Wilder

by North, Lena

  “Yeah,” he said hoarsely.

  “Thank you for the cup, I’ve always loved it” I whispered. Then a thought hit me. “Why did you have one just like it in your house?”

  “Always hoped you’d be there one day to have breakfast with me, and drink your tea from it.”

  I swallowed, but I was also furious with my mother for keeping us apart for so long.

  “Also,” Hawker continued with a small grin that grew into a chuckle. “I made Miller use it every time he visited. Told him how I hated that you weren’t there to use it, which was true. Also told him that I needed to see someone else use it so that I wouldn’t feel so lonely…”

  He trailed off, grinning widely, and my mouth fell. Then I burst out into loud laughter because the thought of Miller with his long, partially gray hair and goatee, sitting in my father’s kitchen drinking coffee from a huge, pink cup with purple swirls was hilarious. It was also very sweet, and it felt good to know that someone had been there for my dad, even when it had meant looking a little bit ridiculous.

  ***

  I lit candles in the windows and on the table, eschewing the electrical lights, thinking that dinner with Mac in the candle lights would be sweet.

  Almost a week had passed since we got back to Norton and Mac was mostly back to normal again. The wounds had healed enough for him to start growling about how the stitches itched, and he’d thrown the sling off a few days earlier, saying that a sprained shoulder was nothing.

  He had spent the first days holed up in his condo, and I left him to it, thinking that he needed to be alone for a while. I’d thought that being on my own to think things through would be right for me too, but I ended up missed him more than expected, and that had been unsettling. I wondered what I’d do when he called and had decided to act a lot less eager than what I’d managed so far.

  Then he simply showed up at Johns, where I sat perched at one of the stools by the bar, chatting with my uncle.

  “Dinner’s ready,” he growled close to my ear.

  His breath on my neck sent shivers down my spine, and I turned slowly to face him. He stepped in between my legs and leaned down.

  “Are you?” he murmured against my lips.

  I heard Uncle Hare murmur something and a glass was set down with quite some force at the back table where I knew my father sat with Miller and a few other men. I slid off the stool to grab hold of Mac’s hand and, ignoring everyone else, I let him pull me along.

  That night I discovered that the falcon on his back might look fantastic, but feeling it under my hands was amazing in ways I hadn’t imagined.

  We’d slept together since then, either at my house or at his place, which wasn’t a wonder of cleanliness but at least it was far from the disaster zone I’d seen the first time.

  Mac was back to working, and I’d learned that Miller was a veterinarian too, so they took turns tending to the animals in Norton. I was astonished to hear that they had two Vets in a small village like Norton, but Mac had chuckled and explained that no one on the town actually had to work. They were expected to contribute to the village by doing something they found satisfying, and everyone did. Then he went on to explain that there was some kind of intricate fund set up and it had enough money in it to cover housing and basic household expenses for everyone in the village.

  A loud knock on the door startled me, and since Mac and I had stopped knocking, or more accurately never even started, I thought it was odd that he suddenly did.

  “Shit,” was my dad’s greeting when I opened the door and looked over my shoulder into the candle lit room. “I’m inviting myself and some of the others over. Mill’s ordering pizza. We should talk about Marshes,” he said then and walked inside.

  Okay. Not what I’d planned for the evening, but he was right. The discussion we apparently were about to have was overdue, and I realized that they’d probably held back to let me and Mac have some time, but that this time was out now.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said and turned on the lights, and started blowing out the candles.

  “I’m sorry, Wilder,” he said gently and nodded toward the table.

  I wasn’t a great cook so we would have had a mostly failed pasta dish, and I had put candles on the table, but it wasn’t as if I’d laid it all out with fancy napkins and flowers.

  “Don’t worry about it, Dad,” I said calmly. “I get that you’ve given us some time, and I appreciate it, but you’re right. We need to talk about Marshes.”

  Then I grinned at him, and added, “Mac and I can be romantic some other time.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I knew that he knew I was teasing him, but before he could say anything, Mac walked in.

  “How badly did you mess up dinner tonight, babe? Pizza guy is on his way up the –”

  His eyes met Hawker’s, and he got immediately why there would be pizza for dinner that evening. Then the pizza delivery-guy arrived and so did everyone else. While we ate, we went through what had happened in Marshes.

  Mac had found papers in Paolo’s study confirming that investors from outside our country were involved, but they had been rather general in their wording, talking only about setting up a company, sourcing energy that Paolo would sell in full to these foreign investors.

  Byrd took notes and said she’d check with her former colleagues in the Army intelligence. Kit added that he’d talk to some friends whom he labeled as his “geek-buddies” to see if they had heard anything.

  “I don’t understand,” I said quietly. “You all seem to know, but I don’t. What is it he can destroy in the mountains and how is it linked to the birds? Or to us?”

  They were silent for a long time and then Hawker spoke, slowly and measuring each word.

  “There’s energy in the mountains, Wilder. You told me yourself about the stories you read, and how the people in them knew when they entered Dreughan land?”

  He paused, and I nodded. This was true. In the stories there had been some kind of shield protecting the mountains, not letting outsiders pass through it.

  “These days, anyone can enter the mountains. Maybe our blood has been mixed up enough to allow for it, maybe all other energy swirling around in the air takes down that shield. But the energy is still there, and we have substantial proof that this energy is coming from crystals, hidden deep in the ground. Over the years a few have surfaced although we don’t know how. Suddenly someone walking around in the mountains have found one of them, just lying there. It could be from stones shifting around after the snow has melted or maybe small earth quakes, perhaps. We don’t know, though, and so far it has only been on our own land, close to Norton.”

  He paused to point at Miller and then the coffee machine. While Miller got up to follow the order, Hawker kept speaking.

  “Now we come to the part we really don’t know much about, Wilder. In the old records, it said that the glimmering stones were linked to the dragons and that they wouldn’t exist without the stones. The birds come from the dragons, and it could be that the old records are incorrect, but no one has ever dared to question it. Removing the crystals has always been considered too much of a risk so they have always been buried again, as deep into the ground as we could, so that we never lose the link to our birds.”

  I exhaled air that had been in my lungs far too long.

  “Paolo believes so too,” I said. “He knows about the birds and somehow he knows that the crystals could be what links us together. I’m sure of it.”

  “Huh,” Hawker said, and he shot a glance at me under lowered brows, but turned to Mac and asked him if he had found something else.

  Mac went on to explain about how he’d continued to look through Paolo’s study, but that the bird had warned him that the man was coming home. He’d gotten out through the back door but passing through the garden he’d been attacked by the short man Paolo had called Francesco.

  “Cousin,” Miller rumbled, and my brows went up. “Fratinelli’
s cousin. It has to be him. Only short dude in that village.”

  Cousin. That made sense.

  “What do we do now?” I asked. “And why does he need Double H, and the land surrounding it?”

  “What do you mean the land surrounding it?” Byrd asked slowly.

  “But that’s what he said? They needed to get one of the Farnhamns out of the way. The land Willy gave to Uncle Andy and Mickey are just north-east of Double H.”

  “Shit,” Hawker murmured. “I didn’t think about that. I thought they just wanted them gone so you would be persuaded to sell.”

  “At least we know where to send the birds now. We’ll send them out to look just outside Rider’s and Mickey’s plots,” Mac added.

  I talked to Mickey every day, so I knew that he and Olly had arranged for security, both some kind of cameras and men guarding the premises, but they had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  The birds had all reported the same things back to us; Men were moving around in the mountains around Double H, but they hadn’t seen any digging or any kind of bigger equipment. Double H was huge, and even though the birds had fantastic eyesight they had a lot of land to cover so if we could tell them where to focus it would make their work much easier.

  “Right,” Hawker agreed. “Let’s take a short break, check in with the birds, tell them where to go tomorrow.”

  We moved around, drinking coffee, and talking about how I was organizing Willy’s documents. When I started looking through them, I’d been grief-stricken and had not known what kind of information there could be, so I’d tossed it in boxes and not done much more. I’d since started to go through them more carefully, and sorted them as best I could. I’d not found anything like what Vilda and her friends had written down, but there were various records and documents, and some of them seemed old.

  I brought out the papers Vildman had hidden behind the stone and Hawker told us that he had started preparing to bring the man down from the mountain. Sloane was apparently helping him with that, but I wasn’t sure if he was happy with the assistance, or annoyed.

  “That woman is full of ideas,” he sighed.

  “Huh,” Miller said, and there was a world full of hidden meaning behind that simple sound.

  Hawker turned to him and to my surprise there was a faint shadow across his cheekbones. Was my rough, cool and growly father blushing?

  “Dad?” I asked, drawing the word out.

  “I’ll get your phone, the others will want to see the pictures you have of Vildman,” my father replied and walked into my bedroom.

  I chuckled but when he didn’t return I started to wonder if we’d offended him. After a long while, he walked into the kitchen, carrying the wooden box I’d picked up from my parent’s house as a memory from my mother.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, and the others stilled.

  “Paolo offered me to take something with me as a memory of Mother, and I had no clue what to ask for, but I felt I should ask for something so I picked that one,” I replied, and then I added, “I like the inlays.”

  “Carrie had it?” Hawker murmured, but his voice was strained.

  “Mother had it on her dressing table all my life,” I replied.

  “She had it on her dressing table all your life,” he said slowly.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “It was my mother’s, Wilder. She gave it to Carrie when you were born, and I asked to get it back when we split up. Carrie said she’d thrown it in the fireplace because she didn’t want any memories of me in the house.”

  Oh.

  “Did you show Carrie?” Miller asked.

  “No. Didn’t plan to, and figured I’d show my daughter when she got older instead.”

  “Show me what?” I asked.

  Hawker set the box down on the kitchen table and moved his fingers over the inlays. Then he pressed down on a few of them and with a snap a thin drawer at the bottom opened. My eyes widened because I’d never even realized that there was a drawer there. It had been hidden well, and without knowing how to press the silver decorations, it would be impossible to open.

  In the drawer, there was a small velvet pouch. Hawker took it out and with a soft smile he pulled out a necklace. As he held it up to show me, my heart stuttered and then it started beating fast and hard.

  Vilda’s dragon pendant. The pendant that was said to have magical powers bring courage and open locked doors and other tings my racing mind couldn’t remember. I stretched out a hand, and Hawker took a step forward. Then he hung the necklace around my neck.

  A wild howling sound suddenly reverberated all around us. As it died out, a warmth settled in my chest, and I turned to Mac, reaching out to him. He grabbed my hand and another, softer howl moved through the air, like an echo of the first one.

  “Cool,” I breathed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Swordfight

  We sat down at the kitchen table again to look at the papers Vildman had left in his hiding place in the wall, and I read the prophecy out loud to them.

  “Turmoil will reign yet again unless one from the three avails of her father's mark to bring the world back from the brink of destruction. One is the removal of one. Adorning in the legacy of a shadow that passed is two. Wielding the heart of swords forged in fire is three.”

  There was a stunned silence at first, and then we discussed for a long time, but all we could come up with was that the swords of the fire dragons were needed somehow.

  Without a word, Hawker got out to come back in with a long bag. Then he pulled out the sword I had gawked at so many times with Mickey, in the lobby of the biggest hotel in the mountains. It was long and looked completely untouched by time. The blade seemed sharper than I would have thought possible in a sword that I knew was more than a thousand years old. The rounded part intended to protect the hand had a few dents, but it was polished, and the light almost bounced off it. He put it down carefully on the table, and I stretched out my hand to touch the bright, yellow stones around the rim of the cup with my fingertips. They were all cut the same way although it wasn’t like any gem I’d ever seen before. In fact, I didn’t recognize the design or craftsmanship from any of the artifacts I’d studied in school.

  “How did you get hold of this?” I asked.

  “Sloane,” he said cryptically and didn’t seem too eager to continue, but I kept staring at him until he did. “Apparently her friggin’ father owns that place, so we went there and talked to him.”

  “He gave it to you?” I asked, thinking that this was incredibly generous but also incredibly weird.

  “After a while,” Hawker muttered. “Had to promise a few things.”

  “What?” I asked curiously.

  The whole situation was kind of funny seeing that the look on my father’s face indicated he’d been thoroughly chastised by the father of his long-ago one-night adventure.

  “He’s an impossible old coot,” Hawker growled and when Miller started chuckling he went on angrily, “Apparently I had a digit wrong in her phone number. Have no clue how I was supposed to know that, but he still blames me and now I have to call her every day for a month, okay?”

  I stared at him. Then I pressed my hand over my mouth. Then I squeezed my eyes shut.

  Nothing I did could stop the laughter that bubbled up my throat, so I gave in and let it out, and the others laughed with me.

  “What are you talking about in these daily calls?” I asked when the laughter had died down.

  “None of your business,” he snapped, and he was right of course.

  Also, I didn’t really want to know.

  “Okay. Where is she now? Prosper?”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “She has lectures all week, so she stayed there. Will be up for the weekend, though.”

  Aha. This was interesting. Sloane was apparently visiting my father for the weekend. I started grinning and wanted to keep tormenting him, but he shut me d
own quickly.

  “You haven’t told me what Sloane gave you.”

  I had successfully skirted that question since Mac had blurted out what he did in the hospital, talking about the lovely blouse she’d given me and how good it had looked when I’d worn it in Marshes. Hawker figured out immediately that this was an aversion tactic, maybe because I usually didn’t blabber quite so much about colors and fabrics.

  “I told you. It was a blouse,” I muttered, and decided to change the topic, so I added, “I have something you should see.”

  Then I walked into my bedroom and brought out the remainder of the sword that Snow’s bird had picked out of the ocean for me. This caused a bit of an uproar since they had all believed she’d rejected her bird when her father died. None of them liked Snow’s mother although I got the distinct impression that it was since she’d moved away with the girl and not because they had anything against the woman’s personality. When they heard how Snow had helped both me and Mac they nodded calmly, as if this was to be expected.

  Then Hawker declared that he wanted to go to Marshes and “bring home the girl.” His words. I stared at him, wondering what in the hell he was talking about. Snow was allowed to live wherever she wanted, wasn’t she? Then a thought struck me.

  “Where do you think I will live, Hawker?” I asked.

  “Well here, of course,” he replied immediately.

  Mac made a small sound and Byrd exhaled. Miller slowly put a hand on Hawker’s shoulder and squeezed in a way that only could be a warning.

  “What if I want to live at Double H. You know? My home?” I asked.

  I had actually not thought so much about where I wanted to live and had figured I’d move back and forth between Norton and the ranch. What I didn’t like was for my father to tell me what to do.

  “Wilder,” he growled, and I could tell that he was about to say something I would in no way like so I braced, but Mac waded in.

  “Right. Here’s what’ll happen now. I will take Wilder for a little walk. Everyone else stays here and explains to Hawker about the twenty-first century, women’s rights and at what age people legally become adults in this country. Okay?”