No Shelter Trilogy (Omnibus, Books 1-3)

by T. S. Welti

  “What?” I ask.

  “Can you come down? There’s a storm coming,” he says. “We’re staying another night.

  “We’re going to ride out the storm under a ledge?” I reply. “We might as well keep going and try to find a cave or an abandoned building?”

  “We’re fifty miles from the Utah border. There’s nothing out here.”

  I sigh before I dangle my legs over the ledge and allow Isaac to lower me. He sets me on the snow in front of him and stares into my eyes searching for a sign of warmth.

  I shake my head. “This isn’t working, Isaac. I want out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “This,” I say, pointing at both of us. “I can’t keep denying reality.”

  “Exactly which reality are you referring to: the one you’ve created in your head as an excuse to dump me or the one where everything I’ve done has been with your best interests in mind? Because I seem to remember that you’re the one who left me behind to die five months ago and I forgave you instantly, Nada… I tried to be honest with you this morning and you accuse me of jerking you around when all I’ve done is try to take care of you.”

  I feel as if I’ve been chastised.

  “What? You didn’t expect me to have anything to say?” he continues. “Contrary to popular opinion, I do have feelings and I can’t believe… I can’t believe I have to explain that to you after everything we’ve been through.”

  Either Isaac is an excellent actor or I’m a horrible person—and I don’t believe I’m a horrible person. At least, not intentionally.

  “I need some time to think,” I reply. “But I want you to know that I never once accused you of not having feelings. And I know you had every right not to forgive me for leaving you behind… but I’m glad you did.”

  I turn to leave and he grabs my hand. He pulls me into his arms and I feel as if I might dissolve into a puddle at his feet. I hold tightly to the front of his jacket so I don’t falter.

  “Are you okay?” he asks worriedly.

  “Yeah, I just lost my balance,” I reply. “I’m fine.”

  I guess I’m not in the habit of being honest with Isaac either.

  Snow flurries whip through our shelter beneath the ledge. We have no choice but to huddle together to conserve warmth. Isaac sits on my left while Elysia sits on my right with my book propped up on her knees. Daedric is on Elysia’s right with Eve then Mary after him.

  Elysia practically screams each sentence aloud to be heard over the roaring wind. “What’s this word?” she yells, when she comes to the word convoluted.

  “It means complicated,” I reply. “All messed up.”

  Sort of like the convoluted mixture of emotions I’m experiencing as I sit between Isaac and Elysia. Is this what being a parent will be like when we’re older? Assuming we survive.

  I listen to Elysia read aloud the words I’ve read dozens of times and suddenly I’m overcome with an intense desire to make sure she survives. She reads a funny part of the book and everyone laughs, except me because I can hear her shivering. I wrap my arm around her shoulder and pull her closer to me. She rests her head on my shoulder and continues reading.

  The wind finally stops and Isaac and Daedric get to work clearing the snow out of the shelter while the rest of us stand outside. Eve and Elysia play tag as Mary and I sit in silence as a light coating of snow builds on the hoods of our coats.

  “I… I’m sorry about what I said this morning,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond. She sits in silence staring at Isaac and Daedric as they work. Though I believe Mary should be apologizing to me, I want her to know how sorry I am. I do think Mary has some despicable qualities, but I don’t think she’s a despicable person.

  “I was angry,” I continue. “Yeah, sometimes I feel like you do things without thinking of who you might be hurting, but I don’t think—I know you’re not a despicable person… You’re a beautiful person… with some messed up ideas about how to get what you want.”

  Mary’s mouth curls into a smile, which she quickly clears away. “Nada, you’re not the only one entitled to happiness,” she replies. “You have something I want and he wants me, too. Don’t I deserve to be happy?”

  “So you’re saying you won’t stop until you’ve broken us up because you deserve to be happy?”

  “Stop what? I don’t have to do anything to get Isaac back. It’s not my fault if you can’t see Isaac for what he truly is. You’re sleepwalking, Nada. It’s tragic.”

  My mind flashes to five weeks ago, the day after Isaac and I made love for the first time. Mary forced Isaac to tell me the gritty details of their last encounter together. The smile on her face as she watched my confidence in Isaac wither away was obscene. Mary’s lack of empathy is obscene.

  She may claim she deserves happiness, but Mary hates herself for being so self-serving. I know this because her self-hatred is spelled out in the scars that crisscross her arms. She may succeed in fooling herself, but I’m not for a single second fooled by this wicked disguise.

  I shake my head. “No, Mary, the way you underestimate the goodness in others is what’s tragic.”

  I stand in the fresh snow and trudge back to the campsite to help get the fire started.

  “What did she say to you?” Isaac asks, as Daedric sets off to gather firewood.

  I brush snow off the stones we’ve been using to contain the fire. “Nothing that matters,” I reply. “Can you help Daedric look for firewood? I want to get this fire started quickly.”

  “Sure,” he replies before he plants a kiss on my forehead and sets off after Daedric.

  When Isaac is gone, I quickly unzip Mary’s backpack and rummage through her stuff until I find all three of her knives. As much as I dislike Mary at this moment, I know my comment is enough to send her sprinting down the path of self-destruction. And I don’t want Elysia to witness the aftermath of one of Mary’s cutting sessions.

  Mary enters the shelter with an all-too-familiar expression of hopelessness mortared onto her heart-shaped face. She sits next to her backpack and immediately unzips the front pocket. She digs through the half-dozen sticks of sunblock and lip balm she carries. She doesn’t even have to search the rest of her backpack to know all her knives are gone.

  She glares at me for a moment before she takes a deep breath to calm herself. “I need those,” she says.

  “For what?” I reply.

  “For carving Isaac’s and your initials into the wall.”

  I can’t help but smile. “Clever, but there will be no carving here tonight. No one’s going hunting in this weather, so I think I’ll just hold on to the knives.”

  Mary snickers. “St. Nada… helping the needy.”

  Daedric enters the shelter, but he’s not carrying any firewood. I want to ask him if everything is okay, but he speaks before I have a chance to open my mouth.

  “Next time, don’t send him out there to help me,” he says to me. “I don’t need anyone’s help—especially his.”

  Mary raises her eyebrows. “That makes two of us,” she says. “So how about you hand over what’s mine?”

  The pain in my chest fires through my throat and explodes in my face. I scramble out of the shelter before the first tears fall. I trudge through eighteen inches of snow as quickly as I can. Within minutes, my thighs are burning, but I push through the pain. I let the pain propel me farther from the shelter until I reach a steep, rocky ravine.

  I lower myself just far enough that I can’t be seen from the shelter then I squat in the snowpack. The tears are warm on my cheeks until the tracks freeze on my skin. I pull my hood tightly around my face and tuck my head into my knees to shield my face from the cold.

  The ravine below is as long and wide as the cafeteria at Whitmore. Through the tears, the sharp boulders and snow-filled crevices rise and fall across the landscape like Guardians towering in the distance. Maybe they are Guardians.

  I shut my eyes tightly to squeeze out the tears
and my stomach growls—the alarm sounds. Time to feed the human growing inside you.

  I should return to the shelter.

  “Wake up… Wake up, Nada.”

  I open my eyes and Eve and Elysia are standing at the top of the ravine.

  “Are you sick?” Elysia asks.

  “No,” I say. “I was just a little tired. I was… looking for firewood.”

  Eve looks disappointed with this lie, but she still holds out her hand to pull me up.

  “We saw you walk over here,” Eve says, as we tread through the snow back toward the shelter. “You weren’t looking for firewood.”

  I don’t respond. What am I supposed to say?

  Eve grabs my arm to stop me. “Nada, you have to believe that everything is going to be all right.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Everything is obviously not all right. And it’s never going to change.”

  Elysia looks confused. “Are we gonna die?” she asks, and Eve shoots me a penetrating glare.

  “No, we’re not going to die,” I say, trying to force myself to sound chipper. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “Yes, you did,” Elysia replies. “And you shouldn’t lie.”

  My lips curl into a smile. “You’re right. I shouldn’t lie and I did mean what I said, but I only said it because I was tired and grumpy from my nap. It was a really stupid thing to say. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  Elysia shrugs. “It’s okay. I’m used to you guys saying stupid things.”

  I suddenly realize why Eve prefers nine-year-old Elysia’s company to the rest of us. A child could find a shining diamond of truth at the center of the darkest maze of lies.

  CHAPTER 11

  It takes six days of hiking over mountains and what is now frozen tundra for us to make it forty miles from Salt Lake City. We are officially in the Northern Sector. Foreign territory. We don’t know the rules in the Northern Sector—if there are any rules. All we know about the North we’ve learned through countless encounters with drifters and dreamers. All I know about the North is it may be our last hope.

  It may have taken us six days to get here, but it took about six seconds for me to realize my friendship with Daedric is deader than snow. He hasn’t so much as looked at me since he scolded me for sending Isaac to help him collect firewood. Every time I read with Elysia, he pretends to have something to do so she won’t ask him to read along with us. We finished Undine’s Daughter two days ago and she immediately requested an encore. I told her we should wait a few days. I didn’t tell her this was to give her brother a break from all his important errands.

  Meanwhile, Isaac has been pulling the same silent treatment performance on Mary. And the parallel to Daedric’s behavior makes me wonder if what Mary said about Isaac is true. Does Isaac really want her back? Or does Daedric just want nothing more to do with me?

  It seems the universe has been shoving Isaac and I together in a series of cosmic head-on collisions. Maybe I should just accept my fate.

  “We should just camp out here,” I say, as we stop to rest under the bare branches of a frozen elm tree. “The sun is going to set in an hour. We should rest up so we’re ready for whatever we find tomorrow.”

  “Nada’s right,” Isaac says. “But I don’t think we’re going to find any useful firewood out here. Everything’s frozen.”

  “You can sleep with me, Mary,” Daedric says then he winks at her.

  Mary’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

  “What was that?” I blurt.

  Isaac chuckles as he sets my backpack on the snow beneath the elm and begins rolling out our sleeping bag.

  “Come on, you guys,” Eve says, as she unrolls her sleeping bag. “Can we not do this today?”

  “What are they doing?” Elysia asks.

  “Acting like kids,” Eve replies. “Get inside.”

  Elysia and Eve are snuggled inside their sleeping bag though it’s still hours from bedtime. It’s too cold out here not to huddle together for warmth.

  Daedric lays his sleeping bag out and holds it open for Mary to slip inside. He gets in after her and zips the bag closed behind him before he faces away from Isaac and me. Mary is completely obscured from view, but something Daedric whispers to her evokes a shrill giggle that echoes in my chest.

  I turn to Isaac and he’s glaring at Daedric’s back. I climb into our sleeping bag without another word. He slips in behind me so we’re facing away from Daedric and Mary.

  “I need to tell you something,” he whispers in my ear.

  “I don’t want to know,” I reply.

  He probably wants to tell me something about Mary, something that will ruin what little hope I have for a normal future with Isaac and our child.

  “Nada, this doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s about you… and Daedric.”

  Just hearing Isaac bring up this subject makes my muscles tense.

  “Go ahead.”

  He places his hand on my shoulder. “Can you turn around?”

  I turn around to face him and I’m surprised to find him looking like a child who just got caught stealing candy.

  “What?” I ask impatiently.

  “Mary told me something.”

  “I thought you weren’t talking to Mary.”

  “This was before… This is why I haven’t spoken to her.”

  He shifts uncomfortably in the sleeping bag and I can sense an uneasiness building inside him.

  “She told me that Daedric told her he… he still loves you.”

  An astonishing lightness overcomes me and I feel as if I could float away if I wasn’t trapped inside this sleeping bag. I turn away from Isaac and close my eyes.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I whisper.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess… I see the way you look at him. I’m not blind. I love you and I… want you to be happy.”

  I reach back and grab Isaac’s arm and drape it over my waist. He buries his face in my hair and squeezes me tightly.

  I turn around again to face him. “Isaac?”

  “Now I feel like a total idiot. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  I kiss him on the cheek and look him in the eye. “Thank you for loving me,” I whisper. “I never told you this, but… through everything… when my mom died and all the times I thought we were going to die… you were the light that I reached for… You’re my sun.”

  He kisses my forehead before he speaks. “This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on us. It’s just that… sometimes fighting for someone means you have to set them free.”

  The tears slide down my face swiftly as I realize this is it. This is the end of us. He kisses both my eyelids then he kisses my mouth. The salty taste of my tears lingers on his lips. This will be the last time we share a kiss like this and I want it to last forever.

  “We can’t do this,” he whispers, as he pulls away.

  I nod. “So… what do we do now?”

  Isaac smiles the same charming smile I first noticed across the cafeteria at Whitmore. “Now, we live.”

  I throw my arms around his neck and wrap my leg around his waist and squeeze.

  He laughs loudly. “Alright, alright. Our wrestling days are over,” he says, as he peels my arms from round his neck and kisses both my hands. “Turn around so you can get some rest and we’ll eat in a while.”

  Daedric loves me. These words play on a loop as I turn away from Isaac and use his arm as a pillow.

  Then a sobering thought hits me like a cannon in my belly. What if Daedric never told Mary he still loves me? What if Mary made this up to try to break Isaac and me up?

  CHAPTER 12

  My paranoia keeps me awake and the three hours we’re supposed to be resting I spend gnashing my teeth. Finally, Isaac reaches over me and unzips the sleeping bag.

  “Time to eat,” he says, patting my belly softly before he climbs out of the sleeping bag.

  For someone who claims to love me so much, he’s unbelievably chipper cons
idering we just broke up. I don’t want to read too far into it, but something is definitely amiss.

  Elysia bursts out of her sleeping bag and runs to me. “Can we read now?” she asks.

  I make room for her to slide in next to me as I watch Mary climb out of Daedric’s sleeping bag.

  “Let’s go hunting,” Isaac says to Mary.

  She doesn’t question the fact that Isaac hasn’t spoken to her in days or the fact that it’s too dark to hunt. She immediately digs through her backpack for a knife.

  “It’s too dark to hunt,” I say, as I unzip my backpack to retrieve Undine’s Daughter.

  “We won’t be able to do it in the morning,” Isaac replies, without looking at me. “We have too much to do to get ready before we head to the city.”

  Mary pulls her switchblade from her backpack and pulls her hood over her head. “I’m ready.”

  As I watch Isaac and Mary trudge off into the night all I can think is that my foolishness knows no bounds. Daedric digs an extra knit cap out of his backpack and throws it to me.

  “Can you put that on her?” he asks.

  I snatch the cap off the snow and pull it over Elysia’s head as she rolls her eyes at me. I tuck her stray hairs under the cap then turn back to Daedric.

  He shakes his head. “You give away your trust too easily,” he says, before he crawls toward me.

  He pulls my hood over my head and ties it tightly below my chin.

  “They’re not hunting,” I whisper.

  Daedric shakes his head as he pulls a spare blanket from his backpack and drapes it over my shoulders.

  He shakes Elysia’s arm. “Get in the bag with Eve so she doesn’t get cold. We’ll read to you over there.”

  Elysia scurries back and Eve hastily tucks her in. Daedric pulls his sleeping bag next to Eve’s and he and I sit on top of it to read to Elysia.

  “Are you still cold?” he asks.

  I shake my head, but the truth is I’m frozen.

  Daedric opens the book in his lap and squints at the page through the moonlight. He reads the first two chapters before I realize I am Undine’s Daughter. I thought I had spent the past few years basking in the glow of Isaac’s love and friendship. The truth is I was living in the shadow of his filthy lies.