The stink of their flesh and the sudden blare of their laughter nearly undid me, flooding me with memories so visceral that I shrank down onto the forest floor, nearly shocked backed into a girl. I bellied into the punk beneath the trunk of the Deadfall, shivering, holding tight to my wolf-shape while human memories rocked me, breathing deep the smell of ancient wood and damp humus while I remembered the stink of blood and violence.
They’d been waiting for us, Rob and his followers Lee and Jeth, hiding in the woods along a lonely stretch of Old Route 15. It was a road we’d walked together since grade school, me and Orion and his older sister Athena. But Athena had graduated and gone north to college to study pre-med. That left just ’Rion and me, a black boy with a white girl, walking and talking alone together.
I didn’t see much. There was a rush of motion when they jumped us, a rustle of grass and weeds against jean-clad legs, a muffled pounding of feet against the green verge. I had a glimpse of Rob’s face, grotesque with excitement, the bigger forms of Lee and Jeth flashing past, going for ’Rion. Then I was down, my face forced into the dirt and gravel of the road’s shoulder. My nose crushed sideways and soaked the dirt with blood. I could barely turn my head enough to get a breath. My right arm was pinned under my ribs, and Rob was gripping my left arm in both fists, using my own arm to hold my face in the dirt. Pain warred with outrage and disbelief. I was Olwen Ap Howell! My grandfather employed half the town. Bullying trash-talk was one thing—that was just high school. But I had never thought anyone would dare touch me, hurt me.
Rob had his full weight on me, and I couldn’t move. Even through my slacks and his tatty jeans I could feel his erection as he ground his hips against my buttocks. “Did I break your nose, bitch?” he growled in my ear. “Let’s see you look down your nose at a real white man with your pretty face all messed up. You Ap Howells, sitting on your pile of money, thinking you’re so much better than everybody else. Does the old man know you’re screwin’ the nigger help?” He pulled back on my arm and smashed it as hard as he could into the back of my head. I screamed and choked against the dirt.
He kept talking, all the things that Rob thought a “man” like him should be teaching me, but what was worse than the filth and pain and the struggle for breath were the sounds and the stink of what Jess and Lee were doing to ’Rion. He’d fought them, probably hurt them some, but they’d taken him down, and I could hear the thud of fists and feet hitting flesh and bone. Even with my own blood filling my nose and mouth with coppery fire, I could still smell my friend’s blood. Even with Rob panting in my ear I could hear the grunts and gasps of pain ’Rion tried to hold in. Then there was the crack of bone breaking, and finally, ’Rion screamed. Rob and his friends hooted with laughter, as if that high, helpless noise was the best joke they’d ever heard.
Then I was fighting myself, fighting my wolf, all my training telling me to keep my Family’s secret instead of defending myself and ’Rion. I fought, too, because part of me knew, if I loosed my wolf in the midst of all that pain and blood, I would kill all three of them.
A car saved all of us. Rob and the others ran. The driver—a black woman—stopped for ’Rion and me, took us home, where I lived and ’Rion’s mother, Iris, worked.
Grandfather took one look at my face, grabbed my nose and pulled it out straight. He didn’t say a word, and I bit off my shriek. We heal fast—but that doesn’t mean broken bones won’t knit crooked if they aren’t set straight in time. I had cuts and bruises all over my face and body, but I was what I was, and I as I washed blood and grit from my wounds they were already beginning to heal.
’Rion was the one who had suffered. He was cut and bruised all over, with two black eyes and a split and swollen lip. They’d broken his left arm and cracked some ribs. He gave me one look that told me to keep silent, and refused to say a word about who had hurt him until the doctors at the clinic were done with him and we were all home again.
“We’re not pressing charges,” he told his mother and my grandfather calmly. They argued, but he held firm. “If we take this to court it will only make things worse. The parents won’t think their kids did anything wrong. It’ll be like when you promoted Dad.” That shut even Grandfather up. Grandfather had promoted ’Rion’s dad over several white workers who thought one of them should have had the job. There were mutters of favoritism, among other things, and both our houses had been vandalized. A few months later, at the start of deer hunting season, ’Rion’s dad had been found dead in the woods, an “apparent hunting accident.”
“It’s only a few months until I graduate,” ’Rion said. “I’ll hang back when we’re walking home, so it won’t look like Olwen and I are together. I already talked to ’Thena and she says I can move in with her as soon as I’m done with school.” He looked down, unable to meet his mother’s eyes, or mine. But his voice was hard and bitter, and left no doubt of his intent. “Let the bastards think they’ve won. Who cares? I’ll be out of here, out of this God-forgotten town for good. Them? They’re too stupid and too ignorant to even know they’re trapped.”
His words hit like a blow to the stomach. I wrapped my arms around myself turned away, trying to hide my shaking and the tears that started in my eyes. I don’t know why, but I had always though ’Rion would stay, even after ’Thena left. Or maybe he—maybe we—would go away to school, but we’d come back. We’d grown up like brother and sister, but we weren’t brother and sister. I’d thought maybe our friendship might grow into something more when we got older. I thought that, no matter what, ’Rion would be one person who would stay here and help me make this town better.
It came home to me that I was trapped, too, not because I was stupid or ignorant or poor, but because I was an Ap Howell.
I could never leave. I could travel, even go away for school, at least as long as Grandfather was still alive. But my ancestors had blood-oathed our family to this town, to this land. It was, it always would be, the center of the compass of my life. I didn’t blame my many-greats grandparents for what they’d done. I’d read their accounts, knew that most of a Welsh village had followed them here to Virginia. They’d wound up on an uninhabited stretch of the James River, their resources exhausted.
My grandparents went into the forest alone. They begged the spirits to guide them to a place where their folk might take a living from the land. In return, they made an offering of their own blood and the blood of their descendants, pledging that we would watch over the land and the folk they brought to it.
They called it Landfair. It had everything the spirits promised—timber, fertile topsoil, and underground waters that called the dowser’s rods and filled wells with deep, cold water. There were beds of a fine clay for pottery, and, at last, on the piece of ground my grandparents had claimed for themselves, the best slate in the county. It had been nearly two hundred years, and the land still gave a living. And we gave it us.
Me.
It must have seemed well worth it, when the place was new, before inbreeding and the ills of time and place ate away at it. It’s still a pretty place. But it’s become a place where too many people cling to ignorance as though it’s something to be proud of, a place those graced with intelligence and ambition only want to leave—as Athena had, as ’Rion would.
While people like Rob stayed, to poison what was left.
Rage rose in me like a cleansing wind. I lifted my wolf’s head, from the forest floor, my ears flattened to damp the noise of their boasting and laughing. I turned my mind to my purpose.
I wanted to scare them, hurt them, but not at risk to myself. I knew my quarry would not have come to the forest unarmed. There were few local households that did not possess at least one gun. Most boys owned a shotgun or a rifle of their own before they hit puberty, and a gun was a practical precaution against the feral dog packs that roamed the area. Rob was the leader of this pack of thugs. He would have brought a gun as symbol of his status. The other two would have switchblades or hunting knives. I was fast—here, in this forest, supernaturally fast—so the blades did not worry me too much. But the gun had to go. It may be that there are Shifters out there who can only be harmed by silver. I’m not one of them.
I crouched in the shadows and let eyes and nose search, until I was certain there was only one single shotgun, a melange of oil and rust, steel and gunpowder, lying carelessly among the empty beer bottles. It looked old and smelled badly kept, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work.
My mother had never found her wolf, but she had come to us a witch. I had inherited her sensitivities with the stronger gifts of the wolf. The Deadfall whispered to me, heavy with the potential for magic. The ground had been fed with lightning, semen, and blood, and those powers had knotted themselves into the deep, secret history of the ancient roots, the centuries of summer leaves that had fallen and been turned to loam. I called on my blood-bond with the land and took a little of that potency into myself, the raw power stoking the magic that ran ancient and deep in my blood.