Chapter Twenty-Five: Impending Illness

Thank you to my amazing beta, Blythechild!

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Felicity's death left its mark on them. They were slower, quieter. Oliver was silent unless asking a question. Riley was angry at the world. After a few weeks, they stopped asking for their sister. Emily wasn't sure if she was relieved or horrified.

But they'd lost condition in that haunted time spent grieving by the tiny grave. Emily had lost her milk. Spencer had lost whatever spark had been driving him.

They'd both lost something between them, some tether they'd been relying on unconsciously without ever realizing it was there. Until it was gone. She reached for him in the night and he was closed to her, a small span of space between their bodies. The pups filled that space, but it still yawned. She felt alone.

A rabbit evaded her. Hares heard her coming. Deer barely even twitched at the sight of the slow, tired wolf trudging after them. Her paws were heavy, her breathing rough. Exhaustion ate at all of them. They needed to rest and recuperate, but there wasn't enough game in this area to do so.

And so they moved on, sluggishly.

Emily, Spencer called one day. She heaved herself up from where she was dozing by a shallow river, the pups wrestling listlessly nearby in the fading summer heat, and padded towards his voice. Double checking that the pups were following; she couldn't bear them out of both their sight anymore, even for a moment. Look.

She padded out next to him, and shivered. The rank smell of oil and grease assaulted her, along with a cold metallic scent. Large rocks cut her rough paws and she skittered as she stepped carefully over to where he was standing on the railway tracks with his head lowered, telling the pups to stay by the tree-line.

Where do you think it goes? she asked, peering down the line.

Nowhere good, he said grimly. Home, eventually, I assume. There aren't enough railway lines in Efisga for it to go elsewhere. It was very probably the track that took us to the compound. They both shuddered at that, the pups barking as they picked up on their parents' quiver of shared fear. But it will likely curve through settlements on this side of the border. We shouldn't follow it unless we're certain they aren't working with the compound wolves.

Can we be certain of that? she asked him.

No.

They crossed the tracks and kept moving, far away from the distant rumbling of a train. During the day, she hunted. Rarely successful.

At night, they slept apart and she tried to pretend she couldn't hear him crying.

Daddy sad, Riley whispered one night, her dark eyes catching the moonlight. Emily cuddled her close, wrapping that sleepy little mind in love and safety and all those things she struggled to cling to, knowing the pup could see the gaps in the show she was trying to put on.

It's okay to be sad, she told her pup wearily. We've lost something precious.

And Olly howled gently, a broken little awooo that was small and uncertain and stopped quickly.

But the grief faded as their hunger grew. Snatched meals of berries and roots that Spencer dug up weren't enough. They spent one afternoon in a river as Spencer tried to catch fish with his paws and jaws, one strangely gleefully fun afternoon of the water cooling cracked paws and the pups giggling and even Spencer laughing once.

What do we do? he asked her one day, and she was horrified to realize he was as lost as she was. We can't keep up like this…

We keep going, she said sternly. Come on. Move.

She bullied and coaxed and pushed and prodded and snarled when they slowed, because the world around them was becoming thicker. Darker trees and shrubs began to sprout from the barren rocky mountain they'd been travelling alongside, and she knew once they delved below into that forest, they'd feed. Plentiful game for even a slow wolf. The pups resented her, Spencer was reluctantly thankful she never let him flag, and they were so close to some sort of relief. They could find a den, bed down for a week, eat and refuel and reunite; reunite, because there was a distance between her and Spencer that had never been there before as he withdrew not only from showing them how hungry he was but also from how much he hurt.

This hunt was going well. She caught a hare. Months ago, she would have called it a weak effort and fretted over how they'd divide a single hare among five. Now, horribly, she was grimly relieved as well as sickened that they'd only have to split it between two. With maybe a mouthful for Spencer. She'd find food elsewhere; the pups needed it most.

Padding back to the den, head lowered and panting around the corpse in her mouth, she stepped on a piece of littered bone that bit deep into her paw. With a snarl and a hiss, she dropped the hare and wiggled the bone out, licking at the wound and peering at the bones. Rabbit, not so long dead. She sniffed, smelling death nearby.

Padding after that scent, she found the fox that had killed it. Half in and out of its den in a frozen paroxysm of death, its muzzle was curled back. Dead. Perhaps a week, maybe slightly less. Something had already been feeding on it, leaving the front half stripped and barely anything edible left.

Nearby, a raven clattered at her. Hopping out of the trees it bickered and crowed strangely, and she ignored it. He'd eaten already. Her turn. The rank meat wouldn't sit well in her pups' bellies when there was something fresher for them, and it would give her the strength to find something for Spencer. She dragged the dead fox from the den and ate what little it had to offer her.

As she picked the hare back up, hunger slightly sated and thankful that the raven hadn't taken the chance while she was distracted to eat it, she glanced at the bird. It didn't seem scared of her, just stared blankly back with its neck kinked strangely to the side and wings drooping.

Uneasy, she left that place.

Have you eaten? Spencer asked absently as the pups fed on the hare, his jaws working around the hind limb she'd given him.

Yeah, she replied, and sent him the memory of the fox and the staring raven. Not paying attention, he just nodded and kept eating, eyes distant.

The night passed in silence. She slept under a bush with the pups flopped over her paws and tail. Spencer slept alone along a fallen log, his eyes occasionally opening and ears flicking as he kept a wary eye out. They didn't speak.

The next day, she woke them and she bullied them until they got up and kept moving. Lethargy nipped at their heels and she felt it too, a slow, draining sensation that begged her to lie down, sleep, rest. But the forest called and they trudged down the slope as the sun beat on their backs until finally, finally, they found themselves under a thick boreal canopy.

Animals called around them, singing of the death of this summer. Emily took a breath and for the first time since the storm, felt life steal back into her lungs. Still tired, still sore, but the forest was alive and she saw that life sparking something back into her tired family. Spencer's paws moved quicker, his mind twitching out of the foggy misery of grief. The pups gasped and squeaked and ran about wildly staring up at the trees above, used to blue skies and scattered trees.

We made it, Emily said, sitting down. The fucking tundra is gone, Spence, we made it. We're out of the arctic.

Yes, we did, he said, a thin measure of pride in his voice mostly coated in relief, and he tapped his nose against her muzzle. A soft sign of affection.

A withdrawn sign of affection.

She swallowed back a burst of fear at that measured touch and managed not to gasp, don't leave me, because it felt like that was what he was doing. Not physically… not physically. But something was gone. Leaving. Lost.

Tired, Oliver whispered, swaying on his lanky legs. Sleep, Mama?

Sleep, she agreed, and nudged them on. They'd find somewhere to rest. She'd hunt in the morning.

Thank you, someone sent as she dozed off. It might have been Spencer. Maybe she dreamed it. For not giving up.

She woke to agony. She tried to cry out but her mouth was numb, her tongue thick and useless, and she couldn't open her eyes. Distantly, she could hear measured breathing around them, but she didn't know if it was night, day, hours later or just minutes, just that she was sick. She was sick and retching and vomiting with a choked gasp as her body forced her jaws to open.

Emily?! Spencer cried, lurching up as her spine snapped forward and hurled everything she'd eaten into the dirt of their crowded den. She tried to get up, to stagger from their shelter, but her paws and legs ignored her. What's wrong?

Sick, she moaned, finally upright. Two steps forward and she realized her hind legs weren't following, toppling forward to twin shrieks from the pups as she fell. Spence, help, my legs…

Oh, fuck, he said, right as her abdomen cramped and everything cramped with it and she was vomiting again. Emily, look at me. Look at me. Open your eyes.

Can't, she whined, falling. Laying in her own vomit, the pups clamouring nearby. She wished they'd be quiet, their shrieks drilling into her skull. Won't. Don't…

Suddenly, he was there. In her mind and rushing through, a fiercely frantic force. He studied her slowing mental functions and then he tasted her pain and illness and then he turned and dived into the memories she offered to him, too out of it wonder what the fuck he was doing.

He tugged a memory, shared between them. The fox. The raven. The drooping wings and neck and she watched lifelessly as she fed from the fox without noting the bird's presence.

Oh no, Spencer moaned, and his voice was fear, raw and broken. Botulism. Emily, it's botulism.

Well. She tried to open her eyes again, but her eyelids were swollen, drooping, her chest tightening. Fuck.

Fuck.

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His turn to be the bully. He got her up and they made what she was sure was a ridiculous sight walking slowly along with her head hanging low and her paws and legs dragging. Leaning heavily against him for support, it took them almost an hour just to get up the slope near the den. The pups were a constant chattering presence, skittering around them yapping things like why Mama slow, why Daddy silly?

Do not lie down, he kept telling her breathlessly, taking all her weight as he kept shoving her along. I don't know if I'm strong enough to carry you.

You're not, she teased, because now that she was properly awake, she felt conscious. Sore as fuck and horribly aware that the next stage of this was the paralysis completing its assault on her limbs and heading for her respiratory system. Skinny thing. You'd be a mad wolf for even trying.

She was blind but he kept leading her and they kept going even when the pain and exhaustion felt like it was going to overwhelm her, until they had to test the I don't know if I can carry you because they didn't have a choice.

She didn't know how long it had been. She didn't know where they were anymore. Her hind legs refused to listen to her; she couldn't vomit anymore because there was nothing left but that didn't stop her body from trying.

She knew, distantly, his voice. When you fall, I'll carry you, he told her. She believed him. She believed him, despite the little voice that whispered to her, it'd be smarter for him to leave. He's being stupid. You're killing them by being weak. A wolf would leave you to die.

He's being human, she thought vaguely, and wondered if he could hear her. This is nothing to do with the wolf.

And then she was drifting, and dreaming of being carried across a never-changing landscape of nothing until the very end of the world.