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“More of you, and closer now,” Flora said, then nodded her head. She started to stump over towards us, leaning heavily on her cane, the woman making a small sound, but Flora just waved her off. “Not too old to walk across a damn room, Mother, but I guess that is just your nature.”
Flora paused midway between us, glancing from me to the red-haired woman and then back again, then cackled.
“But if you’re the mother, what’re you, Priestess?” She eyed me closely, the evil smile somewhat fading, the deep lines of her face proclaiming her age and wisdom. “Crone, mother, maiden, always the divine three. The priestess is usually the mother, the one with the energy to meet the needs of the community and some of the wisdom.”
The little girl broke away from her mother, pacing closer, looking us over carefully with what appeared to be an intelligence beyond her years.
“Priestess?” There was a challenge in her voice. I didn’t understand the context or the content, so it kinda went over my head, but something inside me didn’t. “No, you’re something else again—meddler, parasite, aberration.”
She bit the words off, the little girl, damning me before the crowd, but for what? It was him that provided the final answer, joining the rest of the group, leaving the red-haired woman behind, looking a little lost.
“Branwen?”
He looked into my eyes like they were the windows into something or someone else, and maybe that was true. I’d carried around my Tirian inside me for years, but now? It was starting to feel awfully crowded in here.
NO! my Tirian roared, and I was surprised when I saw others flinch at that, but my beast’s cry was quickly ignored, as was I. I felt our consciousness, all we were, shoved roughly aside to make room for her.
Watching your body move, seeing your hand reach out, feeling your lips purse, when you aren’t the one that moves them, that shit is freaky.
“Sylvan?” she used my voice to say his name with every iota of repressed passion I felt right now, for a man I didn’t know. He blinked, something surging there, his eyes turning bright green in response, but while I saw hope rise in his face, I saw it be quickly smothered as well.
“What’s going on?” he asked Flora, and I felt the pain inside us when he turned his back. “I thought we were done with this.”
“How can we be done with this?” Flora asked, amused in a way that suggested this was the most fun she’d had in ages. “How can we ever be done with this? Sanctuary is a good place, a noble place, but it was not created that way.”
The way she looked at me—no, us, it had changed completely.
“I wondered when you’d make an appearance, prayed it wasn’t me that would need to deal with you.” Her face became a skull, complete with frozen snarl. “Wretched thing, insult to nature—”
“Your progenitor,” we snapped. “You would have no village to preside over if not for me, Crone. I created you, and I can destroy you.”
Gasps went around the room at that, making us realise that maybe we’d overcommitted ourselves. We needed them, this town and its inhabitants, for our master plan. Without worshippers, without participants, our power was as it had always been—limited. We straightened up, ignoring the old biddy. She was on death’s door right now, and perhaps she could be pushed out of it, replaced with someone much more aware of the privilege bestowed upon her. We used that same sense of the whole community, every person in it a small pinprick of consciousness we could touch at will. Yes, there were some ambitious ones out there, one’s who would disregard the current crone, the alpha, all of it, in return for power. We fought the urge to smile triumphantly, schooling our face into that calm, empathetic mask the people always seemed to like.
“Did I not raise your forebears from the ashes created by the Volken? Did I not send you a conduit that helped eradicate them once and for all?”
We nodded to Sylvan, who oddly blanched in response. That was concerning. We obviously needed to spend some more time re-establishing the bond there. Our eyes flicked to the red-haired woman, our doppelgänger, our rival, and then dismissed her without thought.
“Have I not presided over the development of your community, your people, your whole existence? Did I not fuse the lost souls of Oemis with yours? Where would any of you be without me?”
“Why?” The question wasn’t snapped out, yet when Ophelia said the word, it had the same effect. The room went dead silent, so we could hear every breath everyone took. “Why did you do this, Branwen?”
We smiled. “Those that accepted my bargain did not argue.”
I saw it then, women left pregnant and alone, left to bear the children of rape in the destruction the Volken had wreaked, growing thinner and weaker each day. Then she’d come forward, a picture of glowing health. She stepped up towards the one woman who didn’t scrabble away from her and… I saw it for just a second, a ghostly wolf form in white before it dissolved into a cloud that filled the nose of the first woman. Then more and more, each woman filled with their Tirian spirit, transforming now into beast form and striding away from the wasteland that had been their town, out into the world and beyond it, to here.
“Why?” Ophelia insisted.
I felt the tension in our limbs as her compunction rode us. She was the alpha, and her will beat down on mine.
But not Branwen’s. I felt her fight to maintain her hold on me, something that had my heart rattling with fear.
I knew then that I was an obstacle to Branwen and what she wanted. She might bamboozle me with dick, keep the guys coming and me with them, but that wasn’t an altruistic impulse. She wanted me kept docile and happy so she could control me.
The alpha’s will, it created the point of weakness I needed, my Tirian surging up and out of me, wresting control of my body from both of us. We stood there on four paws, head hanging down and panting our way through the transformation. I couldn’t have taken human form if I tried, my beast rigid as she fought to keep our body our own. I felt her reluctance, her disquiet at this, but in the end, we were an animal backed into a corner and we’d act accordingly.
Being bonded with a Tirian was a strange thing. Most of the time, I barely felt her, except when the moon was full or if I was doing something really dumb. She reared her head then, but largely, I was just me, with the addition of a grumpy great aunt wolf or something that occasionally questioned my poor life decisions. Right now, I felt it, what she did, what had her hackles up—fear. Whatever Branwen was, whatever she’d done to create Sanctuary, my beast was not pleased by it at all. This was an animal facing down a hereditary enemy, braced and ready to fight, but the fight was always to be held within. So when I felt his hand on the back of
my neck sinking into my fur, we jolted, expecting something much less pleasant.
