OUR FEARS CANNOT PROTECT US.
- Reyna Biddy
Dead man walking.
The expression means something different here – more literal than figurative. The pack murmur beneath their breath as he walks amongst them, as they step out of his path as though he were a pariah, which Roman suspects he is. An outsider. Unwelcome. Foreign with his lifeless heart, chalky skin, and mystic blood.
He’s unsuited for domestic life, although Moray Mountain is a harsh environment; it’s sun-bleached, dust-covered, rock-laden, but the pack has embraced the terrain and used it for coverage. Like animals whose motley hide and assorted feathers allow them to hide in plain sight, the pack has found a way to manipulate the landscape: well-worn trails seemingly disappear into boulder curves, thorny brush cover rusted vehicles, and the mountain itself has been carved into cabins and labyrinthine rooms. The pack is hard to find, intentionally so, and the homebase tucked into the middle of the mountain path is a fortress – stoic, unwelcoming, as stark as the bedrock of its foundation. It’s a home intended for one family, one audience. Roman is not welcome.
It is not so much his look that marks Roman as an intruder (the Moray pack is itself a hierarchy of variety: long-limbed colts run next to coal-skinned boys with bear hearts, women with skin made leathery by age hand freshly washed linens to men with crane-like heights), the hard manner in which he strikes his consonants, or even his careless powerful way of being. It is his foreignness: utterly alien, immediately noticeable. He has no scent for the wind to carry, no pulse for their ears to judge, no warmth. Worse yet, he does not lower his eyes. He does not beseech. He stands next to Lene with easy entitlement, tainting her grass-scent with the smell of graves.
Dead man.
Dead man walking.
“They don’t understand,” Lene tells him on their first night, self-conscious over the cold, distant welcome her family and friends have given Roman, assuming his silence is a sign of his discontent. Later, he will find some measure of kinship in the Moray’s children, but for now she’s the only one who stands close, who sometimes places her hand in the crook of his elbow, who finds the unnatural coldness of his skin a welcome difference against her own burning heat.
Roman wipes grit from his jaw, his hands covered in mountain dirt from where he’d climbed the ascending rocky path earlier. “Why would they?”
“Give them time. You have plenty of that.” She tries for a smile, lightly jabbing his side with her elbow.
He shakes his head. “They don’t need time, liebchen. They do not understand because they do not want to. That never changes.”
“Wait and see. Once they realize you aren’t going to try eating everything with a pulse–”
“Some things aren’t supposed to be mixed.”
Lene is silent for a moment, considering the implications of what he’s said, before she looks away from him. “We aren’t like that here. We aren’t one of the compounds, and this isn’t Albtraum. Anders isn’t Harrow.”
“A world of negations, yes? … And yet,” Roman murmurs, letting his unfinished sentiment linger while he turns his eyes up to the stark, fearless moon. He hasn’t seen one so bright in years. It isn’t comforting.
Lene follows his gaze. She feels cold although the night is mild.
“You broke their rules. Bringing me here.”
“I’ve been breaking their rules for years,” she says, trying to laugh. “Hell, who I am is technically an affront to our entire lifestyle. I’m an anomaly.”
“In a nest–”
“Pack,” she corrects.
“Those who refused to follow the laws were driven out in order to maintain stability. You have to deal with dissenters swiftly. Often violently. You have seen this, I think.”
It’s Lene’s turn to shake her head. “Anders is my brother. He won’t exile me. Besides, this is different. He knows you’re part of the resistance.”
“The resistance,” Roman sneers, shaping the word as an insult. “What do I resist? No, I am trying to survive.”
“Story of your life, old man. Survival covers all manner of sins.”
Roman watches Lene’s profile, her full lips pulled down in an expression of disapproval, her blonde hair catching at her jaw and sticking to the sides of her neck. She’s cherubic – disarmingly, misleadingly so.
He takes her hand, her skin hot against his, and she startles at the gesture. She can’t remember him ever having done it before.
“I don’t know what sin is,” he tells her, and she knows he’s telling the truth.
What the Moray cannot bring themselves to see is all the aspects of Roman that Lene has found herself surprised to value. (She hesitates to say love, as though mentioning this single word would shatter the unspoken commitment that has grown so steadily between them over the years, but in the back of her mind she knows where her heart is.)
She thinks of him after the fall, in the immediate wake of so much chaos and confusion, when Albtraum had been plunged into fire, screams, panic. He had been calm, eerily so, only his eyes had taken on a hawkish, predatory alertness. When he’d found her, two backpacks slung over his shoulder as though they were about to do nothing more than hike through an easy spring trail, she’d laughed at his impossible composure.
The emergency system within the compound had taken over by then, and his face had flickered between red and shadow. There was only one casualty as they hurried towards the location of the loading docks, Roman having already secured an old SUV for their trip through the desert, and it was a young guard whose face Lene couldn’t identify. He’d opened his mouth to say something to Roman – an order, perhaps, to go back the way they’d come, or a question about their whereabouts – but Roman had already approached him, and for a moment it looked as though the two men would hug before Roman’s hands snapped the guard’s neck. His body had crumbled, falling to the floor, as weightless as a feather. Roman had looked back once. Red and shadow. Eyes alert.
He hadn’t been different in the desert. Lene drove, her foot pressing the pedal to the floormat, Roman covering the windows with old blankets, prepping for dawn’s approach. She’d found his confidence infectious, all her senses heightened, ready, and although her eyes kept straying to the rearview mirror – expecting to see a line of guards in trucks and similar SUVs, packed with guns and fully aware of the treachery played on them – all she could see was smoke from the burning building. All she could hear were screams. Even miles later, she’d thought she’d never escape those cries.
They ran out of gas with a day’s journey remaining to the rendezvous point. It was nighttime when it happened, the SUV gasping and choking its way towards death. Roman had cut the ignition then watched the sky, judging the distance, and in the near pitch-black, Lene could see the fine blue of his veins, the extreme whiteness of his skin. She wondered how he’d ever been able to pose as human.
They traveled by foot until the sun halted them. Lene had watched as Roman buried himself within the sand, his muscles straining and rolling beneath his skin, his hands shoveling away mound after mound, seeking the cool darkness of the deeper layers. She’d spent the day scouting, working away at the last of their provisions, calculating their distance with their crudely drawn map and her own memory.
When he emerged from the desert – a pale specter, coated in sand as a second-skin – he’d looked all the more inhuman. To Lene, he’d seemed strong. An ancient force, birthed from the belly of the earth itself.
That otherworldliness had only continued to grow. In the absence of humans, Roman’s differences shined all the brighter.
It’s that noticeable, marked distinction in him that speaks to her own alienation and plight. He’d told her once that he was not the only of his kind, that man’s desire to attack, destroy, and control preternatural life had forced his ancient line into hiding and deep sleep – a hibernation of self-preservation – but she’s yet to meet any other. Just as she’s yet to meet another quite like herself. Her pack thinks Roman is not the most deserving of her loyalty, of her affections – she knows this too, as she knows that her brother disagrees with her choice, whole-heartedly and without much attempt to reconcile the tension this has caused between them as siblings and as leaders within the community. Knight disagrees as well, partially to keep the peace between him and Anders, but because he wants more for Lene. Hers is a history of pain, a pain specific to that of the outsider, and she knows he thinks there’s no hope for healing those old wounds if she continues down the path she’s on. Where she sees a merging, they see disruption.
They all think it. He is a threat instead of a weapon. A liability.
Which now makes her one too.
Lene tells him as much as he drinks from her thigh, her fingers in his hair, his teeth sharp enough that she barely feels their presence – just the quiver of his mouth. It makes her back arch, her skin tingle, turn to gooseflesh. This is after. After her argument with Anders, after Knight’s silent disapproval, after the pack’s resentment towards her and her decision to bring Roman here, jeopardizing them, has turned from a simmer into a boil. This is after Lene defeated the first contender for her position within the pack, after she had to meet the gaze of her family and see them, suddenly, as strangers.
Roman opens one eye and glances up at her, one of his big hands stroking the skin behind her knee, the other at her hip. She’s sitting on her bed, wearing one of his shirts and only one of his shirts, skin smelling of salt and pine, and he’s kneeling between her legs, as naked as the day he was ripped from his mother’s body, Lene’s blood hot in his mouth, coppery with old secrets and bitter with unshared history. The sun still lingers, fresh as a wound, on the horizon, and he can feel its warmth from where his cheek presses against her thigh. Leisurely, savoring the rush of her blood, he pricks his tongue and licks the small puncture wounds, healing them before sitting back on his heels. There’s a glaze over his hazel eyes, her blood still circulating through him, making him punch-drunk, making him keen. If she reached down between their bodies, Lene knows she’d find him hard.
“Which do you think I am? A threat?” he asks finally, like he’s just now remembered the conversation, mouth still red, fingers more curious in the way they roam her leg and side. He’s distracted, reaching up under his shirt that she’s wearing to cup one of her breasts, a thumb idly tracing across her nipple.
“Are you asking me if I’m naïve enough to assume your life has been all fangs and fucking, old man?” She tugs on a chunk of his hair pointedly, making him dip forward until his mouth is back near her thigh.
He laughs. “That would sum up six centuries of living most concisely.”
When Roman slides his palms beneath her, she leans back, stretching her arms above her head. Looking up at the carved ceiling, she sucks in a breath of air as his mouth crawls further up her leg, his less dangerous, more human teeth dragging over her skin. She turns her face into a pillow. This is the room of her adolescence, the mattress firm with its quilts smelling of old cotton, so she should feel more comfortable than she does. Instead, there’s a tangle of knots in her stomach.
Lene pushes a foot into his chest, halting his progression up her body.
Roman quirks an eyebrow.
“I’ve never seen you …” she hesitates, searching for the words that gnaw at the back of her throat. All this time, but she’s sometimes uncertain how to talk to him.
“Tear a throat? Pull out a heart? Kill a child? Rape a woman? Break someone’s jaw and eat the tongue?” His voice is light, but there’s a fog in his eyes again. He sits back once more, catching her foot this time when she tries swiping at his head, cupping it between his white palms.
She props herself up on her elbows, studying his face. “You’ve done all that.”
It isn’t a question, but Roman only shrugs.
She frowns, and Roman rolls his eyes, digging his thumbs uncomfortably into the arch of her foot. She pulls free, annoyed.
“Not for survival,” she clarifies. “That’s what you won’t say, right? You’ve done terrible things because it’s your nature, because you can, because in the hierarchy of life, your kind is always on top and fuck everything else? It’s survival of the fittest.”
At times like this, Roman thinks Lene only entered his life to serve as the conscience he so desperately needs. He hears her in his head often, judgmental in a way that doesn’t sound judgmental, but philosophical, prosaic, even sometimes sarcastic, like the start of a mockery or a debate. He thinks he’ll always hear her, that he’s taken something from her that she didn’t know she was giving. An unfair truth, but a truth all the same.
“What’s your point, liebchen?” He grabs his jeans, the ones he’d worn all through the desert, the ones that still smell of campfire and salt, and slides them on with an ease and casualness that’s infuriating. He’s still hard. He has to tuck himself into his jeans, and the look he gives her is pointed. He’d much rather be fucking than talking.
So would she, but Lene can’t untangle herself from the mix of emotions she’s feeling and the surrealness of being here, at her home, with a corpse as a companion. Instead of grabbing him by the loopholes of his jeans and pulling him onto the bed, she sits up, folds her arms over her chest in a defiant gesture that does nothing but make her feel childish. Why is she angry? Nervous? Sad? What is it she’s fearing? She’s not sure how to answer his question.
Her emotions resonate inside of him, more muted and dim, but still there – flickering like sparks inside of his veins. A result of the circle their blood makes, the connection thrumming, turning him into a receptacle. He blinks, trying to make sense of this most human of responses, and then Roman surprises her when he takes two steps forward, his hands on either side of her face, his mouth on hers, his tongue licking her teeth. She can taste her own blood. She drops her arms. Presses her hands to his bare chest.
“What is it?” he asks again, softer this time, his voice a whisper that lands against her lips. His forehead touches hers, his eyes challenging.
She takes a breath for reassurance. “… Would you be able to do those terrible things again? If you needed to? If it comes to that?”
It’s an easy answer.
The meeting is called a month later.
Anders sits at the start of the circle, his blonde hair pulled back at the nape of his neck, his elbows on his knees and his hands between them. It’s a position of calm, but Roman knows that every complaint his pack lodges, every dispute, settles like stone on top of his young shoulders and threatens to break him. His desire to lead them is a burden, and the effort it takes to lead them well is crushing him, slowly but acutely. Lene sits by his left, Knight at his right, and Roman stands a step behind Lene – not in the circle, but not far from it.
Only Lene’s mouth looks worried. She’s caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Her eyes are angry, and Roman thinks that’s good. Anger can be useful.
“He doesn’t belong.” Alec, middle-aged and greying at the temples, speaks for a third of the congregation that’s gathered to discuss, for yet another time, Roman’s presence.
“He hasn’t hurt any of us or brought trouble,” Anders responds, shielding the weariness in his voice. “He is a member of the resistance. I do not want to make a habit of rejecting members of this pack purely on …” He pauses, uncertain.
“Species,” Knight offers.
“Oddities,” Lene suggests, speaking for herself as well as Roman.
“He hasn’t proven himself,” A fox by the name of Jalyn says, her eyes like arrows that shoot past Lene’s shoulder and into Roman’s chest.
“But I have.” Lene’s voice is sure, confident, assertive without an edge of meanness. “And I speak for him.”
“You shouldn’t speak for any of us,” Jalyn threatens, turning her harsh gaze on Lene. “You shouldn’t belong either. We all think it.”
“You do not have the authority to speak for all of us present here, so guard your tongue,” Anders says.
When he intercedes as the leader, Jalyn has the grace to look cowed. “My apologies, Alpha.” Her subservience is a mask she brings to her face when convenient, but Anders gives a small nod of acknowledgement regardless.
“We do not doubt that Lene has done well for this pack or that she is capable of earning her position here,” Alec begins, placing a hand on Jalyn’s shoulder. “We’ve all seen how she can defend herself, how she works for our benefit, but Jalyn is right. One’s strength does not merit another’s placement. We all earn our right to be here. This outsider should earn his.”
Roman folds his arms over his chest, shifting his weight to his heels. He follows the conversation, although he’s already certain of where it will end. He’s lived too many similar moments.
“He should fight,” a faceless voice from the back of the group speaks up. The crowd murmurs their agreement.
“No.” Anders says, immediate, his hands still loose between his knees.
“Wait,” Lene says, placing a hand gently on Anders’ arm. “I will fight as his proxy. We can solve this in one shot.”
“No,” Roman says, speaking for the first time, his voice reverberating with his natural harsh cadence.
There’s a collective snarl from half of the pack, as though Roman’s interruption has struck them as distasteful. Someone near his left spits on his boot. He ignores it and does not uncross his arms or move from his place behind Lene. “I will fight.”
“It isn’t your fight,” Lene murmurs, turning her head to look up at him, a scowl slicing the lower half of her face. “It’s me they’re really upset with.”
The smile Roman gives her is indulging. “You know better than that.” He looks to Anders, nodding. “I accept.”
For the first time since the meeting began, Anders curls his hands into fists.
