Page 43 of Avelina

Ward released a bitter laugh. “That’s putting it mildly,” he said, then drew a thumb across his throat.

“Oh,” I said, giving Aaron my own sidelong glance. This could potentially be a huge problem.

I looked up at Ward and decided that we both needed a hug, so I held out my arms to him. He obliged me, though we both knew Aaron wouldn’t like it. It was weird hugging someone so much taller than me, but his warmth was comforting. I missed Rogue, but Ward was still my best friend. He knew me better than anyone.

“When I came to your family,” Ward said, “that was the first time I’d ever heard that it was okay. I was trapped in that dog body, but you made me feel like at least I wasn’t broken.”

I looked up at him, feeling his gratitude, and smiled. “I’m glad. Because you’re not. You just started out in the wrong place. You belong on Earth, Ward. I mean, we’ll have to special order all your clothes and you won’t fit in cars or beds, but I think we could make it work.”

He smiled, nodding, then turned to start walking again. I hooked my arm up into his and walked beside him, almost like old times. “If Seleca trapped you in the dog body, then why are you back to your real body?” I asked.

Ward thought for a moment, his mouth pinched. “Probably because you healed me. You freed me, Lina.”

“I wish I would have known earlier,” I said.

“I don’t,” said Ward. “That was my home. Now I can’t go back. Even if I go back to Earth, I don’t think your parents will want a giant stranger in their house.”

I lifted my hand to my forehead. Yet another problem to solve. The list was getting long, but this one would be a priority. I took Ward’s hand and squeezed it.

“We’ll figure it out,” I said.

We walked that way for a minute. I thought about how he used to walk so close to me through the woods that we were practically touching. I wasn’t as deeply inside his mind as I’d been with Aaron, so I couldn’t send thoughts to him, but I could feel his anxiety very clearly. Underneath that, though, was a solid foundation of love, and I reflected that love back to him.

He squeezed my hand, then let go abruptly when he saw Aaron turn around to look at us. I understood Ward’s trepidation. Aaron was scary for a short dude, especially while hauling a giant dead animal that weighed more than he did. I wasn’t sure if he saw us holding hands, but we made eye contact. His expression was blank, but his eyes were heated, furious. He turned forward again without comment.

I could only guess at Aaron’s psychology, but I knew that he’d been isolated since his family had all but abandoned him to the mercy of Seleca, a literal psychopath. I guessed he anticipated nothing more than the same as he’d always had, plus a good dose of kicking himself for hoping otherwise. Ward coming back right at this moment may have even felt like poetic justice to him given their shared history.

Yeah, that sounded right.

Then again, I could have been projecting. Lord knows I’d had my share of loneliness. I could just be hoping that Aaron cared for me when in fact he preferred to be alone. It’s not like we’d known each other for that long. He was probably thinking about what he wanted for dinner, and happy that Ward had come along to distract me so he could finally get a minute to himself.

But no, I could feel that wasn’t true. Curiously, he was jealous. Nobody had ever been jealous over me before. It was simultaneously flattering and annoying, and holding Ward’s hand in front of him definitely wouldn’t help. On the other hand, was I supposed to ignore my dear friend, who was in the middle of a personal crisis, in order to take care of Aaron? I groaned in frustration, the back-and-forth logic making me dizzy. The two men looked at me. I didn’t know who to look at, so I looked down at the ground in front of me and kept walking.

It was dusk by the time we made it to the edge of the forest. Aaron stopped and surveyed the oardoo fields. They were bordered by a very mundane wooden fence that looked much like the ones I had seen in the American countryside. The only difference was that these were taller, reaching maybe six feet high. Aaron could see over them, but all I could see were violet flowers poking up and over the slats as if trying to escape.

The flowers were so fragrant I could smell them from our position a hundred yards away, even over the pungent odor of dead dragon. It reminded me of lilacs, and I had a vivid memory of the house in Eureka where we lived before my parents moved us outside of town, to the stables. My mother had a potted lilac in the front entryway that smelled like that. She planted it in the yard before we sold the property, and when we drove by the house the next year, it wasn’t there anymore.

I sighed. These random memories were making me homesick. Maybe I wasn’t hangry, just tired and sad.

Aaron stopped to listen before walking out into the open. A dirt trail butted up against the outside of the fence. Grass growing down the center of the trail had recently been flattened, presumably by a wagon or a cart, but I didn’t hear anything except wind rustling through the grass and the trees. A heaviness in the air weighed on my every breath, reminding me of Eureka in early autumn. It felt like a storm was coming, making me sleepy, and I sorely wished for a shower and a comfortable bed. My own bed.

“How long does it take to cross the fields?” I asked.

“An hour if it goes well,” Aaron answered. “The oardoo make a lot of noise when they see intruders coming into their fields, and then they run back to the stalls and ring a bell. If that happened, it would prompt the flock tenders to come looking, and we would have to hide until they gave up. It is known that Jorin is my uncle, and there are bound to be spies among the seasonal workers. If any of the tenders are spies, it wouldn’t be long before Eve’s minions came looking for me.”

“Uh, huh,” I said, “and what’s an oardoo again?”

Ward chuckled.

Aaron did not. Although he was once fond of Ward as a boy, he was obviously far from amused by his presence now. Add it to the list of problems, I guess.

“An oardoo is a large running bird,” Aaron said, clearly annoyed at repeating himself. “It has a blue head and legs and is covered in white feathers everywhere else. My uncle raises them for the feathers, which are worth a great deal. The bedrolls are made with them.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was wondering what that was. And they can ring bells?”

“Yes,” Aaron said. “Jorin has a large oardoo bell by the house. They are trained to run and tap on it when there’s danger.”

“They eat that purple plant on the other side of the fence,” Ward said, smiling. “I’d recognize that smell anywhere. It’s jarring weed.”

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