I may have been a Viking in the time I was born.”
“I thought so.”
He blinked as he watched her. Some of her melancholy was fleeing as she watched her mother on the screen. “How do you know? I don’t have an accent. I practiced-”
“No. The way you dress.”
He looked down at his fur coat and calfskin pants. His boots were heavy steal toes and his shirt was black and white flannel. “I dress like your American miner,” he replied slightly perturbed. He had made some effort to fit in here.
“Okay. You are not in Pittsburgh don’t ya know. Yer in Wisconsin.”
He had heard some of the locals using the accent, but he preferred to use the accent heard in most American movies. It was easier to speak American English with a bit of a Western twang, because of his heavy Norwegian accent, than it was to pick up some of these specific dialects in the North.
“But I see some of the men here. They wear the heavy boots and the flannels.”
“With jeans and t-shirts, and steal toes are all right, but that jacket won’t pass muster up in this neck a the woods I’ll tell you. You stand out like an orange flag in a fresh snow.”
He nodded in understanding. He had thought that the fact that he was a stranger had drawn a lot of attention. In this day and age, however, people were not as alert to strangers in their midst as they had once been, especially the way so many towns thrived on tourism anymore.
“What would be more suitable?” he asked.
She eyed him critically and he was shocked by how quickly she’d gone from near heart break back to perky again. Well if not perky, at least slightly annoying, slightly cute, curious woman.
“Okay. What you wanna buy are some good thermals to go under yer clothes cause when it gets ta snowin up here it will blow yer socks off. Then some nice fur lined boots. Then ya need some good jeans, you could keep the flannels but throw in some good undershirts that say neat things like ‘I love summer’ or ‘Kiss me I’m cute’. Then add a heavy wool coat, some mitts and warmers and you would fit in here like a firecracker on the forth of July.”
“I love… summer?” he asked incredulously.
“Yeah. It’s supposed to be sarcastic. Especially if you wear it in the middle of a blizzard.”
Her deep blue eyes were bright and shinning when she talked to him now. If she could use her legs he had no doubt she would be sitting up on the couch with her legs beneath her ready to pounce in excitement. As it was she was leaning in to him on one small arm and smiling at him. It was a practice in patience not to pull her forward and kiss that soft little mouth.
“Kiss me… I’m cute?”
“That would be more ironic if you have a rounded beer belly like a lot a the guys I know. My dad could have worn that shirt every day of the week and gotten ten laughs per day. He was skinny everywhere but his gut,” she said and patted his gut as if to demonstrate. The touch of her small hand to his abdomen made his muscles tighten.
She let her hand linger over his abs for a moment and he felt like his breaths were shorter. One part of him wanted to move away from her, a completely separate part of him wanted her to stroke to her hearts content. As if she became aware of his thoughts she pulled away as if burned by fire. She laughed and sat back again.
“You would have liked my dad. He likes the history channel too,” she went on, a bit more animated now than before.
“The history channel?”
“Yeah. I saw you had it on when I turned on the television, but he probably didn’t watch it for the same reasons you do, I mean you’re a part of history. He just liked hearing about the life stories of people that lived long ago. He said he hoped someone read about him one day and found him as interesting as those people on the history channel. I told him it wasn’t likely because we only ever owned a copy shop. He said that his copy shop could be the beginning of a chain of copy shops and he would be forever immortalized. The name of our copy shop was The Copy Shop. I mean how original is that? Not at all I tell you. Of course-”
She stopped talking when he put a hand on her bare arm. He was as shocked by the contact as she was. It was his turn to pull away quickly.
“You don’t have to be nervous.”
She shook her head and made a motion as if to say he was being silly, but she didn’t deny it.
“I’m just glad that…” Was he really about to say what he was about to say?
“What?” she asked in a more normal voice.
“That we can be in the same room without ripping each other’s heads off. That can be a real pain in the neck.”
*
It took her a moment. He had said it in his dead pan tone and she wasn’t sure but… when the corner of his mouth lifted she burst into full laughter. He was teasing her. As the laughter faded from her, fatigue hit her in a wave and her head nearly fell back against the back of the couch.
“W
hoa. I guess I’m tired,” she said as her eyes began to close.
“It’s the healing. When we heal ourselves it makes us tired. I’m surprised you were able to heal this soon.”
She had nearly forgotten about the broken leg thing. Everything was beginning to run together in one pile of weird and freaky. “I smelled something… on the air… It was,” she yawned without meaning to.
He stood and scooped her up in his massive arms. She was too tired to feel or act awkward about it. He carried her into the bedroom and laid her down. He quickly stripped off her jeans and covered her with the large blanket.
“I will tell you more when you awaken,” he said softly before he turned and headed to the door.
“Wait.”
He turned back to her reluctantly. He must think she was going to call him to her again. He made it clear how little that appealed to him. Why she should care if that didn’t appeal to him she did not know. Only this morning he had been her captor and now she was supposed to suddenly feel… what? Gratitude, warmth, love? He had just broken her leg for God’s sake.
“What?” he asked, his crystal blue eyes cutting clear through her.
“Tell Saul I appreciate what he did for my mother and… thank you too for being as nice to me as you could.”
He grunted before he turned out the light and left the room. She fell into a deep sleep almost instantly.
Chapter Six
Braden’s eyes fell open as daylight streamed into the room. He had listened for her again last night. She hadn’t started the fever. It seemed that after that initial burning, she was finished. He had dreamed of her last night and he tried to clear the images of her writhing body beneath him from his mind. He needed to clear his head.
He needed a plan. He had to train her, but her training couldn’t be the normal hunter training. She had to be angered to go into hunter mode. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. What she needed was to be able to defend herself as both a human and a hunter. He wondered how she would be around the wolves. Would she be like him? Would the proximity of the wolves change her or would they have to figure out a way to get her anger up every time the wolves were near?
