Chapter 30: 8.5 A Darker Shadow

  Sarah’s eyes open to find the brown leather of the satchel pressed against her cheek and the smell rich within her nose. Beyond the bag, she sees garbage strewn along the wall, then realizes the wall is the floor and pushes herself to sit upright. She groans as the movement seems like the world pivoting and moving around her instead of her moving within it.

  Sarah looks down to see her katana cradled in her arm, then moves both arms to embrace it. The warmth of the nearby fire reaches her face, and she turns towards it, the orange tendrils beginning to wave as reflections in her eyes. One of her hands moves to the center of her chest as she forces her palm across the ugly ridge between her breasts hidden away by her scarf.

  She feels hollow, like a thing had been pried out of her. But not just any thing; this one was supposed to stay private. It was a thing she couldn’t bring herself to look at directly and the thought of others seeing it terrified her. Still, she can’t help but feel as though she let it show, like an exposed tag left untucked from a shirt collar that was actually a window into her soul.

  Sarah draws her legs into her body, her sword across her lap as she wraps her arms around her legs in a hug before laying her head against her knees. She knows her secret was looked at but doesn’t know how it happened. How could she be so careless?

  She notices Jack as he moves to feed something else into the fire. It crosses her mind to say hello, but she refuses, instead hoping to make herself smaller as she embraces a belief that he won’t notice her.

  Wolf is the one to override the sole sound of things being consumed by the hungry flames. “What happened back there, Red?”

  Sarah’s eyes don’t move to him, but she does notice that he’s there, standing beside the same wall that is behind her while being opposite of Jack. Her words don’t go to meet him either as her chin moves to sit atop her knee. She is tired, more tired than she’d been in a long time, and she isn’t ready to wake up just yet. Five more minutes, her mind tells her social cues.

  “When she’s ready,” Jack says, glaring at Wolf.

  “Well, what if I can’t wait that long?” Wolf voices, exposing claws in open grasps while looking at the fire. “I thought I was getting used to her abrasive attitude, but instead, I’ve just been talking to Jekyll while waiting around for Hyde to show up. I don’t think I can keep doing this. I can’t follow someone so unpredictable—unreliable even,” he says looking from the flames back to Jack’s glare.

  “Maybe, I’ll just go then,” he says, monologuing as no one responds. “I’m barely keeping my own shit together, and I can’t do that while she’s losing hers! Plus, I’m getting tired of waking up to her talking in her sleep, always mumbling about her grandfather.”

  It’s time to go, says her mind, returning and addressing the emotional suitcase that she kept by a door. It was packed and ready to go anytime she was, only requiring her to bend slightly before clasping around the handle and stepping out like any other day. When she stands, her scabbard is clasped in her left hand as she prepares for the new day.

  Wolf’s eyes fixate on her as she rises within their narrow alley. The brick walls to each side left some twenty odd feet of unused space between the neighboring two-story businesses. The bright moonlight spills over one of their rooftop, cutting the alley in half at a steep angle.

  Sarah walks past Jack and his eyes return to the fire. Wolf’s eyes move to meet hers as she approaches, looking and waiting her to say something—anything.

  The moonlight comes down, bisecting her nose and only allowing the top of her head and a single eye to be visible. It’s an eye rich with emotion, the blue around her iris seeming sympathetic and understanding. But like a sponge filled to capacity, the eye threatens to shed some of its contents if disturbed as her mouth begins to move in the darkness.

   “If you’re waiting for one of us to ask you to stay, those words aren’t coming,” she says without apology.

  Wolf’s expression sinks.

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  “You wanted a pack, right?” she asks as he raises his concerned eyes again to meet her endearing ones. Her right hand rises to rest on his shoulder. “Well, this is the ugly truth of that: A pack isn’t about strength in numbers and overpowering your prey. It’s about teamwork and supporting one another, it’s about seeing the ugly weakness in each other and then acting to ensure that no one else ever does. And it’s about not needing that team to tell you to stay…or to go, because that world belongs to all of you, and you all know your place in it.”

  Sarah gives his shoulder a squeeze. “Remember what you said to me,” she says, tugging in cadence with her words, “that if you ever wanted to leave, you would do so.” She releases his shoulder to point, though he does not follow the gesture. “So if you aim to leave, it’s that way.”

  She begins walking again, moving past him as his gaze lowers to join his spirit. His mood is at an all-time low as he is strung between two points, one of isolation and the other of belonging. It wasn’t his first time here, but the points seem to keep moving farther away, both from each other and from the ground. Would he fall someday? And if he did, would anyone know?

  “But, Wolf,” Sarah says, drawing out his attention and causing him to turn around to find her standing at the mouth of the alley, ten feet away. He hadn’t paid attention to her footsteps as she traveled past, a simple matter of him being distracted by his own troubles.

  During his training, he was aware of his progress in strength, speed, endurance, and his improvement with the sword. But what he knows to be his most developed are his senses. Without focusing on them, they had heightened, his hearing now supernatural even by wolf standards. And, he has started getting mental glimpses of what he hears. It’s like seeing the reflection in a mirror that’s fogged over. It’s just shapes mostly, but it’s enough to give an impression of what the moving shapes are doing. He hadn’t exactly told the truth when describing the dragon in flight, claiming that the sounds might have been circling or slithering, all the while knowing that the creature had been making diving passes at its prey.

  Additionally, that other sense had gotten stronger too, the one that couldn’t be named outside of simply calling it the sixth. He keeps getting faster, but most of his keeping safe is from the activation of this sense. It’s a sort of awareness that was outside of his body. It’s what had allowed him to be looking elsewhere when Sarah had previously turned to glare at him, its activation causing his body to automatically respond.

  So when Wolf turns around to see Sarah with her scabbard in her left hand and her sword drawn out and laying against her shoulder, he knows something has happened beyond his being distracted. The moonlight is now at her back with her entire front is cloaked in shadow. 

  Wolf’s senses again go untriggered as Sarah’s form changes from one into another with no transition in between, like a film’s opening and ending credits joined together after the movie has been cut from between them. Her sword, no longer on her shoulder, points at his face where a line can be drawn from the tip to extend into his left eye. The sharpened edge is turned to run along the top, and he knows that she’s looking at him across the cutting edge.

  “If you ever mention him again,” she says, flatly. “I will kill you.”

  Sarah’s blade moves back into its sheath, and she leaves, disappearing around the corner as she walks away.

  Wolf stands unmoving for a long while after she becomes absent from his senses. The only thing he can feel is gratitude. Even though he stands motionless, he is grateful that he hadn’t been able to see her eyes. For he had glimpsed a void there once before. He hadn’t looked into it directly, only seeing a flicker back when their eyes had met across the top of her gun. He had seen little, but it had been enough to put him on edge.

  Sarah’s eyes had been behind shadows, and he’s grateful for that—so grateful that tears are forced out of the corners of his eyes. And a grateful rain begins as he falls to his grateful knees.

  Wolf had second guessed the existence of that barren place behind her eyes. But that second guess had been a hope, and that hope had just evaporated because now he knew and knowing is so much worse. When that vapid place had turned to fully face him, he felt gratitude for being unable see it as it stared back at him. The one thing Wolf could never second guess is the thing her concealed eyes had communicated, even before it became words.

  He had never struggled with bad dreams but now faces a growing anxiety as he realizes what nightmares see when they close their own eyes; It’s Sarah, if she were to ever realize a mastery over that place hidden behind her eyes.

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