Change in Life

Chapter 30. ...Until We Are All Blind

Rather than waiting the next twenty-four hours in upbeat anticipation of the upcoming release from their own homely dirt cage, instead, Blake and Jade spent it in deep mourning. A hollow despair they never deserved. The spirits of their lost cubs had left the den, yet the ambient feelings of their presence still remained. The haunting waft of their delicate scent and the darkened stain in the back corner where Jade had given birth were the only things that reminded them of a better, stunted, time. Now those solemn remaining features tormented them with memories of what had happened. And they couldn't escape it.

For Jade this was most heart wrenching. A few hours after her own terrible deed, she went into denial and fell into a pit of severe despair. While Blake tossed and turned from the nightmares of the human kind, she remained half awake. From fear and self-loathing, she forced herself to remain conscious. More as a punishment derived for penance. What right did she have to sleep when she had just put her cub to the eternal one? Delusions soon tugged her psyche and she found herself grooming her mate, wishing him to be Sky, while he frantically dealt with demons summoned brought on by the havoc of the last few nights.

Her body ached for their return in a way not felt the year before. Last year was not helped; something she couldn't control had taken her first litter mercilessly and without prejudice. Yet the impact of having being the right hand of death this season withered a sacred aspect of herself that changed her away from a vixen who took lives for just food.

Many times she wanted to give in to instinct and go out, dig up her young and take them to a safer place. There had to be a better place than here. Two litters and both ended in heartache. There was such promise this year. She had Blake. What more could she have asked for? What she didn't ask for was the series of events he invoked that turned him into an overprotective monster.

The loss of children was hard for Blake also. Although he hardly had a chance to truly know what his daughter's behavior would really be like, he felt he had been with her from minute one, providing what compassion he could. What lot of good that did. The care he showed angered those who hated him from afar. It seemed that the more he tried to help defend, protect, provide, the more intense the effect of the reciprocation was.

While Jade wept as she avoided the sandman at all distressing costs, Blake tried to find refuge from the horror that was the result of the invasion in foggy harrowing dreams. His mind was the last place he thought of for escape, yet it couldn't be helped as exhaustion took him. Over and over in helpless bursts. The nightmares he dreamed where that coming from the eyes of those he knew who were lost to the humans.

First came Brock.

Blake never knew how Brock died, but seeing how rashly the hunters were behaving, he could only imagine. The only thing he knew was that he had fallen into a trap because he believed Brock had scavenged a meal from his stash in the desperate bid of survival during the cull. The images he saw felt like those of his own only marred by sudden shifts of place and light. Clear planes became darkened woods in a blurry wave as sudden as a shift of an eye, and scents and feelings were partially hindered by artificiality of the dreamscape. All else though, he was living history through the bodies of the lost.

He... Brock, was in bliss at the time. The air was dense with humidity and all was calm. Gunshots were heard but he thought nothing of it. Only when they continued and became closer, along side the bellowing of excited dogs, did he become wary. He couldn't smell them, so he felt he was alright. Only after the barrage of bullets did he feel insecure. But by the time that moment came, events were already rolling over his control.

Brock's heart raced as he found his mate exiting the trees near the river, around a mile downstream from the bottleneck of the lake. She was heavy with young. Her deep luminous green eyes stared with worry at the approach of something they could never predict. Brock said something to her in a fretting mumble of the dream, yet Blake lost its meaning as soon as it was said in the thumping pulses of the occasion and the wavy blur of seamless glares at a shift of scenery.