Chapter 7 #4
Skor and Thorn are watching me wind Krall up with inscrutable expressions. I can’t tell if they’re annoyed at me, or enjoying the show.
“I was not born to do as a male tells me. I was born to do what feels correct, to follow my instincts, and to control the elements. You cannot tell me not to do magic. I breathe it.”
I hear something that sounds like a murmur of admiration from Skor. Of all these three, he understands what I am best. He knows that Krall is trying to bind the wind. It will not work.
Krall crosses the room swiftly and gathers me up, one arm around my waist, the other hand firmly curled in my hair. “You’re getting to be more and more mouthy,” he says. “And more and more trouble.”
“Try to punish me again on this train and I’ll scream,” I tell him. “I’ll scream and I’ll scream and they’ll come and they’ll make us all get off. I might do it anyway.”
I really think I am saying the smartest thing.
I can’t keep the smugness out of my tone, or off my face.
Krall doesn’t seem concerned in the slightest. The corners of his eyes crease as he narrows them at me, then holds out his hand silently.
I don’t see what is put into it, but I feel it a moment later being dragged between my teeth as he spins me around and pulls a gag into my mouth, a strap of fabric that Skor must have been rolling up the whole time I was making statements.
“You want to scream? Go ahead,” he growls into my ear. “Let’s see how much noise you make now. And by the way? Shift again, and you’ll be silvered for the duration.”
I stiffen with fear. Silver is a shifter’s worse nightmare, a metal that burns and saps strength on contact.
I have never actually experienced it, and I don’t want to.
I’ve heard stories of wolves left in silver for years at a time.
It’s said a silver collar can trap a wolf in their animal state.
Others say that it makes it impossible to shift.
He just threatened me with a fate worse than death. I reach up to my mouth to try to pull the gag free, but he has tied it behind my head. I squirm and wriggle, reaching back to try to get it off, but he grabs my arms, pulls them down to my sides, and spins me around.
“No,” he says firmly, looking down into my eyes. “You tested me, and now you are suffering the consequences.”
I hate him. I hope he can see that in my eyes.
I hope he knows that he has no way of making me weak, and that he will never be able to take my magic from me.
It comes from a place older and deeper and darker than he can begin to understand, and it will break him if he keeps interfering.
I can feel the old spirits stirring inside me.
“You’re going to submit,” he says, riling me further. He’s just so certain that he can make me do what he wants me to do, and it’s not fair. He’s going to punish me again, and I don’t want to be punished. I’m willing to do almost anything to get out of this.
So I do something. Something they’ll all find very naughty and chaotic. This is their fault.
I direct my energies just outside the train. A burst of elemental force explodes right on the boundary of our cabin and the outside world.
The window shatters loudly into a million pieces.
“The fuck was that?” Thorn jumps forward, covered in glass.
“That was the sound of us being thrown off the train for absolutely certain,” Skor says calmly.
The cabin door flies open and an authoritative voice booms. “Let the lady go!”
Krall lets me go, but I am still gagged and obviously upset.
The window behind us is broken, and the general chaos of the place, previously hidden, is now plain for all to see.
The conductor has thrown the cabin door open, and he is not alone.
A very burly man is standing to his left, and a well-built woman to his right.
All three of them look concerned and displeased in equal measure.
I run toward them. Krall tries to grab for me. The big man with the bushy beard and a white shirt with straps around his arms presses into the cabin and lets me out.
“Unhand the girl! Precious wee mite!” he says while the lady helps me take the gag off. At this point, I am so very angry at Krall and the others I have no interest in maintaining secrecy.
“They kidnapped me from my home and forced me to be their bride,” I say. “I have been trying to get away, but they keep taking me further and further from home.”
I can’t bring myself to look at my mates as I say this, but that only lends more credence to my words. It’s not hard to look disheveled and pathetic and weak.
“You three are under arrest,” the conductor says. “And I’m sorry we’re not throwing you from the train for what you’ve been doing to this poor girl.”
“Come, lass,” the lady says. She is taller than me, broader than me, and her shirt strains to cover her bosom. She has a comforting aura, like a mother, and she ushers me away from the men.
I throw a smug look back over my shoulder as I go. He had the nerve to think he could simply bully me into doing what he wanted, after having seen my power, after knowing what I am capable of. He’s lucky it’s just the window that broke. It could have been him.
A dining car has been added at Broken Belly, I discover. The nice lady who rescued me from the cabin takes me there and tells me I can have whatever I want to eat.
Her name is Maria, she says. She’s got daughters not far off my age, she says. She screws her face up at the idea of any of them being in my position.
“What do you need?” she asks. “Do you want a bath? I’d offer you some clean clothes, but I don’t know that we have any that would fit. Perhaps the Lost Property would provide?”
“I’m just hungry at the moment,” I say, aware that my dress is starting to get into a condition that is considered pretty unacceptable by most human standards.
The hem has been dragged through dirt and mud a lot, and there’s marks from previous meals and candy break-ins and other things I’ve done that I probably shouldn’t have if I was a good girl.
But I am not good. And I am not a girl.
My stomach comes first. My dinner back at Broken Belly was interrupted, and my snacks are back in the cabin, so I order the biggest slices of cake I have ever seen, and devour them one by one until I start to feel sleepy.
Maria stays with me the whole time, drinking an herbal tea and occasionally picking at some cheese and crackers.
“What will happen to the men who took me?”
“They’ll be met by police at Larchford and charged,” she says. “And you’ll be free to go.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“No need to thank me,” she replies. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen?”
“And them being grown men. It’s not right.
There’s plenty of women of marrying age who want to be married.
I don’t know why a group of soldiers would head to a remote place to get a girl who barely knows her own mind yet.
Or maybe I do. Maybe that’s the whole point.
Men can be scum, but don’t you give up. You go back home, and you feel better, and then you decide what you want for yourself. ”
She’s being so sweet. I almost feel like I want to tell her the whole truth, but there’s no real chance that she would believe me, and also it doesn’t really change all that much about my story.
The idea of deciding what I want for myself is kind of a new one.
When I lived in the mountains, I assumed I would be mated and then go back to have my pups in the hills.
Up until this moment, I thought I would run back to the mountains to have pups.
But now, I’m thinking about all it takes to survive up there, and how hard it would be for a baby, let alone multiples to get by.
What if they do not have my strengths? What if they are killed by the monsters in the mountains? What would that do to me?