House of Slide: Wilds, Part I

by Juliann Whicker

  I flinched as a hailstone struck me on the neck through my hood with the steady slopping sound in the background as they shoveled mud onto the coffin. The seven of them made quick work of the job until nothing was left of Devlin Sanders besides a mound.

  The other guests would be disappointed when they emerged from their cars and found the service finished. Helen stepped forward, and I kept my eyes trained on her, waiting for the moment I would finally get a clear view of the girl. It was no use; she moved with Helen. I clenched my fists as waves of fury rose inside of me.

  I felt a tightening in the air a moment before a brilliant flash of lightning exploded into the earth. Helen kept her feet but the girl fell to her knees allowing me a glimpse of her outline before the uncles and the mother helped her to her feet. Alex Sanders, the Nether Cool walked with her away from the grave and towards the gate. At the last moment the girl turned to take one last look at the grave.

  I knew that face in spite of never seeing it before.

  I reached out with my other senses, past patience, needing to use every tool I had in my arsenal to understand the expression in her enigmatic eyes. The world around me disappeared into a blurry melding of inanimate and animate as everything reduced to its basic energetic structure. The brothers and Helen became darkly burning sparks with red lines twining where their bodies would have been. Where the girl had been, I found nothing. I stared blindly in front of me, hardly noting the flashing silver fire of the father, Alex, before he ducked through the iron gate.

  I turned to Old Peter and stared at him dumbly as the sparkling of his soul faded and I could see him with my eyes.

  “Huh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I stared into the distance instead. When I looked at the world through that sense, I could usually see people's souls. It wasn’t something I used often however useful it could be. From my limited experience with soul sight, every living person had a brilliant burning soul that gave them life, well, everyone except for this one girl.

  Old Peter turned and started walking back home, following the lines of trees towards the road and well away from the Wilds.

  “Well?” he asked, the question cutting through the streaming rain.

  I started after him and felt a building fury that would no doubt leave me with a headache.

  “Well, what? Not that it wasn’t an enjoyable afternoon, but I have no idea what I was supposed to learn from that sermon. I feel like I’m dealing with Wilds again. I’ve successfully avoided Wilds for how long, and now I have to go right back to the beginning? Do you know how frustrating that is? I don’t even know who she is. I don’t know why I care. Every time I run into you, things get complicated.” I realized that I was pointing a wet finger at him, and I shoved my hands in my pockets and focused on my steps across the unstable graveyard. Water streamed beneath my feet towards the road, but at least the hail had quit.

  Old Peter shuffled along with me and put his hand on my arm when he slipped in the mud. “You didn’t see it. No, you’re not losing your mind. You didn’t see it because it wasn’t there. So the question now would be where it is.”

  No one liked to talk about this kind of thing. It was brave of Old Peter to bring it up, and I should appreciate his efforts at clarity. I should not want to pound him into… I slumped slightly and tried to submit but the fury wasn’t hot enough. It was burning steady just below submission, the most dangerous levels of heat. Irritating.

  “It was not just a trick of the light? She really doesn’t have a soul?”

  Old Peter shook his head sadly.

  I looked at him waiting for more then impatiently prodded him. “Just one day she woke up missing her soul? Did anyone check the lost and found?” I winced when the words came out of my mouth while he scowled at me. I had a tendency to make bad jokes under stress. “Sorry. Did she lose it when her brother died?”

  He shook his head, white brows pulled low over his eyes. “She’s been soulless for a decade or so.”

  I stared at him then looked forward through the driving rain. Impossible. Without a soul no one could last so long. Good people, bad people—one thing they had in common was that they had a soul. Some people’s souls were barely alive, some people fed their souls to demons, but there was always something. People couldn’t live without their souls at least not long.

  If I shut my eyes, I could easily recall her face—beauty and burning. Other than an impression of shocking beauty her sunken eyes, the pallor of her skin, and the way she’d trembled as she moved, proclaimed a life near its end. It was possible to survive a few days without a soul, a few weeks if someone knew what he was doing, but anything longer than that simply couldn’t be.

  “Interesting,” I murmured before falling into silence broken only by the splash and lash of a mother’s furious rain. Old Peter had more gifts than an ordinary Hotblood. He’d survived far too long to not have picked up some unusual skills along the way. He could see souls better than I could. He’d been here for less than a decade, so his hand probably wasn’t involved in the actual soul removal, but maybe he had helped her stay alive. If the brother had seen me coming to his funeral and told Old Peter, you would have thought he would have gotten cold feet and backed out.

  I rubbed the scar across my chest until Old Peter caught the motion with his piercing gaze then forced my hand back to my damp pockets. I glanced at Old Peter and his lowered head covered in sodden white hair, his scalp visible beneath the thin strands. He moved slowly, more slowly than I’d ever seen. For a moment I felt concerned that he might catch a chill in the rain before I reminded myself what he was capable of.

  “Aren’t you going to ask how she lost her soul?” Old Peter finally asked.

  “What happened?” I didn’t expect him to tell me something that should be a closely guarded secret. Wilds were famous for their closely guarded secrets.

  “Her brother took it.” He looked at me and gave me a gummy smile. “Yep. Her brother took it and kept her alive. I don’t think she’s had any human contact besides him since then. Not that she’d care,” he finished gazing at the road in front of him.

  I slowed and let him get ahead of me while I struggled to understand why I was anything other than vaguely interested with a clinical detachment that would be wondering how you would be able to keep someone alive without a soul, instead of what I wanted to do with the person who had. I burned with a fury that made clear thinking next to impossible, but I tried. I had an irrational urge to turn around and do something with the grave; what exactly, I had no idea, but I was sure I could come up with something. I wasn’t used to digging up graves and messing around with corpses, but I had a few friends… I took a deep breath and let the fury fill me and dissipate. It would do no good to bring someone back from the dead just so I could kill them again.

  “Do you want dinner before you head back to the city?” Old Peter asked briskly.

  “Yes. I’d like that.” My head pounded, and although I could handle it, Old Peter made a near magical elixir for Hotbloods and the aftereffects of the furies we dealt with. “I may hang around for a few days. I’d like to see how this turns out.”

  Only then, I realized that I hadn’t gotten the information I’d come for. I’d completely forgotten the reason I’d sought out Peter in his out-of-the-way town.

  Old Peter shook his head then shrugged. “We’ll slaughter something. What are you in the mood for?”

  Old Peter liked his dinner to go from kicking to the table in an hour. Keeping fresh meat meant that it bleated at you when you walked up with a knife. Three hours after we got back to the house I was still in the yard packaging meat when Old Peter leaned out of the screen door to see if I’d lost the fight with the goat. It wasn’t like me to be so slow, but I was in a careful mood.

  The fury lurked right behind my eyes, and I couldn’t get the idea of visiting the gravesite out of my head. It wasn’t a good idea. It was one of the worst ideas I’d ever had, and I’d had some bad ones. The girl�
�s uncles would be hanging around for at least twenty-four hours. They had sealed the grave with lightning, an extraordinary precaution most people wouldn’t take to keep a dead body in its grave. Wild traditions weren’t always as relevant as this one but from what I’d learned about the son, it was in everyone’s best interest that a body with those capacities stayed dead.

  Who would think a Wild son would mess around with souls, particularly his sister’s, someone he should be sworn to protect? After I’d seen his father firsthand, I shouldn’t have been shocked about Devlin’s abilities since not only did his Wild blood give him foretelling, but his father, Cool and extra Nether, would have given him the ability to bend people to his will. I still couldn’t understand about the soul. Cools were in the realm of the soul, but that meant they did soul sight, not that they stole souls from someone else. Hollows were the suit who borrowed souls, or had been before they’d been wiped out.

  It didn’t make sense. Why would a Hybrid son be accepted by a white House after he’d stolen his sister’s soul?

  For the next few evenings I lay awake in Old Peter’s cramped spare bedroom determined that it would be my last day in Sanders, but eventually find myself pacing the woods outside her house, waiting.

  In the morning when I saw Old Peter he’d say, “Well?” In that gruff voice of his, and I’d find a reason to get out of the room without admitting that I’d spent all night camped outside the Sanders residence. Of course, he knew, and I could see the intense amusement he got out of the situation.

  I was not amused. I had better things to do than watch a stranger die, slowly. Every glimpse of her verified that fact. The Nether blood kept her alive for now, but not even that would keep her for much longer.

  Days of lurking went on until one evening I sighed as I pushed a branch away so I could get a clearer view into the house. I sat perched forty feet off the ground, spring growth exploding around me making spying on the Sanders’ mansion difficult. It wasn’t really a mansion in Wild terms, but it stuck out from the modest housing of the rest of Sanders. The lights came on one by one, and I could see through the glass doors as the uncles gathered in the stark living room.

  Helen stared out the wall of windows oblivious to her brothers. It didn’t seem possible that all those men could fit into one room, however large it was, but eventually they took seats leaving the couch empty. Satan, the biggest brother, came in wearing his slouchy hat but not the trench coat. Ahead of himself he prodded the slight figure of Dariana Sanders, dressed in gray sweats and a black hoodie. Her eyes looked enormous in her lifeless face.

  She sat, a dismal figure curled around a steaming teacup, looking like it was the only warmth she’d ever known. Eventually it cooled, and the cup fell limply from her fingers as she stared at nothing.

  Hours passed until a thick fog obscured my view. I minded more than I should have. Nothing was happening besides the brothers talking and gesturing while Satan sat and watched Dariana. The mother never looked away from the window. Suddenly Dariana jerked twice and stumbled to her feet. She said something and walked from the room. The discussion went on without her, and I closed my eyes and felt my stomach churning.

  I couldn’t do it anymore.

  I slipped down from the tree and started walking in the direction of Old Peter’s, determined to leave the town for good. I hesitated when I heard raised voices for a moment before the sound cut off. Someone had opened a door or window of the Sanders’ residence.

  I was grateful for the fog as I made my way through the formally laid out garden, making my way by memory until I reached the gate to the front yard. In the low visibility, I couldn’t see anything until I focused on the muted sound of something dragging in the road.

  I followed that sound until I nearly ran into her when she stopped to stare at her bare feet, the only things I could see at the bottom of her borrowed trench coat. After a slight shrug she kept going, not noticing me where I stood two short steps away. I stopped breathing until she was at a safe distance. For days she’d been in the house surrounded by the Slide Brothers. The idea that if I wanted I could reach forward and lift a strand of hair off her shoulder made me tremble. So close, she was not close enough.

  I waited until she was far enough I could only hear the coat dragging on the pavement before I continued after her.

  She followed the road through the town, seeming oblivious to everything around her until she stopped near the bridge at the edge of Sanders. She stood still until with a lurch, she stepped off the road and into the woods. I followed hurriedly. In her uncle’s coat and with the dense fog, she was nearly invisible.

  My palms grew sweaty the further I followed her into the dark woods. When someone finally missed her I would have uncles raining down on me. Being so close to the river, I might be able to make my escape into the dangerous woods on the other side, but seven Wilds against one me didn’t sound like good odds. I couldn’t leave her alone in the woods where things might be waiting to hurt her. Some would argue that you couldn’t do anything to her that wouldn’t be a mercy. Some would say that she needed to be put out of her misery. In my past I might have offered my services for a small fee.

  I’d explored the woods in the past days to know where her direct route would take us. A ledge hung over the river where the drop was fast and far to the cold waters below. Some people liked to picnic there, but it would be a cold death for others. However lifeless, I couldn’t stand by while she ended her life.

  I smelled something rotting carried to me by a gust of wind. Scavengers, scarecrows, whatever you called them, they shouldn’t be on this side of the river. The lifeless girl would be easy prey for them. My fury flared as I searched the woods until I saw a face through the fog, tinged green with a gaping mouth in an approximation to a smile.

  How had they gotten through the thickly laid runes, heavy to keep the monsters and nightmares at bay, safely away from the people who lived in Sanders unaware of the terrors that lurked across the river? Scavengers weren't the worst out there, in fact they were practically harmless against anyone who would fight back; they didn’t like losing their loosely attached body parts, but Dariana wouldn’t fight. She could barely stumble through the woods.

  I broke into a run, glad for the coat that camouflaged her. If she could stay hidden for a few minutes then she'd never know how close she'd come to danger.

  One of them held a torch high above his head, waving it back and forth in his loosely jointed hands. There were others; scavengers never hunted alone, but their leader with the torch would be the only one I needed to convince. I didn't have time to try and reason with them—reason not being the strongest talent of scavengers—not when I had to find the girl, to save her from herself.

  My knife, the nondescript curve of metal that I'd managed to keep track of for months, cut through the tendons of his knees before he saw me. It gave a staccato-like shriek before it tumbled over. I didn't even need to bring out my lighter, not when the torch lit his ragged shirt, setting him on fire.

  The others didn't run like I'd expected, instead turning on me with hisses and curses that were almost intelligible. One of them managed to wrap her hand, with the talon at the end of it, around my arm, slicing through my shirt before I grabbed her throat and burned, letting the fury consume me as she struggled, the fury driving my metabolism, building up the proteins until the cut was gone, and so was she, burned out from the inside. Most of them ran then, the few left were quick work to undo. Fury is good for some things.

  When the scavengers were disassembled, I turned back to Dari. I searched the woods as panic grew inside of me. The Scavengers shouldn't have been on this side of the river and they hadn't acted right, slowing me down more than they should have. Maybe the scavengers were a diversion for something worse, something that wanted the girl as much as I did. I inhaled deeply smelling the wet woods but nothing human. I began to move faster towards the clearing hoping that she hadn’t changed direction. When I reached the edge of the wood
s before the clearing, I let out a breath I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding.

  She sat still, perched on the ledge to look up at the moon. Pale threads of light broke through the mist enough to light her still face. I paused. Even if she did fall, I would manage to pull her out of the river in time.

  I heard an ear-shattering scream from the other side of the river. A certifiable nightmare wanted some company. I should get Dariana back home, but how could I get her attention without startling her? I could grab her and carry her home. She couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds, not that weight mattered when I was burning fury, but it seemed like it would make a bad first impression. The first impression seemed important, particularly considering the fact that there likely wouldn't be a second.

  I stared at her, watching through the fog, and wondered if I’d been mistaken the first time. Did she really have no soul? I concentrated until I could make out the life that flickered from the plants and across the river the red brand of the eager nightmare. Everything else, all the life in the world disappeared when I saw her soul hovering around her. She had a soul, or at least she’d had it at one time, but it was outside of her now, a quivering iridescence of perfect purity and breathtaking beauty. I stepped forward without thinking and snapped a stick beneath my boot. I blinked her back into focus and saw her staring in my direction as if she could see me in the dark. I took a few steps forward until she saw my outline.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked and realized how gruff I sounded.

  She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  “It’s probably not the best idea for you to wander around in the woods at night.”

  She looked down and hunched deeper into the trench coat.

  “You look cold. Maybe I can make a fire for you.” A fire was a terrible idea but I couldn’t stand to watch her shiver. A fire would draw her uncles. It would draw all sorts of unwanted attention but in the meantime it would get her warm. It seemed like the least I could do.