Shawna responded, “Ask her a question, this tree.”
“How?” I asked.
Through your roots, was the answer, though not with words. A knowing simply popped into my head.
I couldn’t tell if the response came from Shawna or the tree, but I was in awe.
Why is Marcus such a comfort to you? I found my mind asking through the roots—a question I’d been secretly wrestling with since we’d rescued her. Why at the Hunter complex and after, did you reach for him and not me?
My embarrassing inner struggles with my sister, my hidden hurt feelings, had betrayed me. My eyes fluttered open to see if she was giving me the death stare, because of course she couldn’t help who she reached for in her moment of need. Of course it had nothing to do with our bond. She had every right to be insulted by my question.
Shawna only stood in front of me, eyes closed, a relaxed smile pulling her lips slightly upward.
I closed my eyes, too.
I saw only monsters in the room that day, Shawna answered through the roots, her words finding their way to my mind, leaving her voice behind. I had never seen a huldra in full force, and yours was shocking, how you tore into my captor. I’d assumed Marcus was just another Hunter, until the rusalka Azalea showed herself and calmed me. She assured me he was safe. I grabbed onto him, and I don’t know, I feel safe now whenever he’s near.
Her explanation crushed me. Guilt for my sudden jealousy that she saw Marcus as her safe person quickly followed, and mixed with shame for scaring my sister, for the monster she saw me to be.
“We should be heading back now,” Shawna said, abruptly, stiffly.
She disconnected from the roots, leaving my soul with a sudden emptiness I hadn’t noticed before. I flung my eyes open to see her watching me.
“Is something the matter?” I asked.
“I know you could you feel me,” she said. “Through the roots.”
I nodded.
“I could feel you too.” She waited a breath. “You love him.”
I searched her eyes for a hint of opinion on the matter, but she gave none.
“I won’t leave you, Shawna,” I heard myself proclaiming. And I meant every word with all of my being. “I still want to grow old with you, raise our daughters together.”
I thought of what came after bringing a new generation of huldra into the world. “Mourn our mothers together,” I finally said, hoping my mother still lived. My heart broke a little more when I realized that even if my mother lived, even if I rescued her, I’d only have a few years left with her before she went the way of her mother.
“How, though, if you stay with him?” Shawna asked. She bit her bottom lip and I wondered if she was holding tears back. I wondered if she’d felt abandoned at the Hunter’s cabin, if she feared I’d never come for her. Questions I should have asked her when we were connected through the roots.
“I’ll never let you go, Shawna,” I declared, my voice serious. “You’re my partner sister until the day we die. No male will change that, whether I love him or not.”
Her sullen face cheered. “Do I need to make you pinky-swear?” she asked with a hesitant laugh.
“Better than that,” I said. “I’ll root swear.”
Shawna and I hadn’t made it to the first cement step on the yellow house’s front porch before Marcus swung the door open and rushed out to greet us.
“Faline Frey!” he said, standing with legs spread apart, blocking our path into the home. “You scared the shit out of me. I woke up, and no one could find you. We’ve been out looking.”
Shawna disregarded his intensity by swatting at the air in front of her. “Please, I told the others when Drosera summoned me. They knew Faline was safe.”
Olivia peeked her head around the corner of the hall on the main level and directly in front of us. She snickered and Marcus turned to see who laughed at him.
“You knew?” he asked her, throwing his hands in the air. “But you were looking for her too.”
She burst out laughing and nodded, revealing herself. “I told them when we got to the convenience store, while you were on the next street over,” she said after she took a breath.
“Damn,” he said under his breath. “That’s fucked up.” He shook his head.
Marcus moved to stand at my side and put his arm over my shoulders. I kept hold of Shawna’s hand as the three of us walked toward the door together.
“It is,” I answered, not even trying to whisper because if Marcus could hear it, my coterie could too. I patted his butt with my free hand. “But think of it this way. Olivia wouldn’t joke with you if she disliked you.”
Right before I parted ways with him so we could single-file through the door, he whispered, “So they’re on joking terms with me now?”
I thought to ask him why he was whispering around a bunch of huldra, but my sister beat me to it, in a roundabout way.
“Only when the joke is on you,” Olivia yelled, hopping over the back of the couch to sit on its cushions.
Observing the two supernaturals, the ex-Hunter and the huldra, trying to navigate the foreign terrain of a peaceful relationship made me wonder how well we’d get along with the new Wilds headed our way. Did they have a sense of humor? Or would trusting these women leave us worse off and feeling like someone had played a cruel joke at our expense?
Twenty-Eight
If asked a month ago to tell everything I knew about the snake Wild Women and their Goddesses, I probably would have talked for all of three seconds, maybe five. As far as I knew, the snake Wilds were succubi and the Goddess who created them was Lilith. Yeah, I would have listed the few details I’d learned about the succubi from our teachers, the Hunters. But all-in-all, I had been clueless.
Lately, though, my mother’s stories were rising up within me. As though, like sediment, they rested at the bottom of my subconscious until life came and stirred it all up. Now her words made their way into my dreams and random thoughts. The snake Wilds had the most to prove, she’d remind me, as they were the most demonized of us all.
Snakes were once regarded as sacred beings, able to shed their skin and live, able to access underground, under rocks, explore the unseen, the darker parts of life. “It is this reason,” my mother would whisper while pushing strands of my red hair from my face, “that the snake itself was identified as evil incarnate, because men could not understand its movements or its ways, but most importantly, because throughout ancient belief systems, the snake and the Goddess, the snake and women, were one in the same.”
That memory blossomed to another. “You know,” she’d once said, her own mind in a far off place, “some ancients believed the soul lived in the gut, and I wonder if references to the snake’s belly upon the ground meant the soul was nearer the earth, or if it meant the soul was tainted with earth.”
I paced the living room pondering that exact question. I had only just realized it, but my mother had left me with more questions than answers. Had she unraveled them all, only to place the knots before me to unravel as I grew? Or had she just begun the mission of finding our truth and hoped I would complete it?
I jumped in place when a car door slammed shut. They were here, the snake Wild Women. My stomach twisted and I caught myself wringing my hands. My sisters jumped up to flank me. My aunts went out front to greet the foreign Wilds as almost a planned welcome of dignitaries, being that they were of similar ages. Most of the Wild Women currently exchanging pleasantries would fight the Hunters alongside one another, as post-menopausal women.
Marcus kept quietly occupied in the great room downstairs. We figured he should stay out of this all. And of course, Aleksander, visiting again, stayed with him. Part of me waited for a blow-up from downstairs, the likes of which would blow the door off the place and expose two supernatural males at each other’s throats. But, if all went as planned, the two would stay out of the way until we felt the snake Wilds were ready to make their acquaintance. Past experiences made me assume th
ey’d welcome the incubus much more than the ex-Hunter.
“It’ll be okay,” Shawna offered quietly along with a side-glance. “They’re here to help.”
Shawna’s voice, not her words, reminded me of our morning in the woods, of grounding deep enough to access the wisdom of the tree. I’m not sure when I’d gotten it in my head that I was always inferior, but in that moment, I realized I was an equal to the Wilds now tromping up the porch steps, chatting.
I’d never learned “my place” from my mother or my aunts. But my first check-in at the Hunter complex, complete with receiving an unwanted thigh tattoo of my five-digit identification number and hours of introductory indoctrination, slapped me with a high dose of reality. I’d turned fifteen (I was a late bloomer) and started my period, absolutely thrilled to be a woman. Maybe it was my mother’s stories, or maybe it was the way Freyja moved me during my quiet reflection times, but even as a young girl I looked forward to menstruation as though I were about to take part in the most sacred of rites. And that’s how I saw it too, as utterly sacred.
Until, of course, the month following my first period, when I attended my first check-in at the Hunter’s complex. I remember wishing my aunts and older sisters had prepared me for what I’d walked into, for the way the Hunters would, layer by layer, peel back my dignity and shine a light on my vulnerability. My back had been investigated under a surgical light as though they were inspecting my biggest fault of all, my huldra, my Wild nature. Next was their use of needles to force ink under my skin without my consent, to mar my body, and eventually control it. And last, I was made to sit, sore and broken, as John stood before me, explaining the rules and conduct of a Wild Woman in Washington State.
It had been traumatic, I now realized, and the root of my constant inferiority complex.
The front door swung open and my aunt Renee walked through. She stepped just inside as a tall, striking woman with long black and silver hair and darkly tanned skin stood in the doorframe behind her.
“Faline, this is Anwen,” Renee said in a strong voice. “And Anwen, this is my niece, Faline Frey.”
Anwen eyed me before closing the gap between us and wrapping her arms around my shoulders in an embrace. It took me a second to catch up before I hugged her back. She smelled of tea tree oil and sand. She wore a bright Indian-inspired top and dark blue jeans with sandals. An Egyptian-looking tattoo of an eye covered the back of her right hand.
“Thank you for coming,” I said into her ear with absolute gratitude.
“It is my pleasure,” she said, pulling away to look me over.
“You huldra aren’t very tall, are you?” she laughed. I shot a look to my aunts who were laughing too. Clearly this had already been discussed outside, probably in relation to trees being our strongest connection to nature.
I had no response for that one, other than waving the others to come in.
When the others entered the kitchen, leading to the living room, and my aunt Patricia shut the door behind them, I counted seven new Wild Women. Seven. That was all the rusalki sent?
“I sense fear rising up in you, an emotion that was not present when I arrived,” Anwen said, tilting her head in confusion. “What is it about us that unnerves you so?”
I inhaled deeply and then exhaled, to calm myself. My statement sounded more dignified than I felt. “There are only seven of you and so many more Hunters. We have only two members of our coterie who are post-menopausal, who can join you. That’s not enough.” I shook my head and sat on the couch to keep from pacing.
“Allow me to introduce those who will be aiding you on this mission before you dismiss their contributions,” Anwen said matter-of-factly.
Yup, I’d known this Wild not even ten minutes and I’d already offended her. An ambassador, I was not.
I placed my hands open on my lap as a show of acceptance. If my words offended them, hopefully my body language wouldn’t. “I’m sorry,” I corrected myself. “Yes, please, introduce yourselves.”
Anwen’s smile showed glimpses of her wisdom, in the knowing twinkle of her dark irises and the creases framing her eyes and mouth. I wasn’t sure how her kind, the nagin, aged, but to me she looked to be in her mid to late fifties.
She stood proud and tall in the middle of the room, addressing the huldra who stood behind and beside me. “My name is Anwen of the nagin group. The Egyptian Goddess, Wadjet created us and moves through us in the form of a cobra. We believe she moves through each living being as a snake, which some call kundalini.”
Another woman with blonde and silver hair, who looked slightly older than Anwen stepped forward and gave a quick chin tilt. “I am also nagin, sister to Anwen, and my name is Berwyn.” Her somewhat faded eye tattoo covered a two inch by two inch area of her chest, right above her line of cleavage.
The two nagin women stood in the center of the room and a third woman joined them. She looked older than the first two, maybe in her upper sixties. She wore her silver hair in a crown atop her head and moved with the grace of a serpent. “I am Eta,” the woman said with pride and power. “I am the elder of my two sisters here today, Anwen and Berwyn. And I am pleased to make your acquaintance. It has been some time since we’ve heard from our American Wild Women sisters. While I was not yet alive when the succubi ancestors chose to cross the ocean to the new world, as a child, I heard stories of the painful goodbyes between my nagin ancestors and the ancestors of the succubi.”
“I’m eager to hear those stories,” I said, wishing my mother were here as well to soak up our Wild history.
Eta’s smiled slipped slowly across her lips, lit up her eyes, and then eased away. She ran a finger through her bangs, exposing a small eye tattoo at her hairline on the center of her forehead. She and her sisters stepped aside for the next group to move forward.
Two Chinese women stepped to the center of the living room. Petite in size, they both wore their silver and black hair cropped short with brightly colored scarves over their tops and slacks. The woman on the right spoke, eyeing each huldra for a second before moving on to the next. “Hello, my name is Chen and my sister’s name is Fan. We hail from China, where our Goddess Nü Gua breathed her essence into her highest priestesses long ago and created our kind, the shé.”
The shé Wilds moved aside and the last two newcomers stepped to the center, in front of the couch I sat on, on the other side of the coffee table.
None of these new-to-me women showed signs of feathers or scales. Anwen’s explanation gave me a hint of what the nagin capabilities held; with my aunt Patricia being an acupuncturist I was familiar with the belief of kundalini energy—a female energy residing in all genders, believed to lie coiled at the base of the spine with the abilities to rise up the spine, bringing the body spiritual enlightenment and the ability to connect with other dimensions. But I still couldn’t figure out what that had to do with the nagin, how they used that to help or hurt others.
The two Wild Women who now stood before me were most certainly of Greek descent. In a way, they looked similar to Marcus; the tan skin, dark hair, and how their foreheads were broader than some, but fit their noses and faces perfectly.
“My name is Calle,” one of the women said with an accent. “It is Greek for free woman.”
“And I am Gerda,” said the other. “It means strong like a spear in Greek. We come from the Wild Woman group called echidna, created by the great snake Goddess of Crete, whose name we do not utter to outsiders.” Gerda bowed to me, but not as though she was at my service, no. She bowed as a sign of respect, from one formidable ally to another.
I stood, and not knowing what to do with my hands, I clasped them in thanksgiving to my seven new friends. “I appreciate you coming from so far away,” I started. “And I assume you’re hungry and tired. We’ve got rooms ready for you; it’ll be cramped, but hopefully it will suffice. There’s food in the refrigerator and cabinets, but if you don’t see anything you like, just let me know and one of us can run to the store.” I
looked out the window to see the sun high in the sky. “How about you rest up until nightfall, then we can plan our attack for tomorrow morning. Does that timeline work for all of you?”
I yearned to sit and talk with these women. What were their abilities? How did they use them? And what about their history had my mother so convinced that the snake Wilds would be the ones who tied us all together?
A few of them nodded as we shuffled toward the vacant rooms on the bottom floor. Thankfully I’d heard the men exit the great room through the double doors on the first level, so I knew they wouldn’t be noticed. The shé spoke in Chinese to one another as the echidna followed the shé quietly down the steps. Eta slowed her pace until she walked in step with me, bringing up the rear as my aunts led the way.
The older woman lightly placed her hand on my shoulder and smiled as she inhaled. “Your inner snake is coiled tight, ready to attack,” she uttered.
“How do I have a snake when I’m huldra?” I asked, already trusting this woman I’d just met. To me she felt like the grandmother I barely remembered, the one who kissed me goodbye one day and was buried in the plot behind our tree homes the next. Her hair had barely any silver streaks when she’d left us.
“This is the great mystery,” she answered with a wink. “Some say it is merely the power of nature we each carry, while others link it back to the creation of the world, and still others believe it represents the spirit realm’s energy.”
“Which do you believe?” I asked, almost ready to agree with whatever she suggested. I’d been around elder Wild Women on the mermaid island, but that seemed more unique a situation. Now, I was inviting elder Wilds to come fight with us, asking them to come fight with us, and only meeting the different Wild groups by way of their elders. It brought up a sense of longing I hadn’t realized before—the longing of the wisdom and guidance, the confidence and courage of my grandmother as well as my mother.
She shrugged and said in a British accent, “Who’s to say?”
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