Aviva
The wind hasn’t yet swept last autumn’s leaves off the forest floor. Soft, pale green tufts of spring grass poke out in heaps as I crouch behind a large bramble bush, the earthy scent of the early blooms all around us momentarily stealing my senses.
But only briefly. Ten year old Shoshannah smells like adrenaline and the pancakes with blueberry syrup she had for breakfast as her soft red hair whips across my cheeks, her body rigid and bright green eyes focused on the sparse trees ahead of us.
Lora, six, fidgets on my other side. “Aviva,” she hisses, tugging on the sleeve of my tunic. “I have to pee!”
“Shut up, Lora,” Shosh whispers, her arm flexed as she draws back her arrow, which looks massive against the child-sized bow I whittled for her as a Solstice gift.
“Breathe in,” I whisper against the rim of my little sister’s ear. She does, holding her breath. “Line up. Release–”
The arrow whizzes past our hideout and spins through the air. A squeak echoes through the forest before it falls silent again.
“What’d she get!?” Lora bounces upright, squirming from foot to foot as she tries to peer over the bush.
“A squirrel,” Shosh frowns, her eyes meeting mine. “This is boring, Aviva. I want to shoot an elk.”
I haul her to her feet by the collar of her sweater–which used to be mine as a child and has seen better days. “You can’t bring down an elk with a bow that small. When you can shift, you can go on the big hunts with me. This is just practice anyway.” I motion to the three rabbits hanging from my belt. “It’s enough for supper already.”
“Aviva!” Lora whines as she dances around. “I’m going to pee my pants again–”
“Okay, okay, okay.” I gently clip a disappointed Shosh on the underside of her chin before guiding Lora to a thicket of alder trees, collecting the squirrel along the way.
Shosh follows behind, lazily swinging her bow. “But you got to hunt deer and elk and all kinds of things at my age.”
“Times were different back then,” I grunt, holding Lora upright as she attempts to do her business in the cover of the bushes. She gets distracted by a shiny beetle on one of the trees and nearly sends us both toppling over. “Lora, pay attention. You’re going to pee on your shoes.”
“Times weren’tthat different,” Shosh argues, sighing dramatically.
“I assure you that they were. There, see? It wasn’t that much of an emergency, was it?” I yank Lora’s leggings up and dust the leaves and dirt from her homespun dress and wool jacket.
“But when you were my age–”
“When I was your age,” I cut in, giving my sister a sharp look. She frowns at me, but her cheeks go pink as I continue, “I had to hunt to put food on the table for the whole tribe. Everyone who could walk was out in the woods scavenging for anything they could find. You’re lucky you get to spend the summer learning to hunt instead of wasting all of your arrows and blistering your fingers just to come home with a fledgling missing its hind quarters because you shot them off.”
“Did you do that?” Lora giggles, and I nod, playfully sticking out my tongue at her.
“It’s all I had to eat for days, too.”
“I wanna play with the bow now!” Lora grabs for the bow, but Shosh yanks it out of her tiny hands.
“It’s not a toy, Lora. And it’s mine!”
I rise to my knees and plant my hands on my hips, watching the two girls tussle over the shitty little bow I made from thin, roping alder branches. Shosh gives Lora a look that rattles me to my core, however.
“Wipe that scowl off your face,” I tell her, and not in the least bit kindly. “You look like Mercy right now.”
Shosh sees red at the mention of our eldest, and least fun, sister. “I do not look like Mercy.”
“Well, you’re acting like her.” I peer up at the sky, at the sun starting to creep back toward the horizon. “We’ve got an hour until we need to head back to the village. We’re going to head back now.”
Both girls pout and fuss about it but I’m used to it. Ever since the last of the snow melted, I’ve been taking Shoshannah and Lora out in the woods to learn how to hunt. Lora is mostly here for moral support, even if she’s a bit loud and slows us down with her pockets full of rocks and twigs, but in a few years she’ll be in Shoshannah’s shoes, out here with a bow that looks like it belongs to one of her dolls.
Shosh takes hunting very seriously. She’s keenly aware of her surroundings and has sharp senses that will blossom into something deadly over the next decade until she comes into her wolf powers.
But she wants more. And more, and more. Unhappy with the three rabbits and the squirrel she nabbed today, she continues to pout and hiss under her breath as I try to keep the girls on track toward our village.
“One day,” she mumbles, sniffling, “I’m going to get a golden elk, and I’ll be the best hunter in all of the land. Better than you, Aviva.”
“Well, you’d be the first hunter in over a hundred years to snare a golden elk.” I give her a little nudge, smiling down at her. “You’d better keep–”
The wind changes course, and I smell… something foreign. Sweet, dark, heavy and hard to describe.
Except I know that scent. Musk and leather. Fire and parchment.
Whiskey.
A wolf.
A male.
I grab the girls and toss them in the shelter of two large cottonwood trees. “Do not move,” I whisper, but Lora teeters to the side, her rocks falling out of her pockets. I lunge for her, losing my grip on Shosh’s collar, and the little devil jumps out from behind the tree with her bow outstretched and an arrow primed and ready.
The word, “No,” doesn’t even have time to leave my lips before the arrow darts through the air, sure and straight.
A sharp yelp echoes through the forest, bouncing from tree to tree, followed by a low, rattling growl.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I hiss, shoving the girls behind me as a rustling sound fills my ears. There’s a small clearing only a few yards from us, down a hill where the spring grass bleeds into a swiftly moving creek. The creek bed is lined with bushes, all tangled and covered in bright green leaves. How Shoshannah saw the impossibly large, dark brown wolf stopping to take a drink from the creek before I did is beyond me.
“I got a bear!” she gasps.
“That’s not a fucking bear,” I reply under my breath, and push both girls behind me. I shift. My clothing and weapons are fashioned to fit my body in both forms. My knife belt becomes a halter that fits securely over one shoulder, looping over my back and belly. My bow still rests on my back despite it being totally useless without thumbs, but I digress. It doesn’t matter now, not when the wolf is lumbering out of the bushes, gasping and snarling in pain.
What was once my dress–secured by loops and string, covers a good portion of my bright red fur, the same color as my hair, and just as thick, curly, and untamable–now falls over my back and billows in the wind. I’m a smaller wolf, for sure, but compared to the beast starting to charge me, I’m honestly just fucking toast at this point.
I lunge forward, stomping on my front legs, baring my teeth and growling like I’ve gone completely feral. Lora screams. I doubt she’s seen the wolf charging up the hill toward us yet. I know I look scary as hell right now, though.
But her scream stops the wolf. He skids to a halt, his ears pinned to the top of his head, Shosh’s arrow sticking from his shoulder. Blue eyes meet mine before he peers over my shoulders at the two young girls I’m guarding with my life.
I’ll fight to the death for them. I will paint this clearing with his blood before he gets within a foot of them. That’s a promise.
I snarl again, edging a step closer, all of my fur standing on end.
He steps back.
“Aviva?” Shosh whimpers. Lora chokes on hiccups somewhere behind me.
I take another step, and the wolf continues to retreat until I’ve pushed him back down the hill toward the bushes and the creek bed. It’s a stalemate now. I’m not going to move or stop snarling until he leaves. He lowers his head in submission–a slight bob to show me he isn’t going to harm us–but I’m not anywhere close to believing that. I watch, teeth bared, as he turns his massive head and bites down on the arrow with a grunt, ripping it free of his shoulder. Blood splatters, and behind me, the girls are still trying to muffle their fear.
I keep my eyes on the wolf, on the stranger. He smells so unfamiliar. He’s not from our pack, Endova. I know that for sure. He’s not from Navvan, either, and definitely not from Teshka, which is over a hundred miles south of here, on the sea.
He starts to turn back to us. I lunge, snarling and growling loudly, and his ears prick forward, then slowly fold back to lay flat once again.
“Aviva!” Lora cries.
The wolf turns from us after another long once over of my face, of my eyes, and hobbles away, splashing through the creek and eventually out of sight.
I shift back to my human form and tie my dress back in place, my hands shaking as I adjust my knife belt and draw an arrow from my quiver, slinging my bow over my front. “Go, now,” I tell the girls, stepping into the boots I’d leapt out of moments ago. I pick up my socks, stuffing them in my belt. “Shosh, move it.”
“I’m sorry!” she bellows, tears running down her pink stained cheeks.
My heart quakes as I roughly grab both girls and haul them against me, holding them tight. Lora and Shosh wrap their tiny arms around me as I look over my shoulder at the creek, at the woods beyond, everything caught in the glare of the setting sun.
* * *
“Where have you been?” Mercy scowls as I brush past her into the narrow kitchen of our hovel built into the side of a hill, like most of the buildings in Endova. The earthen walls keep the house warm in the winter and cool in the summer and protect us from the biting wind and torrential rains, as well.
I set the dead animals on the butcher block, ignoring her. She grabs my arm.
“I’m talking to you!”
“I took Shoshannah hunting.”
“Bah!” She gives me a little shove, knocking my hip bones into the wooden table that houses the butcher block. “It’s useless, you know. She’s a girl, Aviva.”
“So am I.” I start skinning the rabbits. Three, and perfectly white. Shosh and Lora will have new mittens for when the weather starts to turn again.
“You’d be better off staying here instead of running off into the woods every chance you get. Your husband isn’t going to allow you to shift all day and ignore your duties at home.”
“I’m not married yet, Mercy.”
She crosses her arms over her breasts, scowling at me. Her dark brown, glossy hair is swept back away from her impossibly beautiful face. She’s tall and lithe. Graceful. Lovely. But her soul is rotten, and she’s the biggest bitch I’ve ever met in my life. “You will be after this year’s Harvest Festival. Hardan of Navvan is going to give father six goats for you.”
I wipe my bloody hands on my dress, turning to her. “And to think I’m only worth four. He must really like me.”
She scoffs, looking down her nose at me. “You’re not worth the filthy clothes on your back.” She snatches the rabbits off the block before I can stop her.
“Hey!”
“Get cleaned up. We’re supposed to be in the meeting hall in twenty minutes.”
I whirl toward her as she walks away with the rabbits. “Why?”
“Because we have guests.” She smirks at me over her shoulder. “From Silverhide. The Alpha has come to call, and he brought gifts.” Her smirk turns rancid as her beautiful smile cracks. “Do not get in my way.”