We Walk As Wolves

Chapter 37

Cass

Cass stood at the edge of the balcony, watching the sun set behind the ocean's waves from the top of the Lost Ones' tree. Colors stained the sky. Blue, pink, red. Natural colors.

Laughter rang out from the hut below, and Cass cocked his ear toward it as the wind blew the conversation up to him.

"Foxy's getting a little slow in his old age," Scout laughed, and the sound of a muffled curse followed after.

"I think it's the new look," Reed taunted. "Makes you look more like a beaver."

"Beavers are brown, idiot."

"Finch," Cass smiled as the wind brought him Dells's voice. "I think I have the right to poke a hole in him."

Poe's rare laugh came next. "At least give him a good clock on the head with it."

"I'll clock all your heads together if you keep up that whining."

As the sun sank deeper into the earth, Cass's smile faded, finding himself painting a different picture of the group in the hut - one that had a lost girl with dark freckles and a wild smile, a red bow always strapped to her spine. Maybe, in some other reality, the boy she loved would be standing beside her.

But the world, even though most of its cruelty and wickedness had been tamed under Cass's ruling, wasn't as easy as Wilder's games. Redd had been a girl with a craving for the wicked. Wilder had been a boy with an appetite for self-destruction. Together, they had devoured everything they touched. Cass wondered if that included each other. He supposed it might have. Love between two people was as dark and as treacherous as a trek through the Lost Forest.

The wind blew a gentle warning to him just before Cass heard the footsteps. His mouth dipped into a smile as Dells walked up beside him, leaning his elbows on the railing.

"Scout stole your blade again?" Cass raised a brow. "You've really lost your touch."

"They're in cahoots with the trees," Dells said. "Terribly discriminatory, if you ask me. Hardly fair at all."

Cass glanced back out at the ocean as the sky around them faded to black. Dells was nearly invisible, a shadow disappearing once the sun bid goodnight.

He's like us, his sister had told him. Changed. Sometimes for worse, sometimes for better. Regardless, we live as long as the island does. Take care of it.

It was unsettling, in a way. Cass would live, and he would die. A new Equal would take his place. Of course, giving and taking a few decades. But Dells would always be stuck where he was, watching each Equal come, and then watching them leave. The boy who'd been terrified of being alone, destined to live in abandonment for eternity. A part of Cass wondered vaguely if he'd be able to handle it.

He took in a deep breath as his eyes started to water, pushing the thought away. He'll adapt. He always does. "Hate to tell you this, Dells. But I think you're going to be stuck with me for quite a while."

"Won't nearly be long enough, Cassy." Then, with a smirk, he added, "Most likely because you'll be eaten before then."

Cass laughed. "What do we do until my unfortunate premature demise?"

Dells gave a short shrug, running a few fingers over his shadowed hair. "I go where you go." Then he turned back to the horizon, jutting his chin at the world around them. "Think you can come up with a name for it? I don't know about you, but after everything, the Island is starting to sound rather bland."

Cass smiled as he followed Dells's gaze, his once pale blue eyes as black as the night around them.

He saw the red moon, the mermaids chasing each other through the peaceful waves, the children in the tree who never aged, the boy standing beside him who had become more shadow than human. The island was a land where things existed that never should have. "I'm sure I can think of something."

As the night settled in around them, both boys turned their heads toward the Land of Beasts. Both knew what they were looking for, but neither ever admitted what they found.

Once the war had ceased, taking two hearts with it, and Cass had taken the crown, two stars had appeared in the empty sky that night. They hung over the battlefield, watching over the world together.

One large star, and a smaller one - just to the right.

The End