The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 1 - Nearly Dark

I could still feel the blood on my skin. I had thought that would go away eventually, but it had been two months, and it hadn't yet. All it took was the slightest smear of mud on my arm, and I was pulling out my water bottle to scrub it away. Just in case I had missed a spot.

This time, I had pulled out my water bottle and found it empty. So the stream had been a welcome sight. The alternative was scrubbing the offending piece of skin against my jeans until it was red and sore. It worked, but not for very long.

Kara hadn't complained about our overly-frequent water stops yet. But I suspected it was only going to be a matter of time. It was starting to get silly, and I knew that, but I also knew that I couldn't think about anything else until I had washed away the imaginary blood.

"I like that sound," Kara said. "The metallic one. What is it?"

I had to listen for it. The river was noisy enough to drown out most things. It was only when I straightened up, letting the canteen dangle against my side, that I heard the soft tinkling that came and went with every lazy gust of cold air. It didn't take long to spot it, hung from a tree above my head.

"Oh, the wind chime?" I asked. "It's pretty, isn't it?"

She nodded slowly. "A wind chime. Okay. Is that a kind of bird?"

"No, Kara. It's ... um, it's a little hard to explain. But look up - it's just above us. People hang them so that they knock together when the wind blows."

It was a strange place for a wind-chime. As far as I could tell, our little stream was in the middle of nowhere. We had gone four days without seeing a trace of human life, so it was safe to say there was not much in the way of civilisation nearby. And yet, there it was. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure there was music in this peaceful little glade.

It was made of broken bottles, as far as I could tell. The pieces of glass were softly curved, and they caught the sun every time they span, sending chinks of light dancing over the trees around them. Kara's eyes followed that light with an almost child-like fascination.

I went back to rinsing my wrist. The water helped, as usual, but it always took some scrubbing before I was convinced it was clean. There was only so much I could disguise it. But if my companion thought it was strange, she didn't say anything. Luckily for me, the whole world was strange to her right now, and the wind chime was a lot more interesting than I was.

"It's nearly dark," Kara told me.

She had to raise her voice to be heard over the babbling water. I had left her on the muddy bank because she couldn't walk on the stones. Not without my arm to support her and a good deal of patience. Her entire world had been made of concrete until last year, so she had never learnt. We were working on that. The fact that she could manage to trek through the forest with me was evidence of exactly how much progress she had already made.

"I know," I told her.

It took another half-minute to wash away my patch of ghostly blood. When I'd finished that, and the itching, crawling sensation was finally gone, I put the canteen into the current. Kara's was already full and hanging from my hip.

"It's nearly-"

"Dark. Yes. You said."

"We need to go," she said waspishly.

Kara was ... very odd. I didn't ever think that in a nasty way, but there was no denying it was true. Her notion that you had to be in bed by the time it was dark and that you had to stay there until it was light again was one of the least odd things about her, in all honesty, so I never fought it very hard.