Marked In Flesh

CHAPTER 4

Windsday, Juin 6

White walls, white furniture, white clothes.

“Please, I need colors. I see the colors.”

“You don’t need colors, cs821. You just need a cut. You’ll feel better after you’re cut.”

“Please.”

“Stubborn little bitch, obsessed with colors. We recommend finger cuts as much as possible. Might as well use up that skin in case we have to remove the fingers to keep her from making drawings that dilute the prophecies.”

The feel of the razor slicing through skin. And then . . . Color. That shade of red that looked like nothing else, at least to her eyes. Floating on the euphoria that came with a cut after she began speaking, she looked at the white walls, at the dark straps that held her to the chair.

“You don’t need colors, cs821. You just need a cut.”

White walls, white ceiling, white furniture, white clothes. As she stared at the wall, part of it darkened, becoming a shape. Four legs. A tail. Massive head with horns. Another dark patch on the wall began forming another animal. And another, until there was a herd of shapes on the wall.

Then she noticed dots forming on the wall just above the herd—that shade of red unlike any other. The dots grew and began to flow down the wall, covering the herd with bloody tears.

Panting, her heart pounding, Hope scrambled out of bed and staggered to the screened window in her room, sucking in cool, early morning air as she pressed her hands against the wood windowsill.

She wasn’t in the compound anymore. The walls of her room weren’t white. The cabin used by the Wolfgard in the terra indigene settlement at Sweetwater had walls made of wood, had floors made of wood. Everything was simple and wood except for the toilet and sink in the little bathroom attached to this bedroom. But some of the drawings she had made since coming to live with Jackson and Grace and the rest of the pack were pinned to the walls. A few were even framed.

Some were just drawings of the pack, of the land, of everything that lived in the Sweetwater territory that came within the boundaries of where she was allowed to wander.

“My name is Hope Wolfsong,” she whispered. “I am not cs821. Not anymore. Never again.”

But the dream. There was more, and the more settled over her skin like a smothering film. Had to get it down on paper to show Jackson and Grace. The dream image of the animal had already faded from memory too much for her to describe with words.

She closed the shutters over the window and carefully felt her way back to her bed and the lamp on the bedside table. She clicked on the lamp and waited. Jackson and Grace sometimes slept on the porch with some of the other Wolves. Sometimes they slept in the cabin’s main room where they could hear her.

No one scratched at her door or growled. No male voice, rough from sleep and vocal chords that hadn’t fully shifted from Wolf to human, demanded to know what was wrong.

Moving as quietly as she could, she gathered her big drawing pad and the colored pencils and pastels that Jackson had bought for her. She started to turn the top page of the pad. Then she stopped and looked at the drawing she’d made just before going to bed last night. She didn’t know if it meant anything, but the last thing she’d added before blinking out of the trance she fell into sometimes when she drew pictures were the words “For Meg.”

She removed the drawing and placed the paper on the desk in her room. Returning to the bed, she sat cross-legged and set the drawing pad in front of her. But the patchwork quilt, which usually delighted her with its shapes and colors, was a distraction now. Pushing it aside, she pulled off the top sheet—white because the Others didn’t feel the need for colors in things that wouldn’t be seen once you turned off the light—and placed it on the floor. Then she settled down, picked up her pencils, and began to draw.

The shapes. Yes, she remembered the shapes. And the sky. And . . .

She searched through her pencils and pastels. Nothing! How could she not have the necessary shade?

She sprang up, pulled open a drawer in the desk, and removed the silver folding razor that had been used exclusively on her when she had lived in the Controller’s compound. Jackson had been told to let her keep the razor because, if she felt compelled to cut, using the razor was safer than all the other things that could be used to slice through fragile skin. Jackson and Grace had bought her paper and pencils, had allowed her to draw, so she had tried so very hard to be good and not cut, but . . .

“Need it,” she muttered, all her thoughts focused on the drawing taking shape on the paper. “Need that shade.”

When the color began to flow, she tossed the razor aside, dipped her fingers into the color, and continued drawing.

The scent of blood snapped Jackson Wolfgard out of a sound sleep moments before Hope screamed. Scrambling to his feet, he leaped for the bedroom door, aware that his mate, Grace, was right behind him. The Wolves who had slept on the porch or on the ground surrounding the cabin were awake and howling an alarm—or getting the pups away from potential danger.

Still shifting to human as he shoved the door open and stepped into the room, Jackson vaguely remembered some rule about adult males in human form not appearing unclothed in front of female puppies or juveniles, but he wasn’t concerned about human rules, not when Hope was staring at the drawing pad on the floor and blood from a deep slice in her left forearm dripped onto the paper and the sheet bunched up beneath it.

“Oh, Hope.” Grace sounded heartbroken.

Jackson wasn’t heartbroken; he was furious. And very frightened. The blood of the cassandra sangue was a danger to Others and humans alike. After taking in Hope, he’d heard that some of the terra indigene called the girls Namid’s creation, both wondrous and terrible.

Until now, he hadn’t thought of Hope as something terrible.

several Wolves called, using the terra indigene’s form of communication.

he ordered.

The girl herself didn’t smell like prey. None of the blood prophets did. But Hope’s blood! He’d never smelled anything quite like it, and he craved a taste of it.

Fear fueled his fury as he covered the distance between the doorway and the swaying girl. He swept up the razor she’d tossed aside. He was about to drop it on the desk when he noticed another drawing with Meg Corbyn’s name written in the bottom right corner. He set the razor away from the drawing, then turned to the girl.

Grace pulled off Hope’s nightshirt and pressed the wadded cloth against the wound, leaving the girl wearing nothing but panties.

“I needed the color,” Hope said, staring at the floor. “I needed . . .”

Jackson smacked the top of Hope’s head, eliciting a snarl from Grace. It wasn’t a hard smack, but it snapped the girl back from whatever she was seeing enough to focus on him.

“You have big teeth,” Hope whispered.

“They’re big so you’ll feel them when I bite you,” he growled, leaning closer. He wasn’t sure if there were other parts of him that wouldn’t pass for human. He didn’t care.

“Jackson,” Grace warned. She hesitated.

He waited until Grace hustled Hope into the bathroom. Then he went to the window and opened the shutters, relieved to breathe in untainted air. Wolf faces peered at him through the screen.

The faces disappeared. This terra indigene settlement didn’t own any horses or burros. When the Others needed such creatures, they rented them, along with the humans who would handle them. But they did have a small wagon that could be pulled by up to three individuals in human form and was mostly used when the Others went down to purchase human-made merchandise. It was big enough to hold Grace and Hope.

Taking a last deep breath, Jackson turned back to the room. Some blood on the sheet, but not as much as he’d thought when he first saw Hope standing there with blood dripping down her arm. Most of the blood was on the drawing, although he would check all the pages carefully to make sure there wasn’t a speck of blood on the rest of the paper.

She’d been doing so well since she’d come to live with them. She’d said she wanted to live. Hadn’t they done everything they could to help her do exactly that? So why . . . ?

Jackson sucked in a breath as he stared at the drawing. A mound of bison, clearly dead. Bloody Wolf prints on all the carcasses. That didn’t make sense. Wolves wouldn’t drag their prey into a mound like that, and killing one bison was hard work and provided several days of food for the entire pack—for the whole terra indigene settlement. So why did Hope draw a slaughter? No recognizable landmarks. Was this going to happen around Sweetwater? Somewhere else?

Meg Corbyn—Meg, the Trailblazer—tended to see prophecies about the Lakeside Courtyard. But that hadn’t always been true. It seemed her abilities, her sensitivity, became refined to Lakeside and the nearby communities that were connected with her Courtyard after she’d been living in Lakeside for a few weeks. But Hope’s vision drawings ranged across the land.

He glanced at the drawing on the desk. Could these girls, these blood prophets, make connections that linked places because of their own connections to the people? Meg and Hope had known each other in the compound where they had been caged and cut so that wealthy humans could know about the future.

Meg was still struggling with her own addiction to cutting, but she was the Trailblazer for the rest of the cassandra sangue, and she might have the answers he needed right now.

Shifting his human hands into Wolf paws that had useful claws, Jackson tore the sheet, making a pad out of the clean linen. He placed the drawing pad on the linen. When the blood scent overwhelmed him to the point that he started salivating, he realized that the paper was more saturated with blood than he’d first thought.

More than a cut, he thought uneasily as he rolled up the part of the sheet that had blood on it. She’d been drawing with her own blood . . . because she needed that color.

The bathroom door opened. Grace led Hope into the bedroom, then stopped when she saw him.

Grace said.

he said.

The pup looked scared. Did she think he would drive her out of the pack for this? He could. Maybe he should. But connections weren’t always about place, and several of Hope’s past drawings made it clear that there was a link between Sweetwater and Lakeside.

He and Simon, friends since they were juveniles, were the link.

And looking at the picture of dead bison, he thought of another Wolf linked to him and Simon through friendship.

Balling up the part of the sheet that had blood on it, Jackson walked out of the bedroom and put the sheet into a metal bucket half-full of fresh water. Then he got dressed and handed Grace the summer dress she’d been wearing yesterday before they’d shifted to Wolf form and gone to sleep.

Yes, they needed more help than the human bodywalker if they were going to keep the pup alive.