Luna of Rogues - Chapter 41: Chapter 41

I was rudely awoken by the clinking of stone on stone. It wasn't constant, but rather a pattern of clink clink clink, then a brief pause, then clink clink clink all over again. Sometimes there were more clinks and sometimes fewer. It was a pattern irregular enough to jolt me from sleep.
My dream had been a strange one — I'd been blind, stumbling around by touch and feel. When I finally cracked my eyes open, the light was still dim and hazy. It wasn't even sun-up. So why was I awake? I propped myself up onto my elbows, careful not to wake Leo and Tally, and undertook a lazy scan of the clearing.
The hammock was empty. It was still slung, and Dad's rucksack was nestled in the roots of a tree, but Rhys was nowhere to be seen. Dammit. Further investigation was required. I extracted myself from the 'bed,' provoking a grumble from Tally.
"Go back to sleep," I told her. No reply — which was as good as agreement, I supposed.
There was nothing like a missing sibling to wake me properly, and my stumbling sleep-walk transitioned to an alert trot in seconds. I passed the ashy remains of our fire and the smattering of pigeon bones surrounding it. I was following the infernal clinking, to be honest.
I half skid, half clambered down the gorge. When the stream came into view, so did Rhys. He was perched on a rock pile, methodically skipping stones downriver. Most of them managed a couple of bounces before hitting the rocks of the bank with that clink clink clink.
I paused and folded my arms across my chest, debating whether I should make a sarcastic comment or just pelt him with birdshit. Before I got the chance to do either, he said, "Morning, Skye," without even turning his head, far too cheerily for the hour before dawn.
"Morning, invalid," I growled. "Time to return to captivity."
He snorted, meaning no, thanks. Then he said, "Dad left."
And it wasn't a question, but I nodded anyway.
The next snort was derisive. "You lied."
"So did you," I pointed out, feeling another flash of anger at the beating he had denied.
His eyes flickered to the ring of bruises on each of his wrists, his jaw tightening. "Fine. We're both liars."
Not a revelation. We'd been taught to lie, and extensively. But lying to each other? That was less normal. I tried not to think of how many lies I'd already told him for the sake of that promise to Fion. I was trying harder and harder not to think about it these days, and it was trying harder and harder to be thought about.
And then I noticed that the pebble he was holding, the one he was about to skip ... it was in his left hand. All those thoughts went away, that easily, and I beckoned. "C'mon then. Let's see your shoulder."
"Why? You've never tried coddling me before," he muttered sullenly.
"I've never seen you fall out of a window before."
He obviously wasn't coming to me, so I went to him, traversing two banks and a stream to do it. He let me examine his forearm, which looked much better (on the surface, at least). The broken bone had realigned and scabbed over. Fine. When it came to the shoulder, I had to swat him a few times before he'd pull his shirt over his head far enough to let me see the bullet wounds.
Now that it wasn't coated with blood, and my brother wasn't in imminent danger of dying, I could see that—
"Rhys!" I exclaimed delightedly. "Look! This one's in line with the other scars."
I was rewarded with open astonishment. "What? Let me see."
He craned around to look. The back was a little wonky — it had come out at a strange angle, but on the front there was a near-perfect row of three circles along his collarbone, all gunshot wounds. The newer one was dark red and scabby, while the two older ones flanking it were white and raised.
He swore through a grin, then told me, "Shit, ain't that a miracle."
I grinned right back, then helped him back into his shirt. "Let's see how high you can lift it."
He made it to chest height before he began to struggle, and I knew that meant there was still some internal damage. He could probably run, but fighting was out of the question. I didn't tell him that because I didn't want him to have any warning if I needed to restrain him.
We walked back to camp together, meandering in lazy zigzags up the gorge. Not twenty metres from camp, I heard leaves crunching and froze. Rhys stopped with me, and the two of us scoured the undergrowth by eye. The ferals Rhodric had mentioned, maybe? Less than a hundred, more than three. How many could our ragtag band survive?
It didn't take long to spot the oddity. There was a pair of wolf eyes in the dead bracken. They watched me relentlessly, following every ragged breath. I let my shoulders slack, got myself ready to shift—
But then Rhys laughed and jostled me playfully. "The hell? A dog?"
Oh. Oh?
Not wolf eyes, but close. He came crawling out, low to the ground. A smile came unbidden to my lips — it was the little one, the brave one, the one with the floppy ear. His police harness was caked with mud, his lead little more than a frayed stub.
"What're you doing here?" I asked, running my fingers through his scruff. He leaned into my hand but didn't reply. How rude.
"Skye," Rhys demanded, affronted, "do you know this dog?"
All I could offer was a shrug. "We scrapped last night. I thought he'd gone back to the cops..."
"You know how much I like dogs, and you did this without me?"
I levelled him a very flat stare. "You were unconscious."
"That's not an excuse," he grumbled under his breath. "But disgusting betrayal aside, I think you need to name him."
"He's already got a name." I said it softly. Too softly to hear, probably. But we needed to call him something aloud, I supposed, so I checked the harness for a tag and read it hesitantly. "Al-fi-ee. Alfie?"
His tail lashed my leg.
"Okay, Alfie, hi," I found myself laughing, only to stop abruptly. What was he doing here, so far from his owners? Dogs didn't just up and run off, I didn't think. Too late, and cursing myself, I ran my hands through his fur, checking for a tracker. I didn't find one. But he did cringe away when I touched his left side.
My stomach was quicksand as I reached out with the link to let him show me what had happened. The reply was an overwhelming stream of senses which left me dazed and shaken.
Cold, wet, sore. The swapper had a pack, and he thought he might join it, but she'd snarled him away. Now he was back with the handlers. Loud voices. Angry voices. He wasn't supposed to run off — he knew it, they all knew it. But the howl had made them forget for a moment, and then it had been too late.
His handler had dragged him to the car by the neck, growling in the yipping human tongue, and beaten him with the light-making-stick. Pain, pain, pain, in his shoulder and his ribs. He'd whimpered and cowered and played meek, like he knew he was had to, if he wanted it to stop. Back turned, just for a second. It was long enough. He ran into the dark and the quiet. Running from was easy — he could have done it years ago, but he'd never had anywhere to run to. Until now.
I choked out a couple of swearwords. Alfie heard the tone of it and tipped his head to one side, those brown eyes worrying about me. He leaned into my thigh, nudged my hand with his muzzle, licked once.
"What is it?" my brother asked. Now there was a second pair of worried eyes, these ones hazel.
I scrubbed at my face. "He got beat because of what I did last night. Shit, Rhys, I didn't know humans beat their dogs."
"I don't think they all do," he said, strangely calm. "But there's always a couple pricks in every species, y'know? Wait here, please — I'll be back in a couple hours."
And with that, he began walking back towards the stream. Back towards the town. It took me a moment to figure out why, but as soon as I did, I hurled myself at him and got a fistful of shirt. "You're not going to kill the guy, you halfwit. No time. There are people dying at Ember while we dither here."
"Yet you could sacrifice an entire night for me?"
Because he had a point, I smacked him. "Yes, I could. Because we need you alive. We do not need revenge for the dog right now."
Rhys stopped trying to break my hold and scowled. Alfie didn't like us arguing, and he was walking anxious circles around the pair of us. I think that, more than my words, convinced him. "Fine. Ember it is. I'll be coming back, though."
"So will I," I muttered.
I looked long and hard at the dog. His harness didn't fit right anymore. I called him to me and fumbled with the buckles until he could wriggle out of it. I surveyed my handiwork with a touch of pride. Much better. Standing in the woods, wearing just his pelt, he could almost pass for a wolf.
Then Alfie whined and put his paws on our waists, and the two of us made an outrageous fuss of him, only stopping when our names were called. Tally was up, and she'd woken my mate. We returned to find them breaking camp.
"Is that a dog?" Leo asked.
"We think so," I said.
He made friends with Alfie, then Tally did. Once we'd covered the remains of the fire, swept away the footprints and dismantled the hammock, we were ready to leave. Rhys made a valiant effort to shoulder the rucksack, and the three of us had to wrestle it away from him before he tore his stitches. Leo ended up carrying it.
We set off in human form, because it would have been much harder to climb the gorge cliffs without hands. Rhys fell back to be rearguard, Tally took the lead, and Leo and I bickered our way through several miles before we cleared the gorge. We had a brief sit down before shifting for the last part of the journey, during which I began to worry that Tally was isolating herself.
She had barely said a word all morning, and even now she was standing a distance away from us, brooding over something. I had spent enough time with her to realise something wasn't right, and I could also take a wild guess as to what. I moved to plonk myself down beside her.
"What's up?" I asked under my breath.
Tally sighed and rubbed her arm nervously. "There's something wrong with Kyle — I can feel it through the bond. He's hurt bad, maybe even—"
"No," I said firmly, bracing myself for a pep talk. "You'd know for sure if he's dead. Besides, Aaron's with him, and Aaron's survived worse predicaments than this."
"Yeah. I know. I'm sorry. Still can't help worrying," she muttered.
I heard a twig snap. That wouldn't have concerned me — there were plenty of animals in these woods — if the sound hadn't been accompanied by a scream. I sat bolt upright and palmed my knife reflexively. We couldn't afford to not defend ourselves while the ferals ran wild.
Rhys tried to get up, but I shoved him back onto his arse before he could move any further. He grinned ruefully, not looking too upset about it, although restless energy practically radiated from him.
I tried to catch a scent ... and failed. We were upwind, so there was nothing do except stay put and wait. I gave Alfie a growl-order to stay down. He didn't stand a chance against wolves. He'd proved that yesterday.
The sounds of an approaching person began to drift towards us. Snow crunching underfoot, the swish of displaced branches and rasping breaths. They weren't bothering to be sneaky... Most shifters wouldn't do that unless they knew they were safe, that they'd win any fight they encountered. Or unless they were very, very unsafe.
I scuffed my heel against a root while I thought. We could only hear one, yes, but could that be a diversion? Was the real threat behind us? Another minute of waiting and I was edgy enough to let Rhys up. We might have needed him, injured or not.
The hilt of my knife was sweaty by the time the new arrival came into view, flat-out sprinting for us, barely bothering to look where they were going. I watched them trip twice, go sprawling the second time, and still not even slow.
It was the hair which gave it away — a long, tangled matt of strawberry blonde. Sophie? Goddess, how? She had been with Aaron, and he was a long way behind and on the wrong side of the town.
She ran right into the middle of us, thudding into Leo and Tally and nearly knocking them flying. While we tried to steady her, her eyes thrashed around, trying to take us in, as if she didn't quite believe we were here.
"Sophie? What the bleeding hell are you doing here?" I asked, bemused. "Are the others okay?"
"No time," she gasped. "Start running."
I didn't need to be told twice. I wasn't stupid to wait around for her to elaborate before I legged it. The others weren't far behind. Leo and Rhys helped Sophie, half carrying her between them. It quickly became apparent that she needed a break, so I called a halt and then shouted over my shoulder, "What's chasing you?"
"Feral," she gasped out. The poor girl must have been running for miles, if the way she was swaying on her feet and panting for air was any indication. No one ran themselves to dropping like that unless their life was in significant danger. Yet she hadn't shifted. Why? "We can't kill him."
That didn't sound great. Maybe it was some sort of undead zombie feral. I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.
An excited howl from somewhere behind punctuated her words. That did it — we were running again, winded or not. I stopped only long enough to stuff my knife back into a pocket. But, as I did so, my hand brushed something metal and L-shaped. And I knew exactly what it was. A gun, which Rhodric must have slipped me, because I didn't see how else it could have got there.
A Goddess-damned gun. I didn't want a gun. I didn't want to have it. I didn't want to shoot it. I didn't even want to look at it. But we'd brought them from the castle, hadn't we? Because we'd known we might need them. This, to me, felt like a time of such need.
I thrashed the decision around in my mind. Play fair or play dirty? Fight or just kill? Screw it, I'd let my finger choose, if it came to that. Just then, Tally skidded to a halt and Alfie slammed into her legs. I nearly did the same thing, and when I'd come to a shaky stop, I looked for the problem.
A feral stood in our path, hackles raised and ears up. His fur was already clotted with blood and dirt and saliva. But the worst part was ... I knew that scent.
The feral was Owen.
We can't kill him. Sophie hadn't meant it literally. Now I understood why she was running instead of fighting... What sort of person could fight their friend? Even kill them?
Owen snarled with a viciousness that he didn't possess. Not a cruel bone in his body, that boy, but I wasn't looking at a boy. I was looking at a rabid animal.
Me. I was that sort of person. My emotions wouldn't get in the way of my judgement which, right then, was telling me that Owen had to die. We couldn't save ferals — we didn't know how, or if it was even possible. He would chase us to the ends of the earth now he had our scent, literally run himself to death. And in that awful moment, I knew it was him or us.
And yet there was Rhys at the corner of my vision, peeling his borrowed shirt away from his crusted wounds and reopening them in the process. Preparation for a shift.
"Leo, watch him," I snapped. So what if he wanted to help? Any more damage to that shoulder would force us to wait here another night, and I wasn't sure Ember had that kind of time.
My mate put himself between Owen and Rhys, who didn't waste his breath on complaining or appealing. Instead, he looked to be debating the best way to knock Leo onto his arse before he shifted. Oh well. I'd bought myself a few seconds.
The wolf stalked closer, licking his lips. This was a game to him. A hunt. We weren't anything more than moving flesh in his eyes. I felt nothing but despair and shook my head slowly. No. Owen was gone. Dead, probably. Now his body wanted to kill me — rip me to shreds simply because I existed.
"Stay where you are," I warned him. The gun shook in my hand ever so slightly. I drew it closer to my body. My other hand fumbled for the pocket knife.
The small wolf took another step. I could see drool pooling at the corners of his open jaws. A set of razor-sharp white teeth were in plain view. I was staring death in the face, and it looked exactly like one of my friends.
"Don't," I insisted futilely. He wasn't human at all. That side of him was dead and gone. This body was occupied by the wolf, driven crazy by the loss of his other half. He would kill me, I repeated to myself. Too late for him, but I could still save myself. "Please, Owen, don't ."
I saw his hind legs bend, his haunches sink down. That was the beginnings of a pounce, and I was the target. There were two options now. I could shift and fight, which would end in ripping him to shreds, or I could shoot him and get it over with. When I thought about it, it wasn't much of a choice for my finger to make.
Owen leapt, all the tension in his muscles uncoiling like a spring. Reflexively, I squeezed the cold metal, and the recoil bruised my hand. The sound of the shot didn't even register, because I was suddenly on the ground, claws digging into my shoulders. The bullet had found a lung, but it wasn't killing Owen quickly enough.
His jaws flashed wide, taking up my entire vision, and I brought my other arm up sharply, ignoring the sting as those claws scraped even further into my flesh. I was better with a knife than a gun, so this weapon slid home between Owen's ribs and ripped straight into his heart. Desperately, I wrenched it downwards as far as it would go. He died quite fast in the end. One minute he was moving and breathing on top of me, the next he was limp and still.
My head slumped backwards and hit a tree trunk. I didn't have the will to move. Rhys and Leo had moved quickly after the gunshot — not fast enough to help, but fast enough to haul Owen's carcass off me. They laid him at the foot of a tree and just stared silently at the growing pool of blood. There weren't really any words.
"You did the right thing," Rhys told me breathlessly. "I swear."
He would have said that even if he didn't believe it, I knew, just to make me feel better. But it didn't work. I knew it had been inevitable and I knew it had been self-defence, but somehow neither of those things mattered. Because Owen was still just as dead.
Leo didn't say anything, but he squeezed my hand.
It took many minutes to pick myself up from the ground and many more to bring myself to look at the boy I had killed. "Sorry," I murmured, because it was all I really had to say. His mind had been destroyed by the hunters, and I had just helped his body catch up. So why did it feel so wrong?
The way Sophie was looking at me... It was accusing and hateful at the same time. The same way she had been after Davies died, when she had blamed me for it.
"You didn't need to kill him!" she screamed at me. "He didn't need to die, you bitch!"
"Shut up," my brother snarled. "It was him or us. Stow the self-righteous shit, because we would all have done the same thing."
"Rhys," I said quietly, shaking my head. "I don't need a guard dog. Let her talk."
He backed down, but not happily. Leo, who looked like he had been about to join the argument, also kept his mouth shut. The two of them had just watched someone try to kill me, and they were feeling protective, I guessed. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to get carried away and take a swing at her. All I really wanted was to be sick.
Sophie took that as permission to let rip. Her eyes, normally such a warm green, were nothing short of venomous. "We could have knocked him out, kept a gun on him, taken him back to camp. We could have found a way to fix him. And you didn't even try! Why is it always kill first, think later with you?"
"I had a gun on him," I pointed out quietly, "and he didn't particularly care. He wasn't open to reason either. I don't know why, but he was an unusually ferally feral."
"It's because he was just turned," Rhys explained. "I saw it happen once. They go utterly mad for the first week or so — they'll even attack each other. It takes a long time to calm down enough to work together. The ferals we see in groups have all survived that process. But Owen..."
He trailed off, not needing to finish the thought. Owen's wolf had just lost half of himself. He was numb and raw and reckless. Nothing I said would have convinced him to back down. I wasn't even entirely sure that he had understood my words.
"What the hell happened, anyway?" Leo asked Sophie when she opened her mouth furiously, probably just wanting to distract her.
She laughed with an icy bitterness. "What do you think happened? We distracted the police so you could escape, and it would have been easy enough, except that they had guns. Instead of waiting for a firearms unit, they just starting firing. Connor and Kyle got themselves shot, and we were slowed down carrying them. Oh, and there was a pack of ferals on our asses."
"Kyle? Shot?" Tally echoed the words shakily.
"He's alive, but I won't lie to you — it doesn't look good." Sophie winced, and I knew she was still in shock. "Bullet lodged in his spine, so his wolf can't heal until it's out. Connor wasn't much better, and Aaron and Emmett were bleeding, too. We were ... shorthanded, to say the least. Owen and I volunteered to go back for you while everyone else got home safe. The state they're in, the others would do more hindering than helping."
No doubt Aaron had thought the boy would be safer with us, rather than limping back to camp through feral terrain.
The Shadowless girl's mouth twisted. "Oh, Goddess," she murmured. A stream of swearwords followed.
But Leo was encouraging Sophie. "Keep going."
"And then the feral pack found us. We fought, but it was twenty against two... Held us down, hurt us, you know how it goes. When they got bored of that, they stuffed some kind of drug down our throats, and it tasted vile, but it didn't do jack shit to me. Well, my wolf is a bit psycho, but that doesn't feel permanent. Owen, though..." She trailed off to sniffle. "He went crazy. And I guessed what the drug was, so I pretended it had worked. They left us there together. I just ran after that. Kept running until I caught your scent."
We fell into a distraught silence. It kept nagging at me. Owen had turned, but Sophie hadn't? Was she about to flip out? Was she just pretending to be normal? I checked her scent, twice, and it seemed normal. Her eyes weren't dark, either...
"Any of you notice," Rhys asked matter-of-factly after a minute, "that the ferals are all male?"
Oh. Well. Maybe that explained it, too. Was I so willing to doubt her because she didn't like me? Because that felt petty. I was many things, but I hadn't thought petty was one of them.
Leo nodded. "You mean it doesn't work on females?"
My brother shrugged, uninterested. "Maybe. Dunno, really. It saved Sophie and she's okay — that's all I care about."
"Owen isn't okay," she snapped. Well, it started as a snap. It ended in a hoarse whisper.
No, he wasn't, and whose fault was that? Leo threaded his fingers through mine and guided them to my pockets, and only then did I notice how badly they were shaking. Adrenaline? I chewed on the insides of my cheek, trying to calm myself.
Rhys was the only one of us who thought to go to Sophie and hug her. Sobs wracked her entire body — sobs I reckoned she'd been holding in ever since she found us. My brother threw me a look over her shoulder, a look which said, I got this, okay? I was all too happy to nod.
"Come on, we'll get you cleaned up and shit," I heard him mutter. "How badly did they hurt you?"
"I... Well... Nothing which hasn't already healed..." Sophie was saying as he helped her walk away from us, a subdued Alfie at their heels, and that was the last I heard. They'd find a stream or a pool or something suitably damp. Washing off the blood and dirt was a good treatment for shock victims, we'd often found, and water itself could be calming.
That left three of us to deal with Owen. I cursed inwardly. We couldn't risk the smoke for a pyre, and we didn't have his tree. Burial — it would have to be. We could carve a marker so his family would stand a chance of finding the place to do it properly. Oh, Goddess, his family. Mortimer-from-the-council was his father, he had over a dozen siblings, Aaron included, and I was fairly sure his mother worked on a patrol. How was I supposed to explain it to them?
"Skye," Leo murmured, his hand squeezing mine. I blinked at him. Was I in shock, too? Had I been doing that awful vacant stare?
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I know. We'd better start digging. Tally, could you—? Tally?"
She was unresponsive, in every sense of the word. Her dark hair had fallen into her eyes, one arm was wrapped around its opposite shoulder and her breathing was shallower than a puddle. Ah, shit. I wasn't entirely sure she'd heard anything beyond the word 'shot.' I knew I should be patient, that I should be nice, but my mood had other thoughts. Next thing I knew, I was slamming the hilt of my knife into her stomach.
"Enough of that," I snapped. "Snap out of it and look at me. Properly look, girl, not that empty-eyed thing you're doing. There. That's better, isn't it?"
A pair of wary, guarded green eyes had met my own. The staring would make her uncomfortable, of course — it was equal to a challenge — but that was the idea. Get her anxious and worked up and frustrated with me rather than pining for her mate.
"You can't help Kyle. It's a genuine bloody fact. So you've got two options. Stay with us and help Ember, after which I'll personally put you in a car, or tuck your tail between your legs and run back home, which'll take days and probably get you killed."
Her jaw clenched and relaxed in quick succession. "I know, I know."
I gave her a light shove. "Then what the hell are you doing? Being a werewolf isn't enough for you — is that it? You gotta play zombie as well?"
The corner of her lip twitched. It wasn't much, but it was enough, for now. I lifted my gaze to the tree behind her and nodded a dismissal. Tally busied herself with cleaning the blood from Owen's coat with snowmelt very quickly.
As I began to fashion a shovel-like piece of equipment from bark and a branch, I felt Leo's full and undivided attention burning a hole in my back. I turned slightly and raised an eyebrow.
"You just... Well, you reminded me a little of—" He trailed off, smiling now. "Never mind. Forget it."
I eyed him strangely but let it drop.
We dug through the snow first. It had already been melting, the water soaking the soil beneath and loosening it for us. Tally shifted to dig with her claws, while Leo and I managed with hands and makeshift tools. About half a metre in, Rhys and Sophie and Alfie returned to help and progress sped up considerably.
"That'll have to do," I muttered after an hour. It wasn't as deep as a grave should have been, but we'd run out of spare energy to expend. Gently, Rhys lowered Owen's body down. The five of us stared morosely into the muddy pit, at the wolf who was curled up too tightly, too unnaturally, undignified in death because we were too exhausted to dig.
There was something jarring about burying another person, not least when you knew that you hadn't done the job properly and that you could've done better. We wouldn't even be able to drink to him and celebrate his life, as we should. All we had time for was a minute of mourning at his graveside.
Then with tears gathering in the corners of my eyes, I kicked the first clump of dirt on top of Owen. We filled the hole halfway, then stopped to unearth a spindly yew sapling and situate it. The remaining dirt and snow was packed around its roots. Sophie cut crosses into the surrounding trees so that Owen's parents and siblings might be able to find him in the future.
The tear tracks had dried on my cheeks by the time we shifted and resumed — in total and utter silence, in such contrast from the journey's beginning — the run to Ember Pack, where dozens of ferals waited for us.