Wolf Sirens: Forbidden: Discover The Legend

by Tina Smith

  “Well, now I know why she wouldn’t let me over

  the threshold.” I chuckled.

  “Don’t take notice of her, she takes prescription

  drugs like candy, why do you think she sleeps so

  soundly?”

  Until then I didn’t know that was how she escaped at night.

  “She’s only a church gossip because she’s never

  had anything else to occupy her time around here,”

  Cres said.

  “How do you get along with her?”

  Cres was suddenly quiet.

  “I don’t,” her voice cracked slightly.

  “Where does she think you are, now?” I asked

  pensively.

  “Who knows? She is literally on the edge of

  having me made a ward of the state. Only thing is,

  she would lose face to all those old biddies at Holy Divinity, so she struggles forth,” Cres joked melodra

  matically, making a holy cross over her chest. I had a feeling despite the jokes Tabetha was

  rough on her.

  “Why do you stay?”

  “Because my brother has already lost everything.

  I can’t leave him too and anyway…” she breathed and

  fell silent.

  “What?”

  “The werewolves might get him, and I couldn’t

  bear that.” Her face was serious and drawn. “Would they do that? Would Sam use him to get

  to you?”

  “If they wanted to, they could do anything, don’t

  forget,” she sniffed.

  Despite her dire warnings, with Cresida by my

  side I wasn’t afraid. But now training was over for

  tonight. He was still gone and I didn’t know for how

  long. Exhausting myself would only last for so long,

  and at night a familiar ache returned as I pined for

  him in my pillow. Having him here while I was now

  myself -the hunter, truly part of the world he existed

  in - would have made me happy beyond words. “We have a truce with them still though, right?”

  I enquired.

  “I had a truce with Sam’s pack.”

  “You had an understanding?”

  “Yes, but you change the game.” She shook her

  pale face in amazed disbelief.

  “Because they don’t trust me?” I frowned. “You’re a real hunter, your job as far as they are

  concerned is to take them out, no rules.” She shook

  her head.

  I was taken aback.“Can’t we establish a new one?” “No, no more truce.” Cres’s mouth was pressed

  into a hard line again but her cobalt eyes fixed on

  mine in warning.

  She touched my arm, I automatically flinched

  away but then let her hold it. She pushed up my

  sleeve and ran her fingers over the raised tattoo scar,

  feeling the pattern of the ink on the underside of my

  arm above my wrist. It seemed she had shown me her

  scar and I was expected without hesitation to allow

  her to look at mine.

  I watched her expression.

  “I got it last year.” I winced, embarrassed. Her stubbed fingers traced the white scars above

  it, left by the glass the night Sky left. “You’ve healed

  well, it’s the powers the hunter’s healing in you,” she

  mused. Then we were silent under the crescent yellow winter’s moon.

  “Why is it faded?” she asked after a moment. “I soaked it in water and the ink washed away,

  made it look faded.” I recalled doing it. The memory

  was painful, something I couldn’t undo.

  Cres looked thoughtful “Why’d you do that?” Now she was asking the hard questions. “I didn’t

  want it, I guess.”

  “What made you decide to get one?”

  “A lot of things rebellion, love…” No, not love,

  infatuation … not even that … a crush. I trailed off; I

  had known nothing of those feelings, then, especially

  love - though I was told what I felt now was a lie. She smiled. “I should get one, too.”

  I looked at her, surprised at the suggestion. “I don’t know, I never considered doing it again.”

  The memory of me trying to wash it away tugged at

  me. “It was out of character for me to get one in the

  first place.” Or at least I had thought it was. “But I

  guess it was meant to be.” The symbol had chosen

  me.

  “There are no accidents, aye.” She nudged me.

  Then noting my woeful expression she added, “I just

  thought, you know…to mark the occasion, of us.”

  She gestured to her knees meaning all of what we

  had become, as though she had something in mind. “What?”

  “Well, we are like possibly the first hunter team

  in history - maybe connected for life.” I knew ‘life’

  didn’t mean long for Cres. So her suggestion didn’t

  mean much to me, we were loners by trait.

  I contemplated this. “Protectors of Shade’s innocents,” I mused sarcastically. “What would you get?”

  I enquired.

  “I don’t know?” She chuckled, shaking her head. I laughed, too. “Rifles or something, skull and

  cross bones.” I gestured with my fingers. She seemed

  embarrassed and amused. “Dead wolves,” she added,

  giggling.

  “Well, that’s a bit rough considering you are one,”

  I prodded humorously.

  “And that you want to be,” she replied in kind.

  We giggled and the stress of the last few days and

  weeks fell away so easily, then.

  Once the laughter had subsided, I wondered “Are

  we like our own pack?” I said it with a serious look,

  wiping the tears from laughter.

  Cresida tossed a tuft of grass at me, which she

  had been plucking from the bed of weeds around us. “Yeah, for now we are…a family,” Cresida said,

  looking up at the moon, which shone down like a

  flashlight encased in a fog of clouds, reflected yellow

  in its light. It was a crescent moon, a huntress moon.

  This was not a wolf moon. We were relaxed, two girls

  in a field in the dark night.

  30. Teach Me

  I had never been a very willing or malleable student. I was headstrong and impatient by nature, though well behaved. I wasn’t a good listener, I lacked the softness most children had, I resisted. My strength of will now focused on learning and listening instead of resistance. In the weeks that followed I gathered a routine momentum: school, home, practice, dinner, late night practice, talk, climb back in the window, shower - if I could, or at least wash all the grass and pebbles and dirt from my war wounds - eat more and if I was tired enough hit bed, otherwise anything I could do to keep my mind off things; emails to old friends who wouldn’t know me anymore and once to Dad and my brother Tim. Otherwise I’d surf the net for weapons and information on topics such as forgery and survival.

  Ben’s guns went missing around the same time. I don’t think the police took him seriously; it would have helped his case if he didn’t reek of whisky and that only one was licensed. Cres taught me to track the heart-shaped prints of deer and importantly one night she smiled as she pulled a bow and arrow out of Reid’s jeep, her vehicle of choice at night. She said it was important to know how to use a bow.

  She helped me pull the string. “The number one thing is confidence,” she whispered to me, as I let out the shot and the bodkin arrowhead struck the tree at which I had aimed it. I caught her smile, I was a natural, and I didn’t need her guidance. The arrow flew as straight as though Artemis hers
elf had commanded its path. My hands found the position over the instruments as though my subconscious remembered the movement from a time long ago. I could shoot twenty apples through the heart in twenty-eight seconds, from eight metres. Not even Cres could touch my score.

  We spent the weekends practicing. I awaited his return out in the meadows on the edge of the bush rehearsing self-defence moves. I lay back in the grass under the sun after the last successive tryst in which Cres got the better of me once again. She stood above me still holding her weapon of choice: a large stick; she wanted me to learn to use what was on hand. I flinched as she suddenly dropped down beside me amongst the damp wild wheat and thick kikuri grass. I rolled to face her.

  “What really happened the night you saved me

  from Sam?”

  “I saw it coming. I warned him. I knew you’d do

  it when he wasn’t there.” She looked at me, studied

  my face for an expression. Something was wrong, she

  was being careful again.

  “What is it?”

  She smiled wide enough to show her gums. I realized it was a nervous smile.“We set you up.” Before

  I could reply she added, “It was inevitable.”

  I didn’t say anything as a cold flush trickled within me.

  Cres went to speak but I cut her off.

  “He set me up?”I began to doubt our relationship. “No, it was me, I told him to not meet you after

  school every Tuesday and on the one that you came

  to her the way I had, I would know. I went and found

  him and we were almost too late.”

  – Yes, I recalled frowning.“He let you,” I uttered

  perplexed.

  “Lila, it was the only way…”

  I got up and walked away into the bracken. I

  couldn’t believe it. I had recovered from the betrayal

  of none of them telling me what they all knew I was.

  I forgave Cres because she had tried to warn me.

  But this was different. Sky and his ex had conspired behind my back and I felt jealousy as well as betrayal

  – again. I thought he really loved me, how could he then put me in so much danger? Was he willing to

  risk my life?

  Cres left me to think about it, I guess. I knew

  why she hadn’t told me before. Maybe I was a fool to

  believe he was as crazy about me as I was about him.

  And I knew nothing would compare in my life to the

  way I felt about him.

  Christmas came and went as though the wolves knew and respected the season. After school broke-up we didn’t even hear their cries. All in all it was a dull Christmas. I would have rather been at school than trapped in the house with my mother watching bad re-runs under the air conditioner with neighbourly visits from her friends; whilst I was dreaming of the pack and the pool at the cabin, which had been too cold in the months I’d spent there. My mind wouldn’t stop. Sometimes I stayed up too late, but I always went to bed earlier the next night. Non-training nights were an unofficial break too, during the fullest moon, sometimes when it waxed. The wolf was strongest during the full moon. Our best chance was to attack under a crescent moon, when their strength was more diluted and rest when they did, as the moon waxed and they slept - though we did not hunt them, and they remained quiet.

  Cres was a hard taskmaster. Some nights she stayed and I would talk to her into the night about life, the way any ordinary girls would have until my eyelids grew too heavy and I would sleep. We read magazines; I was surprised she seemed to love the trash written in them more than me, the only difference being that in-between we had discussions about weapons and attack techniques. Sometimes the topic turned to family and I realized she grieved for her parents deeply still and now it dawned on me that I kept her from her brother. I would have told her to leave me, to see him, but I knew as well as she did that I would be gone when she got back, even under Reid’s watch. I would scour the news - anything but have time to think of him, and I noticed the pages missing from the paper. Cres was quietly censoring my world. No one could watch me as closely and cleverly as she could. She feared I’d turn up dead or worse not turn up at all, MIA (missing in action), then she’d have wasted all that effort training me to take her place. I was after all only human, vulnerable, tough, but weaker than the werewolf she was. I was a more inherently talented hunter than she was, but I was no wolf. During one of our talks I asked her to change me –no was her only reply, simple, cold and stern with a hardness which would not melt her resolve, though I wondered secretly if I could manipulate her. But if my will was strong, Cresida’s was unshakeable. I believed Sky, when he had said she was a strong woman. I knew with a pang that she had been made hard, that she was not innately born with the disposition of a soldier; because I had seen glimpses of the teenager she was before necessity restrained her and survival became her main goal.

  The endorphins swamped my system. I became a hard-wired machine, a soldier in the same way it had crept up and swallowed Cres. It encroached on me like a fire, slow and warm before I knew it. I was inflamed with the feelings of a hunter, a burning desire to track and chase and take down the wild wolf. It burnt stronger in me than other emotions I’d once felt like love and lust, engulfing them in its wake. Now hunting eclipsed these human desires. I could see clearer, suddenly smell more, I was stronger without trying and whereas once my mind used to race, now it focused unrelentingly on one driven impulse at a time. My only heart’s desire instead of to run was to fight. I was in the zone. The blood, which pumped through me, was like an elixir of pure energy and power feeding my cells. I gave myself to the huntress. I was doomed from the beginning whether I was chosen by someone, or some force, born into it, or created. I can’t be sure but their presence in me planted a seed, which upon exposure to them grew like the sun had shone upon it. The closer I got, the less I wanted to harm them, the more I became something that would.

  Something strong and unrelenting.

  Epilogue The Illusion of Freedom

  One night Cres called me. We met out in a meadow. While training,I came across the scent of sandalwood, musk, wet dog and cinnamon, I froze in the paddock. Werewolf! Not just any wolf - Reid!

  Reid stood in the clearing in human form, barechested, breathing slowly and heavily. My recent training automatically compelled me to place a hand over the cold metal of the gun on my right hip, arm tense, ready to draw, though the girl inside me wanted to run to him and embrace him and ask where he was?

  Out of the silence came two words. “He’s dead.” I looked into his sad eyes. They glowed amber green, like crystals and for a moment I thought it wasn’t him; his eyes had always been caramel. Now they were rimmed with tears and hardened with anger. He had a seriousness about him that didn’t suit his usual demeanour. He was drawn, thinner, not the Reid I had known.

  My voice dropped. “No, you’re lying.”

  “He is,” he murmured, swallowing dry.

  To my horror he turned to leave. All my protective pretences forgotten, I ran to him pulling like a beggar at his weight.

  “Tell me,” I pleaded, looking into his eyes.

  He collapsed onto the ground where he stood; his knees became damp from the grass. Head down sobbing, he shrugged my grip from his arm.

  “His injuries were too bad…”

  I couldn’t speak. He had to be lying.

  He swallowed again. Looking at me he managed the sentence he had come to deliver. “He was in a bad way. The other pack couldn’t help him.” A tear ran down his cheek. “Before he died, he said he loved you. I was with him for a while.”He sniffed. He placed something in my hand; it was a tag.

  I looked at it, breathless: the silver army tag. I realized it was his, I knew the indentations, recognized the numbers. It stung, I glared at him. He never went anywhere without it.

  “Something for you to keep.” He spoke to the ground.

  Sky wouldn�
��t have given it for any other reason.

  Wolf SirenS

  My eyes welled with tears of pain, which swelled and broke down my face. Still the voice cried in me that he wasn’t dead, but how could I deny it?

  “When?” I barked sternly.

  “A week ago.” He had been gone three months. I had not felt it. I wished it was wrong but I knew from his face it was true. The blood drained from my face. I’d known from Cresida’s voice on the phone this evening, so quiet and broken. The silence broke the truth to me.

  He pushed me away, then. “I’ve got to get home. My olds have had me on lock-down for weeks, for running away.”

  He stood up and sauntered away slowly.

  “No! You killed him!” I screamed, “Werewolves can heal! Where is he? Where is he? I want to see him! I hate you, Reid! You’re a liar; you’ve lied and cheated before.”

  Snot dripped from my nose. I felt Cresida’s presence in the distance then, but it didn’t stop me. Going after him I placed a gun muzzle against his head. “Take me to him,” I spat forcefully.

  He wisely didn’t move.“I never meant to hurt you, Lila,” he whispered not looking at me.

  “This isn’t about that!” My spit hit him in the face. “I will go and find him,” I raged.

  Reid turned his head bravely to look at me. “You’ll only find ashes.” His eyes were wide and honest, sorrowful.

  I pushed him forward; he fell to the ground, palms up, the whites of his eyes evident in the dark.

  “So help me, Reid, I will kill you…If I find out you are lying.” I cocked the gun, it was all too easy to squeeze the trigger. The click was easily defined against the melody of crickets on the breeze and our three hearts beating. Cresida touched my arm softly, then. I looked back at her in that instant. Reid phased and took off running into the trees.

  I lifted my gun far too late and fired it into the line of trees and went to fire again, but Cresida grabbed my arm and pushed it down and I hadn’t the will to fight her.

  I thought about the last moments I had seen him, his face ashen in pain; how I should have never let them take him, how I should have insisted on going; how I should have gone over to him; kissed him goodbye in the basement and ignored the hurricane that was the aftermath of the fight. Despite Cresida and Reid fussing over him, and how they felt about it, he should have died in my arms. I was the reason he was dead.