Page 40 of In This Iron Ground
“Welcome home,” she said. Damien closed his eyes.
It would have been less painful to have her claws in his stomach.
Hakan stood back. Damien could feel his face twitch with panic, but Hakan didn’t react. He simply watched, a sentinel.
Cameron put his arm around Damien’s shoulders and pulled him towards the house. For a moment, Damien was reminded of that day in school, when he’d seen Cameron use this exact gesture on Hakan and Koko. They’d tried to escape the hold, used to it, but Damien let himself experience the foreign feeling in this suddenly foreign land.
Damien walked up with Cameron to his new room. He had already seen it, but the sight of it then still sent his heart into a gallop. The room was beautiful. Peaceful green walls, wood furniture, and a soft, cream-coloured rug over the same wood panelled floors covering the rest of the house. The white colour, Damien thought dreadfully, was bound not to survive Damien long.
He looked at the waiting shelves, at the wardrobe with an overly optimistic amount of space inside. The first time they had shown him the room, Damien had looked around, barely passing the threshold. He felt like an intruder.
He unpacked slowly. Every piece of clothing hanged, every possession placed tentatively on a shelf, felt like a handful of dirt on his own coffin.
When he had collected himself enough to go downstairs, everybody made up for the staged welcome with a normal flurry of activity. Koko pulled him aside to show him a new game she had found online, collapsing with her laptop on the collection of humongous beanbags puddled on the living room floor. It took thirty seconds for the twins to pile on them.
“You’re gonna stay here forever,” Lallo said as he crawled over Damien, all knees and elbows. Damien’s eyes flicked towards Hakan, who had followed but not joined them, sitting on the couch instead. Damien didn’t reply, simply running a hand through Lallo’s hair.
Dinner was a similar affair. Damien helped out like always, setting the table and helping carry things from the kitchen. The meal was its usual mess of voices and plates and laughter. Damien got so caught up in the normalcy that he turned to Cameron when the washing up was finished to ask when he’d be driven to Oak House. The words died in his throat as the reality, starker than ever, hit Damien.
The Salgados had fostered him. He was staying there to sleep that night, and the next, and the next.“Welcome home,”Mia had said.
Home.
He didn’t realize he was panicking until a warm hand fell on his shoulder. Damien looked up to see Cameron’s understanding face.
“How about we take a breath of fresh air for a moment?” he suggested. He was already steering Damien through the patio doors as Damien tried to get a hold of himself.
They walked until they reached Jurassic Park. It had become a familiar sight, but never at night time. Damien breathed deeply. The scent of the garden had uncurled its petals into something rich and deep.
Cameron walked him towards the centre, where a large, straight tree stood, an odd sort of cactus spiralling around its trunk. Damien felt his mouth drop open as he caught sight of the large, white flowers perching on the cactus. They seemed to glow in the moonlight. Their yellow filaments moved slightly in the breeze as if they were alive.
“Wow,” Damien said. The panic inside him turned to crystalline water. Even amidst all the other plants, the scent of the white flower was fragrant, filling Damien with each slow breath.
“Meet theQueen of the Night,” Cameron said quietly, his hand still warm on Damien’s shoulder. “It blooms only one night a year, did you know? I’m not surprised it chose tonight.”
Damien looked up at him, uncomprehending. Cameron smiled, and Damien had to look away from the openness, the affection.
“The natives from the Mojave Desert have a story about this flower. They talk about ancient tides that flow across the world constantly. They are pulled by the shifts in balance, the equilibrium between give and take. Between order and entropy. The flow of energy. Of Ousía.
“A lot of people have lost the ability to listen to these tides, to what they are telling us. But the world still speaks to us. It is not bitter or vengeful. It reaches out to us constantly. And theQueen of the Nightis a soft hand on our cheek saying,look. It blooms in the heat, when resources are rich. It’s a sign of good tidings.”
Damien looked at the flowers. A feeling unfurled inside him, as fragrant and soft as the desert flower.
“I used to think that the way the Salgados love can be almost…intimidating. When I first met Mia, when I first got invited into the fold, so to speak, family didn’t mean the same to me as it did to her. To them, pack is everything. Nothing else could ever come first. For me—I was never particularly close to my parents. I mean, I loved them, of course, but they had held old-fashioned ideas about too many things. And there was never a big stress on family life—we didn’t do things together, you know?
“When Mia formally invited me to the pack, to start our own branch of it, I was scared,” he confessed. Damien looked up at him avidly as Cameron gazed, lost in thought, at the desert flower. “I was scared that I lacked something, some sensibility, some sort of…I don’t know, an innate knowledge of how to be family, how to be pack. Especially with something as foreign as werewolves were to me then, I was afraid that I could never reach their understanding of pack. Could never live up to their expectation of what it meant.
“But pack…pack is like this flower. Or like the earth, like the forest. It’s meant to grow as much as it is nurtured, to give what it is given, to flourish. At least, that’s how the Salgado pack works. I know they can be intimidating, but they return tenfold whatever they are given.”
Damien understood that the situation Cameron was describing was not completely synonymous with Damien’s, as Damien was being fostered, not joining the pack. Damien had learnt there was a large disparity between the two. Just because he was invited into someone’s home didn’t mean he had the quality offamily, maintained by the omnipresent fact that he could be discarded at a moment’s notice. When he had accepted the Salgados’ offer to be fostered, he had known exactly what he was accepting and exactly what he was not.
Still, Damien thought he understood what Cameron was really trying to say.
Welcome.
Damien nodded, smiling tentatively at Cameron. Cameron returned the smile. Turning back to the flower, Damien took a fortifying breath.
It smelt like a rich, desert night.
