Banished To Earth Book Two, Souls Adrift (11)

He caught her in his great hairy arms. His claws arched up, careful not to bite into her tender flesh. Her hair fanned out and over him, until the beast was completely hidden beneath her living silver tresses.

 

    Tucker dropped his arm and put his pistol away. He stepped back, but not too far. His eyes were trained on the rippling, ghostly figure. A moment passed, then another, until the ‘ghost’ started to ‘melt’. Shrinking with every passing second, until the seven-foot spectre of subtly animated hair was only five feet seven, Chase's normal height.

 

    Her hair fell away. Pry was now wrapped in bare human arms. Her tiny body scarcely covered his nakedness.  

 

   “You spoke.” She whispered. “You spoke.”

 

  “Means nothing,” Chase replied.

 

   “No, Chase, it means everything.”

 

      Swaying side to side, looking for somewhere else to be, Tucker finally said something, something Chase really needed to hear. “I heard you, too, Chase.”

 

    “Mindless beasts can’t speak.” Pry’s voice was melodic with hope and optimism.

 

    “That’s not control.” Chase insisted as he turned away, giving Tucker a show he had no desire to see. He slung his duster off and tossed it to Pry.

 

   “Am I dead? Is Tucker dead?” Pry asked when she handed him the garment. “That is control.”

 

   “I had a gun pointed right at your head,” Tucker added.

 

   Chase wriggled into the duster. “I want to believe you but…”

 

   “But you need us.” Pry injected. “You control yourself for us. What if we were not here?”

 

 

40

 

    “But Stayner…”

 

  “We will deal with Stayner. All of us.”

 

   Tucker, having learned all about the crazed, disfigured Hunter the night before, walked over to them. “You should have killed me.” He said. “You do know that. ‘Cause I woulda’ shore killed you if you had put the slightest scratch on our little one.”

 

  “Our?”

 

 Now Pry was blushing.

 

“Yeah, little sister. Our.”  

 

     Bunching the oversized duster around himself, he turned back toward the shack. “Why in the world would I come back here?” He asked, changing the subject again. But it was a pertinent question.

 

   Pry’s eyes narrowed and turned deep purple as she looked deep into the shack’s shadowed recesses. Nothing.

 

    “Come on, Chase,” said Tucker, “let's find you some clothes. Kinda miss my duster.”

 

   “I can’t go back…”

 

  “Not another word.” Pry cut him off. “It is settled you pose no threat to any of us. You just proved that. I learned to control my hair. You will learn. No. You have learned to control your warrel.”

 

   “Maybe Beth won’t see it that way. This must be her call, Pry. She has Nikki. Nikki comes first.”

 

   Pry relented, “Stay here then, and we will talk to Beth. She knows you are not just Hunter.”

 

   “Knowing and seeing aren’t the same.”

 

   “She did not see you.”

 

    “She must have heard something. She’s not stupid or deaf.”

 

   “Well let’s just see what she has to say,” Said Tucker. “Besides, a werewolf would make a mighty fine secret weapon. I saw you control it. I know you can do it again.”

 

41

 

  Chase shrugged and gave him a weak smile.

 

   Pry took Chase’s hand and pressed it against her cheek. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. A moment later, they shifted back to Trudy’s…

 

 

  

 Try as he might, he could not remember entering the shack. Its front was little more than a pile of rotten, splintered boards. No porch or door, only a pile of crumbling, undisturbed debris told him he had not entered there. And the rear, well, he had to kick his way out of it. He could not have entered there, either.

 

   ‘…must have shifted inside…can’t remember…water, blood,…blue…blue?  Water...no…’ 

 

The blue mist of the alien tree filtered into his mind; it comforted him, for no obvious reason.

 

 … ‘running, to Mama…Mama?..to his Mama…. his home…I…no, he… he wanted to go home…he…?...he…!’ He knew who wanted to go home! But it could not be.

 

  “No!” He said aloud, his eyes pinned to the shack like darts. Something shifted inside the old, dead house. A shadow slid behind the cracks of this broken world. The world he broke. Cracks that were now hiding behind the splintered walls of a crumbling ruin, pretending to be temporal, pretending to belong.

 

   “Davin.” From deep within the hovel’s heart, his ancient true name reverberated. “Davin….” It cooed, taunting him. “Davin Dar Thobay.” His name exploded in his head with such force that it made his skull ring like a bell.

 

    “Getting outta here.” He said, yanking his eyes away from the house, as if they were stuck to it with glue. “Can’t be here.” Spinning around, desperately looking for an escape hatch, his eyes searched the woods until an image of the great oak fixed itself in his mind. He tore through the woods toward it, nearly losing Tucker’s duster as he ran.

 

    Maybe it was the trees’ narcotic hot chocolate aroma, or his warm, sweet remembrance of Trudy’s friendship beneath the old trees’ branches, that drew him there. He did not know. Solace. Escape, or at least the promise of it, drew him there. If nothing else, it was not the shack. Something dark and hateful and far too familiar still dwelled there. He would never return to that awful pit.

 

     Moreover, so far as he knew, the strange oak was no threat to Nikki or Beth.   

 

    But it was more. The tree was more. It resonated deep within. It was a place to be, a place to learn. Not Pry’s Mynar caverns, but not dissimilar either. It was as deep and distant as Alisar, but not dead and gone, as Alisar surely was…