Exodus (17 page)

“I am not!” the first one shouted. “Don’t say that, Alkirk.”

Valen stepped forward just enough to stand out from the pack. Aaron whined at him but didn’t interfere.

“What difference does it make, Jordan?” the one who must be Alkirk said. “We’re going to go mad, and we’ll become violent, destroying everything we can lay hands on. Then when we’ve killed every creature around, we’ll kill each other. We’ve seen it happen. We’re fuckin’ doomed and you know it. Just like Mom and Dad. Just like Em and Jen and Brett and—”

“Stop, please.”

Valen didn’t know if the two were putting on a show and trying to trick him, or if they were sincere. If it was the latter, he couldn’t even imagine the terror they’d lived through.

“They’re all dead now, and we’re next,” Alkirk said. “We’re leading the lost to what? To nothing, that’s what. They’re all gonna die too.”

“Then at least we’ll die trying to find a cure for this malady.”

Just then a thin, very pale, nude, ethereal-looking young man pushed through the shrubs right by where Valen had been sleeping. His eyes were large, with dark circles beneath him, and his sandy brown hair was matted in long chunks. Following him was a much heavier but equally as pale and worn in appearance man who must not have been much older.

Jordan, the thin one, and Alkirk, the other man. Brothers?
They did have similar features. Valen took another step forward and bared his teeth in a silent growl.

Jordan’s huge eyes grew even larger. “Alkirk, look.”

Alkirk did, and he quickly turned and fled, shouting, “Wolves!”

But Jordan didn’t move. He blinked languidly, as if he were in a dream world in his own head. “Not wolves,” he finally murmured. “Shifters. Gods and devils, it’s true. You do exist. The spirits said I’d find you…”

Valen didn’t know anything about spirits. If Lanaka had been there, she could have handled that declaration. As it was, he kept scenting, waiting for more people to come forward.

Jordan sank to his knees then went so far as to bend forward until his forehead was on the ground. “Please, I’m not here to cause trouble. We need help.”

It wasn’t Valen’s job to help him, nor was he obligated to help anyone else for that matter, only those in his pack. Aaron whimpered behind him.

Valen rumbled back at him.

Jordan went prostrate on the ground. “Please, then. Make it swift.”

“Jordan, no!” Another man came running and shouting. “Don’t give up yet! Don’t give yourself to these beasts!”

Short, perhaps the shortest adult man Valen had ever seen, and with black hair that was as matted as Jordan’s, the man looked like a feisty little rodent made human.

The uncharitable thought seemed harsh when the dark-haired man knelt beside Jordan and clamped a hand over one of Jordan’s shoulder. “Come on, get up before they eat us! Come
on
!” He darted nervous glances at Valen.

Valen kept still, showing only his teeth, not his doubts. He couldn’t help the people before him. They had whatever it was that turned humans into monsters. He wouldn’t expose his people to it.

But he wouldn’t murder innocents, either. Valen turned his head enough to see Aaron. He growled and barked, tipping his muzzle up repeatedly.

Aaron nudged his hip, then more barking followed. Finally, Valen heard what he’d been listening for—his pack, moving fluidly away from danger. He remained in place, watching, waiting.

Jordan raised his head up. “No! Please don’t leave us here! We’ll die!”

Valen bared his teeth even more. What was he to do? He couldn’t heal them.

“Please,” Jordan whispered. Tears pooled in his eyes then ran down his cheeks to plunk onto the ground. He sobbed, and the short man beside him tried to soothe him.

“It’ll be okay. We’ll find a way, or…or…”

Valen couldn’t save everyone. He hadn’t a clue what was wrong with the humans carrying the hint of that wretched scent. The two before him now weren’t as bad as the other, Alkirk. Even Alkirk hadn’t been completely…polluted, Valen thought.

Jordan curled into a fetal position and cried harder.

Valen couldn’t stand it. He took a full step back, then shifted.

The dark haired man gasped and toppled to his butt before he scrambled to cover most of Jordan’s body with his own. “Get back! I mean it!”

Valen was amused despite the direness of the situation. He didn’t let it show. “I’m not the one who causes harm. We’ve been attacked several times by people like you.”

Jordan shoved at the other man. “Orion, off. Get off of me!”

Orion moved a little, and Jordan rolled to his belly. “Gods and devils, you
are
real! Shifters, I mean!”

Valen arched an eyebrow at him. “We can’t help you. Whatever is affecting you, your kind, we have no clue how it’s happening. I won’t let you or anyone else infect the people in my pack.”

“Shifters shouldn’t get it,” Jordan began, pushing up to his elbows.

Valen pointed at him. “Stay. Shifters might not, but my pack is made of more than just shifters. You have whatever the illness is that’s making humans try to kill us. You will
not
come near my pack.”

“But…but…” Jordan’s eyes welled again and he looked absolutely crushed.

Understandable, given his death sentence
.

“I can’t help you, nor will I put my people at risk,” Valen reiterated. “What do you know about this illness?”

Orion stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. “Why should we tell you anything when you don’t give a fuck about us?”

Valen narrowed his eyes and glared at the short man. “I don’t wish you to be dead, either, but there’s nothing to stop it. The least you can do is try to protect others who might be at risk.”

Orion had paled until he nearly matched the color of the waning moon. He looked down at the ground.

Jordan knelt and kept his head bowed. “That
is
the least we can do, because if you don’t help us, we’ll die.”

“He already said we’re going to die, so fuck it, Jo. What’s the point?” Orion grumbled. “What’s the fuckin’ point?”

“The point is to be a better man than one who wallows in pity and would rather take others into the grips of death with him than possibly spare them that fate,” Valen snapped out, each word as harsh as a lash.

Orion flinched repeatedly as Valen spoke.

“The point is, I have no shaman, no magic, no healing skills, no way to bring you clear of what already taints you, and that’s hardly my fault,” Valen continued. “But if I
could
help you, I damn sure
would
, because that is the decent thing to do.”

“Will you kill us, then?” Jordan asked. “Or at least kill me? I don’t want to turn into what my parents did.”

Valen considered it. He didn’t know Jordan or any of the others he traveled with. He could administer swift deaths to them.

It was just that a small voice in his head whispered,
what if?

“Who told you I could help?” he found himself asking. “Why do you think I could do anything?”

Jordan wiped at his cheeks, using his hair at one point to dry them off. Then he said, “This old lady. She was really, really old and tall. She had white hair and eyes—”

“Lanaka,” Valen whispered, shock jetting through him.

Jordan bobbed his head. “Yes! Lanaka! She told me before she passed on—”

“What?” Valen shouted.

“Lanaka?” Aaron said from behind him. “Lanaka is gone?”

Orion moved closer to Jordan. “If by ‘gone’ you mean dead, then yes, and it’s not his fault so stop glaring at Jordan!”

Valen was reeling. “Lanaka.” He couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

“I know I was supposed to go with the pack, but I couldn’t,” Aaron said, moving to stand beside him. “Valen, I’m so sorry.” Aaron put an arm around him.

Orion and Jordan both gawked at them. “You—you’re—” Jordan gulped, raking them with a gaze.

Valen could not have cared less about the man’s freak out. “What happened to Lanaka? How did she die?” Gods, the word tried to stick in his throat. “When?”

Jordan folded his hands together in front of him. “She came to us two weeks ago, maybe a little longer. We’re from a village south of here, close to the coast. She just appeared one day, and we all knew she was, um”—He glanced down—“different. None of us were so tall or old, and her eyes—but more than that, she had this power inside of her that surrounded her.”

“And she came to your village? For what?” Valen snarled, hurt and angry at the loss of Lanaka. She likely had known she was to die soon and had left the pack to do so. It felt like a betrayal.

Jordan continued. “The illness had already struck us by then. For months, people had been changing. Growing ill, shrinking in on themselves, and…and their minds just went. They turned violent and killed all the animals we had in the village, then those around that we would have hunted for food.” He swallowed and the tears started up again. “Then they began to kill people. Each other, ones that weren’t sick, children—always the children first,” he rasped.

“We didn’t know they’d do that,” Orion said, and even his cheeks were damp with tears. “We didn’t know, then it was too late and—”

“And those of us who weren’t yet ill did what we had to do,” Jordan continued. “I have my family’s blood on my hands. You can’t know how that haunts me.”

“I can’t, no,” Valen agreed, his heart heavy at the suffering Jordan and other humans must be going through.

“So when Lanaka appeared, there weren’t many of us, barely a dozen. Less now,” Jordan said. “She touched me, here.” He put the tip of his index finger right between his eyes, but about a half inch higher. “It grew hot and my mind blanked. All the static and fear left me. I knew peace for the first—and only—time in months.”

Orion touched Jordan’s shoulder and watched him. “She told Jo to find the black wolf. Said he’d know it when he saw it. You. It. Whatever. If Jo says that’s you, then I believe him. We just didn’t know she was a shifter.”

“We only knew she was special,” Jordan added. “Holy.”

Orion hissed. “Don’t be a heretic!”

Jordan came to his feet in a display of more ire than Valen would have expected. He jabbed Orion’s chest. “A heretic to who? To
what
? To the gods we were told to worship that obviously didn’t give a shit about us? Whose disciples were the first to murder innocents?”

“Y-yes,” Orion stuttered, appearing utterly shocked at Jordan’s outburst.

“Fuck them!” Jordan shouted in a raw voice. “Fuck them!” He turned his face up to the sky. “Do you hear me? If you’re real, if any of you gods exist, I hate you for taking everyone from me!”

Valen hadn’t been brought up to believe in gods or goddesses. He knew humans tended to lean toward such beliefs. Valen himself had raged at fate or circumstance, chance, whatever bullshit had flung him and his pack from their homes. He could understand feeling betrayed by something greater than shifterkind. But in his case, he didn’t believe it was anything more than chaos and chance. Blaming fate just made him feel better at times when he searched for answers that he suspected didn’t exist. Life was what it was. No one was owed an explanation for it.

“All of our prayers did nothing, our sacrifices.” Jordan laughed bitterly. “Our sacrifices before the sacred deer were killed by the others. I can’t believe in gods that would allow such horrible things to befall their faithful worshipers. I won’t.”

Orion looked away.

Jordan sighed and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. “I don’t know how it started. We were all fine. Then we went to a Winter solstice celebration. Many, many villages attend it. I think it spread from there. Someone had this sickness, or maybe many people did—or something there made the illness come into existence. Maybe that’s not how it started and spread at all.”

“How long until you came back to your village before people grew ill?” Valen asked. He also still wanted to know how Lanaka had died and where her body was. She deserved a proper mourning.

“Months, I’d guess. It’s hard to say. It started so gradually,” Jordan explained. “We were always a contended, peaceful people, then a few of the disciples started becoming noticeably short tempered. It was unusual, but we accepted it. Then they publicly whipped someone for a minor infraction.”

“We’d never had any kind of violent punishment occur in our village before,” Orion added. “Never. Soon it became commonplace. From the first I remember noticing the disciples’ anger to the public whipping was approximately six months. From there, it happened quickly—the downward spiral. Within another three months, we were fighting for our lives. Now there are ten of us left. We had twelve, but…” Orion shrugged.

“Lanaka came to us, and she said she’d been searching for me. It was her time, and she needed to find me. If it makes any difference, she was meditating when she passed. She told me to build a funeral pyre for her body when she left us, and to mourn her under the full moon. I did.
We
did.” Jordan turned luminous eyes on him. “She said you would have to save me, and in doing so, you would also save what few of my people there are left.”

A chill skittered down Valen’s spine. “Why would I have to save you?”

Jordan held up one hand and a soft, white ball of light formed above his palm. It looked like a tiny star held there, floating on nothing.

Valen remembered Lanaka mesmerizing him with that same little show of power years and years ago, when he’d stupidly questioned her abilities as a shaman. He’d been a little child with a smart mouth, and she’d convinced him in an instant without ever speaking.

As he stared at that glowing orb, it pulsed and throbbed. Jordan didn’t speak, either, and Valen knew then that a part of Lanaka’s soul had been handed over to the young human before him. Though there’d never been a case of a human being a shaman for a pack, it was going to happen now.

“Welcome to my pack.” There’d have to be rules, and he’d keep those who were ill separated from those who were healthy—for now. He had many things to work out.

“Thank you,” Jordan said. He closed his hand around the light, then opened it again and the orb shot up into the sky.