Claimed│✓

THIRTY: AN OLD WIVES' TALE

[twenty-nine]

"Just a small fire between us child, my light has nearly gone out. No need to fight nature." she told me as the small fire I'd started sparked to life between us.The embers burning my nose but I didn't care for it. Her crooked smile was the only thing that held my attention. How did I not know this woman could speak?

She continued to stare at me, her jet black eyes roving over anything she could see. That night at the bonfire when the elders had sent me away I had suspected she was carrying something, perhaps it was her last confession, her last wish for friends and family that she wanted to impart on them but she had none. There was no one for her to speak to, no one to mourn her properly.

Now she held something for me to hear. We were not related by blood only a bond; she was just another she-wolf.She wasn't even born of this pack. Somehow without even being claimed or going through the Pits at the gathering she'd found herself here with me as her caretaker and she, apparently, the only witness to the havoc this pack wrought on my family.

Her hair lay dead, beside her equally dry and cracked skin, lines upon lines of age having stretched the surface of her body into a gruesome masterpiece of wisdom and tales, tales of the dark that is. It seemed to me as if she had never sat any straighter than now,at the black of night. When sleep was the only commander, she stayed steady, eyes alive and well; even at the brink of death.

"What have you lost, child?" she asked me. Child she called me but I was no child, physically but mentally,spiritually I felt helpless. I'd thought I'd grown out this narrow-minded view but I'd only covered it up in my desperation for something better, more pleasing to my soul. I never thought for myself and look at where it led me; justifying the misdeeds of others to make my pain go away. If I forgave them it would make things easier my mother said, the moon even pushed me to that conclusion or I might've been dead.

"My mother is asleep, and my father is missing." I replied, staring at the small light crackling between us.Chaos was the only thing we'd found once we'd arrived.

"Missing,you say." was her only reply. I didn't want to contemplate what that was supposed to mean, I had no time for riddles. She was going to die and seemed more willing to spill her guts than ever before yet her patience still held a tight grip, as if she were playing a game, refusing to kneel to circle of life, bypassing the natural occurrences of life and death.

Death would be all Jensen and Todd and their families would possess once they turned up.Life for my father if he was still alive, I hoped he was. He seemed so invincible to me, while my mother was hanging on barely breathing as it was.

Asleep was the best way to put into words for me what my mother looked like when I held her cold hands.She had always been my only source of warmth for as long as I could remember and I'd left her here to die, maybe that's why I felt so cold. My warmth had disappeared not even leaving the slightest trace of having existed.

When the boys had come to play with me, to hear my voice I could barely off them a thing about their mother. After seeing the state of my own mother. I wasn't so sure I could give the boys an honest answer on how to live without one. They knew better than I did, they didn't know what it meant to feel her, lie in her bosom be comforted for years on end.I'd never done it before and I didn't want to do it now.Ben had begged me to come see them and I gave in. Madison was as healthy as she could be, a few months into her pregnancy.And his mother still skeptical of me but a sense of despair trumped any disapproval she could have for me.I was a Beta now, higher in rank, where were her own leaders.Gone.

"What was it that your mother's body held when they dragged her from the forest's edge?" she asked me.I looked up from the fire finding much more sympathy in something that could burn me and not from the woman I'd taken care of before. Why did she allow me to touch her if all she really wanted was to sneer in my face?