Wolf Sirens Fever: Many are Born, Few are Reborn (Wolf Sirens #2) Read online

  Wolf Sirens

  Fever

  Many are Born, Few are Reborn

  Tina Smith

  If The Bite Doesn’t Get You, Then The Fever Will

  Wolf Sirens Fever

  By Tina Smith

  Copyright 2012 Tina Smith

  Smashwords Edition

  Cover Image Copyright Tina Smith. All rights reserved – used with permission.

  This is a work of fiction. The events and characters described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or living persons. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted without express consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This book may not be given away. Each reader is required to purchase their own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  The Virgin Divinity

  TheIllusionofFreedom

  Misfit

  FeverPitch

  EscapeorDieTrying

  Reborn

  BitterSweet

  Animosity

  WaterUnderTheBridge

  BrokenLikeCres

  NexttoMe

  FirstDitch

  TheEndJustifiestheMeans

  LastDitch

  TheParty

  TheFirstCutisTheDeepest

  RepentorPerish

  ReidDavies

  JacksonandTheBodySnatchers

  TheAnesthetist

  Bianca

  LearntoFly

  Soldier

  CarefulWhatYouWishFor

  OpposingWorlds

  StrangeAngel

  TheDoor

  CupidsArrow

  HiddenAgenda

  Epitaph

  MonstersBar

  TheAceofPentacles

  QueenofDogTown

  TheGift

  DarkHorse

  Forgotten

  TightRope

  MonstersMoon

  TheMostDevout

  LesserofTwoEvils

  Epilogue

  Amare Et Sapere Vix Deo Conceditur

  Even a god finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time

  My love is as a fever, longing still

  My love is as a fever, longing still,

  For that which longer nurseth the disease:

  Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

  The certain sickly appetite to please.

  My reason, the physician to my love,

  Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

  Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,

  Desire his death, which physic did accept.

  Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

  And frantic –mad with evermore unrest:

  My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

  At random from the truth vainly express’d;

  For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

  Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

  - Shakespeare sonnet 147

  The Virgin Divinity

  Myth has it that in the town of Shade, Artemis was goddess of the moon, founder and protector of towns and streets, young animals and guardian of the forests and mountains. The townsman whom she looked graciously upon was prosperous in his fields and died in old age.

  Legend says the black raven’s eyes now watch over Shade for Apollo, god of the sun. He is the restless seething sea of flame - god of heat, sickness and destruction. His sister is the virgin deity of the moon, a bright and radiant ever-changing white lunar crest.

  When Zeus cursed the town’s men for her murder, his beloved daughter’s spirit sought to protect the innocent as Agrotera, the huntress of wild beasts. Apollo cursed his virgin sister’s legacy on earth with an arrow, to forsake all her sisters, damning them to be forever weak to mortal desires. The divinity never conquered by love would falter. Apollo, god of prophecy, placed a curse over the daughters of Artemis: to love the enemy.

  His mistake was that he cursed her to love and not purely desire.

  One story says that to vanquish all three curses, a reborn maiden with raven hair, pale skin and eyes as emerald as the forest will come with the deity’s haunted soul.

  In death, Artemis discovers she has been banished from the earth where she was raised, and placed in Hades. Awoken in the stained river of the realm of the dead she swims to the shore, with no coin to pay the old boatmen to ferry her across the waters. Her passage into the lands of the departed is not sealed, allowing her to escape, should she so try. When the time is right she flees into the rust waters of the river Styx and into the decaying forest were she hides in the warped, tortured branches, from the black-three headed beast of Hades tracking her down, who never allows any who enter, to leave. She waits in the dank realm of blackened dead man’s fingers, for a departed soul to leave an opening, a door to the earth. She climbs through it and claws her way to the surface, where she emerges reborn. Exhausted, she lies in the long grass by a river to rest. Blessed by fortune she is found by a kindly woman, and taken in her chariot to safety. Hidden in the woman’s cottage, her wounds are wrapped and tended as she recovers from her escape. Strong once more, brokenhearted Artemis prepares to find her beloved...

  The Illusion of Freedom

  One night Cres called me and we met out in a meadow. While training, I came across the scent of sandalwood, musk, wet-dog and cinnamon, I froze in the paddock. Werewolf! Not just any wolf - Reid!

  Reid stood in the clearing in human form, bare-chested, breathing slowly and heavily. My recent training automatically compelled me to place a hand over the cold metal of the gun on my right hip, arm tense, ready to draw, though the girl inside me wanted to run to him and embrace him and ask where Sky was?

  Out of the silence came two words. “He’s dead.” I looked into his sad eyes. They glowed amber green, like crystals, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t him; his eyes had always been caramel. Now they were rimmed with tears and hardened with anger. He had a seriousness about him that didn’t suit his usual demeanor. He was drawn, thinner, not the Reid I had known.

  My voice dropped. “No, you’re lying.”

  “He is,” he murmured, swallowing dry.

  To my horror he turned to leave. All my protective pretences forgotten, I ran to him, pulling like a beggar at his weight.

  “Tell me,” I pleaded, looking into his eyes.

  He collapsed onto the ground where he stood; his knees became damp from the grass. Head down, sobbing, he shrugged my grip from his arm.

  “His injuries were too bad…”

  I couldn’t speak. He had to be lying.

  He swallowed again. Looking at me he managed the sentence he had come to deliver. “He was in a bad way. The other pack couldn’t help him.” A tear ran down his cheek. “Before he died, he said he loved you. I was with him for a while.” He sniffed. He placed something in my hand; it was a tag.

  I looked at it, breathless: the silver army tag. I realized it was his, I knew the indentations, recognized the numbers. It stung, I glared at him. He never went anywhere without it.

  “Something for you to keep.” He spoke to the ground.

  Sky wouldn’t have given it for any other reason. My eyes welled with tears of pain, which swelled and broke down my face. Still the voice cried in me that he wasn’t dead, but how could I deny it?

  “When?” I barked sternly.

  “A week ago.” He had been gone three months. I had not felt it. I wished it was wrong but I knew from his expr
ession it was true. I felt the blood drain from my face. I’d known from Cresida’s voice on the phone this evening, so quiet and broken. The silence broke the truth to me.

  He pushed me away, then. “I’ve got to get home. My olds have had me on lock-down for weeks for running away.”

  He stood up and sauntered away slowly.

  “No! You killed him!” I screamed. “Werewolves can heal! Where is he? Where is he? I want to see him! I hate you, Reid! You’re a liar; you’ve lied and cheated before.”

  Snot dripped from my nose. I felt Cresida’s presence in the distance then, but it didn’t stop me. Going after him I placed a gun muzzle against his head. “Take me to him,” I spat.

  He wisely didn’t move. “I never meant to hurt you, Lila,” he whispered not looking at me.

  “This isn’t about that!” My spit hit him in the face. “I will go and find him,” I raged.

  Reid turned his head bravely to look at me. “You’ll only find ashes.” His eyes were wide and honest, sorrowful.

  I pushed him forward; he fell to the ground, palms up, the whites of his eyes evident in the dark as his head turned.

  “So help me, Reid, I will kill you…if I find out you are lying.” I cocked the gun; it was all too easy to squeeze the trigger. The click was easily defined against the melody of crickets on the breeze and our three hearts beating. Cresida touched my arm softly, then. I looked back at her in that instant. Reid phased and took off running into the trees. I lifted my gun far too late and fired it into the line of trees and went to fire again, but Cresida grabbed my arm and pushed it down and I hadn’t the will to fight her.

  I thought about the last moments I had seen him, his face ashen in pain; how I should never have let them take him, how I should have insisted on going; how I should have gone over to him; kissed him goodbye in the basement and ignored the hurricane that was the aftermath of the fight. Despite Cresida and Reid fussing over him, and how they felt about it, he should have died in my arms. I was the reason he was dead.

  “Cres,” was all I remember saying.

  2. Misfit

  Through the web of forest trees, down a long winding dirt road in a hidden corner of the valley, nestles a wooden house with a faded blue door. Tisane’s body responded to the fragrance of the crisp untainted air as she took in her surroundings from the verandah. She could feel it inside her flesh. It was home but more than that, it was in her blood, in every cell of her body. She drank down the cold water in the glass she held. She never knew what it was about the valley. She had come back here to collect her mother’s things and stow them away in the stuffy attic with her grandmother’s, unable to part with their belongings. She had put off this trip for far too long. Jerry was supposed to help her, but he had moved the kids to Queensland earlier than expected after the news. Here she was alone in the world. Her sister, Narine, had hurt her once more.

  She left the hollow house for the ocean and watched the waves crash below unfurling ash-swirled clouds while the churning breeze washed the dust from her soul. The brackish wind whipped her cropped hair and burnt her cheeks. The cold air cleared her tight chest. She dug her toes into the soft fine, tan-coloured sand overlooking the scattered seaweed shore, and where the sky met the horizon her mind was lost at sea. Her mother’s grave was nearby, in the old Tarah cemetery. Now Tisane regretted not burying her on the property near the house facing the forestlands where her mother’s heart belonged. Tisane was the only one who would visit the grave anyway. She sighed, reminiscing over the past months’ events, having recently broken up with boyfriend no.3 – a cheater as it turned out. Her job in the city was mundane, she knew it was far below her intelligence level and a chore, but she had always concealed what she was. She had floundered in the city. Now after everything that had happened, including her mother’s passing, something had shifted. Her world had changed. She was weeping salt tears. What did she want surrounding her? she wondered as she sank to the sand in despair, silently asking her mother what she should do next. The warm whisper didn’t come that day, as desperation has a way of scaring away answers.

  Her mother knew what to do. She had always told her stories to keep her from harm’s way, to entertain and encourage her daughter. Tales that the river was magical and the fool’s gold dust was the remnants of Zeus’ blood settled over the riverbed. As a child Tisane had spent hours playing in the cool water, running her toes through the sandy flecks of gold that sparkled in the sunlight, imagining Olympus in the pewter clouds above, while the tall dark trees on the edge of the pine and eucalypt perfumed woods watched on. Everything was alive to her young eyes, the trees, clouds, the rocks and the river and the landscape.

  The tales that scared her were the ones she remembered best. The tannin colour of the inlet near the beach was the blood of Zeus flowing out to the sapphire sea, and the smell of the mangroves was the odour of Artemis’s decaying corpse, lost in the black twisting roots and the devils horns. She forever feared the mangroves as a child.

  Tisane’s mother told her the roar of the dark thundering sky was the wrath of Zeus himself storming around in Olympus, still angry, throwing thunderbolts over his beloved daughter’s death. Nowhere had storms like the valley. Tisane was frightened of the thunder and lighting, but not as much as the rain. Last of all her mother would tell Tisane that the wolves had been formed in revenge for Artemis’s murder, by the raindrops containing his immortal blood. To this day Tisane never went out in the rain or felt the cloud drops on her soft white skin. When the rainy months came she and her mother would count the time delay between the lightening strike and the rumble, together inside the house, as the river swelled, reuniting with the rain and swirling cream mahogany with mud. Tisane watched the beads of water trickle down the windowpane, when she was alone. One fable said the spirit of the Demi Goddess haunted the river like a siren, surfacing to beckon immoral men to their deaths. When the Artemis flooded, Tisane avoided its banks.

  Her mother had been discovered floating face down in the rippling creek behind the wooden house. Tisane could no longer go down there now either, even when it was still. Her mother had ironically been the best serving forest ranger in Shade’s long history, only to be found drowned in her own back yard, in the shallow stream, as the trees watched on; when all along it had been predicted the native wolves would be the ones to tear her apart in a job that even grown men feared.

  The one story from the lips of her mother, which terrified Tisane the most, was about the end of the fabled curse of Shade: that Apollo, god of jealousy’s plans to undo his sister’s legacy as huntress would come to fruition. But to lift the curse Artemis would escape the underworld in search of her true love, wading through the depths of the river of blood, hiding in the decaying terrain until she found a door out through which she would climb. Reborn through a dead woman’s soul, she would surface onto the land in search of her beloved, who had died by her own hand. Her eerie spectre wandered the dark trees. This tale had given Tisane terrifying nightmares as a child, which haunted her to this day. She dreamt of the electric jade eyes of the huntress lurking in the woods, still with her hunting knife dripping wet with his red blood. Tisane was sure it was part of the reason she had left Shade – to escape the dreamlands.

  Her mother had done all this to encourage a strong sense of trepidation towards the dangers of the surrounding forest. But the healthy dose of fear she had instilled in her daughter had simply served to petrify the sensitive child.

  Their little house sat alone, sheathed by the dense forest that her mother guarded so passionately in an affair that lasted until it was a tool in her demise. Tisane knew nothing held her mother’s attention like the forest. She trusted and feared it. Tisane often watched her mother stare at the trees and heard her disappear at all hours to tend to her job. But when it came to her daughter, Tisane was discouraged from the forest and expected to go when the time had come to grow up, and fly the shire nest. There was a time when she had been young, naïve and willing to es
cape the grasp of the valley - a long ago feeling she now struggled to recall as she contemplated returning.

  Tisane had been devotedly sheltered, but this meant she was chubby as a result of being coddled by her mother. She found it exasperatingly hard to perform the most mundane household tasks for years after leaving home, because her mother had done everything for her. She had been a smart, quiet natured child who spent her days watching television and reading magazines when she wasn’t in school, and without being told she never drifted into the woods. This was juxtaposed with her mother’s lifestyle as a park ranger. She spent many nights deep inside its labyrinth, studying the wolves in the name of research, and days in the sun surveying the tracks through the vast national forest. Her mother was athletic, taut and agile. A mysterious independent, thin, muscular and tanned creature, she was as robust and brown as Tisane was flimsy, pale and soft. Tisane had been an entirely different creature - a clumsy and woeful child with a poor aptitude for sports. Embarrassed by her lumbering figure, wide hips and deathly pale skin, she avoided anything vaguely athletic. When she did try at sport she failed, awkwardly proving how inept she was. But she possessed a clever mind, entertained well by intellectual pursuits, evident by the books staked along the walls in her room.

  It would have been inconceivable that mother and daughter were even related, being so different in nature, colour and stature, had it not been for their shared nose and curved face. Tisane’s cherub pastel skin and honey hair made her look like the washed-out version of the two. While her brunette mother hiked the dangerous trails into the depths of the mountainous forest around her, Tisane had always remained tucked in the little house with her head in the clouds and her blue eyes in a book, accompanied by her grandmother, when she was small.