Chapter 10: it's quiet here except for this song

She drifts through the next few days like traveling through a dream.

It's not really so weird that she would, she figures. The entire thing is like that now, all the rules changing on her and the few things she still took for granted no longer reliable, and though the bulk of it has been cloaked in night and shadow, it's all seeping into the day. It's there when she's awake, when she's walking around her neighborhood, going to work, going shopping, to the laundromat, at home doing absolutely nothing at all. It's nothing dramatic, nothing that really startles or scares her; it's more a sense that everything is blurring around the edges, that the periphery of her vision is full of motion that vanishes when she turns her head to see it better. Figures very briefly in the reflections of storefront windows and glass doors that don't look exactly like her. Once or twice she catches a glimpse of something hurtling through the sky that isn't a bird or a plane and sure as hell isn't a man in underwear and a cape.

The light is different; it seems dimmer and the shadows all look longer than they did, regardless of the time of day. The shadows themselves are deeper, and more than once she could swear she catches something moving in them, crouched, slipping away again before she can get close. People are different; she'll be walking down the street and barely glance at someone as she passes them, but seconds later she'll be sure that there was something off about them - eyes or fine details of the face or just the way they were holding themselves - but when she turns she won't be able to see anything.

Sometimes no one will be there at all.

Even if the light is dimmer, colors seem brighter and more intense. They bleed off the edges of things and into the air, and now and then they shimmer when touched by direct sunlight. Bluer blues, greener greens, red like bloody assaults on the eyes. Smells, sharper and richer, forcing themselves into her nostrils. On Monday night a middle-aged biker comes in to pick up a box of condoms - Durex XXL, who the fuck is he kidding - scratching at his bald spot and leering at her, and his reek of old french fries and sour sweat and stale piss is so strong that after he leaves she doubles over behind the register and retches.

On Tuesday she goes to pick up some groceries and she has to stop in the cereal aisle and close her eyes until her head stops throbbing.

The moon is brighter. Wednesday night going home, the waxing gibbous moon is impossibly, insanely bright. She can hardly look directly at it. It obscures the streetlights and casts shadows as hard as August afternoon sun, soaks everything in light the color of freshly scrubbed bone.

Is this what it's like for him? All the time?

She wasn't made to be able to see all of this. Or so she's been given to understand. But she is. It's only occasionally very noticeable, but it's getting worse every minute.

Something happened that night in the alley, with him. Something changed. She stepped through a doorway - some much more subtle version of Eostre's meadow - and she has no idea how to find her way back. She has no idea if she wants to. No idea if it would be possible even if she did.

Could the veil ever cover her eyes again?

She lies in bed in the deepest parts of the night and she thinks about him. He has no phone, but she could get on that damn bus - or catch a late-night cab if the bus is no longer running - and go to him. What she would do, she has no idea. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe all she wants to do is sit with him, sit in his den and smoke with him in silence, wander the broken wastelands with him walking as a wolf at her side.

Get on the back of his bike and hold onto him, let him roar her through the night.

Here's the truth, and by Wednesday night she can no longer ignore it: When she's with him, even in her mind, she doesn't feel dead anymore.

She rolls over and slides her hand between her legs, teases herself, but it's not like it was. It's not this desperate, almost violent thing. He's there in the dark, and sometimes there are teeth and claws, and shoulders rippling with muscle and silky with fur, but just as often he's a man, hard body pressing her down and rough hands on her - sometimes not so rough. Gliding over the curve of her spine, over the swell of her ass, nudging her fingers aside and replacing them with his own. Thick and calloused and pushing into her and giving her almost exactly what she wants; she bites the pillow as she comes in a slow, hot wave - and even like this, she feels his teeth closing on the back of her neck.

She wonders if this was always in her - or if this, too, is what happens when you walk through whatever door she stumbled into. Whether - perhaps - if it hadn't been him, this need in her would simply have latched onto someone else.

But it is him. Him. Hers.

And despite her best efforts, she still has no idea what to do about that.

She told him to be outside at noon and he's outside exactly at noon, bike idling, sunglasses and a leather jacket and a cigarette smoked two-thirds down to the filter flicked onto the pavement as she comes out the door. Speaking of cliches, he basically looks like one, and she almost smiles.

She also hasn't seen him in the daylight before. In her apartment the morning after the alley, sure, but that had still been largely in shadow, still inside, and she hadn't watched him leave. Now he's there on the bike in full sun, and maybe it's just that the context is still so new to her but he doesn't look as if he really belongs there. Doesn't look entirely at ease.

If she had to guess she would say he probably sleeps through much of the day. But with him, now, she wouldn't want to assume anything.

The crossbow is strapped to the back of the bike.

"Hi." She actually is smiling just a touch as she comes across the sidewalk to him. She, as far as she's aware, does not resemble any kind of cliche, paperback cover or otherwise; she might have a knife tucked under her own jacket - new, sans bloodstains, not leather at all - and she might be wearing boots and tight jeans, but the boots are her same old ones all worn and faded and the jeans are in much the same condition, holes just about to wear through the ass and knees. It wouldn't be hard to replace them and she has money and there's what she could get downstairs, but.

It's been so hard to care about anything like that.

He gives her a tiny up-nod, and even behind the nearly opaque lenses she can tell he's looking her over - no particular heat in it as far as she can tell. He hasn't looked at her like that ever since she met him, not that she can recall, and now it occurs to her to wonder if he's capable of seeing her that way at all. If he would ever be interested in anything like that with her, all circumstances being different and ideally arranged for such.

She might just be this little girl with a scarred face and an inclination to be mildly annoying at times. Wouldn't be surprising, in fact. She's not sure why she didn't figure that before, unwise assumptions or no. He's got years upon years on her and what she is to him...

Well. Doesn't matter anyway.

"Ready?"

He tilts his head at her, and from the set of his mouth she detects both very slight amusement and very slight irritation. "Yeah, you fuckin' tell me. You're the one wanted to do this."

"Alright." She sighs; she's not bothered by it. If he does find her irritating, there's not a whole lot she can do about it. Not a whole lot she cares to do. How he feels does matter to her - more than she might have expected with someone she met barely a week ago - but he's also a fucking adult, of whatever species, and he can deal.

Deal with one little girl with a scarred face and an inclination to be mildly annoying.

Anyway, right now she has a fuck of a lot on her mind.

She moves to the bike and swings a leg over, settling herself behind him, pressing forward - not more than she has to as a matter of course, but of course that doesn't make a whole lot of difference, and she has to battle back a fine shiver as it tries to creep down her spinal cord. His leather is so warm - sun and body heat both, she guesses, and as he pulls away from the curb she gives in to impulse and lays her cheek against it, the thud of his heart in one ear louder than the engine's growl.

If he feels her do it, he gives no sign.

The bike leaps forward and the wind grabs her hair and plays with it like it loves to do, and her block blurs away and the other blocks after it as he arcs them down to I85 heading southwest.

It's been a long time since she touched this road, this direction. She sees the sign, the interstate and the exits and the points beyond, feels the swerve as he pulls into the merge lane, and her stomach swerves with it. Blocks of green overhead blur like the block she lives on and she leans her head against his back again and closes her eyes.

She told herself that she appreciated the time between the weekend and today, temporal space in which to prepare herself for this - or try to - but the truth is that she thought about it as little as possible. It wasn't something she consciously intended or made an effort to avoid. She's become very good at not going into certain parts of her fucked up mind - somewhat ironic then that now she can't seem to stay out of the part of it which her hot and pounding fantasy version of him has come to occupy - and she does it now by default. She was going to the farm; all right, good, and in the meantime there were so many other things clamoring for her attention, such as restocking the fridges and the racks of jerky and doing laundry and playing level upon level of Candy Crush, and watching the face of the world slowly peel back to reveal something much stranger beneath.

She's going to the farm and she's not ready, and she has no idea how she was supposed to be.

So it probably didn't matter how much she thought about it anyway.

After, when Aunt Martha and Uncle Jake came down to take care of things while she was in the hospital - and then getting out of the hospital and then back in the hospital, a couple of times - they rented a house in town so Beth could finish out the school year. Consistency, they said and the doctors agreed, even though if anyone had thought to ask what Beth wanted, getting the fuck out would have been her preferred option, but regardless, what it means is that when she ran, when she hopped the Greyhound heading northeast, she was running from roughly the place Daryl is now taking her back to.

Middle of the night, backpack and the clothes on her back, about a thousand dollars she managed to save and a couple hundred more she stole from Uncle Jake's top dresser drawer because why the fuck not - and Uncle Jake had a magazine in there stuffed under his folded briefs featuring full page spreads of girls who didn't look a whole lot older than Beth doing a variety of things with a variety of objects and people, so that wasn't creepy at all - clutching all of herself with invisible hands in the sickly lights of the bus station, keeping as much distance as possible between herself and a kid who looked to be in his mid-twenties and who was so drunk he could barely stand up. Clutching all of herself and huddling in the worn and deeply uncomfortable seat, rough fabric like sandpaper against her bare legs because for some unknowable reason she wore shorts that night, leaning her head against the window and trying to sleep and failing and watching the lights of I85 blurring past. Red brake lights and yellow-orange rest stop lights and stretches of hard white high-powered streetlights, the lights of tolling stations, the lights of towns and houses and lives that hadn't ended and somehow still held together.

She traveled this road coming to Atlanta, running because running was the only thing that made sense anymore, because if she was crazy she might as well go ahead and do something crazy, and because she had to get the fuck out even if night after night she goes back in her dreams.

She couldn't stay there.

I don't want to be gutted.

If she had stayed, one way or another she would have been.

She ran in the night. Now Daryl is carrying her back there in the middle of the day - a bright, crisp, mid-autumnal day - and the road should look completely different but as the bike roars over it, it's like the sun goes out bit by bit and only those night-road lights remain.

And him. He's with her. His light. His glowing eyes, those mirrors, catching the light and sending it back. Eyes in the in the dark, and not to fuck her.

Just there.

Long as I'm breathin', I'll be by your side.

She's sleeping, somehow she knows that. She's sleeping - or at least drowsing heavily - but maintaining enough muscle tension to hold onto him, lulled by the bass drum of his heart.

And even if she couldn't hold on, he wouldn't let her fall.

He's taking her back. There's no way she can be ready. But she's glad she's not going alone.

She's glad he's with her.

From where she lives now to where she lived then is about two hours. As far as she can tell she's semi-conscious for a little over one of them; there's a stretch in between where everything fades out into that dream-night she can't ever seem to truly escape. But she's awake before he takes the exit, and she's more and more awake as he turns onto a long two-lane country road lined by trees burning the last of their autumn fire, now and then glimpses of fields beyond.

She knows this. All of this. This road, these trees, those fields. That fire.

God, she doesn't want to think about fire.

She's clutching herself again. All her broken pieces threatening to fly apart in the face of rising g-force. She's clutching herself so she clutches him, holds him tight, and she thinks she might feel him tense up just for a half second.

Maybe. Could be her imagination. Because then he's back to normal. For whatever given value of normal applies where he's concerned.

It's not much further. The trees are falling away, throwing long shadows over fields going brown and gold. And now she sees that the absence of the veil doesn't just apply to Atlanta. It's out here too. It's in all the lines, the shapes, the colors - the way the trees reach for the sky with branches like extended fingers, the way they're just a little too tall and a little too thin. The shadows beneath them, moving shapes she can almost make out. The fiery leaves so fiery they looks as if they should be sending plumes of smoke into the air.

The road. It's paved all smooth black-gray, but somehow it seems to almost be shining. Glowing.

A shadow passing overhead; she jerks her gaze upward just in time to see it - another one of those flying things that aren't birds and aren't planes, and this is the best look at it she's yet had. It's lower than usual, and the afternoon sun strikes its flank and makes it shine brighter than the road. Makes it gleam.

It has wings. It has wings and a long neck, a long snake of a tail, and she knows what it looks like. She knows that. Every kid raised on fairy tales does.

It can't be, though.

Honey, you're on the back of a werewolf's motorcycle. I think a lot of things can be now.

Thanks for that, Mama.

But it's so hard to keep her attention on any one thing. Everything keeps grabbing her, tugging her away from itself. She squeezes her eyes shut and feels the wind, the chill rising in it in spite of the sun, and soaks it in. Cold to bank down the coals.

It was right around this time. It was late October when it happened. Not quite Halloween. After the fact she had allowed herself to notice the irony - if irony is even what it was. Halloween and monsters and coming to the door for treats.

She opens her eyes and there are the familiar rolling hills, there's the distant spindly tower of the windmill, the fences, the long drive.

The place where the house used to be.

She nudges his shoulder and points. A minute or so later he's turning up that drive, wheels raising little clouds of dust, and her heart is ramming itself into her throat like a fist trying to punch its way out of her. Her hands have nearly gone numb, fingers tingling. Her knees feel like bags of water.

He pulls to a halt a few yards from where the porch steps were, not far from the collection of large and ancient trees under whose shade she played, sat and strummed her guitar, dozed through early summer afternoons when Daddy spared her from chores during the hottest parts of the day.

Farmhand came through for one fall harvest, used to eat lunch there. At sixteen - almost seventeen - she developed a gentle schoolgirl crush on him, even though he had at least fifteen years on her. He was rough but not unkind. Tolerated her and maybe even liked her, but never - as far as she could tell - saw her as more than a kid.

And then he was gone. And then a year later everything was gone.

Paddock a ways away to the right, where she gave the horses exercise. Where she learned to ride.

A further ways to the left but clearly visible down another dirt drive, the old barn.

Or where it was.

Ahead of her are the foundations of the house, the rest of the blackened carcass long since cleared away, but she barely notices. She swings herself off the bike as if in a dream, stumbles as she starts to walk toward the open patch of ground where the barn used to be. There's nothing left of it except its outline. The pig pen to the side. The chicken coup - not directly connected to the barn but gone as well. Nothing. Not even boards. It didn't burn that night so since then it's been leveled, cleared away. An old outbuilding in poor repair, demolished and removed from the land.

Her land.

Aunt Martha and her creepy fucking husband took it in trust for her. Then she ran.

She has a horrible feeling about what they might be intending to do with it.

She's still stumbling along, boots scuffing and hands hanging limp at her sides. That barn. The deep, pungent and not unpleasant smell of animal dung. Sweet hay. Nicker of horses in the stable. Lowing of their three cows. Light streaming through the slats, motes dancing in its beams. Everything in there had always been soft and warm and safe. As a child, playing in the hayloft, hide-and-seek with a big brother who she believed was indulgent and later came to understand was doting. Darting in and out of stalls. Laughter ringing off the rafters.

She loved that barn and they've taken it away from her.

Somehow it's too much. Somehow it's that. It's not the house. It's not the blackened foundations and the glaring fact of its absence. It's not the grassy yard out nearer the road where she was found or the wider part of the front drive where all the emergency vehicles parked. It's not any of those things. It's this, some kind of final insult on the part of people she never believed really cared about her all that much, taking from her one of the few things she had left even if she hadn't made any plans to ever return to it, and she goes down on her knees in the dirt and hugs herself, stares at that hole in the world until it blurs away and the breeze cools the tears burning tracks down her cheeks.

It's not just the barn. It's not just the absent house or the trees. It's everything. That veil had lifted; another one is descending now and the world feels so distant, so unreal. So unimportant. Her life died; someone is busy dismantling its corpse.

It was a mistake to come back here.

The grumble of the bike has stopped; maybe it stopped a while ago. The world is silent except for the whisper of the wind in the grass and the harsh calls of crows in the trees. Even her weeping is soundless. But she feels him behind her, all at once - like she's felt him in the dark, in her mind. Big, powerful, looming. He's a man, though. He's just a man in a cliche of a leather jacket and sunglasses, brown-black hair falling around his face. Standing wordlessly over her and staring at her with those narrow wolf eyes.

She had been glad he was with her. Now she wishes he would get the fuck away from her.

He doesn't. He just stands there. And she's beginning to emerge the smallest bit, enough to want to turn and tell him to get the fuck away from her, and she's about to do that - maybe snarl it at him - when she hears the now-familiar rolling series of cracks as his body remakes itself. There on her knees, listening to it happen, she feels no desire whatsoever. None of that frighteningly intense lust. She's just... She's frightened. Not much but it's there, and she doesn't know why.

Who he really is.

She's tensing, tensing, and when she feels an enormous paw-like hand close over her shoulder, looks down and sees the points of those viciously lethal claws lying delicately against her, she shudders violently, can't help it, and when his other hand closes over her other shoulder and he tugs her backward she moans. It's still not desire - all she wants to do is tear herself away from him and run, but then she's enfolded by him, his warmth and his unbelievable softness, his massive arms curling around her and pulling her against his broad chest.

She's aware that there's tension in him too, and there's an awkwardness in it, as if he's touching her but he really doesn't want to be because he's not sure how and is afraid he'll get it wrong, holding her but not tightly as if he's afraid he might break her. But suddenly she doesn't care, because he's there, so much more real than any of her most visceral fantasies of him, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with wanting to fuck him as she turns in his arms and curls into his lap, makes herself even smaller than she already feels, buries her face and her hands in his thick fur and sobs.

And he holds her a little tighter.

He's saying something, she realizes after a few minutes of this. Very softly, almost inaudible. Not English. She doesn't understand. She didn't know he could speak like this at all.

Efensorge. Or it sounds like that. Something like that. Efensorge. Bemurnan.

She doesn't need to know what it means. She lets go, releases, lets herself soak his fur with her tears and lets him hold her in his strange, uncomfortable way. And it fucking sucks and he's not going to make it better because he can't, he can't undo any of what happened - he might have powers of some kind and might know magic but he doesn't know any magic that can fix what's so horribly broken here.

In her.

Maybe it was a mistake, coming back. She has no idea what she expected but there can't be anything here for her except more death.

But she's glad he's with her.