Page 85 of Juniper Unraveling

I see him again, reaching up for me.

Nenny.

Voices reach my ears, and I turn toward the Juniper tree, listening to them. The voices of children.

I see the faces of those voices. The blond little boy, and a little girl with equally blond hair. And somehow, I know their names.

Abel and Sarai.

I stumble toward them, listening carefully. There’s laughter. My laughter. Their laughter. Maddening laughter that forces me to cover my ears.

When I reach the tree, a spatter of red coats the bark, which I assume is someone’s blood, and as I trace carvings inside the trunk, the voices grow louder, bouncing off of one another inside my head.

The packs are gone, leaving the tree empty and hollow inside. Bracing a foot within the root, I climb inside, tucking my knees into my chest. Tipping my head back, I close my eyes and listen. Listen for the voices.

Instead, a different vision strikes me.

Growls.

Hands reaching for me.

Blood.

My hands flail out, and I grip tight to the thick roots at either side of me, bracing myself as in my visions, when the Ragers faces crowd around me.

My eyelids flip open, and all I can see is darkness. Running through the darkness.

I touch my fingers to my lips and climb out of the tree trunk, lifting my gaze to the berries above me. A tart flavor dances over my tongue.

“I found you here. In a pool of blood.” Papa’s voice reaches me through the confusing swirl of memories. “You’d hemorrhaged.”

“The … baby?”

“The Juniper berries induced you, and you lost the baby. You were weak. Dehydrated. And you’d lost way too much blood. I brought you back to the other side of the wall.”

“You told me to come here. To this tree.”

“It’s where my wife and child hid from the Ragers. It kept them safe until I could find them. My wife had already been bitten, though, and she’d passed the illness onto Katie.”

“Not my mother. My mother … she wasn’t killed by … she was murdered.” I stare off at the ruined twists of the tree, the memories of my past unraveling like a flitting spool of thread. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie?”

“You suffered from repressed memories. Dissociative amnesia is a more technical term for it. You didn’t know who you were, where you’d come from, or what happened to you. It happens post-trauma.” He rubs his fingers together at his sides, as though nervous, but unlike the times he sought to escape my questions, he continues. “I’ve battled two years of guilt, trying to decide whether, or not, to tell you. I just wanted you to experience life without the pain, if only for a little while.”

The sting of tears hits the rims of my eyes again, and I tip my face toward the canopy of leaves above me.

God, how many times can the heart suffer? How many blows can it endure before it finally gives out?

“You changed my name?”

“To protect your identity. To give you a new start. You once told me you liked the name Wren for a girl. It was—”

“My mother’s name,” I interrupt, as the memory filters in. “I was going to name the baby … you saved my life. I remember. That’s why you wouldn’t let me go to the North side. Why you wouldn’t let me leave the house for a while. You didn’t want me to run into Doctor Ericsson. Or Ivan.”

He stuffs his hands into his pockets and nods. “A precaution, mostly. They’re rarely seen inside of the wall, as they spend so much time at Calico, but I had nowhere else to take you. Anywhere I’d have hidden you outside of the walls would’ve put your life at just as much risk. So I hid you away there. Eventually your hair grew out. The bruises faded.” A quick gesture toward his face emphasizes his words. “You looked like a different person.”

“They threw me to the Ragers, but they didn’t attack. Why?”

“For the same reason they didn’t attack Six that day. I’d injected you with alpha pheromones. Its effects are temporary, unfortunately. The chemical structure just isn’t compatible with those who aren’t born with the alpha gene.”