Kings and Sirens (The Blood Falls Book 2)
Kings and Sirens: Chapter 18

Atsila

Leena was gone when we arrived. Perhaps it was for the best. It was a sad time and emotionally draining. Still, I missed her. I tried to sleep. I should sleep. It had been so long and my body was beyond exhausted, but my mind was stuck in the horrors.

That, and my brothers’ ways of dealing with it all was to fuck like crazy. It was not quiet with all the grunts and moans coming from either side. Eventually I put a pillow over my head. It helped.

Not enough, but at least I didn’t feel like I was in the middle of a human pornographic movie. It was past midnight when I gave up, pulling on a shirt to keep the cold back, and wandered down the paths. Torches burned here and there for lighting but none of the typical partying took place. Everyone had retreated to their tents to mourn or sleep.

I went to the archives but memories of Leena haunted me and I didn’t want to be there without her. So I ended up at the main tent where the Doctor was working overtime to replace us answers.

“What are you doing awake?” He was elbow deep in a torso.

“Can’t sleep.”

He nodded, twisted something, hummed. “I’m sure there is a lot of that going around tonight.”

“You’re wide awake.” I took a seat on the bench not too far from him. Close enough to speak but far enough away that I didn’t have an up close look at the dead.

“The position comes with some perks, namely being able to sleep when I need to sleep and stay awake as long as I need to stay awake.”

“Are you looking forward to returning to a normal samhain life?”

He sat back on his heels and wiped his sweaty brow. “More than you will ever know.”

The Doctor’s voice was laced with pain and hope. Would I sound like that one day? “Not even a once and future King?”

A small smile turned up his lips. “Perhaps. Get back to me in a few decades and we can compare notes.”

“You have someone. Someone to go back to, don’t you?”

It was hard to miss the open devotion that flashed over his face for a moment. “I do. The sacrifice was easy and impossible. Being the Doctor isn’t something to question. It’s a duty that I would happily perform for the rest of my life if that is what Destiny demanded. But since it has chosen another to take my place, I will happily grab onto the life I once had with both hands and never look back.”

A true man of the moment. I could learn a lot from him. No anchor to the past dragging him back, no dreams of the future making him restless. The Doctor lived for now.

“Who is she? Or him?”

His smile widened as he turned back to the torso and got back to work. “Her name is Bethany. She is Leena’s aunt.”

Not a member of his House. A Sato and a Wren. But this was normal for them wasn’t it? “Tell me about Leena.”

I caught the grin from his profile but I didn’t care that I was so obvious. I was a starving Heida in need of food in the form of information about my mate. “What do you want to know?”

“What was she like as a child? What’s your impression of her? How well do you know her?”

He nodded along with each of my questions. “I know her better than some since she’s the oldest daughter. Bethany has raised her since she was very, very young.”

My muscles all tensed at once. “What happened to her parents?” And why was I so selfishly obsessed with my own needs that I hadn’t gotten to know Leena better? I should know her parents were dead. I should know everything about her.

But all I knew was that she was brilliant like a star. Happy, fun, teasing, smart, and sexy. Superficial really. I was an idiot.

The Doctor froze for a moment. Probably shocked I didn’t know this information. “Uh, well you should probably talk to her about it, but the short answer is they died saving all of us.”

All of us. My mouth opened and closed, no words escaping because there were no words for a sacrifice like that. And here I was pushing her away because maybe Leena wasn’t loyal enough or insider enough to understand what it meant to be Heida.

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I will. I will ask her.”

“As a kid she was a lot of fun. Liked practical jokes. Anything to get at her older brothers.”

I’d spent some time with Draygus and Bo Wren, but not a lot. Mostly I kept to Leena’s side and out of the way because I saw him as I saw Layla, as the King. But that wasn’t how the House of Wren works at all. Leena tried to explain it, but it was hard for my mind to comprehend such a different form of leadership.

“What kind of jokes?”

“Oh…let’s see. One time I was visiting and she replaced the rope on the tree—the one they swung out into the river under the falls—she replaced it with one that was barely attached. Dray climbed up and swung out like he normally did, but instead he fell like a stone.” The Doctor laughed and shook his head. “He chased Leena for the rest of the day trying to get revenge, but she’s faster than her brother and better at using the Plane to hide her location.”

I remembered how Leena teased me in the meadow, shifting from one form to another just to toy with my mind and draw me out of hiding. She was good at using one’s defense mechanisms against them until they self-destructed.

“It sounds like you spent a lot of time with the Wrens.”

The Doctor grunted. “Sometimes I couldn’t help myself. Bethany and I couldn’t be together, but my role as Doctor does not dictate where I spend my free time. There have been periods where I spent all my spare time at the House of Wren, soaking up what I could. But there were other times it was simply too hard.”

I loved my brothers, but it was nice to sit and have a real, meaningful conversation with another male for a change. No dismissal. No sex jokes. Just truth. “So you get your life back just as mine comes into question.”

“Life is like that. Your role as King won’t prevent you from taking a wife though, will it?”

“No. But I don’t know that I’ll have much left to give to another. The job is demanding.” But in the quiet, what quiet there was, I wanted to spend it with Leena, if she’d have me.

“I suppose you’re right. Especially with a war coming.”

My eyes fell to the bodies lined up in rows. “Any news on that?”

“Some. Yes. My sister has been searching the Sato books. There’s some credence to the old stories apparently. The Wren’s have also been working a few angles. Dray and Cass went back to the Black Forest to consult with their main House. Bethany says they’ve been hunting down a lot of ghost anomalies that are helping clear up confusion on that. And Bridge—Cass’s twin—has also found some old stories. She’s working with my sister on replaceing commonalities.”

All this was helpful, but not necessarily useful. Yet. “Any other breakthroughs? What about the creature we found? Ryddyck?” In the midst of all the insanity of fighting the Dreg Army, the House of Axl descended into a chaos of its own making, including the discovery of a male that didn’t seem to be from our world.

The Doctor stood up and went to a cleaning station, washing his arms and hands, then casting his apron aside. I watched as he grabbed a beer and chugged it down before wiping his mouth clean with the back of his hand. “Ryddyck remains a mystery to us all. He’s definitely not samhain and he’s most certainly not from our world. But how he got here and what it means…no one knows.”

“How do you know he’s not from here?”

The Doctor gestured at the Salishan. “DNA to start with. His DNA is nothing like ours. It contains an element I can’t identify. Neither can Georgiahana. He’s fundamentally not from our universe.”

“And yet he looks like us, speaks our language, and understands the Plane.”

“He understands a hell of a lot more than the Plane.” The Doctor scratched the scruff growing on his chin. “And he only looks like us sometimes. You remember his wings? He has trouble shifting into his true form here, but I was able to coax him into it for a few minutes and…it’s something else. Something I’ve never seen.”

The hair on my arm rose up. “So this creature appears at the same time a rip in our universe forms. And not long after these Salishan began hunting the Heida. Or is it coincidence?”

“Coincidence happens. I know it does. But this isn’t it. I believe the Salishan were caught in one of our universe rifts.”

My heart sank.

“They are samhain. My initial look at their DNA confirmed that. I’m hoping Georgiahana has more information for us soon, but fundamentally, at a genetic level, they are us. Heida in particular.”

My stomach twisted and knotted. I knew it was true, but it was something else entirely to hear it confirmed.

“All the autopsies reveal bodies caught between samhain and bear forms. Morphed and twisted one way or another by where they were with the Plane when the rift happened. They look samhain, but the shift was too far along. In reality they are bears. Their olfactory systems are robust, their muscles are enlarged, their bodies caught in the middle. But…there’s also something else.” He moved around, waving for me to follow. He stopped at a body with the top of the skull cut off. “There are brain changes as well. Particularly in the area where abstract thought takes place. It’s where samhain, like the House of Gatlin, get their psychic abilities.”

“That far north of the Line? Perhaps they are a sect of the House of Heida that broke off and bred with House of Gatlin.” Possessing the gifts of both Houses like Leena and her siblings, who can wield the shifting powers of the House of Wren with the psychic gifts of the House of Gatlin.

“Maybe. That’s why I have Georgiahana looking into it. But the other possibility…I’ve seen it before. In Ryddyck.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“My hypothesis is that this group, this clan or whatever you want to call them. Maybe they’re pure Heida, maybe they’re Heida-Gatlin, I won’t know until Georgiahana tells me, but what I think happened is this: a rift formed in the North. Maybe they saw what looked like ghosts to them, too. In reaction to the rift, they shifted—or began to shift—but the rift there was more significant. The separation between our world and the next became negligible. They weren’t just trapped between samhain and bear, they were pulled through one world into another, and then back again. Maybe not entirely. It’s possible the rift closed with them trapped inside it.”

A hideous, twisted monster formed from the fragments of two worlds. I stared down at the claws, the ugly faces, the hairy bodies and black eyes. The weird antlers that seemed to be forming on some skulls but not others. It was as if they were three balls of clay mashed together.

“What are the chances another rift could form near here?” My blood ran cold with the need to protect my family. To sound alarms and gather everyone together. A rift to the North. A rift at the House of Axl. Was there a pattern? Where was safe?

The Doctor shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Not yet.”