True North (The Bears of Blackrock Book 4) (7 page)

SINEAD

Sinead was standing at the back corner of her classroom when the door opened. The children were done for the day, having enjoyed her lesson on gravity.

At least it seemed as though they did.

She felt the presence at the back of the school room for a long moment. The lack of greeting startled her after a moment, and she turned to find the stranger, Theron Talbot standing at the back of the classroom.

Her throat grew tight at the sight of her. She turned away so he wouldn’t see her reaction. “Are you just gonna gawk all day, or do you have something to say?”

“Sorry, didn’t want to disturb you.”

Sinead turned around, setting the stone on her desk. “It’s -” She caught herself. She’d heard the frustrated tone, knew he was about to storm right back out, and she wanted to stop him. If for no other reason than simple curiosity.

Curiosity. Sure. That’s all it was
, she told herself.

“It’s fine. Come in. Sorry, the heater’s back off now that the kids are gone.”

Theron made his way slowly across the room, pulling up a desk near the front of the room. He looked almost comical with his long legs tucked under the small desk.

Sinead turned back to the chalkboard, straightening up from the confines of her coat. The air seemed to warm in his presence again. She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hair was up today, leaving just a couple wisps of ginger hanging at the sides of her face. She had a fleeting moment of regret. She always thought she looked prettier with her hair down.

Wait, why do you care about looking prettier? This guy is an abrasive ass.

“So to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Theron raised an eyebrow. “Pleasure? I’m sure.”

There was that jackass tone, again.

Great. He came to be an asshole.

Theron exhaled out his nose and met her gaze. “Alright, well. Look,” he said, leaning onto his desk. “I’m having trouble here. You see, no one will talk to me. About anything. I say I want to do a perimeter check, Gram hisses like a snake at me. I ask how everyone got up here, I get ignored. I ask how you ended up here, given you’re clearly not -”

Her eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t say anything.

“You’re not exactly a family member. So, yeah. You said you haven’t been allowed to leave in two years, so then – why did everybody come here?”

Sinead stared at her hands for a moment, then she sat down at a small table, just a few feet away from him. She felt warmer the closer she drew to him, but still, she didn’t want to welcome his company. He was as cuddly as a cactus thus far.

She took a long moment before she spoke. She’d never needed to tell this story before. Everyone on the Extension knew it. Still, it wasn’t one she looked forward to telling.

She talked about her parents and growing up in Halifax. She explained that after college, she decided to go off on some humanitarian exodus. Sinead heard all about the Indian Reserves and how they had trouble getting and keeping teachers – that many reserves didn’t have any at all. She didn’t have a degree in teaching, but she was a biologist.

“I contacted some First Nations foundation and found my way up to the reserve. Then I got there, and instead of teaching science, I taught everything. I was the only teacher there at the time.”

Theron listened, quietly.

“My parents were proud of me at first, but when I told them I was going to stay after my first year was up, they were a little upset. Said they didn’t want to see me ‘wasting my life’ in the Arctic.”

Theron laughed, slumping back in his seat.

“See, I couldn’t bring myself to leave after that first year. They didn’t have anyone new coming in, and I’d grown really fond of the children, so I stayed. I remember my mother’s shocked reaction when I told her we’d started having polar bear sightings. She thought I was living in wild kingdom.”

Theron fidgeted at this.

Sinead took a deep breath as she remembered the events at the end of her second year. This was the part she’d relived a thousand times. Every second of it.

“The tribe was contacted about a clinic coming to the area – that they would be offering physicals to all the kids. There’s practically nothing up here a lot of the time, so the parents all signed off. The bus and everything were paid for. I packed lunches for everyone – it was going to be a good day, I thought. But when the bus drove right past the nearest town, I asked the driver where we were going. He said not to worry, and asked me to sit down.”

They’d driven for two hours on roads that were only open two months out of the year. When the bus finally stopped, they were here.

On the Extension.

“They bussed us through the gates, pulled up to this ratty old schoolhouse, and herded the babies inside,” she said, and she had to take a moment to settle herself. The memory of their scared, confused faces. The look of helpless terror – that they were far from home, that they wanted their parents, trying to behave perfectly so they could go home. She’d never seen such wariness and strength before in her life. “Then they lined the kids up, took their temperature, took blood samples. They didn’t check their ears, or their heads for lice, didn’t look at their eyes. Just a temperature check, and a pin prick to the finger.”

Sinead swallowed, staring at her hands. The bones in her knuckles had become more prominent in the past two years, a sign she wasn’t eating like her normal, soft self. “An hour later, they pointed to twelve of the eighteen kids and told them to climb back on the bus. At that point, I started screaming.”

She was losing herself in the memory of that day. She’d never felt so helpless and lost in her life. She remembered staring into the emotionless faces of the technicians and guard-like men who stood around, eyeing them, demanding to know what they were doing, why they’d brought them there.

“They assured me the bus would return in a short while to collect the rest of the children, that they would be safe in the interim. Then they told me to get on the bus with the rest of my kids.”

Sinead felt her body trembling under the weight of her winter coat. She wasn’t cold, but she was shaking none the less. “I refused. The bus didn’t come back for eight hours. When it finally returned, it had every one of the kids’ families on it. They’d been told the only way they’d see their children again, was if they got on the bus. Thirty two people in total, including me.”

Sinead stared off into space for a long while. She was reliving every little piece of that day. Reliving that day wasn’t new. She’d remembered flashes of each moment, each instant where some part of her brain scolded her for not doing more, for not seeing what it was that was happening.

These families were a little disconnected from the rest of the tribe back on the reserve, but not shunned. Not looked down upon. If anything, they were revered. Still, they kept to themselves. That day she learned why.

She caught herself after a long while and turned to find Theron sitting forward in his seat, watching her.

He didn’t turn away. He continued to stare at her, unbidden by her sudden awareness. She stifled under his gaze, unable to hold it.

“Sorry. It’s not something I’ve ever talked about before.”

“It’s alright,” he said, and the tone had softened. There was no snark there now, no sarcasm. Sinead felt her cheeks flushed and turned away. Despite their terse interactions before that moment, Theron’s expression as he stared at her had rattled her.

She felt seen. In a way, she’d never felt before – while reveling in the darkest memory of her life, she felt seen.

It was almost too intimate to take.

“What happened then?” He asked, his voice still soft.

Sinead shrugged. “That was the day we all met Baird Davenport. He explained that for public safety, these families were to be relocated to The Extension. At that time, I didn’t know. Then Baird dropped one of those god awful crates at their feet, and everyone lost their minds.”

Stoic, almost eerily peaceful members of the family went ballistic. It had startled her almost as much as the separation. “They chased the truck back to the gate, but he got through before anyone could stop them. Darrell and his brother, Eddie, were hollering after the guy, threatening to murder him.” Sinead gave a sad laugh. “Baird just smiled at us all through the fence. That’s when Eddie went running toward the gate.”

Sinead pinched the skin of her fingers, watching it turn pale white, then seeing the pink return.

“I had no idea what they all were until that moment. All of a sudden, this kid who I’d taught in his last year of school went from being Eddie anymore to – something else. Suddenly, there was this bear – this just massive bear where Eddie had been.

Sinead’s throat grew tight, but she fought to steady her words and continue. “Then I watched his beautiful animal charge toward the gate, throw his full weight into the metal frame -” She took a deep breath and blew out through pursed lips to settle herself. “Then the bear dropped to the ground, and he didn’t get back up.”

Theron leaned forward, his hand drawing closer to hers. She half expected him to take her hand. She realized at that moment, she wouldn’t have protested.

“They knew – what we are?”

Sinead nodded. “They did. They offered to let me leave more than once that day, but once Eddie died, they stopped offering.”

“Has no one come looking for you?” Theron asked.

She forced a smile, but this question hurt more than she ever wanted to let on. He seemed to lean in further.

She shook her head. “If they have, no one’s told me. Baird makes me write letters home.”

“And they read them?” Theron said. It was a question, but his tone said he already knew the answer.

“Like good prison wardens.”

Sinead felt startling warmth wrap around her fingers. She looked down to find Theron holding her hand. She exhaled. She didn’t pull away.

“This is internment,” he said, softly, and the tone hurt her heart. She knew it for what it was, but somewhere in Theron’s world there was a different kind of knowledge, a different memory that could only be harbored by those with certain ancestry – those who’ve heard stories of darkness, those who’d seen a different world than hers. It felt as though the Holdens saw this darkness arrive not with shock, but with an almost defeated expectation.

It broke her heart every time.

“How could this still be happening, and no one knows?” He asked.

Sinead frowned. “This is five hundred miles north of the middle of nowhere, Theron. No one stumbles upon a place like this unless they mean to.”

“Because we’re shifters?” He said, then his eyes went wide. He hadn’t meant to say it, but she’d known. If they let him onto the property – if they considered him one of the Holdens, then he was like the rest of them.

And by the temperature of his hand alone, she’d known with utter certainty - Theron was like Eddie.

“No one would speak up for us. The tribes don’t speak of us. We don’t share our stories with just anyone,” Theron said, and suddenly let go of her hand. He was up now, pacing. “Has anyone tried to dig under it? The fence? Have they done a perimeter check?”

She gave him a half laugh and displayed her forearm to him. She took hold of his hand, drawing up his index finger, then ran it over her skin.

The sensation unnerved her in a way she hadn’t expected. Still, she fought to hide it from him. A moment later, they both exhaled at the same time.

They’d both been holding their breath.

“What is that?” He asked.

She touched her own fingertips to her skin. There was something hard there, just under her skin. She gave a sad smile. “It’s a tracker. We all have them.”

His eyebrows shot up. “What do you mean? They put this in you?”

He touched her arm again, this time with more purpose.

She nodded, fighting to stifle a whimper of surprise and excitement.

Where the hell did that come from?

“If we congregate in one place for too long, they come. If any one person spends too much time along the perimeter, they come. If a tracker stops working, they come. Darrell cut his out after they injected them. Baird hunted him down for it. Shot him in the back with a new tracker.”

Sinead went quiet a moment, remembering the sound of Darrell’s cries as he went down. Everyone had thought he was dead.

Theron was agitated now, his feet falling heavier with each step. “No one knows? I know we’re not like other people, but a fucking internment camp? And they’re starving you, aren’t they? That fence doesn’t just keep you in – there’s no game. There’s no hunting, is there?”

Sinead looked up at him, suddenly feeling an endless rush of patience. She knew all the things he was just now realizing – just now railing against.

“There are no trees in sight – how do you keep warm in the winters?”

Sinead gave a sad smile. “I have space heaters. On the really cold stretches, I stay with Pearl or Pauloosie and Cara.

There looked to be a fire rising in his chest. She’d seen this before – just before Darrell got himself shot. “How big is The Extension? Acreage?”

“We’re about five miles, squared as far as we know,” she said. She watched him for a long moment before she spoke again. “Don’t do it.”

The wind howled outside the window, betraying a turn in the weather.

Theron turned back to her, startled. “Do what?”

She softened her eyes, taking a moment to let the silence speak for her. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking of fighting back. It’s no use.”

“How can you say that?”

“They watch us. They watch us all the time. If we do anything they don’t like they punish us.”

“How? How do they punish you?”

Theron lunged down to his knees in front of her, taking her hands in his. She stiffened, but fought not to let the touch draw a sound again.

Good grief, why did he affect her this way?

“They take food away. Sometimes, they give us less gas for the generators. Sometimes, none at all. If we do something they don’t like, they make sure we don’t do it again.”