“You aren’t stupid, Riv,” Valen assured his brother. “Maybe Father was just hurt because you chose to leave the pack.”
Which was the wrong thing to say. Rivvie looked stricken.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him!”
Valen wasn’t given to excessive displays of affection, but his brother needed a hug more than just about anyone in the world, except maybe Aaron. Valen pulled Rivvie into his arms. “Of course not. Father doesn’t usually say cruel things, though, and that
was
cruel of him. Makes me wonder what he was thinking.”
Rivvie clung to Valen. “He was mad, and that means he was hurt. I was too busy wanting to see the humans and horses and yeah, I wanted to leave with you and be free even if I still was in a pack. It would at least be your pack and maybe—” Rivvie’s breath hitched. “Maybe new people who would take me seriously if I’m not a smiling prankster. I can learn to be someone more mature.”
Valen thought back to the dozens of times he’d heard someone joking about Rivvie being the flighty, fun one and him the serious, grumpy one. He was as guilty as anyone else of not really seeing Rivvie. When Rivvie smiled and laughed, he lit up everyone around him with that same infectious joy. That didn’t mean he was stupid, and most certainly not vapid. He was just carefree and liked to joke around.
“There’s nothing wrong with being happy, you know.” Valen gave Rivvie’s back a pat. “Nothing wrong with smiling. The world would be a pretty shitty place if everyone was serious.”
“Yeah, I know. I have to be serious too,” Rivvie protested. “Everyone thinks I’m one of my own jokes. You know I’m not.”
“You’ve set me straight more than once,” Valen agreed.
“I just like to have fun. That isn’t all I do.” Rivvie wiggled.
Valen released him. “Just be yourself, Riv. I wish sometimes I wasn’t so in control. Pushing you in the stream just then is about as spontaneous as I’ve been since I was a kid.”
Rivvie leered at him. “You were pretty spontaneous with Aaron.”
Valen crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve been spontaneous sexually many times.” Sex wasn’t forbidden, or anything like that, for them. It was a natural part of life and people needed affection, needed to feel good. Otherwise there was little point to life other than hardship.
“Yeah, but with shifters, though I guess he’s really not any different from us when we’re in this form.” Rivvie shrugged. “He seemed nervous. Was he a virgin?”
Valen suspected that was the case. “We didn’t really talk much.”
“You’re hanging around here because of him, and that’s okay,” Rivvie tacked on quickly. “That’s what I was trying to say when I pointed out how Aaron isn’t equipped to make it on his own.”
“You could have just said it was okay.” Valen looked up at the sky, taking in the shades of orange, purple and blue. “Sun’s up, and we have no plans for today. Until now. I was thinking of seeing what kind of guards the village Aaron lives in has.” The idea had only just come to him. “In case he’s told them about us. I know whoever was with him talked, too. Aaron knows more.” Not much more. It was an excuse to snoop, and the only excuse he was willing to admit to. Maybe Valen would lose his weird fascination with the man before long. “Make sure they don’t come after Father or anything once we’re clear of here, since Father’s the closest pack.”
“Because you sullied the pretty little virgin?” Rivvie joked.
“Pretty?” Aaron was every inch a man, though Valen supposed he had a masculine sort of beauty. “He is little. So were the humans on the horses. I think. Kind of hard to judge when they were riding. Their torsos didn’t appear to be long and the girl who helped Aaron, Lin, she was downright tiny.”
Rivvie grinned. “Hey, maybe humans are shrinking down to troll size. Oh! Or fairies. Fairies would be cool.”
Valen almost told Rivvie he was being a goofball, but after the whole ‘vapid’ thing, he decided to be much more careful with his words to Rivvie. No more calling his brother a moron, even jokingly. “You know, you are right. Something about Aaron hooked me right here.” Valen touched his chest.
Rivvie looked lower. “Are you sure he didn’t hook you about a foot and a half down?”
“Smart ass.” There, that wasn’t calling Rivvie stupid or anything along those lines. “And that was good, too, yes. It’s just, there’s more. I want to see him again. I thought I could leave—think every day, I’ll head out in the morning—yet here I am.”
“Here
we
are,” Rivvie corrected. “Okay, let’s go spy on your boy.”
Chapter Seven
Waiting to find out how much trouble he’d gotten into was always the worst part about being punished. Not that Aaron had a whole lot of experience with that sort of thing, but of course, he hadn’t been a perfect kid, and the apprehension had always bothered him the
most. He’d spent a week waiting on a lecture and punishment, yet neither had been handed to him. It was unnerving.
“How is your knee?” Anita asked. “I want to change the dressing on it.”
Aaron glanced at the still-sore joint. He’d have been fine by now if he hadn’t tripped getting out of bed yesterday and gashed it open on the edge of the nightstand drawer. The one that he should have closed the night before. “It’s okay, I guess. I won’t be running in any races, but I can walk.”
Anita took a deep breath then blew it out. “We haven’t talked about it. I didn’t want to push and make you run off again. I have to say, you know you’re lucky those shifters didn’t kill you.”
“Mo—” Aaron caught himself before he could finish. Once a person became an adult, his or her parents were no long Mom and Dad. They were equals, of a sort, and so were called by their first names then. “Anita, they aren’t vicious. In fact, I’m going to have to say they were better people than I was. I tried to steal the leather bag.”
Anita began to unwrap the bandage around his knee. “So you said. I’m sure you thought it had been truly abandoned. You were always a good boy, with the exception of a minor incident here or there, of course. Was there a name on the bag?”
“That’s not the point,” Aaron argued. “I didn’t really look. He could have been in the stream or something and I still would have taken the bag in that instant. I wanted to find something to—” He shut up. The reasons he’d done it didn’t really matter.
Anita looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Go on.”
Aaron had never been able to withstand his mother’s commands any more than he held up against his father’s, usually. “I just wanted to find something great that would make Walter see there’s more to this world than the village we live in. More than just struggling to get by.”
More to me.
Aaron couldn’t confess that longing.
“Of course there’s more than that to life,” Anita said quietly. “There are friendships and love, memories to be made.”
“When’s there time for any of those things? We always have to repair falling down dwellings, tend gardens, haul stones, work on sharpening knives and weapons… And love?” Aaron scoffed. “How is that possible when we aren’t allowed to even be with anyone else until we’ve helped create two new lives? And it’s not like most of us can forge ahead with that because we’re related to each other, and so Walter or you have to send someone out to the village a week away, at minimum, and hope that your person returns with someone suitable for breeding purposes instead of deciding to stay in that village or move on elsewhere. Lenny, Betty and Kurtis never came back.”
Anita didn’t argue over whether or not Aaron had a point. “Some people leave. Others do what they must to help ensure we keep going. After that, you can find love. Your father and I were lucky in that we fell in love and were matched. It happens that way, sometimes. If it doesn’t, you move on.”
Aaron couldn’t face her. His cheeks burned with shame.
“You’ll make beautiful babies,” Anita said. “With eyes as blue as the sky before the sun sets, and hair the color of the flowers that grow on the ridge.”
“Babies that have no skills, that are born feeling like they will never fit in,” Aaron muttered before he could stop himself.
“Aaron?” Anita asked.
Aaron refused to turn his head her way.
“You don’t think you fit in here?”
Ignoring two questions in a row made him nervous, and he just couldn’t do it. “I don’t, Mom.” He bit his bottom lip. “Sorry, I know I’m not supposed to call you that.”
“I will always be your mom,” Anita said firmly. “I don’t care what the rules are, and you
do
belong here. Does the idea of making a child with a woman make you want to leave us?”
The question should have struck fear in him, it was so close to what he’d tried to hide from everyone in the village. Instead, he wanted to shout out that no, he didn’t want a woman. Women were amazing, they were some of his closest friends and he loved them, just not the way his male friends loved them.
Aaron finally glanced at his mother. She was taller than him, and very slender. Her hair was a shade lighter than his, and her eyes held a tint of green his didn’t. They still resembled each other closely, though, with Aaron’s jaw only being a tiny bit wider than hers, his chin less pointed. He even had the beauty mark she did, right below the outer edge of his left eyebrow. The small brown mark was hardly bigger than a freckle, and he was the only one of her children who had it.
The resemblance did nothing to make him feel that he wasn’t useless. “No, I don’t think I do belong, for many reasons.” Was he really going to explain why? Now Aaron’s appendages numbed with fear. He didn’t know if he had the courage to be completely honest. Maybe it was time he tried. “I—”
The bedroom door swung open.
Aaron snapped his mouth shut as Walter entered the room. He closed the door and strode purposefully to Aaron’s bed, where Aaron was resting. “How are you?”
Aaron frowned, confused by the tone and the question. Walter hadn’t spoken more than two words to him since finding Aaron in the forest. Regardless, he didn’t sound furious. He should have been furious. Aaron had broken rules, risked himself and others on a stupid plan to search for something, and he hadn’t even known what it was he’d been looking for. Perhaps just the chance to see if he really could leave the village.
Even so, he’d risked the horses, too, and had made Walter and Anita as well as the rest of the searchers waste valuable time looking for him. Winter was coming and there were more chores because of it.
Walter leaned on the small stand beside Aaron’s bed, and frowned at Aaron in return. “Did you hit your head when you fell yesterday? Is your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth?”
“You’re teasing me?” Aaron asked, stunned.
Walter and Anita exchanged a glance that must have communicated something because she stood then left the room, closing the door behind her. Walter sighed then patted Aaron’s hip. “Scoot over and let an old man have some room.”
“Okay,” Aaron said warily, sliding over toward the wall. “This is weird.”
Walter chuckled.
It startled Aaron. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard his father express any kind of amusement. Then again, leading the village was a stressful job. Everyone came to Walter and Anita with their problems, some such asinine ones and so easily solved, yet people thought they required intervention.
Walter eased back and closed his eyes. “You know, I see you, Aaron. I don’t think you believe anyone does, but your mother and I do. We know our boy.”
Aaron could only gawp in horror at his father.
Walter opened his eyes, turned his head, and looked at Aaron. “You’ve begged off us bringing in someone for you to reproduce with.”
Aaron gulped and began stuttering. “I—I—I—” Gods, he didn’t know what to say.
Walter caught a hold of one of Aaron’s hands. Aaron hadn’t even been aware of flailing it uselessly.
“Aaron, calm down. No one is angry with you. Contrary to how it may seem, I
do
have knowledge of the world before it came to be the way it is now. The village I came from wasn’t as remote as ours.” Walter tugged and Aaron followed, resting his head on his father’s shoulder. “I don’t talk about it, because there’s no point, but I came from a place several months’ ride from here called Redwood. There were these trees that were just amazing,” he said, his voice filled with wonder. “It was a beautiful place. It had problems. The earth shook sometimes, and the tides began to come in higher and higher. None of that would have made me leave, though. I loved Redwood.”
“Then why did you leave?” Aaron asked, feeling that his father was waiting for the question.
Walter cupped the back of Aaron’s head. “Well, something very bad happened to someone I loved, and I couldn’t stay.”
“Mom?” Aaron cleared his throat. “I mean, Anita?”
“That’s a stupid rule, isn’t it?” Walter asked. “You know, you and your brothers and sisters have me questioning all the rules that have existed here for so long. Anita’s father handed over the responsibility of the village to me and your mother. It’s always been easier to just go along with the rules already in place until now. I look at you, and I know some of them must change.”
Aaron felt as if something was intrinsically wrong with him if it meant the rules had to be changed, an exception made just for him. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to change anything for me.”
Walter chuckled again, and the sound held such warmth that Aaron’s eyes pricked with tears. That, and the gentle caress of his father’s hand over his heart were going to make Aaron bawl like a baby.
“It’s not for you. It’s because of you,” Walter explained. “There are these rules and regimens, and I think originally, they might have all been good. People had to learn how to exist and prosper outside of the life they’d known before the End Times. They needed that kind of structure. We aren’t prospering now. We’re just trudging along, every day more of a struggle than not. We’ve lost the joy that is also an essential part of being human.”
“Not just humans,” Aaron murmured, then blinked and tensed.
“Oh?” Walter tipped Aaron’s chin up.
Aaron looked at his father. “The… The shifters, they were actually nice people. They talk and think like people, they aren’t just animals that change shapes.”