Ghost Towns

Five

Rye curled into the one chair on the front porch of the cabin, blanket laid over her legs. Her eyes followed Jax as he paced back and forth, and then when he got tired of that, up and down the three wooden steps. For once, Rye bit her tongue. She had to believe that he would tell her if given the time to think about how to say it.

"What human town did you come from, again?" He stopped abruptly, meeting Rye's gaze across the porch.

"Goldcrest," Rye said, barely above a whisper. She didn't know if anything still existed of that town.

Jax hissed under his breath, "it makes sense," he muttered to himself, and she had to restrain herself from actually shaking the answers out of him.

Rye couldn't stand how cryptic he was. And about things she actually needed to know. The more mysterious he unintentionally was, the more she just wanted to crack him open and know everything.

The wind whistled somewhere where there was a gap in the wood of the house. Birdsong picked up beyond the treelines somewhere.

Her patience paid off, just as it began to thin.

With a deep, weary breath, Jax leaned over the railing, resting on his forearms. His back to her, facing the woods, he began.

"Do you see that hill?" He asked, pointing.

Rye squinted. The crown of it poked just above the trees, maybe two kilometres away. "Yes,"

"In the same direction, several hours away, is your town. And between the hill and Goldcrest is one corner of the territory of the Onyx Wolves."

The trees shivered in a gust of wind, and Rye shivered subconsciously with them. All she could think about when she heard that name was the wolf who had carved the flesh out of her shoulder.

"The Onyx Wolves are an old pack of werewolves," his voice dropped low, falling into the lilting rhythm of his story, the part of his face that she could see gone utterly stony. "For hundreds of years they coexisted with all the other life in this area - humans, animals, and other beasts alike."

He looked in the other direction, briefly, "in fact, there is another powerful pack far to the west, and the Onyx Wolves used to live alongside them like brethren.

"I guess that's where the whole problem began. Wolves are territorial. Protective and impulsive. Loyal to their own, and only their own. And what could have been a few genuine misunderstandings spiralled into an irreparable rift between the Onyx Wolves and their neighbours, the Midnight Blue Pack."

He turned so Rye couldn't see his face at all. She could tell though, that he had grown tense, his shoulders tightening and spreading his shirt thin.

"There is only one pack now." Even his voice was heavy and terse.

His hair ruffled in the wind, already messy and getting messier. He seemed completely oblivious to it. The ribbon in Rye's hair came undone, and she busied herself with tying it back in.

"What happened?" Rye couldn't stand the apprehension that came with silence.

He turned then, to the sound of the voice, and whatever Rye was going to say next died on her lips.

Jax had silver eyes, and they were almost glowing. His face was wholly different than it had been at breakfast, but Rye could not pinpoint what the change was. It was as if a stranger stared back at her, and it was very, very unsettling.

Perhaps something about the tale had upset him? But Rye couldn't think of anything he said that would have reasonably warranted his reaction.

"Jax?" Her voice came out squeaky and a little frightened, but Rye didn't care.