Wildblood

Chapter 22

22

Kai stared at the piece of card proffered by the soldier at the end of the train car. Its edges were threadbare, ragged where the paper was torn. His last dream had ended here, the stench of grime, shit, and blood enveloping him in a nauseating plume. Meat hooks. Bodies. Walls stained with viscera.

But Miya was gone.

The wagon juddered as metal shrieked against metal, but the soldier was a dark nucleus, those eyes made of fire never leaving Kai’s. They beckoned him to listen. The soldier’s head swayed with the train’s movements, but his arm remained outstretched. He clinched the ratty card between his fingers like he’d gathered his remaining strength solely for this one task. Kai took in the man’s appearance a second time—cracked lips, a stubbled jaw, angles carved from hunger, and unkempt black hair that grazed his shoulders. They were alike, Kai and the soldier, though the latter was shorter, slighter, no older than twenty.

Kai’s gaze dipped to what the soldier held. The darkness of the train washed out color the way bleach faded blood, but there was no mistaking the pale lilac, the tattered corners, and the creases Kai had made by his own hand, folding and re- folding his most cherished keepsake. The only piece of Alice he had left.

Kai plucked the card from the soldier’s fingers, ice coating his veins. “What the fuck is this?”

The soldier stared back, mute. Kai only ever pulled the card from his wallet to remind himself of what belonging felt like—to yearn for its phantom touch. He could do nothing else. Governed by habit, he pressed open the scrap of card, his eyes tracing every unsteady line of Alice’s final gift to him.

Happy Birthday, Kai Donovan.

The day he joined Alice’s family and took her last name.

“How did you get this?” He sounded so meek, so unsure of himself. Gone was the man who threatened with a smile and the confidence of a god made flesh.

Still, his question garnered no response, the soldier tranquil in his resignation. This was a dream, after all. The force of Kai’s body was useless here.

For the first time since their meeting, the soldier’s mouth bent. A specter of recognition curved his flaking lips, and his chin tipped in a gesture that was both a greeting and a farewell.

The train tore from the tracks, blackness stretched above and below, and Kai’s stomach leapt into his throat as he fell. He collided with earth that should’ve been hard, but soft grass and warm fur broke his sudden plummet. When he righted himself, his tail shot out for balance, and he found himself on four paws. He was small, merely a cub, his limbs stout and uncoordinated. With the eagerness of youth, he wove through the meadow toward the scent of his kin.

A woman awaited in a field of cattails. Her features were blurry, though he recognized her long, wild black hair, the shape of her eyes, and the curve of her elbow as she planted a hand on her hip. Behind her, a man peered vigilantly into the woods. Tall, lithe, and broad-shouldered, he was hewn into hard angles and sharp edges. His dark hair wasn’t the cool midnight of the woman’s but warm and rich like roasted coffee. Kai had inherited the woman’s coat—that same disheveled mane as the man on the train car. Her eyes echoed the soldier’s, their fiery gleam passed on to Kai so he could one day snare the Dreamwalker with a single searing stare. But Kai also had the watchful man’s stature, and the same distrust of what came from the shadowy gaps between the trees.

They were his parents, and they were waiting for him.

No matter how hard Kai paddled his legs, they remained at a distance, ever-patiently expecting him to catch up. He willed himself to move faster until his front paws flew upward, and his back legs lengthened. He pumped his arms—the skinny, unblemished arms of a child—and as his body finally carried him, his parents sank into the cattails like ghosts. Kai stumbled to a halt, his meagre height a hindrance as he waded through the emerald stems. Annoyance morphed into frustration, which mounted into urgency as fibrous blades gave way to more and more and more…until finally, the cattails parted to reveal two large wolves, one pitch black and the other a deep brown. Noticing their son, they trotted into the woods, their boy at their heels.

Kai remembered the incongruence then. He could never stay in step with them. There was always a disconnect, a gnawing rift between who he thought he was and who he ought to be. His parents couldn’t decide if he was a firebrand or a trickster, a boy or a god. He was like them yet not, his whole life spent wondering if he’d lost the only people capable of understanding his conflicted nature. It never occurred to him that they weren’t conflicted at all. Perhaps being wolves in the shape of humans never daunted them. Kai was born with something else inside him—a legacy that transcended the trifles of species and blood.

A thunderous crackle pierced the sky. A body fell, heavy and limp, and then another beside it. Tattered breaths, tongues lolled, eyes wide open. A furred ribcage straining to hold a racing heart, lungs heaving to pull life back into them as if the air could act as ambrosia.

But Kai knew it couldn’t.

He could never stay in step with them. There was always a disconnect, a gnawing rift…

Now, it severed life from death. Child from parents. Human from wolf.

A choked sob snagged Kai’s throat as he tripped into the lifeless bodies of the two wolves. Red pooled beneath them, their vitality painting him the color of his ancestor’s eyes. Blood flowed free, nourishing the ground in iron.

Teeth clenched into a snarl, Kai’s attention snapped toward the source of the gunshots—the scent of death an invisible tether leading straight to his parents’ killers. He threw himself down that line, blind with rage. That furious god of destruction Kai carried within him clawed at the confines of his skin, ravenous for vengeance. A grief-stricken roar rent the air as he launched himself at the one holding the rifle. The hunter staggered, and Kai kicked off his slanted thigh to latch on to his torso, one hand gripping a large shoulder while the other raked across the man’s face. Fingers dug into flesh, and Kai sank his teeth into the man’s neck—a frantic bid for the jugular. Wild, panicked, thoughtless, he gnawed and gnawed and gnawed like he could somehow devour that rift right back. Copper flooded his mouth, but it couldn’t quash the pungent taste of sorrow, so he dug deeper, filled himself with more, desperate to drown it out. He didn’t hear the man screaming for help, begging for the assault to end. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have stopped, but he would’ve seen the other man coming.

Something hard and flat connected with the back of Kai’s skull. Dizzied, he loosened his grip but refused to relent. The stock of the second hunter’s rifle slammed down on him once more, and this time, Kai felt the crunch between his ears. His limbs went slack, and he crumpled to the forest floor.

His vision blurred like a greasy film had been placed over his eyes. Gasping for breath, he tried to lift his head, but it was too heavy for a child to carry—heavier than life itself. It thumped back against the ground, sending a wave of nausea and bone-splitting pain through his spine. He tried cleaving through the fog, focused on clenching his fists. They were larger now, knuckles hardened from endless back-alley brawls, palms calloused from years of labor, hands practiced in fighting and fucking. He was a man again, but the man had little left of him.

Jaw set, Kai forced his neck to hold the weight of his skull. He rolled his shoulders forward, battling collapse, and his vision gradually homed in on a small figure.

He saw himself—a boy of barely ten—standing over the two dead wolves.

His parents.

The boy’s face was bruised, his hair matted and sticky with blood as it dribbled down his neck and torso. His gaze was far off even as he stared bleakly at the meat left rotting on the ground. Meat that was once something more. Someone more.

The boy too wanted to be meat. But his heart kept beating, kept forcing life and spirit through his veins. That fucking tumor in his chest—that throbbing, malignant mass, violent in its insistence that he live.

Kai’s ragged breaths thundered in his ears, his pulse a storm as he writhed against his immobility. He was useless, impotent, a heap of hurt and discord hollowed out by loss. Crushed by an invisible force he could never name, he surrendered to the inevitability laid bare before him. The past clung on, a fishhook in his heart, and it would hack him into pieces.

Kai could only watch, helpless, as the boy bathed in blood turned to greet the man he would become.