Page 5 of In This Iron Ground
There was no mistaking her for anything other than the wolf.
“Are you going to kill me?” Damien asked hoarsely.
“No, pup,” the woman said, and where there should have been relief was only frustration.
“Why not?” He whispered. The woman frowned, her hand stilling in his hair.
The wolves shifted around him, but Damien didn’t look away from her. Her frown deepened, and she shook her head.
“Let’s go,” she said gently, pulling him up with seemingly no force, as if Damien’s limbs were more under her command than his own. Damien choked on a sob. A fruitless, foreboding feeling rotted under his skin.
These creatures looked like monsters, but Damien was bound to so much worse.
**********
Damien sat on the couch he had been guided to, huddling under a soft blanket that was slowly heating up the cold that had snuck into his bones. He was alone in a large living room, the details of which were lost on him. He could hear movement and voices in other parts of the house, most prominently the woman who had led Damien to the large house in the forest.
It had taken over an hour to get there, the woman steadying him every time his shuffling and uncooperative feet stumbled. He had walked as if in a daze, feeling nothing. Not the wolves, or the prospect of the McKenzies, or anything at all seemed to be able to bridge the divide between him and the world around him.
Damien lifted his eyes as the woman walked into the room, now dressed in a disturbingly normal pair of jeans and short-sleeved T-shirt. She placed a cup on the coffee table in front of Damien and sat beside him. He tensed and shuffled slightly away as the couch dipped. He wasn’t afraid of her, but the thought of being touched right now was too much to even consider.
“I’ve brought you some hot chocolate. The good stuff, too, none of thatadding waternonsense. A hundred percent milk,” she said teasingly. Damien stared at the bribe. The thought of eating or drinking anything made the knot in his stomach tighten. “My name is Miakoda, but you can call me Mia,” the woman, Mia, said when the silence stretched uncomfortably. “Could you tell me yours?”
“Damien,” he muttered.
“Nice to meet you, Damien,” she said.
Her voice was so placid that it made hysterical laughter bubble out of his mouth before he could clamp his lips around it. It was rude of him, he knew, but his self-control seemed to have been completely shredded.
“Yeah, I guess this is a pretty strange situation, huh?” she said. Damien said nothing. “I wasn’t expecting to see anybody in the forest tonight. What were you doing out there so late?”
Damien knew that tone of voice. It was the friendly lilt adults used when they wanted a confession out of you.
“I got lost,” he said, which was a lie in spirit but not in letter.
“Okay. Can you tell me what you were doing there in the first place? I’m not telling you off, Damien. I’m just wondering.”
“Got confused,” he shrugged. Normally, there was a buzz of anxiety when he defied adults but now there was nothing at all.
“I see,” Mia said. “Did you have a fight with your parents?”
The ache inside Damien metastasized.
“My parents are dead,” Damien replied, surprising even himself with the flatness of his voice.
“I’m…I’m sorry to hear that,” she said softly. Damien shrugged again, though it felt more like he was hunching into himself. Like a collapse.
“Who are you living with now, then? Relatives?”
“No. Foster carers. The McKenzies.”
“Oh. McKenzies.…How long have you been living with them?” she asked.
“Eight months.”
“Did you guys have a fight? Is that why you were out so late?”
“No, I just do this type of thing,” Damien said, closing his eyes. Each question was growing more exhausting.
