by Bella Jacobs
“Something like that,” I say gently, silently begging her to give me a break. “But I only want to help people like you, Bird Girl. It’s my mission in life. My spirit work. It’s something I do because I care. Especially about you.”
“What do you mean, people like me?” she asks, ignoring my attempt to introduce emotions into the picture. “Sick people? Members of the movement? Which of those was my lucky lottery card?”
I bite my lip and shake my head, certain this conversation isn’t going to end well. But we might as well get the worst out first, I guess. After that, there’s nowhere to go but up. “Both. And you’re not sick. They made you sick with all that shit they’ve been pumping into your body to keep you from figuring out who you really are. What you really are.”
Wren rolls her eyes with a laugh. “I almost wish you were right. Seriously, I would love to be able to stop taking meds and magically be well, but that’s not reality, Kite.”
I shrug. “Listen, I get the denial—everyone I rescue goes through it to some degree—but sooner or later, you’re going to be confronted with undeniable evidence that I’m telling the truth. And then you’re going to have to deal with the fact that the people who adopted you aren’t your family. Or your friends. They’re crazy extremists who were willing to put your life on the line in order to make sure you never turned into something their messed-up religion doesn’t approve of.”
She shakes her head, her bottom lip jutting out as her expression hardens. “No. That’s not true. You don’t know anything about my family. Mom and Pops are nothing like that. They are the kindest, most generous—”
“They’re monsters!” I say, frustration making my voice louder than I want it to be.
“No, they’re not,” she shouts. “They love me!”
“Fine. They may love you. Parents in India and East Africa who take their baby girls to have their genitals mutilated love those kids, too. That doesn’t make what they do in the name of their religious beliefs any less barbaric.”
Wren’s lip curls. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m not,” I say softly. “And that’s what’s really crazy. These people think we’re marked by the beast, Wren. The devil. And the only way to save the earth from our ‘wickedness’ is to control those of us they can with drugs and slaughter the rest.”
“Beast-marked?” she whispers, her face going even paler than usual. “But that’s not part of the movement anymore, Kite. It never was, really. The elders purged that from the texts decades ago, along with the nonsense about ghosts and exorcisms and drowning vampires in holy water. That was insanity left over from the early days when the elders were old hippies who’d done too much LSD while watching cheesy horror movies. None of us actually believe beast-people or vampires are real anymore, and the sane members of the movement never did.”
Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes.
“We don’t,” she insists. “I mean, clearly you believe you’re…special in some way, but I—”
“Ouch.” I thump my fist gently against my chest, above my heart. “Special, huh? Is that your nice way of saying you think I should be locked in a padded room with no doorknobs?”
Wren clears her throat, suddenly very interested in a bit of mud caked on the back of her hand. “I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t presume to tell you where you belong, Kite, all I know is who I am. And I’m not a supernatural creature. I’m just an average girl with a Meltdown virus, like hundreds of others across the world.”
“There’s nothing average about you, Bird Girl,” I say, my voice going husky. “You’re one of the kindest, bravest, most good-hearted people I’ve ever met. There’s nothing average about that. In the world we live in, that sort of kindness takes fucking guts.”
She swallows and her forehead ripples. “Th-thank you. I…” She shakes her head, apparently thinking better of what she was going to say. “My parents, Hank and Abby, are the ones who taught me to be kind. And I’ve never heard them utter a single word about werewolves or ghosts or anything else. They’re the least supernaturally or fictionally inclined people in the world. They don’t even watch that kind of stuff on television. They’re documentary and news-watching people, firmly grounded in reality and motivated by love and concern for me.”
She stands up straighter, obviously buoyed by her own argument. “They would never hurt me, Kite. I can’t even imagine it. They would die first. There is no doubt in my mind, and nothing you say is going to shake my faith in them. Hank and Abby are my parents, and we’re a family, and they want me to get better more than anything else in the world. Truly, they’re willing to do anything to make it happen.”
“Even damn your soul to hell for all eternity?” I ask, though I know there’s no way I’m getting through to her right now.
Shifting into bear form would certainly help with the whole “denial of the existence of shifters” thing, but I’d be wasting precious energy I need to get us both to safety, and her parents and the movement are too deep in her head for me to have any chance of deprogramming her this quickly.
It’s going to take time, and time is one of the many things we don’t have right now. The Kin Born soldiers who nearly killed us last night won’t stop scouring the river and the forest until they find us, and we’ve already been vulnerable for too long.
“I believe you mean well, Kite, and that you think you’re telling the truth, but I… I can’t believe this. Not about my parents,” Wren says, but there’s hesitation that wasn’t there before.
I should insist we take the rest of this convo on the road, but I’m too intrigued by the flicker of doubt in her pretty blue eyes to look away. “What about the rest of it?”
She meets my gaze, her throat working as she swallows. “There was something last night. Something I just remembered.”
“Yeah?” I prompt after a moment. “What was that?”
She blinks faster. “I dreamt that I woke up and… There was someone, something, holding me and… It wasn’t exactly…human.” She glances up at me through her lashes.
I smile. “And how did it feel? This dream?”
“It felt…safe,” she says, holding my gaze as electricity leaps between us, charging the early morning air. The attraction is still there. I can feel it prickling across my skin as her focus shifts from my eyes to my lips and back again.
I wonder if she’s thinking about our kiss yesterday, and hope to all the gods she is, because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
I’ve never fallen for one of the people I’ve rescued before, but Wren is different, special. I’ve known for a while she and I might have a future together, but actually meeting her changed everything. From the moment our eyes met months ago, when she looked up at me from her desk where she was working on handwritten Valentine’s Day cards for all one hundred and three kids under her care—each one personalized and overflowing with heart and humor—I was possessed by the urge not just to help her or save her, but to know her.
To get closer to her and see if she was as amazing as she seemed.
After four months, I know she’s even better—kinder, funnier, stronger, fiercer and more passionate than anyone gives her credit for.
And sexy, too.
Like right now, the way she bites her lip as her eyes search mine…
It’s enough to make me ache to hold her, to pull her close and crush my lips to hers and show her just what she does to me, all the incredible, overwhelming things she makes me feel. I haven’t felt this kind of hope in so damned long, and it isn’t just because Wren is the one who might finally put an end to all the terror and bloodshed plaguing our world. It’s because she’s a girl with the prettiest blue eyes and the sweetest heart, who tastes like moonlight and honeysuckle and who makes me long to be the one who gets to wake up to her kiss every morning.
“All I want to do is keep you safe,” I finally say, neither confirming nor denying that I was the not-human someone in her “dream.” There will be time for t
hat later. For now, I just need her to know that, “As long as there’s breath in my body, I’ll do everything in my power to keep you out of harm’s way, Wren. I’ll give my life for yours if I have to.”
She steps closer, her lips softly parting, and I realize she’s going to kiss me, to push up on tiptoe and bring her lips to mine, and I experience a flash of anxiety that I’m going to embarrass myself. My leaf loincloth covers the subject now, but if Wren’s kiss starts doing what it did to me yesterday, I’ll soon be pitching a massive leaf tent. And when the leaf tent goes up, the berries are going to end up dangling in the breeze for all the world—and this girl I would really prefer not to be introduced to my balls this early in our relationship—to see.
I do not have attractive balls. Do any guys have attractive balls? Is Wren experienced enough to realize that my balls are merely equally ugly to all other balls and not uniquely hideous monstrosities that should never be allowed to dangle free in the forest or anywhere else?
I have no idea, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take for another taste of her sweet mouth. I lean down, gently threading my fingers through her tangled hair, my pulse spiking as the heat of her body warms my lips, and the river and Wren scent of her fills my head.
My eyes are sliding closed, and I’m half a racing heartbeat away from claiming her mouth, when the sharp whomp-whomp-whomp of chopper blades thrums through the air, silencing the birds and sending any creature with sense diving for cover.
“Get down,” I order urgently.
“What, I—”
“Down, now.” I put an arm around Wren, dragging her to the ground with me as I back off the deer trail, tucking us both against the side of a tree, hoping the evergreen needles above will conceal our presence as the churning sound of the chopper blades grows closer.
Of course, if they have heat-seeking instruments in the copter, a lack of naked-eye visibility won’t matter—our blood will give us away.
With a glance over my shoulder, I quickly estimate the time it will take me to carry Wren to the river versus the time it will take for the helicopter to reach our location. It’s going to be tight—tight as hell—but I think I can make it.
I have to make it. I meant what I said to Wren. I’m going to keep her safe, and I’m willing to go to whatever lengths it takes.
A second later, I’ve got Wren in my arms, hauling ass down the hill to the river bank while she clings to my shoulders and hisses, “What’s happening, Kite? What’s going on? Who’s in the helicopter?”
“No time,” I pant, staggering down the steep slope where grass and dirt becomes stony river bed. “No time. Just trust me. And I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For this.” I leap into the swiftly flowing water at the edge of the bank and charge through the current to where the riverbed is shadowed by tree limbs hanging low over the surface.
Wren sucks in a shocked breath as the frigid water soaks into her clothes, but when I lie down in the maybe two feet of river rushing over us, pinning her against me, she doesn’t pull away. She presses closer, shivering silently as the helicopter roars overhead, pausing to hover over the place where we went into the river a few yards up the bank.
It makes me wonder if she can feel it—the danger. Empathy is my kin-born gift. I can feel what other people are feeling, even when they don’t want me to. It’s a gift that led to a lot of pain when I was younger, before I realized that feelings aren’t always something we can control and a flash of loathing or contempt from someone I care about doesn’t mean they don’t still care about me. But these days it saves my life on an almost daily basis.
Like now…
I can feel the hate and fear roiling from whoever is in the chopper and know to stay the fuck down. I can feel how much they want to shoot to kill, to satisfy the blood lust that has their jaws locked tight and their fingers itchy on the trigger.
If Wren is what Ghost says she is, and I have no reason to doubt him, then she should be able to channel my gift, to absorb it through physical touch at first—mental touch once we’ve established a bond—and use it as her own. Moving slowly, carefully, I press my hand to the top of her chest beneath the water. Even with skin and bone between her heart and my palm, I can feel it thrashing behind her ribs.
She’s terrified.
As she should be, but if she gets too worked up, she might trip the heat seeking equipment, even with the cold water streaming over us.
Bringing my lips to her ears, I say just loud enough to be heard over the storm of the chopper blades, “They aren’t going to get us. Not today. We’ve still got too much left to do together. Try to relax if you can. The cooler we stay, the better.”
After a beat, she nods, and some of the tension eases from her shoulders as her body melts against mine.
And even though the water is fucking freezing and I can barely feel my arms or legs, a crazy part of me celebrates the chance to be this close to her, to have her against my chest and her ass tucked to my hips and all the lovely length of her fitting into small-spoon position like we were made to fit together.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am crazy, but as the helicopter finally swoops away, heading south following the curve of the river, I decide I don’t give a shit. I stopped asking “why” a long time ago.
Most of the time, “why” doesn’t matter. Things just are the way they are, and the sooner you start tackling how to deal with them, the better. Many a life has been lost to “why,” to looking back and shifting puzzle pieces made of smoke and raging at people who are now ghosts.
I don’t care about why, I only care that holding Wren feels like the rightest thing I’ve ever done, and I’m not going to stop fighting for her until she gives me a chance to show her how good we could be together.
How completely fucking perfect.
As if reading my mind—or my heart, I guess—Wren shifts in my arms, glancing over her shoulder into my eyes. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking while we’re submerged in forty-degree water and have just barely escaped being shot by bad guys, you really are out of your mind.”
I laugh because sometime a man just has to cop to being a man, a less than logical creature ruled as much by what’s between his legs as what’s between his ears.
And then a miracle happens—Wren laughs, too, before coming to her feet in the water and announcing, “I want a hot coffee and a stack of pancakes as long as my arm. Then we can get back to our discussion. I haven’t been this hungry in years, and I’m not going to be able to think straight until I eat something more than termites.”
Grinning, I stand beside her. “I can make that happen.”
“You can?” She arches a brow. “Because right now neither of us is any state to cruise into the nearest diner.”
I scoff as I offer my arm for her to hold onto for balance as we start toward shore. “Oh, I have my ways, Bird Girl. And a few tricks up my sleeve. You stick with me and I’ll take care of your belly. We’ll have you fattened up in no time.”
She steps out of the river ahead of me, turning to cast a darker look my way. She doesn’t say a word, but I can feel the silent battle waging inside her, the way she’s suddenly torn between the lies of the past and the possibilities of the future. She’s still not sold on me, on this great escape, and she might very well try to run if I give her the chance. But she doesn’t hate me anymore, and that’s a start.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” I whisper.
“Chinese philosophy so early in the morning?”
“Any time’s a good time for Chinese philosophy.” I squeeze her hand. “But that was also an offer of a piggyback ride. I can get us where we’re going faster if you’ll let me carry you.”
Wren hesitates, but after a moment she nods. “As long as you promise to put me down if you get tired.”
“I don’t get tired,” I say with a wink. “But sure, in the unlikely event your scrawny scrap of a self starts feelin
g heavy, I’ll put you down. Deal?”
Her lips twist. “Deal. For now.”
And that’s good enough.
For now.
Chapter 10
Wren
I’m probably losing my mind—or developing a swift and sudden case of Stockholm syndrome—but I can’t worry about that right now. I can’t seem to focus for too long on anything except how atrociously starved I am.
Starved to the core, to the bone, to the depths of my very being.
I thought I understood what it meant to be ravenous—childhood growth spurts and school days when lunch wasn’t served until nearly one o’clock stand out in my memory as particularly belly-focused times—but I have never experienced anything like the hunger that catches fire inside me somewhere between the woods and Dupont, Washington. I only know that by the time we reach the U-Store at the edge of town, it feels like my stomach is about to inflict serious damage on the world at large.
“Are you going to be okay out here alone for a few minutes?” Kite asks, squatting beside where I’m perched on a tree root in the woods a few yards from the storage facility’s back fence.
I scrunch my nose and nod—just once.
“Are you sure?” Kite presses. “If you’re scared, I can—”
“I’m not scared, I’m hangry,” I snap. “I finally understand what hangry feels like, and it’s not funny. Not even a little bit.”
His lips twitch at the edges, but he seems to know better than to laugh at me. “Okay, then I’ll hurry. Give me two minutes. Sit tight and try not to chew your arm off while I’m gone.”
“I’ll try,” I respond in a sullen voice as he pats me on the back before loping away toward the fence and scaling it with the ease of one of those kids who uses the urban landscape as an obstacle course.
What is the name of that?
When they leap off of roofs and flip over stair railings?
I can’t remember—my brain is a shriveled creature desperately in need of calories—and that makes me even angrier. I am full-on spitting mad at…nothing. No one. I’m enraged at the universe and fate and the layout of the greater Seattle-Tacoma metro area for being pock-marked by so many lakes and rivers that the sprawl has been contained to isolated pockets and Kite and I have not passed a single restaurant in our journey.