Born of Blood

Chapter 18

Scarlet could hear the roar of the wind.

The whispers of the leaves, the rushing of water from the high mountains to the low slopes. She could hear the deer two miles out walking further into the thick brush, the rain beating against the flesh of the earth an army of chants echoing through her eardrums. She could hear this man gasping, his heart thundering from his chest and sputtering words attempting to leave his rain soaked lips that his brain wasn't assisting in forming. He stared at her like she were a ghost, a spirit come to personally haunt him to the ends of the Earth, an omen of death in the wild storm howling around their frozen bodies.

Scarlet knew she wasn't a ghost and she knew she had never seen this man, so why did he stare at her with a terrified familiarity? The rain beat against her skin, hail leaving red dots across her flesh as the storm mixed with the winter of the foreign land she stood upon. The wind pushed its rage across the unknown environment, screeching its fury at the interruption of its relationship with Scarlet. Her eyelashes fluttered with raindrops, her lips dripped with water as the rain kissed her in greeting. The storm missed her as much as she missed it, it needed her as much as she needed it.

Her scalp tingled, a deep itch she wanted to take her nails through like a wild animal with fleas, but she knew to never move in the eyes of a predator. No matter his appearance, this man was larger than Scarlet, his height and weight leaving her without a doubt that she would be taken down should this lead to a fight. Her arms shook in the freezing temperatures, her toes and fingertips a bright pink while her lips began to tremble with the settling cold.

He stared, his heart stuttered in his chest as he could see her skull slowly piling itself back into place, his stomach rolled and he thought he might be ill. Her flesh of her scalp bubbled and boiled and grew itself over the purchase of her corrected scull until it met and her cells mended back together. Scar tissue was visibly thick, running along her hairline, under her dark chocolate hair, and Jacobs heart thumped in his chest. Her brain had just moved, he just saw her brain tissue go from black and rotted to a fleshy pink. It had healed from the foul, death smelling, necrotic tissue he had just seen that morning, to a healthy, vibrant tissue that showed no remnants of the injury that had plagued her. Her skull just reconnected, the bones of her shattered cranium plucking themselves from her tissue and laying back together as a puzzle would be completed by a gentile player.

She had been dead.

Just that morning Jacob had heard the monotonous sound of a flatline echoing through the hospital wing as he entered through the storm that ravaged the mountains Sendöw rested on. He had pulled the pulse ox from her index finger, and had removed the leads and IV drips from her cold, stiff, skin and allowed her to rest in death, undisturbed. She had died alone, in the night. He had notified Sabina after sending a prayer to the Goddess for her safe delivery, and in turn the Alpha had been informed, just before the worst rainstorm of the year, grew double in its fury.

Fog stuck to the trees trunks, rolling thickly through the soaked grass as the clouds covered the high mountains, the animals rushed to find shelter before the first drops fell to the ground. Sendöw members allowing their children a moment in the harsh, freezing, weather before hearing the cracks of thunder and the roaring wind and pulling them inside their homes. They could feel the duress of this weather, they could feel its need to spread and reach all the land it could, the odd sense it was searching, prowling over their territory. It had a claim on that mountain, and it was going to find it.

He had just come from the site where they were digging her grave. It was on the peak of the mountain, beside the largest Sitka Spruce any had ever identified on their land. It's broad trunk climbed high through the sky and its leaves branched over a deep cliff, it overlooked the lake far below the mountain that eventually met the mouth of the ocean. In the spring you could see whales breeching the water as they sought mates, their large bodies creating explosions as they slammed against the surface of the ocean, a world only they could know. It was a beautiful spot, the space Orion had reserved for himself if he were to ever pass away, and he had decided to share it with this woman, this stranger, his only mate.