What He Heard

Chapter 14

            Willow stared at him for a moment. “Okay,” she said, stretching the word out. “That’s not exactly out of the ordinary. I hear the wind too, especially when it shrieks.”

            “No, that’s not…” Rune shook his head and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “That came out wrong. I mean, I do hear the wind, but it’s not like what you’re thinking. It’s… You know how sometimes you’ll hear a snatch of music or someone’s voice on a breeze as it blows past you?”

            She nodded slowly. “Yeah…”

            “For as long as I can remember, the winds have brought me information that way, except it’s a lot clearer than when it happens by accident. And they seem to always bring me everything they can get that’s related to me. It’s not always good. Hell, it’s not often good, not when it’s people talking about me behind my back.”

            Willow blinked, her mind slowly processing the information. Suddenly, all those times Rune had said he’d heard something, all the times he’d known what was ahead of them before her, and how that rumour about him hearing voices had gotten started. “You hear what people say about you? Like everything they say about you?”

            Rune sighed. “Yeah.”

            “Damn! That’s got to suck. It certainly explains why you’re such a cynical bastard though,” she said, one side of her mouth quirking up. “I guess I’ll have to stop complaining about you all the time then, since you’re just going to hear about it anyway.”

            He grinned, his whole body draining of tension. “Don’t even pretend like you do. All I’ve ever gotten from you and your family is stuff about not letting me find out about your curse, which now that I know, has pretty much dried up the info I get off you. Though, I think because we spend so much time together, the winds have started bringing me stuff about you, too. It’s how I got the sasquatch hunters. I got a couple of snippets of their conversations, enough to figure out what they were up to. That was last night.”

            “Well, that’s good. At least they haven’t been there long. You come home with me tonight, and we’ll both tell Uncle Allistair,” Willow said. Seeing the look on Rune’s face, she rolled her eyes. “Clearly we don’t have to tell him about your wind-thing. Just that you overheard the hunters. It won’t even be a lie, exactly.”

            “And I thought I was the devious one.”

            “No, but you’re still evil,” Willow said, punching Rune in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt for a few moments. “That’s for not telling me earlier. You had to know, that as a sasquatch, I was going to believe you.”

            Rune winced and rubbed his arm. “No need to get violent, you damn Neanderthal,” he said. “I told you, I’ve never told anyone. Even my mom doesn’t know.”

            That had her frowning. “Seriously? How does she not know?”

            He shrugged. “I figured out pretty early on that it wasn’t something normal, and that telling others was just going to make me a freak. And well, when I was younger, people never really questioned how I knew stuff. I assume, since Mom’s never mentioned anything about it, that I got it from my father’s side. But I don’t know. I could just be some weird mutant or something.”

            Willow snorted. “If either of us is a mutant, it’s me. I’m frigging half-bear. Oh man! No wonder you didn’t freak out when you found out I was a sasquatch! I thought you’d taken the whole thing way too well. No one’s ever accepted us that easily.”

            Rune chuckled. “Yeah, I wasn’t about to freak. One, I knew your family was cursed since the winds brought me a whole bunch of you and your cousins’ conversations. Two, I hear things on the wind, so it’s not like I can judge you. And three, you have no idea how relieved I was when I found out. It was both confirmation that I’m not crazy, well, no more than anyone suspected, and that there are potentially other people like me. Or at least, people who are also other.”

            “No wonder we got along so well so quickly,” Willow replied, shaking her head but smiling. “We’re both freaks of nature. Makes you wonder if there are any other people like us out there. Maybe like vampires, or zombies, or whatever.”

            “Or werewolves.”

            “Nah, werewolves aren’t real. At least, my family’s pretty sure they aren’t. We think, especially since most of the stories about them involve silver being how you kill them, that someone saw one of the kids change and mistook the bear form for a wolf. At least, we’ve never come across any other evidence that they’re real, and you’d think, given our habit of going into the middle of forests for our vacations and scent marking the whole area, that we’d have run into them at some point if they did exist.”

            “So much for adding another hairy beast to our freak brigade.”

            Willow’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t think I won’t hit you again. And really, you think we’re actually going to meet someone else who’s just as weird as we are? The odds against the two of us meeting were already probably astronomical.”

            “You don’t know that. Maybe there are way more people like us, but each group thinks they’re alone and does their best to hide. What if it’s actually normal humans who are the minority?”

            She chuckled. “You would think like that. I’m pretty sure, given the variety of places my family has picked up spouses, that we’d have come across other groups by now if they were common. Now c’mon, we’re going to be late for class.”

            Leading the way back inside, Willow couldn’t help the grin that slowly spread itself across her face. She was glad, now more than ever, that she’d met Rune.