“It looks like stomach pain at first,” Eta answered. She picked up her tea and took a sip before setting it back down on the table and continuing. “And then it transcends to nerve pain. Think of a serpent living in the core of your body, sinking its angry teeth into every major nerve, sending pain ricocheting through each limb, each muscle. In the end, it looks like someone writhing on the floor, screaming.”
Mental note taken: never piss off a nagin.
“Okay,” I said, happy to have them on my side.
I turned to the two shé sitting close enough that their elbows touched. “What about you?”
The sisters turned to one another before looking at me. The moment both their eyes locked onto me, scales burst over their faces, necks, and arms, sluffing off skin in their wake. Chen reached over her left shoulder and grabbed a small wooden string instrument from the carrier on her back, what looked like a miniature ruan. Her scaled fingers plucked each string thoughtfully as a slight smirk lifted her lips.
“Oh, wow,” my aunt Renee gasped.
I whipped my head back toward the living room to make sure my aunt was all right. My sister’s mother stood in one jerk of her body and then faced Chen, who continued to strum her instrument ever so gently. Still, Chen watched Renee from beneath her lowered brows. Renee’s hands, through what looked like no decision of her own, rested, palms flat, on her abdomen. When Chen’s music changed just slightly, Renee’s hands eased upwards until they cupped her breasts over her button-up top.
I whipped my gaze back to Chen, not sure if I wanted to see what my aunt did next. “I get it,” I said, acting the least bit impressed only because I was pretty sure I saw my aunt begin to pivot her hips as I looked away.
Chen responded with something between a smile and a smirk. She raised her hand from her instrument and in one fluid movement, returned the piece to its holding place on her back. I heard my aunt take a seat and exhale with a laugh. Chen kept her gaze on Renee.
I switched my focus to the two echidna, Calle and Gerda. They must have felt my gaze because they nodded to one another and turned their attention to me.
“The people of Crete have one of the most intact Goddess temples from ancient days in all the world,” Calle started. “This is because patriarchy took its time coming to our island, and as such, we also still hold to our ancient beliefs and ways.”
“One such practice is to be reborn from the Great Mother,” Gerda finished.
Both echidnas flexed and stretched their necks and backs as they took turns speaking. Obviously they were preparing to show me their abilities. Thinking it’d be awkward to just wait and watch them pop their spines, I filled the pause with a question.
“How does one go about being reborn?”
Gerda flashed a quick smile. “Some of our caves include labyrinths deep within their bellies. It’s where the original Ariadne’s Thread myth originated,” she added, as though it were a side note. “Only, the original had been more about a powerful woman than a princess vying for the affections of a man.”
Gerda shook her head and continued, “Every life has points of transition, when old ways die and new ways must be made. As part of the process, we delve deep into the depths of a cave, into the darkness where we are alone with our thoughts and our Goddess. We seek her wisdom for what we are to embark on, and when she is ready to release us, she shows us the way out of the cave to be born once again.”
“That’s beautiful,” I said in awe. When this was all over and done with, when the Hunters were no more than supernatural males living their own lives and leaving us alone, I wanted to visit Crete and meet Freyja in the depths of a sacred cave. I wanted to be reborn a new, free huldra.
Gerda’s eyes flashed from human-looking to snake eyes and then back again. She stood and backed away from the table. Her sister followed. Silver strands wove through their dark brownish-black hair, which they’d tied into a long braid down each of their backs. Their skirts weren’t identical, but similar in that each had a mandala print of deep oranges, greens, and yellows against a dark background color.
“Our Goddess, may she be forever honored,” Gerda started to say.
“May she be forever honored,” Calle whispered in agreement.
“Is mother of the snake women, echidna,” Gerda continued. “She whose name must not rest on the ears or lips of outsiders.”
Calle closed her eyes and swayed back and forth slowly, her skirt swishing along the tile kitchen floor.
“She is able to slide into unseen places, see unseen things, able to visit the depths of the very earth who bore us,” Gerda said, closing her eyes. “She does not need feet, for her whole self kisses the sacred earth mother.”
Gerda quieted and swayed in motion with Calle. As their movements picked up speed, their skirts both swinging across the tile, their eyes moved rapidly beneath their lids. With a loud exhale they both stopped in place and their eyes sprang open.
The two advanced on me and before I had the time to stand, they were within inches from where I sat. That was nothing compared to what they did next. In another quick movement Calle lifted her skirt to where her knees should be. Except they weren’t there.
I gasped and nearly fell backwards in my chair. “Holy shit!”
Thirty
“That’s amazing!” I exclaimed, scrambling out of my chair and backing up to keep a safe distance. I’d only seen Wilds don tails in the water, never on land…in a kitchen.
Each echidna boasted a thick snake tail from the waist down. I restrained myself from getting too close; I didn’t know these women well enough to put myself within harm’s grasp, or should I say, within their tail’s reach. I was learning by the second, though. For instance, Calle’s tail, leaner and longer than her sister’s, snapped back and forth at the tip and resembled the color of a deep green fern. Whereas the tip of Gerda’s tail waved back and forth slowly and its color reminded me of an oak leaf in the early fall, transitioning from green to brown.
Their tails seemed so much longer than their legs, which confused me. I’d seen a mermaid change, how her legs fused together and created a tail. Clearly that wasn’t the case for the echidna.
“How does it work?” I asked, barely making eye contact with Gerda before bouncing my gaze back to her tail.
Her greenish-brown scaled tail slunk closer to my foot and I took two steps back.
“The length helps us to entrap our prey,” she answered.
I nodded. “I can see that, but how does it get so much longer than your legs?”
Calle piped in, “Our legs fuse together and then shift, one on top of the other. Essentially, our tail is as long as our lower torso and both our legs.”
Okay, I could see that now, how that’d work. My bounty hunter brain kicked on and more questions came to mind, pushing out the list of other, non-necessary questions about their island and if the humans inhabiting it knew about them and their snake tails.
“So, to do any damage to your foe, you have to get within tail’s reach, right?” I asked.
Gerda looked to her sister and then back at me. “Yes.”
“Are Hunters wise to this ability of yours? Have you ever used it against a Hunter?” I wondered if their tails were stronger than a Hunter’s supernatural strength, than a Hunter’s ability to tear an entwining echidna’s tail from the Hunter’s body.
“We’ve never met a Hunter,” Calle said as though her statement was no big deal.
It was a huge deal to me.
“Are you in hiding, living off the grid like the mermaids were, before the Hunters located them?” I still wondered if Gabrielle had anything to do with the males knowing where the mermaids resided. I had to believe she didn’t, had to believe she’d never had led them to her sisters.
“No hiding,” Calle said. “We live near our sisters; some of us even share homes. But our homes are in the same vicinity of the homes of humans.”
“The humans do not know that we are echidna,” Gerda added. �
�It is none of their concern. To them we are descendants of the old ones, the earliest people on our island, and because of that they respect our privacy, keep their distance.”
“But what about the Hunters?” I asked as though my mind could not compute their idyllic existence. Were there actual Wild Women who’d never attended a check-in in their lives and who didn’t have to hide under a grassy roof on an island in the middle of a tumultuous ocean to keep it that way?
“What about the Hunters?” Gerda asked me back.
“They just let you live among humans with no consequences? Do they not have a presence on Crete at all, or a nearby place? How have you never met one?” I said. Maybe it seemed a simple fact to them, but I couldn’t wrap my head around a life without the Hunters doling out commandments for how to live, which job to pursue, and which abilities to suppress.
The sisters slithered to be near one another. They eyed me and cocked their heads. “Do you not know?” Calle asked.
“No,” said Anwen, the nagin from the United Kingdom. “I don’t think she does.”
“Know what?” my aunt Patricia asked.
An unease filled the air around us as my coterie and I waited for the revelation we’d apparently not been privy to that these other Wilds had known all along. I wasn’t sure if these non-American Wild Women were waiting to tell us because what they had to say would rock our world, or if they weren’t sure it’d be safe for us to know. Either way, someone needed to come out with it already.
Eta, another nagin, pushed her chair away from the table and stood. She made her way to me and placed a soft hand on my forearm. “Darling,” she said in a motherly tone. “None of us answer to Hunters. They still run a few pockets in more controlled lands, but for the most part, they were run out of many parts of the world a long time ago.”
My knees weakened and Eta gripped my other arm too, allowing me her strength to stay standing. How had I not known this? How had the mermaids not known this when they seemed to know so much more than the controlled Wilds of the States? Had the mermaids known this? Is that where they were right now, why they couldn’t help us get the succubi back? Had the mermaids fled to a Hunter-free part of the world?
My stomach felt as though a void lived within it and my head felt as though it floated. I blinked and found focus on my partner sister who stood from the red couch. “Shawna,” I said. “How did we not know this?”
Olivia shook her head. “I’ve never come across anything suggesting this in all my research on Wild Women.”
“But you wouldn’t, would you?” Celeste countered. “Clearly, even the free Wild Women don’t flaunt the reality of who they are to humans. And most humans tend to dismiss the supernatural. So why would they know and believe Wilds exist enough to put that information online?”
As each coterie member added her two cents, I stared at them blankly, my gaze shifting from one to the next. My logical side scrambled for a thread of thoughts that made sense, but only my emotional side made itself known with a stab of betrayal.
I turned to look at Eta. “Why hadn’t you helped us earlier? Why hadn’t you free Wilds reached out to your trapped sisters?”
Her eyes softened and the wrinkles around her lids deepened. She released her grasp of my arms, and despite my weak legs, I stayed standing.
“For generations we’ve been oppressed by the Hunters.” I said, bitterness rising up within me and filling my voice. “We’ve lost our roots, literally and figuratively. We’ve been conditioned to fit a mold so much so that since some of us have broken that mold we don’t even know the first thing about recrafting ourselves. We were so cut off from our nature that we don’t even know how to find it enough to connect with it once again.”
I thought back to the rusalka in the park and how she taught me to connect to the roots of plants. How much more was missing from my life? How empty had I been this whole time, without a clue of the fulfillment buried within my own bones? How different would my life have been if free Wild Women had teamed up to defeat the Hunters of the States and my mother had been raised free, if I’d been raised free?
“My sincerest apologizes, young huldra, but we hadn’t a clue you existed.” Eta’s words dripped with genuine regret and I believed her.
I believed her because I knew how hard the Hunters worked to suppress us, to hide us away, to create incorrect folklore that either erased us or demonized us.
“The strongest form of manipulation, of control, is the withholding of information,” Eta spoke softly. “Information about your kinds here, about the Hunters’ reign on this land, has been withheld.”
The blank stares on the faces of my sisters and aunts had to mirror my own.
“There were no stories, handed down, of the Wild Women who migrated to the Americas or the Hunters?” my aunt Renee asked.
Anwen spoke up. “Yes, from northern Europe there are stories of huldra and other Wild Women migrating to the Americas to liberate themselves from the Hunters’ tyranny, before the Hunters in most of Europe were overthrown. But these are old and speculative stories, changed over the years, I’d presume.”
“And we knew the Hunters lived in the States as well,” Anwen’s sister, Berwyn, continued. “But we’d figured, I think, that it was a situation much like ours. Hunters reside all over the world, but only in the same way other supernatural beings live—they rarely have complexes and if they do, it’s not to rule over Wild Women anymore.”
“Do you answer to Hunters?” I asked the shé sisters, Chen and Fan. Both shook their heads, looking apologetic.
I found myself void of a response. I stared off into nothingness. My mind only spun around this fact, searching for a foothold, something to process or decide. It came up empty time and time again.
Seconds of silence turned to minutes.
Eta’s clear, strong voice broke the quiet. “We are here now. That’s what matters. We can’t change what we didn’t know. No one can. But we’re here now.”
I blinked as her words slowly permeated my mind, pushed past the fact-searching and foothold-grasping. “Okay,” was all I could say at first. I swallowed and breathed in deeply. I gave a heavy exhale. My eyes focused in the direction I’d been staring off into, the above-stove microwave. The time read three o’clock in the morning in green numbers. “Okay, if you’re offering to help us not only retrieve the succubi, but fight to regain our freedom, then I for one accept your offer.”
Eta smiled, as did her sisters. Chen and Fan smirked as their eyes flashed with snake pupils. Gerda and Calle gave dignified nods.
“If we’re going to rescue the succubi and be out of the Oregon complex before sunrise, we’d better head out soon,” Abigale spoke up. She’d been fairly quiet this whole morning and I’d wondered if her silence was due to fear, but I threw that assumption out. No, Abigale had more reason to attack the Hunters, more venom for their establishment, than any other Wild Woman planning on fighting tonight. I made a mental note to stay out of her way when we got to the complex; she was a woman on a mission.
“Did you all want to at least practice before you headed out?” Olivia asked.
“We don’t have the time,” I responded. “I just needed to know their abilities and I do now.”
“The rusalka told me about yours,” Anwen said.
The other Wild Women agreed that they too had been told about us by the rusalki.
“Then let’s go get our succubi sisters back, ladies,” I said, leading the others as I made my way to the front door.
Did I wish we could spar with one another to practice or at least warm up? Absolutely. But in this case, time was of the essence. And anyway, the Hunters we were about to go up against knew nothing of how to fight a huldra, a shé, a nagin, or an echidna. They probably assumed they’d already won the war by capturing the biggest oppressed Wild group, and that the rest of us would wave the white flag as a result.
If that was the case, they assumed wrong.
I held the front door open f
or the Wilds joining me on this battle to pass through. They headed down the porch steps ahead of me.
“Wait, Faline,” Celeste said, the last Wild still standing in the kitchen. “Shawna told me about the hemlock in your system, and I trust the rusalki, but what if it doesn’t work? You’re just as susceptible to the blood stones as we are.”
I grabbed my sister’s hand and gave it a squeeze of reassurance. “The rusalki seem to know the abilities of our kind more than we do. And plus, if the hemlock wears off or doesn’t do its job at keeping up my strength against the stones, the other Wilds I’m going with are more than capable of getting me out of there.”
Celeste gave a squeeze and released my hand. Still, her shoulders slumped.
“I’ll get her back,” I assured my sister. “Don’t worry, Marie will come back to you.”
Celeste bit her lower lip and nodded. She swallowed hard and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “Please come back, and bring our mothers back with you.” I knew what she meant, and didn’t fault her for her words, but so very much I wished my mother was among those we planned to rescue today.
Thirty-One
We piled into the black Mercedes Benz passenger van our new Wild Women friends had rented to get them from the airport to our Airbnb. My aunts, Patricia and Abigale, sat on each side of me on the second row of the vehicle while the two shé took the front two seats and the three nagin and the two echidna occupied the rows behind us.
Chen drove and Fan acted as her sister’s navigator, studying the car’s GPS device, and giving directions in Chinese. I’d only ever visited one Hunter complex, before it became the charred memory of what it once was. From what I’d seen of the map Rod drew, the Oregon complex had the same layout. I could assume the others did too which would give me another foothold when we advanced on the two remaining Hunter complexes after this one. I had to think like that, plan for my future rather than negotiate whether or not I’d have a future after today. There was too much on the line, too much to lose if I failed.
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