Aviva
Three month old Lexa’s dark blue eyes are wide and round as she grips Mercy’s arm. Her eyes go glassy as her lower lip begins to tremble, her little face twisting with pitiful sorrow.
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” I try to assure her, but my voice wobbles with sudden heartbreak. I look at my sister, desperate and unsure. “It’s too early, isn’t it? Leaving her like this?”
Mercy rolls her eyes. “You’re going to be gone for like… ten hours, Aviva. She’s fine. She has plenty of milk–”
I take a single step away, and Lexa wails.
We’re attached, that’s clear. I’ve been wearing her on my chest since the day she was born. We’re rarely apart, and if we are, Lexa firmly believes she’ll never see me again.
She wants nothing to do with Ryan recently. It’s not that she doesn’t like him, or can’t find comfort in his arms but… I’m her mother. I smell familiar, feel familiar….
“I’ll be back very soon, love,” I croak, trying not to burst into tears myself.
Lexa gives me the most heartbroken face as I whirl, running out of Mercy and Jacob’s house and across the village, where I close myself in our quiet, empty house and let my own tears flow free.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve added a second story to the house… not that Lexa needed her own room because she sleeps with us every night, cuddled tight against my chest, nursing whenever she wants.
I blink back tears, drying my face on the back of my hands as Ryan comes out of our bedroom carrying my weapons belt and halter. He notices the look of utter dismay crossing my features and sighs, setting the items in his hands on the kitchen table. “That bad?”
“It’s far too early to spend a night away from her, isn’t it? She was devastated, Ryan!”
“She’s not going to remember this,” he assures me. “You need this, Aviva.”
“I know,” I grind out. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“It’s just a night. We’ll be back before dawn tomorrow, I promise.”
I nod but feel guilty about how excited I am to get out of the village for the night, to shift and run free in my wolf form for the first time since her birth. I’m excited to go hunting with the men and feel the cool, summer night air whispering through my fur.
I’m excited to be myself again, just for a few hours, before going back to being Lexa’s mom.
I didn’t get to go on the spring hunt in Endova this year. Lexa was less than a week old, and Ryan stayed behind to tend to both of us while most of the men in our pack left for four or five days. This hunt he planned… it’s just for me.
He wraps me in his strong arms and holds me close. “If you don’t want to go, we don’t have to.”
“I need this,” I echo, laying my cheek against his chest.
“You’ve needed this,” he smiles. “So let’s go.”
I make quick work of preparing for our night in the forest around Silverhide. If I linger long, I’m going to lose my nerve. I know Lexa’s in great hands with Mercy, who dotes on her endlessly already, but still. I wasn’t expecting motherhood to feel like this–all-consuming and fragile, like if I blink, I’ll miss this time with her when she’s so young and dependent on me, while also dying to recognize myself in the mirror again.
The sun sets on Silverhide as we head out, shifting and racing over the mountain top together and dropping into the endless forest beyond our sheltered valley.
There’s a stillness to the forest I realize I remember from my youth. Once, years ago, the Deadlands were a calm place. A place teeming with ancient magic that settled in the ground and thrummed deep beneath us… but a few years ago, when I was still becoming the warrior, and hunter, I am today… that changed. The forest–our old hunting grounds–changed. Evil coasted over the forest floor. Rogues moved in, traveling in droves. Hellhounds separated from their witches long ago woke from their endless slumbers to stalk through the forest.
It was Richard and his magic all along.
But now, the Deadlands are free.
I sprint through the woods, weaving and leaping, reveling in how easily I shifted and how good it feels to be in my wolf form again. My crippling brain-fog brought on by long, sleepless nights lifts completely, and I feel… amazing. Amazingly myself again.
I’m not sure where Ryan’s taking me tonight. He didn’t mention any specific plans or hunting grounds, but after an hour, we reach the western edge of the forest where it bleeds into plains again, and stretches another hundred miles to another row of towering mountains where Moonrise is nestled somewhere in the valleys.
But the mountains to the south are draped in moonlight and beckoning to me, so I turn in that direction. The last time I hunted in these mountains, I got a mountain goat in an… unprecedented way. By nearly falling to my death, actually. Ryan had been there to witness it, of course, and it’s a story he loves to tell anyone willing to listen.
Ryan follows me through the plains under a cloak of moonlight. I feel light as air, darting over rocks and leaping over dry creek beds, sailing through the night.
We reach a small valley with a patch of woods–a new place, a place I don’t think I’ve ever been–but I notice smoke rising from the thicket below and skid to a stop.
‘Other hunters?’ Ryan asks through the mind-link.
‘Possibly,’ I reply, hesitating as I step from paw to paw. Adrenaline races through my veins. It’s later summer now–prime hunting season. The last chance to gather meat and furs before the animals return to their winter grazing lands far from the reaches of the tribal packs that inhabit this area.
‘I want to check it out,’ Ryan says, his voice calm but stern. He’s been on edge lately. I’ve chalked it up to being a new father, but two new packs have settled in the Deadlands this summer, one of which he’s not fond of.
The Alpha of Narrow Valley, a pack now only twenty miles east of Silverhide, is Ryan’s age. He’s mateless and hungry for power. His pack isn’t any different. Mostly young, eager men looking for adventure and… women.
They’ve already gotten into some trouble with my father in Endova, hunting in Endovian territory, harassing the women they come across. Ryan’s had to put his foot down several times, and the Alpha of Narrow Valley isn’t too keen on bending the knee to an Alpha King.
Not yet, at least.
The last thing I want right now is to come across a band of Narrow Valley hunters, but I follow Ryan toward the woods, toward the smoke, nonetheless. Ten minutes later, we shift into our human forms, hugged by our Endovian leathers, and walk into a camp of… Teshkan hunters.
“Long way from Teshka,” Ryan says, clapping the shoulder of the leader of the group, a warrior named Saul.
Saul rolls his dark brown eyes, motioning to the full moon over our heads. He’s a young man, and a kind one. His uncle is the patriarch, and his father is an elder, so he’s of high rank. “We weren’t going to waste the new moon.”
“Any luck?” I ask the men as I sit next to the fire, settling beside Ryan.
“We’ve seen a few elk, but that’s it,” answers one of the hunters with a shrug. “We’re not here to hunt, though.”
“Why are you here then?” Ryan is genuinely curious.
I am, too. These guys are dozens of miles away from their village right now, and they’re all dressed for a long journey, based on the supplies scattered around the camp.
“We were actually on our way to you, Alpha,” Saul says wearily, giving Ryan a knowing look. “There’s been an incident in Teshka, on the shore.”
Ryan furrows his brows. “What happened?”
Saul looks to his friend, Ezra, who continues, “A man washed up on the beach, about ten miles from Teshka. We thought he was dead, but we brought him to the village, and he eventually woke up in a panic.”
Saul says, “We thought he might’ve been in the war last year, in Tarsian. We share the sea, you know. I thought he might’ve been swept away and ended up here, but where he was in the meantime is a mystery.”
“What does the guy say about it?” Ryan asks, his voice low and gravelly. “Where was he, all these months?”
“That’s the thing.” Saul sighs, glancing at Ezra, who shares an equally concerned expression on his chiseled face. “He only speaks the old tongue. That’s not totally uncommon, but it’s mostly the oldest of the elders who still converse in Firestone…. He’s young. Only a teenager… maybe fourteen or fifteen at the most.”
“You said he was a man,” I argue, but the men ignore me.
“He said he was in a wreck on the water. His boat sank. He can’t find his parents. He has no idea where he is.”
“Where is he from, then? Somewhere in Tarisan?”
“No,” Saul grinds out, looking worried and skeptical. “I don’t believe so. I think he came from… across the water.”
Ryan glances at me. “So… where?”
It’s common knowledge, at least in Eastonia, that those who travel into the Southern Sea don’t return. There are small islands, of course, but eventually they fade to nothing but raging, angry, open water and waves as tall as mountains… or so, the legends go.
We argue back and forth with the Teshkan group, trying to piece together the boy’s history. He’s not from the islands. He’s not from Serpentia, or the other cities along Tarsian’s shore. He’s young, hurt, and terrified, and Saul was coming to Silverhide to ask us for help.
“He says he’s from a place called Emberfyll,” Saul says in conclusion, shaking his head. “We have no idea where that is, and the poor kid insists it’s in the sea, far away. He said he’d been traveling for months when their boat sank in a storm.”
I roll the word Emberfyll over my tongue. It doesn’t sound that familiar. I dig through the legends and tall-tales I know from my childhood and come up with nothing regarding the Southern Sea, other than the storms and the monsters that guard it, for some reason, stopping people from venturing too far.
“Why was he traveling?” Ryan asks into the gloom of night. “What was his destination?”
Saul heaves a breath, his eyes holding Ryan’s gaze. “He told us his parents were on the run. An Alpha and Luna, apparently. They left Emberfyll, wherever that is, to try to take him somewhere safe.”
“Why?”
It’s Ezra’s turn to speak, but he glances at Saul before saying, “He won’t say. He gets really upset when we ask him. We thought maybe he’d answer to you, instead.”
Ryan looks around the fire before his eyes meet mine. Inside my head, he asks, ‘Is Emberfyll familiar to you at all?’
‘No, it’s not. But if he’s really from somewhere in the sea… If there’re people that far south, people that might come looking for him…’
“Where is the boy now?” Ryan asks the group.
“In Teshka, recovering. He’s badly malnourished, but he’ll be fit for travel soon.”
“Bring him to Silverhide as soon as you can.” Ryan rises, nodding at Saul. “We can house him there until we can find a way to return him to his people–or whatever.”
Ryan walks away from the camp. I rise, and follow.
We walk through the woods side-by-side in silence for a while before he finally speaks, saying, “I have an odd feeling about this.”
“So do I,” I admit, a chill snaking through my body. “What do you think it means?”
“I think it means we involve my aunt and uncle,” he says quietly. “And… Sarah, who can look into his mind… and Misty, who can paint us a picture of what happened to the boy.”
“Sarah and Misty haven’t wanted to come back to Eastonia since the war.”
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Ryan says to me.
I take a deep breath, knowing he’s right and wondering what the hell we’re getting ourselves into now.
We’re about to find out….