Ravensong

by TJ Klune

  “How human of you.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Just a moment ago you said Thomas Bennett didn’t give two shits about you. And yet here you are saying he didn’t deserve the death he got. By implication, you’re saying you cared about him, even though you don’t feel it was reciprocated. It’s such a human thing to do. A born wolf sees things in terms of pack and Alpha. Of scents and the emotions associated with them. Turned wolves tend to war with themselves, remembering both what it meant to be human and what it means to be a wolf. Humans, though. They are more… complex. More fallible. Your magic doesn’t preclude you from this complexity.” He shook his head. “It’s why humans aren’t often in packs. They don’t have the understanding of what it means to be pack.”

  “We do just fine, thank you.”

  There was that smile again. “Oh, I know. Another oddity of the Bennett pack. Ox is… unlike anything that’s ever come before. I find myself fascinated with him. We all are. He’s the topic of many conversations.”

  I took a step toward him, slowly rolling up my sleeve until the raven was exposed. I pressed two fingers against its talons and for a moment felt the sharpness of them, the heat of them burning into my skin. I took a savage satisfaction when Pappas’s eyes widened slightly. “When I was young, I sat in this room and my father carved magic into my skin. My Alpha told me I would do great things. That one day I would be his witch. Things have changed. I have new Alphas, even though I never expected to belong in a pack again. One of these Alphas also happens to be my tether.” His expression stuttered. “And from where I’m standing, it sounds like you just threatened him. I don’t take kindly to threats against my tether. Against my Alphas. Against my pack. If I wanted to, right here, right now, I could stuff you with so much silver, all they would have to do is strip your skin and they’d have a goddamn statue.”

  “Careful, Gordo,” Pappas said, voice flat. “You don’t want to burn the bridge when you’re standing in the middle of it.”

  The raven was agitated. “When you go back, you tell your Alpha that if anything should happen to my pack, that if I get even an inkling of a plan against them, against us, I’ll tear all of you apart, and I’ll do it with a fucking smile on my face. Are we clear?”

  Pappas nodded. “As day.”

  “Good. Now get the fuck out of the Bennett house. You can stay the night in town at the same motel as before, but I expect you gone by morning. We’ll take care of the Omega. I don’t want you touching her.”

  He looked as if he was going to say something more, but thought better of it. He stood and brushed by me. For a second I thought I saw something that couldn’t be there.

  A flash of violet.

  But it had to be just a trick of the light.

  The raven settled on its bed of roses, and I closed my eyes.

  THE OMEGA burned quickly on the pyre in the woods. The stars shone above brightly. The moon was more than half-full, and I knew the wolves felt its pull.

  Ox stood and watched the flames flicker toward the sky, Joe at his side. Carter and Kelly were with their mother, a shawl pulled over her shoulders. I wondered if she was thinking about the last time she’d been faced with fire, when her mate had become nothing but ash. Her sons rested their heads on her shoulders, and she hummed softly under her breath. It sounded like it was Johnny and his guitar.

  Robbie stood awkwardly next to Kelly. He looked as if he wanted to reach out and put a hand on Kelly’s back, but decided against it. He kept glancing at me, the expression on his face like he thought the sun shone out of my ass. It was unnerving, and I was going to nip that in the bud before it could become full-blown hero worship. I didn’t need a goddamn puppy following me around.

  But of course someone else noticed it too.

  “Looks like you’ve got an admirer,” Mark murmured.

  I rolled my eyes. “Kid gets stars in his eyes easier than anyone I’ve met. He’s too soft.”

  “What caused this newfound affection, you think?”

  “Why? You jealous?”

  “Do you want me to be?”

  What the fuck. “What are you—Jesus Christ. I don’t give two shits about him.”

  He snorted. “Sure, Gordo. Let’s go with that.”

  “Pappas was messing with his head. I put a stop to it.”

  I felt Mark’s gaze on me, but I watched the flames. “I never understood that. About you.”

  “What?”

  “How the outside never matched what was inside.”

  I glanced at him, eyes narrowing. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He shrugged. “You aren’t as much of an asshole as you want everyone to think you are. It’s… comforting.”

  “Fuck off, Mark. You don’t know a goddamn thing about me.”

  He laughed quietly. “Sure, Gordo.” He reached up and squeezed my arm. I was barely able to stop from jerking it away. His hand was heavy and warm and—

  Gone.

  He went to Elizabeth, leaning forward and pressing a kiss against her forehead.

  My stomach twisted something fierce.

  I left the wolves and disappeared into the forest. I had wards to check.

  MAGIC IS a strange and expansive thing.

  My father’s had been more singularly focused. He was capable of great feats, of wondrous things, but he had his limits.

  “I’m not like you,” he’d told me once, and I wouldn’t understand until I was older that he said it with a mixture of envy and irony. “Magic tends to manifest itself in odd ways. I can feel the pack. Sometimes I think I can hear them in my head. But you… you’re different. There’s never been one quite like you, Gordo. I can pass down the secrets. I can give you the tools, the symbols needed, but you will do things with them that I cannot.”

  The raven took three months to finish. The pain was immense. It felt like I was getting stabbed with a butcher knife that conducted electricity. I begged him to stop hurting me, I was his son, daddy please stop, daddy please—

  Abel held me down.

  Thomas put his hand in my hair.

  My father bent over me with the tattoo gun, the ink in the jars on the table bursting in bright colors.

  When the raven was finally finished, I felt more focused than I ever had before.

  The first time it moved, I accidentally lit a tree on fire.

  The wolves laughed at me.

  My mother cried.

  And my father?

  Well.

  He just stared at me.

  THE WARDS felt thick and strong. I pushed my hand against them and they lit up, large circles with archaic symbols carved into thin air. They were all green, green, green.

  My father had taught me how to make them.

  But I had learned to make them more.

  No one would be able to touch them.

  I’D TOLD Ox once that magic was real. That monsters were real. That anything he could think of was real.

  The wards were designed to keep the worst of them out.

  But sometimes they kept the worst things in.

  I BLINKED in a dark room, the remnants of a fading dream of a secret smile and ice-cold eyes still clinging to my skin. I turned my head, almost expecting a strong body stretched out next to mine. But he wasn’t there, of course. He hadn’t been for years.

  My phone rang again, the screen glowing white.

  I groaned before rolling over and reaching out for it.

  I put it against my ear. “Hello.”

  Silence.

  I pulled it away and squinted against the light of the screen.

  UNKNOWN.

  00:03

  00:04

  00:05

  “Hello,” I said again as I put it at my ear.

  “Gordo.”

  I sat up in the bed. I knew that voice, but it was—“Pappas?”

  “It… it hurts.” He sounded as if he were speaking through a mouthful of fangs.

  I was wide-awake. “Wh
at does? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s… something. In me. And I can’t….” His words choked off on a growl. Then, “I didn’t think… it would be me. It’s fraying. All the little threads. They’ll break. I know they’ll break. I’ve seen it before.”

  I climbed out of bed. I found jeans on the floor and pulled them on. “Where are you?”

  He laughed. It sounded more wolf than man. “She knows. I’m sorry, but she knows. More. Than you. More. Than I could say. When did they get me? When did they…?”

  “Pappas!” I barked into the phone. “Where the fuck are you?”

  The phone beeped in my ear. The call had been disconnected.

  “Motherfucker,” I muttered. I grabbed a shirt from the edge of my bed and pulled it over my head.

  I was out the door only a moment later.

  SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES were at the Shady Oak Inn, the little motel at the edge of town. A cruiser was parked in front, lights spinning. I recognized one of the deputies. Something… Jones. He’d brought his bike into the garage with a faulty clutch. I’d knocked a few bucks off the bill, given it was easier to kiss a cop’s ass then beg for leniency later.

  He and another deputy I didn’t know were standing with Will, the old guy who owned the motel, who was waving his hands around like he was doing an impression of some kind of Lovecraftian nightmare. I pulled up beside them, rolling down my window.

  “—and then it growled at me,” Will was saying, sounding slightly hysterical. “I didn’t see it, but I heard it. It was big, okay? It sounded big.”

  “Big, huh?” Jones asked. He wasn’t believing a goddamn word Will was saying. I didn’t blame him. Not really. Will was drunk more than he was sober. It was well-known. Price of living in a small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.

  Most of the time.

  “All right?” I asked, going for nonchalance and landing near it.

  Jones turned to look at me. “Gordo? What’re you doing out this late?”

  I shrugged. “Paperwork. Never ends when you own a business. Ain’t that right, Will?”

  He nodded frantically. “Oh yeah. Just mountains of it. I was doing the same thing when I heard it.”

  He was more than likely deep in a bottle of Wild Turkey. “Heard it?”

  Jones looked like he was barely restraining an eye roll. “Will here says there was some kind of animal in one of his rooms.”

  “Tore it to shreds!” Will cried. “Table overturned! Bed ruined. Gotta be a mountain lion or something. Big fucker too. I heard it, Gordo. I did. And I went to check it out, okay? Because goddamn if I was going to let another squatter come in and wreck my motel. I had a flashlight and everything. And I heard it.”

  I bet he did. “Heard what?”

  His eyes were bulging, his face red. “This… this growl. It sounded like something big, okay? I swear.”

  “Probably just a couple of kids looking to get their rocks off,” Jones said. “Will, you had anything to drink tonight?”

  “No.” Then, “Well, maybe just a couple of fingers. You know how it is.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You have anyone in there?” I asked, looking at the door Will had been pointing at. It hung off its hinges against the vinyl siding of the motel. Even from where I sat, I could see the claw marks in the wood.

  Will nodded again, head snapping up and down. “Yes, sir. Some out-of-towners. In suits. Businessmen, looks like, though they didn’t talk much about anything. They’d been here a couple of times before. Rude, if you ask me. No one was in there, though. It’s empty.”

  “Get any names, old man?” the other deputy asked. “Or did you just take cash under the table?”

  “This is a legitimate business,” Will snapped. “Of course I got names. It’s in the ledger. I’ll show you. I don’t do dirty work. And I’ve always said there’s been something weird going on in this town, okay? No one else sees it, but I do. You can’t tell me you don’t hear the howling that comes from the forest at night. Just because other people don’t talk about it doesn’t mean I won’t.”

  “Sure,” the deputy said. “Mountain lions and howling in the woods. Got it. Let’s see the ledger.”

  Will stomped off toward the office, muttering under his breath. The deputy followed him. I put the truck in Park and turned off the key as Jones began walking toward the motel room, flashlight out, hand on the grip of the gun.

  I opened the door.

  He glanced back at me. “Maybe you should stay in the truck.”

  I shrugged. “Wild animal, right? Probably more scared of us than we should be of it.”

  Jones sighed. “He’s trashed.”

  “Probably. But what else is new.”

  “At least he’s not behind the wheel,” he muttered.

  “Only because he lost his license after jumping the curb and hitting a parking meter.”

  “Said his brakes were faulty. Blew damn near three times the legal limit.”

  The gravel crunched beneath my feet as I followed Jones toward the open door.

  “See that?” he said quietly, the beam of his flashlight on the scratch marks. There were four of them, scarring the door deeply. They were big.

  “Still think it was a couple of kids?”

  “More than a mountain lion. Could have been done with a knife.”

  “Sure, Jones.”

  We stopped on the stoop near the room. Jones cocked his head, standing stock-still. Then, “I don’t hear anything.”

  That’s because there was nothing there, but I didn’t say that. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  He walked forward.

  From over his shoulder, I could see the room had been destroyed, just like Will had said. Tables overturned, the walls gouged. The bed had been ripped to shreds, the mattress hanging off the frame, springs poking up through the fabric.

  “What the hell?” Jones whispered.

  “Kids,” I said. “Drunk. Drugs. Something.”

  He shook his head. “Then what about that?”

  I followed the beam of his flashlight.

  Blood splattered the wall. It wasn’t a lot. But it was there, still wet and dripping.

  JONES WAS out in the cruiser, reporting back to dispatch. He’d changed his tune. “Animal,” I could hear him saying. “Some kind of animal. Looks like it was hurt. Will’s saying he had guests in the room, but their SUV is gone, so they might have already left town. Didn’t get a plate number.”

  The phone was ringing in my ear.

  “Gordo,” a voice said, rough with sleep.

  “Ox. We’ve got a problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  In the dirt, leading out of the parking lot and into the trees, were tracks. Bigger than an animal had any right to be.

  “Wolves.”

  she knows/then came the violet

  “ABEL TOLD you about tethers,” my father said to me once.

  I nodded, eager to please. “They keep the wolf at bay. They’re the most important things in the world.”

  “Yes,” my father said. We were sitting in the grass behind our house as we sometimes did, digging our hands into the earth to see what we could find. My tattoos felt alive. “They are. So very important. You take that tether away and all that’s left is a beast.”

  I WAS in the forest, the trees around me bending in the sharp winds. I knew these woods better than almost anyone, aside from the wolves. I’d grown up here. I knew the lay of the land. How the earth pulsed.

  I was breathing deeply, jacket shed somewhere farther back and left on the forest floor. The tattoos glowed brightly, and my skin felt like it was crawling.

  I reached out my senses, letting them ripple through the territory around me. The wards were still intact. I flexed my hands. They flared briefly, strong and fibrous.

  In the distance, I heard the howl of a wolf.

  It wasn’t one of mine.

  It was enraged.

  “Shit,”
I muttered, making a split-second decision.

  I ran, feet crunching leaves, branches snapping against my arms.

  I didn’t understand what was happening. If Omegas had made their way into Green Creek without me knowing. If there were hunters. If somehow my father had managed to find a way through my wards. Pappas had said it was hurting him. What if the other wolves he’d been traveling with had turned on him? They could have been just like Osmond, worming their way into positions of power before turning around and betraying those they stood beside. I didn’t know why they’d go after Pappas, or why they’d wait until they were on Bennett land to attack him.

  Countless scenarios played through my head, and in my chest, the threads pulled, those bonds I had been missing for so long. The strongest was Ox, my tether. He was moving fast, shifted into his wolf. Joe was at his side, as was Carter. Mark was bringing up the rear. They whispered to me, voices melding together and saying we’re coming we hear you we need you don’t be stupid gordo don’t do anything without us PackWitchBrotherLove. It sang in my head, louder than it’d ever been, and I felt their anger, their worry. And for a moment, I thought I felt Mark’s fear. He was scared, his heart jackrabbiting in his great chest. It caused me to stumble, almost sending me crashing down to the ground.

  I pushed back i’m fine calm fine safe stop stop stop as soothingly as I could, trying to get him to let up.

  It worked, but barely.

  He subsided, his distress a low simmer.

  They were to the east.

  The howl of the unknown wolf was coming from the west.

  wait wait just wait please wait don’t go

  I went west.

  Moments later I saw a pair of lights shining through the trees off to my right. I changed course and headed toward them. I broke through the tree line and hit a backwoods dirt road, one of the many that crisscrossed through the forest.

  The lights were coming from the generic SUV Pappas and the two Betas had arrived in. It lay on its side, its engine still ticking. The driver’s door had been ripped off its hinges and had landed in the grass at the side of the road. One of the tires was shredded. The SUV had come to rest against an old oak tree.