Wolf Sirens Fever: Many are Born, Few are Reborn (Wolf Sirens #2)
Page 13
Later that moonless night Cresida sat upstairs in the dark reading in her bed, under lamplight and the shadow of the feather mobile she had constructed. That was when she knew Lila had arrived. She stopped midsentence of a Jules Vern novel when she heard the howling calls, alarmed for just a moment before she settled. Wiggling back into a comfortable wedge in her pillow, she continued to read.
17. Reid Davies
Reid had a guilty secret. He had admired Cresida - had watched all the while Cresida came and left school, grief-stricken and troubled, and then returned with a chip on her shoulder. He remembered her scrunchy socks and the way she read before the bell rang in primary school. He loved her elfin features, her short golden hair - beautiful beyond words - and the startling blueness of her eyes, the colour of breakwater in the sun. Out on the ocean he gazed, thinking of her soft tanned curves, while the light of the Sapphire Coast’s waters reflected in his own bronze eyes. He’d had a crush on those bright blue eyes and the meek little girl since first grade who’d become a sexy woman in front of him.
Her soft skin, which he had never touched, was pale yellow compared to his own russet orange brown skin, which was now coated with the beige white sand of Tarah beach. His brothers called to him.
“Hey Davies!”
“Stop day-dreaming,” Trent teased and smiled. He loved any opportunity to taunt his older brother.
“Yeah get your hand off it,” mocked the oldest brother starting to paddle for the shore. “We’re going in, buttercup.”
The sun was only just beginning to set on the clear summer’s day. It had been a hot one with a low swell and they had been out early in the waves. They’d rested during the heat of the day, lounging at home, then had driven back out at 2pm for a second round.
Reid’s older brother was home from University for one week - which this summer was all he could get off work. He had a car, which spelled freedom for the two younger boys. They lived in the best of two worlds for seven days. Their mother let them be slobs, sleep in and surf the days away. If she hadn’t been so accommodating they would have camped on the beach. But she cooked for them, provided cupboards full of cereal. There was a TV and couch and free laundry service - everything they needed. So they piled in their rooms at home on bunk beds, hung their towels to dry on the metal bed posts. If they were to turn up washed and folded, all the better.
Last time big brother had come home he had brought a girl, so the fun was sucked out of the visit for the irresponsible band of brothers - somewhat, anyhow. This time when the two younger boys knew there was no girlfriend they planned to make the most of it. Their father went with them on Saturday and watched his boys surf - he never had himself. He didn’t even take shorts, but rolled up his Kakis, filled with pride as his three healthy sons played in the surf.
The redhead on the balcony had watched them all week, from one of the few expensive looking houses on the beach. Reid later learnt she owned the blue one with white weather vanes and trim. She walked over to their father seated in the sand and began to talk to him. From out on the water, Reid watched his father gesture to the pale redhead covered from chest to toe in a flowing sarong and a huge pair of sunglasses, before she took a seat next to his father on the sand.
“Who’s that?” his brother Trent called, tossing his wet hair. “Aw, dad’s picked up,” Reid’s younger brother joked, amazed a girl was talking to his old man.
“I’m going in,” Josh yelled already nearing the sand.
Reid replied that they should bring the old man more often.
The little brother Trent, who floated closer on his board commented, “Yeah, he’s chick bait.” The surf was low and he bobbed on a wave beside Reid, watching the beach.
Reid watched his older brother, Josh, paddle up and jog out of the surf, broadly stretching out a hand to the girl, shaking his wet hair in an attempt to flirt. Reid was then distracted by a wave and dropped in on his brother on the same crest. They both looked at each other, Reid pushed him off and they took a huge dive into the surf, tossed in the turbulence and came up.
The next week at school he saw her. Rumour was she and some other blonde had rocked up, rich bitches from the city that had moved to ‘holiday town’.
“Tourists,” his little brother spat. They ruined the beach in summer with their picnics and barbecues and now it looked like they would just set up in ‘holiday town’ for good. Locals like the Davies boys despised tourists.
“She’s got a car,” said Reid as though that would erase the spiteful name he had labelled her with.
“Hi surfer, it’s the beach brothers!” she said smiling at both of them. She looked too mature for high school, but not old. Her skin was a flawless translucent pale tone. She pulled her sunglasses up over her long straight fringe so he could read her eyes. They weren’t amber like his but florescent green and flawless like tropical water.
He leaned on her car door with his palm.
“Why? You going to drive us?” he flirted, gesturing to the car. Back then it was a red hatchback, something acquired so they would blend. It was beaten up and the paint had bubbled and come off the bonnet.
The blonde came up from the other side, opened the creaky door and threw her bag in. After sitting in the passenger side she said, “Hi.” She was also wearing goggle-like sunglasses and she also looked too mature to be attending school. They could have been young teachers fresh from college.
Reid's brother, who stood beside him, waved with the hand that held his bag on his shoulder, spreading four fingers out shyly.
“Jump in,” she teased, her eyebrows rising in challenge. He looked at her in disbelief. She gestured to the back seat with her head - a flirty move he learnt to copy months later.
“We wouldn’t fit,” he joked, then, shifting uneasily. Reid looked about for his mother with their lift. She’d kill him for jumping into a girl’s car without asking her first.
“Sorry, can’t, mum’s picking us up.” He hoped saying it with confidence would make him sound less juvenile. But this was met with laughter from both girls.
“Okay, we’ll take a rain check then.” And they sped off.
“What a loser. They’ll never ask again, Reid,” his little brother said as they walked to where their mum had swung in with the Torago.
Reid was determined then that he was going to talk to the redhead again.
He said ‘hi,’ to her in the halls and took up weights with more vigour.
“You trying to get laid or something?” Trent commented over the bowl of cereal in his grasp. After thinking a little he exclaimed “I know! By that red headed minx!” he laughed through the mouthful of cereal he chewed.
Reid narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, what’s it to you?”
“Treat‘em mean, keep‘em keen.” His brother laughed again, choking on the lumps in his mouth, he then started coughing.
Their mother called, “What are you doing in there!?” Her voice travelled up the stairs. They went quiet and when they heard no other calls Trent leant in and whispered, “Five, says you won’t get a date with her – ever.” He smirked broadly.
“Five!” Reid scoffed. “Twenty says I get her to take me to the beach.”
“Woo, the older woman thing, eh?” Trent teased laughing.
“She’s…our age.” Reid responded.
“You just want her for her ride.” Trent laughed, bringing to mind the weather beaten hatchback.
“What? Yeah, and you want her for her sexy brain,” he retorted, doing an accompanying finger gesture with his fist.
It took Reid three weeks, once he worked up enough nerve, to end up at her table at lunch. All he had to say was that he would “Accept the rain check now.” He earned her laughter and a date to the beach. Trent had to eat his words and lost a twenty.
“We can go to my place actually. Sam will be there. Bring your brother.” She slyly glanced in his little brother’s direction. “We’re meeting Bianca there too.” Bianca who sat with them was another ne
w face at the small town high school.
They were picked up at 10 o’clock on Saturday. By Sunday Trent was missing, presumed dead after a midnight swim, and Reid was in a fever on the floor of Lily’s place at the beach. The reality was they ate him, every piece of his adolescent body. The big bones and the skull were cremated to ashes in the barbecue pit and scattered.
Reid’s mother was hysterical. Things were never the same after that. Their family lost its innocence. His father drank and his mother walked around in a daze, wondering where their baby boy had gone and what had happened to his body. Reid was alone and things weren’t the same with Josh. A piece was missing. They couldn’t surf, and a shark attack was the final story issued by the police. The offending beast wasn’t caught. “Kids and alcohol,” the police constable had muttered, disgusted. And it burnt like salt in a gaping wound. Because Reid knew Trent was a good boy.
Reid’s parents didn’t notice the change. They assumed it was the cloud of grief; their eyes were half closed with it. Reid wouldn’t surf anymore and his mother was glad.
Sam talked to everyone in the town, one after the other, turning up and removing her big black sunglasses. Soon Trent Davies was a shadow in the memory of the high school and even to his parents, and Reid.
Jackson, Trent's best friend, found himself forgetting him and instead remembered Reid only. So it must have been he who was his best mate, otherwise how did he know the family so well? Reid had known while it was happening all around him, that Sam and the other girls had participated in his brother’s death, and he blamed himself. Thanks to Sam’s power he forgot his brother in a haze too. He no longer remembered knowing that she got best pick of the kill - of his brother’s carcass. Reid was recruited perhaps because Sky had somewhat defected and the girls wanted a male. Denial can save those in pain a lot of grief and they were all glad to forget. The She-wolf pack set fire to the Davies family house and insurance bought Reid’s family a new one devoid of photos. Friends were too sad to mention Trent and life went on. The only evidence of his life was the paper in the town library, a statistic in youth deaths and shark attack and a small headstone in the town graveyard, which no one visited. Another face on the long list of forgotten.
Sky showed up around then. He had been visiting Paws - another pack further down the coast and after arguing with Sam, Sky met the newest member of the pack. No one argued with Sam, not for long, and Reid was a cool kid, he was fresh. Sky was quietly glad to have a male companion and easily took him under his wing. Not knowing what the girls had done in his absence.
18. Jackson and The Body Snatchers
Reid still lived with his family. He was in year eleven and encouraged Sky to join the rest of the group at school. Before Sky had been with Cresida, Reid had ritually taken her in with his eyes during school mornings. First with a strange admiration then desire, then jealousy. Then eventually with a manufactured disdain as she became the enemy. When they had saved her from Sam's jaws, it wasn’t for his loyalty to Sky or out of regret that he couldn’t save Jackson or himself; no it was for far more selfish reasons, for foreign undesirable reasons. He was not supposed to feel that vulnerability for her and he was too embarrassed to admit he did. It was an invisible dawning he was powerless to defeat. It wasn’t worth considering, something that he would never know. Just as he had abandoned the sentimentality of his life, now devoid of genuine human experience. The Alpha Sam had numbed grief and taken things less important to herself and of the most sacred to her victims into the abyss. Under the murky depths of the Shade River, where she had tossed Trent's ashes, by the handful, to be infused into the muddy water.
It made everything easier to not even know where the painful truth was hidden inside him, quenched in the time since by the pack mentality.
Reid had forgotten much of his life prior to the accident. He went home and obeyed his parents, or seemed to. He was himself, but all his teenage awkwardness was gone, from his body and his mind. He filled out overnight and at the same time quit the football team – otherwise he may have made a meal of his teammates with his huge canines. Jackson, who remembered being his best friend, marvelled at him and at once felt rejected by his friend for this other big new guy, Sky, who assimilated Reid into someone else. Before anybody else, Jackson feared his friend had been reborn as a stranger. This new Reid kid was different to his best friend, and due to a love of science fiction, he had a theory all of his own.
Jackson Hastings was a sprightly boy, his mother’s pride and joy.
He was her only child. When his mother remarried, he was doted on by his stepfather, and older stepsister who had by now moved to the city. By the time he was five he had a baby half-brother, who then received all the attention and he found himself a middle child and despite his stepfather’s fairness to each boy, Jackson felt rejected.
When he was in year ten he didn’t think a lot about anything except football, cricket, girls and his slight interest in science fiction movies. When suddenly his long-time friend ignored him, rejection was all he could contemplate. The feelings dredged up from the depths of his subconscious threatened to overwhelm him: the way his father had left him, without a word. Had it not been for this abandonment by his father in childhood he may have brushed it off and moved on.
He followed Reid like a puppy, spied on him. He seemed to be the only one to notice that his best friend went up two sizes in a week in muscle bulk and started hanging out with new kids in his year - with glowing eyes. Reid warned him to stay away but Jackson wasn’t perturbed and spied on the big log and stone house out of town. Even from the beginning he had the inquisitive nature of a wolf. Eventually, it got out of hand. He saw too much one night out on the riverbank and they were compromised. This was when the rumours about the river sprang up at Shade High. He hadn’t listened to their warnings; he was convinced they were alien beings who had somehow invaded human bodies. Now, however, he knew they were werewolves. In terror he ran home and dead-bolted the door. Sam wasn’t happy, and would kill him given half a chance - maybe even have Lily or Bianca do it. She was ferocious. Sky’s hands were tied. Either the girls would rip him apart, or he could do it humanely. Sky volunteered to be the one to do it with one difference – to change him. Sky didn’t like to get involved with the humans; it interfered with their world and free will. But for Jackson there was no choice, he had to either turn up dead or become one of them. Sky had been thinking and acting independently of Sam lately and he liked the idea of another member in his gang. It evened out the numbers.
A discussion took place, Reid couldn’t comment. He watched the decision develop and panicked. He suddenly didn’t trust Sky to do it without killing Jackson and saying it was an accident. After all, he knew Sam could be very persuasive. They all knew if something wasn’t done soon they would be in the headlines. They had to act quickly. By the time Sky got there to do the job, it had been done. Jackson was rigidly thrashing about on the floor, Reid above him, horrified at what he had done. The human part of him told him he was a killer, he had damned his friend to eternity as an animal with no choice. But it was that or stand by while he was murdered, and live with it. Sky knelt down to examine the wound, which he had intended to inflict himself. He investigated the scene around him, one hand on the boy. Reid was in shock.
“You know I wouldn’t have killed him, Reid,” he said touching the writhing body with the other hand to examine the boy’s face. Concern twisted his features.
“I know,” Reid frowned. “I just wanted to be sure. Did I do it right?” he asked dully, through blood-stained teeth, still looking downward, but not directly at the boy who had broken out in a fever. Sweat sheened his grey complexion. Suddenly he stilled. He looked more like a body gripped by rigor mortis than a would-be werewolf. Sky contemplated what needed to be done, should the venom take him. In Reid’s haste he had overdosed the boy. Havoc churned inside Jackson’s cells and they all thought he would die, his body exploding internally as he vibrated with an uncontrollable
energy force, springing like electricity and burning him from the inside out. For 24 hours the venom churned in his flesh and assaulted him.
Reid didn’t know where to turn. Sky wondered what he would say to his pack brother if the boy were lost. He feared the lacklustre life of the immortal half-human half-beast would be a tomb for Reid if the boy perished. In Reid’s haste and inexperience to save his friend, he had perhaps become a killer. Comfort only came when his friend’s colour improved and his breathing steadied. They hurriedly moved him to the cabin. Reid watched Jackson’s transformation into a carnivorous shape shifter and as Jackson stretched his legs on the second evening a weight lifted from his shoulders. Miraculously, it seemed, Jackson’s tortured body had relaxed and renewed. Somewhere in his partly evaporated memory Reid saw his brother but, like dust, it settled into nothingness. He knew that if Jackson were to survive his bite they would be brothers of venom, a band of three, just like he had been once upon a time in a faded life: Reid and his pack brothers Sky and Jackson, different and the same as he had felt in the summer before Trent had gone missing, when he had known happiness.