Wolf Song (Wolf Singer Prophecies Book 1)

by Elle Cross

  Was there something out there waiting for me to leave?

  Or were they hoping I’d stay and be easy pickings as they barged in?

  Maybe there wasn’t even a they out there waiting for me.

  What if it's Dad?

  I shut down that thought right away. He had always said that he would follow the rules and that I should as well. Even if it seemed like he’d ignored them.

  The sound of growling was unmistakable in the stark silence. I was stuck in place. Most monsters had better hearing than the average person; maybe whoever or whatever was outside had a strong sense of smell as well?

  If rule number one was to survive, rule number two was never, ever open the front door at night.

  If Dad said it once, he said it a thousand times. “Do not open that door, Soli. You gon' get in a world of hurt if you do.”

  He didn't threaten me. He didn't have to. He was as mild-mannered a man as could be had in this here world. But if you witnessed a fount of liquid flames pouring out from the sky to obliterate a city, you became a little more high-strung than usual.

  I knew as sure as I stood here, frozen in fear, that the rules mattered less to me than saving my dad’s life. Even in the full dark I would have opened it. I was so close to the door, ready to pounce in case my dad needed me. Ready and hoping he would appear.

  Survive.

  I swallowed down my sigh, reality sharpening its edges down my throat and resting in my heart. It was this way of thinking that got so many of us into trouble, first with the Rave disease, and then with the Reapers. It made us soft, weak, easily picked apart.

  No wonder we had been broken so easily. First, the Reapers dressed themselves up to look like us. And then they discovered that bonds of love, our own humanity, would override any sense and precaution.

  Any sense of survival.

  And what were we if we didn’t have the sense to survive?

  My mother’s humanity had been the lure that eventually got her killed when she went outside in the dark.

  Survive with no regrets if you can. Survive anyway if you can’t.

  The old wood of the porch groaned as something stepped heavily upon it. Whatever it was didn't have the weight or feel of my dad. There was a hesitation there.

  Besides, if it was my dad, he would know better than to test the front door. But there was nothing and I was too frozen in place to do anything about it.

  Pressure mounted as if a storm front decided to sit itself down right in front of my door. The air was thick with humidity and tension. And then something like a high-pitched note reverberated into the air like a plucked violin string. It was there and then gone.

  Breath held, I walked to the door, avoiding the warped wood in the flooring, unlike the intruder, and put my eye to the lookout. I couldn't be sure that it wasn't just my mind or my eyelashes or a trick of the shadows, but a figure cut against the moonlight among the trees, barely a darting shadow.

  I knew it.

  Dad and I had taken the precaution of cutting back the trees from around the house to keep any intruders from sheltering behind them or using them to climb over the wards and drop in on us from above.

  We couldn't do anything about the Reapers who could defy air or had other genetic modifications, but we hadn’t had to worry about those actions in these parts. We were so far removed from the cities that unless my dad was a high-priority person of interest for the government that I didn’t know about, no one was looking for us.

  I crouched by the door, gun beside me, and stayed vigilant.

  We should have left the city sooner. Especially when rumors saturated the air that new monsters, bigger monsters, prowled the streets at night.

  The collective consciousness of our community had rolled together and poured out its questions in one voice to the heavens. Were these shifters? What should be done? Though the collective asked each other these questions, the answer they had waited on was from Dad.

  My dad wasn’t fooled by politicians wearing masks. “Shifters may look like monsters from time to time but they can still talk at us, reason with us despite the skin they wear. These here, the ones roaming at night, are not one of us. Not one of our protectors that kept us safe from the Ravers, ungrateful though we may be.

  “These are true monsters, concocted by the government for their own purpose. They have no kinship with us.”

  My mother had agreed with my father, though she tackled it from a simpler angle with me. “Don’t listen to what the news said or what others said. These aren’t ‘genetic freaks,’ harmless and prone to ill-health. These are genetic soldiers, sent by the government, and they’re coming for everyone who isn’t like them.”

  Everyone said that it could never happen. The government couldn’t run our lives, they said. There would never be a way for the government to be able to build walls between nations, or cut people off from travel between states.

  People shouldn't have said nothing.

  They were paying so much attention to what couldn't be done, they didn't see what was actually happening before their eyes. The government wasn't run by humans anymore. The Reapers had taken over.

  My parents, or at least my dad, never believed the government in anything. Sure, he had always done as he was told like any other good citizen, but he had never believed the fairy tales they spouted on the television. "Sunny girl, there is a difference between surviving and also believing. I will never judge you for what you need to do to survive."

  My dad had always been big on survival, even Before. Probably because he’d been a monster hunter his entire life, like his dad and granddad before him. Survival was a way of life for the Bishops.

  Made sense that it was his number one rule. "Soli, the only thing you can do nowadays is survive. So do that. Do what you need to. But don't do it if you have to compromise yourself. The point of living is to live free, and there ain't no freedom in living in the bondage of any regrets, ya hear?"

  "Yes, sir," I would always say. I never had a reason to doubt him.

  Dawn pressed in, weak like a water-fried egg. When I opened the door, there was a bundle of apples piled in a neat pyramid. I paused. No one gave up apples, not in these parts. It was hard enough to even get the supplies we needed.

  There was the hand pump for water. There was the crank for the motor to keep our solar-powered car moving. Our chickens kind of roamed free, but if they wanted to use the makeshift coop, they could. More likely than not, they took advantage of the shelter and laid a few dozen eggs. We kept them safe for the most part. They were a big lure for the coyotes and other bigger predators, though, so I didn't want to take too much time to keep them alive.

  Survive was the number one rule. Sometimes, that meant taking away stuff that might attract a more immediate danger and risking starving to death.

  I bent down to pick up the apples. I needed to make sure these weren't a bait or trap. There were monsters who were sneakier, subtler than the brute force of Skolls.

  My mother had been the unfortunate victim of that. They had used children to lure her away from the safety of the house. And then from the safety of the ring. That was the thing that my mother could be counted on. She had a mama bear streak and it extended far beyond her biological child. She had forgotten the rules.

  Forgotten about the Door.

  Forgotten about the Ring.

  And forgotten about Survival.

  The cries of the baby filled the air as she ran out into the night. As soon as she ran past the circle, an eerie nothing replaced the screaming child.

  My dad realized something at that point. We would be less tempted by our weaknesses if we were unable to hear.

  And so he put up the spells from scripture that talked about silence. He walked the entire ring twice. Ever since, we couldn't hear any outside words or sounds.

  The fact that I was starting to worried me. That meant the veil of protection was thinning.

  Soon, sound. What was next? Scent?

 
We bathed in holy water for that purpose, and anointed ourselves in oil in order to keep hidden from the monsters wearing people skin. They didn't like anything blessed.

  I looked to the mountains on one side of me and then the black nothingness that dotted the valley below. How long had it been since we had brought the car up the mountain? So long that the road was surely not passable if I ever needed to find my way out of the mountain.

  The night was coming on faster. Once the equinox happened in a few weeks' time, the night would encroach more and more. That was the worst time of year here. Thankfully there was still some sunshine here and there.

  But at night? Things started to get stronger, things that came with the Rave and the sickness. Things that had started to test the wards around the house.

  Each year the wards grew weaker and we didn't know what to do about it. Of course, to be honest, it was more like my dad didn't know what to do about it. It wasn't like I knew what to do at all.

  But I watched and learned and thank God I did. Because we both knew that dad would die someday. We didn't acknowledge it, but it would happen, and I needed to be prepared.

  And so I was.

  Sort of. I didn't do what he could do with his scriptures. He was a preacher and so his words were spells all their own. He would walk around the circle as if he were walking along the pulpit preaching love and forgiveness and the healing power of the word. He would reach into the scriptures and pull out the words and throw them to the congregation and we could feel it like a mighty rush.

  The power of love and forgiveness.

  I didn't have a gift, or at least not that I knew about. I normally would have gotten a confirmation service where I would be baptized in front of the church. There’d be witnesses and prayer and my vow that I would use my gift for good. That was something that was denied me with the Hellfire that rained down out of the sky, leaving the cities a charred ruin.

  My mother had been of the old tradition. She didn't follow the structured pace of my dad's religion, she said. She was into the nature of things and believed that we ought to listen to our own truths. “Soli,” she would say. “Your gifts are already inside you. You don’t need a host of witnesses to validate who you are. There’s not a how-to, it’s more listening and believing.”

  It was funny, because they all boiled it down to me in the same way. Believe and it shall happen.

  Believe and my gifts will be revealed.

  Believe and all my needs would be provided for.

  Believe, believe, believe.

  What my dad and ma didn't see? I did believe them. And I had faith in the ability to believe. The only difference was that I believed that no matter what I did, I would die out here.

  One of my earliest memories was of my dad in his old walnut rocker in front of the fireplace, smoking on his pipe. He’d let me color in my own notebook as he read from his scriptures.

  “In the beginning,” Dad had read from his leather-bound book, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

  I had drawn green and blue circles on my paper, saving the yellow and orange to make the sunshine for later. "Daddy, how come He did that?" I asked him.

  “Did what, chile?”

  I’d shrugged. “Made stuff. Like the earth.”

  I hadn’t appreciated it as much then as I would have now. How my dad took a moment to pause to give me a serious answer. How he chewed the end of his pipe as he had mulled. "He was looking to create something to love Him and something He could love, too."

  Then I’d thought about it a little. My dad had told me over and over again about the monsters at our door, the monsters that we had made ourselves. "Is that what we wanted to do, daddy? Did we want to create something that loved us?"

  He’d patted my head, then held me close. "No child. We aren't God. Where God created for love, we created something that we could hate."

  And hate we did.

  Monsters hadn’t all been bad Before.

  Before, monsters wasn’t a bad word. It was synonymous with anyone who shifted. They kept to themselves mostly, and even though an activist group would pop up here and there to shout them down for being evil, for the most part no one normal raised a fuss about them.

  At least, not against the ones who only wore the monster skin every now and again. My dad, however, had a thing against those he labeled “monsters wearing human skin.” They looked just like us, lived among us, but were definitely not us, he would say.

  No one else had taken my dad seriously. They were all, “That Pastor Reggie, pay him no mind. He just think he doing the Lord's work. Lord don't got nothing to do with us no more. Look at what this world come to.”

  But my dad was convinced that there were real monsters in human flesh plotting the end of the world as we knew it. Most of them had gotten into the highest offices of power, he would say. According to him, heads of governmental agencies, CEOs, and other influential personnel were all steeped in conspiracy.

  He was a popular enough preacher and word mage in the old community that he had been able to start grassroots activism to audit political corruption, like earmarks and porkbelly spending. Dad was actually getting some media attention with his perspectives. Anyone who’d listened to him were swayed by him, that was for sure.

  The fact that he was a legendary monster hunter in his heyday also helped. People still talked of the way he had contained a berserker Sasquatch out in the Pacific Northwest. If he was an expert in identifying monsters in the field, they would say, then he should be trusted in pointing out monsters in our midst. At least, that was the general logic.

  He was on the cusp on getting some real reform happening when the Rave disease struck and the fever swept through the country.

  That was the turning point of the world’s descent into darkness.

  Because after the Rave hit, the Reapers stepped out from their disguises—their human skin—and showed the world who they really were. Pale-skinned, glowing, and beautiful, they duped the world with their promises to save the world from the Rave disease.

  In their desperation, people believed them and embraced them all while getting vaccines that would kill them faster.

  Most of those who survived, were consumed in the Hellfire that the Reapers called down from the sky.

  It all started because of a spore.

  Before the world went dark, a tiny thing that no one could see had infected millions of people.

  No one noticed, of course. Fevers, chills, even shakes were normal enough that people had mistaken the epidemic that swept the nation as an odd flu.

  But then, one by one, the infected fell into a coma until a good third of them were unconscious. More than half died at this stage.

  The few who managed to survive woke as something...else. The spore had eaten away at their brains, leaving people driven by their baser urges. From coma one moment to ravenous fiends the next, the havoc they wrought in a short time was devastating.

  The one subset of humanity not affected were the shifters—which didn’t help their likability factor one bit.

  It didn’t matter that those were the same people that bore the brunt of containing the first wave of Ravers. No one had wanted to put down a rabid loved one and those moments of hesitation cost more lives. The shifters didn’t hesitate.

  And that sealed their fate.

  Once the first wave burnt out and the incidences of infection died off, all people remembered was the unaffected shifter population killing their loved ones while they were sick.

  It was open season on monsters then, though not the ones that Dad preached against.

  You would hear about a massacre on the news or see a lynching in the midst of zealots. They looked no different than the Ravers who had razed whole communities in their bloodlust.

  My dad had grown quiet in those latter times, no longer moved to preach. He had stopped watching the news or television shows at all, which was just as well.

  Soon after, the Hellfire rained down and there
was nothing left to see.

  My mother was one of the scientists who helped to isolate the spore. Though she was Dr. Lena Bishop among her colleagues, as an herb witch, she had been more attuned to plants and herbology in general.

  They tried to make a vaccine, of course, but nothing worked. The vaccine either killed people outright or turned them into Ravers immediately—people whose brains were reduced to nothing but madness by the spore. They were driven to infect anyone and anything they came into contact with.

  The scientists discovered that after the first wave of Ravers burnt out, the ones left behind had some kind of gene marker on them. In an attempt to avoid this genetic anomaly from happening in the future, the government, in connection with a big name pharmaceuticals company, patented the vaccine that my mother and her team had deemed ineffective.

  The government didn’t care. They said that the people wanted them to come up with solutions. The pharmaceuticals executives couldn’t see past the dollar signs in their eyes. Only my parents and a few close to them knew the dangers of that vaccine.

  Many more died needlessly.

  The Rave was not a pretty sight.

  People spoke in tongues. And then tore out tongues.

  The Hellfire squad was able to take them down with their targeted missiles, and save us.

  Too bad they didn't care if they were killing unaffected humans along with the Ravers.

  My dad threw me and my mom in a truck that didn't belong to us and drove us toward a little cabin in the woods that my parents had kept from their previous life. We turned it into a little farmhouse.

  And now, here we were. From three to two. And now one.

  I heard it again. A scratching sound that took me out of my dreams. I lay still.

  The moonlight bathed my front windows. Normally I appreciated the glow, but now I felt exposed. I didn't sit up in bed. If I could hear them, would they hear me?