Wild Women Collection

by Rachel Sullivan

  I must have caught onto rusalki language because her meaning made complete sense, not that I liked it much. “What she’s saying,” I explained to Marcus, and also to get confirmation from Drosera, “is that my decisions and where I place my energy will affect whether we win or lose.”

  “Not only your decisions,” she corrected. “But the decisions of everyone involved. Each of your choices, the choices of all of you, weaves together into a tapestry that will soon become history. I can see a few possible outcomes, but one changed decision can bring forth a whole new set of possible outcomes.”

  With that taken care of, or rather not taken care of, I asked the rusalki another question, one that was more reality than spiritual. Hopefully one she could answer. “Will your coven be well enough to help us in Maine?”

  Her expression relaxed a little. “Ah,” she said as though she were sighing away the weight of my last question. “Yes, and we’ve devised a plan with which to take them by surprise.”

  Though my heart pounded with excitement over this, I waited, but when she failed to expound, I prodded. “What is it?” I could really use a little good news. A dash of hope right now could go a long way.

  “Our plan is in the beginning stages and not yet ready to reveal,” she said. “We must first get their permission.”

  “Whose permission?” I asked.

  “I would rather not say.”

  “Have we met them?” Marcus chimed in.

  She seemed to think on that for a second. “No, I don’t believe you have.”

  “Are they other Wild Women?” I asked, as though Marcus and I took turns playing twenty questions.

  “Hm,” Drosera said, tapping her chin. “I suppose they were, once.”

  Images of my tree foremothers popped into my mind, the elder huldra as they passed over by stepping into the trunk of a tree where they’d begin the final phase of their life journey. I yearned to know what my mother knew of this practice, to ask her how she’d learned of it if American huldra had never done it. And I yearned to travel to Nordic places, to the woods there, and grow my roots deep enough to connect with the roots of my ancestors, to absorb whatever wisdom they were kind enough to share.

  “Are they tree women?” I asked, hopeful the answer would be yes.

  “That is enough,” Drosera answered with a sway of her hand. “It is time that I return to planning with my sisters.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  Marcus tapped the screen of his throw-away phone on the bedside table. It lit the room in a muted blue. “Three in the morning.”

  I stretched my arms and stood. “Considering the news, I guess it’s also time to gather the coterie and pay a visit to Eonza, find out more about this gem of a man she chose to make a baby with. Then a few of us can go to wherever he lives for a house call.” I threw my robe around my bare arms and tied the waist portion. “Maybe Marie can work her magic and make him forget he’d ever met a harpy.” I pictured the scene playing out and thought of how amazingly shitty our luck had been with our latest bright ideas—Eonza’s being one of them. I hoped making a baby with a journalist wasn’t one of those choices Drosera had referred to, but I could almost bet it was. “It’ll either work like a charm or fail miserably and out yet another group of Wild Women.”

  If this journalist outed us, dealing with the Hunters would be like a walk in the park on a gorgeously rainy day compared to the wrath of angry Wild Women.

  Seven

  I put a fresh pot of coffee on and made my way upstairs to wake my coterie as the coffee brewed. If I was going to pull them out of their warm beds before the sun even thought about coming up, the least I could do was present them with a steaming cup of coffee for their efforts. After making my rounds I made my way back to the kitchen and set out mugs, creamer, and a spoon for quick and easy access.

  The old wooden stairs creaked as huldra made their way to the kitchen, no doubt following their noses to the nearly full coffee pot.

  “Good morning,” Aleksander greeted me, looking way too awake in his silk pajamas. He bypassed the morning drink of choice and made his way to a chair beside the kitchen table. “Why the early morning meeting?”

  I hadn’t woken him up. “It’s not a meeting,” I assured him. “So you’re not missing out on anything if you want to go back to bed.”

  “I would rather stay with my housemates,” he said with a wink. Way too awake…

  I leaned against the tiled countertop and took a sip of warm liquid. After relishing in the bitter taste of earth, and then taking another two sips, I answered the incubus. “Drosera visited me. Apparently Eonza forgot to mention that she made her baby with a journalist. One who’s set on winning the Pulitzer for outing her kind.”

  That woke them all up.

  “So we need to deal with this little snafu sooner rather than later,” I continued. I fielded questions much like the ones I asked Drosera, but by the bottom of my first cup of coffee, we all agreed we needed to silence the journalist. We weren’t entirely sure on the specifics of how, but we hoped the harpies could help us come up with that part.

  The harpies had already returned the rental passenger vans, and we didn’t want them to come pick us up anyway. So we traveled old school style—on foot. Oddly enough, Lapis had left their location on the notepad beside the phone at the old house, but not a phone number. They were staying in the same one-story hotel I’d arranged for Gabrielle and me what seemed like a lifetime ago. The one Gabrielle had passed on, where I ended up sharing a bed with Marcus for the first time. Ah, memories.

  We weren’t staying too far from the motel, and an early morning walk got my blood flowing more than I’d anticipated. I missed my home, my property, the woods. I missed the quiet loudness of nature, the serene commotion. Walking hand-in-hand with Marcus, huddled in my coterie, I took in a snippet of what I’d missed so much. In the wee hours of the morning, before most humans woke from their beds, only the sounds of small animals rustled through the bushes of front yards and wind blew through the leaves of trees surrounding us. And it was glorious.

  The heaviness of my newest task to deal with the journalist rose from my shoulders as we left the older residential area of town and quickly ended up in the older business side of town. We passed brick buildings containing shops and doctor and dental offices, all closed up tight for the night with only dim outdoor lights shining over their entrances.

  I smiled and inhaled, squeezing Marcus’s hand. As impossible as life felt at times, it was as though nature sent us little gifts of hope for a better tomorrow in the form of a sunrise or birdsong.

  Or a tree in an alleyway?

  I paused and squinted my eyes, peering deeper into the dark alley between two brick two-story buildings claiming to house medical and insurance offices. The tree moved and I froze.

  “Someone is watching us,” I whispered under my breath, only loud enough for my coterie to hear. It’s not that I didn’t want to alert the men too, but I also didn’t want to be heard by whoever stood in the alley.

  “You think it’s the journalist?” Marcus asked with the same whisper.

  I inhaled deeply again, irritated that I’d been too caught up in the scent of morning that I’d missed the non-human female watching us.

  “No,” I answered. “She’s not human either.”

  I thought it over for all of two seconds before I said, “I’m going to see what’s up.”

  I unclasped Marcus’s hand and stood taller, squaring my shoulders as I walked assertively over to our audience. She smelled like no other Wild I’d ever met before. As I got within one hundred feet of her, she turned and ran the other direction.

  And so I chased her. Maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea, running into an alley in the middle of the night to chase a supernatural woman. But both the huldra and the bounty hunter in me wouldn’t have it any other way.

  When she picked up her pace, I yelled, “Wait! Stop!”

  Yelling in the middle of the ni
ght for humans to hear was also not the best idea. And it’s not like she listened either. She turned the corner behind the building to our left and lost me. When I made it to the corner, I caught no sight of her and only the faintness of her scent still lingered in the damp early morning air.

  “Dammit!” I huffed under my breath. I balled my fist and struck the wet brick wall.

  The others of my group came running around the corner, asking if I was all right. No, I was pissed.

  “Did you get a good whiff of her?” My aunt Patricia asked as we got back onto the sidewalk toward the motel.

  I shrugged. “Apparently not good enough.”

  “Which type of Wild Woman did she smell like?” Shawna asked. “Maybe the echidna were out for a morning walk and didn’t want us to know.”

  I stomped from the sidewalk onto the blacktop parking lot of the motel. Gone were the reminiscent feelings of the last time I walked into this motel, or the simple pleasures I found in the nature around me.

  I stood outside of room number three and knocked loudly. “She didn’t smell like any Wild Woman I’ve ever met,” I grumbled as I waited for a harpy to answer my knock.

  I knocked again.

  Finally Lapis drew back a floral print curtain and peeked out the front window at us. The chain on the door slid and the door opened. The three harpies shared a king size bed, and with Lapis out from under the covers, her two sisters sat up and leaned against the wooden headboard.

  Lapis clicked on a bedside lamp and sat at the edge of the bed.

  I waited for everyone to crowd into the small room, and the door to close, before I spoke.

  Aunt Renee replaced the chain lock at the top of the door.

  As I woke my coterie this morning, and on my walk to the motel, I’d gone over a rough outline of how I’d gently bring up the topic of Eonza’s poor choice of a mate. Each and every one of those words had flown out the proverbial window the moment I caught a non-human woman spying on us.

  I stood at the foot of the bed, dead straight with Eonza, and looked the harpy in the eyes.

  “So, Eonza, you decided to make a baby with an attention-hungry journalist, huh?” I said in not the nicest of tones.

  She opened her mouth to speak, and then shut it again. Lapis answered for her instead. “We did not fully research the male before they mated. It was an opportunity that presented itself and so she took it.”

  “And then?” I asked, wanting more than the obvious.

  “And then,” Lapis continued, defensively, “he saw her wings.”

  I jumped back in shock. “What the fuck, Eonza?”

  Both Lapis and Salis stood on the bed between Eonza and me in a jolt. Wings burst from their naked backs and talons exploded from their fingers and toes. Within a heartbeat the two harpies were ready to defend their sister and their newest unborn flock member.

  Tension filled the room and my sisters and aunts rushed to flank me, each growing vines from her fingers and crouching low enough to prepare for an aerial attack. Marcus breathed down my back and I felt his right arm brush against me as it moved for his dagger.

  “How dare you come into our resting chambers demanding to know flock business,” Salis seethed, her wings outstretched.

  The harpies, standing above us battle-ready, were a terrifying sight. I could imagine the scare Eonza gave the journalist with only her wings showing. No wonder he wanted to out her kind. Other than being internationally recognized, he’d also be regaining a smidge of the dignity he probably felt he lost when he no doubt wetted himself.

  But this wasn’t just flock business.

  “Flock business, my ass,” I retorted, holding my ground. “When Wild Women start showing up to stalk us, this moves out of the realm of flock business and into the realm of American Wild Women livelihood.”

  Lapis’s blue wings relaxed and the tips fell to the mattress. “What kind of Wild Women?” she asked.

  Salis folded her light brown wings and pulled them snug against her back. Her talons slowly retracted.

  “I have no clue,” I answered, a little less seething and a little more irritated. “Not one I’ve ever smelled before.”

  Lapis and Salis sat at the foot of the bed and I took a few steps back. My coterie relaxed too, pulling their vines into their fingers and spreading out away from me to sit on the table and chairs, or lean against the back wall. Marcus and Shawna stayed close.

  “Drosera came to me this morning,” I continued. “She said that if we don’t stop the journalist from revealing your kind, the other Wild Women of the world will take action…against him and then against us.” I narrowed my eyes. “Please tell me he has no proof, that whatever he’s planning on writing has no evidence to back it up.”

  Lapis raised her chin and held my gaze. “He took a picture with his phone.”

  I closed my eyes to calm myself enough in the time it took me to slowly inhale and exhale.

  “What would Drosera have us do, then?” Eonza spoke up.

  “The only way to effectively shut him up is to kill him,” my aunt Renee suggested.

  We all turned to her, shocked at the ease in which she delivered a damning verdict.

  “My sisters and I will not take any part in killing an innocent man,” Eonza declared.

  “Neither will I,” I agreed. The human male hadn’t tried to hurt or kill us. At least that hadn’t seemed to have been his intention.

  “I won’t,” Marcus said.

  “Nor will I,” Aleksander added.

  “Okay,” I said, my hands out in front of me. “We aren’t going to kill the guy. Next option?”

  “We can ask the mermaids if they know anything about the new Wild Women in town when they call as they’ve promised,” Olivia offered.

  Celeste cut her partner sister off. “The succubi,” she said.

  Olivia looked at Celeste with scrunched eyebrows. “The mermaids will tell us the new Wild Women are succubi? That makes no sense, sister.”

  Celeste widened her eyes and gave her partner sister a second to think about what she’d just said.

  “Oh,” Olivia uttered, giving her sister a nod of approval. “The succubi can wipe the guy’s memories of Eonza’s wings. Smart.”

  “Yeah, that’ll work,” I added, remembering I’d had that idea while talking to Drosera. Stress and lack of sleep really left me feeling like a dull knife among daggers. “That should work.”

  When I’d first met Marie she’d been sitting on her red couch with a human man who wore only boxers. I had interrupted their night of fun by barging in, asking the whereabouts of my sister, Shawna. When Marie spoke about Wild Women in front of the human, I’d been shocked until she’d explained he would only remember that night as a hazy dream of ultimate pleasure.

  The succubi had the ability to manipulate energy, which included sexual energy. Seeing as we were all energy, succubi could redesign memories as well as render a person motionless. This was why my aunt Renee had blamed the succubi for whispering into the minds of the men who took Shawna, and the man who’d tried to attack me in the Bellevue hotel bedroom—the man I accidentally killed. Of course my aunt had been wrong. The succubi didn’t aim to hurt, they aimed to help, using their abilities to heal humans and bring them joy as well as pleasure. But either way, they were capable.

  Which meant a couple hours between a succubus and the journalist would end in smiles on both their faces. The succubus would have a good time and get to use her energy abilities for good, and the journalist would have the best romp of his life—no offense to Eonza—and be left without his memory of Eonza’s wings. Sure, he’d also never end up winning a Pulitzer or some other prestigious award for reporting about Wild Women, but he also wouldn’t out a group of Wilds and in turn feel the wrath of those of them from different lands with a lifestyle to protect.

  “I believe that’ll work,” Eonza said. She stretched her neck and arms as though she were just rising from bed. “I’m famished.” She peered at the clock on
the bedside table. “There’s a coffee place opening soon. We should get breakfast.”

  Having experienced the highs and lows of an emotional roller coaster, all before the sun came up, my group, fueled with nothing but coffee, supported Eonza’s plan.

  I wondered, though, as we walked out into the crisp early morning air, which Wild Women were following us. How many were there, lurking in the shadows? And most importantly, would we be able to fight them off if we failed to stop the journalist in time?

  Eight

  By early afternoon, my coterie, Marcus, Aleksander, Marie, and two of her succubus sisters walked the bustling streets of Charlotte, North Carolina with a mission: Enter the building of the Charlotte Tribune, find Brice Smith’s office, and redesign his memory of Eonza and her wings.

  Earlier that morning, over a mocha and a blueberry scone, I listened as Eonza told the story behind her and the journalist’s moments of baby-making. From the way she’d explained it, no passion entered the picture, but if she had lost control and released her wings, there had to be at least a little unbridled pleasure involved. Clearly, she’d left the good parts out of her retelling. I’d never say as much to her face, though, with those talons of hers.

  The journalist, Brice, had been in the Mt. Mitchell area for a weekend nature retreat where he occupied a rental cabin along with seven others. Brice didn’t say much about why he came, other than he needed a break from everything. He’d been hiking alone in the woods when the harpies spotted him from a treetop. Lapis and Salis flew home in a hurry to leave Eonza alone with the unsuspecting male.

  According to Eonza, they mated right there in the woods. She’d left out the part where she flashed her wings, and only mentioned them going their separate ways and her flying home when she knew he wouldn’t see her.