We Walk As Wolves

Chapter 5

Cass

Wet sand spewed from his mouth as Cass shot upright, heaving up swallowed ocean. 

His throat burned, and sand fell from his hair into his eyes. A thin coat of silver scales lined his arms and a cluster of seashells coated the edges of his fingers. He shook his hand in an attempt to dislodge them, but they stuck like glue on his skin. 

A cold wind coiled around his body, brushing against his face, a gentle nudge on the side of his cheek. Reluctantly, he glanced to his left. Beneath the moon's red haze, the ocean was silent, and the thick waves that had beat against the sides of Pitch had softened into gentle surfs. The boat, its crew, and the creatures that lay beneath the dark water had disappeared. Gone. 

Cass sat rigid on the beach, cold, wet sand crumbling beneath his tightening fingers. 

Gone. 

A single word. Was it really so simple, so easy? To keep a grip so tight it had made his hands blister, for years, only for the world to smash his fingers open one by one and drag it all away?After everything, all the endless panic ripping away at his stomach, all the broken bones he'd suffered and the cold nights he'd thought if the crooks lurking in the moon's light didn't get her first, the weather would - could it all really have been compiling up to this? A fate so blindingly simple? 

One sword, two hands holding him back. A lifetime of distance between them. 

Cass shut his eyes, trembling in the lashing wind. He hadn't held the blade to her throat, he hadn't plunged it through, but her blood was on his hands. Simple. Who was he to think he'd ever been enough to keep her safe? 

The body somewhere in the water should have been his. Tumbling, blistering, rotting - 

Every inch of his stomach fractured. He rocked forward, catching himself on his hands, back arching like a cat's as his body emptied itself. Then a scream ravaged the beach. A ragged, broken sound so animalistic it took him a moment to realize it had come out of him. 

He screamed until he was heaving air, until the bleeding of his throat was no longer just from swallowing salt. 

He linked his hands behind his head, grappling for a steady breath, knees digging deep into the sand until it felt more like thorns against his wet skin. He sat there for minutes. Hours. Lifetimes. Trying to forget, trying to tighten his own reins, trying to shove out the image of his sister flashing behind his eyes, a little girl with blonde hair and a fragile smile he'd always been so afraid of breaking. 

When the image flickered, fragmented, like glass shattering on tile, he lurched to his feet. He didn't know where he was going, could hardly see more than a step in front of him, just knew he had to walk, had to move, as if as long as he did it fast enough, he could outrun the new thing spinning in his head: the smile falling away, replaced by red spurting from a slash in her throat. 

With a kind of desperate effort, he made himself take a step forward, and then another, and then another. Until the backs of his legs burned and the ground began to cave in beneath his feet. He was getting higher, away from the dense, waterlogged sand near the shoreline. 

He continued up. Up, up, up in a darkness so thick it was blinding, stopping only once he stumbled against a tree, one wrong step away from breaking his nose on its trunk. He pressed his forehead to it, attempted to reconstruct himself into the boy he'd been before waking up on the beach, before he knew bones could shimmer in moonlight, before he'd failed her. 

But he wasn't sure he understood who that boy was any longer. 

Cries snarled around him, far enough away they didn't make him spook immediately, animalistic enough to discern too far wouldn't be far enough. He wondered if they could smell the blood on him. The thought made Bella's old image jerk and stutter in his head, spraying red across her skin, violently thrashing between the two until his stomach rolled again.