The Guardian of Lone Wolf Peak
A novella in the Guardians of Eternal Series
The Guardian of Lone Wolf Peak
By Evelyn Winters
The Guardian of Lone Wolf Peak by Evelyn Winters
© 2020 Evelyn Winters
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover by Ammelor Rae.
“He tasted of earth and water, fire and ice, salvation and destruction all together in a tender kiss that held me captive throughout a stolen moment in time.”
― Bella J., The Rise of Saint
Chapter 1
“Hey, sweetheart, need a ride?”
Kira looked up at the semi-truck pulled up against the side of the road near the lodgepole pine she was sheltering under. The driver was a pleasant-faced older man, silver hair combed back, held away from his face by some sort of gel, and a white fluffy beard that immediately called up childhood images of Santa Claus. He even had the red, ruddy cheeks, and a nose pinkened from the cold wind blowing in from his opened window.
As far as threatening went, he didn’t look any more threatening than her own grandfather did, what she could remember of him anyway. But Kira knew better than most that appearances could be deceiving, and you never could be too careful, especially for someone like her. Nineteen, lost in an unfamiliar country, a runaway. She was the girl that families heard about on the news, found dead, raped, whatever the circumstances, girls like her rarely came with a happy ending.
She knew that she should turn him away. But the worst thing was, she did want that ride. November in Canada wasn’t as forgiving as she had imagined and being stranded on Gold River Highway, sheltering under a lodgepole while the snow piled up around her, made her think that her choices might be between chancing it with a potential murderer or staying, and definitely dying of exposure.
Her car had broken down about ten miles back, scratch that, Harvey’s car had broken down a few miles back. She had stolen it when she walked out, and she was certain that he had reported her to the police. She didn’t want to try and walk to the next town, but she wasn’t going to chance hanging around a stolen car.
The truth was, she didn’t know how she got here, how it all started. She never knew how it started. One minute and she was doing her chores and the next she would be in a shouting match with her step-father. Her mother had married Harvey while Kira had still been an awkward and gangly pre-teen a few years after struggling to make ends meet after her father was killed in a car accident. It turns out, he didn’t have any insurance, so Kira and her mother were left to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives and try to move on. She wasn’t sure what was so different about the day that she walked out. It was just like any other when it began.
Kira was working on the pile of dirty dishes in the sink when Harvey snapped his fingers. “Beer.” He said, eyes stilled glued to the television screen. Things were better when Harvey still had his construction company, he was gone most of the day and when a contract took him out of town, sometimes even over nights. That must have been what appealed to her mom, the steady income, otherwise Kira couldn’t see what her mother ever saw in that man. He might have been attractive once, but that classically handsome face was now buried under a scraggly beard that Harvey couldn’t manage to trim or keep clean and a mop of salt and pepper hair that he kept slicked back with grease. What had been a large and athletic frame when Kira’s mother first married him, had evolved into slouching beer gut that oozed over the top of his sweatpants.
“I said beer, bitch. Don’t make me get up out of this chair.” The idle threat had Kira moving, grabbing a fresh beer from the fridge to press into his waiting hand. She took the empty and darted back to the safety of the kitchen. She had become more and more worried about being grabbed. There was a certain way his eyes would follow her across the room that she didn’t like.
They had rarely gotten along anyway and then a year ago, Harvey’s Construction and Remodel went bankrupt. It turned out that all her step-dad was really good for was building shoddy homes with walls that fell like dominoes and ceilings with perpetual leaks. Lawsuit after lawsuit crippled the company, and then they started to sue Harvey personally. He lost everything and after the last court case was settled, he came home, sat in his armchair, and never left it.
Now that she was out of high school, and with her mother working 60 hour work weeks as the sole provider, Kira was left to take care of the house and Harvey. She wanted to escape to college like the rest of her friends, but her test scores were low enough to keep her out of the universities, even the mediocre ones. It didn’t do much for her confidence whenever Harvey started to call her names, which began at about the eighth beer. Stupid bitch, dumbass, bottle blonde deadhead, which was extra insulting because her hair was naturally ash blonde.
You could say her “colorful” home life, as Mr. Harned, the Biology teacher, called it, made it a little difficult to keep her grades up in her senior year. She was enrolled in the local community college, working towards a retail management certificate, but it was a slow progress between working part-time at the local Macy’s and full-time taking care of Harvey.
Her mother wasn’t any help. She tried not to resent her for it. Mila Owen, maiden name Volkova, was born in Volvograd in the southwestern region of Russia. She had met Kira’s father while he was on tour and he ended up bringing her back to America with him. After her father’s accident her mother got a job cleaning for some of the wealthy families in the area, once she married Harvey, she told Kira that was behind her now. It was, for a few months, until Harvey lost his business and tanked their credit. Now she was back to scrubbing toilets for the wealthy.
Despite almost never seeing her mother, Kira was reminded of her anytime she walked in front of a mirror. It was from her mother that she inherited her blonde hair and her unfortunate tendency to gain weight in her hips and breasts. It was another point of tension in their household, the more stress her mother was under, the more weight her mother had put on in the months following Harvey’s downward spiral, and Harvey didn’t like his women to look like cows, at least that’s what he liked to say when he was especially drunk and got nasty.
Harvey’s fingers snapped again. “I need something to eat.” He said.
“Mom’s bringing something home tonight.” She called back, scrubbing the coffee stain on her mug with a little more vigor than she intended.
Snap. “I said bring me something to eat.”
“We don’t have anything!” She yelled and gripped the edges of the sink in the silence that followed. It seemed to stretch on for an eternity, when in reality there were only a few seconds between her answer and the creak that meant Harvey was getting up out of his chair. She busied herself with the dishes again. It was always better to be busy when he was angry. He stepped past her, his belly jiggling under the dirty white t-shirt stretched over its expanse.
She focused on scrubbing the leftover sauce out of her mother’s copper pot while Harvey jerked open the door to the refrigerator. He stared into it’s humming, empty expanse for long enough to send Kira grinding her teeth. When he shut it again, he slammed it. Opening the empty cupboards next. Each on of these knocked closed with a ‘crack’ against the wooden frame. Instead of the usual fear that iced her veins, Kira felt a rage so strong she had to drop the pot and grip t
he edges of the sink in fear of being bowled over by it.
“Why is there never any food in this fucking house?” He demanded.
“I don’t know, maybe you should try going to the store and buying some.” She quipped. Her eyes close, the breath involuntarily rushing from her lungs in a great sigh. She had never known instant regret until this moment. Her muscles were already tensing in anticipation, although she’d swear later that she hadn’t known it was going to end in a fight. Not a physical one at the least.
She turned to watch him as he walked absently back to fridge, seeming almost as if he hadn’t heard what she said. His fingers closed around the tall neck of the last beer bottle from the six-pack and only then did he look back at her, slowly, deliberately. “I’m out of beer.”
The rage washed over her again, she could feel herself getting hot with it, her stomach felt like it had been filled with hot coals. “Then I guess you better put on some fucking pants, wipe the drool from your beard, and go get some.”
***
“Then I guess you better put on some fucking pants, wipe the drool from your beard, and go get some.” She said. The sneer in her voice, the blatant disrespect in the curve of her smirk… He had meant to lay into her right away, to smash that last bottle of beer over her head or across her face, but she was different. He didn’t know how, but a woman different to the 19-year-old smartass he usually had to correct, was standing in front of him today. She spoke in a voice that he had never heard before, but it was her eyes that really gave him a reason to pause.
It wasn’t her typical hurt, doe-eyed look, brown eyes welling with tears, wide with just enough fear to get his cock stiffening in his pants. Today, she looked at him with eyes that were both alert and filled with anger. The anger had lent her enough strength to transform from Harvey’s teenage step-daughter, into the woman he was looking at now.
The anger had brought a natural blush to her cheeks, her lips were bitten, sin red, and her dirty, blonde hair was escaping its bun, strands falling to frame her face. Her tank top and jeans were too tight, molding to her body, the front wet from dish water. She looked messy. She looked like a slut. And there was no reason for her to look like that in his house.
“Kira,” he began softly. “Why don’t you apologize before you make this any worse than it has to be.”
“Don’t you even think about laying a hand on me, Harvey. I’m done, I’ve had enough.” She said in that same hard voice.
He stared at her, fingers loosening around the neck of the bottle then tightening again as a little uneasiness bloomed within his stomach. She had never looked or spoken this way to him before. The tension rose in the little kitchen around them until it felt like an aura of hate and anger so strong it was almost visible.
“It’s my duty as man of this house to make sure you turn out to be a decent woman.” He spit, raking his eyes over her body. “There’s nothing decent about you.”
“Harvey,” she said calmly. “I’m not a little girl anymore.” She walked straight past him through the arch and into the living room. She stopped when she was at the foot of the stairs. “I’m 19, for God’s sake, I’ll be 20 soon. I was only staying for mom, but I can’t do this anymore.”
“You watch what kind of filth comes out of your mouth! That’s what you’re going to do!” He shouted at her, but the fear he had been expecting to raise in her never came. “I thought your mother was supposed to teach you what it means to be a woman?”
“And maybe I’d learn that if this were the 50s in Russia, but I live in Washington, Harvey, my high school was in Seattle. Did you really expect me to buy into all those lines about a woman’s place and femininity? She never talked like that when dad was alive.” This last bit seemed to strengthen her resolve. “I’m moving out. Who knows, maybe this will shock mom into going too.”
“Don’t you dare talk like that to me! She’s my woman and you should be grateful I took the two of you in or you’d both be out selling your asses on the street!” He bellowed, but she only shook her head at him, curling a hand over the stair railing as she began to climb.
If she wanted to prance around and pretend like she could up and leave when she was one of his girls, that was her business, but then it was his business to correct her. He moved fast, he didn’t want her to get all the way up the stairs. He cocked his right arm back and threw the bottle like a running back making a last ditch effort for the receiver. Kira saw it coming and tried to duck out of the way, but the bottle impacted on her right shoulder, causing her to make a little sound of pain. It didn’t shatter, which was a shame, he would have liked to see that bitch picking glass shards out of her arm all night. The bottle fell to the carpeted stairs, rolling down until it finally broke at the bottom.
His eyes fastened on her face, hoping to see some regret and maybe terror, but she was looking down at him from the stairs like he was beneath her. She looked at him the way someone would look at a fly that got into the house, an annoyance.
“Oh, would you just stop it already? I’m not going to live here anymore.” She said, but Harvey no more understood what she said then if she had been speaking Chinese. Her voice sounded distant anyways, quiet under the sound of his own thudding heart. But even if he didn’t understand what she had said, he understood the tone. The one that sounded like a fed-up babysitter or pre-school monitor. She really wasn’t afraid of him anymore. He’d have to correct that.
He roared and thundered up the stairs after her. Satisfaction bloomed in his chest when he saw a flicker of something, almost fear in her eyes, but it withered as soon as her expression steeled. She didn’t try to run, didn’t move away from the top of the stairs, even while he was panting like a bull up after her. She turned away from him at the last moment, her hands gripping either side of the handrails for leverage and kicked out powerfully with her right leg.
The sole of her foot connected squarely with the center of his chest which exploded with pain, his booming heart seemed to stutter in his chest. It skipped a beat and then another as Harvey’s arms pinwheeled at his sides, hands grasping for the railings before he lost his footing, but he missed and tumbled backwards down the stairs with a howl of pain, until he finally lay broken at the bottom.
Tepid beer soaked through his sweats; the wet spot grew until it met the second one from his urine. He had pissed himself on the way down it seemed. He propped himself up on his elbows, his brow furrowing when he took in the crooked and misshapen angle of his legs. He tried to move them and couldn’t. He snapped his gaze back up to see her still staring at him indifferently from the top of the stairs.
“I can’t move my legs.” He blurted, his voice weak and pinched. “I can’t walk. Call an ambulance Goddamnit!” She finally turned at the top of the stairs and he was treated to the sight of her rear end as it walked away down the upstairs hall.
***
Kira had just started throwing some clothes into a backpack when she heard him thudding around downstairs. Probably trying to figure out how to crawl to the phone, she thought absently. He was hollering as he moved around down there, calling her all sorts of names for women that she didn’t even know existed.
She zipped her backpack up and hoped she had grabbed what she needed, she didn’t want to hang around long enough to double check. She slipped the twenties she had hidden out from her Twilight book and stuffed them into the pocket of her jeans. Every paycheck, she tucked away a single twenty before helping her mom out with their bills. She never knew why she was doing it, until now. There must have been a part of her that knew she’d need it soon. She slipped on her favorite black coat and she was ready to leave her childhood room behind.
She slung the backpack over her shoulders and walked back to the top of the stairs. Harvey had maneuvered himself onto his belly and was flopping around like some kind of grotesque worm. He stopped when he heard her feet on the stairs.
He craned his neck up to look at her, shouting, “You bitch! You nasty bitch, get down h
ere and help me!”
She had felt so much braver when he was still on two feet, coming after her, but now seeing him broken at the bottom of the stairs, for the first time tonight she was scared. He was hurt, seriously hurt, and she had been the one to do it to him. She started to cry, hot tears streaming down her cheeks, breath hitching as she began to sob.
She would be arrested for this. There’s no doubt in her mind that he’d press full charges. What could she even say in her defense? She knew what he intended to do to her, but there wasn’t a mark on her besides the growing bruise from where he had hit her with the bottle. Did one bruised shoulder really justify all this? She didn’t think a jury would think so.
She began to carefully pick her way down the stairs, eyesight blurred by her tears. The stairs were damp and smelled of urine, she was suddenly grateful she decided to put her sneakers on in her room. He was still shrieking at her while she descended.
Night after night she had dreamed about leaving this house, leaving him and the hollow version of her mother that he had created. Stealing away in the middle of the night with her luggage and a bus ticket in hand, or meeting a handsome stranger at her college and being heroically swept away, or discovering a wealthy, long lost relative on her father’s side. She had never once imagined it like this.
With careful agility that came from years of practicing sports, Kira swung herself over the banister and jumped down safely into the living room when she was a little more that halfway down the stairs. She didn’t need another confrontation with Harvey when it could be easily avoided. As soon as her feet touched the floor with a soft ‘thud’, he was bellowing at her.
“KIRA, YOU GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE AND HELP ME!”
She jerked her head around to watch as he struggled to drag himself across the carpet towards her. Their eyes met and then she adjusted the straps on her backpack, grabbed the keys to his Honda off the hook in the back porch, and stepped outside, closing and locking the door behind her. She took in a breath of the bracing fall air and slid into the car. She turned on the engine and began to laugh. Softly at first, and then devolving into bellyaching, hysterical throes.
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