Wild Women Collection

by Rachel Sullivan

  “Then they’ve abandoned us,” Renee said. “Probably something to do with their alliance to the Hunters.” My aunt, ever the conspiracy theorist.

  “I don’t think so,” I answered. “The rusalki said we could trust the mermaid shoal, for the most part. Only a select few were working with the Hunters. It wasn’t a shoal-wide thing. I don’t think their whole shoal would get behind them on that. Especially after the Hunters ran them off their island, away from their home.”

  “The rusalki,” Shawna uttered, staring at her hand on Celeste’s thigh, clearly lost in thought. I just hoped this talk wasn’t triggering her PTSD. “The rusalki can help us. They may be one of the smaller Wild Women groups, but they are the most powerful by far.”

  “What makes you say that?” Olivia asked from a chair at the dining table.

  Shawna finally looked up. Her dreads fell to the side of her face. She looked ashen. “In the Hunter’s house…” She paused and took a few breaths. Celeste wrapped a comforting arm around Shawna’s shoulder. “In the Hunter’s house, the rusalka whispered things into my mind. I felt so untethered to reality, like I was floating through air, outside of my body. But she met me there, spoke to guide me back to my body. She said energy is everywhere, but the energy of water held a higher vibration than air, so to imagine I was floating in water and to swim back to my body. When I opened my eyes, she wasn’t in the room. And then all of a sudden, she was there. It’s as though they can transcend time and space.”

  Her assessment of the rusalki abilities reminded me of Azalea, the rusalka who’d pulled me from my huldra rage before I tried to kill Marcus. My heart tightened in my chest at the memory. Seeing my partner sister drugged and unresponsive, and the fact that at any time I could go into a huldra rage and attack the man I was falling for, twisted me in unfathomable ways. The reality of that truth did not escape me. Azalea had been killed in the battle, by the Hunter’s woman no less. The woman who Marcus had urged me to leave behind rather than try to arrest and take in for a hefty bounty as the skip who’d been the alleged leader of Seattle’s most notorious human-trafficking ring. Azalea didn’t deserve such a death. It made me sick just remembering how everything went down.

  My head jolted up and my wide eyes found Shawna. “You’re absolutely right,” I told my partner sister. “The rusalki are our only hope.”

  “We haven’t been able to get a hold of them either,” Olivia said dryly, shaking her head in yet another round of defeat. “They’ve never had phones, but they’d told us they’d be in contact. They’re not.”

  My gaze didn’t find Olivia at the table. I stared at Shawna on the couch. “They’re busy mourning their sister, Azalea,” I said. “And I know where they’re doing it.”

  Eighteen

  We threw our suitcases into the bed of Marcus’s dark blue truck and crammed into the extended cab. Thankfully, each time he’d parked his truck at our home in Washington, he’d pulled it into the woods behind the common house, so it wouldn’t be visible from the driveway. So when the Hunters made a surprise house call, and he and my coterie ran through the back door of the common house and into the forest, they made it to his truck in time and went off-roading through our property to the nearest highway heading south.

  We pulled up to the address on the folded piece of paper and gazed at the yellow split-level located in a bedroom community outside of Portland while the truck idled in the driveway. Celeste exited the vehicle first and the rest of us followed. Shawna let her dog, Sepa, down to excitedly sniff the edges of the front yard before locating the perfect spot of grass to relieve herself.

  “I’ll unlock the door,” I announced, making my way up the flower-pot lined cement steps to the yellow front door. I pressed the series of numbers into the keypad of the lockbox hanging from the doorknob, based on what Aleksander had written beneath the house’s address. His handwriting reminded me of the fancy ink calligraphy of historical manuscripts.

  Marcus looked over my shoulder at the incubus’s writing and groaned. “I still don’t like accepting his help. I mean, I get it, but I don’t like it.”

  “We’ll pay him back when this is over,” I assured him. “Every penny.”

  I opened the door and we stepped in. The house appeared to be a sewer’s retreat. Brochures announcing Portland’s bi-annual quilting show sat fanned out on the entry counter. Ornate quilts hung on the walls and spread over the tops of beds, of which there were many. Five bedrooms to be exact—three on the top floor and two on the bottom, most filled with two twin beds. Marcus and I called the only room with a queen bed, and those of us who had suitcases, left them in our claimed rooms.

  After Shawna set up a mecca of comfort, complete with full water and food bowls and a floor covered in pee pads for Sepa, we locked up the yellow rental. We were met in the driveway by an Uber that Celeste had asked Aleksander to order with his credit card, and got back onto the road for what we hoped would be a turn-around trip.

  The ten-hour flight from Oregon’s Portland International Airport to Maine’s Bangor International Airport took forever. We finally had a possible plan, one that may just work, but a long-ass plane ride stood between planning and action. It was a hurry up and wait situation. Watching the reactions of my coterie to their first ever airport and airplane experience had kept me slightly entertained in the beginning. But after ten hours of the same thing, nothing is entertaining. Not even my aunt Renee’s suggestion to go home to dig up our weapons and bring them with us, just in case, cracked a smile on my face. Although, my response made Marcus laugh.

  “No, Renee, it would have been a waste of time anyways,” I’d answered her insistent idea as we waited to board the plane. “They don’t let you bring weapons, or anything that can be used as a weapon, past those metal detectors we went through. Trust me, I’ve tried.” I’d left out the fact that we were nowhere near our home to begin with.

  Marcus scoffed. “You tried to bring your dagger onto the plane?”

  I’d rolled my eyes at him. “Of course I didn’t get that far.” I muttered the last part, “Gabrielle wouldn’t let me.”

  Marcus slapped his knee and laughed. “God, I would have loved to have seen that conversation.”

  I replayed the discussion with Gabrielle before my first time flying. My stomach twisted. She may have been cavorting with the Hunters, but I still held onto the notion that she’d had a good reason, that she wouldn’t have sold us out in the end. Maybe it was wishful thinking. I liked the mermaid, and I thought she’d liked me too. Gabrielle had been my first Wild friend outside of my own kind. In my mind, there was something to be said for that.

  The plane’s descent into Bangor, Maine brought back more memories. Being back on the ground helped, and it didn’t. The drive to the rusalki’s forest, the one where Gabrielle and I walked only weeks earlier, gave me a nostalgia more painful than pleasing. This time, though, I had Shawna. This time I wasn’t fearing for her safety, worrying we wouldn’t get answers, wouldn’t get help in time. I grabbed my partner sister’s hand and squeezed it tight, thankful to have her by my side.

  Celeste, though, she felt all those things. I saw it written along her scrunched brows and in her hurried steps. In the way she scanned the forest with the intensity of a starving wolf on the hunt, her head snapping one way and then the next, her gaze swinging from tree to tree. She was starving, all right, for answers to help reunite her with Marie. And the more time I spent with Celeste in this hurried and worried mode, the more I realized Marie was not going to be a temporary fixture in my coterie’s life.

  “These trees look familiar,” I said, pausing to examine an evergreen that seemed to have separated early on and grown two trunks from one. “I remember this one. Their home isn’t far.”

  We’d caught an afternoon flight, headed to the Portland International Airport shortly after leaving the incubi and gathering a few things from the succubi’s apartment complex. The last-minute tickets weren’t cheap, but we’d managed by dipping i
nto our emergency cash savings we had tucked away. We’d arrived in Maine in the early morning hours, shortly after midnight and headed straight to the rusalki.

  Abigale caught up to Shawna and me, and wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder. Shawna slowed her pace to match her mother’s until they hung back behind the rest of us, trudging through the dark forest.

  Marcus reached to hold my hand, but then pulled away right as I reached back. I narrowed my gaze at him. “What? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I forgot you might need your hands, branches and all.”

  I accepted his excuse with a nod, but his monotone voice gave me the impression his answer held a deeper layer.

  “You doing okay?” I asked. “Being so close to so many Wilds? In the car, on a plane, tromping through the Maine forest around Moosehead Lake?”

  He didn’t look at me to respond, only kept in-step with me and looked ahead. “I wish you’d stop asking me that.”

  “What?” I snapped back with a harsh whisper, knowing full well my coterie could hear everything we said. Still, whispering gave me the false sense that our private conversation was just that—private. “Asking if you’re okay? I’m sorry that I care.”

  “Is that why you’re asking?” he shot back in a low voice. “Or is it that you’re painfully aware that I’m a Hunter and you can’t help but remind me of that fact?”

  I almost stopped mid-step, but Celeste wouldn’t have it, so I kept stepping over ferns, dripping from an earlier rain, and weaving past tangled bushes.

  “The fact that you’re a Hunter and I’m a Wild Woman isn’t my fault,” I answered, no longer whispering. Screw it. It’s not like my coterie weren’t already privy to our heated conversation. “It’s a blaring fact of life that we can’t pretend out of existence.”

  “Tell me how you really feel, Faline,” Marcus said, shaking his head and looking away.

  “What?” I asked, exasperated. What the hell was his problem?

  “Is that it?” Celeste exclaimed, running out from behind me, pointing to a pile of dirt and sticks in the distance. “Is that their home?”

  “Yes!” I yelled with more enthusiasm than I felt, but happy to change the subject. “They could have moved, but this is where they were last time I visited.”

  We jogged to catch up to Celeste and stopped short of stepping onto the square shape of stones that made up their “porch.” After the stones stood a door made of sticks tied tightly together, covering a hole leading down into the mound, into their den. And I knew from my last visit that in their den sat shelves made from sticks, and chairs and a table made from tree stumps, with moss for carpet. I had no intention of entering their home during this visit, though. One night spent underground had been enough for this huldra.

  I looked up to scan the tops of the trees around the rusalki den. They should have made their presence known by now, called out to us, stretched invisible fingers into our minds to see what we were up to, and maybe told a parable or two. That is, if they were here. And from what Shawna had mentioned about them helping her upstairs in the Hunter’s cabin, as though they were all in water…and how they’d mentioned the higher energy frequency of water…I figured we wouldn’t find them in their home or hiding in trees.

  I pivoted and ran toward the lake. The same lake Gabrielle complained about having to wade through in search of the rusalki last time we were here.

  My coterie and Marcus stopped at the lake’s edge less than a minute after the steel toes of my boots barely touched the water. I didn’t need my boots anymore, my vines were more helpful if given free rein to grow, but old habits die hard.

  It’s as though my accomplices knew not to speak, knew, in the same strange way I now understood, we were encroaching on something sacred.

  It didn’t take long before the tops of three heads broke the surface of the murky lake, followed by the faces of what was left of the rusalki coven. They stared at us, blankly. I waited to feel them rummaging around my mind, but felt nothing. I shot a look to Shawna and she only shrugged. Apparently, they weren’t sorting through her mind either.

  “I am sorry to interrupt you,” I said cautiously.

  “The water takes what she has given, but she also grieves her loss when her creation is removed from her realm,” Drosera, one of the rusalki said on an even tone.

  “We know you’re mourning your sister, and we wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t an emergency,” I continued.

  The three rusalki didn’t so much as blink.

  “You can read my thoughts if it’ll help,” I offered. Never in a million years did I think I’d request rusalki enter my mind, and now I hoped they would. Mostly because they’d get way more information than by mere words alone. And also there was a part of me that felt unnerved by their morose stillness, their lack of desire, the blankness in their eyes that I’d seen all too many times while interviewing families of murder victims in my hunt for skips. The look of vacancy.

  “I haven’t the energy,” Drosera answered in what was probably the most direct statement I’d heard from a rusalka.

  My thoughts stuttered over how that was even possible.

  “We need your help in saving the succubi,” Celeste blurted, nearing the murky water with hurried steps. The rusalki didn’t recoil, or move at all. “They attended check-in and the Hunters detained them all! Probably over suspicion with what happened at the Washington Hunter complex. They’re in danger!”

  Without so much as a head-turn or a muttering of sounds, the rusalki lowered back into the water in much the same way they’d emerged, the tops of their heads being the last of them we saw and soon even that disappeared seamlessly, not even causing more than a wrinkle in the top of the lake.

  “No, they can’t just ignore us,” Celeste seethed, walking deeper into the water as though set on going after them.

  Lake water gathered around Celeste’s ankles, soaking her slip-on shoes and the bottom of her fitted jeans. She took another two steps and it reached her knees. “Celeste,” I called to her. “You can’t go in there. They’re mourning their sister. The space, they may see it as sacred.”

  I doubted they’d do to my sister what they’d done to Gabrielle, but I refused to take that chance. Celeste hadn’t seen what I’d seen. She didn’t know how quickly they strike and how deadly the snip of their birch scissors could be. Her bravery in confronting the rusalki was partly based on ignorance of their abilities.

  A thought bloomed in my mind. I’d figured out that the Hunters had been keeping us ignorant of other Wilds, teaching us incorrect history of our kind as well as the others’. But had they also kept us ignorant for another reason? Fearing other Wilds kept us from joining together for so long. But not knowing the abilities of other Wilds gave the Hunters another advantage. If the Wild Women were to ever war again, we’d be at a disadvantage in not knowing how to protect ourselves, how to counter the attacks and abilities of other Wilds. Hunters lower in their hierarchy probably only knew the truth about the Wild Women in their state, the women they were trained to police. John had specifically stated as much when I’d asked him for help in finding Shawna. But the higher-up Hunters probably knew about each kind of Wild Woman, her weaknesses and her strengths.

  Celeste’s response pulled me from my plotting. “But they just left us, without answering.” She didn’t step deeper into the water, but she also didn’t leave it for land.

  Damn. Love could really fuck with the mind—my love for Celeste and her love for Marie. It had to be love she held for the succubus because why else would I be forced to trudge into the murky lake to retrieve her? I pulled my boots and socks off in a hurry that grew with each thud of my heart. I’d seen the rusalki’s response to Gabrielle and me entering their territory of forest. How much worse would they respond to Celeste entering their mourning space? No, I wasn’t completely sure that’s what they were doing, but I’d made an informed guess and that was enough to freak out about.

&nb
sp; “What are you doing?” Shawna asked me.

  I didn’t turn to answer, only flung my socks to the side and headed into the water a little more than irritated that Celeste had forced my hand. “I’m retrieving our sister who is refusing to come back to land,” I grumbled.

  I didn’t need to see Marcus to know he too readied himself to come in after me. I didn’t turn toward the shore as I added, “Don’t follow me in. Especially you, Marcus.”

  Celeste’s brow furrowed, first in indignation, and then in concern as her eyes widened. Her torso leaned forward as though she were trying to take a step toward me, but didn’t. “I can’t…I can’t move,” she exclaimed.

  “Shit,” I yelled as I ran to her.

  Others in my coterie began moving toward the water and I flung my hand up to stop them. “If one of us can’t get her out, all of us won’t be able to do it,” I reminded, trying to keep my voice and breath steady. Causing my sisters and aunts to fear wouldn’t help anything. It’d only distract them and right now they needed to stay alert.

  Celeste struggled to move and fell forward, soaking her whole body. I grabbed her arms and hoisted her to stand. She pushed her body to move forward again, disregarding my advice to remain calm. As though whatever chains had held her in place broke in an instant, she fell forward with force and her feet sprang from the water as her chest broke through the surface.

  I reached to pull her up and run her to the shore, but my feet now refused to budge. “What the hell?” I yelled.

  Celeste pulled herself from the lake, sopping wet, and sprang to grab me.

  As though my legs were being pulled out from under me, becoming liquid in the process, my body slipped under water, toward the center of the lake. My coterie and Marcus ran for me, and before my face followed my body below the surface I exhaled sharply, “Don’t follow me!”