Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand

Lisa Ochai had never liked the Ghost Roads, but she ventured on them today, chasing half a haunting.

 Her friends, she knew, pretended to hate the rough, wild places that could be reached through the Ghost Roads, but in truth they always spoke of them with affection, with a kind of lust in their voices. They would never admit it, and probably didn't realise, but they thrived on danger. That need for risk, that eagerness for the fray and the fight cemented their friendships.

 But she had found no excitement here - nothing but grief, in truth.

 It was grief that guided her steps - grief, and the last shreds of love. She had spoken of love to Cern Akafren once, and been refused. Now she would speak to him of friendship and hope he said yes.

 "Hey hold still! You're on Pack territory, and-" The voice that came from the undergrowth was young and rough; she recognised the boy who stepped through the trees, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. "Oh. It's you. What are you doing here? Come to visit your mate?"

 "If he's around," she answered, careful to keep her voice even. The Pack was always quick to interpret careless words as a slight, and Romulus could find insult in the most innocuous of comments. "Aren't you cold?"

 She couldn't feel the bite in the air: since she had been made a vampire, the weather's extremes didn't touch her, but she could see her breath fogging in the air, and despite the rowdy challenge, Romulus stood like he was trying to huddle in on himself.

 He gave her a sullen nod. "Yeah. But Donna says I have to watch in human form or I'll get distracted." The grumpiness in his voice suggested that the Pack's leader was probably right. "And you can't come by. He said he didn't want visitors."

 Hmm. She eyed him. He did look wretched, his nose and cheeks red, his eyes watering.

 "Tell you what, " she said, slipping off the oversized polo neck she had stolen from Vaje. It wasn't like she really needed it, but if she strolled out in a T-shirt, people tended to stare. "Give me half an hour with him, and you can keep the top."

 His expression lightened fractionally. "Well...guess it can't hurt none. And you know, if it was just seasons greetings, don't reckon anyone could argue with that..."

 She waited.

 He snatched the pullover from her and shrugged into it, burying his nose in the thick neck. "Go on then, but make sure he don't take it out on me later."

 "That's not his way," she said absently, already planning out what she would say to convince Cern to come back.

 So she missed Romulus's soft rejoinder. "Yeah? Sure fooled me."

~*~

 The Pack were sat about their makeshift camp, most in wolf-form. Felicity Seraphine was playing a card game with a young boy she didn't recognise; he didn't look more than about eleven or twelve, and she had to wonder how he'd managed to find his way to this group of misfits and wilderness creatures.

 And there was Cern, slumped on the picnic bench. In profile, his expression was unreadable, but his face seemed different.

 Nerves gripped her, washing away her all her careful words. Still, she was here; she might as well make the best of it.

 She stepped out of the woodland into the clearing, and a dozen heads snapped round. Growls rolled through the air, overlapping in a rasping symphony.

 Cern had gone quite still at sight of her; gods, how thin he'd become, how different he looked in those ragged clothes. She was shocked by the gauntness of his face, all pallid skin and grey shadows beneath his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.

 For a moment, she didn't know what to say, then she swallowed down the uncertainty. "Could I have a word?" she said, cool and impersonal. Maybe that was the best way to start. She didn't want to talk him around the Pack.

 She thought he would refuse - when had his face become so hard to read? - but he gave a shrug and said, "If you want."

~*~

 They walked in silence for a while, moving towards the heart of the forest. The tree trunks were thick and close here, the weak winter light winding through the skeletal branches. Under it, he was ashen, a thing of dark hues and lethargy.

 Once upon a time - wasn't that how fairytales went? - there would have been argument and chatter, talking avidly over one another as the conversation twisted and turned to some unknown ending. Or maybe not to any end; she could still think of half a dozen unfinished discussions, picked up as and when they felt like it.

The silence saddened her, and so she broke it, not with the tact she had planned, but with the question that had hovered on her lips for the last month.

 "Why did you leave us?"

 He stopped, and surprise put a welcome light into his eyes, the violet of sunset skies. He answered her bluntness with equal candour. "Because you killed her."

 His soulmate: it always came back to Jallakri ap Ganra, who had gone to her death with more dignity than she had come to her life of slaughter and ignorance. "We didn't kill her. She chose her death."

 His lips skinned back ,and somehow it was more unsettling to see human teeth than the wolves' spiky canines. "She had no choice. If she hadn't gone willingly, you would have pushed onto that pyre yourself and lit the damn match."

 Was that what he told himself in the lonely nights? Lonely, yes, she had no doubt that in the witching hour, he saw only the blackness that arched above him and cared nothing for the guiding lights that stippled it. Every sky was starless for him, each sunrise nothing more than the result of gravity and science's ponderous logic.

 When your soulmate was gone, some of the wonder of the world vanished, and if your will was not strong enough, if you could not believe that you were more than half of a whole, you would vanish too, sooner or later. She had seen it happen to others: she had refused to let it happen to her.

 But it made his words no less cruel.

 "That's unfair," she told him softly.

 "Is it?" The face he turned to her burned with fervour, the skin taut at his temples and cheeks. "I don't think so."

 In truth, yes, she would have done anything to protect Cern. Nor would she be alone. She had seen the cold look in Cougar's eyes when they carried Cern back from the ledge where Jal had left him; she had heard the loathing scythe through Jepar's voice when he kept vigil over Cern, and she had even seen a flicker of hatred surface in Thom's face, stifling his serenity.

 "We would do anything for you," she answered, struggling to keep her voice calm and controlled. "We love you, Cern, what part of that don't you understand? It was her or you, and we were always going to choose you."

 "It was meant to be her and me." His voice cracked across the air like a whip. "Her and me, always. I could have helped her, I should have stopped her walking into the fire - there must have been another way, but no one ever gave me time to find it!"

 He slammed the palm of his hand into a tree. She winced at the sound of flesh bruising. Again, and again, until he was still once more.

  "There was no time," she replied, hating the faint quiver in her voice. "Do you think you were the only one she wanted? Do you think you're the only person we would have lost? You know what, if she had to die a thousand times to save you just once, I'd still choose you. We all would."

  He shuddered, and the ferocity that twisted his mouth and filled his eyes made her take a half-step back. "And you called her monster."

 The words went home like an axe, a bitter betrayal of the friendship they'd once had. The friendship that she, in her naivety, had thought still lay under that angry, grieving mask. The boy she had known would never have said that.

 Did I love you? she thought, staring at him. Have we changed so much, you and I, that I can search your face for what I once adored and find only what I abhor? And here's the tragedy, here's the really sad thing - this isn't even the first time I have been so grossly mistaken in love. You don't even have the shabby honour of being the first.

 "You're a fool," she said, the words rising up on a tide of anger. "You're surrounded by monsters and you just don't want to see it. They're wolves in wolves' clothing, Cern - they don't even bother to hide it."

 "Better a fool than a monster," he spat, his hands clenched at his sides. "All of you, you were glad to see her die!"

 Tact abandoned her, and what came out was a slurry of words that she had been wanting to scream for months. "You know what? Her death was a tragedy, it was, but that's no reason to make your life into a farce. There will be grief, and there will be pain, and there will always be an absence where she should be - welcome to the world! Do you think you're the first person ever to lose someone? Do you think you're the only one who's ever been lonely or scared or angry?"

 He opened his mouth but she ignored him and carried on, her voice overriding him easily.

 "Appalling things happen to everyone, they really do. It's nothing to do with whatever big sweeping tragedies are in your past - it's how you deal with them that matters. So you've been bereaved, you and millions of other people. Having a tragic past is not an excuse to be a complete moron!"

 She stopped, shocked at the torrent that had poured out of her.

 Cern was staring at her, his mouth slack and still.

 "In fact," she continued, making an effort to lower her voice, "I don't think I'm prepared to waste my time on you anymore. And I think you owe everyone in the Circle an apology. Not me, I think we're probably even. But Cougar, Jepar, Chatoya - particularly after what you said to her...you owe them."

 The anger slipped away from her, leaving her feeling queerly blank.

 "Don't carry on like this," she said, examining his face. She had sketched him so often that she'd thought she knew every bend of his bones. Wrong, it seemed. "Live or die, Cern, make up your damn mind. No one else is going to do it for you."

 She turned on her heel, not waiting for his response. Anger still thrummed in her veins, but somehow she felt purged, as if letting out all the words she had held in her heart for fear of losing him had eased her grief.

 Vaje would be waiting for her at home, and if there was not yet love in their burgeoning relationship, there was no lack of affection, nothing but wicked warmth in those bronze eyes. And she knew that she would tell him what had happened, she would lie in his arms and maybe cry in them for a little while, and then her world would carry on.

 She would bear her loss with as much grace as she knew how.

 And Cern...?

 It was time for him to decide. A life lived in grief and regret was only a postponed death, a slow pervasive despair. She was not sure if she could ever repair the rift she had just put between them - or if she even wanted to - but if he changed his mind, the rest of the Circle would be there.

 But in the meantime, there was Vaje and comfort and a world that carried on no matter what she said or did or felt.