Part Five
Thursy and Yared's parents had been killed six years before in the same disastrous flash flood that had taken Scotch's sister. A storm had come tumbling in the mountains and joined with another in the middle of winter, a time when heavy rains are hardly expected. Food was running short and - rather than eat processed meat like humans, which always tasted to Scotch like the plastic it had been wrapped in - Galdwyn had declared a three-day village hunt. Off they had all gone into the forest, and up the storms had risen, and washed away were Mia and Alus and Brandy.
The houses in the village were clustered closely together, and there wasn't more than fifteen feet of space between the window to Scotch's bedroom and the window to Thursy's. She and Yared had been allowed to live in their house alone, with one of Scotch's three parents always close at hand should anything go wrong.
He had always felt safe with so many people around him. A little smothered, but safe. Tonight, for the first time, he had to hide.
"Kitten?" Gedmark called softly from the living room, as he opened the front door.
"Yeah, it's me."
He slipped out of his shoes and padded into the living room, where his mothers were sitting on the couch. Gedmark was reading a massive printed text and Kvyn was dozing.
"Where's Dad?" he asked, lowering his voice to keep from waking his mother up.
"At Law and Narsa's. Did you all get home safely?"
"I guess. I just dropped Thursy off next door."
Gedmark's blue eyes ran over him thoughtfully. Scotch didn't really know which of the women he called Mom had borne him - they refused to say - but he had a good idea that it had been Gedmark. His resemblance to her was striking, and their temperaments were similar. Sometimes he wished they would have told him the truth though, and had faith in him that he wouldn't be so shallow as to love Kvyn any less.
"You okay, baby?" Gedmark asked.
Thursy could tell, his mother could tell--was he really that transparent, or had this afternoon been a life-altering event?
His mind flashed back to Coalise, and the way he had kissed her without even thinking about it. He had never kissed anyone but Thursy, except for Kiria once, and that had been on a dare and she had hit him afterward, so he didn't think it counted, but he had reached for Coalise as if it had been their hundreth kiss and not their first.
Definitely a life-altering event.
"I'm fine," he told his mother and looked for a believable explanation for the preoccupation he couldn't seem to hide. "I got caught in a minor landslide and bumped my head-"
"A landslide!" Kvyn said, suddenly wide awake. She probably had been all along. She bolted off the couch and began patting him down the way Thursy had, and it occurred to Scotch for the first time that human parents might have considered this molestation. To him, it was just home life.
"Was anyone else caught?" Gedmark asked.
"No, it was a really tiny landslide," Scotch told her. Kvyn's quick hand darted down his arms, checking for muscles still rubbery with healing. "Nothing broke."
"You're sure?" Kvyn was light-hearted, but she could be over-protective of Scotch if he so much as dropped a plate on his foot. She had already lost one child - who had been, Scotch was sure, biologically her own - and wasn't prepared to lose the other.
"I'm sure. But it wiped me out and I'm going to go lay day."
"Good, good." She smiled then. "I'll bring in some bacon in a couple of minutes and you'll feel better."
"I feel better now, you don't need to-"
But her mind wouldn't be changed. Scotch went into his room and sprawled out on the round futon on the floor, watching the light get progressively dimmer and knowing that Coalise was still out in the mountains, unable to see anything with her pathetic little human eyes. She would probably freeze to death before morning, he realized, why hadn't he thought of it before? Every minute he wasted here, she was getting colder and more afraid.
He wouldn't have understood fear of being in the woods at night alone before, but he did now. Coalise was a little bird, and almost everything in the forest eats birds.
Kvyn came in with a half pound of deep-friend bacon and wouldn't leave until he'd eaten all of it. He hadn't realized how hungry he was, and the meat unexpectedly strengthened him. Kvyn talked while he ate, about plans for expanding the village once the millennium was past, and what sort of garden she wanted to grow.
She thought - as everyone thought - that there would be freedom after the millennium. The pack would no longer have to hide in a mountain crevice, they could spread out, explore, visit long-lost cousins in California and Miami. Scotch had thought so, too, until he met Coalise and realized what the human world entailed.
He had told Thursy to vote that the pack side with Circle Daybreak. There were only five votes: hers, Yared's, Galdwyn's, Tish's, and one belonging to an old biddy named Simone, and he knew that whichever way Thursy went, Yared would followed. Similarly, Tish would vote the way her father did, and Galdwyn was all for asking the lamia for protection. Simone was a wild card.
But even if they sided with Circle Daybreak, and Circle Daybreak won whatever Night Wars might come, the world would not become an amusement park for Night People. Humanity had a long history of fear and genocide. Coalise's memories pointed to the Halocause and the Trail of Tears, but Scotch saw what would happen if humans tried to hurt the Night People.
They would get killed. The Night People were a minority with weapons.
All of this ran through Scotch's head as he listened to his mother ramble obliviously. Finally she saw his drooping eyelids and mistook his sadness for exhaustion, and told him to get some sleep. She left him curled up on his cushion with his head cradled on his arms.
An hour had passed since he had left Coalise in the mountains. He swore he would wait another five minutes and then-
"Scotch? Are you still awake?"
His father stuck his head inside the room.
Fifteen minutes later, Scotch swore he would wait five more minutes and then go out the window.
He cheated, and at three minutes and twenty-six seconds, he cranked the window open and vaulted outside.
He could see easily into Thursy's bedroom. The proximity of their windows had led to a number of late-night rendezvous, and he was used to looking through the glass and seeing her at her desk, or asleep on the floor, or sitting in her armchair watching television.
Tonight the TV was on, and the lights were on, but the room was empty. A glass of milk had been spilled on the desk around a partially eaten T-bone steak.
Scotch's mind wondered for a moment, but he didn't have time to worry. She had probably just gone into the kitchen for a dishtowel.
Sneaking out of the village was easy. All ten houses were arranged in a circle, with a central courtyard in the middle, and all he had to do was walk behind Thursy's house and then circle around. Once he was a hundred yards into the forest, he felt safe taking a deep breath and sprinting into the mountains.
The cave was six miles away. Scotch didn't make it three.
Leaping over a dry creek bed, he heard a wailing sound. He stopped, titling his head, and listened. That wasn't…it couldn't be…
"Yared?" he called. He turned toward the sound and found himself off the path, blazing through dry brush and bushes. "Yared, is that you?"
He had never heard Yared wail before. He'd seen him curse and slam doors and one time he'd smacked Thursy when she tried to pull out a branch that had impaled his right knee. But he was more the type to make a joke when he was in pain than to wail.
Despite that, the closer Scotch got to the sound, the more certain he became that the injured party was Yared, so it was with some confusion but not total surprise that he found Yared lying on the ground bleeding at the bottom of a ravine.
How he had managed to walk right over the drop, Scotch didn't know, but he had landed on his back on a large boulder, crushing his rib cage, and then rolled off. A number of bones had torn through the skin of his chest and were causing his lungs to shudder as he moaned.
Scotch had to follow the ravine west thirty feet before he was able to climb down. A minute later, he was carefully tearing Yared's shirt open. The sight unsettled him, but he wasn't in danger of vomiting, as he knew Coalise would have been.
"What happened?" he asked.
Yared didn't even seem to hear him. The moonlight refracted haphazardly in his eyes, each beam shattered and he looked at Scotch but only in passing.
"Yared?" Scotch asked, becoming genuinely afraid. He had never seen anything like this before.
He touched his palm to Yared's forehead and gently pushed the brown and maroon strands out of his eyes. His fingers ran over Yared's scull, making sure there were no head injuries. Yared fell silent but continued to breathe rapidly and shudder.
"I'm going to get you home," Scotch told him. He tore Yared's shirt up and used the pieces to bind his friend's busted chest as best he could, and then helped him to his feet. Yared stumbled as if half asleep. There was no way he could make it out of the ravine; they had to follow it down fifty yards before it became shallow enough that Scotch could carry him to the surface.
Halfway back to the village, he remembered why he had come out here. He stopped, Yared dropping against him, and turned back the way he had come.
Full night was upon Mount Aurora. Somewhere out there, Coalise was hiding in the cave, cold, hungry, and unprotected.
"As soon as I get him home, I'll be back," Scotch murmured, hoping that she might hear him. "Even if I have to bring my parents with me."
Around that time, back at the village, Thursy was being arrested for murder.