Chapter 47
I'd gotten some groceries for Miss Martha, the sweet older woman with her tricky hip that keeps her mobility at a minimum. I'd just come from Mr. Baker’s where I'd done the same thing, delivered groceries.
“Hi honey, aren’t you kind” she said what she always says every time I walked the bags in and placed them on her counter for her.
“How are you feeling lately?” I studied her form, noticing she was moving slower than usual. “Oh, I’m alright. It’s just an off day. I think it’s the weather. Too much moisture in the air makes the bones achy.”
I nodded and started removing items from the bag.
“Let me put these away for you then. Don’t overdo it” I offered. She gladly pulled out a seat from her kitchen table and sat down so we could chat as she watched what I was doing.
“Middle cabinet” she pointed when I struggled to find each item’s place. Miss Martha has the type of kitchen you’d just expect from someone her age.
She has ceramic duck salt and pepper shakers in the middle of her kitchen table and hand sewn seat cushions for the seats. It’s a dusty bluish color as are her short curtains in the window above her sink.
We talked about common community news like how little Jimmy fell out of a tree the other day and almost broke his arm, or how so-and-so found their mate. Gossip really.
She did ask me about the whole Mystic thing but I kept it to a minimum, especially when she told me I was a 'sacred thing'. That felt odd and untrue.
“Alright, Miss Martha, I gotta get going. I have a few more things to do around town today” I waved to her as I told her I’d let myself out. If her hip was bad I didn’t want her moving around unnecessarily.
I ended up running into Declan, Jasper’s brother, on my way out.
“Hey, are you making deliveries?” He asked me, knowing what I do around here. “I was, I’m finished now” I told him as I made it down the walkway.
“I haven’t seen you in a while, punk. What’ve you been up to?” I nudged him playfully. He has a lot of similar features to his other siblings; it’s easy to tell they're all related.
“Uh” he said awkwardly, scratching at the back of his head.
“Oh my Goddess, you have a girlfriend, don’t you?” I grinned as soon as his expression told me I was right.
“Shush, it’s not official. I’ve been hanging out with a girl, yes” he admitted quietly. “Uyy, is she pretty? Who is it?” I acted like a preteen.
I got to watch Declan grow over the last year of my being here. We’re the same age but where I've looked the same for a while, I met him at a time where his chin hairs sprouted and he grew another inch or two.
“Nope. I’m not telling you crap! You spend too much time with my brother” he playfully zipped his lips.
“Why can’t Jasper know? That means you’re doing something bad” I chuckled.
“Not even. I just like to be lowkey and him and the guys in the Pack house will start harassing me, making jokes and stuff.”
I shrugged because I could picture exactly that happening and I understood wanting to be a lowkey person. That’s probably why we got along. Him and I were quiet presences in the house when I lived there.
“Well-” I didn’t get to finish when Declan swiftly threw his hand up to shut me up. I could see in his face that it was something serious.
“Mira, run,” he told me. The order didn’t even process in my mind in time because it had come from so left field.
“What’s going on, Declan?” I reached for his arm as he started to try rushing me off to my cottage.
I started noticing people running away from something and some screaming rang out. It formed a pit in my gut as I whirled my head left and right trying to understand what was happening.
“Wolves breached our Western border. If they got this close to town that means our guards on the sector were probably killed, go, run” he shoved me again before rushing off to do whatever he needed to be doing at this moment.
My body started to tremble at the thought of some of our own wolves being killed. And at the thought of being alone in the house. I didn’t know what to do.
I just ran to my cottage and locked the door. I rushed to the kitchen and hid behind the half wall as I hugged my knees to my chest and tried to make sense of all this.
If they killed our guys and made it close to town that means there has to be a lot of them.
I flinched when I started hearing growling and howling. The pit in my gut soured all over again and I scrambled to get a kitchen knife in case someone broke into this house looking for blood. It’s all I could do to try and protect myself.
I’ve been independent all my life and I've faced scary situations on my own before.
One time when we were staying on someone’s sofa between living situations someone broke into the house and robbed them of a bunch of stuff.
The people who lived there were out with my mom and Greg scoring drugs probably, and I hid inside a kitchen cupboard so that the men didn’t know I was there.
If they saw me they might've harmed or killed me so I just stuffed myself inside a cupboard until I heard them leave and even for a while after that because I was frozen in fear. I was alone and very young.
It had scared the crap out of me and I'd nightmares for a little while about break ins and bad guys getting me.
I had to fight with a landlord once because my mom wasn’t paying bills and he was sick of waiting for her to cover her debts.
He was a grown ass man with a heavy belly and thick hands. He barreled past me at the door as I begged him not to kick us out and ripped our cable wires out of the wall and cut our electricity that day.
I’ve been scared plenty of times but I've faced humans and our human problems. I don’t know how to handle supernatural beings.
So, I sat curled up in my kitchen like I was that same little girl who heard the bad guys breaking in. And I held a knife tightly clutched in my hands hoping I wouldn’t be found.
It was the sounds of whimpering and fighting that made my stomach flip and my heart ache in my chest each time. It was loud and it sounded like it was everywhere.
I wasn’t near a window to see so my imagination was running wild. I heard human screams and more growls so I was confused about what was happening.
So much commotion and noise. Utter chaos really. I finally couldn’t stand it and crawled to the window to peek outside.
I sucked in a breath of shock and disbelief and then released it as a shaky terrified exhale. The sight in front of me wasn’t just a couple stray wolves, it looked to be almost like an army.
I saw bodies crashing into each other as claws and large sharp canine teeth were out and tearing each other apart. The ground ran red with blood and some wolf bodies laid dead in the streets.
I couldn’t even tell which wolf was which because they all blurred into the same thing. Large furred creatures whose limbs dripped with blood and whose teeth showed crimson.
I watched as no more than 30 feet away from my cottage window one wolf ripped out the throat of the other. It made me almost nauseous to see.
My heart beat so loud in my chest that it echoed into my ears.
Devran is out there. Declan and plenty of other fighting wolves were out there. Alpha Conan and Jasper’s dad would be out there. Many female wolves too because they do have female warriors. And overall just any she-wolf who wanted to run out and help their fallen brothers.
I thanked the Goddess that Jasper wasn’t here but he wasn’t the only one I feared for. I was terrified that someone I cared about would be killed here today.
And what if this other army of wolves won? What then? Would they kill us all or force us under their rule? And when they saw I was human would they even allow it?
It was in that moment when I called myself human that I remembered my powers. How can I apply that here? What could I do to help?
On bended knees I prayed to the Moon Goddess for guidance and strength. I spoke out some enchantments I had a dream about a few nights ago and wrote down to remember them.
The thing is the chants aren’t in English. I don’t know what they are but I can speak them. In my dream they called it ‘light language’ whatever that means.
I whispered these words over and over again until conviction shot through me and I knew help would flow through me too.
When I swung open my front door it was with total surrender to the Moon Goddess and faith that what needed to happen would happen.
I had no choice. My loved ones were dying and I thought of people like Miss Martha who couldn’t run away.
The door swung open and I stepped outside. Outside into the chaos. Outside into the bloodshed. Outside into the wolf fight.
I caught the attention of a grey and white wolf whose underbelly was soaked through with blood. Probably someone else’s blood if he was still standing that way.
His dark eyes shifted over to me and he would have lunged if not for one of our wolves running over to intervene. I looked up at the sky and lifted my hands up.
Another wolf started to come at me and I realized if I wanted this to work I couldn’t be so easily interrupted. I had the idea to use the garbage bins at the back of my cottage to climb onto the roof. It’s one floor and not too hard to climb.
It was then that I got the attention of many more wolves. As I started to raise my hands into the sky again, calling out a loud sound that ripped through me as though it weren’t something from me.
My voice echoed almost unnaturally through the air in waves.
At first I didn’t know what I was doing but as I concentrated my mind I understood. With the play of my fingers and waving of my hand I summoned what turned out to be hundreds upon hundreds of birds. Dark birds that began to fly overhead in swarms.
Even more fighting stopped as the wolves began taking in the sight before their eyes. The army who'd invaded us wouldn’t understand how I was doing this because they wouldn’t know a Mystic was among them.
I hoped the distraction would prove to be a good thing for our side.
With two fingers held upward and two fingers bent down I motioned my hand. The birds who were swarming overhead began to fly down with force and peck at the bodies of these wolves who meant my people harm.
Our wolves were left untouched.
Howls rang out as hundreds of birds would quickly swoop down and peck harshly at them before flying away too quickly to get snatched between the snapping jaws.
I remained focused on the crowd below and then up above as I communicated with these birds to peck at the flesh and the eyes of those with malintention.
And then the ground began to rumble and shake and wolves all around our village were snapping their heads left and right trying to understand the sounds.
In the light language I spoke and to the forest my words were understood.
A herd of bison as large as the wolves themselves came hurtling through the streets as their hooves stomped on the wolves who had yet to run away. I saw some men flee while others stood their ground.
Our own people were taking this time to pull their wounded out of the battle grounds and to secure the houses with elderly and children or anyone else like mothers who wouldn’t fight.
My body trembled like I was with the bison in a stampede of harsh hard limbs. My chest fluttered like the birds wings as they too still swarm above my head like black smoke or obsidian clouds. Swooping down from time to time to cut the flesh of the wolves who tried fighting again.
I moved my body like my motions were a language of its own and then herds of screaming people surfaced from the trees as they rushed forward.
I realized it was the women and children of these soldiers who had been hidden away in waiting for their warriors to defeat my people and take over.
I exposed their weaknesses as more forest creatures chased them like a dog to the sheep.
Some of the wolves tried swarming their families to keep our guys from attacking them.
Some wolves shifted back into bloody naked men and tried moving their people away.
Not understanding why they came until a while later, when the entire crowd was run over here, and the animals who shepherded them here were revealed.
“WARRIORS OF CLAN RED MOON, surrender to our Alpha Devran or face death” I shouted over the crowd of hundreds.
The chaos was still now. Everything was still, even the trees from a single breeze. I removed the lighter from my back pocket, which at the time I didn’t know why I grabbed. Not until one smug wolf tried leaping up onto the roof to kill me.
I flicked the lighter on and with a power that flowed through me I sent that small flame forward onto the fur of the snarling wolf as it yelped in pain and lit up into a ball of fire.
There were gasps all around and I could see fear in the eyes of men. I didn’t want to be feared at all but I needed to stop the violence.
And sometimes violence must be met with violence to find peace.