Wolf Sirens Night Fall: What Rises Must Fall (Wolf Sirens #3)

by Tina Smith

  Samantha was invaluable when it came to retrieving them. Narine gave her more rope than any of the others. For Sam to join them was a great victory for their side. Paws and Narine had hoped for a merger for some time. Sam had such power that they had initially been wary of her, knowing her talent. Sam was a good bitch to have on side and she handled the pack for him now and kept an eye on things like that, so they could concentrate on the bigger picture; as they worked towards a time when they would rule over the Valley, where the wolves outnumbered the uninfected.

  There were a few bumps that needed ironing out, so Narine and Paws turned their attention to within the gang, his children.

  Samantha would gather old members from across the valley and persuaded them to return for their family, her talent came in handy for this. But the old ones were somewhat difficult to track. Because they had either ended it, which was difficult for others of their kind to acknowledge, or they lived permanently as wolves. He wanted them to grow strong. He trained the pack day and night until they understood what it was to be affiliated with the Cult - power, protection and brotherhood.

  The old ways were lost and the ruthlessness of the early days was forgotten in time. It was as though they now had found a way to be surrogate siblings, mothers and fathers to fill the void of no longer having human procreation. Paws was the grandfather, Narine had evolved to equal him in status. The real performing of punishment fell to them as pack elders and leaders. They always decided who got the cage and when they were let out.

  7. Old Blood

  Dents and marks in the paint on the walls were evidence of a rough household. Cement was the only reason the house held together. The furnishings were still the same but more worn, complete with mottled brown shag carpet and a collection of green, brown and orange mismatched furnishings. It had been out dated even in her time; it even smelt the same, if not mustier.

  Leveling him with her eyes, “Be straight with me, Paws,” Aylish said sounding more in control than she felt.

  “Girls, please have a drink.” He leant on the bar with a victorious smile and motioned for Sky to get the beers, hiding the annoyance she brought him by persisting with resistance to his hospitality. Sky handed him a bottle from the fridge and he strode back over to the lounge area. A stocky blonde with black streaks in her hair and tattoos on her arms leant on the bar and her eyes followed him, Genna.

  “Why now?” Aylish insisted with a low growl.

  He sat down on the dark brown plaid couch, which sank too low, and opened his beer. “Aylish this is your home,” he reminded her with an uncharacteristic lilt.

  “No, it was.” She looked about with her hard blue eyes.

  “Please just try it; you really hold a grudge like no other Aylish.” He looked at Blair. “Twenty plus years,” he quipped and his tired smile faded to reveal the set of annoyance, which lay behind it.

  “Not long enough,” she replied promptly. This, however, seemed to genuinely amuse him. “Why now? Why let us get away for twenty five years and drag us back now?” she persisted.

  He smirked at her piteous face. “She’s clever,” he said aloud to himself.

  “I want to leave.” She looked at Dahlia in her periphery and she meant with or without her. Dahlia shied away from her sister’s glance, seeming to shrink back in the corner of the room.

  Paws failed to hide his pleasure as he smiled widely. “Ha, see, Dahlia wants to stay so it can’t be all bad.”

  “I want to stay a while,” Dahlia whined in a soft voice.

  Aylish ignored her sister. “Don’t tell her what to do,” she said, her piercing eyes burning with hatred for him.

  “Defensive, Aylish,” he scolded her with an artificial light heartedness.

  She narrowed her hard stare, “With reason.”

  “Oh well, I didn’t say you had to forgive me, or yourself.”

  Her face remained hard. “When can we leave?” She spoke towards him and swallowed. She knew, despite the pretence of freedom, they were trapped.

  Narine, who had remained silent, interjected. “Aylish, please stay with us a while? Dahlia seems to want to.” She nodded and smiled submissively, hopefully.

  Aylish narrowed her eyes at Narine, not underestimating her for a second. And little did she know, with Shell in the lockup, they couldn’t force Aylish to stay, and she didn’t seem the type to obey the rules of punishment.

  Aylish looked at Paws. “Do you remember what happened?” Her eyes glistened as she stared angrily at him.

  “Of course Ay,” he sang.

  “You remember it differently,” her tone was clipped, as she struggled to hide the breaking, furious emotion in her voice. As her chest rose and fell more rapidly.

  Narine’s smooth tone broke the intensity. Infuriatingly acting as the voice of reason. “If you don’t like it after, say two or three days, you are free to leave,” she offered coercively.

  After a moment, Aylish spoke. “So I have no choice,” she said flatly as anger boiled inside her.

  There was an audible silence as Blair snapped open a beer and handed it to her. She took it, then stood up and poured it on the floor. They all watched as the frothing liquid sloshed all over the shag carpet; as it fizzed and sank, Genna gave an awkward giggle. Aylish turned, tossing the bottle on the floor, inches from Paws and without so much as a backward glance, went through the open screen door to the balcony.

  “Do you want another?” Paws laughed in a humorous tone behind her, but only Tyler snickered. Paws seethed quietly, disgruntled at knowing his reaction was witnessed by all in the lounge.

  Out in the air, Aylish couldn’t believe it still. Here she was, back in the family as though she had forgiven them, though she never could. She tried to breathe. She heard them talking in the room.

  “Aylish has always had an independent streak,” Paws said aloud, glancing at Narine.

  And in fact, it made her all the more attractive as a leader. She did what she wanted when she wanted and followed no orders, she would have made a sublime Alpha – probably why she was head of her own small pack, which she ran with ease. However, she was the gentlest of creatures away from him and his influence. She had shown fierce independence and stubbornness. But she had something they lacked: compassion.

  Dahlia enjoyed their company for a few moments before following her pack sister, once the room had recovered from Aylish’s tantrum.

  “Aylish,” Dahlia said softly, stepping out onto the balcony. She rolled the sliding door closed, behind her, taking care to remove her nineteen fifties inspired skirt out of the way.

  “You know, I can’t ever forgive it,” Aylish uttered into the night air, which smelt of shrubbery; something lemon scented lingered from below in the warm air.

  “I know,” Dahlia replied, her startling aqua eyes reflecting the truth.

  She breathed the summer air. “This place makes me someone I can’t stand.” She ignored the brilliant starlit sky. The Jackaranda’s were taller.

  “We don’t have to fight it anymore.” Dahlia said it full of hope, like it was a revelation that Aylish just hadn’t realized.

  “You can do what you want, but once things cool here I’m out,” Aylish replied sharply. Looking away from her pack sister she glanced at the rusted Kombi van abandoned in the yard.

  “So you’ll stay for a bit?” said Dahlia, still optimistic. Aylish could hear the excitement of anticipation in her voice, but it only made her so much more anxious to leave. She was filled with a nervousness she covered with anger.

  “I’m not assuring you anything,” she breathed. “We are no longer a pack, we are individuals.” She turned her face further away when she said it.

  “No.” Dahlia thought aloud. “Aylish I - ” She tried to handle her delicately “Please just try it.” She placed her warm hand gently over Aylish’s on the railing “You’re my sister; I go with you…okay?” Her face shifted in honesty. Showing she wouldn’t resist Aylish’s orders.

  “I’m not you
r mother, Dahlia, so just leave it, okay?” She shrugged her off, pouting defensively.

  Dahlia wanted to talk further, to ask her more, but in this mood of hers, Aylish wouldn’t oblige. Dahlia knew Aylish wasn’t stubborn or strange, she was hurt; cut so deeply by the actions taken so long ago. So painful was the wound that time would never heal it.

  Aylish had died with them; she had withered away because of the sheer horror of what had happened. She didn’t play by any rules anymore, not Paws’s rules or the pack, or the human worlds. She reserved her love now; she had even refused to let Dahlia in, despite them living so tightly alone together for so many years - through three decades, never changing. She was a ghost, a terrifyingly wounded immortal spectre.

  Dahlia knew Lonnie, for some reason, was the only person Aylish cared to bother with; he had patched a part of the void and she had let him in, in a way she couldn’t or would not let Dahlia. She had not allowed Dahlia in, in thirty-two years. She never let her do her hair or her make-up. Aylish didn’t read fashion magazines or even borrow her outfits. Dahlia knew the only way to make her dear friend stay and be contented was to get Lonnie here, to let him see and feel the pack the way Dahlia had again. Because he would want to stay, then Aylish would surely stay too. He comforted her, like no one else had been able to.

  8. Breaking The Broken

  It was easy, too easy, to break into the house; Angele, like an idiot, hadn’t set the alarm before phasing. It was silly to think how open and vulnerable their lair was to anyone stupid or daring enough to enter - though it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been locked with them all off hunting. The lair was deserted and vulnerable when left unguarded. It wouldn’t have been hard to break in, not during a full moon. The side windows were open to let in a south breeze, after the humid heat of the last three days, which had been stifling. The house was still too warm and the rooms were stuffy from humidity. The smell of her hit Sky like a slap in the cheek when he came upon it - the huntress; it was palpable, and her sweat lingered in the air. Sky silently wanted her to break in again, to see her, and kiss her cool, moist lips. His heart gave a shudder.

  Shell entered the stuffy room, her uneven eyes alive following the trail. She came in, licked her lips, and screwed her nose up as though she had been chasing the odour this way and that, all over the house. Her blue eyes were unusually excited by the unleashed prey that had been in her territory.

  “Fresh meat,” she said as she assessed his reaction. He knew better than to give her one, and he covered his baleful expression under a facade of casual concern. Though Shell understood him better than most in the pack, she seemed to have been starved of warm blood and Sky worried she may, one day, do something unintentional that she would regret because of that fact. Paws had deliberately and cruelly denied her fresh blood. Shell was well below anyone in rank; she had to participate in the hunt and if she was lucky, he gave her a cold piece of bone with some sinew on it. She had lost weight since coming here and her dark brown hair had grown long. Shell was like Sky, under strict instruction not to leave the compound unless accompanied, usually by Narine’s lackey Angele or Genna, when she wasn’t at the hospital.

  “Least she didn’t go through my stuff.” Shell watched his eyes and then relaxed her penetrating glare when he pretended not to care. The wild look in her eye subsided. She regained herself and he breathed a sigh of relief when she left the room for downstairs.

  Sky resisted the urge to dive into the cool pillows on his bed to inhale her more deeply. He could hear Angele excitedly talking to the others in the main room and he decided to act fast. The scent was strongest on his bed; he followed it to the pillow and panicking, he almost ripped the pillowcase with ferocity, tugging it free and shoving it in his clothes basket. Just as he finished, Angele with her limp followed by Paws and Narine entered the room looking furtively; they hardly had to breathe the air to taste her strongly in the atmosphere of his room. Sky had to remind himself they didn’t know who she was exactly, by the scent alone.

  Paws asked the obvious. “Do you know who it might have been?” He gave a sideways glance at Sky. Her essence was everywhere. Their eyes danced, chasing it.

  “No.” He lied – they all knew who it was, it couldn’t be anyone else. He tried not to swallow.

  Narine marched further into the room with Paws and they set about turning up the mattress and bedding. As they did, Angele watched from the doorway. Sky stared on mutely as Angele did, as they walked about poking at things. Like wardens.

  “Did she take anything?” Paws asked, orange eyes turned on him, after he lifted the laundry basket to reveal more carpet.

  “I’m not sure,” Sky mumbled, looking down so they wouldn’t see the telling flicker of fear in his eyes. Tyler walked past the doorway but didn’t look in.

  “Check,” he advised as Narine left the room, nudging past Angele. Paws brushed past her also.

  Angele lingered and spoke to Sky. “Narine's calling a meeting,” she said. She glanced at him and went out after Paws with a swish of her brown shoulder length hair, which had been dyed and trimmed to conceal her identity. Sky stood alone for a moment.

  Shell peeked in the doorway on her way past. “Better tidy up,” she advised, seeming more herself.

  He heard Angele laugh from down the hall. She had known nothing of this world before being taken from high school. She was, surprisingly, one of Paws’s earlier choices at creating a mate. When she wasn’t a good fit and he’d used her enough, he selected another woman. Angele had then been knocked down in rank by Narine's arrival. After he had them fight over him to determine the stronger bitch, by some miracle she had lived, but was heavily injured and remained with a limp, even as a wolf. No one cared enough to try to have her leg reset and after the scars disappeared, she was too traumatized to ask.

  Sky grabbed his own hair in both fists and struggled to contain the many conflicting emotions he could not give into. Regaining his composure, he went through the hallway to Sam’s end room and out onto the balcony that wrapped around the top of the house. He stared hard at the Jacaranda tree, willing himself to jump and take off, and he should have jumped the rail and run. But they would have caught him and he hated to admit it to himself but he feared the cage.

  He breathed in the air. Shell made a noise as she stepped out through the far screen door, which led from the main living room; she pulled up a chair on the opposite end of the long verandah. He tried to ignore her, and struggling to do so, went over and pulled up a seat opposite her which squeaked on the wooden boards.

  “Intense huh?” she said low, towards the view in front of them, she was smoking a cigarette. He breathed out; Shell was trapped here herself, though she had been more compliant than him. He sensed they shared a similar unrest at being in this pack that the likes of Angele and wolves like Blair did not suffer. They had never belonged so well anywhere else in life and had never had another pack. Perhaps they knew no better.

  But Shell and he longed for something that had been better and had been taken from them. He put his bare feet up on the other chair. He wasn’t sure what it was for her, just that she had been happy before Paws took her, kidnapped her into this world, and she knew better than to simply be happy with that decision being made for her. They both heard the continuing kerfuffle in the house. It was dawn and the first light of the sun began to peek over the horizon of trees.

  “Narine’s going through your room,” Shells soft voice informed, not looking towards him as she breathed a feathery plume of smoke and flicked the ash on the boards. They weren’t allowed lighters, Tyler had probably lit it for her. Sky glanced at her and back towards the expansive dawn view over the railing as light hit the green lawn, which stretched into shrubbery and sweeping bushland.

  Neither of them felt the urge to make idle gossip and anyway, anything they chatted about would not have been what was on their minds and to speak what they really felt would have been idiotic. Anything overheard now could be twiste
d against them and they knew better. Genna was always listening. She offered him a drag and he accepted it. Shelly Bealy had been his Geography teacher in Shade High. So they had found some common ground and shared a few jokes every now and then.

  Angele’s flowery scent alerted him to her presence before her ringing voice, that there was a meeting in five. He handed the smoke back to Shell. They sat wasting time until the pack convened on the mismatched couches in the living area in the upstairs. He wanted so badly to escape it, but as though trapped, he had to attend and hope against hope they wouldn’t pin him down and tear his body apart for treason. There was no way out other than to see it through and hope to arrive on the other side of the meeting in one piece and though she was all he wanted to think of, he couldn’t think of her.

  9. New Leaf

  The valley went on whether I believed in it or not. I dreamt of the angel statue as I slept, armed with a bow, above Tormey’s grave. She opened her electric eyes to glance at me lovingly. As I neared her she put her hand to my face. Her cold marble skin began to crack in lines that grew like lightning strikes and I reached for her. As she gave me a startled look, I desperately grappled with nothing as she fell to pieces before me. I felt as though I had shattered the angel.

  Sometimes, after waking from the dreams, I would go to the river. On the bank there was a big leafy oak. I left my clothes on its branches and waded into the Artemis. There was an aged carving on the trunk, a cross with the initials T&R inside a heart, with four lines coming out behind it and a half crescent around it.

  I wondered if it was his absence that caused the rain. There was no part of me that didn’t wish I was with him. Thinking he didn’t feel for me what I felt for him drained my existence of any light. I still wanted to see him, to lose myself in his sapphire eyes, to inhale the heat from his hot skin. I wanted the sensation his hands holding me and at the same time I didn’t want to feel it, because it meant the death of the huntress. Did he leave me willingly, did he have a choice? What really bothered me was why he didn’t fight to get back to me, as hard as I fought to get back to him. But I couldn’t let him go, not until I knew why.