I read Marcus’s body language, contemplated his words, weighed them against the many conversations we’d had at the jail’s intake desk, our dinner out, and our evening together afterwards.
My feet tingled as though someone ran a feather along my skin. I looked down to see why. My bark receded, faded into my pores. It crawled down to my toes and left smooth skin in its wake.
Was that another secret Wild ability? The ability to intuitively detect truth from lies? Because it seemed that my body believed him before my mind decided on a verdict.
“Your skin’s changing,” Marcus said in awe.
I nodded. “I trust you.”
I started to get up from the bed when he grabbed my hand and locked eyes with me. “Your bark is beautiful. I don’t care what it does to me. I shouldn’t have told you to stop it from spreading. I’m sorry.”
I bit my lip to keep from tearing up. This Hunter was taught to find my wildness repulsive and instead he admired it. I stood, my hand still wrapped securely in his, and walked to the table with him close behind. With my free hand I ran my fingers along the envelope. “What will I find in here?” I asked.
Marcus released my hand, but didn’t part from me. His breath on my neck sent shivers through every nerve and muscle. I closed my eyes and swallowed my biological response to feeling him so close, to inhaling his scent.
“When you called from Oregon and asked me to access the missing persons reports, you mentioned a missing friend between the ages of eighteen and mid-twenties with a large snake tattoo. Not many young women have that kind of body ink, but succubi are known for it.”
He paused and gave me a look. It felt strange to hear him talk about a Wild Woman as though it were an everyday thing to him. Yesterday he had been only Marcus the Police Officer to me. Today he was someone entirely new.
He went on. “And you were in their region at the time. But I figured it had to be a coincidence. There was no way a huldra was helping a succubus. Still, I needed to be sure. So I pulled up your most recent skip arrest and your last name stood out to me. Faline Frey, as in the Norse goddess Freyja. I kept telling myself it was all a coincidence, but I had to follow my hunch. After I gathered those reports for you, I dug deeper and eventually found what’s in that envelope.”
“Is it information on Shawna?” I prayed to Freyja there wasn’t a coroner’s report in that envelope.
He moved to stand beside me. “No.”
I released a deep exhale. No coroner’s report. I still had time.
“And for the record,” he continued, “it’s not why I distanced myself either.” His tired eyes locked on mine. “I had to think about what I wanted to do. Not to decide what to do, because from the moment I suspected who you were I wanted to help. I had to take a step back, because that decision couldn’t be entered into lightly. If I help you, I’d be doing much more than putting my job on the line.”
“So then what’s in this envelope can get you fired?” I asked, still clinging to the odds that my sister was alive.
Unsure about the inner workings of the Hunter society, I appreciated that whatever risk he took in coming here, he took it for me. It used every ounce of my restraint not wrap my arms around him.
“It’s one thing to leave the Hunter complex and refuse to take orders from them. But to be born a Hunter and betray their secrets, help a Wild Woman by exposing their core? They’d kill me if they found out.” He tapped a finger on the envelope. “And once this is opened, what comes next will lead to them finding out.”
I brushed my hand down his arm, suddenly unsure about reading the hidden contents on the table. Was I ready for what came next? For information so detrimental to the Hunters that they’d kill their own flesh and blood for leaking it? I wanted to know. I needed to know. But one question nagged at my mind.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Putting yourself in danger like this.”
Marcus pulled my hand from his arm to his lips and kissed my knuckles. And for the first time I noticed how heavy his reality weighed on him. In the slight slump of his shoulders, the concern in his eyes. “I’ve had a cop mentality since before I joined the police force. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to do what’s right and stop others from doing what’s wrong. As an officer, I function within legal limits. As a person, I function within ethical limits. And as someone with Hunter abilities, non-human strength, and a worldwide brotherhood at my back, the responsibility is tenfold.” Marcus dropped my hand and tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “I’m doing this because I’ve realized that your kind is in the right. And my brotherhood is in the wrong.”
“You’re referring to the papers you brought me, what you found? That’s how you realized we were in the right?” I asked.
Marcus nodded. He pulled out a chair and motioned for me to sit. He sat across the table from me and pushed the manila envelope in my direction.
I couldn’t remember the last time I felt timid, but now as I peeled back the flap and pulled a pile of papers from their container, my fingers shook. At first I only saw the printed files he’d already sent me. I flipped through and paused when the font changed to what looked like letters and dates created by a typewriter.
My throat tightened and I coughed to get a breath.
The form I stared at was my mother’s missing person report, dated twenty years prior. Marcus left the table and brought back two glasses of water. His movement pulled me from my daze and I set my mother’s report aside, set my sadness aside. There were more reports from the other Wilds’ regions, dated the same year, each victim whose surname derived from the title of a goddess.
“They were taking Wilds from every region,” I said, setting the loose stack down. I took a sip of water, using the seconds to bridle my racing thoughts.
Marcus neatened the pile of paperwork. “Maybe it was the shock, or maybe I just wanted him to know I knew. But I called my dad after I found this, asked if he knew that Hunters across the nation were abducting Wild Women twenty years ago. He denied it of course, denied all of it. Since I left the brotherhood I’m not privy to their secrets. But I can tell when he’s lying.”
I rubbed my eyes and leaned into the chair.
“I think what’s going on right now with the missing Wild Women is something they tried twenty years ago. But back then they didn’t bury the missing person reports very well, probably didn’t think they had to because most people didn’t have the full-access type of technology we have today.” He paused and eyed the papers. “Most criminals have a pattern, especially those who prey on others. My guess is the Hunters have been doing this every twenty years; that’d be their pattern. Either that or whatever they tried to do twenty years ago failed and they’ve decided to try it again with a new approach. It’s hard to tell—I couldn’t find any reports similar to these from forty years ago to substantiate my pattern theory. But that’s not to say it didn’t happen.”
The possibility of hidden or destroyed evidence didn’t shock me, not since my illuminating time spent with the mermaids. “The Hunters have a way of hiding things they’d like to pretend don’t exist,” I said, thinking of our false history lessons. I picked up the one report I’d touched more than any of the others. My mother’s name wasn’t in bold font, but it looked like it was to me. Those letters seemed larger and darker than the rest in the whole pile: Naomi Frey. According to the report, she’d never been found—her case went cold.
“If they’d killed her, would there be a Jane Doe report or some way we’d know?” I asked.
“Not necessarily, but I wouldn’t assume she’s gone.”
“Why’s that?” I said.
“Hunters aren’t dumb,” he answered. “They have a calculated reason for everything they do. If they’re taking Wilds every twenty years, there’s a reason for it, a plan behind it. But I highly doubt they’d keep her at the complex in Washington. If she’s alive and still in their custody, odds are they’ve been moving her around, as a precautionary measure
. The Wild Women most recently taken, they probably haven’t gotten that far yet—to move them around.” He paused. “I wonder if they’re all alive, everyone on these files from twenty years ago. They’ve got their people in all the right places to happen upon a woman’s body in the woods and confirm the body belongs to one of these missing women. To close these cases for good. But they don’t for some reason.”
I imagined he referred to Hunters in coroner positions, signing off on the causes of death as suicides or animal attacks. His response sparked a new question. “The Hunters helped you get your job, right?” I asked.
Marcus nodded.
“So is it plausible to say a Hunter who’s also a cop could have handled my mom’s case?”
“That’s why I brought the reports. Every male born into the Hunter line is given a biblical first name and carries the last name of a historical pope.”
“Similar to how we choose our names,” I stated. And yet neither of our two groups fathomed that the other would have such a similar tradition.
“Every cop who closed the missing persons cases twenty years ago, stating insufficient evidence and the probability that the woman chose to run away, had a biblical first name and the last name of a pope.” Marcus’s eyes held mine, and when I didn’t respond, couldn’t respond, he continued. “When you’re in the brotherhood, they hook you up with the job that best suits their purpose and they control everything you do in that job. So that when they have to do something highly illegal, they have the people in place to cover it up. And when they need to create propaganda, they’ve got their own people in place to make sure that gets done, too. Where do you think the witch burnings came from? And the twists on the original Wild Women folklore? Why do you think villagers went from seeking the healing of succubi to calling them brides of Satan? They don’t get rid of documents and history; they create new ones—documents and histories that push their purpose. This is what they’ve been doing to your kind for hundreds of years.”
“And what’s their purpose, then?” I asked.
“Simple. Control through fear.” He took a sip of water and I wondered if this topic of conversation was giving him a dry throat, too. “Their tactics change with the culture, but their foundation is always the same: dominate, particularly from behind the scenes. And they like it that way. Because you can’t fight what you can’t see coming. If you don’t know who’s pulling the strings, then it’s harder for you to cut them. Humans aren’t the reason Wilds have to hide what they are. Hunters are the reason.”
“Then why come after us?” I asked. “We’re not in power. No one knows about us.”
Marcus reached across the table and touched my hand. “I’ve asked myself this a thousand times in the last few days. I grew up with their bullshit about how Wild Women are evil and Hunters are the blessed ones, so it’s our duty to suppress the evil. But we both know that’s not true. If the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, I’d say they maintain their dominance over your kind because both the Hunters and the Wild Women are more powerful than humans. To them, someone’s got to be above the humans and they want to stay on top. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I doubt even John is privy to that information.”
I still clung to my mother’s report. Marcus had mentioned earlier that he’d realized the truth behind his mother’s leaving him and in this moment I felt a deeper connection to him because of it. We’d both been lied to by the Hunters. For him the lies were about his mother, created so he’d believe she’d birthed him and not cared enough to stick around. For me the lies concerned who and what I was as a huldra. And according to my mother’s closed missing person report, they’d lied about her too. “How did you find the truth about your mother?” I asked.
“I let them think that me becoming a cop was their idea, and technically it was, though I’d always wanted to be a police officer. They’re strategic and like to have members in every government agency, anything with power.”
“I’d suspected as much,” I said.
“Yeah. After I finished my academy training and came home to work for the Everett police, on my days off the higher ups at my Hunter complex assigned me to reorganize their filing room and input the older files and paperwork into the computer. Eventually they had me transfer it all to an encrypted file that only the man in charge could access. They probably figured I wouldn’t mention any of the illegal shit I saw because they’d gotten me my job with the precinct and they could take it away—ruin me.” He went a little pale as he paused.
I touched his arm. “They’d do that to their own?”
He nodded. “There’s this story I heard as a kid about a Hunter who betrayed his brotherhood and ended up serving time in prison because he was set up for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m not sure if it was based on facts or a warning from our leaders to stay in line. Either way, I wasn’t going to chance it. They had me by the balls; I was still a member of the brotherhood and had to follow orders. The complex leader at the time said that spending my days off working for the brotherhood was a part of my Hunter training.” Marcus scoffed. “They give every inexperienced Hunter that line to get free labor out of them. And I ate it up, too.”
“What’d you find in the room?” I asked.
“A type of case file they’d made for my mother. It had a copy of her birth certificate and driver’s license, but not a marriage certificate. Turns out she was never married to my father. She wasn’t from the area of Spain where we’d lived when I was born.” His brows furrowed. “And included in the file was an execution order—dated before I was born and ordered to be carried out directly following my birth.”
I gasped. Everything Marcus explained made perfect sense, fit like puzzle pieces. And yet it was all so senseless.
“The report was simple and concise. It had the order at the top, and underneath it was the date it’d been drawn up with the execution date two boxes below that. The box labeled ‘execution uncompleted’ had been checked and someone wrote a little note beside it stating that they couldn’t find her. Which is probably why I can’t either. I waited until after I left the brotherhood to start looking. She clearly wants to stay hidden for her own safety. Makes sense.” I was pretty sure I caught Marcus’s hands shake around the glass of water. Just barely.
For Marcus’s sake, I wanted to change the subject. I understood the hole that losing a parent creates. But I had a feeling he’d trudge through the details whether I prodded or not. So I prodded. “Do you have any type of relationship with your father or have you sworn him off?”
“Both and neither,” he said, inserting the stack of papers into the manila envelope. “We don’t have much of a relationship, but seeing as he visits my police chief every once in a while, we do talk in passing. Hunter males are the head of their household, making all the familial decisions. He’s decided I’m a bad influence and won’t let his new wife and children around me.”
The pain in his eyes made me ache. I wanted to comfort him, but I had no idea what to say. Before I could figure it out, he went on. “To my face he uses the polite term for someone who abandons the brotherhood—says I’ve ‘gone soft.’ But I know how they talk about men like me, deserters. I’d heard about men leaving when I was a gung-ho Hunter. They’d tell us stories about the men being lured away by rebellious women, too weak to break free of her, and drawn away from his brothers because of it. When I left, I hadn’t been dating anyone, but I bet that’s what they told the Hunters in training. I couldn’t have left such a righteous cause and close-knit brotherhood on my own accord. I had to have been pussy-whipped. It was a warning to the younger Hunters: never get involved with a strong woman.”
I laughed to break the tension weighing Marcus down. “Pussy-whipped is such a ridiculous term. You know, it’s only used by men who aren’t getting any.”
Marcus grinned. “There’s probably a scientific study out there proving that exact phenomenon.”
I stood, my mother’s missing person report gripped
tightly in my hand. “So this just got bigger. Did you know it all started with me thinking the succubi took Shawna? I even went to your…I mean…the Hunter complex for help.”
If my little slip-up referring to the complex as his upset Marcus, he didn’t show it.
“I figured the succubi would be blamed. That group is usually the go-to for finger pointing,” he said.
“And then it turned into my helping them to get word to their sister, Heather,” I said. “In a deal we made, which is when I called you. And then the mermaids had this wise woman who told them a huldra would start a war one day, so they turned this whole thing into me starting a war. And the harpies are missing a mother and think I’m here to help them. And now you.” I shook my head and let out a sigh. “I just want Shawna.” I looked at the paper I held. “And to know what really happened to my mother.” For most of my life I’d believed the succubi killed her.
Marcus put his hand out. “Start a war?” he asked.
“Yeah. Their legends tell them that a tree woman will rise up and battle the Hunters to regain power for all Wilds. It sounds nice and all, at least the end result, but I still don’t know how much of that I believe.”
His chocolate brown eyes widened and he nodded. “All of it.”
I raised one eyebrow. “I should believe all of it?”
“Every word. Because the old monks, who went rogue from the church to raise and train the first Hunters, told a similar story. That a Wild Woman would challenge the Hunters. If they were weak and allowed her to win, they’d cause the demise of not only Hunters, but of all civilization. If they gave her a deserved bloody death they’d squelch future uprisings and secure their future as masters over all.” A swath of hair stuck out and curled on Marcus’s forehead. He swiped it into place, though I thought it looked perfectly fine. “I used to hear that story all the time when I was little.”
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