Bitter Waters (11 page)

“No!” she snapped and then sighed, concentrating on heaping food onto her plate. “I'm sorry. Today was just bad. Good people destroyed for no reason. The little girl, Kimmie.” Indigo shook her head at the senselessness of it. “Her folks are good people who got in a fight with their white trash neighbors over a parking space. The parents won, and the neighbors falsely accused them of child neglect. Child Youth Services did a Nazi raid, took Kimmie into custody, and put her into foster care for her own safety.” She stilled, fighting rage, seeking her center. “I had to talk to the damn vindictive bastards today, and they didn't even have the decency to be ashamed of what they'd done.”

“Which ones? The neighbors or CYS?”

“The neighbors. The employees at CYS are all apologetic; it's the organization as a whole that's a well-meaning giant trampling half of what it's trying to save. Although right now the right hand is trying to help while the left hand tries to cover its ass.”

“And the other three missing children? Any chance they were false accusations too?”

“One's a biracial baby found abandoned in May. The other two have single mothers in prison. The children were rightfully in foster care—you can't fault CYS there.”

So it looped back to inexplicable tragedy. No one's fault except the kidnappers', no one to punish but the unknown villain, and no words of comfort that he could give her.

So they settled among the Dogs to eat as if they were any
normal family. The conversation centered around Hellena's sewing projects with occasional detours into the stopping power of various handguns.

Afterward, as they drifted toward the bonfire, someone killed the heavy music and an expectant hush moved through the wanna-bes until they were a ring of excited faces at the fringe of the firelight.

“You're going to howl with us?”
Rennie asked, pausing to rest a hand on Ukiah's chest. Through the contact, Ukiah could sense the memory of small body changes needed in order to howl.

Ukiah glanced to Indigo holding his hand. Did she mind such an obvious display of his nonhuman side? Judging by the tightness around her eyes and mouth, she'd seen the question pass between him and Rennie, and wasn't happy, but she gave his hand a squeeze and let it drop.
Be with your family,
she seemed to say without speaking. And the part of him that had been Magic Boy, isolated from his kind for hundreds of years, went nearly shivering with excitement.

Rennie smiled and backed away, leading him into the loose circle of Dog Warriors. The change moved through him, a painful burn of forced rearrangements, of cells grudgingly changing function and shifting to make his voice box capable of creating howls.

The watching wanna-bes stirred restlessly, and a man laughed drunkenly and gave a yell, a pale attempt of the real thing. Rennie loosed a long, low-pitched and coarse howl, more the confrontational howl of an alpha male warning off strangers than the start of a chorus. A low growl rose from the other Dogs, leery of being watched during their celebration of their wolf taint. Ukiah drew in a deep breath and tried for an answering howl; his body wasn't ready yet and the howl came out high-pitched and short, so like a puppy's that the rest of the Pack broke into laughter. He grinned with embarrassment, and then closed his eyes and focused deep inside of him. There, and there, and there, short bursts of white-hot pain as cells unwillingly complied.

Eyes closed, Ukiah could still recognize Rennie's deep alpha howl as it rose, simple now for the start of the chorus.
Hellena's howl joined in two heartbeats later, alpha female, and then Bear Shadow's nearly deep as Rennie's. The three voices rose and twined in independent songs, wordless and wild. With his memories, Rennie had given Ukiah the pack's wolf taint, and sound shimmered along ancient instinct, taking meaning as clear as words.
I am here!
Ukiah took a deep breath and tried again, and was pleased that his howl came out low and long. And now the rest of the Dogs, en masse, joined in.

The chorus became more and more modulated, changing pitch rapidly in what might seem as chaotic disorder. From his Mom Jo, though, Ukiah knew that the chorus howl was to protect the pack's territory from interlopers, and with the discord, their numbers were exaggerated. Two wolves could seem to be six, and six seem to be twenty.
Beware! We are here! This is ours!

It was a sound meant to carry the length and breadth of a wolf pack's hunting range, and standing at the heart of it was nearly deafening. The wanna-bes wore expressions of amazement, delight, and envy despite the level of sound. After a minute, the chorus wound down and stopped. In the sudden quiet, one of the humans whispered, “Oh, wow!”

Rennie grinned at this, filled his lungs, and loosed another low howl. And as the howl echoed out over the cornfield, Rennie reached out with his Pack presence, speaking now with all his being.
“I am here!”
It was a shout of individuality and existence across all spectrums, to which the watching humans were mostly deaf to. As each pack member took voice, they stretched out their own presence. Each howl similar, and yet different. Each mind holding the same ancient base memories, and a fine layer of individual personalities. They joined together seamlessly at that deep, shared level, and yet stayed bright stars of separate selves, so close that one could feel the beating of the other's heart as if it was under one's own skin.
“We are here! This is ours!”

They sang through one chorus after another, reveling in the completeness it gave them, nearly one but yet, just as important, still a collection of individuals. The wind, scented with the cinnamon spice of fall and night chilled, rose and washed
over them, bringing them reports of everything hidden in the velvet dark. The bonfire roared up, a half-tamed beast, and gleaming embers trailed off into the darkness like a swarm of fireflies.

As the Pack fell quiet after the last chorus, the human reverently silent, and only the wind and the fire talked, Rennie lifted his head, nostrils flaring to catch a scent. “Whitetail buck,” the Pack leader murmured, and then loped away, wolf silent, in pursuit of the deer.

Without thinking, Ukiah followed, as if Rennie's going had created a vacuum that sucked him in after Rennie.

The buck was in the cornfield. The cornstalks, spent of summer green, whispered dryly as they slipped in among the rows. The wind changed, taking their scent to the buck, and it bounded away, flashing its white tail. Beyond the corn lay a country road, and then a woodlot of hickory trees and maples, at first dark as a cave, and then as Ukiah's eyes adjusted to the shadowed black, full of dappled moonlight and vivid grays. The buck leapt a fallen tree, a six-foot jump, graceful as a bird taking wing. Rennie followed without breaking stride, Ukiah close on his heels.

Through a sudden clearing, deep in knee-high grass that bruised with their passing, a flash of deep green perfume against the rich earth scent of the woods. Why they were chasing the buck, Ukiah couldn't say, but he knew that he was grinning in wild delight. He could feel the others slipping through the darkness around him, sharing in the fierce joy. They fell into ancient patterns of a wolf pack on hunt.

The hunt moved out of a creek bottom, swinging east to run parallel to Slippery Rock Creek, heading north where the lay of the land narrowed into the gorge. Even as Ukiah realized that the gorge cliffs were close at hand, the buck swerved toward the rocky edge.

Rennie leapt forward and caught hold of the buck. “No, no, no. None of that.”

Ukiah joined him at pulling the deer around, away from the cliff. The buck fought their hold, trying to bring its antlers into play. Ukiah controlled it, holding it fast so it could harm neither them nor itself. “Easy.” He was suddenly stunned with
the knowledge that no human hand had ever touched the buck before, nor would again while it was still living.

Rennie grinned, teeth flashing in the moonlight, well pleased in the deer, the night, and Ukiah. “Let's turn him around.” Once facing safely inland, Rennie took his hands away, saying, “Go on! Go tell your brothers that you outran the wolves of hell tonight!”

Ukiah watched the buck bound away, and then glanced back toward the cliff. Beyond the land dropped down into the gorge bottom, and the opposite side rose only half the height of the side he stood on, giving him full view of the northeast sky. Mom Lara's aurora borealis was dancing in the sky, but his eyes were drawn to the big dipper. Ursa Major. The bear.

The constellation brought up his strange vision in Oregon's Blue Mountains.

A male grizzly bear towered over him. It roared, a sound that filled his ears and senses. He saw the huge mouth open, the yellowed canines, the deep cavern of its throat, the red rim of gum and the drool. The hot breath blasted over his upraised face. The carnivore smell of old meat. The spittle touched him with information on the huge beast before him, the ancient link with all bears and the twisting path down to this giant creature before him. The sound rippled over his skin, felt as well as heard.

It stood there, real in all his senses. But its eyes—its eyes were great pools of blackness filled with stars. And into his mind he felt the firm impression of something unreal, something huge and unknowable, something beyond anything he and any of his ancestral memories stretching back eons had ever experienced. The bear, he somehow knew, wasn't truly there. And so, where he should feel fear jazzing over his nerves like electricity, he felt only serene awe.

It was one of the few times his perfect memory was proving to be a handicap. Reliving the experience brought back the stunning grandeur and awe, and yet the memory underlined the profound difference in him. The careful detective that went to Oregon still struggled to understand
what
or
who
had appeared to him, and
why
. Magic Boy, though, accepted
it without question; the bear was his totem animal. It appeared to him in his time of need and set him on his quest.

He had the memory of his mother, Kicking Deer, telling the story of his birth, of how the thunderbird crashed in the mountains, carrying a piece of the sun in its beak, of the crow people that killed his uncle and aunts, and of the trickster god Coyote saving his mother only to trick her into giving birth to Ukiah. He knew that the thunderbird had been the scout ship crashing, the Ontongard had been the crow people, but he couldn't explain Coyote's part in the story. Had the trickster god crouched in the briars with his mother, telling her to swallow a magic stone, or had his mother just made it up, a simple way to explain her perplexing survival and his birth?

Magic Boy believed his mother completely.

Looking into the star-filled eyes of the phantom bear, Ukiah could not be sure of anything.

“You've been holding out on us, Cub,” Rennie whispered hoarsely. The Pack leader had tried for sarcastic and failed utterly.

Ukiah startled and turned. The Dog Warriors ranged around him, minds still linked with his, experiencing the bear through his senses. Even as his surprise broke off his recall, they replayed the memory, copied in detail, hoarding it. They seemed even more profoundly moved than he had been; tears shimmered in the moonlight.

“God has not turned His face from us,” Hellena said. “We didn't lose our souls when we became Pack.”

Ukiah understood then. Many of the Dog Warriors were deeply religious; born during a time when miracles were unquestioned, and the state of one's soul extremely important. They had suffered for centuries, thinking themselves damned, to find redemption possible.

“Did we leave Indigo alone at the farm?” Ukiah asked as he realized
all
of the Dog Warriors stood around him.

“Oops.” Rennie looked almost fearfully back toward the farm, the bonfire a flickering light in the distance. “That wasn't smart of us.”

Ukiah headed back at a run.
“I hope she's not mad.”

“I hope she didn't start arresting people.”

 

They found Indigo sitting on a log bench in the dancing light of the bonfire. The wanna-bes were clustered on the far side of the bonfire, eyeing her silently, fearfully. Neither Indigo nor the wanna-bes were inclined to mention what had happened in their absence, except for one man who murmured to Rennie, “That's one creepy chick your kid is dating.”

Ukiah knew he'd messed up big. Indigo didn't say it, but he suspected that she was thinking it. It was hard to go back to the normal interaction with humans after the wordless rapport with the Pack: needing to guess what someone was feeling and explaining his actions. He wondered if he would be any better at it if he'd grown up normally, from child to full adult in one heady rush, surrounded by family and strangers alike. Both the times he'd grown up, it had been slowly, shielded by his family or the forest from strangers.

They said their good-byes. During the return to Pittsburgh on his bike, they were pressed just as close, and yet, now, they seemed worlds apart. Her car was in the Kaufmanns' garage; he killed his engines when he pulled up beside it.

“You're angry at me,” he said.

“I've got lots to think about,” she said.

“I'm sorry I left you alone. I went without thinking.”

“I'm not angry with you.” Was that a hint of exasperation?