Chapter 14
ELLIE
The word for wolf was the first one the children taught me three days after I could finally walk without help, giggling when I'd pronounced it wrong the first six times. Vahr. Wolf shifter was vahr-shen. it meant one whose spirit was also of the wolf. That’s how they explained it.
That instead of one spirit, Dar Ama, the Great Mother of All Life, had granted certain peoples a human spirit and an animal spirit, fused together.
I loved the idea, and it spoke to me a lot more than the genetic modifiers Nathan had often talked about when we were dating.
Now, nearly four weeks after Daska had carried me into this camp more dead than alive, I knew maybe two hundred words.
Enough to greet someone, ask for water, thank someone for food, to ask where Daska was.
I had always been good at language, they came naturally to me.
When I had trained in Paris, it hadn’t taken me more than a few months to become conversational, and less than a year to become fluent.
Aside from my cooking, it was the one thing Nathan had been slightly impressed by.
I pushed the thought away and focused on the little girl crouched beside me, her small hand pointing insistently at a carved wooden deer.
"Elu," she said clearly, her dark eyes bright with the particular patience children reserved for teaching adults obvious things.
"Elu," I repeated, and she beamed.
She grabbed a carved bear, nearly as big as her torso. "Dru."
"Dru." That one I knew. Bear. I'd heard it often enough around camp, usually whispered with respect.
The girl nodded approvingly and picked up a rabbit. "Navi-shen."
I repeated it dutifully, earning another smile.
Bear shifter. We'd been at this for maybe an hour, sitting in the weak spring sunlight outside Daska's shelter while he worked nearby.
I could hear him moving inside, the quiet sounds of pestle against stone as he ground something medicinal.
Comforting sounds. Familiar, now. I liked to listen to him.
Two more children joined us, a boy maybe seven and his younger sister. They dumped an entire collection of carved animals between us and the lesson devolved into cheerful chaos, everyone pointing and naming and correcting my pronunciation with increasing hilarity.
I laughed more in that hour than I had in months. Maybe longer.
When was the last time I had laughed? Really laughed, not the polite chuckle you gave when your boyfriend made an insensitive joke at the faculty mixer?
Stop comparing everything to Nathan. He's not the measuring stick for your entire life.
But he'd been my life for three years. It was hard to just stop.
I didn't notice Daska had emerged from the shelter until his shadow fell across us.
The children looked up and immediately scattered with laughing shrieks, as if they'd been caught doing something forbidden. But Daska was smiling warmly, and he said something to their retreating backs that sounded fond.
Then he looked at me.
"You learn fast," he said in his language, speaking slowly enough for me to follow.
"Children good teachers," I replied, picking through my limited vocabulary carefully.
He settled onto the ground beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from him. Not touching, but close. He seemed to like sitting close to me, and honestly, I liked it too. It should have felt strange. Instead it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
He picked up a carved bear and turned it over in his hands. "You good pups," he said after a moment. Then, quieter: "You pups?"
The question caught me off guard.
"No," I said. "No cubs."
He let out a breath and set the bear down carefully and asked, even more quietly, "You ... mate?"
My heart stuttered. Without even thinking, I glanced across the camp to where Nathan sat next to a flat stone in the sunlight, Megan as always by his side.
He’d been spending his time trying to fix the scanner, but he was limited only to daylight hours and it still wasn’t working.
It was just a glance. A fraction of a second.
But Daska saw it.
His smile faded, and his eyes seemed to dim, like a door closing softly.
"Understand," he said, and rose to his feet in one fluid motion.
"Wait, Daska, I—"
But he was already turning away, already moving toward the other side of camp, his shoulders tight and his hands clenched briefly before he forced them to relax.
Oh no.
"Daska!" I tried to stand too quickly and my healing leg protested, sending a spike of pain up my thigh that made me gasp. I steadied myself on a nearby post, but when I looked up again, Daska had disappeared.
Fuck.
Filled with the sudden need to talk to someone where I could actually use words to make myself understood, I moved across to where Dev was sitting outside his shelter. His leg was propped on a folded hide, a large staff propped nearby that he was using to practise walking again.
"You look like someone kicked your puppy," he observed as I collapsed beside him with decidedly less grace than Daska's exit.
"I think I just accidentally told someone I'm taken when I'm not."
Dev's eyebrows rose. "The healer guy?"
"His name is Daska."
"Right. Daska." Dev shifted his leg carefully, wincing. "So tell him you're not."
"It's not that simple."
"Why not?"
"Because I..." I stopped, frustrated with myself. "Because I looked at Nathan when he asked if I had a mate, and now he thinks..."
"Ah." Dev was quiet for a moment. "You know Nathan's an asshole, right?"
The bluntness startled a laugh out of me. "Yeah. I'm aware."
"Good. Just checking." He picked up a piece of carved wood he'd been working on. A new skill he’d developed with all the spare time he suddenly had on his hands.
Occupational therapy, basically, something to keep his hands busy while his leg healed.
"For what it's worth, Daska seems like a good guy.
Patient. Kind. Built like he could bench-press a boulder. "
"Dev."
"I'm just saying. If you wanted to, you know, move on from the asshole professor who dumped you for a graduate student..."
"She's a postdoc," I corrected automatically, then realized how stupid that sounded. "And it's not about wanting to move on. It's about..." What? Fear? Confusion? The fact that I'd started feeling things I wasn't ready to feel? "It's complicated."
"It doesn't have to be."
But it did. Because I wasn't supposed to be here at all.
None of us were. We were supposed to be finding this magical drain, saving the world and then going home.
Back to our real lives, our real world. Being here in the pack camp, this was temporary.
Except it had been four weeks, and I was feeling more at home here every day.
I helped with the evening meal preparation, or tried to.
The men and women of the camp had been patient with me, showing me how to prepare roots and grains, how to identify which plants were edible, how to keep the cooking fire at the right temperature.
It should have felt strange, living among people whose language I barely spoke, whose customs I didn't understand, whose entire world was separated from mine by thousands of years and a temporal rift I still couldn't explain.
It didn’t. These people had taken me in when I was dying. Had healed me. Had fed me and clothed me and taught me their language with patience I hadn't earned.
I'd been with Nathan for three years and he still didn’t know how I took my coffee. Daska had spent days bringing me different herbal blends of tea to find some I really loved, and there was always a hot cup waiting for me when I woke.
The comparison with Nathan hurt. Not because I still wanted him.
The soul deep pain that had resided inside me for so long, had dulled over the last few weeks to a bearable ache, even with him living mere metres away with Megan.
It hurt because I was starting to realise just how little I'd been settling for.
How small I'd made myself to fit into his life.
“Ellie,” said Dev quietly. “You deserve to be happy too.” I didn’t reply. He turned the carved wood over in his hands. He was making something. I couldn't tell what yet. A bird, maybe. Or a fish. The shavings curled at his feet like tiny question marks.
"You know what I noticed?" he said. "You laugh here. Like, properly laugh. Not that polite little noise you used to make at department dinners. You sound like a completely different person."
"I just... what's the point, Dev? Even if I sorted things out with Daska, even if I could make him understand that Nathan is nothing to me anymore, we're not staying.
We have a job to do, and when it's done, we go home.
Starting something with someone when you know you're going to leave. .. that's not fair. Not to him."
"And not giving him the choice to decide for himself? That's fair to you?"
I shot him a look. "When did you become a therapist?"
"About three weeks into lying on my back with nothing to do but think and whittle terrible sculptures.
" He held up the piece he'd been carving, squinting at it critically.
It was meant to be a horse, I thought, though it looked more like a lumpy dog.
"Also, I've had a lot of time to watch people.
You and Daska, specifically. The way that man looks at you, Ells—"
"Don't."
"Like you hung the bloody moon. Like you're the most fascinating thing he's ever seen, and he's lived his entire life in a world full of actual wolves and bears and—"
"Dev, please. Nathan and Megan are working on the scanner every day.
Once it's fixed, once we find what we came for, we leave.
We go back. And Daska..." My voice caught.
"He won't understand. I can barely string a sentence together in his language, how am I supposed to explain temporal displacement theory to a literal caveman?”