“You know I cannot.” But something in her demeanor changed, becoming nearly wistful. “Have you ever heard the nightingale sing outside your bedroom window?”
The nightingale … She was giving me a hint to her location.
“Nyet. Tell me what it is like.”
“They can be very loud if they are lonely,” she said, her words as soft as the snow falling outside my window. I imagined following the trail of that voice all the winding way to wherever she rested without me. “They have a journey they make every year. I do not know why this one still sings, and stays—he should be gone—he should have given up finding love this year.”
“He is a stubborn bird?”
“Da. Stubborn, or persistent. I like to think of him as the latter.”
“Do you think he will find his love?”
“Persistence should pay off, da?”
“Da. In a perfect world.”
But our world was far from perfect.
She wished me good night, knowing I did not know what to wish her—was it morning, afternoon, evening, or something stretching in between where she was? Was her day coming to an end or a new beginning?
I set down the phone and laid my head on my pillow. Leaving Mother’s body as we did—losing her so completely—seemed the fiercest of endings, but doing precisely that I prayed would somehow give us all a new beginning.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marlaena
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Straining even with my superior night vision to avoid running into bushes and brambles, darkness surrounded us. Perhaps this was the void.
And maybe, beyond it, there’d be a new beginning.
I wanted that. A fresh start where no one knew our names, our faces, or our pasts. Where we could be what we wanted to be. But those were things all the members of my pack wanted. I might be alone in many ways, but I wasn’t alone in wanting a redo.
The B-I-B-L-E, yes, that’s the book for me … A snatch of the Sunday school song invaded my brain. The Bible was the book I should have been most familiar with because of Phil and Margie, but, thanks to them it was also the one I avoided the most.
A year after I’d run away a man in a bookstore pressed a copy into my hands after catching me trying to steal The Catcher in the Rye.
“Do you know what book is most frequently stolen?” he asked, his eyes solemn as only the faithfuls’ could be.
“The Joy of Sex?” I’d quipped.
But instead of shouting at me, he simply took The Catcher in the Rye from me, stepped across the aisle, and gently nudged the Bible—King James Version—at me. “The Good Book,” he whispered as if imparting some big secret. He corralled me toward the cash register and set both books on the counter. “Please ring these up,” he instructed the girl watching us with great curiosity. “At some point everyone wants answers. At some point everyone wants a bit of grace, a bit of peace. And forgiveness. That’s why people steal the Bible. They’ll commit one more sin to gain the knowledge to be rid of a lifetime of sinning.”
He paid for the books and set the bag in my crossed arms. “Go,” he instructed, “and don’t come back until you’ve read and understood both.”
I flipped him the bird and left the store. But the bag was heavy. And for some reason I thought back to all of the books I’d stolen. All the knowledge I’d sucked down in rebellion seeking something I doubted even existed—but something he seemed to know the location of with certainty. He understood the need for sanctuary: something it seemed no one and no place could provide for me yet.
But maybe that could change.
Gareth loped up beside me, his look assuring me that everyone was fine—and that he was checking up on me.
I clenched my jaw against the lingering pain in my shoulder and lengthened my stride, giving him a challenge as we dodged and wove our way through the trees lining the mountain’s top.
As much as I wanted sanctuary, safety—security—I knew enough about life at twenty to know I was the only one I could truly depend on.
And sometimes even I let myself down.
If there was a rescue to be had—figuratively or literally—it would be made by me. I had no one else to depend on. The pack understood that. They recognized my independence—my dominance—and knew that if I could somehow save myself, I would do my damnedest to save them all, too.
That was why we all worked so well together. They understood me.
They wanted and needed me.
And because of that, I needed them.
Sometimes my depth astounded me. Mostly there was so little depth to me I was the wading pool of personality: shallow and easy to get to the bottom of. I had to give credit where credit was due, I thought, glancing at Gareth. Any depth there was to me was in part—in large part—due to Gareth’s late-night talks. Or Gareth’s stories told around the campfire at any odd place we stopped along our way to wherever.
All his tales had some deep meaning or moral.
All mine came with a punch line or a lesson from the school of hard knocks. Gareth had only been enrolled in it a few years—I was born into it.
A sudden dip in the ground and I stumbled before catching my stride. But it was enough Gareth noticed. He looked at me, eyes narrowing. I ignored him and kept my focus ahead. He swung his heavy head toward me, hinting I should slow down, maybe stop.
I pushed on. Sped up.
He turned his face back to the path ahead, settling into the rhythm of our run.
Then he lunged in front of me, cutting me off, and I plowed into his ribs with a whuff as the breath tore out of me.
We tangled on the pathway, our packmates swarming around, nudging us with soft noses before stepping back and whining softly. They shifted their weight from side to side, flared their nostrils to try and smell some clue they couldn’t see or hear, and watched us with great curiosity.
I came up fighting, my teeth filled with Gareth, my growl the rumble of a Harley. I bit, I tore. His fur littered the snowy ground, and I spattered the white by our paws with bursts of bright red, my snarl bubbling through the coppery taste of his blood.
The pups plowed backward into each other in surprise.
But Gareth just stood.
Still.
Stoic.
Shit.
I froze, the growl still rattling along the length of my spine.
Nose-to-nose, puffs of cocoa-colored hair floated on the breeze around us like fuzzy clouds.