Hunter's Moon

by Bevill, C. L.

  Claire didn’t understand, but she thought that Kale meant that he literally couldn’t go through the portal. He had helped to create it with his own personal magicks. He controlled it, and he likely couldn’t control it if he was inside it.

  Tatsu reached out with one elegant hand, and the portal vanished.

  Claire was caught in a never-ending loop of time’s worst regrets.

  A throng of weres surrounded them, not saying anything. Some of them had become friends. Hands gently touched their shoulders. She pushed forward, trying to find the portal again, even while she knew it was gone. It took her only seconds, but she had to force herself to accept the reality.

  Tatsu keened and fell to her knees. Claire tried to understand what it meant. The young man had been in the Shadow Realm no more than days, but he had become something to the drakken.

  Claire wearily reached into a pants pocket and pulled out the satphone that Kale had given her not two hours before. They had brought it with them when they first opened Scarlotte’s portal, knowing they wouldn’t be able to use it there, but hoping that they would come out somewhere else where it could be used.

  She powered the unit up. The battery charge had held. It took the phone about thirty seconds to find its satellite connection.

  She found the menu and the list of numbers that had been programed into it.

  Claire looked up. It was as the other were had said. A forest and it was nighttime. The temperature indicated it was somewhere around early autumn. She didn’t know what it meant. The stars shone above them, and she could see the gentle curve of the moon as it waxed into complete fullness. “Do we know where we are?”

  “Use the GPS on the phone,” someone said.

  “Oh,” Claire said numbly.

  “Aokigahara,” Tatsu said just as numbly. “It’s the Sea of Trees. The suicide forest in the shadow of Mt. Fuji. It’s supposed to be haunted with the spirits of those who died here. This is the home of the drakken.”

  “Right,” Claire said. She knew her voice sounded dead. “At least there won’t be tourists watching us walk out to a road.” She punched a button. The other end rang three times before someone picked up.

  “Taqukaq!” someone boomed on the other end.

  “No,” Claire said sadly to the were who had raised Taq.

  Aningan didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, he said, “Claire. Your family is very anxious about you.”

  Epilogue

  Love unexpressed is useless. – Philippine Proverb

  Claire was alone for the moment. Her family didn’t like it much. The others thought she was wasting away. Calls to Kale’s branwyn relatives were the only thing that kept her going. They were trying to find another way to open Scarlotte’s portal to the Shadow Realm. It seemed unlikely that they could find more of the same dragon’s bones, in fact, Kale’s father sadly reported that he thought the portal had shorted out when Kale and Taq had used it. He told her forlornly that he couldn’t feel the spark within it as he could feel in other portals. They didn’t have much else to say. He was getting phone calls from Tatsu, as well.

  Her only consolation was that if Taq had survived his wounds from Dyson, he wouldn’t have much competition in the Shadow Realm. There was food and water. He wouldn’t be happy, but he would be alive. However, he would probably have to bury Kale.

  Soon daily calls to the branwyns became weekly calls. Then it was a month after they had returned. Trying to stay busy, Claire worked with the children of the clan. She ignored her parents’ worried looks. She spoke to Ula, on the satphone, once a day. Ula was spending time with Killian in Denver as she went through the surgery she needed on her ankle.

  Finally, Claire took to escaping the clan by transforming into the wolf and running away for days at a time. She headed into the hills and lived as a wolf. She howled at the moon, and sometimes she howled because it was better than crying. Everyone knew that wolves don’t cry. She would catch her mother’s scent sometimes as the other looked for her. Claire left enough signs behind to let them know she was still alive.

  After another week, her father bellowed at her from a nearby hill. He had tracked her until he was exhausted, and even she was on the edge of falling over from fatigue. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DIE! HE WOULDN’T WANT THAT, EVEN IF HE IS A BEAR!” he yelled at her. She was close enough that she heard Braydon Bennett pause and then mutter, “A fucking cat and now a fucking bear. Have mercy.”

  Claire was too wrapped up in her misery to think about what her father had said until after he was long gone. Then she sat in an open meadow watching some rabbits play on the other side but not feeling like hunting anything. The words came trickling back to her. It didn’t sound like he was talking about a dead were. Braydon was talking about Taq in the first person. In the present.

  The very next day, she slunk close to the clan’s village, and not even a minute passed before she scented something that shook her to the core. In fact, she thought she was deluding herself. Days of running as a wolf and nights with only a few hours of nightmare-filled sleep had pitched her over the edge of sanity. She abruptly turned around and ran back to the infinite forests of Northern Manitoba.

  She came back the next day. It was a long day, at the end of summer, but she found the inuksuk at the edge of the village. It hadn’t been there the day before. The large stone monument was a study in sharp edges and just the right flat rocks in order to balance the structure. One side pointed toward the north.

  The stories came to her mind. The thoughts she’d had of another inuksuk she’d seen just before she’d been captured, came to her. It might have been a marker to designate a direction, a guide for the lost. It might have been a reminder of someone who once was.

  The were known as Shade, the one whose given name was Taqukaq, had known about her interest in the inuksuit. He sighed and said, “And you’ve built inuksuit, haven’t you? In order to guide the lost children back to The People.”

  Claire closed her wolf eyes and sniffed. The hands that had been on these rocks were the same hands that had once touched her. These hands smelled distinctly of were and wrapped around her soul, causing her heart to lurch in her chest. The scent was real; her daffy mind wasn’t playing tricks with her. Her father had tried to tell her.

  She padded toward the north, following her nose. Nearly a mile away was a smaller inuksuk. It pointed in another direction, and she scrambled to follow the bearing. After another mile, she heard a generator. There was a cabin out on this track. Some old timer had lived in it a few years before he’d gone south to live with his daughter. He’d minded his own business, and the clan hadn’t minded his presence. He didn’t shoot any game except elk and white-tailed deer, so he’d seemed harmless.

  The sound of a circular saw churning its way through reluctant wood came to her. She slowed to a cautious walk, carefully picking her paws through the brush to avoid breaking fallen branches, and peered through the bushes into the clearing where the cabin was located. Her wolf ears rotated once to hear what was behind her and then came back to the front.

  A Land Rover was parked in front of the cabin. The circular saw cut off with a whine. A voice said, “I don’t like sawdust.” A sneeze followed.

  “Tough,” came a second voice.

  Claire moved to where she could see around the Land Rover. Two men were cutting two by fours and plywood to fix the roof of the cabin. One was hammering the plywood into place as he balanced on the studs that supported the roof of the cabin.

  “I suppose we have to get this done before it rains or something,” the first one said.

  “Something,” the one on the roof agreed.

  “It doesn’t rain or snow much in Texas,” the other one said.

  They both smelt of bear. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it wasn’t exactly correct for the first one. Claire’s head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. She had been mourning and she hadn’t expected the unexpected. It was like a delusion, a wishful, wonderful delusion. But it
also was a puzzle.

  “It didn’t rain or snow in the Shadow Realm, either,” Kale said. He didn’t look dead. He didn’t look sick anymore. In fact, he looked a little skinny but healthy, and his hair had grown out from its military shortness. However, he didn’t smell like he had before. In fact, he didn’t smell human at all any longer. It took Claire a moment to understand. He’d been bitten and infected with the shifter gene. It didn’t happen very often. Humans died all too often. But Kale had already been dying; it was a gamble and a gamble that had worked. Perhaps the otherworldly in him had helped him to survive. Doubtless the cancer was gone. Weres didn’t get cancer.

  “Good thing we found that skeleton, huh?” Kale asked. He was looking into the forest, watching exactly where Claire was hidden in the shadows of the trees. “Claire was right. The Civil War soldier came through another portal. She’s a smart girl. Pretty, too. Sorry she doesn’t have another sister.”

  The were on the roof grunted.

  “And did I love coming out in the middle of a Civil War reenactment in Pennsylvania?” Kale asked mostly himself. “God, I did. I think three men peed in their replica Union pantsies. Three. One of them dropped his rifle on his foot. I swear I heard a bone break. Love the new hearing.”

  “You need to call the drakken,” the were on the roof said. His hair was longer, too, as if he had spent a lot of time in a place where it couldn’t be cut. He hammered some more.

  “Kettle! Pot! Black!” Kale said when the other one paused and then laughed. “She’ll probably come get me.”

  “You didn’t have to come to Canada,” the were on the roof said.

  “Sure I did. Why couldn’t you just call and tell the poor girl?”

  “Her mother said she was mourning,” Taq said.

  “And a sudden surprise will be much better,” Kale said sarcastically.

  “She’s in the woods most of the time now,” Taq said and hammered more than a little enthusiastically on the roof. There was a sudden crack. “Dammit. I broke the hammer.”

  “So you’ll just let her get used to the idea,” Kale said. He gestured at Claire with his hand. He wanted her to come closer.

  “There isn’t a rule book on how you’re supposed to tell your mate you’re not really dead in a Shadow Realm,” Taq said. He jumped from the roof, ignoring the ladder. “Don’t we have another hammer?”

  “I bet you could write one and I could use it, too,” Kale said. He shook his head at Claire, then mouthed, “Come on.” “You put up two stone monuments yesterday just for her,” he said. “Big monuments with heavy rocks, too.”

  “And I’ll put up two more tomorrow, so she knows how special she is,” Taq said.

  Kale grinned broadly. “How about a story? One of those Native American stories you’re so good at?”

  Taq grunted.

  “Okay,” Kale said amicably. “I’ll tell the story. Once there was a great warrior bear. He was a grumpy warrior bear, but fairly decent and never shortchanged a waitress on her tip. So this warrior bear found himself in a bad situation where there were evil nasties in charge. He tried to do something about it, but he didn’t really have enough power. Then he made some new friends, friends with big double-edged axes and a killer rep. It was like they watched Star Wars or something. But then the warrior bear met the cute wolf babe. Now we all know that bears and wolves don’t mix, but this was true love. Excuse me, twue wuv. My mom watches that movie once a week, I swear. And since the warrior bear was right in the middle of a big hooflafla, he couldn’t tell the babe that he wasn’t really a bad guy. Also he threw her in jail so that her cute little tushie could be protected. Then she found out who he was, didn’t understand, and ran away into a Shadow Realm. Of course, the warrior bear moved heaven and Earth to get to her. Then some more shit happened. The warrior bear’s handsome and charming sidekick almost killed himself helping make a portal, and the warrior bear tossed the cute babe through the portal to save her. All would have ended on a sad note, but the cute babe had given the warrior bear a clue to an exit because not only is she a cute babe, but kind of smart, too. Then the warrior bear saved his handsome and charming sidekick because they were like dudes. They came back through another portal. They came running to the ass end of the world, but the cute babe was wasting away in the woods. Hmm. The warrior bear had to think. So he built a funky stone monument.”

  “Inuksuk,” Taq corrected in a grim voice.

  “Inuksuk,” Kale repeated obediently. “The warrior bear made these inuksuks to guide the cute babe to him.”

  “Inuksuk is one. Inuksuit is plural,” Taq muttered.

  “Oh kay, whatever,” Kale said. “Stop interrupting. I don’t interrupt your stories. Well, I do, but never mind that. The warrior bear made these inuksuit to guide the cute babe home, which is where we join the present and eagerly await the ending of the story.” He sighed gustily. “I love this story. Well, I love the way I tell the story.”

  Taq didn’t say anything else.

  Kale smiled at Claire and then called, “Hammer’s in the toolbox next to the genny.” He gestured at her again and then he trotted to the Land Rover. He got in. “Got a poker game in town,” he yelled out the open window. “Braydon said he could whup me at Texas Hold ‘Em. Call me on the satphone when you want me to come back and work on the roof.” He started up the vehicle and roared away, waving at Claire as he went down a dirt track that was barely two ruts.

  “What the hell?” Taq asked, looking after him. Finally, he turned to the toolbox and dug through it, producing a hammer after a few seconds.

  Claire stared at Taq. Kale had answered all the questions she could have asked. She didn’t need any more reassurance. He had his shirt off, and she could see some scars and a tattoo on his right bicep. When wounds were very bad, sometimes they left scars even on weres. The wounds from Dyson had been that bad. It didn’t matter in the least to Claire. She took a breath and inhaled the wonderful scent that was her mate.

  Without hesitation, Claire began her change. She stepped out of the forest a minute later, naked as the day she was born.

  Taq had one foot on the ladder when the wind shifted and he froze. Slowly his head turned toward Claire.

  She took another step toward him.

  “I would have gone into the underworld after you,” Taq said. “All the way to Adlivun to battle Anguta, Sedna, and all of her dogs, too.”

  “You—” Claire started to say, but she coughed and cleared her throat. It had been a long time since she had spoken in a human voice. She started again. “You did. I’m sorry I misjudged you, but you did keep me in a dungeon.”

  Taq nodded. He tossed the hammer onto the ground.

  “You won’t do that again,” she said and took another step.

  Taq nodded again. “Never.”

  “You built the inuksuit for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were going to wait for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “As long as it took?”

  “Yes.”

  Claire felt the muscles in her face move. It dawned on her that she was smiling. She felt something crack inside her, like a dam of ice had broken. She glanced down, certain that she was standing in a pool of melting ice water. She knew that she had been frozen, but the extent surprised her. “You’re awfully accommodating,” she said.

  “No, I’m not, but I would be for you,” Taq said.

  “I tried to go back to the Shadow Realm for you,” Claire said and took another step.

  “I know.”

  “The branwyns said there was…no hope.”

  Taq slowly smiled at her. It was the first time she’d ever seen his smile. It transformed his face. “That’s because they don’t know about the trials of the old Inuit gods and goddesses. There’s always a path, always a trick. There’s always hope.” He reached behind him and pulled the 1851 Colt Navy revolver from where it had been tucked into his belt. “You left this behind. It took me awhile to figure out what you m
eant. It took me longer to find the skeleton. But then it took only an hour to find the other portal.”

  There was a moment where Claire didn’t know exactly what to do. But then she was standing before Taq. She could feel the heat of his body so near to hers. She reached up with tentative fingers and touched the scars at his neck and down his trunk. He stood very still and waited for her to finish. Under the tips of her fingers, his flesh trembled.

  Then she knew exactly what to do. She took the revolver from him and dropped it to the ground. She tugged his chin in the direction that she wanted him to go, and he didn’t resist. He was still smiling when their lips met.

  And everything was just fine.

  – THE END –

  A Note from the Author: Occasionally we all have times where we wished that events would be easier or that something should be handed to us, preferably on a silver platter. As I’ve learned, life is never easy. This previous year has been taxing, not only for myself but for my various family members and friends, and it reminds us to be grateful to the things and people that truly matter. Family matters. Friends matter. The rest is minutia and should be taken accordingly.

  A quick thank you to my editors, but please remember that all mistakes are mine in the end.

  First, thanks to Mary E. Bates, freelance proofreader of ebooks, printed material, and websites. She can be contacted at mbates16@columbus.rr.com.

  Second, thanks to my other editor, Lauran Strait, who is, as far as I can tell, a very determined individual. She can be contacted at lauran-strait@cox.net.

  And a special thank you to my husband and my daughter who put up all kinds of weirdness when I’m writing. I’m not sure how they do it. I don’t think I could.

  Finally, thank you to all the readers who buy my novels and novellas. A writer wouldn’t be a writer without readers.