by Tina Smith
Lila did not seem to mind that she was covered in bits of dirt that was still caked under her nails, or that her dark brown hair was knotted into a sandy clump at the back of her head. She had silvery scars, along the underside of her pale forearms.
Examining her bravely Tisane summoned her courage, her soft features becoming tense. “Who raised you?”
Lila stopped mid chew, to gaze defiantly at Tisane’s insipid face from under her messy eyebrows.
“You must have …someone?” she insisted. “Was your mother… in the Cult?”
“You think she’s in the Cult? That they did this to me? Fine.” Lila shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I told you, I’ll be gone in the morning,” she muttered.
Tisane gazed out the window. “You won’t be going anywhere,” she said flatly.
Lila felt alarmed for a moment - before Tisane added, “Zeus is angry again, see that blanket of clouds, it’s going to storm.” She said it with such confidence that Lila didn’t doubt her and only gazed out the window towards the deep threatening sky.
“It’s going to be a wet summer,” Tisane added.
Lila didn’t reply.
Tisane had her back turned, as Lila noticed it began to pour outside and a wind that rattled the windows blew up from the direction of the ocean.
Tisane had allowed Lila to slow her attack on the Cult. Lila could afford to be more strategic now she had a hideout. It seemed even the heavens wanted her to stay as they growled and protested loudly. As long as her host was compliant and submissive, it seemed the best thing to do. It had occurred to her that Tisane’s gift was much like Cresida’s and maybe she could use Tisane to her benefit.
“It looks as though I’m stuck here then.” Lila hoped she wouldn’t see Lily’s face appear in the window as the wind pounded the glass pane. Rain didn’t scare her. “Why does the spirit follow me?” Lila’s voice was quiet and edgy.
Tisane was silent in thought as the tap water ran. “I think either you were very close in life, or the way she died connected you.” She turned the water off and sat the last dish in the rack as low thunder rumbled.
Lila shifted as her blood ran cold, recalling Lily’s heavy lifeless wolf body fade into death over her, in an instant. It was the moment everything had changed. Tisane had no way of knowing how nearly correct she was. No one had seen how Lily had died, other than Sam, Bianca and Giny.
“You’re right, I was the last thing she knew before a bullet took her - through the head.” Lila recalled the blood pooled on the floor, Lily’s red hair and the warm crimson puddle that had soaked over her shirt. Then she remembered Sky and the way Reid had helped her. She shook her head as if to dissolve the memories of the past. “I caused her death and I want to take out others as well.” Her icy tone revealed the sinister meaning behind the words.
Tisane went to the freezer and cracked ice from a tray onto the counter; it clinked in the glass and crackled in the tepid water as she sat back down at the table.
Lila referred to the spirit again. “How do you do it?”
“What?” The ice clinked in the glass as she drank.
“Communicate with them? Are there others?”
“No, I have to be attuned.”
Lightning flashed.
Lila rocked back on her chair. She absent-mindedly swept up a pile of large-sized cards and began to flip them, only noticing as she did that they were some sort of fortune cards. Thunder cracked and rumbled loudly.
“They appear for a reason.” Tisane insisted.
Lila knew Lily was here to help Tisane save the wolves. Lily would never have helped her kill the rest of the pack, even from a higher place. Sam had those words engraved on her sister’s headstone out of love and loyalty. Beloved Lily wouldn’t betray her pack even in death. Lila hid this thought. She needed to at least act like she believed Tisane to earn her trust to let her lead the hunter closer to the wolves.
“Pick one. Pick one of those cards,” Tisane urged, drying her damp hands on a towel, but there was a sharpness in her tone she had not yet used.
Taking up the challenge Lila pulled one from the middle and as though taunting Tisane, took her time before flipping it over on the table.
“Ah, the knight of wands,” Tisane cooed knowingly, sitting across from her.
“I suppose you know everything about me now,” Lila said trying to hide the uncomfortable twinge that pinched inside her. To distract Tisane she pulled another and turned it up on the table placing it next to the first.
“The lovers!” cried Tisane. “You have a choice to make,” she added more solemnly.
“Question time is over.” Lila placed the cards back, disgruntled.
“Have you ever loved anyone, Lila?” Tisane touched it - the night of wands, emerging from the fire with his sword. “There was a man like this. The card usually means one like him has appeared in your life – and the first card drawn is the past.” The cards were something Tisane could decipher.
“No.” Lila ignored her and as if it was automatic, turned the next card before she realized what she had done. She admitted quietly, “I think my boyfriend was taken from me by your Cult. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”
Tisane looked at her. She understood the feeling well. It was loss which haunted her guest.
“Oh.” Perhaps Lila knew the anguish Tisane felt and the same desperation, for someone she held dear.
“I don’t know if I’ll find him at the compound, I don’t know if he’s dead - been dead all this time. Then I’ll do my duty and kill all of them so they can’t hurt humans.” Thunder rumbled above.
Lila indeed believed they were werewolves. And Tisane felt the clarity slip away as quickly as it appeared as lightening flashed.
“We can help them get out.” Tisane looked at the last card Lila had turned. “The tower.” She touched it with her delicate long fingers.
Before them lay the image of a man and woman falling from a high tower, filled with bursting flames. Tisane used her intuition then, which despite earlier feelings had not abandoned her.
“He’s not dead,” she stated.
But Lila looked frightened when she immediately met her eyes.
“This card is the future,” Tisane knew despite her prediction the card was not fortuitous. She had an idea. “What if he’s one of them, your boyfriend?” the image depicted turmoil, a fight.
Lila shrugged.
“Won’t that ruin it a bit? With you being a” - Tisane thought - “hunter?”
“You’re right, the truth is I’m lucky to get this far without being caught.”
“By the Cult?”
“They know I’m coming, all of them. They’re not sure when. If I decide or plan, they have a way of seeing - like you.” Lila shrugged slightly. Whether the cards were right or not about the future, she was in for a fight, she knew that. “Something about you has helped and protected me,” Lila admitted looking to the table.
She turned in her chair, getting ready to leave.
“Is there a reason they’re all against you?” Tisane asked, and Lila paused.
“You mean apart from the wanting to murder them?” Lila realized how tired Tisane looked under the pleading expression when she met her red-rimmed gaze. “I’d be willing to bet they killed your mother.”
Tisane ignored her taunt.
“Why would the Cult kill?” Tisane searched Lila’s face.
Lila got up from her chair. “It’s a complicated beast,” she muttered in frustration.
“Tell me what happened.” The strain of the past few days was evident in her grey blue eyes when she looked up at Lila’s turned back. “Why would they take my sister and murder my mother?”
Lila walked toward the door.
Tisane turned a card herself. It was the emperor and she knew the card was for her. She knew this meant her power was being tested, and the emperor himself lacked intuition.
Tisane stared at Lila’s back; she was a small and thin girl, fa
r too muscular for a female. Her short dark hair and pale skin was somehow different to the face captured in the newspaper. She did know why Lila was here, she reminded herself. Tisane had asked the universe to help free her sister. She turned another card - death. The saying be careful what you wish came to mind as the universe seemed to laugh at her as she lay the black card down to face the image of a smiling skull, stark and menacing. The rule of nine came to mind, whatever you wished came back at you nine fold.
She drew another card. The third card represented the future, and she went out after Lila.
“Why have you come here? Please tell me what happened to you.” She knew with clarity the test the Goddess had sent her was to see past the wall she had erected around herself which made her blind, unable to use her intuition. She opened herself to hear Lila. The card she held had the answer. She flipped it in her palm; it was the Ace of Pentacles – the most favourable card in the Major Arcana. It indicated reward and good fortune. The third draw was the future and this card represented the first star, the one you wish upon; it is the card that gives you the strength of the earth to do the work that will bring your plans to fruition. Lila was the treasure, the resource she had waited for, to further her latent talents. The thing she had prayed for since returning. The key to her wish to free Narine. She realized she simply had to accept the gift.
“I’m sorry I haven’t believed you,” said softly.
Lila walked to the verandah edge as though she hadn’t heard Tisane above the static sound of the rain and she looked out over the grass, inhaling the wet smell permeating from the earth.
“I want you to do one more thing for me.” Lila looked over her shoulder at Tisane in the doorway. “Do it for me and I’ll leave, I promise,” she said, dully.
“I believe you are meant to be here, Lila.”
“I know I am,” she confirmed. “It’s too strange, all the coincidences...”
“I’m listening.”
Lila pressed her lips together unsurely. “I need you to make me something.” She pulled her tag over her head. “Please, can you re-create this - but change the numbers, so they look exact - except for the numbers? Can you do it?” Her green feline eyes looked pleadingly into Tisane’s.
“Yes.”
“Exactly?”
“Yes, I can,” Tisane assured her and held out her upturned palm, still holding the card in the other as her hair was whipped by the breeze. Lila hesitated for a moment and then dropped the metal piece and chain carefully into Tisane’s soft palm.
She examined it closely with pale fingers. “I can. It will take a few hours or so and the right materials, but,” she said quietly, before raising her voice as she squinted her round blue eyes, “I want you to tell me everything, so I understand. Tell me about all of it, please? Tormey had the same tattoo as you do. You’re like her, aren’t you?”
“Yes, if she was a hunter. Your mother saved me from drowning in the river when I was a child. It was no mistake that you found me.”
34. Tisane
Tisane came down the ladder from the attic, arms laden with clothes, to see Lila at the table. Her dark hair was cut away into a short pixie cut, cropped to the shape of her head to reveal her neck, pale and taut like the rest of her, except for her cheeks, which shone with a healthy pink glow.
Lila looked up. “It was tangled.”
“Oh.” Tisane walked over and sat opposite her unsure, if it should bother her that Lila had so easily cut away part of herself. Tisane would have never shed her own hair so easily. It made her quiet and perhaps uneasy of Lila’s carelessness.
“We could have washed it?” she offered, knowing as she met Lila’s blank eyes that her own were glistening with moisture. She looked at the clothes in her arms.
“Oh, um, it was easier to just get rid of it,” Lila replied shrugging and shifting the position of the saltshaker.
Tisane smiled. “It suits you. Here, you’ll definitely fit her clothes better than mine.” Tormey had been slight and well built like Lila. Tisane’s mother had become lean and toned under the Valley sunshine, patrolling the national parklands and campsites. Tisane was an altogether different build or Tisane would have worn some of the clothes herself, so instead she had lovingly stored them. Tisane was taller and had wider hips with thicker arms and legs than her mother. She called them ‘cankles’ growing up. She wished she’d been more like her mother.
She watched Lila through the window of the kitchen. She was moulding arrowheads continuously, as though driven. It seemed hunting was a lone occupation. She barely slept, and then for only hours at a time. Then she’d wake with more energy than a man who had slept an entire day. She didn’t seem to tire easily, and seemed happy now to prepare for this attack she was planning. Tisane wondered if she was more contented just doing that - planning and preparing - and not as keen on the fighting and bloodshed part. But she knew it was just wishful thinking.
Tisane barely slept either and they made a good pair of introverts. Lila needed Tisane’s home as a hideout and her gift could be of some help, which was promising. She was used to being alone herself, and infringed on Lila very little. They lived a quiet co-existence. Tisane saw clients by appointment only, and all traces of Lila were expunged before their arrival, while Lila remained missing.
Day by day Tisane asked the universe for guidance but every time she turned a card it was the same story with a different layout. Lila was headed for a fight one way or another and she had asked for Tisane’s help. She had even reminded her in the beginning that she had said she would help her, and that was true. Before Tisane knew what help she needed. Tormey had always taught Tisane to be a pacifist. Did passive resistance fighters help the soldiers who took a more aggressive stance? She knew she was being silly even contemplating helping her attempt murder. Tisane prayed for all of them, to Artemis for an answer. Surely this was not fair. But the answer hadn’t come as yet and so Tisane waited, watching Lila.
When she looked up through the window again Lila was gone from the arrow casting on the stump. Her voice came from the door.
“They threatened him,” Lila said as though lightning had struck her.
“What?” Tisane asked, turning.
“They threatened her brother’s life.” She looked pleased with her revelation as her dark lips parted to reveal a smile. “That’s why she helped them.” She put her hand to her mouth. “She’s not against me, she knew we would all be safe if she did what they asked, and she let me escape, I know it. Somehow she wanted me to get out. She had to be so subtle so they wouldn’t blame her and I think that’s partly why she hasn’t found me.”
“Because she doesn’t want to?” Tisane asked.
35. Dark Horse
I thought about what to do. The next step would be to surprise Cres. After devising many plans Tisane came up with the most simple – a phone call.
Like Sky, Cres was sure to be watched, but by this time a month after my disappearance, their guard could quite possibly be relaxed. Tisane agreed to do it, but in the end I knew I had to do it. We needed information to know if any part of Cres was still on our side and why she had cooperated with the enemy. I began to think of motives. Cres had wanted to die; she was disgusted with her wolf blood. The only reason ever given for why she hadn’t ended her half-breed life was because of her brother. I saw it now. All of it. Why hadn’t they come for Cres? Regardless of Sky and his compliance, Cresida had guarded me. More than that, Cres had protected me from them. I was suddenly sure of it. In a moment everything which had puzzled me for nearly a year opened up as though the distance made it suddenly clear.
Cres had made a deal. To kill her, meant more hunters, Cresida had told me that, so it was better to keep me away from the pack. But why had she agreed? I thought then how Cres was truly compromised. She had worked with the wolves to keep me away and ignorant. Who better to guard a hunter - than a hunter? My freedom in Shade was an illusion, but what they couldn’t have relied on was that I would feel
it. I felt the entrapment. I was right and I had known it all along, I was no better than an animal in a free-range zoo. The huntress cannot stand to be trapped, the power of the goddess possesses us and we must hunt. I could feel my energy return to me. Day and night I prepared and thought about hunting them down or fighting them off, but it was not yet the time to battle, things were still finding their place. I would know when the time was right and now I had to at least hear it from Cres to know that she was with or against me.
Tisane got the number, luckily it was listed. Tabetha Horrel was a problem though. She knew I was missing, everyone knew. I was front-page news. Tisane had to dial and hang up when it was Tabetha who answered, on my nod. Initial requests to speak to or leave messages for Cresida were denied.
I knew that Cresida’s parents were most likely targeted by the pack, whether it was Sam or the Cult. I felt it wasn’t an accident.
“She is very strict, really devoutly religious.”
“She’s human?” enquired Tisane unsure still of the bounds of the underworld.
“Yes, and a phenomenal pain. If she hangs up one more time I might give up werewolf slaying and take up bitch shooting.”
Tisane furrowed her brow.
We tried five times over, each day for three days, before Cres answered.
I was so stunned I nearly dropped the phone as it was passed to me “Hello Cres?”
“Yes.”
“This is Elle Knight.”
“Li-”
“Don’t say it, just in case she’s listening.” I looked at the list of questions.
“Yes, okay.” She sounded happy to hear my voice. There was no time to waste. I suddenly became nervous.
”Did you know about the Cult? Answer yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Were you protecting me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you on my side?”
“Yes.”
”Are you alone.”
“Yes and no, she’s going to listen in any minute.”