2. Chapter 2
Buck Wild
Dasher
The last thing I remembered clearly was the smell of turned earth.
I’d been out past the north fence since sunup, walking the line where my crop met the wild grass.
The land called out to me when I woke, and I knew I needed to go and feel the ground under my feet.
My land stretched from the ice-capped peaks of the Range in the north, to the warm shallows of the Amber Sea in the south.
Between the extremes was my everything - tall grasses that turned copper in the dry season, ancient trees whose root systems ran so deep and so tangled that the ground itself seemed to breathe, and watering holes ringed with pale mineral deposits where the herd gathered at dusk, and stood shoulder to shoulder in something that wasn’t prayer, but was as close to it as we could get.
I had been born on this land.
I would, I had always assumed, die on it.
Frost still sat heavy on the seed rows. My breath fogged in front of me.
I remember thinking the sky looked wrong, too bright at the edges for that hour, and then I heard the sound.
It was a small thing at first, like the moment before a dry lightning strike when the atmosphere pulled itself tight.
I opened my eyes and my nostrils flared in a vain attempt to identify the scent.
There was no scent attached to it, which was somehow worse than if there had been.
In my experience, everything that could hurt you had a smell.
The long-tusked predators had a smell. Flood water had a metallic smell.
Even the invisible biting insects that came up from the Amber Sea in high summer had a smell if you knew what to look for.
This had no scent attached. Instead it had a sound.
Bells, of all things. Bells and something like the crack of a whip, and a shape coming down out of that wrong-bright sky faster than anything I’d seen before.
I raised my hand over my eyes, squinting in the too-bright light, as a sled with eight animals strapped to it moved faster than it had any business moving.
The air bent in on itself, starting with the edges first, like the surface of a watering hole when a stone hit it. But instead of rippling outward, it pulled inward, collapsing toward a center point that grew darker by the second, a wound in my perfect sky.
I took one step back, then another.
Every instinct I had, screamed the same thing: run.
Not the measured trot-and-assess that served for most threats.
Not even the full-out sprint I used when the long-tusked predators got between me and the herd.
This was a visceral instinct. Run as if the world is ending.
Never in my life had I felt anything like this before.
I felt, with a bone-deep certainty, that whatever this was, there was no standing in front of it.
I ran.
I did not run fast enough.
The thing made a sound like the world tearing along a seam. I remember running faster than I ever have before, and I remember a hand closing on the back of my coat like a fist closing on a prey rodent.
The legend. It’s true. My last conscious thought before I tumbled into darkness.
I did not remember the rest, and therein was the trouble.
I came back to myself in pieces. First the cold bit through my skin, but yet it wasn’t skin. Why won’t my arms work? I tried to move my hand, but my shoulders felt farther away from my head than normal.
Then, the ringing behind my ears stopped, taking the nausea with it. I stood, reaching for a wall to steady myself, but I fell on my face.
What the fuck? My vision blurred and swished into focus. I struggled to my feet without using my hands, because I didn’t have them. I stood on four legs instead of two, which should have told me everything, but told me nothing.
None of it made a lick of sense laid end to end.
I was standing. I had hooves. I had a body built wrong in every direction I reached for it, wide through the chest, low through the shoulders, and when I tried to speak, tried to shout for the man who’d grabbed me, what came out was a low, ragged bellow that didn’t belong to any throat I recognized as mine.
Trees. Snow. A cold that went past my new hide and settled somewhere behind my ribs.
Where the fuck am I? What the fuck am I?
I did not know this place. I did not know this body.
I stood there among the trees that looked similar to, but different from the ones I grew up with.
My heart jackhammered in my chest. I looked around, my vision crystal clear, with my heart going like a hammer on a fence post and no earthly idea what had happened to the last however-many hours of my life, and that not-knowing sat in me like a stone.
I tried walking, but my legs shook and I hit the ground hard.
It was too hard, the surface wrong beneath me, soft, cold, and giving in a way my land’s hard-packed soil never was.
It took several lurching, humiliating seconds for my legs to catch up with the rest of me and arrest my momentum, before I crashed through a stand of trees that were too dark, too straight, barren of leaves, and dusted with frozen white moisture that exploded upward as I skidded.
Something cracked in the brush off to my left.
“I’m telling you, the tracks go this way.”
“Jake, those tracks are… those aren’t anything I’ve seen before.”
“They’re moose. Big moose, okay. I know what moose tracks look like.”
The voices paused, and my ears twitched at the sound of heavy coverings grinding against each other.
“No moose I ever saw had a stride like that.”
“Cole. I’m looking at moose tracks. You want to head back empty-handed, be my guest.”
“That’s gotta be the biggest fucking moose you’ll ever see.”
“Maybe it’s for the best Mer overslept.”
“Maybe.”
I turned toward it out of instinct, the way any normal person would. That turning was the only warning I got before the strange world came apart.
The first shot took me high in the shoulder, a punch of heat that turned to fire before I’d even registered the sound of it going off.
The second missed wide, close enough I felt the air split near my ear.
I heard voices clearer now, two of them, males, I was certain.
They were close, too close for comfort. One of them shouted something that had my name in it, if my name had been moose, and the animal half of whatever I’d become did the only thing it knew how to do with pain and noise, and men holding weapons that spewed hot metal.
It ran.
I didn’t decide to charge, not in any sense of rational thought; I didn’t choose it.
My massive body turned toward the noise and threw everything I had at it, four legs eating up the ground, frozen white moisture kicking up behind me in a spray, and I heard the shouting break apart into something higher, more alien to me.
Whatever it was sounded scared. A pang of satisfaction filled my chest. I refused to feel guilty over it - they’d put a hole in me.
I didn’t catch either of them. Some sliver of sense under the animalistic panic swerved me wide at the last stretch, and I tore past them into the trees instead, white stuff flying, blood running hot down my foreleg where the shot had opened me, and I ran until the ground blurred and my lungs burned, and the fear in me had nowhere left to go but out through my legs.
That was when I caught her scent.
It came in on the wind, faint at first, then rolled over me whole.
It stopped me dead in a way the hot metal of the shot hadn’t.
She smelled of something warm, something right, wrapped up in the sharper animal notes of cold pine and gunpowder and my own blood.
I didn’t understand why, but I caved into it.
I felt a pull, like a rope had been tied around whatever passed for my heart in this body, and someone on the other end had started reeling it in.
I turned toward the female’s scent before I decided against it. My legs moved of their own volition.
There.
Her.
Go.
I went.
I don’t know how far I ran, chasing that thread of scent through the trees.
Distance stopped meaning anything. My shoulder screamed with every stride, blood matting dark down my leg, and somewhere in that stretch of white, and wrong trees, and pain, the shape of me started coming apart at the seams. My hooves softened into something with fingers, the wide barrel of a chest folded down into ribs I recognized, the taste of fur in my mouth turned to nothing but my own ragged breath.
I didn’t stop running through any of it.
If pressed, I couldn’t tell when four legs became two.
I only knew that somewhere in the last stretch I was on human feet, bare on packed moisture, the cold cutting through skin instead of hide, and I did not slow down even then, because the pull was close now, so close it filled up every thought I had room for.
A house with wood siding rose up out of the trees.
A porch light burned yellow against the dark.
Smoke threaded up from somewhere behind it.
The female’s scent was strongest here, thick enough to taste, and my body carried me the last of the distance on legs that had gone to rubber.
I climbed up wooden steps that felt solid after miles of the white shit, and then the strength went out of me all at once, as if someone had cut a wire, and the porch boards came up to meet me hard.
I struggled to my feet and knocked hard on the movable piece of wood.
The door opened and she stood there, dark brown hair loose around her shoulders. She smelled like the scent on the wind.
Of course she did.
“What the holy fuck?” She stopped herself. Her jaw worked and words came out, but I couldn’t understand them. This female sounded like she was underwater. She glanced at the blood on my side, and then back to my face. “Did someone shoot you?”
I opened my mouth because I had a great many things to communicate, starting with yes, I was shot, followed by I was on the wrong world entirely, and I had no idea where the fuck I was.
I’d been stolen - kidnapped - from my home by a mechanism I didn’t understand or have a name for.
She needed to know I needed water and to feel warm again.
And she needed to tell me who the fuck she was, because my entire nervous system decided she was the most important thing on this planet and I would very much like to understand why.
That scent. That warmth. That rope pulled taut and singing - it was HER.
Whatever else the day had taken from me - my fields, my sky, the life I knew before, with some animal certainty under the pain I knew I had found the one thing in this cold, wrong world that was mine.
Instead, I croaked, “Yes.”
Then, the porch came up to meet me.
She caught more of my weight than she should have been able to, one arm going under mine before I went fully down, and I heard her make a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
“Okay,” she said, not to me, in the tone of someone revising their plans for the evening. “Okay. We’re doing this.”
She pulled me inside out of the cold.
I passed out before I ever saw her face.