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1) Luck
Sometimes talking to Natalie feels like soothing a rabid stray dog. All sharp teeth and wild eyes, trust the size of a flea and it’s all covered in sores oozing love me love me love me.
But Lottie supposed it had always been that way. Nat had always had this sort of attitude to people caring about her that reminded Lottie of abused animals. She barked at them, shied away and hid under a table, don’t touch me, you’ll only hurt me.
She tries anyway. Thinks she might be able to teach Nat to bite instead of bark, because they’re getting nowhere with this constant attack on each other. Nat dismisses the rituals, Lottie tries her hardest but it’s futile. They’re constantly stuck at stalemate. No one is winning and they’re all fucking losing miserably.
Nat’s about to head out to hunt on her own, Travis pouting in some corner about something that didn’t make sense since Javi was back now. The snow is a foot deep and Nat is cleaning the gun off with a rag, delicate hands becoming strong as she wipes off the muzzle and barrel.
“Did you need something, Lot?” She says, not looking up.
Lottie swallows. “Uh, yeah. Here.”
She hands her a rock she found the other day, this flat grey stone with a hole through the middle. It’s been a while since she had read anything related to fae or myth, but she knows those rocks are supposed to be a view between worlds.
And maybe there’s a world where she can look through the stone and find a way home, but this isn’t that world. She just thinks it’ll bring her good luck.
She probably looks a lot like a penguin right now actually. Hello Nat, here is a nice rock. Please love me and stop running suicide missions, hugs and kisses!
Like, fucking hell, she used to have game back home. Now she’s giving out rocks to show her affections. Jesus Christ.
Nat stares at the rock in her hand and raises an eyebrow. “Is that some weird wilderness Wicca shit?”
Lottie frowns. “No? It’s just a rock.”
“Oh.” Nat nods. She takes the rock from Lottie and turns it over in her hand, finger tracing around the hole. “Cool. Thanks, Lot.”
Lottie smiles. “You’ll be careful out there, won’t you? The snow looks pretty deep.”
Nat stands and shoulders the now shiny gun. She grimaced as she wrapped the fabric around her face, rank with stale breath. They ran out of toothpaste a month ago. But it would keep her face out of the elements, so she’d suck it up.
“Well, I’ve got your little good luck charm now, so I should be good.” She smirked when Lottie pouted at her sarcasm.
“It is literally just a rock, Nat. I just thought it was nice.”
“I’m just teasing, Lot. It’s a cool rock. Thank you.” Nat grins, bumping her shoulder. This doesn’t feel like taming a wild animal anymore, it feels like befriending the little cat that wandered into her garden when she was five.
It was this tiny little gray thing, massive blue eyes and a tiny deformity on its lip that made the right side hang a little over its front teeth. Lottie had begged and begged her parents to let her keep the cat, but they said it had fleas and would destroy their nice furniture.
The cat lived in her back garden instead, hidden behind the gardenias and the apple tree. Lottie got it a little box with a bed and fresh water, she fed it tuna from a can and for a really long time, the cat was her only friend in the world. The cat didn’t think she was crazy when she told it about the things she saw, and it didn’t think she was stuck up like Shauna Shipman said she was when they were six. It just liked her.
In hindsight, that cat was actually rather similar to Nat. It would leave dead mice on her doorstep like Nat would bring fresh game to the cabin. It hated being touched, but sometimes it would let Lottie scratch behind its ears. Nat refuses to be close to anyone for more than five minutes, but sometimes, when it’s quiet and dark and everyone else is asleep, she’ll let Lottie burrow in closer to her back under their blankets.
When she was twelve, the cat ran away.
When she was twelve, Natalie Scatorccio moved to town.
Funny how these things happen.
2) Healing
Shauna’s grown too big to keep standing up, and the snow is coming down thick and heavy outside the meat shed. Nat and Lottie have taken over for the minute, and Lottie is struggling to keep focus on skinning the two rabbits be use the wilderness keeps telling to bring it to the trees.
Bury it.
Offer it.
Sacrifice it.
“Oh, shit.” Nat curses, dropping the blade on the table and holding her hand in her left palm.
Lottie rushes to her, the whispers quieting. “What happened?”
Nat pushes away her concern and steps back, and for a moment, she’s a grey wolf, snarling and gnashing teeth.
Go on, Lottie thinks, eyes challenging Nat. Go on, bite me. Devour me. Swallow me raw and mangled. You’ll spit me back out covered in your own blood.
“It’s just a cut, Lot.” Nat says eventually, fangs rising back into her jaw where Lottie doesn’t think she can see. Under Nat’s sharp jaw, there’s all there claws and teeth just waiting to come back down. She sees it every time the gun goes off, every time someone whispered slut behind her back, when her dad shot himself in the face. They’re big and venomous, and Nat doesn’t want to maim Lottie, even if sometime she thinks the other girl wants her to maul her.
“Let me see.” Consume. Let me consume you. I’ll spit you back out whole.
Lottie really had to stop talking to trees. This was getting a little too Emily Brontë for her liking.
Nat slowly outstretched her hand, like she knew where Lottie hid her deer hooves. Deep in the abyss of her stomach, antlers growing as big as a stags. She won’t let herself starve this winter, she’ll consume the blood of her only non-believer.
Lottie take her hand cautiously, and overturned to her palm. A deep wide gash across the calloused flat, an ocean of red in a land full of pure white. It’s beautiful, Lottie thinks, to see the deepest part of someone. The part that runs through them. the part that trades with the dirt, the part that belongs to only them.
“Y’know Lot, I’d hate to get sepsis when the only doctor on call is Misty Quigley.” Nat laughs quietly. “Can we just wrap it up?”
Lottie shakes her head. “It needs stitches.”
Nat’s blood drips from her hand into the snow, dyeing it a bright pink Lottie wants to taste on her tongue. She hears the faintest sound of a fox stepping across crunching snow on his way to the lake. He’ll be dead tomorrow, a clean bullet through his little brain. Nat will drop onto the table here and they’ll carve it up together. They’ll eat again next week.
“Does it look like we have stitches here?” Nat asks sarcastically, rolling her eyes.
Lottie traces across the sliver in her palm, spreading the blood around. Nat watches her, feeling something in her rising through her lungs to bite.
Feed me. Feed me.
I’m hungry.
I’m starving. Feed me your intoxication, feed me your beliefs, I’ll choke on your religion. I’ll swallow your blood like whiskey. Feed me, feed me.
“We don’t need them.” Lottie says, her finger wet with blood as she turned back around to the table, the rabbit staring her down. Leaves rustle outside. Use it. Cut out the heart. She’ll live if you give us your heart.
Nat’s eyes widen. “Sorry, what?”
Lottie looks back at her, her blood still dripping into the snow. “We can use the heartstrings. Real sutures are just cats guts, aren’t they? This isn’t any different really.”
“I’m definitely sure there’s some steps in making the sutures we’re missing out here, but okay. Whatever.” She shouldn’t be cool with this. She isn’t cool with this. What the fuck is she doing?
But Lottie cuts into the rabbit, like she’s dissecting a frog in biology. Every movement awkward and clumsy, this is Shauna’s job, not hers. Hers is apparently running a small cult.
And strangely, Nat isn’t like, turned off by it? This is disgusting, but Lottie is doing this for her, and how is she supposed to say that? Lottie’s antlers are almost a foot high, poking through the holes in the wood above them. She pulls out the heart of the rabbit, a tiny little things, pristine and glwomg red with blood.
“Gross.” Nat says, but coming closer to look at it anyway. It doesn’t look as grotesque up close, it’s just this little red clump of flesh. A bit grimy on the dirty table, the dirt disrupting the perfection of it.
Lottie has needles in all of her pockets now, a simple prick of her finger until the wilderness trusts her enough to send off her hunters. She pulls one out and threads through a thing string of vein, blue and glistening with blood.
“Give me your hand.” She tells Nat, holding up the needle. “Before infection starts to set in.”
“I think I’d rather take the sepsis.” Nat groans, but she gives her injured hand over to Lottie anyway. Lottie cradles her hand like it’s precious metal, but she looks at it like it’s something to feast upon. Nat tries very hard not to stare at Lottie’s face, but Lottie Matthews is very pretty and Nat has always been drawn to pretty things she cannot have.
A chill that has nothing to do with the snow sets in around them as Lottie sews across the gash with rabbit heartstring. It feels indescribably cold, numbing Nat’s bones as she watches Lottie mend her hand.
She knows something will change after this. She’ll be connected to the wilderness until the stitches come out, she’ll be a part of it, because of a part of it is in her.
Natalie doesn’t believe in the wilderness, but she knows she’ll never be able to go back home again.
Natalie doesn’t believe in the wilderness, but she knows she’ll always belong to the trees and the mud. To the blood from the rabbit and the blue veins crisscrossing the flesh of her palm. To Lottie and her wide eyes, dark with want and hunger and amazement.
In the quiet of the meat shed, the only sound coming from the gore of threading Nat’s skin with rabbit heartstring, Lottie watches as Nat shrinks into herself. Not a wolf or a rabid dog, but a small cat, or maybe a fawn. She’s malleable here, she listens here. The wilderness seeps into her bloodstream with the beating heart of a dead rabbit and overcomes her completely.
“There.” Lottie says as she finishes the last stitch. She’s a little sad to see Nat’s blood retreat back under her skin, misses the raw carnal feeling in her gut of watching it drip onto the snow. The fox still waits for slaughter by the lake. “All fixed.”
“Thanks, Lot.” Her voice sounds a million miles away whilst Lottie wraps a strip of cloth around the injury. It’s somewhere deep in the woods, hiding out behind a tree and waiting to ambush. “Would have been pretty depressing to die from infection.”
“Embarrassing too.” Lottie hums, her smile a tease lost in the wind. Nat shoves her gently and takes up the knife again, they stand side by side as they carve away the meat from the rabbit.
Their hands are all covered in blood and gristle, wet with innards and shining with deep red rubies that glisten in the sunlight. It’s disgusting, but there’s some traitorous part of Lottie that exists deep in her stomach that wants Natalie exactly like this.
Dripping with blood and tearing into raw rabbit flesh. The Hunter, emaciated and reeking of gunpowder, a fragile lone wolf crawling along the snow banks, but she’s warm against Lottie’s side.
But just like with rabid dogs, you have to be patient with them. So no matter how much Lottie wants to devour Nat completely, she’ll wait until the dog learns to bite first.
3) Responsibility
Nat thinks that Lottie spends so much of her time trying to be kind, sometimes she doesn’t realise she’s being cruel. Or not cruel, Lottie could never be cruel, but that her actions can hurt. That they burn. That they scar.
Nat’s covered in inches of scars from Lottie Matthews and her kindness. Messy and colourful, drawn in crayon at junior soccer or written in blood here in the wilderness.
She’d taken all of the violence from Shauna out of kindness. She let herself become a cult leader in the name of kindness and belief. She bleeds herself dry for the kindness she believes the wilderness is giving her. Lottie’s kindness stains this place, it colours it a pretty purple colour, the colour that she will dye her acolytes in years to come.
But she still named Nat the Antler Queen.
And that wasn’t kindness. It wasn’t cruelty either, but Nat is struggling to tell the difference now. Wasn’t it enough that she trekked through the wilderness every single day in search of game that didn’t exist, now she had to lead them too?
They don’t believe in her for a long time.
The first night of her ruling, Ben sets the cabin on fire. She can’t get the door open. They almost burn alive until Van and Tai break the stupid fucking door down, and send them hurtling out into the snow to splutter and cough up black ash, the only place they had ever felt safe in this hellhole crumbling in front of the eyes.
They look to her for what to do next, and Nat feels like a disgruntled big sister who’s been charged with her younger siblings for a night, except it’s much worse than that because Javi died under her watch and it was supposed to be her-
“We go back to the plane.” She says instead of screaming her lungs out. “We’ll be safe there for a night. Grab what you can, we’ll come back in the morning to salvage.”
“What about Coach?” Misty asks quietly, falling into step next to her as she leads them back to the plane carcass. It’s a path she knows like the back of her hand, the trees twisting out of their way and the leaves parting. It’s listening to her, or she’s listening to it, she’s not too sure anymore.
Nat shrugs. “I gave him a chance to run. He tried to kill us. If we see him again, he’ll regret ever giving me that gun.”
“Okay!” Misty smiles, and Nat really does not like this girl at all. Instinctively, she holds her burned palm away from Misty’s eyeline, just in case she decided to try and fix it. “We’re killing Coach Scott next. Cool.”
“What?” Nat asks, frowning. “That’s not what I meant-“
“Nat!” Mari calls her from the back of the group. Nat sighs and turns back, signalling Van and Tai to lead the rest of them up the hill. “Can you help me carry Lottie?”
“Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah.” Nat stumbles a little, she’s been avoiding looking at Lottie since Shauna’s beating. She’d seen enough when she’d helped clean Lottie up after, it hurt too much to look at all of the damage left from Shauna’s fists. But she hooks her arm under Lottie’s anyway. “It’s not that much further, I promise.”
Nat and Mari basically haul Lottie the rest of the way to the plane. They don’t talk, but Nat can feel the daggers in Mari’s eyes anyway. They blame her already for the fire. She was the closest to Ben, she should have known. She was first to the slaughter, but now she was ordering them to put down their guns and retreat.
They’d already accepted that she was going to die. That they were going to kill her. Now they were all stuck in purgatory and Nat doesn’t need to be fucking telepathic to know they all hate that it’s her that Lottie chose.
Eventually, they follow the others into the clearing with the remnants of the plane. Everyone is dirty and exhausted, a ragtag group of dying bodies alone in the wreckage. It’s a fucking mess.
She gets Van, Tai and Travis to start ripping the plane seats out of their fixings, opening up the body of the plane and giving them something soft to sleep on at least. Mari, Akilah, Misty and Gen sit on the ground and sort through everything they managed to grab on the way out of the burning cabin. Lottie goes to follow Shauna to set up a bathroom situation, but Nat grabs her back.
“Absolutely not.” Lottie frowns at Nat’s reluctance to let her be alone with Shauna, and Nat knows she’s probably being a little overprotective but Shauna did literally beat Lottie like three days ago, so forgive her if she’s not crazy about the prospect of the two of them being together.
Lottie shrugs. “I’m gonna have to be alone with her eventually.”
Nat just rolls her eyes and storms off, and if you weren’t watching her, you wouldn’t know she was going to hide Jackie’s bones from Shauna’s eyeline, just so the other girl wouldn’t hurt as much.
Secretly, Lottie quite likes this version of Nat. The one that fought and kicked and bled, the soldier on the battlefield, the brave one, the good one. Above all else, Lottie likes that Nat is somehow still good out here. That she cares enough to separate her and Shauna. That she cares enough to give Melissa something to do just because the girl was looking like she was about to have a mental breakdown if her hands weren’t busy. That she cares enough to take the brunt of all the other girl’s hits, all of their anguish, all of their fear and all of their resentment too, and turn it into something golden.
Lottie likes that about Nat a lot.
Loves it, maybe.
Loves her, maybe.
She thinks that cruelty can get confused with love quite a lot. Giving Nat the Antler Queen wasn’t kindness, it was selfish and it was the best thing she’d ever done. She’d taken her punishment already, two little boys dead and a broken rib. But she wouldn’t change it.
The wilderness chose.
Lottie chose.
4) Blood
An angry Shauna Shipman is not someone anyone likes to mess with. The still healing bruises crisscrossing Lottie’s body say that loud and clear.
Her anger ricochets through their camp, built from the body of the plane and melted pieces of metal, dirt-stained and bloody with exhaustion. It’s small and it’s cramped, but at least it’s fucking warm.
Lottie thinks that Shauna is mainly angry because she wasn’t allowed to be before.
In the land of Before, Shauna was trapped behind Jackie Taylor’s tongue like a secret. Burrowed between Jackie’s teeth and lips was Shauna Shipman in all of her jealousy and envy, a confused mix of love for Jackie and resentment that they had practically become one being. A Frankenstein’s monster of teenage girl and skulking god.
But in the myriad of Now, Jackie is dead and Shauna is allowed to be angry. Angry at all of her losses, all of her pain, all of her suffering. Shauna Shipman is a rage-filled god and it’s going to kill them all.
She decides to start with Nat.
Nat doesn’t understand Shauna. They’re all fucking angry and hungry and losing something every other day. Javi’s hands still reach for her every time she closes her eyes, so she stopped sleeping. She didn’t start beating up her friends, she just made it her own problem.
If she looked at Shauna a little closer, she’d probably be able to find some similarities between them, but she’s too busy checking up on Lottie’s healing ribs and trying to lead their ragtag team of teenaged cannibals to be too concerned about Shauna’s feelings.
If she had looked at little closer, she probably would have seen the knife coming.
Shauna attacks from behind, the butcher knife held tightly in her hand, rage coursing through her veins coloured the same shade as Jackie’s lipstick. Her blood boils the same colour as her dead baby, she’s screaming herself raw and gnawing on bare bones like it will bring everything she has loved back from the dead.
Nat was just trying to check the fucking snares when she feels the first wound. It rips through her, pushing deep into her back and bloodying her vision. The trip wire of the snare pulls taut as she lets it go, stumbling as she stood up, the knife already gone from her back.
She presses her hands to it and slowly turns around, breathing carefully as pain rages through her body like a forest fire. Nat’s expecting Ben when she turns around, dirty and still covered in ash from the fire. She’s expecting Travis, still clinging to his brother’s beating heart. She’s expecting Lottie, offering her a pair of antlers and carving the symbol into her back to mark her the wilderness’s property for the rest of her life.
But it’s Shauna.
It’s the Butcher.
Nat had always thought that butchers and hunters were supposed to work together. The hunter deposits her game and the butcher carves it up to be sold or eaten for dinner. Was that not the way it was supposed to be? Were they not supposed to be a team? She can still see the bright yellow numbers on their shirts, are they not still those girls just trying to win Nationals?
“What the fuck, Shipman?” She’s not Lottie. She’s not going to take Shauna’s rage with her hands clasped behind her back, lying down feeble like a discarded dog. Nat knows what it’s like to be trapped in the hand of someone’s rage, she’d known it her entire life.
Shauna practically growls. Nat would laugh if the situation wasn’t so fucking dire. “It should have been me. I was supposed to lead us.”
“What-“ She doesn’t have the time to question if Shauna has gone completely round the fucking twist, because she’s too busy being stabbed in the shoulder. Nat cries out as Shauna drives in the blade, their faces inches apart. She could kiss her if she wanted to. Bite her, maybe. Grab her face and drive it into the dirt. Why the fuck did she leave the gun back at camp, and why the everloving fuck was Shauna stabbing her?
“The wilderness was supposed to choose me.” Shauna is saying, but Nat can’t really hear her. There’s too much blood rushing in her ears, a crescendo of noise and pollution, pooling in her brain and making it too hard to concentrate. “It took Jackie. It took my baby. It still chose you.”
“Lottie chose me, you fucking idiot.” Nat grunts, her eyes screwing up in pain as Shauna pulled the knife out again. “She chose me because I’m the only one left with any fucking morality. If she’d chosen you, it would have been a bloodbath.”
It’s turned into one anyway.
But it was always going to, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what happens in the game of war?
Shauna curses and drives the knife back into her ribs, and Nat falls to her knees, the pain ripping through her entire body. She doesn’t fucking understand it, all she had ever tried to do was fucking help. She carried Jackie’s fucking bones away from the camp so Shauna didn’t have to look at them, she let Shauna crush the bones in her hand when she was in labour, hell, she fucking let Shauna hold a goddamn knife to her throat and offer her up as a lamb to slaughter.
Was that not enough?
Would anything ever be enough?
Probably not. She’s still checking snares for game that doesn’t exist, she’s still leading girls who don’t believe in her through the winter, she’s still looking after the boy who hates her and she’s still sleeping next to the girl who looks at her like she’s a rabid dog to be tamed. Nat’s still trying to be good, and no one is fucking listening anymore.
“Shauna, please-“ Her mouth fills up with blood as Shauna twists the knife in her gut. She screams into the void above her, the trees multiplying in her eyes and the roots twisting around her limbs. It’s trying to swallow her, the same way Lottie wants to. She’d let her, if she could just get off the forest floor. “Stop. Just- stop, please.”
“It’s not fucking fair, Nat.” Shauna says, tears streaming down her cheeks. They drip into Natalie’s wounds, and she’d never known salt water could burn more than holy water, but she’s burning up now. Laura Lee could explain it better, but Laura Lee died because Nat wasn’t enough to save her either. “There’s nothing left. It’s all gone. I’ve lost everything.”
Nat absently wonders if Shauna has ever really known love in her life. If she’d known it like Jackie had, where it was fed to her from a silver spoon dangling from Shauna’s fingertips. If she had, maybe they wouldn’t be here. Shauna wouldn’t have learned to lick love from the knives she’s dragging through Nat’s organs.
Shauna’s anger seemingly knows no bounds, because her eyes flash again when Nat weakly tries to push her away. She grips Nat closer, her knees crashing against a fallen tree and Nat whines in pain as Shauna removes the knife again. Her movements are clunky and uncomfortable, like she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. The Butcher was never supposed to kill, that’s the Hunter’s job. Nat finds it kind of tragic that Shauna keeps trying to kill her and fails every time.
She pushes right into Nat’s face, and Nat wonders if this is what it feels like to lie upon Shauna’s butcher block. To lie in the meat shed and wait to be carved up and fed to starving girls. Was this how Javi felt? Was this how those rabbits Nat cut up with Lottie felt? Her hand itches where the scar that was created with heartstring lies, she wonders what they’ll use to fix her up this time. Maybe there’s still some of Javi left in the ashes of the cabin, maybe she’ll have to carry his blood as well as his skin in her stomach.
Shauna’s face twists as Nat closes her eyes. “It should have been you who died in the snow, not her. It’s not fucking fair, Natalie.”
“I know.” Nat whispers. She’s known that for a decade now. Travis had a gun pointed at her months ago, and all she could think was, go on, do it. Shoot me. Do it. I’m telling you to shoot me. Get it over with. I’m tired of trying, just fucking shoot me. She’s been living with a stone in her stomach since she learned to walk and he could have ripped it out with her with gunpowder and a splash of blood on the ground.
He didn’t shoot her.
And she keeps fucking surviving. Even now, with Shauna’s rage pouring salt into her wounds, and with four wounds bigger than canyons tearing her to shreds, she knows she’ll survive this too. The world isn’t fair, God isn’t fair, the wilderness isn’t fair, and they’ve all deemed that Natalie Scatorccio should have to live with all of her fucking mistakes clinging to her skin.
She opens her eyes and grips onto Shauna’s hand with whatever strength she’s got left. The knife is lodged in her side, and it’s very hard to breathe, but she has to let Shauna know she’s not angry. Has to provide the girl some comfort, something tangible, something she can cling to when she falls asleep at night. “Just do it. Kill me. Get it over with. Just kill me, please.”
And because God died with Laura Lee in a jet over the lake, Shauna blinks and comes back to herself. The anger recedes back into her stomach and she takes the knife back out of Nat’s side, a sickening sound of blood comes crashing out of her.
“Oh shit-“
Nat supposes she should be pretty pissed right now, but she grew up too sharp and too angular for rage like that. Her body wasn’t supposed to survive this long, it was supposed to die somewhere aged seven, or maybe aged fifteen, a rifle stuck on safety, a father’s touch that hurt like it was supposed to love exploding in front of her.
Her bones are all too sharp and leaking poison. It’s spilling all over the ground, tainting green grass a harsh black. Or maybe red, because isn’t that all of her blood? Isn’t that all of her anger? And isn’t all of that her love too?
“Shit.” Shauna breathes again, still clutching her blade. “Shit, Nat. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-“
But Nat can’t hear the rest. She’s somewhere else, stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying desperately to claw her way back to life. Blood ricochets through her ears, how many places is she bleeding from? She opens her mouth to apologise to Shauna for dirtying her clothes, but all that comes out is a sputtering cough of deep red ink.
That’s not good.
“Oh god, Natalie.” Shauna pants, tears rolling down her face as she catches Nat when she starts to slip into the grass again. “We’re gonna get you help. Come on, we’re not that far from the plane.”
Right. She hadn’t gone that far from the plane because Lottie put rocks in the bottom of her boots to stop her from going any further than the snares. There was a landslide in the distance, she remembers now. The falling of rocks signalling Shauna’s arrival, the first stab wound, the betrayal of feeling like a lamb to slaughter again. Nat would have taken exile over sacrifice instead.
“Shauna.” Nat breathes through her choking lungs. It hurts, everything hurts. “It’s not worth it. Just let me die.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Shauna says, and she actually sounds angry again, which is kinda funny in retrospect. Didn’t she literally just try to kill Nat? “We need you, Nat.”
“Didn’t seem that way when you stabbed me.” Now is so not the time to be cracking jokes, but if she doesn’t then she has literally nothing else left, and that would be really fucking tragic. She wonders how Lottie is going to react when Shauna drags her through the door, and then wonders why her first thought was Lottie and not Travis, but thankfully, she passes the fuck out before she can any further down that rabbit hole.
Lottie feels her coming before she sees her.
Blood, scarlet and withering, dripping into mud instead of snow. The rocks she’d placed quietly in the bottom of Nat’s boots to warn her of the landslide in the distance crunching under feet that were dragging, not walking. Shauna’s soft grunts as she dragged a girl she’d once held a knife to back home, and Lottie knew, she knew, that she should never have let Shauna go anywhere near Nat with all of her anger locked in her back pocket.
Eight hungry mouths look up at the noise coming through the door. The Butcher and the Hunter, their Queen and her Acolyte. If they were together, they must have something to feed them with, right?
But Lottie, the High Prophet, knows better. Knows it like she knew rocks were going to clatter down the mountainside, knows it like she knew Javi was still alive because he was going to feed them in a few months, knows it like she knew Laura Lee was going to die in that plane because everything Lottie has ever loved has been ripped from her arms and left her scarred. She knows that the Butcher and the Hunter can never be friends, not really. Knows that the Unfaithful Acolyte will always try to usurp the Queen in the name of grief and distrust.
“You have to help her.” Shauna says, breathless with desperation and reeking of guilt. Lottie wonders that if Shauna had known love when she was growing up, she wouldn’t even know what guilt tastes like. Now it coats her tongue and spills into every sentence.
Tai rushes to them, Van at her back. They grab Nat from Shauna and Tai’s eyes go wide when she sees all of the blood. “What the fuck did you do, Shauna?”
Shauna looks almost childlike in her guilt, hiding her hands behind her back to conceal Natalie’s blood and all of the bruises from beating Lottie. She looks down at the dirt. “I was angry. She was there. I didn’t- I didn’t mean for it to go so far.”
Van rolls her eyes and deposits Nat on one of their makeshift beds. She unzips Nat’s leather jacket and Lottie takes up residence on her knees next to the girl. Van gags at the sight of Nat’s wounds. “Jesus fucking Christ. This is- This is bad.”
“She’s gonna make it.” Lottie whispers, and she’s not even hearing fucking voices right now, she just has to say that aloud to herself. Has to make herself believe it, because Nat is bleeding out and she can’t lose her. Nat is the good one, she couldn’t cause real harm even if she tried. Natalie is their leader, anointed by Lottie’s bloody symbols and a dead little boy. They can’t lose her. “I know it. She’s not gonna die here.”
The wilderness is cruel, but it’s not the wilderness that did this. Lottie looks back up at Shauna, who’s biting on her bottom lip and staring at Nat. It’s familiar, the tentative way Shauna tries so hard to keep her rage under her skin and it ends up exploding out anyway. Lottie’s back aches under Shauna’s stare, bones twisting with all of the ghosts she tried to absorb from Shauna’s fists.
It wasn’t enough.
God, will she ever just be enough?
“Alright, move, move.” Misty is saying, barrelling through the girls with a bucket of clean water held under her arm. The Healer. The girls scramble out of the way and Misty rips the rest of Nat’s t-shirt off, which she’ll be mad about when she woke up. It was her favourite t-shirt, she gave it to Lottie in the attic when she was lonely and bruised and guilty. “Someone start wetting rags. And get me some needle and thread. We need to stop the blood flow, put some pressure on the wounds.”
The girls follow Misty’s instructions, their hands joining on their wounded Queen’s injuries. If she was awake, Nat would probably be swearing at them all, but as it is, she’s pale and dead to the world. She looks pretty peaceful actually. Lottie would kill a million bears if Nat could look that peaceful when she actually slept.
Lottie produces a needle from her pocket, and there’s no rabbits here to rip veins from, so they’re using an old holey blanket that was no use to anyone. Mari tears threads out of it, as Misty heats up the needle from Lottie over the fire. A few tears slip from Misty’s eyes and her hand shakes as she presses the wound in Nat’s gut together to start stitching it up.
“She’s losing too much blood.” Lottie whispers, as the girl beneath them continues to pale. The wind around them hurls against the walls of the shelter, a storm gathering across the skies to mourn its Queen. Wolves circle from their hideout, narrowly avoiding Nat’s traps and trying to find a way to their leader. The wolves circle in here too, nine pairs of eyes waiting for their Hunter to die so they could feast. “We have to do something.”
“I don’t even know her blood type.” Misty says, voice choked up with tears. “I don’t have the shit to make a transfusion. I don’t know how to save her if this doesn’t work.”
Lottie squeezes Misty’s shoulder, the Healer cracking under the weight of the Prophet’s gaze. “Take mine.”
Misty gapes at her. “That’s not going to-“
“Just do it.” Lottie says, offering her wrists. This is what she always done, this is what she will always do. Her blood is the wilderness’s and the wilderness is Natalie. It’s Natalie, and it’s Shauna too. It’s all of them, and it’s none of them, but Lottie knows that if she has any hope at all of saving Nat’s life, she has to do this. “Quickly. We don’t have much time.”
The summer solstice was coming.
Nat had to be back on her feet by then. There would be animals again, flowers in full bloom, twin antlers upon their heads. Lottie has had endless visions of bowing to her Queen beneath a sunny sky, slicing open their palms and offering up their flesh to the gods. Offering their flesh to the hungry girls that prowl around the wilderness, the ones that are staring at Nat like they did during the hunt, wild wolves waiting to pounce.
Lottie wouldn’t let them. They needed at least one person who hadn’t gone absolutely fucking insane, now that Shauna was going around stabbing innocents and Tai was disappearing during the night again and Travis ate his little brother’s heart raw.
They construct a makeshift tube to feed Lottie’s blood into Nat out of some old engine piping, and absently Lottie wonders if they should be worried about the definite metal poisoning they could both receive from this, or about the sulphuric smell that rips through the air when they inject the tube into Nat’s skin, flushing out whatever the fuck was in said tube before it fills with Lottie’s blood; but in the end, she decides not to mention it whilst Misty Quigley is still holding a needle and thread.
The silence around them is suffocating as they watch Misty sew Nat up. Lottie sits back on her heels, dizzy and refusing to look away from Nat’s face, just praying for a sign of life. She’ll take anything right now, an insult, a sarcastic comment, some woo woo bullshit that would normally fall from her own mouth, anything, as long as it came from Nat. As long as she was going to wake up. As long as she would still be there, where Lottie could see her, where Lottie could tell her that she lo-
“Lot-“ It’s quiet, and it’s muffled, but it’s there. Nat’s face twists in agony, even as the rest of the girls breathe a quiet sigh of almost-relief. Almost, because they just lost another feast. Almost, because they hadn’t lost their Queen. Almost, because their friend survived. “Lottie? It- it hurts.”
She almost faints as she sits up, bones still aching from Shauna’s fists two months ago now. God, how much fucking blood will she spill in this place? How much more will she have to lose before they are allowed to live?
Lottie reaches out to brush the hair out of Nat’s face. She’s burning up, but then again, she was just stabbed four times. “Nat. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna make it.”
“Don’t wanna-“ Nat gasps out, opening her eyes. Everything in her body burns, she’s a forest fire waiting to happen. It was always going to end this way, she always knew she’d be taken out eventually. She’d welcome it, open her arms and let death in the form of Shauna Shipman’s knife carve her into oblivion, but of course, Lottie fucking Matthews refused to just let her die. Why did people keep doing that?
Lottie shakes her head. “Not happening. You are going to survive. I said so, so it’s going to happen.”
Nat grimaces. “You’re very bossy for a guardian angel, Lottie.”
This is very intimate for the amount of eyes on them, but Lottie couldn’t give less of shit. Let them see, let them watch, let them know. The Queen and her Prophet, the Hunter and her Protector, the Stag and her Doe, whatever they were, they were alive. That was all that mattered.
Lottie rolls her eyes. “You’re very talkative for someone on the brink of death.”
“Then let me fucking die and I’ll shut up.” Nat feels fragile on that bed, horrifically so. She wishes for the cold of the snow, because everything is on fire and she can’t control the flames anymore. Antlers are poking through her skull, as Lottie’s blood drips through the dirty tubes to join her own. Is this how she truly becomes the Queen? With the Sacrificial Lamb still scraping away at the lining of her stomach and the blood of thr Prophet in her veins? If there was a part of Lottie inside of her, like there was a part of the wilderness in her palm, would the girls finally come to trust her?
She doubts it.
But she’ll keep trying anyway. She doesn’t have a choice anymore, the wilderness rules that she must keep on surviving, and Lottie rules that she must lead, and Shauna rules that she must earn her place in scars and blood. She never really had a choice in the first place anyway, she became their Hunter aged six when her father first put a rifle in her hands and taught her to shoot.
“The wilderness chose, Natalie.” Lottie reminds her, as if it doesn’t ring in her ears every single fucking day. Misty tugs hard on a stitch in her side and Nat cries out, a shameful sound that she doesn’t think the Queen should utter. She bites down on her lip and doesn’t tell Lottie that the wilderness chose wrong.
She curses under her breath and begs Lottie closer with her eyes. The other girl complies easily, raising her ear to Nat’s mouth. “Tell Shauna I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Lottie asks.
For not being enough to bear the weight of her anger. For letting it fall to you instead. For not letting her kill me. “For it not being her that was chosen. For Jackie. For the baby. For all of it.”
“Tell her yourself.” Lottie says. Because she’s going to survive this. Because they’re both going to survive until the bitter end, even if neither of them really want to anymore. They’re a part of each other now, twin vampires feeding on each other’s blood, antlers so twisted in each other that they’ve become one being of carnal nature. The earth quivers beneath their skin, soil leaching into their lungs and choking up their throats. In spring, flowers will bloom from their mouths and in summer, they’ll be anointed with the water of the lake that lives in their stomachs.
“I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere near Shauna for a long time, Lot.” Nat wheezes out a laugh. “She’s very stabby at the minute.”
“Can you not make jokes on your literal deathbed right now?” Misty chastises above them. They’d both forgotten she was there to be honest. “It’s very distracting.”
5) The Symbol
The summer solstice happens on the clearest day of what they’re pretty sure is June. The sun burns brightly in the sky, the days are longer, the nights are warmer. They’re not so reliant on the fires to keep them warm anymore, and no one has died since Gen got caught in the snare during their last hunt during the last desperate days of the receding winter.
Animals have returned to the wilderness, repopulated families of rabbits and foxes roaming the trees, fish swimming in groups in the lake, coyotes and wolves snarling in the mountains. The wilderness is alive again, and Nat doesn’t flinch as much when she shoots another rabbit to add to their feast tonight.
She wonders when that started happening.
Nat shakes out her ever-darkening hair and trudges over to the dead rabbit. Her body is still healing, probably always will be. Misty and Mari wouldn’t even let her move for a good week and a half, and there is only so long Nat can be contained to a bed before she started shooting at things.
(The bird deserved it.)
(So did the pee bucket.)
(And the bed frame. And the fuselage. And the tree Coach Martinez died in.)
She winces as she bends down to pick up the rabbit, tying it to the belt that lies too far down on her hips now. Misty tried to feed her up a bit when she was restrained to the ‘sick bay’, but Nat had threatened violence after the second bowl of soup and that was the end of that. Someone else needed it more. Maybe the extra food would help calm Shauna’s rage.
“That’s quite the haul, Nat.” Lottie appear behind her, and Natalie has to take several breaths to cool her trigger finger on the gun. Fucking Lottie and her fucking quietness. “I think you got Bugs Bunny’s entire family tree.”
Nat huffs a laugh and proudly pats her belt carrying six rabbits. “Someone had to end that bloodline.”
“Come on.” Lottie smiles, grabbing Nat’s hand. “It’s almost time.”
Right, the ceremony. Lottie had been very serious about the whole thing, preparing flower crowns for weeks with the JV girls and getting Nat to hunt a bunch of different animals in the name of offerings. Nat would play along with it, so long as Misty and her fucking mushrooms stayed far away. The last thing they needed was another night like Doomcoming.
“Remind me why we’re doing this whole thing again?” Nat asks as they trek back to camp.
Lottie rolls her eyes, but explains it for the sixth time anyway. “It’s to boost the sun’s strength, so we can have a good harvest for the rest of the year. People have been doing for centuries, Nat. Real people in real places.”
Not like us.
“I’m losing track of all the gods we worship out here, Lot.” Nat sighs. “We’ve got the wilderness gods, and the cabin guy, your Wicca shit, the water gods that Mel was telling us about when Gen died. Now we’ve got to worship the sun too?”
“The cabin guy wasn’t a god.” Lottie frowns. “He was just some dead dude that possessed me.”
“Right.” Nat nods, unphased at this point by the weird shit Lottie just comes out with sometimes. Since the whole stabbing and blood donation debacle, they’d grown a lot closer, if that had been possible. Lottie didn’t leave Nat’s bedside for more than two hours when she was in the worst of it, panting and shaking and throwing up as her body tried to knit itself back together.
And as much as she hated to admit it, Lottie made her feel safe. Her warm eyes, her tentative grip on her hands, her unbreakable belief in Natalie that didn’t make any sense at all, it all made Nat’s heart stop thumping so hard and her lungs deflate just a little. She could breathe around Lottie, she could cry or scream or just fucking face off somewhere, and Lottie would still be there at the end of it all.
She loves that about Lottie.
Loves Lottie, maybe.
Won’t tell her that out loud, because everything Nat has ever let go of has claw marks on it, and she was never supposed to survive this long anyway. Best to toe the line of almost-friends, almost-enemies, almost-lovers instead. It’s safer that way for both of them.
And all Nat wants in the end is to keep Lottie safe.
“It’ll be fun, Nat.” Lottie promises, even though the last time they said that, Travis was almost crucified and Javi went missing for two months and Jackie ended up dead. They’re not very good at fun these days. “We’ll just stay away from hallucinogens this time.”
Nat laughs. “It’s good we kept Misty out of the forest this time, then.”
-
The sun is at its highest point in the sky. Flowers crown their heads, sickly sweet harebells and elephants heads wrapped around thick green vines, twisted into dirty hair and filling their noses with the scent of home. Not the bleach of the school halls or the familiar scent of their childhood bedrooms, but the home that has become the wilderness. The camp made from the plane parts and sticks and mud, a towering sculpture in the middle of the Canadian Rockies, a cornucopia of snarling girls grown wild beneath their delicate flower crowns.
Lottie leads through a clearing into a circle of mushrooms, (the non-hallucinogenic kind. She was serious when she said she wasn’t doing that again.) A faerie circle if she remembers right, a different kind of magic than that that existed here. Childlike wonder instead of it’s dirty reality, blood oaths and child sacrifices and guilt guilt guilt.
The sun shines down through the clearing, a sun spot burning into the ground. Bones carved with the wilderness’ symbol, Jackie’s, Javi’s, Gen’s. She lays a femur in the centre, next to it a collarbone and beneath those, a delicate pieces of jaw, shattered from the impact of Gen’s body against the rock next to the snare.
“We hear the wilderness and it hears us.” The Prophet must begin the chant, for she was the one who heard it first. Deep in the recesses of her bones, she hears it in her dreams and in her memory. It had always been waiting for her.
“We hear the wilderness and it hears us.” The Butcher, the Shaman, the Healer, the Cook, the Wolf, the Acolytes.
And in the centre of the circle, face covered in the blood of her offerings and head crowned with heavy antler, the Queen. Carved bones lie at her feet, hair from the sacrifices sewed into her cloak, rabbit heartstring in her hand and the Prophet’s blood in her veins, this is their Queen in all of her glory.
Their Saviour.
The wilderness’s favourite.
Nat rolls her eyes at the chanting, but if Lottie believes this will bring them game all winter then so what, she’ll get a little freaky with the nature gods. If it means Shauna will stop going on murderous rampages then she’ll play in the dirt with the woodland sprites or whatever the fuck they’re praying to right now, she’ll even let Lottie carve the symbol into her back, knife sharp, blood oozing, a scar the same as the ones Shauna left behind.
But it came from Lottie, so she doesn’t mind as much. It doesn’t hurt as much when Lottie drags a knife against her skin, it’s just the same as a kiss. Aren’t love and violence the same? Isn’t a kiss just the same as a stab wound? Isn’t love supposed to scar as much as it’s supposed to heal?
She doesn’t believe in any of this, but for Lottie, she’ll bleed herself dry across the bones on the ground. She’ll raise her arms to the sky to worship the sun, for the sun is in Lottie Matthews’ smile, and it’s burning her up from the inside out.
“We hear the wilderness, and it hears us.” Nat murmurs eventually, her antlers standing tall on her head. The Stag, in all of his glory, the Queen, in all of her blood soaked finery and power, the Hunter, dripping with the flesh of her kills and growling out the call of the wolves that surround her. The wolves howl as the sun beats down on them, their foreheads marked with Nat’s blood.
Lottie bows her head, antlers invisible to the rest of them but ten foot tall to Natalie scraping at Nat’s face. “My Queen.”
She leans down to kiss Nat, a soft chaste thing that leans more toward religion than anything Nat had ever read in the Bible. Protection, carved into her skin and implanted into her lips. It’s fleeting, but Nat thinks she finally understands what they are because of where they are.
Violence. (Lottie holding a knife to the hard skin of her back to carve out the symbol. Shauna revelling in the anger that rolled through her bones when she stabbed Nat.)
Love. (The scar the symbol will leave behind, Lottie’s blood in her veins. Sleeping next to Jackie’s bones every night so Shauna didn’t have to. Bringing Tai back from her nightly wanderings so Van could sleep for once. Giving Mari space to cry when the sound of blood dripping through the walls got too loud.)
Power. (Antlers poking through her skull, thick twisted things, the same colour as Javi’s hair and glistening like Jackie’s tears and leaning toward Melissa like Gen would do.)
The other girls kiss her too, the JV girls pressing their lips to her forehead and the Varsity girls tracing Lottie’s words on her mouth. Shauna bites her, but Nat’s grown used to it. She’s never minded a little bloodshed in exchange for the feeling of being wanted.
“We give the wilderness our offerings.” Lottie says. The bones on the ground, the symbol on Nat’s back, the blood of the animals smeared across Nat’s face. “We hear it’s wishes, and we ask for forgiveness. We ask the wilderness to protect us. To nourish us, so we may nourish it when we return to it.”
“Amen.” Nat can’t help herself, she’s kept all her sarcastic comments to herself for so long enough now. She’d played along with all of this shit, she even let Lottie literally carve a symbol into her skin, a scar she’ll carry around like a dead body on her back.
Lottie rolls her eyes and flicks Nat’s blood streaked forehead. “Can you let me finish, asshole?”
“As you were, Princess.” Nat smirks.
Lottie sighs fondly and continues on. “We ask the wilderness to help us survive. We ask that it keeps us safe, and that we protect each other too.”
Its a promise made a million years ago, in the Before, a hazy memory of the locker room and spit-streaked palms promising to watch out for each other on the field.
But promises like that are breakable.
It fractured and splintered, broke completely when Tai accidentally broke Allie’s leg. Promises like that break like the sickening crunch of Allie’s tibia, and it was always ache when it rained. Promises like that don’t last, not out here.
For gods sake, they’d taken to hunting each other for blood sports just to survive the steady onslaught of winter. The promise wouldn’t last, and they all knew it, but Nat watches them nod their heads, neck taut and eyes wary. They’ll agree because Lottie asked them to, and they’d created a prophet out of a girl with no choice other than to teach them religion.
That was supposed to be Laura Lee’s job.
Lottie wonders, not for the first time, what she would have thought if she had survived this long. If she have joined them in the first feast, or if she would have burned the cabin down along with Ben. If she would have brought Lottie in from the snow, or if she would have let Nat do it all the same. If she would have joined the pack of wolves with the rest of the girls, or if she would have met the same fate as Gen, hung on a cross and wearing a crown of thorns.
Nat watches them from beneath her antlers. Her girls, hers and Lottie’s, making blood pacts beneath the sun of the summer solstice, even though they all know it will end in tragedy. But they’ll agree anyway, because they’d made a Prophet and a Queen out of their mid-defender and their linebacker, out of the rich girl and the burnout, and they could never tell them no.
Its kind of heartbreaking, actually. To watch religion being born out of sheer fear, but Nat supposed that’s how most religions started. Laura Lee would know better, but Laura Lee is dead, and Jackie is dead, and Javi is dead, and Gen is dead, and Crystal is probably dead, and it’s all Nat’s fault.
But Lottie smiles at her anyway. Her blood drips into the soil, and that blood is Lottie’s, and Lottie knows all of her ugliness and loves her in spite of it.
That didn’t matter when it was God who saw it. He was still God at the end of the day, and Natalie was still covered in her fathers blood. But out here, Lottie isn’t God and she isn’t really a prophet and she’s not Jesus, she’s just a girl who smiles at Nat like she’s never done anything wrong in her entire life.
She’s just a girl Nat loves.
So they stand beneath the sun, Hades meeting Persephone, Orpheus meeting Eurydice, the Queen meeting the Prophet, and they bite into raw deer hearts. Swallow the flesh of their sacrifices and laugh when their mouths are coated in blood, and the girls, their girls are dancing in their flower crowns.
For love was violence.
And violence carved black holes into teenage girls and made them goddesses. They’re swallowed up into the trees and the wilderness feeds them until the next cold wind breezes through their camp and Melissa chooses to die rather than run.
1) Silence
“Please.” Lottie whispers to her altar. Twenty-five years later and here she was, offering herself up to the gods she was supposed to leave behind on the tarmac of a runway, screaming herself hoarse. “Just let this be enough. Just this time, let this be enough.”
“Lottie?” Nat. The voice that had whispered in all of Lottie’s dreams, following her to Switzerland and to Thailand when she escaped, to New Zealand and to Spain, and all the way back here, in her own kingdom where people learned to get better. When she helped people, where she gave herself over to every single acolyte so they didn’t end up like her.
Her kingdom was crumbling now though.
“Natalie.” Lottie says quietly, hiding her hand behind her back. She’d reopened a scar, one of the bigger ones, the one that Nat shared too. The final hunt, the one that fed them for weeks on end. Akilah, Mari and Ben, all gone in one single night. Her palm was crisscrossed with memories of them, a fucked up tic-tac-toe game that Lottie never wanted to play. “What are you doing here?”
Natalie, shedding her eyeliner and reckless exterior in the moonlight, shifts nervously on her feet. “You looked upset earlier. I know that look. Knew it, I mean.”
Lottie rises to her feet, palm still dripping behind her back. “Of course you know it. It’s written on your face too.”
“Give me your hand.” A memory shifts into focus, the meat shed, two skinned rabbits, Nat’s blood in the snow.
“It’s fine, Natalie.” Lottie says, even though her voice is wavering and she thinks she might fall apart any second. It’s all so loud, thousands of whisperings she hadn’t heard clearly for two decades suddenly assaulting every part of her. Tree roots cling to her limbs and the wind whistles in her ears, it’s back and she can’t stop it.
Natalie rolls her eyes. “Nice try. Give me your hand, Lot.”
They’ve been doing this for centuries. Sewing up wounds and swapping blood, Lottie wonders if Nat had completely replaced her blood with drugs by now. Wonders if her hand still contained rabbit heartstring or if Shauna’s wounds ever really healed. Of course she can hear the wilderness again, it’s standing right in front of her.
Lottie holds out her bloody palm, and she can see the rabid dog that exists in the back of Nat’s eyes climb to the surface. It’s hungry, she thinks, it hasn’t eaten for years. Just like them.
“Let’s get this fixed up.” Nat says, pressing a scrap of purple cloth to the wound. “Before you start speaking French and throwing your head into windows again.”
Lottie thinks that the promise made on the summer solstice is still being upheld. She follows Nat through the compound, because that is what she’s always done, ever since the day she laid antlers on her head. Nat’s hand is tight against her own, and it’s the only tether to reality she’s got right now, the only tether she’s ever really had. Even after all these years, the Prophet will always turn to the Queen for help.
They get back to Lottie’s cabin, locking the door behind them. It doesn’t feel like her own right now, even though it’s been hers since she founded the compound. She doesn’t feel like herself at all, she feels eighteen years old again, listening for the whisperings of the wilderness and kissing a bloody Natalie in a circle of mushrooms.
“We’ve been here before.” Lottie whispers, when Nat has started stitching up her hand. “We always come back to this.”
Natalie grunts noncommittadly. “No one’s dying yet.”
You almost did.
Lottie doesn’t say that. Doesn’t mention flashes of red hair sitting in a hospital room either, the woman in her dreams, her face scarred from wolves and a drip in her arm that is doing nothing. That would be admitting it’s real.
“I’m sorry about Travis, Natalie.” Why the fuck she decides to bring him up right now, she has no fucking clue. Sometimes Lottie just says things without thinking, and suddenly she’s leading a cannibalistic cult in the Canadian Rockies. These things happen.
Nat’s face twists. She ties off the sutures in Lottie’s hand and wraps it up a bandage and a piece of red, not purple, not the colour of Laura Lee, cloth over the top. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
Lottie nods. “Then what do you want to talk about?”
Natalie chuckles fondly and presses her lips to Lottie’s palm, the way Lottie would do in the wilderness. It’s familiar, it’s home, and it’s the agony of the injury of being known. “Tax evasion. Nuclear disasters. Misty Quigley’s pet bird. Arson. Anything but the fuckin’ wilderness.”
It hurts to be known so well. Lottie finds herself carving out holes in herself with how well Nat still knows her, right down to her bones and her blood. The blood that runs in Nat’s veins, the bones that make up one half of their twin antlers. They laugh about nothing, like they’re sixteen again and sharing a joint at a party. They talk and they laugh, and the whispers quiten down for once.
It’s finally silent.
Lottie tucks herself into her rightful place, curling around Nat’s back like she’s an old dog. No longer rabid, no longer feral, no longer scared, just wary. There’s no bite left in her really, just bark. And Lottie is glad she never did teach Nat to bite in the end, she thinks the soothing sound of Nat’s breathing is enough for tonight.
She traces the symbol she carved into Nat’s back, a white mess of circle, triangle, line, line, line. The scars from Shauna lay nearby, blotched and messy, they never did quite heal right.
“Do they hurt?” She asks quietly.
Nat nods, threading her hand with Lottie’s. “Hers do. When it rains or I’m so high I’m on a different astral plane. Sometimes they hurt so much I feel like it just happened again.”
“Does mine?”
“No.”
“No?” Lottie repeats, because it must. The symbol starts at her tailbone and ends halfway up her ribs, it’s etched in blood and dirt and an empty prayer that ended in violence. It was an act of love, but love is only violence in the end.
“No.” Nat says simply, turning over to face Lottie. The moonlight cascades through the gaps in the curtains, and it could so easily be the cabin or their camp, two decaying bodies wrapping together for warmth. This can only end in heartache, everything Lottie had ever let go of had claw marks all over it. Things get burned when they belong to Lottie Matthews, things get bloody, things die.
“Why?”
“Because it came from you.” Violence was love, this is something Nat has known since she was a child. Her father, with his angry fists, her mother, with her booze soaked breath. The Yellowjackets, their carnal need to win. The wilderness, and all it took and all it gave.
But still, there was still love trapped in between all of it. She thinks of Lottie, and all of the things she did for Nat there out of love. The blood tea in the mornings, the rabbit heartstring, antlers and the summer solstice, her own blood through a dirty tube. There was love in all of that mess, there was love in every room they walked into, it was just trapped outside the windows, trying to break in.
Lottie nods and smiles, her mind quiet and her body relaxed. She can feel the taut ribbing of heartstring threaded into Nat’s palm, matching the sutures on her own. The world is silent now, their breathing the only sound for miles around. It’s the only sound there’s ever been, and the only sound that will ever be.
Silence, she thinks, is the greatest gift Nat could ever have given her.
Peace, she thinks, might come next.
(As usual, Lottie is wrong.)