Rippled (21 page)

I’d scanned the forest, peering at my house far in the distance.

“You’re the only one who can help us heal these wounds. The others…your parents won’t understand.”

I’d taken another breath before kneeling in front of him. I’d stared at his eyes. “But how can I hear you? How can I understand you? You’re just a wolf.”

He hadn’t moved. Ears perked. Tail wagging behind him. “To your eyes, perhaps.”

“How do I know this is real?”

“You don’t.”

His final words have stayed with me ever since.
“The Earth will not find you if you come with me. I can keep you safe.”

I remembered the memories he’d shared with me then—a black tree, dead and broken, strips of green energy seeping through the cracks, and the boy, his eyes the same silver as my wolf.

His memory still kissed my dreams—both the wolf and the boy visited me as I slept.

My body trembled, as if feeling his hands against my face, his cold nose resting in the palm of my hand. It was how I woke every morning, bleary-eyed and much too soon to see the dream to its end.

My dreams were my only escape from the prison into which my parents had deposited me. Too awake to return to my wolf, I blinked at the early morning sunlight. White walls with bars on the windows surrounded me. The ratty old mattress screeched under my weight as I rolled over, scanning the piles of books collected in every corner of the room.

Books about wolves, werewolves, romance novels and anything else I could get my hands on. There were no teachers, no recess. Just my books. My memories. But no matter how much I read, no matter how hard I tried to remember, nothing explained what my wolf had been, or why he hadn’t come back for me.

The staff at the ward insisted I hadn’t seen him at all, and if it hadn’t been for how real my dreams felt, I might have believed them. For the past six years, I’d struggled with the truth. Six years later and I still remembered him.

He’d taken me as far into the woods as we could possibly have gone. And pressing his forehead to mine, he’d shown me things that hadn’t happened yet, things that had happened to him and memories that somehow had appeared in my dreams after we’d met. The black tree. The Earth’s essence—the green energy humans had begun to siphon out of the ground with their heavy machinery. The more we took from the Earth, the darker the ground became.

The Earth was dying, and even though everyone else at the ward could see it, I was the only one who could hear it—the only one who could feel the Earth’s cries. That was what had brought me here in the first place. When my parents couldn’t stand my stories about Tucker any longer, they took me to the ward—to a place he would never find me.

He’d told me to find him when I was ready. When I was sure. He’d promised if I got lost, he’d seek me out. The days passed as if they were years, and as they did, the likelihood of Tucker’s return to me faded.

Aroused as a result of my most recent dream, I considered staying in bed, to close my eyes and only think of him. I couldn’t. The nurses were due back at any minute. Much too soon for me to get off, and way too early for my liking.
Damn.

Rousing myself, I fixed my nightgown, the thin fabric falling below my knees as I closed my hands around the bars of the window. I scanned the world outside for Tucker, the same shape I’d searched for every morning and right before I went to bed. I’d never seen him, yet still I hoped for his return.

A bleak sky hung overhead, but I knew better than to hope for rain. Broken roads and tall cranes jutted from the ground in place of the trees I remembered from my childhood. The colours here were either brown, grey or black. There was no green grass or any wild flowers like the ones from my books. That part of my world had faded, shortly after my fifth birthday, into memory and fiction.

The destruction first started in 2018, following the earthquakes and storms that had begun in 2011 and increased every year. The quakes caused the lands to shift, to break off and fall into the sea. The storms scarred whatever remained. And as the Earth died, mankind tried to save what they could by building machines, ones capable of draining the essence right from the Earth. This essence, or the core as some called it, was hidden far beneath the surface. It was what brought life to the flowers, fields and farms.

After a large string of earthquakes, the humans discovered the stream by mistake—a green energy seeping through the cracks of the Earth’s crust. Wherever the streams touched, new life bloomed. Consumed by their greed, mankind built even more machines—allowing them to turn the Earth’s essence into useable energy.

The children had started to vanish soon after that.
The Earth’s price.

Someone knocked on the door to my room, and I jumped.

“Emma, are you awake?” a voice called from the other side of the door.

“Of course. Am I ever
not
awake?” I asked, heading over to it.

“Good point,” the voice replied, a set of keys jingling before turning the lock. An older woman poked her head into the room. She glared at my mess of hair, the unmade bed and the books lining the walls of my room. She handed me a cup of pills and some water with a sigh. “I take it the new medication isn’t helping?”

Damn right, it isn’t.
It’s not working because I’m not taking it.
I bit my lip and shook my head. As soon as the staff had stopped supervising me, I’d weaned myself off the mindless drugs—they’d been strong enough to put me out, but too weak to do much else.

“I will have them up the dose, then,” the woman said, rummaging in her pocket for a pad of paper so she could write it down. “Perhaps we need to do a few more tests,” she mused, stepping into the hall to retrieve a tray of foodstuffs. After depositing my first meal of the day onto the table beside my bed, she paused in the doorway. “Will you be needing anything else?”

“I could use a new notebook. My last one’s full,” I replied.

“But we just gave you one last week.”

I waved a hand around the room. “What else do you expect me to do in here?”

“You really should go to the activity room more often. They miss you down there.”

My eyes narrowed. “And waste my thoughts when I could be writing them down? No, thanks.”

The woman shrugged. “I have you scheduled for a shower later this afternoon. I should have a new notebook for you by then.”

“I smell that bad, huh?”

The woman smiled, her eyes wrinkling at the corners. “You look even worse,” she teased, excusing herself from the room.

I pressed my back against the door until it clicked, taking a few short breaths before sliding my bedside table away from the wall. It was somewhere they never looked, not even during inspection. I stashed the pills in the small hole in the wall before replacing the table.

The food was as unappetising as ever—an overcooked egg, a piece of toast that had been slathered with so much butter it was probably cold, a few strips of bacon and a children’s juice box. I ignored it all, including my stomach, which protested when I moved to the other side of the room.

I was about to look through one of my notebooks when another knock came. I opened my notebook, eyes scanning over the memories I’d recorded there. They never changed—they were always about my wolf and the promise he’d made to me so long ago.

The lock on the door clicked, followed by a
whoosh
of cool air from the hallway.

“Gather your things,” a younger woman ordered, her voice sounding more miserable than the first. “Someone’s come for you.”

I turned on my heels, expecting the woman’s face to show some form of amusement, as if this were some practical joke. It wasn’t. The woman didn’t move—her lips as motionless as the rest of her. Something squeezed around my heart.
Who’d ever come for me?
I knew it wouldn’t be my parents. They’d stopped visiting over a year ago, and it had been almost as long since their last call.
It can’t be them.
Even if it was, if they’d had some change of heart, I wouldn’t go with them.

“My parents?” I asked, turning back to my collection of notebooks before picking them up off the floor, one by one.

“I don’t think so. He’s waiting at the front desk with your papers and everything.”

He?
But I didn’t know anyone else. It had to be Tucker. I shook my head. It wasn’t possible.
He’s a wolf, remember?
He was a dream, nothing more.

Feeling a little more self-conscious than before, I combed my fingers through my tangled hair, the blonde curls resting against the middle of my back as I chased the nurse into the hall. My mind wandered as we walked single file to the reception desk. As we did, I considered the idea of my parents coming to get me, to release me into the world.
What’s left of it, at least.
I pushed the possibility to the side, however, when we rounded the corner.
That voice.
And when he turned to look at me, I just about fell over. It wasn’t possible.

The figure of a man Tucker had shown me from his memories was the same one that was now standing in front of the desk.
It's him.
It was Tucker. It had to be.

I sucked in a breath. Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I averted my eyes.
Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. Don’t. Freak—

“Hello, Emma,” came an all-too-familiar voice, once I was within hearing distance. Wearing a thin leather jacket and a torn pair of jeans, Tucker looked just as comfortable in his human skin as he had as a wolf.

This is a dream.
It had to be. Humans didn’t turn into wolves, and it certainly didn’t happen the other way around.

“And how do you know this young woman?” the gentleman behind the reception desk asked.

“Half-sister,” Tucker said, pushing a hand through his short brown hair.

“You parents never spoke of…”

“Dad doesn’t know,” Tucker added, cutting the man off. “I have our papers.” Peering down at me, he retrieved a set of documents from inside his jacket pocket. At over six feet tall, he towered above my five-foot-four frame.
Trust me.
He mouthed the words so only I could see them.

Nerves seized my heart, and I moistened my lips. He was there, right beside me, and it took every bit of strength I had not to geek out on him. I reminded myself to breathe, hugging an arm around Tucker’s when he offered it to me. He flashed me a smile, and that recognition alone sent a shiver down my spine.

“She’ll need to get dressed first,” the man behind the desk said, raising his eyebrows in my direction.

“We’re only going to the car,” Tucker explained. “She’ll sleep most of the way home anyway. She was always good at dozing off in the backseat. Isn’t that right, Em?”

Heat brushed my cheeks, and after a long moment, I somehow managed to murmur an acceptable reply.
He’s taken this long to find you. Shouldn’t you at least look somewhat decent?
He’d already seen me in a gown though—twice actually—and I refused to head back down that hall, even if it was just to get changed.

While I did my best not to fall face first onto the floor, Tucker started to collect my things, filing my notebooks into a tan duffle bag. My knees wobbled, threatening to buckle under my weight, and I used Tucker for support.

His eyes fell on me, and I just about lost it.

“Go on outside. I’ll just be a minute.” He leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. “The car’s waiting out front.”

Heat radiated from his kiss, warming my skin long after his lips were gone. I wanted to ask him what car. What did it look like? Instead, I locked my jaw and did my best to hide the shaking of my hands as I wrapped them around his waist. Tucker glanced at me, his eyes a mix of emotions I couldn’t read.

“Go on,” he said, untangling my arms from around his middle before swatting at my ass.

I smiled, and when he smiled back at me, I smiled even more. Giddy from the sudden contact, I swallowed around my excitement, doing my best to look as serious as he did. It wasn’t as easy as he made it seem. Not only was I getting out of the building full of white walls and sleepless nights, I was going with
him
—the very person my parents had said wasn’t real.
And I almost believed them.
I growled under my breath, heading for the front doors when Tucker gave me a warning glance.

A soft breeze kissed my cheeks when I opened the doors. The grey clouds from before were slowly melting away, small patches of blue filling the gaps.

I almost looked down at my feet to see if the green cracks still stretched across the ground when a hand fell onto my shoulder.

“Eyes forward,” Tucker said, his voice firm. “Where we’re going, there is no broken Earth.” He stopped and turned me around so I was facing him. His once-silver eyes mimicked the grey just before an oncoming storm—silent and calm. “Do you remember what I said to you so many years ago?”

“To come to you when I was ready,” I said, staring at my hands.

“And if you got lost, I’d come and find you instead. Are you ready to join me?”

I glanced back over my shoulder at the prison I’d spent the last six years of my life in. “Do I really have a choice?”

“You do, though I’d hope my offer is a little more appetising than where you just were.”

My nightgown suddenly felt too small, too thin. “I’m a mess,” I warned, nodding to his duffle bag.

“I’m sure that isn’t true. Come, there will be a fresh change of clothes and a hot shower waiting for you at home.” He guided me to a yellow pickup.

“And where is home?” I asked when he opened the passenger door for me.

“A world away from here.”

I frowned at him when he slid into his side of the car, turning the keys in the ignition. The ward wasn’t that far from home, was it?

As if Tucker could read my thoughts, he continued, “What I showed you was only a glimpse of what it truly is. I had to give you a reason to remember me, to remember what I told you—for me to imprint on you, and for you to do the same to me. Sort of like a long-distance relationship, but without all the mystery.”