Ice (35 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. I knew my face had to be pink. I kept ripping open packages of noodles and tossing them in. I had no idea how much werewolves ate, but there were quite a few of us.

“You’re afraid we’re going to repeat what happened with you and Marcus.”

I nodded, feeling ashamed for some reason. I guess I shouldn’t just assume things and give Kavick the chance to prove that he wasn’t like Marcus.

“I promise that’s never going to happen.”

I put the lid on the pot and looked back up at him. He seemed so sincere in his words, and he wasn’t offended at all by what I had said. My heart was pounding again, or maybe it had never stopped. For some reason, my hands were shaking. I could feel them at my sides trembling. I couldn’t believe he was making that promise when things seemed so uncertain, but that was exactly what I had wanted to hear, and I prayed he would he able to keep it.

“Christine, I can’t begin to tell you how you’ve changed my life….”

We heard the front door open and the screen door squeak. Tartok and Suka had all of their clothes on and they were covered in dirt. Their hair was a mess and they
looked exhausted. They had scratch marks on their faces and necks, some looked a little bloody, others were just welted and pink. They tromped into the kitchen and plopped down at the table. Anana slowly trailed behind them.

I quickly looked down at the pot, wondering how much they had heard. It would sound strange to them and they might misunderstand Kavick’s words as something more than it really was—I definitely knew Tartok would. I could feel the wolf staring at the back of my head.

Kavick shifted awkwardly and turned to face them. “Why don’t you guys clean up? The food’s almost ready.”

I glanced from the corner of my eye to see Anana standing there staring at us, too. At least she didn’t have a suspicious look on her face like Tartok had when he walked by.

Suka ran past him and said, “I get the bathroom first!”

He chased after her, suddenly forgetting Kavick and me. “No! You’ll take too long!”

“If I do, it’s because I’ve got to pick the pine needles out of my panties!”

Anana hid her face in her hands
, embarrassed. Her sleeves covered her entire face. “I’m really sorry about them,” she said in a little, muffled voice.

I smiled and said, “Don’t worry about it. I think it’s kind of funny
, actually.”

Suddenly, we heard a banging noise and Anana removed her hands so that she could look toward the hallway where Suka and Tartok had run off to.

“You better not make me wait long!” Tartok yelled.

I could hear Suka’s voice, just faintly. “Ooh! What are you going to do about it? You wouldn’t dare tear up your precious door, just like your precious roof!”

“I mean it, Suka! That’s
my
bathroom!”

“Well, you shouldn’t have thrown my clothes in the
trees
then!”

About ten minutes later, we were all at the table, silently eating. I was sitting between Kavick and Suka, and on the other side nearest Kavick was Anana, and then past an empty seat was Tartok. Tartok glared across the table at Suka. She grinned smugly as she slurped her noodles. He had been forced to wash his hands and face at the kitchen sink because she was still in the bathroom when the noodles were done. He had said several times that he could swear that he heard her texting through the bathroom door. He would then imitate the noise her keypad made, saying,
“Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep!”
He had declared he would never ask her to marry him again.

The tense silence made it a bit uncomfortable, but I finally spoke, desperate for convers
ation. “So how does everyone like the ramen?”

Kavick, Suka, and Anana all said it was good, but Tartok didn’t say anything. I guess he didn’t dislike it too much since he was eating it.

“Hey, Christine,” Suka said, looking past the long gray bang that hung over the side of her face, “wanna hike with us later? I’ll tell the boys not to shift so you’ll feel more comfortable.” She then raised her eyebrows thoughtfully and said, “But I guess it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”

Kavick’s face turned red and Tartok looked furious, slamming his fork down into his bowl loudly. “Suka!” they both scolded in unison, but while Kavick’s was more out of exasperation, Tartok’s was an angry bark.

“What?” She acted like she didn’t understand their reaction. “Sure, it’s kind of embarrassing, but I’m just being honest. I’ve seen both of you naked ever since we were kids, and Kavick said he’s shifted in front of her…” she said, pointing toward me.

Now I felt myself blushing. Again. But, somehow, it seemed strangely amusing. I think Suka’s frank
comments were an attempt to clear the air and make the embarrassing a little more comfortable. I think it broke the ice a little and I felt like the Miller sisters really didn’t mind having me around. In fact, I almost felt like Suka and Anana considered me one of them.

Tartok returned to his noodles and said, “There are enough trees for us to change behind if we want to shift.”

He then looked at Kavick and muttered, “You and Anana need to spend more time out there, anyway.”

Kavick avoided his gaze and just kept twisting noodles around his fork. “Not today,” he mumbled back.

“Tomorrow.”

Kavick glanced at Tartok, giving him a firm look. “We’ll talk about it later.”

Tartok didn’t argue with him anymore and went back to his own food.

Just when I was starting to feel comfortable, Tartok had ruined it again.

“Geronimo!!” Suka hollered from atop a cliff. She jumped from a large rock, her brown shirt and camouflage pants wrinkling in the wind. She screamed as she flew down, curling into a ball just before she hit the water.

Tartok was only God knew where, having gone off the trail on his own long ago.

Kavick, Anana, and I had stayed together, the only ones sticking with the original plan. We did, however, start chasing each other after Kavick had jumped down from a tree, scaring us half to death. I had to seek my revenge at some point, and did the same to him while he was musing over some tracks he had found, discussing with Anana whether or not it belonged to a bear. Before we knew it, we were hiding from each other, running around the woods like children, looking for an opportunity to scare the other. I wondered how on earth I was stupid enough to play this game with werewolves, when suddenly I heard Anana growl loudly nearby and Kavick shout.

“I thought you were a bear!” I heard Kavick laugh hysterically.

Finally, I spotted the two. Anana must have jumped onto his back, because she was dangling from his neck like a rag doll. She let go, landing silently on her feet. “Those tracks have really got you worried.”

“What if we run into a bear out here?” he said in a low voice, turning around so he could face her. He scanned the woods for me, looking in the wrong direction.

“I’m not so scared anymore. Suka gave me some pointers.” I could barely hear Anana’s little voice. She always spoke so softly and usually monotonously. “I promise I won’t run like before.”

He kept looking in the wrong direction, raising his head slightly to see farther through the trees. “I’m worried about Christine, though.”

After a few seconds, Anana looked up at him. “You worry about her a lot, don’t you?”

Kavick didn’t look at her. I could tell he was pretending to still be searching for me. After several seconds, he finally said, “She doesn’t have claws and fangs like we do.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

I couldn’t tell if that was good, or bad. I didn’t really understand much of what had just happened.

“Kavick!” I heard Tartok call from far in the distance. Kavick and Anana turned around. I could barely see Tartok’s black figure on a hill we had crossed moments ago. “Come here. I want you to see this.”

Kavic
k was hesitant to leave.

“I’ll find her,” Anana told him.

Kavick went on to Tartok then.

When
the boys were out of sight, I came out from behind my tree and walked over to Anana. She immediately spotted me at the sound of my footsteps.

“I’m surprised he couldn’t find me,” I said.

“You were really quiet, and the wind was probably blowing your scent away,” she explained in the same monotone she had used with Kavick.

I jerked my head toward where Tartok had taken Kavick and asked, “Do you have any idea what Tartok wanted to show him?”

“No clue.” Anana shrugged slightly in her oversized coat. It reminded me a bit of Molly’s baggy clothes; however, recently Molly had started wearing clothes that were a bit more fitted in an attempt to get boys’ attention.

Anana
fiddled with her feet and said in a shy kind of way, “Can I talk to you about something?”

I was surprised by this, but I didn’t let it show.

“Sure,” I said pleasantly, so that it might put her at ease. Her apprehension was making me a little nervous, too, but I felt like I was hiding it well.

She looked up at me, still keeping her head tipped down. “Is it okay if I talk to you about
Kavick
?” she asked slowly.

I felt my mouth hang open a little, but I promptly closed it. I nodded, perhaps a little
more vigorously than normal, and said, “Yeah, sure.”

We started walking slowly through the trees, her picking up a stick and tearing the leaves off to toss aside as we talked.

“Kavick’s told you we’re thinking about marrying, right?” Her soft voice seemed to get even quieter at the word “marrying” until it was nearly a whisper.

“Yeah,” I said with far less energy than earlier. It was suddenly a lot harder to fake a calm façade now. The walking helped release some of the nervous energy, though.

“I thought so…it seems like he’s told you a lot. I don’t have a problem with it, though; it’s nice to have friends outside of our little circle...and you seem trustworthy. It’s just that it seemed like you weren’t surprised when Tartok mentioned it in the church parking lot, is why I asked….” Her words trailed off, reminding me of Kavick’s awkwardness whenever he would talk about it.

“I know he talks to you a lot,” she continued, looking up at me for a brief moment. “He’s told you everything, hasn’t he?”

I thought for a second. “I don’t know…he’s told me a lot of things. He told me he’s changed his mind a lot and that you two have been friends a long time.”

“Ever since our families met when we were kids,” Anana said, looking ahead. “We’ve been friends practically since we were babies.”

She then looked up at me again, seeming even more uncomfortable than before. “I know that he talks to you a lot, not only because Tartok has followed him to your house…but because I was the one that discovered where he was going off to so much. I was the one who followed him first.”

She hung her head like she was ashamed, no longer able to look at me. S
he focused on tearing the dead leaves off of the branch. I was stunned by this information. I hadn’t thought Anana would follow him. She had struck me as uninterested in marrying Kavick as he was her. But, if she were uninterested, why would she follow him then? Instead, she had followed him around like Tartok. Followed him to Justin’s house, spied on him while he spent time with me…suddenly, I didn’t know what to think about her anymore. I was shocked. And I was scared. What if she had heard him talking to me about her and the prospect of marriage? How much did she know? And did this mean that Kavick meant more to her than I had thought, that maybe she actually did want to marry him?

I couldn’t say anything. My mouth just hung open stupidly as I tried to think of something to say, but all I had were a thousand questions floating around in my head.

She glanced at me only to hang her head again, somehow looking even more ashamed. “You see…my father wants him to marry me. He told me that’s what he wants me to do…and a while back, Kavick considered it. After Tupit died, he felt really alone and we kind of relied on each other, because he couldn’t lean on Tartok. Tartok’s way of coping with it was to be alone. But Kavick, when he hurts, he needs somebody.”

She tipped her head down even lower and I wondered if she was about to cry. Her hands were still, no longer fiddling with the stick in her hands. She kept on walking, though, so I didn’t slow down. Just as I was about to ask her if she was alright I saw her hands move again. They abrup
tly stopped searching for a leafe to tear. At some point she had torn the last leaf off without even realizing it.

“There’s no more, I guess…” I heard her mutter to herself. “They’re gone…
.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if those words hel
d another meaning.

She tossed the stick aside and looked ahead, appearing stronger than I had expected. “Tupit was my friend, too. We spent even more time together than
I did with Kavick…especially in those last few months of his life. So when Tupit died, we both grieved…and I had lost my mother to the hunter some time before, so we understood each other. We started spending more time together because of that…and then my dad and Tartok told us we should get used to staying in our wolf forms for long periods of time in case we need to hide, and that we should  do it together…especially if we were going to get married. It’s not always clear what we’re thinking when we can’t talk, you know. Spending more time together as wolves would help us better understand each other, too.”

She added with an embarrassed laugh, “We’ve done it before, anyway, so it wasn’t anything new, we just hadn’t done it that long
.”

This felt strangely intimate to me, like it was something private she shouldn’t have been telling me, even though Kavick had mentioned this before. I wondered why it was making me so uncomfortable now. I assumed it was because
she
was acting so uncomfortable about it.

“That’s when you spotted me in the woods when you were looking for your pet wolf. Kavick told me that you mistook me for him. And then there was that bear behind you and Kavick was going to fi
ght it. I panicked and ran to get help. Suka and Tartok came back with me, but Kavick had already escaped from your house. You had taken care of him while I had run away.” She sounded a bit ashamed. She looked up at me timidly again and added, “Thanks for that, by the way.”

“Uh, no problem,” I said, sounding a bit hoarse for some reason. I guess because I had my
mouth hanging open so much, the cold air had scratched my throat.

“It took us a little while to get readjusted to being human, even though it was only a week…especially him. But, I could tell there was something else about him. He couldn’t stop talking about you. He was so shocked that someone would be so kind and caring to take in a stray animal like that. Even though he was a dog, he had seemed like a wild animal fighting that bear, but you had still helped him…I guess, like me, he had begun to think the world was full of killers and that we could never be safe with anyone outside of our kind. It’s like you woke him up and he returned to his old self, not only before Tupit had been killed, but before any of the killing had begun.” She grinned at me and added, seeming somewhat relaxed for the first time since the conversat
ion began, saying, “I could tell that he was head over heels.”

I felt myself blush
, wondering why everyone thought he was in love with me. I think that I would know, since I’m supposedly the object of his affections; isn’t that proof enough that he didn’t feel that way about me? Why does everyone assume the most extreme, just because we’re friends?

I laughed awkwardly, saying, “Uh, I don’t know about that.”

“I can tell,” she insisted with a smile.

That’s what everyone says,
I thought with an internal sigh of annoyance.

“I followed him once, because we were supposed to be spending more time together, but he would never show up when we
would make plans, or even to some of the meetings,” she continued. “Once I discovered he was seeing you, I stopped following him and had intended to keep it a secret, but Suka asked me where I had been, so I told her and said to keep it a secret.”

Anana gave a little huff and said, “I should have known she would tell Tartok, though. Despite their bickering, they talk all the time. They do it late at night on the roof of his house, or ours, after everyone’s asleep. I wake up sometimes at night and hear them. Kavick told me he hears them sometimes, too.”

She stuck her hands in her pockets and kicked some leaves as we walked. “I just want Kavick to be happy, so if you feel the same way…what I’m trying to say is, I’m not trying to keep him from you. I won’t try to get in the way of you two if you feel the same way about him.”

Everything I thought I had just discovered about her a few seconds ago had crashed and once again I was thrown. I finally managed to filter through the question in my head and asked, “But...how do you feel about it? I mean, I know your dad wants you to marry him, but what do you want?”

She looked as if she was surprised I would ask that. Had anyone asked her if she even wanted to?

“…I don’t know,” she said, looking as if she were thinking it over in her head for the first time. “If that’s what my father
tells me to do, I have to do it.”

This confused me even more. “Wait—how old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Then why do you need to do this because your dad says so?”

Her eyes widened as if I were crazy. “Because he’s my father…and my father is someone who doesn’t take no for an answer.”

I thought back to Adrik Miller’s unfriendly disposition and bitter attitude that wasn’t much different than Tartok. Suddenly it made sense; Anana was a quiet, compliant girl. She would never say no to an order from her father. In fact, I was surprised she had stood up to Tartok in the church parking lot.

I just nodded, deciding to keep my opinion of her father to myself, since I didn’t have anything good to say about him.

She looked thoughtful again, and said, “I could probably grow to love Kavick like that in time if we got married, but we’re just friends right now. He’s just Kavick to me.”

We walked in silence for a few seconds, and then I finally decided to say what had been nagging at me. “Anana, I’m not trying to tell you what to do—or cause problems. Lord knows I’ve created plenty of those—but marriage is a big deal. It’ll change your life. Don’t you think such a big decision should be made by you? It’s easy for someone to tell you what to do, but the only one it’s going to affect in the end is you.”

She didn’t give me a surprised look that time. She actually nodded like she understood. “I guess it’s really up to Kavick in the end, anyway,” she said as she looked away, not fully taking in what I had just said about her opinion mattering.  “If he wants to marry me, I don’t mind if it’ll make him happy. Besides, what are the chances of me finding someone who’s not frightened by what I am? Most people who discover our secret aren’t as understanding as you are. Kavick’s really lucky he found you.”