24. Kestrel
Kestrel
It’s amazing how quickly you can fall into routines that seem so perfect that you forget the reason you were avoiding them in the first place.
We decided to stay in the town, rent out the stinky house for longer, and just hide in a place no one would willingly come to visit.
Not because it’s bad, but simply because nothing about it stands out, nothing draws attention.
The first thing wrong was so innocuous that I didn’t notice, nor did I even think anything of it. There was a brief flicker of something that just felt wrong, and then it was forgotten. But one thing multiplied quickly.
A feeling of being followed. A car that seemed out of place. There was a neighbour who came out bruised and beaten. She’d packed her car and left town without a word to anyone.
Spray-paint on the sidewalks and fences.
Pix couldn’t get through to his friends or family.
He would try every night, ringing first his best friend Mark, then Bonnie, then Sariah.
The omega would try Meg and Desi, Mitchel, and other people I didn’t know.
He kept all the numbers in his head; he never had them programmed into the phone, but no matter how hard he tried or how frustrated he got… he couldn’t get through.
For a week, every night, he would get ‘this number can’t be connected’, call after call.
Pix seemed to go into himself, and I realised just how important family can be. The worry ate at us, hitting the pack and turning them watchful, dangerous and quiet.
My alters, too, sat uneasily. Were they okay? Were they alive? How did we check?
On the eighth night, sitting on the couch watching the flat-screen TV Rolly had installed, I came to a decision.
It wasn’t easy, but it’s necessary. I turn to Blaze, finding the words stuck in my throat, unwilling to come out easily.
I reach out and take his hand, waiting until I have his complete attention.
I hate this.
I inhale and exhale the words, putting them out into the world where I can’t take them back.
“Take Pix and go see his family.”
Blaze’s eyes sharpen despite the roar of protest in the room. Pix is silent, staring at me with gratitude and relief.
Unlike the others, Blaze doesn’t immediately dismiss me or shoot me down. He mulls it over.
“Please. He needs it.” My quiet request silences our alphas and turns Blaze’s silver grey eyes molten. He covers my hand with his and squeezes.
Blaze finally, finally dips his chin. “Okay. Tonight.” He turns and looks around the group. “King and Rolly, come with us?”
King nods and unfurls his body, while Rolly just bounces up and rushes off. They mobilize quickly, and within five minutes, I’m watching three quarters of the pack walk out the door.
“I’m not kissing you because I’m kissing you when I get back, and I’m not going to stop until I’m knot deep,” Rolly says sharply with a heavy look.
King touches my cheek and presses his lips to my forehead, then he’s gone. Blaze does kiss me. Long and hard. While Pix’s kiss is light and teasing.
“Back soon, Omega,” he murmurs.
“You better be, Omega,” I say, my heart hurting.
He cups my cheek and then spins and walks out, pulling the door closed behind him. I stare at the space where they were, resisting the urge to go out there and scream for them to come back. My heart is racing, and this feels wrong.
All wrong.
I whine, and before I can finish the sound, Rose is wrapped around me, pulling me tight against his chest.
“It’s okay, Kest. They will come back. I promise.”
I turn into him and bury my face in his shirt, drowning myself in his scent, trying to keep the panic at bay. It helps a bit, but not enough. The more time passes, the more frantic I get.
Rose picks me up and carries me into the bedroom where he strips me out of my clothes and then pulls off his.
“I don’t want to!” I sob.
“No sex. Just skin to skin. It will feel better.”
He crawls up my body and presses himself against my back. His arms and legs wrap around me, tight. For the first time since they left, I can breathe. I’m crying. When did I start crying? And shaking.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“My guess is bond sickness,” Rose whispers.
“We don’t have bonds, though,” I protest and then cry out, writhing in his arms as my stomach spasms painfully.
“I think you want them. Or your body does.”
“It feels like they are dead. Or that something terrible is going to happen. I can’t control it, my thoughts, this fear.”
Sage crawls into bed naked and hugs me from the front. I’m surrounded by walls of molten flesh, and it’s helping, but the keening won’t stop.
I can’t force the images of them being dead from my mind. I can’t stop anything.
“Nothing is going to happen to them, Kestrel. You are safe. Raven, Merle, Jay, Dove, Raptor, all of you listen to me. Nothing is going to happen to them. They will come back, they are coming back. Breathe with us.”
He falls silent, but after five seconds, the silence sounds like thunder and is crushing me.
“Talk to me!” I say sharply. “Distract me. Please. Oh, god, it hurts. Please.”
“Someone walked up to me today. She slapped me and accused me of having an affair with you.”
It takes far too long for my mind to catch up to Sage’s amused words.
“What?”
“I know. It was strange. She thought I was someone else. She was so apologetic. I don’t think anyone has aplogised to me that much before. Ever. She said she’s going to drop over a sorry cake.”
“What’s a sorry cake?”
“I have no idea, but I’m sure it will be tasty.”
Rose snickers, and the amusement and relaxed feel of the alphas is calming to my overwrought nerves.
Sage leans forward and kisses my forehead.
“What if you were to give me bonds?” I whisper.
Sage hesitates.
“No,” Roseland whispers to my neck.
“No? No, you won’t?” It feels like the floor drops out, leaving me broken and tumbling alone.
“No, we can’t.”
“Why?” I whisper harshly. “Why?” I shout louder. “What’s wrong with me? Why not?”
“Because it’s not just you, and you all need to be on the same page, and I know there is one of you who will refuse because she’s already refused. I won’t force any of your alters to bond with us, Kestrel, and I won’t let the others do it either. I’m sorry.”
I lay in their arms, refusing to speak, even though they try for hours.
The pain it’s heavy, and I feel like I’m outside my body, watching it from a dark tunnel far away. Moving is too hard, speaking is beyond me.
In my dissociative state, I don’t consciously think, but thoughts just arrive and puzzle pieces put themselves together in ways that my brain can’t when I’m in my body.
We’ve been going for walks every day. The toy train was on the road, it had an eagle etched on its side.
There was a bat painted in fresh spray paint, the bin lid up, the rubbish strewn.
Alarms going off. There were strange cars parked in the same spot.
I remember seeing signs up about missing cats and a middle-aged tourist who hadn’t been seen.
There was a big search for them. A bird sketched on the corner of the picture of the old man who went for a walk with his dog and never came home.
But the memory that slams me back into my body are the dead birds.
I explode into movement, struggling free of the alphas. I grab my clothes and pull them on. Yanking hard while I mutter, repeating what I’ve seen with suddenly clear sight.
“Kestrel?” Roseland snaps, grabbing at me. I dance out of his way. “Kest?”
I hiss at them and pull on Rolly’s jumper. There’s not much time, I can’t let them stop me. I snatch up a torch they keep by the front door and launch out into the night, ignoring their demands for me to wait. I have to know.
Am I right? Am I wrong?
I forgot to put shoes on, and the bitterly cold temperatures have me gasping, but I ignore the cold and the pain.
I shine the torch, scanning the side of the road, back and forth. Wild animals would have taken the bodies. It’s unlikely they will still remain. I step into the wet grass and shine the torch. Nothing, maybe a bit further…
The raven is lying on its back, legs curled up, eye sockets empty.
Doesn’t mean anything. Not yet.
Of course, it does. You know what this means.
I walk deeper, frightened now. All the peace of the last week, those happy, boring, agonizing, ordinary moments that have been fraught with the growing unease of not being able to explain what’s going on suddenly peels away, leaving me with the cold hard reality of my life.
Father is here.
“Kestrel!”
I ignore Blaze and continue into the tree line. I think I would be less scared walking into a cemetery. The trees are tall and clumped close together. Their shadows are everywhere, and the moonlight barely penetrates, but it pushes through enough just to make sure the darkness dances.
My breath slips from between my lips in a white cloud and every muscle in my body aches.
I want the life we got to pretend we were living. I want those bonds. To belong. To have them.
Raven rises in me, and for once, I don’t fight her.
“If we bond, and he takes us, he takes them too,” she whispers. “Are they strong enough? Because that’s the gamble.”
The devastation of that one sentence in my head almost brings me to my knees. Of course. I didn’t think that far ahead.
“You’re onto something here. We have all been feeling it. Go deeper. He’ll have left a message for us.”
I force my feet to keep moving, one step after another.
Deep inside us, Dove starts to scream. Raven and I ignore her, focusing instead on the problem in front of us.
One step, then another. The grass is cold and covered in frost. The wind is blowing hard, freezing me.
Roseland and Blaze are searching for us. I want to call out, though Raven doesn’t stop me. She doesn’t like it, so I don’t.
We keep walking through the trees until we find a massive old monster, an ancient tree that is different from the others. It’s got as many branches as it has roots, and they all twist and curl over each other as they spread out. It’s a sprawling, massive tree that holds this majesty.
It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d like to ruin. Father is nothing if not dramatic. He will go put bodies in newly built apartments. In buildings scheduled for demolition. On playgrounds. On monuments.
I walk closer, lifting the torch’s beam to the branches, searching one after another. I know there’s something here; I can smell the blood and decay.
I skirt around the tree slowly, moving in a wide circle until I find the body.
It’s the elderly man who was missing. He’s been dumped on the branch like a jaguar would leave an antelope carcass.
His head is tilted back, eyes open and staring, mouth wide.
The rest of his limbs are tangled around the branches, keeping him from falling.
Feathers are glued to the branch and his body as if they are falling from him.
Roseland approaches first, Sage a minute behind him. He stares at the body and gently takes the torch from me as he moves closer, peering up at it from different angles.
Now that we’ve found it, we collapse in on ourselves. The pain and sickness returns, the loneliness, the fear.
These few weeks have been a paradise. But having tasted freedom that is so rich and beautiful, I don’t want to lose it. The future I’ve been dreaming of is within reach. Was. He’s going to snatch it away.
“Is this?” Sage asks.
“Yes,” Roseland says. “It’s got all the markers. This is Father.”
“Okay, so we run,” Sage says simply.
“Where?” Rose says sharply. “Where the hell can we go that he won’t find us?”
Sage snarls. “Don’t swear at me, Aaron.”
I turn away from both of them and walk back to the road. I trip a couple of times, and I think by the time I get back, my feet will be so cold they are ready to snap off. Sage snarls and swings me up into his arms and carries me back towards the house.
“What is Roseland doing?”
“Burying the body.”
“He shouldn’t be alone.”
Sage hesitates, he’s torn. I can tell.
“You are more important.”
“No one in a pack is more important than the other,” I say. “You know this. You might not be feeling it right now, but every person is as important as the next.”
Sage closes his eyes and turns back, carrying me through the dark until we get back to the tree.
He hesitates and then sets me on a low branch and wraps me in his jumper. “Do not move, or I will leave him, brother or no brother, here.”
I accept the jumper and watch as they get rid of the evidence of the crime. Silently, I make a promise to myself that we will come back here one day and find a way to get this man home to his loved ones.
His life is already gone, but his deathly silence could keep us alive a while longer.
It’s selfish and awful, but Father has always liked to make me do the most vile of things.
Forcing me to choose who dies was one of his favourite games.
Which sibling gets a whipping and which gets to eat.
Who is he taking to train, who is he killing for laughs.
Games that end in my punishment.
I lift my eyes, staring at the old man as they take him down from the tree.
“Raven, what is a Nightingale?”
I can feel her shift inside me. “We are.”
“Yes, but what are we? Why can’t I remember?”
“You will soon.”
They bury the body, and we go home. Rose stands with me in the shower until we’re warm again.
I don’t complain about the cramps, and I don’t let myself whine anymore. I bury that inside, and I put up walls.
There’s an end to this happy dream I’ve been living in.
The war’s already started, we just didn’t realise.