by Eden Beck
She starts by climbing down the ladder, the closest thing to ‘storming’ down that one can on a ladder.
The silence is expecting. Waiting. I know this time she won’t just let it go, so with great effort, I follow.
I eye her carefully as soon as my feet hit the floorboards.
My mother is very predictable. She can handle things right up until the point that she can’t. Then she has a sort of catatonic meltdown like a child on the other side of a sugar high. This has happened throughout the course of my life more times than I care to remember.
More often now that she’s hit the bottle.
Her voice comes out louder, one octave below shouting, when she finally finds the words to speak again.
“You’re skipping school, acting like you don’t give a shit about anything anymore, and then disappearing for nights at a time. Now I find these in your things?”
She holds the crushed and crumbling remnants of last night’s mistake out on her outstretched palm. “Tell me now, what am I supposed to do about all that, Sabrina?”
The pain that’s replaced the numbness emboldens me.
“Nothing, Mom. How about you take care of your own life?” I shoot back.
Once again, the accusation silences her.
“It’s not like you’ve been home a whole hell of a lot lately,” I say. “Don’t bother telling me you’re busy working your ass off either, because if that was the case then we wouldn’t still be getting shut-off notices for the utilities.”
I pick up one of the unopened pieces of mail from the table that is marked from the power company with the big red words “DISCONNECTION NOTICE” stamped across the front of the envelope.
I slam it back down on the table, causing papers to scatter across the cabin’s tiny space.
“Don’t you dare lecture me,” she shouts, suddenly. “I’m the adult.”
“Yeah and you’re doing a stellar job at it, Mom, as always.”
I know that what I’m saying is hurtful, but I’m tired of treating my mom with kid gloves on all the time.
If she wants to claim bragging rights as being the adult, then she needs to act like one.
Yeah, I know I’ve been a bit much to handle lately, but parents aren’t supposed to jump ship when things get tough.
And that’s exactly what she’s been doing.
She might still be here, physically, but she mentally checked out the day my dad failed at kidnapping us.
She gave up on us.
She gave up on me.
Even when I needed her the most, when I was abandoned by the family I’d thought for a moment that I might actually get to be a part of, she just slipped further away.
No wonder I slipped with her.
She opens her mouth, and I know what’s coming next. More accusations. More blame.
This is my fault.
All of this. If I’d just stayed quiet. If I’d never insisted we leave in the first place.
She could put up with my father, after all … so why couldn’t I?
But what she says is surprising, even though it shouldn’t be.
“I’ve been talking to your father again.”
She says the words with force, but the look on her face … she can’t hide the guilt. This is a confession, as much as she desperately tries to make it sound otherwise.
“I tried, Sabrina. I really did. But then these last weeks …”
And there it is.
The blame.
I hold out one hand to stop her. “Weeks?” I say, my voice coming out stronger than I expected. “How long has this really been going on? How long have you been planning this?”
I glance over my shoulder through the window, as if expecting my father to appear in the darkness again.
At first, my mother opens her mouth to disagree, but then she falters. Her eyes flit from mine, and her head hangs.
She doesn’t have to tell me. I already know.
“So this is it, is it?” I say. “You’ve made up your mind?”
She looks up at me, tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. Tears of betrayal.
I won’t stay to hear the words. I can’t.
And suddenly, I look around the tiny cabin, and I feel like a stranger.
I don’t know why I’m here. There’s nothing here for me anymore.
No protection. No family.
My head is pounding, my blood rushing in my ears as I grab another pair of pants and start tugging them on.
“Go ahead mom,” I say as I grab my hoodie and backpack without even looking at her. “This is what you always wanted. So, go ahead and do it. You just can’t expect me to sit around and take it. Not this time.”
I still can’t look. If I look at her then I’m going to cry, and I’m all done with crying.
I’m all done with losing people that I care about.
I’m just going to take care of myself from now on. I may only be seventeen, but I’m the only reliable person I know that won’t abandon me.
She’s saying something to me, but I ignore it. I go out the door and don’t look back. If she really wanted to, she could run down to the end of the driveway and stop me. But she doesn’t, and I didn’t expect that she would.
I’m so angry right now that I can’t see straight.
My aching head has turned to pounding because of the blinding anger that’s taking over all of my thoughts. It’s more than just the news that after everything, after all this time, my mother is going back to the monster that sired me. It’s more than just the come-down after the mushrooms, and the repulsive fact that I almost had sex with Tom. It’s even more than the boys leaving me behind and abandoning me for good after they promised they wouldn’t.
It’s the bond.
The bond that Lydia said I wouldn’t and couldn’t feel since I was a human.
She was wrong.
They were all wrong.
I can feel it, and I feel it more strongly than anything I’ve ever felt in my life. It feels like it’s going to pull me apart. I feel as if the connection strung between me, Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb, has sunken teeth into each part of me and won’t stop intensifying until it is either appeased or kills me in the process.
It’s here. This place.
Rory, Marlowe, Kaleb, they’re saturated in every inch of it. Every river bend has a memory of them. Every rock in the road. Every tree, every mountain ridge.
I am going to do something foolish now, something that I know I shouldn’t do. But hell, everyone else has done something foolish and something they shouldn’t have done too. The boys all broke their promise. It’s my turn now.
Even though he’s the last person on Earth that I want to see, I text Tom and ask him to come meet me at the barn further up on the property. I really hope he isn’t too pissed off at me for kneeing him in the crotch last night that he ignores my text.
I would be.
No, actually. I’d be ashamed.
Here, now, in the cold light of day … the full breadth of Tom’s actions last night makes me want to be sick. He knew what he was doing.
If there was anyone else here who I could call for help, I would. I don’t trust him, but as it is, I need him.
Unfortunately, he’s all I have … since the only people I could trust have long since left me here alone.
21
Sabrina
Here.
That, I’ve come to realize, is the problem.
The barn is locked when I get there, so I break into the side window and use my hoodie to crawl over the broken glass. Once I’m inside, I open the front door for Tom. He arrives within minutes.
“Hey,” he says as he walks awkwardly into the barn with his hands in his jean pockets. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you today after how last night went to be honest. Look, about the mushrooms, I was only trying to help. I didn’t bring you out there with the intention of—”
I cut him off. I really don’t have the patience right now to listen to an
yone else’s stupid excuses.
“If you do this for me, I’ll never bring up last night again,” I say, through gritted teeth.
He glances up from where he’s been staring at his shoes. “You mean, you’ll forgive me?”
I laugh a heartless, humorless laugh.
“Fuck no,” I snap. “But I won’t accuse you of trying to take advantage of me, either.”
He opens his mouth to argue with me, but then he suddenly deflates. His face turns pale and sweat beads along the line of his forehead.
He nods once, his eyes avoiding mine.
“What do you need me to do?”
I pull the tarp off the old convertible car, letting it flutter down to the ground in a flurry of dust.
This was the first place I ran into the boys, the first real encounter I had with them in North Port.
Seems fitting that this should be where the whole ordeal here ends.
“I need you to hotwire this car.”
Within minutes, the engine of the old classic purrs to life.
I hop into the driver’s seat, my hands stretching out over the curve of the worn leather covering the wheel. It smells of must and rust and age and freedom.
When I look up through the glass at Tom standing on the other side, a strange feeling overwhelms me.
“Where are you going?” he asks, coming to stand outside the window.
I look away from him, past the barn doors to the overgrown road on the other side.
I shift the car into gear.
“Away.”
I step on the gas, spinning the wheels out from under the old car as it drives out of the barn and down the hill. The car jumps over the bumps in the road and flies around the narrow bends as I take off recklessly.
I hear voices in my head now, instead of howling wolves.
“Christ, Sabrina, slow down!” Rory shouts. “Slow down, you’re going to get us both killed!”
I imagine him appearing in the seat beside me, the memory of him fading as I swerve to avoid an overgrown root on the dirt roads.
I swear and ignore him.
I need to find open road. I need to get away from here.
I need to go as far as I can.
I want to hear the sound in my ears again; the howling.
As soon as the tires meet pavement, I press on the gas until there’s no further down for the pedal to go and drive around the steep curves and inclines in a rush of dangerous speed in order to hear it.
But there’s no howl in my ears anymore.
“This is stupid, Sabrina.” The voice belongs to Marlowe this time. The image of him flickers in and out of my peripherals. “Calm down. I’m sure we can find a way to solve this.”
I just push the car harder.
I push until the engine roars in my ears, until the tires screech with every turn, until the trees become a blur of green outside the windows fogging with my own panted breaths.
No matter how fast I go, no matter how far the car takes me down these winding roads, the howling doesn’t return.
This is what I wanted, right?
To be rid of this place.
To be rid of them.
“Sabrina.” This time the voice is Kaleb’s. His eyes meet mine in the rear-view mirror. “You know as far as you run, you’ll never be rid of us, right?”
I know he isn’t there. Not really.
Knowing that doesn’t stop the scream of rage from bubbling out of my throat as I take the next turn so fast that I feel the moment the wheels start losing their grip on the road.
The sound is gone, and the pain of emptiness and numbness settles back into me like a bone-chilling cold that digs into my bones and won’t let go. I refuse to stop. I won’t stop until I hear something again.
Or so I think until something leaps out into the road and the car nearly careens into it.
I’ve been here before.
The old car skitters to a halt, narrowly avoiding a wreck as I snap out of my daze and look to see what it was that we almost hit.
It takes me a moment to catch my breath, then another to peel my hands from the death-grip they’ve taken on the steering wheel just long enough to put the car in park.
I’ve been here before, I think again.
But last time, it was my father trying to take me away.
This time … this time …
I need to know what stopped me.
I must be hallucinating again, because when I look up through the windshield. I think that I see Vivian standing at the edge of the forest.
Vivian.
My brain, or some long-lasting residual effects of the mushrooms, is conjuring this image just to torture me further.
Perhaps karma is playing its hand with me now.
Vivian looks wild and ferocious as I stare at her. No matter how many times I blink, how many times I look away and look back, she’s still there.
What a fitting fate it would be for me to be attacked and killed by a wolf in the forest with no pack to protect me this time.
But when Vivian approaches the car, I realize that she’s not at all a figment of my imagination or a drug-induced apparition; she’s actually here.
Or, at least, I think she is.
What is Vivian doing here? The eclipse will be starting in hours. She should be with the rest of the packs gathered for the ceremony.
It’s a surprisingly sober thought for my decidedly not sober mind.
Vivian walks straight over to the passenger side and wrenches the door open even though it was locked. For such a small girl, she is exceptionally strong. I guess that just comes along with being a shifter.
She doesn’t say anything to me.
She just throws herself into the passenger seat and points ahead of us to the stretch of road.
“Drive,” Vivian says to me. “NOW.”
There’s an urgency in her voice that makes my heart pound faster. Hallucination or not, I’m not going to disobey.
I have no idea where I’m even driving to, but I just drive anyway. I both scared and excitedly relieved to see Vivian here.
Even if she does turn out to be some kind of very convincing hallucination. Even more convincing than the rest.
I don’t drive as recklessly this time. Something about her, here in my car, it seems too solid. Too real. I have to focus on driving as much as I want to stare at her until I’ve made up my mind on whether or not she’s actually here.
“You goaded him into this, you know,” Vivian says, suddenly, with vehemence in her voice. “If this ends badly and if something happens to him, I hope you realize that this was all YOUR fault.”
If something happens to who? I’m so confused right now, and a feeling of panic is starting to come over me.
That foreboding feeling from last night.
It never really left. I thought it was because of me, because of what I almost did, of what I was about to do … but the sound of her voice makes me think it’s something else.
“What—”
She cuts me off.
“Honestly, how could you be so selfish and stupid? Even for a human,” she shakes her head and I can feel the anger emanating from her.
I have to swerve to avoid hitting an oncoming car, and finally, I manage to get a word in edgewise.
“Vivian, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Who did I goad into doing something? Who is it that you’re worried about something happening to?”
I glance over at her, and the look on her face …
It tells me right away, even before she speaks.
“Rory,” she says. “It’s Rory.”
22
Sabrina
The sound of his name on her lips feels like a dagger to the chest.
Rory.
He’s in trouble.
“Go this way,” Vivian says as she points down a sudden intersection in the road. The car jerks to the side as I take the turn, the tires careening off the edge for a moment as I overcorrect. The jolt of tires sha
kes me back to some semblance of sense.
The last grip of the mushrooms fades, leaving me overwhelmingly aware of that fact that this here, now, with Vivian beside me … it’s actually happening. It’s not just in my head.
“Vivian,” I say as hysteria grips me. “You have to tell me what’s happened. What’s wrong with Rory?”
“Currently his obsession with you,” she says, angrily. “As soon as Romulus’ pack left, Rory left us too. He told Romulus that he was going off on his own for a while to scout out the surrounding areas, but everyone knew what he was really doing.”
“What was that?” I ask. “What was he doing?”
“Watching over you.”
What?
“But he said he was leaving,” I stammer as tears start to well in my eyes. “All of you left, Rory left too.”
“He snuck away more than once. In fact, he snuck away all the bloody time. But this time, last night, he didn’t come back.”
The yellow eyes in the forest.
They weren’t imagined.
My hands jerk the wheel, drawing the car back closer to the middle of the road. I try to focus on not driving off the road, but it’s not easy to concentrate on anything other than Vivian’s words as she continues.
“After Rory didn’t return, I could just sense that something wasn’t right, so I went after him. I don’t know what drove him to it, but when I found him last night …” She trails off, her eyes flickering accusatorially over to me. “He was not himself. He was wildly out of control and trust me, I’ve seen Rory out of control before, but never like this. You know his temper.”
She bares her teeth. “Something’s sent him to do it, and I can only imagine that something is you.”
“Do what?” I ask, still not understanding what she could possibly mean. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what she’s saying.
Rory came back.
He was watching, waiting, protecting.
It suddenly clicks in my brain.
The howling.
It wasn’t made up. It wasn’t all in my head. I was hearing him.
I shake my head from side to side as if I can shake some sense into it. “What’s he supposed to be doing now, because of me?”