you're too young & eager to love

Thanks to Muffin for the idea/direction here! Let's hope my formatting sticks.




“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven.”
“Crush”




At noon on the seventh day, Kim flays three of Harrow’s men to the bone - the Head of Security who, in a full week, was unable to locate the missing captives, the unlucky security guard whose post had been in the control panel room during the night of the blackout, and the sentry who had been unable to maintain order and thus allowed several captives to evade the Compound walls and disappear, including Harrow’s swan and the thieving mongrel.

The courtyard’s dirt floor is stained red. But like a vengeful god, Harrow is still unsatisfied. Roman can tell by the way he clenches his jaw, by his impatient tone.

Harrow tells Roman that same night over a dinner of roasted venison and a tumbler of whiskey that Roman must go now, that it is Roman’s duty, Roman’s obligation, Roman’s honor. As a soldier, he isn’t much surprised; the words mean little to him, but he understands the task at hand and that the luxury of choice has been all but whittled away in this world by violence and greed and hatred.

Roman accepts with an easy grin. He doesn’t tell Lene until the day he leaves.






The sickness caused by the Compound’s drug has mostly left him by the end of the week. Even so, Chason cannot fully maintain his bestial guise for more than a few hours. He sheds his animal skin and comes sliding down the sand dune, his feet just as stable as his paws had been.

Ita sits beside a dying fire. She’s unwrapped her scarves from around her head; the skin across her shoulders and nose is raw and peeling. In contrast, Chason seems tan, as though his skin has been thirsting for the heat and burn of the sun after so many months inside a cage.

She doesn’t look at him, but he can sense more than see the blush of color that spreads over her cheeks as he reaches for the pile of clothes next to the pit. He pulls his jeans on first, then his shirt, fastening a belt around his hips last. He tucks his pants into military boots and ties the lacings with quick, nimble fingers.

“I don’t think we’re being followed, not yet,” he says, sitting down beside the warmth of the fire.

Ita works her fingers through the wind-tangled strands of her hair. “We will be. He won’t let me go so easily.”

“Who would you send? To find you?”

Ita thinks for a moment, twisting her silver-blonde hair into a braid now that she’s untangled it. “He doesn’t have a title … The lieutenant, I guess you would call him, his right hand.” She tries to suppress the shiver that runs down her spine but fails. “Roman.”

“Tall? Beard? Looks like marble but with an etched on smug grin?”

Ita nods. Finished braiding, she works her fingers into her layered skirts. There’s a practiced perfection to the rigidity of her back, to her composure, except for her hands. Now that she isn’t under constant surveillance and tethered in fine gold, Chason thinks she must not know what to do with them. Her time has so rarely been her own. He feels the need to reach out and grasp her hands, to stop her fidgeting, but he doesn’t.

“What do you know about him?” he asks.

“Harrow trusts him, so he’s proven himself capable. He’s persistent. Charming but ruthless. Cold. And there’s something else.”

“Something else?”

“He doesn’t smell right.”

Chason snorts. “I didn’t realize you had a preference in body odors.”

“No,” she shakes her head, fists the skirts in her lap. “He smells …. empty. Like bone. Or a husk.”

Chason makes a noncommittal noise and toes the remnants of their last burning log with the tip of one boot. It will get cold soon, but they don’t have any more wood to burn. He doesn’t know what to make about a man who smells like nothingness, like the absence of scent, and not knowing his enemy makes him uneasy. Not for the first time, he wonders how he’s ended up in this situation, half-rescued, half-bound to the woman beside him, a creature full of sadness and mystery, with a smell of pond water and feathers in her blood. She is unlike the other few women who have mattered to him, unlike all other women.

He can’t explain his feelings for Ita, but the sudden, distant laughter of hyenas in the night push away his desire to try. He titters, a nervous burst of sound from his chest, and Chason’s whole body perks up, his head twisting towards his pack’s night noises. Not too far away now.

“We have to find a safe house for you,” he tells her, still looking westward and curling his fingers around a fist of desert sand.

Ita watches him with her watery eyes, barely hiding a frown. She feels a flurry of nervousness, the kind she can’t articulate.






“What will happen to them if you bring them back?” Lene asks quietly, inconspicuous. She’s loading a crate of supplies into one of the three desert patrol vehicles, sandrail-types left over from when the military was still a functioning active unit before the world moved on, as Roman checks the machine gun mounted in the gunner’s position over the engine. He’ll have no need for the guns, but he knows how much men crave the power they provide. There’s another shifter, a boxy man with a scar on his lower lip, stocking a second crate with the dumb mute efficiency of a workhorse behind them. Lene keeps her ears on him while Roman keeps his eyes on the gun, checking the belt of ammunition. His eyebrows knit together above his sunglasses and a scowl shatters his face.

“If?” he scoffs.

“You could-”

“No.”

They’ve had this conversation before, earlier, in the privacy of his cold bedroom, and his answer had been more or less the same. He doesn’t know what she expects from him or why his opinion would change in the span of a few hours. When Roman continues to not look at her, Lene slams the new crate the boxy man passes her into the wedge of space remaining in the back seat.

From her left, Harrow looks up from the map he’s been consulting. There’s a small huddle of watchguards and compound men with him and, of course, Arletta, a perfect expression of concern painted onto her face as she listens to the exchange between Harrow and the other men. Lene’s own face molds into a mask of passivity similar to boxy’s, and she steps back to Arletta as dutifully as any servant, assuming a shoulder-wide stance behind her. Her mouth is slack, her eyes almost vacant.

“You know the path to take?” Harrow asks as Roman wipes hands on his pants and walks up to the group. He shoulders a backpack full of medical supplies from one of the watchguards.

“To the West. They won’t have gone East. There’s nothing there but desolate beaches, cargo holds, and a few ports, but everyone knows those ports are sanctioned by the Vries and crawling with our men. They’d have to be dumber than a turnip to go East.”

Harrow’s lip curls. His agitation is palpable. Roman takes the map from him and folds it into his pocket. “They went West,” he says gently, comfortingly. “He’s a desert animal. He thinks he knows how to survive out there.” He slaps Harrow on the side of the arm and then turns, headed to the sandrail. “You worry too much. Hold down the fort, I’ll be back in time for your sister’s arrival.”

“You had better,” Harrow says, and nobody misses the implication darkening his voice.

If he could, Roman would have shot Lene an I-told-you-so glance.






Chason leaves Ita in a tilted house beside a rare lake. It’s more of a pond than a lake, in all honesty, but she seems delighted by the find. Nonetheless, he can sense her sadness when he leaves. Sadness but not any distrust. When he told her he would return, she believed it more than he did.

It takes him another full week to find his pack. They circle the familiar haunts, rotating between desolate drifter towns and single isolated shacks. If they sense him before they see him, he doesn’t know, but they cackle like lightning at his approach.

Austin smells the swan all over him; Chason smells death all over her.

He wants time, but he can feel the fever heat radiating off of her body. Tilly shrugs her shoulders, an empty gesture, and Sabra’s breath continues to hitch as she clings to Chason’s side in an embrace that is half hug, half desperation. Porter’s pretty, boyish face is full of relief. Garret wears a sloppy grin. If he wasn’t in his human form, Chason thinks he’d be panting, his tongue stupidly lolling from his mouth.

After, once they finish nuzzling into each other’s necks and snickering their peculiar greetings, Chason speaks to Tilly in a worn down kitchen inside of a barely standing shack while the others tend to Austin. Her eyes are as hard as flint. “Why were we separated?”

“I don’t know. You went one way. I went another.”

“Taken,” Tilly corrects, her voice sharp with accusation. “We were taken away. Maybe you went willingly.”

Chason barks a laugh, a sound so full of warning that Tilly resists the urge to duck her eyes. Chason is not her alpha and never has been. He was once Austin’s second, but he’s been gone for too long, and now he stinks of something foreign. Things change. She wants to tell him this, to warn him out of some misplaced sense of pack loyalty, but she doesn’t. Instead, she stands straight, the edge of an old counter splintering against the small of her spine.

“Are you being followed?”

“No,” he says, more softly now, “but there is a woman. She’s with me. We’ll need to return to her.”

“We?”

He can’t explain it. He’ll try to, but not to Tilly. Chason will only share his story to Austin.






On his second week in the desert, Roman begins to see her, his maker.

It’s been a long time since he saw her last, and at first she’s only a glimmer in the distance, a mirage on the horizon; she flickers in and out of his perception, so he doesn’t even acknowledge her, not really, not then. He thinks her a trick of light and some vague effect of his own mounting thirst. But by the time the moon has reached its peak in the sky, she is a solid outline on the top of a dune, so white that her skin is the color of piano keys and bridal lace. He hears her say his name, the sound of it is a whisper on the wind, a snatch of night time birdsong.

He says hers back: Adira.

Roman finds the pack the same night he finds her. They’re still distant, but his hawk eyes and sharp senses can make out their lurching, lolling shapes against the dunes. There’s a tilted house, and he figures that’s either where they’re headed or where they’ve been staying. Roman knows to leave the sandrails behind now. He’ll come back for it and the cages they hold, along with the two guards and their guns, once he’s incapicated the group. It will be easier for him to approach without the sound of the vehicles; he’ll be as the moonlight, slipping forward steadily and silently. He’ll be, as always, a soldier.

When he thinks about where best to wait, when Roman least wants to, he pictures Lene. Her face is bright and lovely despite her inverted smile. Her eyes are full of judgement and disappointment.

“Out of my head now, kid,” he mumbles, bracing himself against the sandrail’s frame as he stands on the railing, looking into the distance, judging the miles. He smells her all the same - mountain grass and wildflowers, cavern waters and shifting red sands. The hunger that is a gaping maw in the pit of his stomach snaps its fangs.

From the corner of his eye, Roman thinks he sees Adira frown. She’s curled against the passenger seat now, one pale arm dangling out the window, staring up at him with cold eyes.

“I should let you go,” he tells her as he ducks back into the body of the sandrail.

She laughs, a sound like dead skins rustling in the wind. “How can you? I am your blood.”

Not in it, Roman acknowledges begrudgingly, but you are it. He’s forgotten her arrogance.

“I shall put you to sleep then.”

“Mon soldat, I am not even here,” Adira says with a bemused smile on her thin lips.

He grunts an acknowledgement and scratches the sand in his beard, but he’s grinning all the same. It’s a knife cut of an expression.

“Where to, sir?” one of the guards asks from an adjacent sandrail.

“Hold back,” Roman tells him. “I think I’ll continue on foot and do some scouting.”






When the pack invades the tilted house, Ita takes to the roof on the first night. Only Austin sleeps in a bed, her fever sweat staining an old mattress, while the others slink into the cellar like shadows and claim spots for themselves. Ita can hear their laughter through the walls and rafters. She expects Chason to be with them, cackling into their fur, and so is surprised to see him when he appears.

She gives him a small smile, still made awkward by the way her heart leaps into her throat whenever he’s near. “I did not know you too had wings.”

Chason grins. “There was a ladder in the shed.”

“Are you here to check on me?”

“You really must stop talking to me in questions.”

Ita smiles again, the same small, timid expression. Chason steps carefully over the roof, minding the missing shingles, to sit beside her. His body is instantaneously a heat source she wants to lean into, but she resists.

“Thank you,” he says, brushing a hand back through his hair like he does when he’s nervous. “It must be strange to meet all of them like this.”

“They don’t like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am … unlike them. Unlike you. A different type. That one, with the cold eyes, I think she would eat me if she could.”

Chason laughs. It’s warmer, less automatic than the laughter he shares with his packmates. “Tilly? She looks that way at everyone.” Tentatively, he curls his arm around Ita’s slender waist, feeling her ribs shudder beneath the weight of his palm. It takes her a moment to relax into him, and then she turns her face into his shoulder, breathing in the smell of his skin. “It was Austin and me, and then it was Austin and us. And that’s it. Before the doctors and the cells and the drugs. They need time.”

Ita nods. “I understand.” He feels the shape of her words against his arm. “I’m fine. You should go back to them.”

“Not yet,” he says and holds her closer.






“Aufwachen,” Adira whispers into the shell of his ear on his second night of scouting, and Roman’s eyes are open, alert. He rolls to the left and narrowly avoids the snap of a hyena’s jaws. Roman thinks the beast would be tearing into the marrow of his left humerus by now if he had hesitated only a second longer in responding.

When it lunges again, its bearish head full of hungry teeth, Roman catches his hand beneath its throat and squeezes. His fingers grip as hard as granite. The hyena makes a noise that would count for surprise if it had been from a real mouth, and beneath the scent of fur and anger and meat, Roman can smell something distinctly female, something close to human.

He snarls, his fangs detracting, and squeezes the beast’s throat more, their lumbering bodies tangling in the sand. The beast whimpers in a cackling kind of way, and Roman throws it off. The hyena shakes its head, catching its footing, and circles back cautiously, snapping its jaws again when Roman takes a step forward.

Roman growls, crouched low to the ground, balancing on the balls of his feet. “Are you done yet? Now that you haven’t gutted me? What was plan B?”

The hyena’s eyes are hard, fearless, and arrogant. It tosses its head again, snarling, its fur raised down its neck and back. It paces back and forth slowly, watching Roman, before finally it sits. There’s a moment full of static electricity and then there’s a woman standing where the hyena had sat, her body naked, her eyes the same. One of her wrists is mangled with old scars.

Roman stands slowly. He doesn’t bother extending his hand. “You’re part of the pack.”

“I won’t go back,” the woman tells him. She has a voice of stone, but Roman knows fear when he hears in it. “I’ll die before you take me back.”

“I don’t want you. I don’t want the others either. Not really.” Roman thinks of Lene again, of the shape her mouth makes when she frowns. “I’m only here for two.”

“Just you?” The woman sneers, snickering laughter spilling out of her mouth.

“And others with very big guns.”

“Tomorrow night,” she says after a moment, and he respects the stable, even quality of her voice. “You can take them. But you never saw us. You’ll have nothing to report. We were never here.”






It is the silence that wakes him. Ita is still asleep, the rise and fall of her chest steady and serene. She shifts but does not awaken when Chason sits up, his eyes already adjusting to the darkness of the bedroom. He has not slept with the pack for some time now, but he had always heard them, their familiar rustling in the night. Now, he can hear nothing from below.

If he concentrates, he can make out Austin’s faint struggling, sickly breaths in the next room. She’s breathing too slowly. There are red infection lines spreading up the insides of her arms, and she’s started to smell like rot.

Chason shakes Ita. “Wake up. Something is wrong.”

“What?” Ita asks, no hint of grogginess in her voice, but a sharp, startled pitch of fear.

“The others. They left. Why would they leave? And without Austin?”

Ita has no answer. She touches his hand, and he jerks away, agitated, nervous. He pulls her to her feet and is about to head into Austin’s room when the rumble of engines and the bright, garish light of headlights burst through the room’s window.

From outside, Roman has to shout to be heard, but Chason doesn’t understand a word of it. He grips Ita’s hand very hard and listens to the far-off cries of his sly, traitorous pack, their laughter staccato yelps in the night, like gunshots.






The injections force them to shift. Their bodies make brutal ripping noises. The two guards muzzle and collar Chason by the throat then force him into a cage too small for his hulking, spotted form. Ita is collared too and her dark bill bound. They wrap her large wings in chains so pretty that they could be jewelry.

Roman tucks her in the passenger seat of his sandrail, like she’s a pet. Her eyes are sad. He strokes her neck once. He isn’t sure why. It wouldn’t be much of an apology, and he knows she doesn’t seek comfort from the likes of him.

When he flicks his green eyes up to the rear view mirror, he sees Adira in the backseat, tucked against the supply crates, a deceivingly small-boned creature of the night. She graces him with a smile, one full of pride, one meant for those who survive.

Roman doesn’t think Lene will smile at him when he returns to the Compound. Surviving, she had once said, isn’t living.

Roman shifts the sandrail into drive. Lene, he thinks, is still very young.