by K. N. Knight
We traveled all of the first day, stopping frequently to feed and water the horses, and didn’t stop for the night until the sun had set. We mostly had the road to ourselves, passing other carts and wagons and other wandering hobos like myself only very occasionally. The guys were quiet, pensive. Zain and Rael checked on my well-being from time to time and included me on decisions on when to eat and find water. Oran was distant and haughty, taking the reins most of the time, to my relief, since it meant I’d walk with Rael or Zain instead.
“What did you do for work before the fires?” I asked Zain cautiously when the two of us were walking together near the rear of the wagon. I wanted to learn more about him without reminding him of his suffering.
“I was in a clan. A real bear clan that lived self-sufficiently in the forest and never had contact with humans. I’d barely even spoken to a human before. And then—” He didn’t finish the sentence; he didn’t need to. Everyone had a similar story—the fires came and they lost everything and everyone.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
We were quiet for a while. “My mate survived,” he said abruptly, and I automatically turned my head to him before I remembered I needed to shield myself from his suffering. A shard of white-hot pain entered my body, via my chest, and I inhaled sharply.
He stopped immediately, laid his hands on my shoulders. Damn. I thought I’d concealed my reaction from him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Let’s change the subject,” he murmured.
“No, it’s okay. I asked the question. I just need to make sure that I keep my eyes down.” I gave a weak laugh. “Please, tell me what happened?”
He sighed. “We escaped together. But she soon became insane and purely animal. As many others did. We were sheltering near a small town, and she went on a rampage. I had to put her down to protect the inhabitants she was trying to kill. It was the worst moment of my life.” His voice got very tight, and he broke off again.
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry, Zain.”
“That’s why I don’t shift unless I have to. I’m scared I’ll end up with the shifter madness like her.”
“I can understand that.”
“And that’s why I’m so committed to bringing the fire back. I know it’s what’s caused the madness.”
I sighed. “I’ve been hearing that a lot, too.”
“What about you, Ranger? Why are you wandering through the world alone?”
I told him because I felt so bad for him, and it was only fair to share. I told him how I’d lost my mom, who was already sick, and my grandmother. And how I ran with my three siblings but failed to protect them because I was young and scared, and they were lost to the wildfires.
“That’s even worse than I’ve suffered, Ranger,” he said, laying a comforting hand on my shoulder. “You were so young.”
“I don’t think you can compare people’s losses. They’re all so sad,” I replied.
“You won’t be alone again.”
In surprise, I glanced at him. It hurt, but it was bearable. He was looking at me kindly, and I was confused. I still couldn’t work out if I was their prisoner, or if I was choosing their company of my own free will.
In the early evening, we set up camp in another parking lot. It turned out that Rael had a map of all the old national parks and where the facilities were located. But this park had suffered the wildfires, and it was all burned out. Blackened tree stumps poked out from the ground, which was more ash than earth. There were saplings and small bushes beginning to emerge here and there, but it felt like a lonely place where very little flourished.
I was eager to hunt, and as soon as I’d helped the guys unload our things from the wagon, I shifted and ran out into the woods. It was worse than I’d expected. Stiff with sadness and loss. There weren’t the echoes I felt from human dwellings, but a subtler pain from the earth itself. And there was very little to hunt. I caught a mouse or two and then a single rabbit that was running in a verge where the forest met the road, and that was all. I shambled back, my stomach growling worse than ever. Oran greeted me with a sardonic grin. He’d warned me there was nothing out there. I drew back my lips in a wolf-scowl, wondering how the guys survived for so long without eating meat.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find some living forest soon. If not tomorrow then hopefully the day after,” Zain assured me once I’d shifted back to my human form. “I bet your wolf is crazy for hunting right now.”
I nodded.
“She needs to build up her strength, test her power. But there’ll be opportunities soon. You’ll see.”
“Thanks.” I flashed him a smile. It was impossible not to like him. He always seemed to get how I was feeling. Not on a telepathic level, but more like our thoughts were in tune, as if he was trying to put himself in my place.
We ate the same grains and vegetables as the previous day, but I could see supplies were getting low. The guys didn’t seem too worried, though. If you’re a shifter, you’ll never starve. We went to bed early, and I slept deeply again. The place was so sad and lonely I didn’t think there’d be anybody around to bother us. The guys seemed happy to let me have the wagon again. In fact, I had the weirdest feeling they preferred me to sleep there, but I couldn’t figure out why.
The following day we set out early again. It was a quiet day on a mostly flat road, the sky pale blue with patchy clouds and the mercury a couple degrees lower than the previous day. Today, Zain took his turn at the driver seat while Oran walked. I stayed on the other side of the horses, either walking alone or speaking to Rael. Today he was wearing an old rock band T-shirt with the neck torn off so it made a V-neck. It made a distractingly sexy combination with his muscles and tanned, inked skin. At last, I couldn’t resist asking him about his tattoos.
He broke into a grin, as if there was nothing he liked being asked about more. And then he reached behind his neck and yanked his T-shirt over his head before tucking it into the back of his jeans. Since he was displaying himself to me, I stared at him openly, feasting my eyes on the rippling contours of his skin. It was nothing personal. He just had a good body, that was all.
“This”—he pointed at the large design on his left pec, which was the one that had emerged from the neck of his T-shirt—“I got when I completed Seals’ training.”
I gawked. “You were a Seal?”
“Yup.” He puffed his chest out a little. “Surprised? You thought I was just a book nerd, didn’t you?”
“I-I guess.”
“Books are a new thing to me, to be honest. I was never academically oriented. I always knew I wanted to be a Seal. But when I found my grandfather’s books after the fires, I started reading and studying, and suddenly I couldn’t get enough.”
I nodded, and aware that I’d been staring at the tattoo for a long time, I asked him what all the different components of the design symbolized.
“So the anchor represents the Navy, and the other three are the areas the Seals represent—the trident is the water, the pistol is the land and the—” He sighed dramatically. “The eagle represents the air. Although Oran likes to pretend I’m so into him that I got his true form tattooed on my chest.”
I sniggered. “And how about this one?” I indicated the ink on his left bicep, featuring a tiger with an air tank on its back, on top of a red flag with a white diagonal line running through it.
He fingered it affectionately. “It’s known as the frogman, illustrating the fact I’ve been trained in underwater missions and scuba diving. But because I’m a tiger shifter and can breathe underwater, I asked them to add a tiger instead of the usual frog.”
“You can breathe underwater?” I said, incredulous.
He shrugged. “For a limited time. A good half-dozen breaths anyway.”
“Do you have gills somewhere?” I stared at his neck suspiciously.
“Nope.” He laughed. “I just breathe regularly, and my lungs take in the oxygen and push out the water. It seems to be a genetic variation particu
lar to my family.”
“That’s…cool,” I said, too surprised to say anything else. “Okay. What’s that phrase on your other bicep?”
“Numquam timebunt umbrae. Never fear the shadows. Or never fear ghosts. It’s ambiguous.”
“I like it,” I said. “Maybe I should get the same thing.”
After we stopped for our lunch break, there was a slight downhill, and Zain didn’t need to push the horses at all. Barely able to keep up, I climbed aboard, and then Zain called for Oran and Rael to climb aboard in order to steady the wagon as it gathered pace and grit spun out from the wheels in all directions. After a while, the road leveled out again, and by mid afternoon, we were pulling into a small town. It was like so many others I’d seen—half the houses were charred carcasses, others had been restored and looked almost normal.
Right after the fires, the whole land had been drenched in soot and ash. The air was thick with it, and it clung to your skin. You could taste it, smell it, and when you blew your nose, it came out black. Nowadays, it was usually only the houses that had been badly burned and abandoned that were still scorched. The buildings that were semi-habitable had been cleaned up over time, the visual signs of sorrow scrubbed away.
We parked up just outside the turn off to the town and Rael suggested we look for a campsite on foot to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to ourselves. Zain volunteered to go since he’d been sitting down most of the day, and Oran went with him, while Rael and I stayed with the horses.
“Where do we get food tonight?” I asked.
“We should be able to buy some, either that or barter some of our stuff.”
“No hunting again today?”
“Probably not, unless you’ve got a taste for rats,” he said with a grin.
I pulled a face. “Even a hungry carnivore’s got to draw the line somewhere.”
He laughed. “We might be lucky, though. There could be some wild land on the far side of the town.”
I fell silent, turning over my thoughts. I had that tingle in my belly I always got when I approached civilization. It meant opportunities, money in my pocket. “I appreciate you guys feeding me,” I began, “but I prefer to have a little of my own money in my pocket, if you catch my drift.”
Rael shot me a suspicious look.
“I’m not going to run off,” I said. “I’ll even leave my bag here if it stops you from going into high-alert mode. I just want to feel like I have a little independence. This is what I do.”
He looked at me a moment longer, those intense green eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I hope by now you realize you’ll be safer with us than without us, Ranger. No shifter should be alone at this important juncture in their life.”
I gave him a long look, too, which wasn’t easy since his presence seemed to be affecting me more and more strongly as time went on, and being caught in that cat-headlight stare brought an uncomfortable flutter to my chest. He looked sexy when he was serious. He looked sexy when he was playful too. And when he was excitable. Damn. I mentally shook myself out. “I don’t know about that. All I know is I don’t want to feel like your prisoner. I’m here of my own free will.”
He gave a slow, deep nod. “I hear that loud and clear. I’m just saying…He left the end of the sentence hanging, a hint of a warning in his deep, purring tone. I didn’t doubt that if I ran off, he’d be on my tail before I knew it.
“I’ll be back in an hour, or two at the most,” I said.
“One of us will be here. Be careful, Ranger.”
I waved vaguely and stalked toward the town, remembering I hadn’t left my bag as I promised. I didn’t owe them anything, I reminded myself. I could find a ride out of here and never think about them again. But I knew that wasn’t true. Because the images of Rael and Zain—and even Oran—were sharp in my mind. They needed me. And I believed that, however misguided, they were trying to do something good.
As I turned onto the old main street, I pulled off my hat, untied my hair, and ran my fingers through it, combing out the tangles. When it was loose, its auburn sheen had a habit of attracting people’s attention—both good and bad. The street was a mess. It looked like a giant conflagration had blazed from one building to another. A long row of colorful storefronts, old-fashioned family businesses passed from one generation to another, ruined in a matter of hours. I paused in the middle of the road and let the sorrows wash through.
Slowly, I began to walk, assailed by the sadness of lost livelihoods. The street was deserted. There was no building left that could be turned into a home or store of any kind, so people probably had no reason to visit. At the end, I took the left-hand turn which brought me deeper into the town. Some streets looked like a corridor of flames had blown through, destroying everything. Others were virtually unscathed. Soon I found what could be called a commercial street nowadays. All along the road, people had set up stores in brick houses, selling their vegetables, milk, homemade cheese, buckwheat, and oats. I swore if fire ever returned to the world, I would never touch buckwheat or oats again.
I straightened my clothes, put my shoulders back, and started to do my thing: going from place to place, asking if anyone knew of anyone who required the services of an exorcist.
The fourth person I asked, and the first not to look at me as if I was crazy, was selling chilies and herbs fresh from his garden. He explained that his soil was good because he’d bought a bunch of compost ready to lay in the garden before the fires came, and it had remained unscathed. As I bought five chilies and a small bunch of cilantro with a coin, he told me he couldn’t stop dreaming of his dead son.
“He’s there every night,” he said. “I feel him when I enter the house, as if he’s been waiting for me all day. And when I fall asleep, he’s as real in my dreams as if he was still alive.”
“This house?” I asked, looking doubtfully at the brick building behind him.
“No, this is just my store. My house is further along. Come on, I’ll show you.” He locked his gate closed with a length of chain and gathered up his cashbox. I followed him down the street. He was slightly built, no taller than me, with hair that seemed prematurely silver, and his light blue eyes regarded me with such hope that it pierced me. Sometimes I felt people wanted to take out their hurt on me; other times I thought they just wanted to share it with somebody.
We came to a clapboard house that was badly fire-damaged on one side, but barely touched on the other.
“There was a fire truck nearby,” he replied to my questioning look. “We were very lucky. The winds turned, and the firefighters managed to put out the flames.”
As I passed through the front gate and walked along a pathway with a lush vegetable garden growing on either side, I felt something, as faint as a whisper of breeze. I expected it to become stronger as the man showed me into the house and I stepped over the threshold, but it was still indistinct. I tried to feel it, sense it oscillating back through time, but it was pale and old. His son died years before the fires, I realized. Some childhood illness. There was no real echo here—just the sad memories of a lonely man missing his son. But he wanted me to do the ritual, and I was happy to go ahead. He agreed readily when I told him the price and asked him to get me the usual stuff. I sat on the steps and waited while he went to work.
When he returned, I spread out the bathroom towel he’d brought me on the threshold and piled the Bible, the freshly picked sage, some peacock feathers, and a dead bumblebee on top. Then, lacking any genuine inspiration, I threw myself onto my knees and began to recite some mumbo-jumbo while he watched me anxiously, hands clasped.
My voice was good and strong. I was always better when there’d been a few days since my last exorcism, and as I gathered pace, the inside of the house seemed to ring with my words. I was just reaching the crescendo, spinning around, hands stretched wide, telling the spirits to go, when I caught sight of a big, tall figure standing on the pathway leading up to the house. Oran. His lip curled before he lifted his hands and gave me a
slow handclap. Shit.
“Go away. Leave me alone!” I hissed.
“I’m afraid this little exorcist here is a fraud,” he told the man. “Whatever she’s told you, it’s all lies. You’ve been hoodwinked, I’m sorry to say.”
“What?” the man stuttered.
“Shut up,” I whispered.
“It’s all hokum, whatever she’s been telling you. You’re not the first, but I’m trying to make sure you’re the last.”
“Sir,” I said loudly, “that’s not true. I hardly know this—this character. He knows nothing about me. All I know is he’s jealous of my gift and he’s trying to ruin my livelihood.”
“Oh, I know her pretty well. I’ve observed her doing these rituals before. And they are not worth a dead bumblebee.”
The man gazed at me with such hurt and disbelief that it pierced me for a second time. “You were lying to me, young lady,” he said. “I told you all about my son, and all you cared about was cheating me out of some money.”
“No! I’ve brought you peace, sir. And I think you know that,” I said, doing my best to keep the indignation out of my voice.
“I hope you haven’t paid this little charlatan here. Because she doesn’t deserve a dime,” Oran interjected.
“It’s not about the money, really,” I insisted.
“I don’t think I can pay you, ma’am,” the man said.
“You got to be kidding me. And after I bought your chilies out of pity!” I raised my hand dismissively, spun around, and stalked down the steps and out of the garden.
“You’re a liar and a cheat, Ranger,” Oran’s voice called after me.
I could hear his footsteps behind me, but I kept going until I was halfway down the next street, then I rounded on him. “You fucking asshole!” I spat. “First of all, I am not a cheat. What I experience is real and way beyond your comprehension. And secondly, I’m trying to make a living here like everybody else. That man was desperate for some peace, and that’s what I gave him. Now you owe me ten coins for that.”