Silver

by Rhiannon Held

  Andrew closed his eyes for a moment to check how clear-headed he felt. Now was his moment. He had to do this, to make sure Silver stayed safe. His muscles all felt reasonably solid. He opened his eyes and pushed to his feet in one smooth movement, swinging for Stefan’s jaw.

  He hadn’t counted on the silver. Caught by surprise, Stefan’s block was clumsy, but the metal sizzled against Andrew’s forearm anyway. The agony of phantom heat brought tears to his eyes and slowed him enough for Stefan to take out his knees once more. No, part of Andrew wailed. He couldn’t have failed again.

  “Enough,” Stefan growled, anger backed by the full weight of his insanity coming into his face. He knocked Andrew to his stomach with calculated blows to propping arms and then shoulder.

  Then the crowbar fell on Andrew’s back. The movement ground Andrew’s cheek into the rough concrete. Stefan yanked up Andrew’s shirt and rained blows down on the small of his bare back. Over and over on the same spot, burning, burning, until Andrew would have screamed if he’d had the air for it. He could feel the instant the bar broke the blistered skin, like someone poured napalm into the wound. And the bar fell again. And again. Something in his spine crunched.

  “There. Now you’ll have to listen to me properly.” The bloody bar clunked to the ground as Stefan knelt, keeping his hand on it. “It’s a trial, the way those of our kind heal. You never have the patience to remain still and listen. But if you don’t listen, you won’t repent before I kill you. And that would be a shame.” He released the bar and took Andrew’s chin so he was looking up at him, neck twisted sideways at a painful angle. “But now you won’t be walking anywhere, yes?”

  Andrew made a noise, trying to make his throat work. Silver. He couldn’t fail Silver. The longer he hung on, the longer the pack would have to get her safe. Hanging on seemed the best he could do now.

  “You know, I don’t think I know your name.” Stefan paused, then continued when Andrew couldn’t answer. “Ah, well. Perhaps we will be more comfortable inside.” He flipped Andrew onto his back, and then took a handful of his shirt collar.

  Andrew’s sight grayed out with the bumping, jarring drag along the path and over the house’s threshold. With one hand, Stefan couldn’t have been gentle if he’d wanted to. It was clear he didn’t want to.

  His back just hurt so much. Andrew tried to concentrate on something else—Silver, hang on to give the others time to find Silver and get her to safety—but the pain dragged at him with every heartbeat and every breath. Maybe it had ebbed, as some healing occurred in the mess of his back even in the wound made by silver, or maybe that was his imagination. His energy had been sapped for so much healing already.

  Stefan hauled him up into a chair with one last jerk at his collar. He circled around to the front and adjusted Andrew’s legs to make his position more stable, since Andrew couldn’t himself. The agony traveled over Andrew in waves in time to his heart. For Silver. Hang on for Silver.

  Fire settled over his wrists, and he couldn’t move his arms because the muscles were paralyzed. Bound with silver chains. Exactly as Silver’s pack had been. Stefan’s bare fingers still showed no burns from touching those, either.

  “Now.” Stefan smoothed lank hair from his eyes, gave a twisted smile, and knelt at Andrew’s feet and placed a hand on his knee. Andrew’s skin crawled. “Forsake the false Lady. Allow yourself to be purified in your death so you can see the light of God.”

  Andrew strained to make his arm muscles work, to snap the chains. So thin. But he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t strong enough.

  Stefan smiled once more. “We have time, don’t worry. You’ll see.” He patted Andrew’s knee. “Faith comes more easily when the beast has been burned out of your blood. Selene understands. She just hasn’t admitted it to herself yet.”

  23

  “Dare should have returned by now. Something’s wrong.” Silver didn’t need Death to reply, she could see his answer in every movement he made as he paced back and forth across the room. Though it was hard to tell in his ruff’s deep blackness, she thought his hackles were up. But more than that, she could feel it herself. They’d brought her back to her mother’s pack’s den, and they’d locked her up in the closest room before she could run away again.

  And Dare didn’t return.

  Death stopped, going from restless movement into utter stillness so quickly it was like a slap. “What would you do if there was something wrong?”

  “Help him.” Silver drew her lip between her teeth and bit hard. But where? Where was she going to do her helping? The monster knew how to leave no trail, the same as he knew how to find hers when she tried to hide it.

  “You know where they are.” Death sounded exasperated. “Stop running from the answer.”

  Silver pressed her palms to her eyes. The monster would take him somewhere he knew he could work uninterrupted. He didn’t work quickly. Somewhere no one would overhear, since he didn’t work quietly either. And he knew Silver’s former home was both those things, from experience.

  Silver threw herself against the blocked entrance, bad shoulder first. Sometimes it was useful the snakes had deadened the pain in that arm. “We have to go!” she shouted at the others in the pack. “We have to go back to my home!” No one answered her, though she could hear them outside. Crazy Silver, babbling again. Always crazy.

  Silver stepped away and laced her fingers into her hair, smoothing it flat to her head and trying to hold it there. Holding it as if this time it would stay. But she had no more control over that than anything else about herself. It fluffed right back up. “The others will never take me to him just on my word. There’s little I can do without my wild self. I can’t run to him quickly enough, can’t defend him.”

  “You still search for her?” Death’s words were simple, but so bleak.

  Silver swallowed convulsively. She hadn’t been ready to admit it to herself, but maybe this was the time. If not for herself, for Dare. “She’s not coming back, is she?”

  Death yipped in her wild self’s voice. Silver found herself on her knees, tears in her eyes, like someone had torn a hole inside her. But then Death hadn’t torn her open, he’d merely made her acknowledge the wound.

  “Now you’ve admitted that, I suppose I have no more reason to be here.” Again, there was the bleakness to Death’s voice, the voice of the man Silver didn’t know. It was the voice Death liked best to use. As Silver watched him walk away, it occurred to her that she would miss him. He had called the fire and watched her burn, but he had never left her. Already, the air near her seemed empty with the lack of anything even shaped like her wild self to fill it.

  “Wait.”

  He tilted his head back over his shoulder. In that moment, she realized what he looked like. A wild self without his tame. She’d told the stories, but she wondered how she could have missed seeing how empty Death was without the Lady.

  “Please. Stay with me. Help me. If we are both without our names, denied the Lady, let us at least be alone together?”

  Death considered a long moment, eyes inscrutable. Then he walked into the embrace of her good arm. She’d never touched him before, but his fur was soft, tickling against her chin and neck. One would never have guessed it, looking at his harsh silhouette.

  “You have what you need to help him, you know,” he said at length. “You have another self that can get there quickly enough. You just don’t wish to acknowledge her … Selene.”

  Silver choked on hearing the name. “I can’t—”

  “Even for him? You’d rather I had his voice to speak to you with?”

  Silver pressed her face into Death’s fur, dampening it with her tears. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, it was that she wouldn’t. Somehow, she didn’t think Dare would let that stop him.

  “You’ll help me?” she said into his fur.

  She felt more than heard the rumble of his answer. “I’ll help you.”

  * * *

  Selene rebuilt herself
memory by memory, picking them up like hot coals in her bare hands. Her brother’s death. The death of her niece and nephew. She tried to pick the memories up faster to avoid pain, like walking across those coals instead. The Bellingham house, her childhood in Seattle. Names: Ares, Lilianne, John.

  Stefan.

  Knowledge built itself up around her when she wasn’t looking, computers and cell phones and cars, all the things she hadn’t been able to see without the memories. She knew she was in Seattle, in a house, in a bedroom. It had been Ares’s bedroom once. When the last piece fell into place, Selene felt a small flicker of triumph. Why hadn’t she done this before?

  Then one of the memory coals slipped a tendril of scent into her nose. She remembered what it smelled like when Were flesh burned from silver. She remembered what it sounded like when that Were screamed. Memory linked to memory. She wanted to press hands to her eyes to hold back the tears but her bad arm wouldn’t move. That reminded her of the spreading deadness of the silver entering her blood.

  She never could escape that linking while her memories were intact, she realized. Not permanently. She could think of only new things, things with no connection to her past, but that wouldn’t last forever. She could only hope it would last long enough for Andrew.

  She sent her thoughts forward like running on a crumbling slope. No room to pause or you’d fall. She thought about how to sneak out without John or the others knowing. It was lucky they’d put her in her brother’s old room. Ares had a half a dozen secret ways out in this house. You could make it to the garage roof from his window, and from there it was only a short jump to the ground. She didn’t know who had the room now, but it was another child. She removed several plastic dinosaurs from the top of a bookcase and shoved it under the window. Pulling yourself up onto the sill was all very well when you had two working arms, but she needed the help.

  The window had a lock installed to prevent it from opening wide enough to let a teenage Were sneak out at night to go running alone. Selene fished in the gap between the window’s bottom edge and the track it ran on and drew out a screwdriver, handle snapped off. Still there. Ares had left the screws so loose it took only a couple turns to remove them and toss the lock away.

  Then she had to wait. Pierce was out walking the perimeter. She could see the top of his head below. She needed him to get to the other side of the house, but he was walking so slowly.

  Waiting gave her time to think, and she felt the memories begin again. If only she had someone to talk with to distract herself, but all she’d ever had since the monster injected her was her own mind. Whatever form her hallucinations had taken.

  Selene hugged herself as tightly as she could with only one arm. Just wait. Don’t think. Concentrate on breathing. Or think of Andrew. He wasn’t in any memory except those warped by her insanity. Bringing up his face, his body, his scent, raised a heat that was a good distraction.

  In the end, it wasn’t so long until Pierce disappeared from sight and had time to reach the other side of the house. It just felt that way. Selene pushed open the window and levered herself out. Moss and dirty roof crud smeared her jeans as she slid down the garage roof. Lowering herself down from there with one arm was more of a controlled fall than anything else.

  They still had the old Honda she needed, too. It looked even more broken-down than she remembered, but it was parked alongside the driveway. Bless John, for not buying a new one when the old one still worked, even years after they’d all left for Bellingham. The extra key was still stuck under the drainpipe at the side of the garage, where she and Ares had left it to pass it back and forth when one was grounded and the other wasn’t.

  The others would probably dismiss the noise of the car door opening and shutting as the neighbors, but Selene took a deep breath before she started the car. She’d have to move fast after they heard an engine so close.

  She drove off the grass onto the driveway and floored it, not bothering to check the mirror to see if Pierce was running after her, or if the others had come to the front door. She realized her speed was a bad idea at the first turn, when her sense of the car’s path slid alarmingly. She yanked it back off the shoulder and slowed down. Her muscle memory was adjusted to a car with much better brakes. The more she concentrated on the exact details of what she was doing—which was the accelerator? Which was the brake?—the more things mixed themselves up. Better to trust to instinct.

  Navigating was harder. That knowledge was buried inside the dangerous memories, and while she managed to get herself heading north, she wasn’t at all sure where to turn off once she was closer to home.

  Selene’s stomach squeezed and someone honked at her for forgetting to move when the light turned green. Home. Maybe she could find her way home, but did she want to get there?

  Andrew. She had to remember Andrew. Selene gritted her teeth and turned on the radio to grating, twangy country. Listen to the radio. Don’t think about what waited at home.

  This time, the wait was almost too much for her. She drifted onto the freeway shoulder once, the car not feeling quite real under her hand. But she didn’t want to die, and the adrenaline burst kept her thinking clearly after that. Mostly.

  When she reached the house, she had no time for finesse. She parked in the driveway behind a car with a rental window sticker and slammed the door behind her. Stefan was welcome to know she was here. She had no hope of sneaking up on him, and better he was as distracted as possible until Andrew could deal with him. Selene certainly couldn’t.

  She looked at the path, rather than the house, so she could make it up to the door without thinking. Everything looked dusty and overgrown, like the house’s owners had stopped caring. It made her angry, like it had been vandals, and not just time, that had destroyed their home. Then she reached the bright crimson stain.

  She tried to push away the sight, but she couldn’t not smell the stench. Stefan’s infection and fresh, untainted blood—Andrew’s blood—and someone’s fear. Silver taint in everything. She smelled like that, she supposed. Never able to escape the poison. The scents bypassed her careful defenses, straight to the memories, and she doubled over with their strength. No. No, keep walking. Andrew’s blood, not her pack’s. Break the scent into its component parts, its differences. Not the same as in the memories, something new. The stain became a trail of fresh blood dragged over the front step into the house. The door stood open.

  Whatever happened, the others would be following her. She’d told them where to go when they first locked her up. She trusted they were smart enough to remember that. She just had to stay alive, or failing that, keep Dare alive until they got here.

  Each breath was a struggle. She wanted to run so badly. “Stefan!” she called, unable to make her legs move farther than the first step. “I’m here. I’m the one you want, not him.” She leaned on the doorframe so her knees didn’t give way.

  She couldn’t smell him approach over the blood, but she heard his steps. Slow at first, wary of a trick, then jogging. He reached the doorway and smiled at her, smiled with all of the vulnerable charm he’d shown when he first approached their pack. She wanted to scratch it right off his face.

  “Selene.” He reached for her, hesitated, then gallantly drew back and opened the door wider. “I knew you’d see sense and come back to me. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Stefan.” Once Selene said the first word, the next was easier to get out, and the next one after that. “Andrew means nothing to me, you must know that. He just gets off on protecting broken things.” She smiled and thought about using the teeth she showed to rip open his throat. She should touch him now. It was like commanding yourself to touch a lit stove. Every muscle held her back.

  Once, she might have taunted herself for weakness, using a hallucination as her mouthpiece. Now, she had to set her teeth and find the strength on her own. She stroked Stefan’s dead, dangling arm. “I know we’re not broken.”

  He shivered at her touch. She’d never volunt
arily touched him before, she realized. She caught a whimper before it made it out of her throat. Andrew needed time, that was all. She’d give him what time she could. Lady grant it would be enough.

  24

  For several moments, Andrew didn’t register that Stefan had stopped talking. His ranting was all the same, anyway. Selene was his, Andrew was going to die for touching her, but he had a chance to repent first. Repent, repent. Over and over.

  Andrew had let his head drop, and now he stared at the kitchen floor. A long scratch bisected a piece of the wood laminate. He tried to make pictures with it and the whorls of the grain. A thought gradually trickled past the pain. Stefan was gone. If Stefan was no longer in here with Andrew, where was he? Silver was only completely safe when Stefan was with him. He tried to summon the motivation to do something about it, but when he moved his head the pain just pounded until he was blinded with colored bursts.

  “To think you give up so easily,” a woman’s voice said in Spanish. “Dare.” She said it with Spanish vowels.

  Andrew’s heart no longer had any burst of speed to give, but he lifted his head. Stefan was indeed gone. Instead, a wolf sat before Andrew, up on its haunches. It was blacker than black, like someone had taken a colored-pencil sketch of the room and layered pure ink onto one spot until the paper was sodden with it.

  “Isabel never called me Dare.” The words came more quickly as he remembered how to use his throat again. “Silver says you speak with their voices, not their words.” Andrew drew in a slow breath, floating in a sense of unreality. “Death.”

  The wolf dipped his head, and spoke in a man’s voice. “Silver is an intelligent woman. But does it matter whose words they are, if they are still true?” His voice changed again, Isabel once more. “You need to let me go.”

  “You’re not real. You’re a manifestation of her unconscious.” Andrew let his head drop again. The boy in him, raised to worship and respect the Lady, was crying out, sure Death had come to take him. His intellect had another worry. Had he been poisoned the way Silver had been? He’d been drifting a lot, in the pain. Had Stefan injected him? One needle-prick would have been lost in the general agony. Was that causing his hallucinations? Maybe it was too late for him now too. Hopelessness dragged at him.