Ravensong

by TJ Klune

  The wolf whined.

  I reached for him.

  He licked the tips of my fingers before he collapsed, eyes closed.

  The fog cleared.

  I felt it then. The broken shards within me. As if I’d been shattered into pieces. It wasn’t like when my mother had died. When my father had killed her.

  It was more.

  It was so much more.

  “No,” I whispered.

  LATER, WHEN Mark had healed enough to stand on his own, we moved through the woods.

  He led the way, limping awkwardly.

  Everything hurt.

  Everything.

  The forest wept around us.

  I could feel it in the trees. In the ground beneath my feet. In the wind. The birds were crying, and the forest shook.

  My tattoos were dull and faded.

  A human man lay next to a tree. He wore body armor. There was a rifle at his feet. His throat had been ripped out. He stared sightlessly into nothing.

  Mark growled.

  We moved on.

  I reached through the bonds of packpackpack, but they were broken.

  I said, “Oh god, Mark, oh god.”

  He rumbled deep in his chest.

  We found the clearing. Somehow.

  The air smelled of silver and blood.

  Humans lay on the ground, mangled and gored.

  And wolves. So many wolves. All shifted.

  All dead.

  The bigger ones.

  The smaller ones.

  I cried out at the anguish of it all, trying to find someone, anyone who—

  Movement off to the right.

  A woman stood there, pale in the moonlight. She held a baby.

  Elizabeth Bennett said, “Gordo.”

  Two wolves were at her side.

  Richard Collins.

  And—

  Thomas Bennett moved toward me. His wolf was bigger than I’d ever seen it before. His eyes never left me. Every step he took was slow and deliberate. When he stood in front of me, I understood all that we had lost.

  And what he had gained.

  His eyes flared red in the deep, dark night.

  Through my horror, I said the only thing I could.

  Alpha.

  the third year/not yet

  SOME NIGHTS I dreamed of the moon and blood and Mark dragging his broken body toward me.

  Other nights I dreamed of kissing him on a warm summer afternoon.

  “You say his name, sometimes,” Carter told me once.

  “Who?”

  “Mark.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, Gordo. Sure you don’t.”

  “I will fucking turn your tongue to silver if you don’t shut up, Carter. I swear to god.”

  He grinned at me, waggling his eyebrows. “Is it those kind of dreams? You know, the ones where you and Mark are all rubbing on each—you know what, I just realized that’s my uncle and I’m going to stop talking now.”

  Kelly gagged.

  Joe stared out the window.

  Goddamn Thomas for leaving me with these assholes.

  THERE WERE stretches of days and weeks when we’d be spinning our wheels.

  We ate shitty diner food in Bonners Ferry, Idaho.

  We slept in a ramshackle motel on the outskirts of Bow Island, Alberta.

  The wolves left massive paw prints in the dunes of the Great Sandhills.

  We drove along lonely stretches of road in Nowhere, Montana.

  Some days we didn’t speak for hours and hours.

  Then there were the other days.

  “WHAT DO you think they’re doing right now?” Kelly asked, feet up on the dash. His head was against the headrest, face turned toward his brother.

  Carter was silent for a long time. Then, “It’s Sunday.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s tradition.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, Carter.”

  He said, “Mom’s probably in the kitchen. There’s music playing in the background. A record on her old record player. She’s dancing. Slow. And she’s singing along.”

  “What song?”

  “I don’t—maybe Peggy Lee. That… sounds right.”

  “Yeah. It does. Peggy Lee singing ‘Johnny Guitar.’”

  I didn’t move as Kelly’s voice broke. His brother did. He reached across the console and took Kelly by the hand. The tires rolled against the cracked pavement. I didn’t look away. I was enraptured by the sight in front of me. Somewhere to my right, Joe breathed but didn’t speak.

  “Johnny Guitar,” Carter agreed. “I always liked that song. And Peggy Lee.”

  “Me too,” Kelly said, sniffling quietly. “She’s real pretty. Song is sad, though.”

  “You know how Mom is. She likes—she likes that kind of music.”

  “What else?”

  “She’s in the kitchen with Peggy Lee asking Johnny to play it again. And she’s getting dinner ready because it’s tradition. There’s roast and mashed potatoes, the kind with sour cream and potato skins.”

  “And probably some pie too, huh?” Kelly asked. “Because she knows how much you like pie.”

  “Yeah,” Carter said. “Apple pie. There’s probably some ice cream in the freezer. Vanilla bean. You get warm pie topped with melted ice cream and I swear, Kelly, there’s nothing better.”

  “And she’s not alone, right? Because the others are there with her.”

  Carter opened his mouth once, twice, but no sound came out. He coughed and cleared his throat. Then, “Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. “Ox is there. And he’s smiling, okay? He’s smiling in that way he does. A little goofy with the side of his mouth. And he’s watching her dance and sing and cook. She’s handing him a basket filled with rolls fresh from the oven, covered in that green dish towel. He’ll take it outside and put it on the table. And when he comes back inside, she’ll ask him if he remembered to put the cloth napkins out, because we aren’t uncivilized here, Ox, we may be wolves, but we have some decorum.”

  Kelly was crying quietly, head bowed. His brother squeezed his hand tight. These men, these large, intimidating men, were clinging to each other, and almost desperately so.

  I opened my mouth to say something, anything, when Carter said, “And Mark’s there too,” and I nearly bit my tongue clean through. Carter looked straight at me in the rearview mirror. “Mark’s there too. He’s watching over them both. He’s humming along with Mom and Peggy Lee. And he’s thinking about us. Wondering where we are. What we’re doing. If we’re okay. He’s hoping that we’re coming home. Because he knows we belong with him. With them. Because it’s Sunday. It’s tradition. And he’s—”

  Joe growled angrily. It sent a chill down my spine.

  Carter fell silent.

  Kelly wiped his face with the back of his hand.

  I looked over in time to see a single tear fall from the Alpha’s cheek.

  No one spoke for a long time after that.

  BIRCH BAY, Washington.

  There lived an old witch, someone I didn’t want to even think about, much less see. But none of the wolves argued with me when I told them to point the SUV west. They were out of ideas. We hadn’t had a lead in months. Richard Collins was playing with us, and we all knew it.

  The witch didn’t seem surprised when we rolled up to his tiny house on a cove. “I see things,” he said from his chair on the porch, even though I hadn’t said a word. “You know this, Gordo Livingstone.”

  His eyes were milky white. He’d been blind since he was a child, early in the last century.

  He stood, back hunched. He shuffled slowly through the door.

  “You know,” Carter said, “this is the point in horror movies where I usually shout at the screen for the people to not go inside the house.”

  “You’re a werewolf,” I muttered. “You’re the one that’s usually waiting for the people inside the house.”

  He looked
offended.

  I ignored him.

  Gravel crunched under my feet as I followed the witch inside. The porch steps creaked before I walked through the darkened doorway.

  Seagulls called just outside an open window. Farther on, there was the low rush of the tide washing against a rocky beach. The air was cool, and the house smelled of salt and fish and mint. Overhead, hung on strings from the ceiling, were the skulls of cats and small rodents. He was old-school magic, the type that always had a caldron bubbling as he rolled bones from a cup made from an ancient tree.

  He was also completely out of his mind, which is why he was a last resort.

  “What in the fuck,” Carter muttered after walking into the rather large skull of an animal I didn’t think I’d ever seen before.

  “It’s certainly not the interior design choice I would have gone for,” Kelly whispered to him.

  “You think? Nothing says ‘welcome to my murder shack’ like skeletons hanging from the ceiling.”

  “Is that a jar of eyeballs on the shelf?”

  “What? No, don’t be stup—that’s a jar of eyeballs on the shelf. Well, now I’m officially that person that shouldn’t have gone inside the house.”

  Joe came in last. He crossed the threshold and his eyes briefly flared red.

  The old witch stood near a cast-iron stove. He was stoking the fire inside. Embers sparked out, landing on his skin. He didn’t flinch. He closed the stove and put the charred poker next to it before settling down in an old recliner. He stared in my direction, head cocked.

  “Don’t touch the jar of eyeballs,” Kelly hissed at his brother.

  “I just want to see it—”

  “What are they prattling on about?” the witch asked.

  “Eyeballs,” I said mildly.

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Those. Eyes of my enemies, those are! Scooped them out myself with a dull and rusty spoon. The wolves I took them from kicked and screamed, but to no avail. They were of the curious sort, much like yourselves, touching things that didn’t belong to them.”

  “Eep,” Carter said.

  Kelly covered his eyes with a hand.

  I snorted, shaking my head.

  Joe said nothing.

  The old witch cackled. “Ah, youth. Such a waste.”

  “We don’t mean to intrude,” I started, but stopped when he waved me off with a gnarled hand.

  “Yes,” he said, “you did. You meant that specifically. It’s the reason you’re here. I may be old, Gordo Livingstone, but I can still smell the bullshit you always seem to sling. And don’t give me that look. You are nearly forty years old. Keep making that face and it’ll freeze like that. You’ll end up looking like me.”

  I stopped scowling at him.

  “That’s better,” he said. “You would think with your mate being back in Green Creek, you’d have learned happiness again. Though I suppose the events of the past few years took much of that away.”

  The fire snapped and popped. The seagulls called. I began to wish we’d never set foot inside Birch Bay as I felt the eyes of my pack slide over to me.

  He put a hand next to his ear. “What’s that? Nothing else to add? Then maybe we shall just sit here and wait until someone has the balls to say what they’re thinking. Lord knows I don’t. Lost those a few years back. Cancer, if you can believe it.”

  Carter made a choking sound.

  The old witch grinned. He still had a few teeth left. “Wolves. Bennetts, I believe. I’ve always liked the Bennetts. Foolish bunch, but their hearts were usually in the right place. Who do we have here?”

  Kelly opened his mouth to speak but closed it when I gave a sharp shake of my head. I nodded toward Joe. He watched me for a moment, mouth in a thin line. Then he nodded and stepped forward.

  The floorboards creaked, and the old witch turned toward him.

  “My name is Joseph Bennett,” he said quietly, voice rusty with disuse. It’d been months since he’d spoken in more than a grunt.

  “Alpha,” the witch said with a deferential tilt to his head.

  Joe’s eyes widened slightly. “And these are my brothers. My second, Carter. My other brother, Kelly.”

  Carter waved.

  Kelly elbowed him in the stomach.

  I sighed.

  The witch nodded. “I knew your great-grandfather. William Bennett. He begat Abel. Abel begat Thomas. Thomas begat you. Tell me, Alpha Bennett, who are you?”

  Joe balked.

  “Because,” the witch continued, “I’m not sure if you know. Are you an Alpha? A brother? A son? One half of a mated pair? Are you a leader, or do you seek nothing but vengeance? You can’t have both. You cannot have it all. There isn’t enough room in your heart, though it beats as a wolf. There is strength within you, child, but even one such as you cannot live on rage alone.”

  “My father—”

  “I know of your father,” the witch snapped. “I know he fell much like his father did. One would think the Bennett name is cursed with how much you suffer. Cursed almost as much as the Livingstones. You have so much in common, it’s a wonder you can even find where one of you ends and the other begins. Your families have always been intertwined, even if the bonds were broken.”

  Carter and Kelly turned slowly to stare at me.

  “I’m doing what I have to,” Joe said, a quiet growl in his voice.

  “Are you?” the witch asked. “Or are you doing what your anger has demanded of you? When you give in to it, when you let your wolf become mired in fury, you no longer have control.”

  “Richard Collins—”

  “Is a monster who has lost himself to his wolf. He has forsaken a tether, and his eyes have become clouded in violet because of it. He is an Omega, a monster hell-bent on taking something that never belonged to him. But you, Joseph. You are not him. You will never be him, no matter how much you have to be in order to justify your actions.”

  “Didn’t I tell Joe that exact same thing?” Carter whispered to Kelly.

  “No,” Kelly whispered back. “You told him he was a fucking idiot and you wanted to go home because you hated how motels smelled like spunk and regret.”

  “So… almost the same thing, then.”

  “They understand,” Joe said, sounding angrier.

  “They?” the witch asked, though we all knew full well who Joe meant.

  “They,” Joe said. “Them. My pack.”

  “Ah. Those you left behind. Tell me, Joseph. You face the monster from your youth. You lose your father. You become an Alpha. And your first response is to tear your pack apart?” He shook his head.

  “Ox—”

  “Oxnard Matheson will play his part,” the old witch said, causing all of us to freeze. “He will become who he is supposed to be. The question that remains is whether you will do the same.”

  Joe bared his teeth. “What do you know about Ox?”

  The witch remained undaunted. “Enough to know the path you have set yourself on has diverged from his. Is this what you want? Is this what you set out to do? Because if so, then you have succeeded.”

  Joe’s eyes started to bleed red. Before I could move, he launched himself at the old man.

  He barely made it a few feet. The witch raised a hand and the air rippled around his fingers. Joe was knocked across the room into his brothers. They all fell to the floor with arms and legs flailing.

  I shook my head.

  The old witch smiled at me. “Children these days.”

  “You’re baiting them.”

  He shrugged. “Have to get my kicks somewhere. Not every day I’m visited by royalty.”

  I snorted. “Royalty.”

  “The Bennett line is as royal as it gets.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Do you?” He tapped his fingers on the table. “I was also speaking about you.”

  I sighed as the wolves squawked, trying to pick themselves up by shoving each other. “It’s not like that. Not anymore.”

  “Isn’
t it?” the witch asked me, not fooled. He nodded toward the wolves. “Theirs is a story of fathers and sons. Oxnard’s is the same, or so the bones tell me. And then there’s you.”

  I touched the roses underneath the raven on my arm. “It’s not the same.”

  “It is, Gordo, and the sooner you realize it, the sooner you’ll realize your full potential. You have already set yourself upon the right path. You have found yourself a pack again.”

  “Get off me, Carter!” Kelly snarled. “Jesus Christ, you’re heavy.”

  “Are you saying I’m fat?” Carter yelped. “I’ll have you know that women like it when I lay on top of them.”

  “We’re not your floozies,” Joe growled.

  “I should hope not. We’re related. That’s disgusting. Besides, you only wish you could get someone as hot as me. And who the fuck says floozies? What are you, ninety-four and reliving the glory of your youth?”

  “Did you just fart?” Kelly screeched, sounding horrified.

  “Yeah,” Carter said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Gas station microwave burritos are not so good on my intestines, apparently.”

  “Get off! Get off!”

  I groaned, my face in my hands.

  “Yes,” the old man said as he chuckled, “you have definitely found yourself a pack.”

  I dropped my hands and looked at him. He was smiling quietly, eyes staring off into nothing. “We need—”

  “I know what you need,” he said. “And I will help you as best I can. But you cannot go on like this forever, Gordo. None of you can. If, in the end, this endeavor proves futile, you must return to Green Creek. For too long it was without its Alpha and wolves, and only a witch to guide it. And now the witch is gone, along with the Alpha. I fear what will become of it if this persists. There are only a few places of such power left in this world. The balance must be kept. You know this better than anyone.”

  “You hear that?” Carter said. “He’s going to tell us how to kill the bad guy!”

  “That’s not what he said,” Kelly muttered.

  Joe didn’t speak.

  I turned to look at them. They were still on the floor, bodies tangled together. But they looked… content. More so than I’d seen them in a long time. Even Joe. I wondered if they’d forgotten how much a pack needed to touch, needed to feel each other’s warmth.