Wild Ones (12 page)

I woke up with
the sun streaming through a gap in the curtains and trying to fry
my eyeballs. I sat up when I saw a familiar face leaning over me
and smirking. Millie was awake before me, and she looked a lot
better this morning than she had yesterday. I grinned back in
relief, suddenly really pleased that we'd risked this trip into the
unknown. I had lain in bed last night worrying that I'd dragged my
sister hundreds of miles from her home to an unfamiliar place
populated by strangers. Witches, no less.

"Wake up, Madz.
Breakfast is ready and Lucy and the others want to talk to us."

"You look
better today."

"I feel
great. Jane says I had a specific vitamin deficiency that some
women get when they're pregnant with vampire babies. She gave me
some sort of weird tea to drink. Tastes disgusting, but I feel like
a human being again. Come
on
,
now. I'm hungry."

"OK, OK, I'm
coming." I started dressing while she paced the room impatiently.
She appeared to be wearing a fresh pair of jeans and another
t-shirt, both of which looked new.

"Where did you
get the clothes?"

"These guys
have everything. They have a room in this house with only clothes
in, all new, and all sizes. Even undies."

"Brilliant," I
said. "I didn't think to pack anything before I came to find
you."

"I know. I
brought some stuff up for you in your size and packed it in there."
She indicated the dresser that stood between the two simple pine
beds we had slept on last night. "There's a bathroom just outside
this room with a massive shower. Bliss."

"Give me five
minutes," I said as I grabbed a set of clothing from one of the
drawers of the dresser and ducked out of the room. Millie and I had
always been more or less the same size. That plus the way we looked
and the fact that our names started with 'm' resulted in us being
called M&M at school. Not overly original, I know, but it
stuck.

Ten minutes
later we found ourselves walking barefoot down a carpeted passage
behind a young woman called Jess, who had apparently been sent to
find us. She led us to a large room with a big rectangular oak
table in the centre, and several chairs around it, all of which
were currently occupied, apart from two nearest us. Lucy stood as
we entered the room, and indicated for us to sit. We sat, just as
we had done all those years ago in a small dark tent at a country
fair.

"Witches," she
spoke to the women gathered at the table. "This is Madeleine
Grantham and the Lady Milla Blake."

"Wait a
second," I said uncertainly. There were so many eyes in this room,
and they were making me nervous. "Those aren't our surnames. And
Millie isn't a Lady anything. What's going on here?"

Lucy smiled
benevolently at us.

"We are all
three governed by the same Law, Madeleine; the witches, the wolves
and the bloodfeeders, or vampires as they are more commonly known.
Witches are here to balance the activities of those other two
groups - we are the Keepers of the Law. If a vampire or a wolf
breaks the Law, we encourage the group to step in and deal out the
appropriate punishment. For example, we know that Marcus Arnold has
laid a hand on the Lady Blake, and by law this is punishable by
death. Titus Blake is a just ruler, and he will see that the Law is
obeyed, but others before him were not so righteous, and we have
had to intervene in the past to ensure that justice was meted out.
That is who we are, and it is what we do."

"However," Lucy
paused briefly before continuing, "over the years our function has
by necessity evolved. We now offer sanctuary to those women who
seek to flee the wolves and the vampires, and we do this for two
reasons. The first is the unassailable fact that we too are women,
and the wolves and vampires have not been good to women in the
past, and we have sympathised with their plight. We have felt their
pain."

"The second
reason we offer sanctuary is to allow the wolves and vampires to
speak with their women on neutral ground, and to facilitate a
reconciliation between the two. Paranormals are possessive, often
violently so, and many people who have attempted to protect these
women from them have died in the past. The simple fact is that once
you have been claimed by a paranormal, and impregnated, you belong
to them under our Law, and even more importantly, in their eyes.
You can flee, but you will never escape them. They will hunt you
relentlessly, and kill anyone and anything that stands in their
way. We seek to avoid that."

I thought my
jaw was going to dislocate the way my mouth had fallen open. I
glanced across at Millie who looked equally shocked, and horrified
too. This was definitely not turning out the way I had hoped. It
was starting to feel a lot more like a trap than a sanctuary, and
it sounded suspiciously like we would be forced to go back to those
bastards. Reconcile with Cade Grantham? I would rather open a
fucking vein.

"I know this
will come as a shock to you both, and I must apologise for
misleading you, although that was not my intention. We as witches
and Keepers of the Law recognise your marriage to Cade Grantham,
and Lady Milla's marriage to Atticus, son of Titus and heir to the
vampire regime."

"You are
fucking kidding me," said Millie. Lucy just shook her head.

"You are
welcome to remain here as long as you want, but when you leave, it
will be with the the paranormal who claims you. The risk to
innocent life is too great otherwise, and we cannot allow
that."

"Your Law needs
changing," muttered Millie angrily. "Do you have any idea how many
women Atticus and Julius have raped? And that disgusting Marcus and
his gang were going to rape another innocent woman, and me too if
they got half the chance. They knew it would kill me, but they
didn't care. What does your precious Law have to say about
that?"

"Our Law does
not recognise the concept of rape," said Lucy quietly. "But the
intentional killing of a woman is forbidden. I am glad you alerted
me to Marcus' intentions. I will have to discuss the issue with
Titus. The Arnolds have always been difficult, and it is probably
time we did something about them. I will attend to that
immediately. In the meantime you are welcome to explore the house
and grounds, but I cannot allow you to leave yet. Your breakfast
will be served shortly."

And with that
she stood and left, shortly followed by everyone else in the room
apart from us, of course. I looked across at Millie.

"I'm sorry,
Mills," I said regretfully. "I didn't mean for this to happen."

"That's OK,
Maddie. I guess it was too good to be true. At least we're safe
here, and Lucy did say we could stay as long as we liked. Let's
eat. We can worry about this on a full stomach."

"You're
obsessed with food," I told her jokingly, feeling guilty for
bringing her here.

"Absolutely,"
she grinned at me. Jess reappeared and indicated for us to follow
her, which we did. She took us to a large kitchen where we were
given eggs on toast and thick chunks of bacon for breakfast. Millie
choked down some foul-smelling tea, and I drank milk, which I'd
been craving for a couple of weeks now. We thanked Jess and the
cook, and left the kitchen to explore the grounds outside. The
house felt too much like a prison just then.

We ended up
sitting on the grass under a big old beech tree on the edge of the
lawn that circled the house. It was a beautiful day, warm and
bright, and we sat leaning our backs against the trunk of the tree,
and our legs straight out in front of us.

"You know,
Maddie, it's almost as if everyone is conspiring against us. What
are we going to do?"

"I wonder what
would happen if we terminated these goddamn pregnancies? We should
ask Lucy."

"I don't think
it would make much of a difference. They could always force you to
have more."

"That sucks.
What about if I couldn't have more? I would seriously consider
having a hysterectomy to avoid this life they expect me to
live."

Millie
considered the implications of this. "You're right," she said.
"That might work. But getting a doctor to perform one for you when
you're young and healthy is going to be really tricky."

"I hadn't
thought of that. Damn." We sat in silence for a while.

"We could
negotiate with them. Offer to let them have the baby in exchange
for your freedom."

"D'you know,
that is actually a very good idea." I was impressed.

"I know," she
smirked at me.

"And you,
Mills? Don't think I haven't noticed the way you keep saying 'you'
instead of 'we'. What do you want to do?"

"I'm not sure."
She paused. I waited in silence for her to continue.

"On the
one hand, Atticus hurt me. He and Julius basically held me down and
raped me. And it
hurt
. You
have no idea how big they are, Madz. But the problem is that I sort
of understand why they did it."

"
What
?" I was horrified
to hear her say that, and didn't bother to hide it.

"I know.
It sounds crazy. But I met Marcus, that vampire I was telling Lucy
about. He and another vampire accosted me in that shopping centre.
They were going to do much worse things to me, and Marcus knew it
would kill me, and I could see that he
liked
that. But as soon as I showed him the
tattoo on my wrist, they both backed off. I guess what I'm trying
to say is that if having the wild gene attracts evil like that,
then I'm glad Atticus did what he did, because being pregnant keeps
me safe. Even though he did it for his own reasons, and against my
will, the outcome is better for me than if he hadn't done
it."

I sat watching
her face as she spoke, seeing the truth in her eyes, and how much
it cost her to say those words to me, knowing how I'd react. What
she said made a strange kind of sense, and I wondered if the fact
that I'd been pretty much undisturbed by male attention in the past
few months could be due to a similar protection. I remembered how
much I'd been pestered by men in the months before I'd run into the
wolves. There had been a few times that I'd been really worried. At
one stage there were four different guys following me at random
times of the day. I hadn't thought about it much since they'd
disappeared from my life, but I wondered now. They'd been there one
day, and the next they were gone. And I hadn't experienced anything
similar since. For a shit magnet like me that was something of a
miracle.

"Two things,
Millie," I said. She looked at me with apprehensive curiosity.

"How big
exactly? Their dicks, I mean. I'm assuming that's what you mean
when you say they're big." She blushed furiously, just as I had
known she would. I grinned in satisfaction.

"Short answer?"
I nodded.

"Almost as
thick as a Coke can and twice as long."

"Jesus!"

"Tell me about
it. And they have spikes too."

"
What
?" I crossed my
legs involuntarily. It was her turn to grin at my reaction. "I
know, right. But the spikes only appear after they come, and if
they keep still, the spikes go down after about half an hour.
Apparently."

"I'm surprised
you survived that."

"Me too. But
they did all they could to minimise the physical damage for me, and
that makes me hate him less than I should."

"I get that," I
said gently when I saw her anguished expression. I knew that she
was conflicted by what she felt she ought to feel, and what she did
feel, and I understood that.

We spent most
of the day under that tree, talking about possibilities, weighing
up options and exploring emotions. Eventually we decided not to
decide just then. We sat there as the afternoon drew to a close,
quiet and content for the moment just to have everything suspended
in a kind of hiatus, until we saw Jess running across the grass
towards us.

"What now," I
said sourly, and Millie giggled.

"Madeleine,"
Jess began when she finally reached us, panting slightly. "There's
a couple of wolves and another woman up at the house. They've just
arrived. Lucy said to let you know that Cade would like to speak to
you."

"Really? Gosh.
Do me a favour. Tell him to fuck off."

My heart sank
when I heard the trauma call go out. Well, to be perfectly honest
it sank some more. I was in one of the cubicles on the other side
of the ED, and I had just explained to a sweet old guy with a
younger and adoring wife that he had a couple of tumours on his
liver, and they had probably come from somewhere else, and were
probably going to kill him. Not in those words, obviously but I
could tell by the way she started sobbing that they had picked up
the gist of what I was saying. Even so, they had both thanked me,
and I walked out of that cubicle hating the CT scanner, my job and
that damn tumour for making me deliver the shittest news anyone
could never hope to hear.

I hadn't
thought this day could get much worse, but apparently it could.

Twenty minutes
later I was standing over the head of the only survivor of a three
car pileup, manipulating a laryngoscope while I tried to make out
the elusive vocal chords through a mist of blood splattering the
plastic visor I wore. I sighed with relief as they came into view,
and I slid the plastic tube between them.

"Airway
secured," I announced to the room in general, and a nurse made a
note on the large whiteboard in the corner of the huge
resuscitation bay. I inflated the balloon around the tube and taped
it in place while one of the junior docs listened for the air that
the ventilator was forcing into the patients battered lungs.