Authors: Kate Spofford
“Daniel is your mate,” my mother said as Aunt
Jenny sniffled. “He’s the only one left. If we bond you, you’ll be
able to find him.”
Of course, I could share thoughts with Mom
and Aunt Jenny. It was a gift female pack members had. The bond
between mates was the strongest bond, which meant the telepathy
would be much clearer. Mates could have entire conversations in
their heads.
Then they told me what the Bonding ritual
required.
Blood.
Aunt Jenny had a vial of Daniel’s blood. I
did not ask her how she got it. They sliced open my palm and
dripped my blood into a shallow bowl filled with Daniel’s blood,
then they made me drink it. Normally, both of us would have had to
drink it, but they said it should still work.
I hadn’t felt anything right away, other than
a strange tingling all over my skin. Not
that
kind of
tingling, more like insects crawling on me. I fell into bed and
slipped immediately into sleep.
That night the dreams began.
Through his eyes I saw the miles fly under
tires, I saw the moon and the barren flat landscape, a sign that
said “Welcome to Nebraska.”
I didn’t hear his thoughts right away. But I
felt hungry. Hunger gnawed at my stomach all the time. The next day
my mother sent me on the road after Daniel, telling me to stay in
my wolf form until I found him, to be safe.
When I turned wolf, his thoughts poured into
my head. Killer, monster, that’s what he called himself. That’s how
I knew to look in the papers. I couldn’t stay wolf for very long,
without a trail to follow. I learned how to jump into those
clothing donation bins and find clothes and shoes and how to
shoplift. I learned to read maps and followed him, only turning
wolf when I caught his scent.
From his thoughts I could hear how he wished
to die, how he wanted to go home but was afraid.
The first time I found one of his victims I
was horrified. It was a man in a hotel, just some old trucker with
a grizzled face and his pants around his ankles. What was left of
his ankles. His throat had been ripped open and half his face
eaten. Was this what my father’s body had looked like?
No, I told myself. Dad had been a wolf when
it happened. They had fought. Daniel had not eaten my father.
I heard when Daniel figured out that I’d
burned up the bodies he’d left like a bread crumb trail through the
Midwest. If my mother knew Daniel was out there leaving evidence
like that, she’d have a fit.
The closer I got to Daniel, the louder his
thoughts had become. The better I could feel his pain.
Now I told my mother, “Maybe I wasn’t close
enough to hear his thoughts. I found a lot of bodies, but... It
could be all those bodies were from a real serial killer or
something.”
Wow. Could I sound any more lame?
“You saw the bodies?”
I nodded.
She looked behind us. Aunt Jenny had closed
the bathroom door and we could both hear her sobbing in there.
“Then he’s still out there. No human can do
that, Kayla, you know that. No reason for the other packs to kill
humans like that either.”
My shoulders slump. “I know.”
“And you couldn’t pick up his trail?”
“I tried, Mom, I really did. For eight
months. He was hitchhiking. Every time I got close, he’d take off
in a car and I couldn’t follow.”
She nodded, thought for a bit. “So if the
Bonding didn’t work, which I wasn’t sure it would–I don’t know how
long Jen had that blood lying around–and that means there’s still a
chance. For you and Remy.”
Solve one problem, move right on to another.
What the hell was my mother thinking? Fuck being Bonded to some
dude I just met.
Some hot dude…
Shut up!
“I’m only fifteen! Is this even legal?” I
whine.
“Kayla, it would really help to secure Remy
as part of our pack if you were Bonded. Think about the pack
instead of just yourself.”
“For fuck’s sake, Mom, do you ever think
about me? Ever?”
“Language!”
Guess listening to Daniel’s thoughts has had
some negative side effects. I never used to swear so much.
I get up off the bed and pace around the
room. “So what, I’m going to be Remy’s child bride? And you’re okay
with that?”
“You can at least be betrothed, and he can
Bond with you next year, when you are legal. How’s that?”
“You’re ridiculous!”
The hotel room is too small. I slam outside
and hang the upper half of my body over the railing, breathing in
the cold air.
We head out to the new location with Remy two
days later. Two tense, silent days later. Remy rolls up in a
Jeep.
“No motorcycle?” I ask him.
He shrugs with a smile, which only makes me
narrow my eyes at him. Did he sell the motorcycle in order to buy
the Jeep? Or does he own two vehicles? Where would he get the money
for that? And why would he need two modes of transportation?
The road winds through the mountains. Remy
drives with one wrist resting on the top of the wheel and the other
slung over the passenger seat, where my mom sits, flirting
shamelessly. It makes me sick.
I rest my forehead against the glass of the
window and try to focus on the music playing low through the
speakers. It’s some kind of mournful country music. As the trees
flash by my window, I think of Daniel out there in the snow, cold
and hungry, with a pain as big as a wolf bite in his side. The pain
in my own side connects me to him.
I can’t let it show. I can’t let up my mental
block. I don’t want my mother to find out that I lied.
This wouldn’t be so hard if I had just been
able to bring Daniel back.
I feel like a failure. It shouldn’t have been
so difficult. God, if only he hadn’t been so fucked up! I guess
being on the road, on your own, for three years, believing you were
a murderer–well, technically he is a murderer, but as a werewolf
it’s sort of a given–killing God knew how many people, that would
leave you plenty fucked up. I assumed he’d want to come back home.
You know, I figured he’d be afraid that his mother would hate him
for killing his father, and the news that his mother wanted him
back would make all the difference. Not that I explicitly told him
that… I exhale and my hot breath steams up the car window. I wipe
it away with the side of my fist.
The thing is, I thought of Daniel as weak,
after I realized how fucked up he was. I knew what he could do as a
wolf, how strong his wolf was, and thought he was weak for letting
his wolf control him like that. And yet I still couldn’t get him
home. I barely kept him from killing himself. I tried everything I
could think of. I befriended him. I comforted him. I even tried to
seduce him, which now seems supremely ridiculous anywhere in the
vicinity of Sebastian Vincent over there, a walking sex god that
makes me feel like I’m nine years old.
I thought I could convince Daniel with the
dreamwalking, but that took forever to work. From what I read
online, it’s supposed to be like hypnosis. Subliminal suggestions
that influence his decisions when he wakes up. Not Daniel. After he
woke up, he’d go and do the exact opposite, like holing up with
that old man Bobby for weeks after I told him to go home.
Before I start to feeling too much like a
failure at dreamwalking, I remind myself that I’ve only been
practicing the dreamwalking for a year or so.
Mom doesn’t know anything about dreamwalking.
Last year, when I found myself walking around in her dreams for the
first time, I asked her about it. She just thought it was weird
that we both had the same dream.
I had to Google it and found some Native
American legend type stuff that didn’t sound anything like what I
was doing. I wasn’t just lucid dreaming. I was in my mother’s
dream. Talking to her.
I was beginning to think it was a weird
coincidence, like my mom said, until it happened again. This time,
it was Aunt Jenny’s dream. It was the night of Daniel’s birthday
and I’d been thinking about her. Every year she hiked up into those
mountains and turned wolf and howled. Those lonely howls spoke of
all her grief and loneliness and despair at having lost her family
and almost everyone she loved. Her son and her husband, both gone
in a night, an irreparable rift between her and her sister, my
mother. Her son had killed her sister’s husband too. Their grief
was not equal.
And I found myself in that clearing with her.
Human and in the white gown I’d worn on the first night I’d
changed. She paced as a wolf and howled mournfully and I took her
head in my lap and comforted her.
The next day, when she returned from the
mountain, she seemed different. Less broken, somehow.
After that, I started experimenting. It was
difficult to figure out how to make the lucid dreams happen, and it
wasn’t until I started dreaming about this boy at school that I
figured it out: I dreamt about who I was meditating all my thoughts
on.
This boy, Alexander Lo, he moved into town
last year, which meant he didn’t know the history of how the other
kids excluded Daniel and me. He didn’t really stand out much–there
were a lot of Native American kids at our school, and his brown
skin and shiny black hair helped him fit in. He had the build of a
gymnast, however, and I’d watch him during gym class, the way he
moved even playing regular sports, so graceful. Before I could
invite him to sit with me during lunch at school the jocks snapped
him up. They could tell he was one of them. Soon he was on the
track team, the star high jumper, which was as close to gymnastics
as Wolf Point, Montana came.
At lunch, sitting with my “friends”–a girl
who barely spoke named Cecilia (called “Sissy” by almost everyone)
and her polar opposite, a hard-faced bully named Melanie–I watched
Alexander Lo and imagined that one day he would see in me what I
saw in him.
And then I started dreamwalking with him.
In the first dream we were at school and he
was on a balance beam in the gym doing a routine. He was dressed as
if for a competition, but the only people in the audience were his
parents and all the jocks. I probably don’t need to say that our
school gym did not have a balance beam and did not host gymnastics
competitions… it was surreal, to say the least.
I found myself standing by the bleachers
where the audience was sitting, watching. Alex was clearly nervous,
sweating and shaking. I wasn’t surprised when he attempted a
backflip and missed the landing, slamming into the beam and falling
to the floor. The jocks in the audience roared with laughter, and
Alex’s parents buried their faces in their hands, so ashamed of
their son.
Without thinking I ran to him to see if he
was injured. You can’t expect anyone in a dream to behave the way
they would in real life, and it can be very disconcerting when
you’re dreamwalking. All the rules are different.
I leaned over Alex, who looked like he wanted
to curl up and die. He wasn’t injured. Because it was just a dream,
remember? “Are you okay?” I asked him.
And he just stared at me in wonder.
Then we both woke up.
The next day at school I noticed him looking
my way. I tried to play it cool, pretending I wasn’t always looking
at him. The few times our eyes met my heart stopped in my
chest.
The next time I dreamwalked with Alex Lo–only
a couple of nights later–I found myself sitting in the cafeteria,
at my usual table but alone, as Alex walked into the room with a
lunch tray. The cafeteria wasn’t especially crowded, but I didn’t
really recognize anyone. When I tried to focus on them, they got
blurry and out of focus.
I watched Alex as he glanced up and made eye
contact with me. I felt how empty the space around me was, the way
the chatter and laughter ramped up but left me inside this odd
bubble. Alex took one step toward me–my heart leapt–then he
tripped. Flat on his face, Superman-style, lunch tray smeared
across his t-shirt, and of course it was spaghetti day and he wore
white.
The laughter started, the pointing. If I
thought it had been loud before, it was deafening now. People were
crammed in that room, all open laughing mouths and staring eyes and
pointing fingers.
Alex picked himself up and looked around, his
face flaming red. He took in the damage done to his shirt, a
plate-sized sauce stain, right across his chest. Then more red,
bleeding down from his nose and forehead.
I stood up, struggling to see over the crowd
of assholes. Alex was bleeding and everyone was still laughing. He
gazed around in confusion. “I’m bleeding,” he said, quietly yet I
could hear it through the laughter.
I pushed through the crowd. They were a
nearly solid wall. I pushed and no one moved. “Here comes your
girlfriend,” I hear over the wall. “Why don’t you let your trashy
girlfriend take care of you, the way she takes care of her cousin?”
Kissing noises and fresh bursts of laughter.
I stopped pushing and stepped back.
This dream wasn’t like the last one.
Alex had heard these words before. Someone
had discovered that Alex had an interest in me. Maybe, after the
first dream, he had thought, “I had a dream about that girl… she’s
pretty.” And then had tried to be casual when asking his jock
friends, “Hey, do you know anything about that girl over
there?”
And these were the things they had told him.
That I was white trash. That I spent too much time with my cousin.
Oh, and don’t you know her dad and uncles were murdered? They think
it was her cousin. He disappeared right at the same time. They
don’t really seem all that concerned about finding him.
There it was.
Now Alex had a new reason to be anxious.
Before it was some kind of performance anxiety. Now they made fun
of me, like he had even chosen me. I had chosen him. I had walked
into his dream and earned him the ridicule of his so-called
friends.