Wolf Sirens: Forbidden: Discover The Legend

by Tina Smith

  “No.” He shook his head again.

  “Because of Cres?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” I loved the way his mouth moved when he talked, the way his bottom lip moved lop-sided when he spoke.

  I wanted him to say more reassuring things, but I didn’t care either. It wouldn’t have made any difference. This was our moment and the night wouldn’t last forever. I inhaled the wet heat and musk from his pores and hoped it would permeate into my sheets. We lay on the bed cuddling all of the sleepless night. He left before dawn, kissing me goodbye, long and soft, and again after he got up. He smiled – his perfect row of white teeth and large canines. “See you at school.”

  I must have looked worried. “Shh,” he cooed. “I’ll deal with Sam, don’t worry,” he hushed, pleading me to calm, with his luminescent eyes. But I knew it might not be that easy, that simple. I shook when he held me. Each excruciating moment could be the last.

  “Don’t see Sam,” my voice rasped, terrified she would brainwash him.

  “Don’t worry.” He smiled sadly and bent to touch my cheek. He ran his fingers over my lips looking at me longingly, as though I was a portrait he adored. I wanted to ask him everything that couldn’t be said and I did worry. We hadn’t devised a plan, as though both our brains were too full of endorphins to realize the magnitude of our union, the repercussions.

  I felt like he had left me a million times before, and each time it had felt like a hunger. The moment he leapt out the window carelessly my mind turned to the immediate logical concerns. I was nervous to even be seen with him; rightfully so. I still wasn’t like him, beautiful or indestructible. Still shaky and clumsy, due to tiredness, I knew I would be a zombie by the early afternoon but I couldn’t stay home

  – not while adrenaline thrashed around inside me. I dressed for school earlier than was necessary, thinking of how I was human and I wouldn’t be the only one who wondered what he saw in me; maybe he would ignore me and forget this night ever occurred. I struggled to believe he had come up in pursuit of me and that he could feel the same insane feelings – that he would pursue me tormented by the lust I had been suffocated by, and still painfully was.

  I didn’t know for sure if he would be at school. I felt as though maybe I would never see him again, and at the same time wondered how I could survive his excruciating presence. Surely that was all I could have wished for; those few hours in his hands, against him, feeling his chest rise and fall, my own chest panting alongside his. Maybe I’d had my fix and I could walk away now and leave it all behind me, get out with my life intact, go back to my old school – a life of safety and obscurity.

  The second I saw him at the school bus stop waiting for me every thought disappeared. If I did leave, it would be kicking and screaming. He was my sustenance.

  I ran off the bus and bounded into his arms inhaling his smell. He held me close as he had last night, my head against his chest.

  “Sorry,” I said pulling away. “Is Sam going to kill me?” I searched his eyes.

  “More like us,” he replied. “Maybe we should keep it tame for today, play it down a bit.” I must have looked devastated. He quickly added, “It’s just while we’re here. Unless you don’t want to?” he said, concern wrinkling his forehead.

  “No, you’re right, we should be careful, I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Admitting the truth of it made me shake, but I couldn’t pull away, not while he held me. This was the longest sentence I had ever spoken to him in public. I rested my cheek against his t-shirt inhaling the scent.

  “I’ve talked to Cres,” he said low. I winced inside at hearing her name on his lips. So that’s where he’d been early this morning.

  “She’ll keep an eye on you and Sam.” For very different reasons. He looked deep into my eyes with his sapphires burning. “I don’t know if I can keep my hands off you, though,” he said as his mouth parted in a smile. I trembled a little, unable to contain the whirlpool of emotions inside me of fear, desperation and love, all fighting within my body, inside my brain.

  Cresida, even Sam, was pushed far away from my mind; nothing mattered but him and me in our own moment, our own world. The way he made me feel was like nothing I had experienced in my short seventeen years of life. It was like I had been living in a grey tunnel and all of a sudden every colour imaginable was revealed to me and I could look up and see all around me. As though there were a million directions to go, but all I wanted to do was walk towards him. I realized what it was to be alive and to be happy. To be in love and to struggle for each and every wonderfully excruciating breath of life, just to stare into his vivid sapphire eyes.

  We were stared at like never before as we entered the high school atmosphere. Sky linked his fingers in mine. His hands were too large, my digits were stretched to fit tightly into his, they were warm and dry. Kids tripped as they passed us in the hall, at lunch we sat together near the clique. Sam was perhaps still too raw to accept us in close proximity just yet. The others would have assumed I had stolen her long-term boyfriend and that she was angry or even jealous.That was normal, the normal human reaction and subsequent conclusion. She stood her ground despite the gossip and the glances in the lunch area. How bizarre and dangerous our relationship really was would have been invisible to all of them. Giny waved a sly hand in our direction. She was flushed and she smirked at me. Because she and I were both human and Giny was surely as shocked or even more so stunned than the rest of the town to see us as an item, I took this gesture as a sign of her approval. I was pleased, I knew she wanted all the details and I was relieved she hadn’t reacted badly. Maybe it wasn’t going to be all bad. This was a good omen, and the rest of the school day went by in an overtired daze of endorphins. Sky met me after my final class and we strolled hand in hand to our amazed public’s continued adoration and ended up walking to the centre of town through the park to the river’s edge under a row of oak trees, which had shed acorns all over the ground.The priestess was now covered with a gazebo to protect her and the wolf from the elements, which had pitted the surface of the monument.

  Sky sat on a boulder by the edge of the river and we embraced in the way only new couples can, me shaking with pleasure and disbelief that he loved me too. I ran my fingers over his goatee, which had miraculously grown over the day. It was paler than his chestnut hair and coarser, but soft to the touch and I ran my thumb over his lips letting the hairs tickle me.

  “I have to shave it almost twice a day.” He grabbed my hand gently and pulled me close again and the electricity coursed through us, our bodies pulsed against each other. I wondered if this is what love felt like.

  24. Dusk

  I felt like I was part of him, like our flesh had been separated, like his blood was mine and now we were united. I wanted to know everything. I considered it inevitable now that I would become one of them. There was no way I could leave him or not be part of his world; I would die first and the more of him I had the more I wanted.

  But it still eluded me how they were killed, if they were vulnerable. As much as I loved him, or because I loved him, I wanted to know what Reid hadn’t told me. Like a covenant he, like Reid, seemed reluctant to tell me directly.

  I lay my head on his chest, breathing in the sweet smell of his warm breath as we lay on the little couch in my mother’s living room.

  “Are you strong?” I enquired light-heartedly as we lay side by side.

  “Yes.”

  “How strong?”

  “As strong as five men.”

  I threaded my fingers playfully in his. “Even when not transformed?”

  “Like now?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “As strong as…four, five men maybe.” He considered.

  “How strong are hunters?”

  “Like Cresida?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a wolf but she’s not as strong as an ordinary human wolf, like us,” he said, referring to the pack. “As a hunter she is strong.”

 
“As strong as a wolf?” I uttered.

  “No, I don’t think so but the fact that she is wolf also makes her stronger physically, but not as strong as us still. It’s almost like the mix dilutes her strength.” He thought. “She doesn’t heal as well as us,” he added.

  “Because it’s not meant to be?”

  He nodded.

  I ran my fingertip over his lips.

  “So how can she frighten you all so much?”

  He grimaced. “Have you seen her guns?” He laughed, grabbing my hand. “She is powerful though, on the inside. She is intuitive and she’s smart…she’s a warrior really,” he admitted, taking my palm in his and entangling our fingers.

  “Like an inner strength?”

  “Yeah,” he breathed. He admired her.

  “Cres reminds me of the statue priestess,” I admitted. We had walked about the deity only recently holding hands, by the riverbank. Perhaps I shared his awe of her.

  We were quiet for a moment. Sky was still winding his warm fingers around mine. He added, “You know, legend has it us wolves contain the blood of a god.”

  “Really?”

  He smirked.

  “You’re lying,” I teased.

  “No, have you ever read the monument?”

  “I’ve seen it.” I had been preoccupied. I was remembering him kissing me and our hands intertwined as we strolled past the monument over the acorns and leaves of poplar trees, before he walked me home on the cusp of curfew.

  “The inscription reads that an angry God…Zeus created the beasts from his own blood as vengeance.”

  “For what?”

  He paused and then he admitted, “There are many different versions…”

  “Which one do you like?” I said, eager to hear more.

  “I don’t know but there is one that says she was his wife and another that she was his daughter, but anyway, she falls in love with a wolf, so he curses them and she kills the animal. Well, first she says she will slay the wolf to prove her love to Zeus and when he hears of her plan to win him back by killing the wolf he makes the wolf strong so that it may retaliate and eat her…but she is not to be underestimated.”

  “She still slays him?”

  “Yes, then she kills herself.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe it was all for show and they really both planned to run away together, but when her husband the god intervened, she had to really fight for her life.”

  “What? - And then she couldn’t stand what she had done?”

  “She couldn’t give Zeus the satisfaction – or she really loved the wolf.”

  “–Or both,” I added. The story sounded so familiar, it sounded like a tale of star-crossed lovers.

  He frowned, “You don’t see it that way?”

  “I don’t know, maybe the wolf didn’t really love her?” I suggested.

  Sky shrugged. We lay silent for a moment.

  “Did you love Cresida? Really, Sky?” I asked wrapped in his long arms on the sofa, in the darkness encroaching from outside, as the night crept upon the town of Shade. Soon my wolf man would disappear into the darkness.

  “It’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love themself,” he admitted, then noticing my displeasure at his answer, he added, “Hmm.” He nuzzled my hair tickling my ear deliberately, which made me squirm.

  “Sky!” I scolded. I looked at him with a serious expression. “Did you love her? I need to know the truth.” I frowned.

  He stopped and huffed. “I didn’t feel the way I feel about you that’s for sure,” he said, defeated. Sky glanced into my eyes as we spooned on the far too small couch. I turned my head away then to face the window as the sky turned dark purple; we were almost in the darkness. I couldn’t fully acknowledge what he was saying. I felt numb.

  I knew I should have felt happier than I was made by his answer. It felt strange hearing him admitting he felt so strongly, but part of me, the larger part, still didn’t believe him.

  “Sky, I understand.”

  He waited for my explanation. “I haven’t felt like this ever, not even when I thought I knew what love was, I didn’t.” He felt like heroin to me, I could not believe he felt as I did.

  I didn’t say it, but I thought of my crush on Jeff in Horkum and the way it had been with Reid. I almost cringed, recalling the dreary memories. Sky made them seem further and further away and so distant and unimportant.

  He felt my body shudder. He broke the silence in the dim light.“You know someone defaced it back in the eighties.”

  “What?”

  “The statue,” he explained.

  “What did they do?” I imagined a high school prank. “It seems solid.”

  “Someone got a pick or chisel and took out the word hunter from the inscription.”

  “Who?” I wondered if they’d ever been caught.

  “No one knows.” he yawned. “It was quite the scandal.”

  “Oh, my god, are you yawning? Are you actually tired?” I teased, referring to his human weakness, in his need for sleep, though it was considerably less than my own. I had an idea. “Do you think it was Cres? Who damaged it?”

  “You do realize I’m forty years old? I do get tired.”

  I knew thinking of my past had made him remember how little of it there was compared to his own. “Yes, so what’s your point, you are a mythical creature, you need no rest.” I chuckled. I was annoyed when his age came up; he tended to use it for his own gain.

  “I’m forty in wolf years. If you add my human life I’m more like sixty-five…more like sixty-eight, actually.” His voice hushed then. “Actually we get sleepy but we never that get tired, Lila.” He answered the previous question, “-And, no, it was before her time, probably a practical joke. You know I’ve lived a long time, I’d had to have been a monk not to have had another relationship or two.”

  I cringed. This indicated he knew why I asked about her. I was more than a little devastated by that fact, that he knew I was jealous.

  “It’s made me better prepared for women - or one woman.” He smiled. “All my experience…” he added, caressing and pressing his lips into my skin so that his breath heated the hairs on my neck.

  “Oh, so I’m a woman now.” I smiled sardonically.

  “Yes.” He looked deep into my eyes and smirked. I turned towards him and kissed his lips once, softly.

  “Are you winding me up?” I poked him playfully.

  “I’ve never felt this way,” he whispered.

  “In sixty eight years?”

  He huffed. “Are you put off?”

  “Never.”

  He laughed and my mouth found his, and we kissed for a moment.

  “Do you really never tire?” I uttered inches from his soft lips.

  His breath brushed my face. “Ha, we never feel fatigue. Not like when you are human.”

  He glided his palm down, from my torso, back onto the couch and forced his weight gently over me.

  I gasped as I suddenly had a flash back of Lily lunging and collapsing over me, with force.

  He stopped.“Have I hurt you?”he said concerned, his glowing eyes wide. He began to ease his body off me. Shifting his weight he asked more panicked than before, “Are you hurt?”

  “No, no, just scared,” I trailed off.

  He breathed out, then.

  “Is it me?”

  I shook my head.

  “More nightmares?” he insisted.

  I had never had someone show so much concern for me.

  “Day-mares now,” I confirmed sulkily.

  “It’s night,” he said, glancing around, now barely visible. He was right, but I didn’t mention I had had both today. His hands were still about me.

  “Well, whatever you call it when I’m awake, umm flashes, flashbacks.” I frowned, finding the phrase. I didn’t like the sound of it though. I’d been having dreams lately of the wolves and fighting, trying to stop my mother from undoing things I had made, frustrating nightmares of t
he kind where you struggle to scream but no voice comes out.

  “Maybe if you stop with all those crazy supplements you’re on…”

  I cut him off “- Sky this isn’t some sort of vitamininduced mental attack.” I sounded over-frustrated. His insistence reminded me of the feelings in the dreams. “I feel so weak compared to you, it’s like it’s all coming out in the night from my subconscious.” Fears of being overcome, restrained, unable to move. He eased further from my body, but I pulled him back.

  “So you have been thinking about them,”he whispered. It was something I had denied today when I had frozen in thought in the kitchen. He was referring to the remainder of the pack. When he’d asked I had denied it but I had been deep in thought like a spooked deer - like Cresida, I mused. Had she seen dreams too? Was that part of her instinct, one of her hunter traits, her intuition speaking?

  “Aren’t you putting something off?” I changed the subject.

  He was due with the pack by now, the night wanted him and they would call if he didn’t run to join them soon. I wished, for not the first time, that I could run with him. I imagined it as exhilarating and free, dashing through the forest in the night under my own raw power in the cold night air, the twigs of trees scrapping my body as I ran weaving headfirst easily through the undergrowth. I wanted to dream that dream tonight, not the ones where I felt forced and helpless, fumbling and weak, trapped. I considered a night run and at once knew it was hopeless. I wasn’t allowed out, especially during a full moon. Not now Sam was angry.

  He kissed me with soft lips, roughly, and bounced up. His hands came down back around my neck and with far more gentleness than I could have imagined he lifted his dog tags off my chest and over my head.

  “I can’t leave this with you.” He winked. I must have looked hurt for he added with a smile, “You might lose it.” He scuffed my head with his palm the way he would have Reid’s and took off out the door only to return just as quickly to kiss my ready lips once more softly and retreat again into the night, to the pack. I was left alone in the house to ponder our conversation and the daydream I’d had.

  I saw the statue’s face as it was in the park on the river: weatherworn, covered in spots of moss, her eyes closed as she wielded her bow at the beast lunging for her, the soft smoothed angelic features of her stone face and then her eyes, which suddenly opened to stare right at me.