Ravensong

by TJ Klune

  I remembered his father standing next to me, hand on my shoulder, and I said, “Hey. You don’t have to—”

  “I can do this.”

  “Then do it.”

  His touch was soft at first, tentative. It felt good and safe, almost like it’d been before Kelly was even alive. When pack had meaning, when witches and wolves and hunters hadn’t done all they could to take everything from me. I hated how it felt. I leaned into his touch. It wasn’t sexual, not that I wanted it to be. And I sure as shit wasn’t Thomas Bennett.

  But it was something.

  He turned the clippers on.

  They buzzed near my ear.

  Hair fell onto my shoulders, my lap. To the towel on the floor.

  He tilted my head forward and backward. To the side. On and on it went.

  He saved the back for last, just as I said.

  Eventually he turned the clippers off.

  I felt lighter.

  I brushed a hand over my head, fingers scraping against the barest of stubble.

  He took a step back.

  I stood.

  The man who stared back in the mirror was harder still. The breadth of his chest. The strength in his arms. A thin layer of dark growth across his skull.

  He was a stranger. I wondered if even he knew who he was anymore.

  He looked like a wolf.

  “Is it okay?” Kelly asked. “I didn’t—”

  “It’s fine,” I said, voice rough. “It’s… fine.”

  “My turn. I want the same.”

  I blinked. My reflection blinked back. The tattoos seemed a little brighter then. “Are you sure? I could probably take some scissors and—”

  “I want the same,” he repeated.

  Carter and Joe came back when I was halfway done. Kelly’s nostrils flared, and the raven shifted lightly on my arm even before they opened the door.

  We ignored them as they called out for us.

  “Keep going,” Kelly said. “All of it.”

  “What the fuck,” I heard Carter say faintly from the bathroom doorway.

  Joe didn’t speak.

  When I finished, I set the clippers on the counter and reached down to brush off Kelly’s shoulders. He stood in front of me until we were eye level. I took him by the chin and turned his head slowly from side to side.

  I nodded and took a step back.

  He watched himself in the mirror for a long time.

  He looked older. I wondered what Thomas would think of the man he’d become. I thought he’d be devastated.

  “Do me,” Carter demanded. “I want to look like a badass motherfucker too.”

  Goddammit.

  Joe was last. We stood in that tiny bathroom, his brothers crowding around me, watching him. He reached up slowly and tugged on his hair before looking at his hands. I wondered if he saw the wolf underneath.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  From then on, every few weeks, we’d do it all over again. And again. And again.

  THERE WAS a secret pocket in my duffel bag.

  I hadn’t opened it since we left, no matter how intense the urge.

  “WHEN DID you know?” Joe asked me in a whisper, his brothers asleep in the back seat, the hum of the tires on pavement the only other sound. We had crossed from Indiana into Michigan an hour before.

  “Know what?”

  “That Ox was your tether.”

  My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “He was… a kid. His father wasn’t a good man. I gave him a job because he knew cars, but he wasn’t a good man. He took more than he gave. And he didn’t—Ox and his mom deserved more. Better than him. He hurt her. With words and with his hands.”

  A car passed us going in the opposite direction. It was the first one we’d seen in over an hour. Its headlights were bright. I blinked away the afterimage.

  “Ox came to me. Needed help, but he didn’t know how to ask for it. But I knew. He wasn’t mine, but I knew.”

  “Even back then?”

  I shook my head. “No. It was… it took longer. Because I didn’t know how else to… I didn’t know how to be who I was anymore. I hated wolves, and I hated magic. I had a pack, but it wasn’t like it was before.”

  “The guys from the garage.”

  I nodded. “They didn’t know. They don’t know, and I hope they never find out. They don’t belong here in this world.”

  “Not like we do. Not like Ox does.”

  I hated that. “Does he? Don’t you ever think what his life would be like if you hadn’t found him?”

  Joe laughed bitterly. “All the time. Every day. With everything I have. But it was—it was candy canes and pinecones. It was epic and awesome.”

  Dirt and leaves and rain—

  “Is that how you justify it?”

  “It’s what forces me out of bed when I want nothing more than to fade away.”

  The yellow lines on the road blurred.

  “I gave him a shirt with his name on it. For work. For his birthday. It was wrapped in paper with snowmen on it because it was all I could find.” I sighed. “He was fifteen years old. And it was… it shouldn’t have happened. Not like that. Not without him knowing. But I couldn’t stop it. No matter how hard I tried. It just—snapped into place. In a way that it couldn’t with Rico. Chris. Tanner. They’re my pack. My family. Ox is too, but he’s….”

  “More.”

  I was helpless in the face of it. “Yeah. More. I guess he is. More than people expect. More than I expected. He became my tether after that. Because of a shirt. Because of snowman wrapping paper.”

  “What was it? Before? Your tether.”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. I didn’t—aside from wards, I didn’t do magic. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any of it.”

  “Was it Mark, once?”

  “Joe,” I said, the warning clear in my voice.

  Joe stared out at the dark road ahead. “When you don’t speak, when you lose your voice, it causes you to focus on everything else. You spend less time worrying about what to say. You hear things you might not have heard before. You see things that would have stayed hidden.”

  “It’s not—”

  “They found me. My dad. Mom. After… he took me. They found me, and I wanted nothing more than to tell them thank you. Thank you for coming for me just like you said. Thank you for letting me still be your son even though I was cracked right down the middle. But I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t find any words to say, so I said nothing at all. I saw things. That I might not have seen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Joe said, “Carter. He puts up a front. He’s big and strong and brave, but when I came home, he cried longer than anyone else. For a long time, he wouldn’t let anyone else touch me. He’d carry me everywhere, and if Mom or Dad tried to take me from him, he’d snarl at them until they backed away.

  “And Kelly. I had… bad dreams. I still do, but not like they used to be. I would close my eyes and Richard Collins would be standing above me again in that dirty cabin in the woods, and he’d be telling me that he was only doing this because of what my father had done, how he’d killed their entire pack, that my father had taken everything away from him. And then he’d break my fingers one by one. Or he’d hit my knee with a hammer. You can’t go through what I did and not dream. He was there every time. And when I would wake up, Kelly would be there in the bed next to me, kissing my hair and whispering that I was home, home, home.”

  A splatter of rain against the windshield. Just a few drops, really.

  “Mom and Dad would… well. They would treat me as if I was fragile. Like something precious and broken. And maybe I was. To them. But it didn’t last, because Dad knew what I was capable of. What I could become. I was home for two months before he carried me on his back out into the trees and told me what it meant to be an Alpha.”

  He was smiling. I could hear
it. God, how it fucking ached.

  I knew where he was going. Who was left.

  Joe said, “Mark.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I couldn’t figure out what it was. Why he seemed to be with us, but not. There’s a signal. It’s chemical. It’s the scent of what you’re feeling. It’s like you’re… sweating your emotions. And he was happy, and he laughed. He could be angry. He was quiet and gruff. But there was always something blue about him. Just… blue. It was like when my mother went through her phases. Sometimes she was vibrant. Sometimes she raged. She was fierce and proud and overcome. But then everything would be blue, and I didn’t understand. It was azure and indigo and sapphire. It was Prussian and royal and sky. And then it was midnight, and I understood. Mark was midnight. Mark was sad. Mark was blue. And it was part of him for as long as I could remember. Maybe it was always there and I just hadn’t seen it. But since I couldn’t speak for fear of screaming, I watched. And I saw it. It’s with us now. On our skin. I can see it in you, but it’s buried under all the anger. All the rage.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “I know,” he said. “After all, I’m just a kid who has had everything taken from him. What could I possibly understand about loss?”

  We didn’t speak for a long time after that.

  IN THE border town of Portal, we came across a wolf. He whimpered at the sight of us, leather jackets, the dust of the road on our boots. We were tired and lost, and Joe’s nostrils had flared when he pressed the wolf against the side of a building in a back alley. The rain hadn’t let up for days.

  But the wolf’s eyes were violet in the dark.

  He said, “Please, let me go. Please don’t hurt me. I’m not like them. I’m not like him. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I should have never gone to Green Creek—”

  Carter and Kelly growled, teeth lengthening.

  “Why were you in Green Creek?” Joe said, voice soft and dangerous.

  The wolf was shaking. “They thought—you were gone. There was no Alpha. It was unprotected territory. We—he—thought we could get in. That if we took it for our own, Richard Collins would reward us. He would give us anything we wanted, anything we—”

  Blood spilled over Joe’s hand around his neck.

  “Did you hurt them?” he asked.

  The Omega shook his head furiously, choking as Joe’s grip tightened. “There was only a few of them, but they—oh god, they were a pack. They were stronger than we were, and that goddamn human, he said his name was Ox—”

  “Don’t you fucking say his name,” Joe snarled in his face. “You don’t get to say his name.”

  The Omega whimpered. “There were a few of us that didn’t want to be there. I just wanted—all I wanted was to find a pack again, to not—he showed us mercy. He let us crawl out of town. And I ran. I ran as fast as I could, and I promise you I won’t go back. Please don’t hurt me. Just let me go and you’ll never see me again, I swear. I can feel it pulling me down. In my head. I’m losing my mind, but I swear you’ll never see me again. You’ll never—”

  For a moment I thought Joe wouldn’t listen.

  For a moment I thought Joe would tear out the Omega’s throat.

  I said, “Joe.”

  He snapped his head toward me. His eyes were red.

  “Don’t. It’s not worth it.”

  White hair sprouted along his face as he began to shift.

  “Is he telling the truth?”

  Joe nodded slowly.

  “Then Ox let him live. Don’t take that away. Not here. Not now. He wouldn’t want you to.”

  The red faded from the Alpha’s eyes.

  The Omega slumped against the wall, sliding down as he sobbed.

  Carter and Kelly led their brother from the alley.

  I crouched in front of the Omega. His neck was healing slowly. The blood dripped down onto the collar of his jacket.

  The rain poured down.

  I said, “There were wolves. With the human.”

  The Omega nodded slowly.

  “A brown wolf. Big.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “I don’t—no. I don’t think so. Everything happened so fast, it was—”

  “Richard Collins. Where is he?”

  “I can’t—”

  “You can,” I said, rolling up the right sleeve of my jacket. The rain was cold against my skin. “And you will.”

  “Tioga,” he gasped. “He’s been in Tioga. Omegas came to him, and he told them to wait. That the time would come.”

  I said, “Okay. Hey. Hey. Calm down. I need you to listen to me, okay?”

  His eyes were bulging.

  “Do you still hear him? Does he still call for you? In your head. Like an Alpha.”

  “Yeah, yes, I can’t, it’s so loud, it’s like there’s something more, and he’s calling me to him, he’s calling for all of us to—”

  “Good. Thank you. That’s what I needed to hear. Do you know there are mines underneath this town?”

  His chest heaved. “Please, please, I won’t go to him no matter how hard he calls, no matter what he does, I won’t—”

  “You’re an Omega. It won’t matter. Live long enough and you’ll lose your mind. You said it yourself.”

  “No, no, nononono—”

  I snapped my fingers in his face. “Focus. I asked you a question. Did you know there are mines under this town?”

  His head snapped side to side. It looked painful.

  “Just gravel and sand, mostly. But if you dig deep enough, if you go into the earth, you will find things that were missed.”

  “What the hell are you—”

  I pressed my hand flat against the ground. The raven’s wings twitched. Two wavy lines on my arm lit up. I breathed in. I breathed out. It was there. I just had to find it. It wasn’t the same as it was back home. It was harder here. Green Creek was different. I hadn’t realized how much.

  “Witch,” the Omega hissed.

  “Yes,” I agreed quietly. “And you just had an Alpha’s claws around your throat and lived to tell the tale. You went to my home and were shown mercy. But I am not a wolf. And I’m not exactly human. Veins underneath the earth. Sometimes so deep they will never be found. Until someone like me comes along. And I’m the one you should be scared of. Because I’m the worst of them all.”

  His eyes turned violet.

  He began to shift, face elongated, claws scraping along the brick of the alleyway.

  But I’d found the silver in the earth, buried far beneath the surface.

  I pulled it up and up and up until a little ball of silver struck my palm, molten and hot. The raven’s talons dug into the roses, and I slammed my hand against the side of the Omega’s head as he reached for me. The silver entered one side of his head and exited the other.

  His shift pulled back.

  The violet faded.

  He slumped against the brick.

  His eyes were wet and unseeing. A drop trickled down his cheek. I told myself it was the rain.

  I stood, knees popping. I was getting too old for this shit.

  I turned and left the Omega behind, rolling down the sleeve of my jacket.

  I felt the beginnings of a headache coming on.

  The others were waiting for me at the SUV. “What did he say?” Carter demanded. “Did he know—”

  “Tioga. I saw it on the map earlier. It’s an hour away. Richard was there. Might still be.”

  “What did you do with the Omega?” Kelly asked, sounding nervous. “He’s okay, right? He’s—”

  “He’s fine,” I told them. I’d learned a long time ago how to lie to wolves. And the rain would have muffled the sound of his heartbeat. “He won’t be bothering us again. Probably across the border already.”

  Joe stared at me.

  I didn’t blink.

  He said, “Kelly, it’s you
r turn to drive.”

  And that was it.

  IT WAS in Tioga that Joe lost control.

  Because Richard had been there. His scent was all over a motel outside of town, and while it was faded, it was there, buried under all the Omega stink. We had been so close. So goddamn close.

  Joe howled until his voice broke.

  His claws tore into walls.

  His teeth shredded the bed.

  Kelly huddled at my side.

  Carter’s face was in his hands as his shoulders shook.

  Joe only pushed back the wolf when sirens sounded in the distance.

  We left Tioga behind.

  After that day, Joe spoke less and less.

  TOWARD THE end of that second year, on a day when I thought I couldn’t take another step, I opened the secret pocket in my duffel bag.

  Inside was a wooden raven.

  I stared at it.

  I stroked one of its wings. Just once.

  The wolves slept, dreaming their dreams of moons and blood.

  And when I finally closed my eyes, all I saw was blue.

  abominations

  SIX MONTHS after I turned thirteen, I kissed Mark Bennett for the first time.

  Seven months after I turned thirteen, hunters came and killed everyone.

  BUT BEFORE then:

  “She’s pregnant,” Thomas whispered to me.

  I stared at him in shock.

  His smile was blinding.

  “What?”

  He nodded. “I wanted you to know before anyone else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my witch, Gordo. And my friend.”

  “But—Richard, and—”

  “Oh, I’ll tell him. But it’s you, okay? It’ll be you and me forever. We are going to be our own pack. I will be your Alpha, and you will be my witch. You’re my family, and I hope my child will be yours too.”

  Somehow, my heart was mending.

  I WORRIED, briefly, when I breached the surface of my grief, what would happen to me. I was only twelve, and my mother was dead, my father was imprisoned in a place where he could never escape, and I was alone.