Year of the Tiger (Changeling Sisters)

by Heather Heffner

  I recognize this alien invasion from when my mate did it, recognize it as an attempt to assert dominance. And I remember the cold chokehold of the river when I tried to run.

  This is something I can’t flee from. Shying against all of my internal instincts, I must let her presence catch me, caress me, surround me with comforting whispers until my head is full of them, no matter how much it might repulse me. Because her presence cannot hurt me. It cannot control me. She whispers to me of the power of the moon, but I ignore her because the Dead One does not understand the moon. The Dead One does not know that the moon’s steady but sure cycle is her motherly way of empowering us, her four-legged children. When it rises to its fullest, it is her blessing to hunt. The moon does not belong to anyone.

  The Dead One approaches now, leaking false assurances in my ear. I sit, head half-cocked, and witness this preposterous phenomenon of the prey approaching me, the hunter. I must be the one to get her first. My inner instincts know this. She has no heartbeat, so I cannot attack her there.

  Her eyes are locked on mine, so she does not see the way my muscles tense. Then I launch myself at her head.

  This Dead One is fragile, little more than a child. I think Alpha will be pleased when I break her neck.

  The child withers and dies, but something—monster, I think—crawls free from her eyes. The scent of decaying rose petals smothers me, suddenly. When I turn, the Dead One is back, her hair longer, her eyes older.

  Her body stronger.

  It is the one Alpha calls “Queen.” I am consumed in an unexplainable fear of her, but everywhere I turn, she is already there. She raises a paw, authoritative, the Alpha of her dead pack. Sticker bushes erupt from the snow and dig into my flesh, tying me down. I whimper against the pain. That scent of damp rose petals is everywhere again, the terrifying smell of something beautiful that was buried cruelly by winter, yet lived on beneath the drifts of snow. Her black hair hides her face like a hood as she approaches me, and I know I am looking at something much scarier than the threat of winter. I should have known I could not kill Death.

  I want to tell Alpha, but Fire Sister pads up to face Death with me, unafraid. Fire Sister does not want me to tell “Omega,” as she savagely refers to the human girl. Omega already fled before Death’s daughter.

  I try to defend Alpha. She is more fragile than us, true, but she was here first. Her intelligence is necessary to navigate this world. Her raw, bright emotions, which I do not understand but love to look at, are necessary.

  Fire Sister reminds me that survival is necessary. That, we can both agree upon. Alpha will understand.

  I cough brimstone. Great, rubicund flames, the pelt of Fire Sister, rise to engulf my vision, and I flee from the second thing I am afraid of: wildfire.

  ***

  At last.

  I pop the irksome thorns off at my leisure, reveling in the fresh air gathering on my tongue. Omega buried me deep because she was afraid of me. I, the Demon Wolf, chase fear. It makes me hungry. I gobble it down, and then look around for more.

  This place is cold and painful and reeks of her—the Old One. This “Queen” is a daughter of hers, but not the one I seek. I will have to drive her out. The older they get, the more they have to lose. The more they fear.

  In this white cold place, I need to be fed. But I can last. Because a powerful thing fuels my infernal flames: hunger. The Old One has enough power to satisfy me. I will take her life…as well as all of that delightful, colorful energy I sense, whirling within her withered carcass like a nightscape of stars.

  I burn the rest of her precious flowers until they are smoking cinders. The flakes hit her wasting cheek, and she winces, slightly. Then my monstrous jaws close around her head.

  She wriggles helplessly as I tilt my head back, prepared to swallow her whole. My tooth punctures her torso, but still, she does not give up. Her arms claw through my living, breathing flames. I hear her footsteps stumble away from me, headless. When I swallow the head whole, her body hits the whiteness with a thud.

  I paw the ground where her body lay. Ashes. But her burned hairs still tickle my throat, causing me to choke. Immediately, I can sense the Old One’s presence. She is here. And she is watching me. Content to let me run blindly around in circles. Before she strikes.

  I track her scent down the mountain, testing each ice patch carefully. The trail I follow smells of dust, and broken words, and dried blood. The abyss expels a gust of wind, and my flames are blown on end. I am still choking on those hairs. I bend over, hacking, trying to cough up a ball of matted hair, when I hear it distinctly: a single crack.

  Then ice fangs from above slam through me like spears, and it doesn’t stop there. Several more tons of snow crush me, bury me, and my fire splutters under their dark, burrowing fingers.

  It is in this fleeting moment of frailty that Omega climbs her way back in.

  Crawl, she tells me. Crawl free.

  Why? I accuse her. This is all you have ever done to me. Hide me. Bury me.

  When she answers, I understand that for now, she is Alpha:

  I was wrong. You are me. I am you. Wolf is us.

  ***

  I gasped, coming to, and the first thing I felt was the wooden prayer wheel splintering against my skin. Sure, my flesh was scarred and bumpy, but thank God, it was mine. There was nothing more terrifying than feeling like you were on fire.

  Demon had stayed true to its word. It—She—I didn’t know how to refer to my third soul persona anymore—had pulled us free of the avalanche.

  “C-clothes,” I said through chattering teeth, “come.”

  The night remained impassive to my entreaties. Clouds whispered around my bare skin, leaving gifts of diamond rain drops.

  A robe patterned with black roses dropped at my feet. Slowly, I pulled it on. The mists parted, and I raised my head to see old, sagging eyes of twilight gazing back.

  Vampyre. Maya’s fourth and final life stage. Even Khyber hadn’t seen the grandmother for centuries. This was the creature who remembered how the gardens of Jerusalem smelled, who’d watched men of the Crusades throw themselves at each other for salvation, land, and glory, who’d walked among fields of the starving and the wretched, looked into the hollow eyes of those marked by the Black Plague and felt—hunger. The empires of the Mongols, Chinese emperors, Romans, English, the Aztec: all had crumbled over the centuries or combust into flames—but hers remained. Silhouetted in secrecy was the Court of Eve. And this was its Queen. Like all earthly rulers, her throne was built of blood.

  Her squatting shape watched me from the cliffs above, more wild animal than human. Rain fell through her dusky gray wings, yet they held together stubbornly, like threads of a spider web. Her nose and chin were elongated, and flaps of loose skin hung over her bones, suggesting she hadn’t eaten for a long time. I knew that couldn’t be right, but then again, there was only one thing that would sustain a vampyre of her age: souls.

  I could see them: They pelted their fists against the cage of her eyes and then wheeled away in a kaleidoscope of lights. Somewhere in there was my eldest sister’s.

  This—monster—really was a child of the Dark Spirits. But frighteningly more substantial.

  I watched in horror as Vampyre clambered her way down the rocks. She smiled at me, and to my disgust, I felt great calm wash over me. She wanted to ssh away all my fears. Wolf had been trussed up in thorns, and Demon lay in a pile of smoking ashes. Finally, she could have her feast: me.

  “For a broken soul is better than nothing at all,” Vampyre told me, as softly persuasive as a kindly grandmother. “Then you shall be my Dark Dog. And you will help me hunt down and take the rest of your friends. I must be strong when they come for me.”

  The Dark Spirits. Lunar New Year was nearing its close, and when it did, Maya would have broken her deal with them. I remembered how ruthlessly Fred had carried out his sentence on the goblins. Maya would be bound to whatever curse the Dark Spirits cast upon her.

/>   Her winged shadow fell over me. I did the only thing left to me: I prayed.

  Chapter 41: Lady of Eve

  One old, wrinkled finger touched my right eye. I cried unabashedly now, as she closed it. I knew instantly that she’d taken it with that death touch she and Khyber shared; my right eye was gone forever.

  “Please!” I begged the four animal faces on the blurry prayer wheel, sitting in silent judgment. “I need your help!”

  The jackdaw had died defending me once. The monkey was a mischievous messenger, but not foolish. No way it would risk its own life. The serpent would not come to my aid; had I not called upon its children to deliver me to freedom three times?

  Vampyre hushed me, and I found that I couldn’t speak. Her gray wings enveloped me, as she reached to take my other eye. I fixed my last view of this world on the long empty shrine of the tiger.

  Please, I called, I am not the lone hunter you are. I can’t stop her alone.

  Time seemed suspended; my chest beat with the hollowness from where Wolf and Demon should be. Then a thin, uncertain voice: “Dog-girl?”

  We turned, Vampyre and I, to see No-Name.

  I expected No-Name to realize why she was here, but she seemed more surprised than I.

  “No!” she wailed at the sight of Vampyre. “Dog-girl, why do you bring me here?”

  “I brought you here?” My mind ran furiously. How was this possible? No-Name was the last person I wanted to summon. How could I have brought Maya’s soul right to her doorstep, when I’d called upon the tiger?

  Vampyre’s eyes blazed with greed. She dropped me to the snow and flashed behind No-Name in an instant.

  “Who are you, child?” she breathed, drinking in the scent of her neck.

  No-Name cowered, beating her fists in the snow. “I am no-name-no-name-no-name—”

  “Yes, child; you need no name.” Vampyre loomed over her, unable to contain her blood lust any longer. “You are little more than a thing—a thing that is rightfully mine. You are my soul.”

  No-Name mewled as Vampyre caressed the red ribbon around her neck. The cry was hauntingly familiar, blown in from the dust of Vampyre’s wings. My eyes grew wide as their scents swept over me; they didn’t smell the same. Vampyre dripped of death, suffocating and heavy. No-Name was something different. Something wild, like me: a dual child.

  The red ribbon flickered on the edge of my memory. I followed it back into Raina’s dreams, to the scene of betrayal on an icy, desolate ledge, in which Maya had stabbed the Lady of Eve. She’d leashed something that had escaped upon the white tiger’s death: a young, infantile spirit, crying to follow its mother.

  I’d thought what had been leashed had been the white tiger’s soul. But the white tiger had been whole. Unshakeable. It had been a newborn cub that had bitten Maya, had taken something from her, before the leash had been clamped around its neck.

  Once upon a time, the white tiger had tried to become human. She’d failed. I doubted any of us would ever know why she’d dreamed of becoming a human, but it was obvious why she would seek that sort of protection for someone else.

  What if Maya hadn’t been the only one with child?

  The white tiger would want to protect her daughter. Especially considering what she held.

  “Mother’s scared of the fire that burned our home to the ground,” No-Name had told me, a long time ago, upon the lily pond. She’d fled from fire and all things man-made. Like a beast of the forest.

  “Stop!” Both turned to stare at me, as I raised myself up on an elbow in the snow. “I know who you are! You do have a name that your mother gave to you, a name that no human knows: You are the daughter of the white tiger. And you are the true heir to Eve.”

  I crawled submissively toward them on my belly like a good Omega, so they let me approach. “Your mother protected you from Maya by hiding you in a human’s shape. But you—you were frightened. You couldn’t remember how to change back. And eventually you forgot everything about who you were, except this: you were the daughter of a dead queen. If I know anything from watching the vampyres spin tales of false love in the heads of the innocent, it’s that the truth can be buried. But now you must remember,” I told No-Name’s wary eyes, hands upheld in supplication, “because we need you now.”

  And I tore the red ribbon free from her neck. No-Name continued to stare at me, more of a frightened deer than a tiger, and I remembered how Raina had triggered her own transformation from human to dragon.

  “Run!” I cried. “Run!”

  But it was too late; Vampyre pounced on No-Name before she’d fled two steps and twisted her neck painfully into place in the snow.

  “If the dog-girl speaks the truth, then I have found the last piece keeping me from ruling the Dark Spirits!” the ancient creature crowed. “A daughter of my old friend, the Lady of Eve! Your soul will give me sole ownership of the spirit world. No more challenges, no more sacrifices—all of Eve will be mine!”

  And she plunged her fangs into No-Name’s neck. I clawed at her back, trying to stop her, but those damned wings bucked about like a whirlwind. Black rot leaked around Vampyre’s kiss, creeping down No-Name’s cheeks, over her arms, curling around her toes, until the poor girl’s head jerked and convulsed under the spell of death. She expelled something into the air, something lonely and tear-shaped: a black spot upon the world. And Vampyre swallowed it.

  I screamed my hopelessness.

  One of Vampyre’s wings shattered into dust.

  We stared at the spot in surprise. Then, slowly, a great light appeared in the black fringe of Vampyre’s eyes. It moved with rapid pace, quickly overtaking her. Vampyre began to shake and splutter. The black rot ran down her eyes and ears in an effort to escape the light. Then Vampyre burst into a blizzard of black rose petals.

  I closed my eyes. The petals whirled past my cheeks—sharp, screaming with silent anger—and shriveled up upon the snow.

  When Vampyre swallowed her own soul, it seemed enough to shatter all illusions. When I opened my eyes, I could only see from one of them. But it was enough to see a white tiger sitting where No-Name’s body had fallen.

  –Maya–

  I backed up the path toward the summit. I felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation I wasn’t supposed to be a part of.

  –When you betrayed my mother, you were responsible for severing your own soul– the new Lady of Eve told her enemy’s fallen ashes. –And still, my mother gave you one last chance to save yourself. I held your soul for you all of these years, in hopes that you, a vampyre, would one day learn how to reconcile with it. But just as you let the Dark Spirits feast upon the body of your stillborn son, so, too, did you jump to devour your old friend’s daughter, not realizing what I held. And thus did the predator, unable to recognize its own image, eat itself–

  Chapter 42: The Alpha and the Omega

  They came upon me cautiously: Xiang of the goshawks; Kaelan and Yu Li; a pair of cloud leopards; the werenaga leader; a werebear, grumbling that the high elevation wasn’t good for his blood pressure; and finally, a watchful weretiger, noticeably smaller than the Lady of Eve. They looked around at the empty summit, eyes growing bigger and rounder, until all gazes came to rest upon me standing beneath the Korean flag.

  I said what they wanted to hear: “Maya the Vampyre Queen is dead. The true Lady of Eve has returned.”

  Xiang narrowed a milky yellow eye. “And who is naming herself Lady of Eve, Fire Wolf?”

  So they knew about Demon. Drat. I was saved from answering by a tiger’s low growl, rippling through the clouds like powerful thunder. Our hairs stood on end. No one had to say anything. We all knew.

  “She’s returned,” Yu Li said wonderingly. “With Maya gone, the souls can move on. We’ve won!” We fell into an excited bundle of yaps and howls, giddy like we’d fallen under the spell of the moon.

  “Seu Jaehoon-nim would be proud.” Xiang’s predatory gaze swept over the wolves present. “His successor must pass
the word along to the rest of the pack.”

  We three wolves bowed our heads.

  “Sajang-nim,” Yu Li began gruffly, “our Alpha’s passing came so sudden that I don’t believe he had time to pass the red fang on—”

  My head reared up, as if I smelled something wrong on the breeze. Kaelan, too, was staring at me funny.

  “But the juin-nim did give it to someone,” he said. “He gave it to Citlalli.”

  All heads slowly pivoted toward me and the red fang tied fast around my neck. Their long silence made me shiver.

  ***

  I cleaned and dressed myself at the Were base camp in Eve, established in the wreckage of the lunar night procession.

  “Alpha?” Bae ducked into my tent. He seemed uncertain of my English title. “The prayer wheel message you requested.”

  I snatched it, but remembered to say thank you. Bae bowed out, still looking puzzled.

  The message read:

  Vampyres retreat. All girls stable condition in hospital. Happy soon to see your face. –Moon

  I set the prayer wheel down and stared hard into a cracked hand mirror at my new face. I tried to look happy. With my one eye, I looked like a stupid leering pirate. My eyes wandered down to the red fang necklace. The one that declared me Alpha, although the jury was still out on that one. I replayed their arguments in my mind: Did Jaehoon really intend for me to be the next Alpha? How could I lead, when I was, as Xiang had put it, A) a foreigner, B) young, and C) distracted?

  I could hear Jaehoon’s stern chiding running circles around my head: I had no work ethic. I had no respect.

  I had, as he’d once admitted before a photograph of bygone pack mates, the temperament for an Alpha.

  “Were you really choosing me?” I whispered. “Or was there no other choice, in Rafael and Yu Li’s absence? What about Kaelan? Yah. Jaehoon. What about Kaelan? Do you have something against the Irish? They’re supposed to be lucky, didn’t you know? Why did you choose me?”