True North (The Bears of Blackrock Book 4) (6 page)

It wasn’t until she headed out to handle inventory and divvying up the month’s supplies that Theron had a moment to himself. Theron sprawled out on the couch, staring up at the sad looking ceiling.

The moment was short lived.

“Are you still hurting?”

Theron shot a look toward the front door. Miss Dalton stood just inside the living room, his backpack dangling from her right hand. He exhaled. He’d almost completely forgotten it in the drama of the afternoon.

Nothing like almost being murdered to make you forget you need a change of boxers at some point.

Theron nodded, but didn’t meet her gaze. “I am. As I’m sure you’ll be happy to know.”

She stared at him a long moment. She huffed finally, a wordless complaint against the cold. Her long hair hanging in ringlets down over her shoulders. She frowned, but didn’t speak.

“School’s out, I take it?”

“Yeah. Too much excitement today to expect kids to pay attention to geography. So what ails you, then?”

Theron shot a look toward his bum foot. “Other than the fact someone tried to kill me this afternoon, not much. Jammed my ankle when I got here.”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah, that was going to be my next question -”

“Look, what do you want?”

Sinead stopped, staring at him with a stricken expression.

“Did you know they were going to take me down to the fence? Were you in on that? Is that a common practice up here?”

“No!”

“Because you sure as shit weren’t too friendly just an hour or two ago. Now you’re concerned with my well-being?”

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t be!”

“Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t!” He snapped back.

The two of them remained in silence for a long moment. He could hear her breathing, a little faster than normal. She was agitated.

It was in that silence that Theron realized why the house was so quiet.

It was the stillness of a house without electricity.

Sinead took a step toward him, licking her lips. She opened her mouth to speak, but took a second to form words. “I’m sorry. If you knew what life was like up here, you would understand.”

“Sure, I would.”

Sinead blew out through pursed lips and turned for the door. The sight of her living made his heart leap into his throat. “So what then? You let them drag me off to fry, but then decide to grow a conscience and come running to stop them before the job was done.”

“No,” she said, and the tone was deliberately calm. Theron realized he could rile this woman if he wanted to. She was barely holding in her temper. “I looked through your things.”

Theron’s head fell back onto the arm of the couch with a thud. He regretted it, but pretended it hadn’t hurt. “Well, that’s just fucking great. Find anything good? Wanna know my blood type?”

“God damn it, you’re intolerable. Shut up.” Her tone had changed, and she was moving across the room toward the couch before he could say another word. Sinead reached down to his hurt ankle.

“And you’re a ray of fucking sunshine?”

The touch of her fingers grazed his bare skin, and his whole body tensed.

He hadn’t been expecting that.

Sinead dropped to her knees by the side of the couch. “I’m going to patch up your ankle, alright? I’ll try not to kill you in the process.”

“Oh, please. Don’t try too hard.”

Theron swallowed back his bile and turned away.

“You know, if you knew what life was like here, you wouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

Theron shot her a glare, but didn’t speak.

“How did you get here, anyway?”

Theron chuckled, sadly. “That psycho cop dropped me off.”

“Oh, psycho cop doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she said, moving toward the end of the couch. Her hand was on the laces of his boots before he could protest.

He stiffened at the touch, trying to straighten up on the couch. “Yeah, I’ve had my fair share of run ins with those, recently. Psycho cops. Psycho family members. Psycho school teachers.”

She pinched him and he shot her a frustrated, ‘Hey!’

She ignored him. “Psycho cops? Sorry to hear that. Nice job keeping the boot on.”

“What?” Theron asked. Sinead sat down at the edge of the couch and loosened his boot. She was making him nervous, but he didn’t want her to see.

The woman grumbled under her breath as she moved closer. Theron could only make out, ‘fucking Baird.’ She seemed to catch herself and gave him the side eye. “Keeping the boot on. It keeps the ankle from swelling up like a melon. Hopefully, we can ice it now and set it to sorts.”

The teacher’s fingers grazed the skin of his ankle again and chilled him. She stopped. She seemed startled by the sensation, too.

“So what is this? Good cop, bad cop type thing, but you’re both?”

Sinead frowned. “If it is, you better stop trying to piss me off, I’d say.”

He stared at her from beneath a curtain of his hair. “Fuck that. I’m just waiting for someone to throttle me in my sleep at this point.”

She gave the boot a tug and he winced, gritting his teeth as she pulled the heel of the boot. He hissed, letting her hold the pillow in place as he lowered his foot back down. “Is there a chance you might have a phone? I need to call home and let them know -”

“No. There’s no phone here.”

Her tone stopped him.

“No phones. No cars. No TV. No power outside the generators. No cell service. No computers. And no way out,” she said, finishing the run of words with the uninvested tone of a flight attendant.

“What do you mean?” He asked. He didn’t need to hear the answer. He’d heard the hum of that fence. He’d seen the gate slide shut behind him when Baird brought him onto the Extension.

Sinead held up a hand, and she was carting two rolled up ace bandages. “We
do
have a first aid kit down at the school, though. Small miracles. I don’t have any ice, but we can get you braced up.”

She eyed him from her perch on her knees before him. He almost shuddered at the touch as she ran her hand up the back of his calf.

“They don’t let you leave?”

Sinead gave him a sad smile. “Not in two years.”

Two years? He’d come north with the intention of hiding out til winter. The thought of being stuck there indefinitely made his stomach drop.

Her fingers pushed his jeans upward, leaving his skin bare to the touch. He shivered just so as her hand crept higher. Theron shifted in his seat, fearing he might embarrass himself if he kept shivering at her touch. “That’s – they can’t fucking do that.”

Sinead laughed. “Well, Jesus. Thank god, you arrived to point out the injustice of it all.”

The two of them sat in a cold silence as Sinead wrapped the two bandages around his ankle. She finished after a long quiet, setting his well wrapped foot back down on the pillow. “There. Can I get you anything else while I’m here?”

Theron glanced down at his foot and frowned. “No. You’ve done enough to alleviate your guilty conscience.”

Sinead’s nostrils flared and he almost relished to see it.

“You’ll be happy to know you and Darrell and startlingly similar. Have a nice day,” she said. Then she turned and marched out the front door of the trailer, pulling her coat up around her jawline before she disappeared from sight.

Despite his anger, he felt almost disappointed to see her go.

Theron spent the next two days curled up on his grandmother’s couch, his sore ankle wrapped and elevated with pillows and blankets. He learned very little about The Extension as he convalesced, Grandma Pearl focusing wholly on organizing and dispensing the supplies from Baird Davenport’s crates much of the first day. Each family group stopped by her house over the course of the day to receive shares from the cache – a share per each family member. Theron watched Pearl divide two massive blocks of cheese, ten jars of peanut butter, or thirty loaves of bread – he then saw gratitude the likes of which he’d never seen before as frail looking fathers and mothers arrived to pick up their share.

These things were meant to last a month.

Though there were only thirty two people on The Extension, there was no question this food wasn’t enough. Especially since they were bears.

All of them. Every single person on The Extension was a shifter.

“Thank you, Chief,
” they’d say as they bowed their heads to Pearl Holden. She gave them a friendly nod, patted their children on the head, and sent them on their way.

“Thank you, Chief.
Qujannamiik
,”

Theron knew that phrase. His mother taught him to say it when he was a boy, back before Karen and Pearl’s fighting finally ended and Karen severed ties with everything up north.

Theron’s ankle was well enough to walk by the second day, and given Grandma Pearl’s stoic nature, he was aching for human contact. He found his mind was fixated on one human in particular, but he didn’t dare seek her out.

“Bring this down to the third house on the right and say a proper hello to your Uncle Gregory and Aunt Pam. They will appreciate it,” Grandma Pearl said, and the tone was hauntingly familiar. Chief Richard Talbot had spoken with a similar air of authority.

Hell, even his father spoke with that same ‘respect your elders, tend to your family’ kind of purpose. Still, he’d never so much as spoken to them on the phone. He wasn’t sure what use he’d be as company.

The Extension houses were all quiet, the same stillness as Pearl’s trailer. There were voices in the distance at times, even children’s laughter, but for the most part it was still – as though the cold stifled sound itself that far north.

Uncle Gregory came to the door with a confused look, but offered up a half smile when he saw Theron standing there, his arms heavy with supplies.

“Come in, come in. You’re Karen’s boy, right?”

Theron nodded, stepping into the almost identical trailer. A woman with long black hair, graying slightly at the temples, sat in a ratty old recliner, a worn paperback copy of
Tom Sawyer
in her hands. She glanced up at Theron and was quickly on her feet to greet him. Gregory took the supplies from Theron as Pam offered him a hug.

“God, you couldn’t mistake that jawline. Karen’s son, indeed.”

Theron forced a smile and took up residence on their weathered couch. The room was so similar to Pearl’s, he almost joked about a glitch in the Matrix.

Pamela caught him eyeing the place. “This was an old base of some kind. Army or Navy. As far as we can tell. It’s not the only fishing village that’s been abandoned this far north, but it is the only one with a fifteen foot electric fence around the perimeter.”

Theron gave a half laugh and Gregory appeared at his shoulder, offering a cup of tea. Theron took it and was startled to find it actually tasted like tea. Pearl watered hers down to nearly tasteless.

Uncle Gregory offered a smile before sitting down in the seat across from him. Gregory had short hair and deep lines across his cheeks. Still, despite the weathered state of his face, he shared features with his little sister that couldn’t be denied. Gregory looked just like Theron’s mom.

And like Theron’s mom, he was particular about hospitality. The guest gets the best cut of cake, the last slice of bread, the biggest marshmallow in their cocoa. Here, Theron got the full tea bag in his tea, steeped until it was spent.

Theron felt guilty, and as a result, determined to drink it all.

“You look to be getting along better, yes? How is the ankle feeling?” Pamela asked. Theron didn’t know much of Pamela. He’d heard Karen talk about Gregory over the years, always speaking fondly of her older brother. Yet his wife, who seemed a gentler sort than the rest of the Holdens, he knew nothing of.

Theron shrugged. “It’s feeling better. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry that you had such a rough introduction to the place. Darrell is understandably suspicious. But I see our Sinead patched you up well enough.”

Theron frowned. He hadn’t crossed paths with his cousin since the incident by the fence. “I guess she did,” Theron said, smiling at his uncle. “She’s an interesting addition to the clan, no?”

Gregory chuckled. “You’re telling me. Don’t know what we’d do without her, though.”

“Yeah, I was actually wondering – Grandma Pearl isn’t exactly the most talkative person.”

Gregory chuckled. “No, that she isn’t.”

“Would you mind telling me what’s going on up here? I stopped at the old reserve, but as per usual, I couldn’t get anyone to tell me a damn thing. How did you all end up here?”

Before his aunt and uncle could speak, the front door to the house opened and a young boy with similarly short hair to his father marched inside, followed by a second small boy. They gave Theron a quick once over, then turned to their parents to say hello. Theron quickly learned their names were Sivoy and James.

Sivoy. Buniq. Pauloosie.

In among the familiar English names, there were traditional names. That wasn’t uncommon in Theron’s tribe either, but most had one of each, not one or the other.

Karen once told him she’d thought to choose an Inuit name for him, but felt his spirit was more of his father’s tribe than hers. He didn’t protest. Theron wasn’t exactly the most common of names, either.

Pam and Gregory found a way to side step the question. Just as Pearl had.

Theron sighed. He wasn’t unaccustomed to that lack of candor.

He sat with his aunt and uncle until his tea was done, sharing details of home back down south in Maine. They seemed to relish the simpler details. Finally, Theron took his leave before Gregory could offer a second cup of tea.

Theron stood outside the small houses, scanning the world around him as though some wall might have answers written on it if he just looked long enough. Finally, he shoved his hands in his pockets and started marching down toward the gate. If he had any chance of finding a straight talker, he knew exactly where to look.

CHAPTER SIX