WHO: Hecate and Kaden WHEN: Friday night WHERE: Manitoba, Canada WHAT: Waking up WARNINGS: None
Hecate opened her eyes as the moonlight hit them, breaking through the wind-whipped branches of the trees above. She opened her mouth and gasped it in; the moonlight tasted of frost and earth and dog.
She was lying on her side on the cold, damp ground, feeling so heavy that her body was pressed into the earth. Hecuba lay beside her, the great warmth of her pressed up against Hecate’s front and under Hecate’s limp arm. For a long few moments it was all she could do to lie there, feeling her heart beat in her chest, her lungs inflate, deflate. Feeling her body, aching, aching, and most alarming at all, the utter lack of magic within her.
Hecate groaned faintly and Hecuba stirred, a quiver running through her, ending at the thumping of her tail against Hecate’s legs, and she dragged her tongue all the way across Hecate’s face. Slowly, Hecate found the use of her arms again, and stroked a heavy hand down Hecuba’s long back. She tried to speak, but her mouth was so dry, all she could do for a few more moments was curl herself closer to Hecuba and try to take stock… She had no magic, so, what did she have?
The first thing she noticed (after her impossible thirst) was the other dogs at her back. Hecuba was large enough to be a very effective little spoon, but curled up behind her bent legs was a second dog, and at her back a third, and overlapping each other and her stomach like a canine patchwork quilt was a forth and a fifth and a sixth. Covering her legs like a blanket was someone very shaggy indeed.
With a whimper not unlike a dog herself, Hecate sat up slowly, using Hecuba, and looked down at her pack in the moonlight. Several pairs of eyes looked back at her, and gently she touched the head or back of each one, thanking them, knowing she may well have frozen if not for their warmth.
She was still very, very cold, and her lips were so chapped that the smallest movement of her mouth cracked one open and it started to bleed. Her dry tongue was worse than sandpaper against it, and her head pounded. But… first things first.
The shaggy dog shook himself, rattling his collar, and one by one Hecate searched the others for collars, for signs of domesticity. Only the one dog lacked a collar, a leggy, tan coloured mixed breed with a round muzzle and floppy ears, the who had been curled behind her knees. He was trembling, trying to bury his nose now under her leg, and Hecate leaned forward to pick him up and pull him into her lap. He was not particularly heavy, but she felt particularly weak. “Kaden?” she rasped, and he pushed his muzzle deep under her arm, shaking, and Hecate found herself shaking too as she wrapped her arms around him. Aside from the trembling, he lay limp in her arms.
“You’re okay, Kaden, you’re okay. Good boy, you’re okay,” she murmured, stroking her cold hands down his back, over and over. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here sooner. But I’ve got you now, I’ve got you.” His nose was hot and dry, and she didn’t like the way he was panting, but he was definitely alive.
It took a long few moments, but eventually Hecate gathered the courage to find out if she could stand. Her body ached terribly, and pins and needles swarmed her legs as they came back to life. Hecuba stood nearby like a ballast, and Hecate kept her arms wrapped around Kaden, climbing slowly to her feet once they felt like feet again instead of nebulous clouds of prickling nerves.
The size of the moon said she had been asleep for several days.
Kaden’s clothes had been used by the one of the dogs as a bed, and Hecate set Kaden back on the ground to collect them up. He gravitated straight toward Hecuba, walking with a terrible limp in his front paw that pained Hecate to see, but there was nothing she could do about it yet.
When she’d come back from the dead, her magic had been haywire, untameable bursts of it lashing out. But now, she was entirely drained. She couldn’t even feel the magic flowing through the earth. She couldn’t even feel the moon.
But the dogs had all still come for her. And magic wasn’t the be-all-and-end-all of her.
She brushed dead, wet leaves off Kaden’s hoodie, and then shed her own coat. With stiff, clumsy arms she pulled on the frost-damp and blood-stained shirt and hoodie over her own clothes, then covered it all up with her coat. She couldn’t leave the bloody clothes out here for someone to find and wonder about, and the extra layers of fabric, soiled and cold as they were, were at least a little extra defense against the cold. The blood was no longer fresh; the overwhelming smell was of earth, though that might have been the deep cold numbing Hecate’s nose.
From his pockets she rescued his phone (long dead) and the charm of Qebhet’s (still valiantly alive), then tied the shoes to her belt with the laces, and knotted the legs of his jeans around her waist. Dizziness hit her each time she bent, her fingers were stiff from the cold, the muscles in her legs trembled. But she, too, was alive, and stronger than Kaden, so she bundled him into her arms again.
“Alright friends,” she said, to the circle of dogs watching her. “Lead the way.”
The walk back was long on tired legs, and she had to stop and rest several times. She did not know how far she had sped toward Ares and Kaden that night, but there was certainly no supernatural speed to her tonight, and no ghosts to guide her path at all. Just the dogs, all of them. They guided her past a small stream and she set Kaden down and cupped her hand into the water, drinking down a few mouthfuls that also tasted like frost and earth. Hecuba and a couple of the other dogs had a drink, and Kaden dragged himself on his stomach toward it, and put his paw in as Hecate had, and tried to lick it.
It had been a long time since Hecate had to familiarse anyone with the use of a new shape of mouth, of tongue and throat and teeth. “Here Kaden, here we go,” she said gently, pulling him into her lap again. She cupped a palmful of water and tipped it slowly into his mouth. He swallowed a little, but choked on the rest. After the third handful he buried his face under her arm again, a low and miserable whine emanating out of him and making the other dogs anxious.
The best thing they could do now was keep moving, though rising to her feet again was painful and stiff.
As she hit the edge of town, the other dogs peeled off, heading back to their own homes, all but one. A border collie with a blue collar wagged her tail and cast her eyes back over her shoulder at Hecate, waiting to be followed, and then very boldly nipped around behind them and tried to herd Hecuba where she wanted her to go. Hecuba’s growl rumbled deep in her throat at the indignity of it, but she followed when Hecate did. Hecate untied Kaden’s shoes from her belt, and wrapped them up in the jeans, and slid them deep into a bin.
The collie led them through to a diner, where the doors were closed and the seats were empty, and there was a young woman mopping the floor. A sharp bark announced their arrival, and the woman looked up, first in annoyance that Mattie had managed to get out again, then in extra annoyance because they were closed and she was about to go home, and then in alarm, at the state of the woman on the other side of the door.
“Mooom!” she hollered through to the kitchens, where a woman with a tea towel draped over her shoulder emerged through the swinging doors.
Later Hecate thought: the women in the diner was an extremely good sport.
There weren’t a lot of people who wouldn’t balk at a freezing, dehydrated, ravenous woman bursting into their diner after hours, one huge dog on her heels and another in her arms, hair tangled with dead leaves and clothes looking like she’d spent the better part of a week outdoors (and oddly bulky beneath her coat, besides.)
Well, they’d balked, but not much.
The younger woman’s name was Keziah, her mother Delphine. Delphine was forty five and had seen her share of people who’d gotten lost in the woods, a fact she used as a weapon as she scolded Hecate intensely for wandering off into the hills on her own to try and find her lost puppy. But she scolded while pouring coffee as Keziah (resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to get home early tonight) reheated a large plate of roast meat. Even if Hecate did feel like disagreeing with her (which she very much did not) her teeth were chattering too hard to speak. The warmth was slowly seeping up her arms as her hands were grasped around the mug, but the heat was only making her shake all the harder.
“You pup is having some problems there,” Delphine pointed out, as the puppy who used to be a boy buried his face in the water bowl, trying to copy Hecuba to drink, and coughed and coughed and coughed.
Hecuba stepped closer and butted her nose against Kaden’s side, and Hecate slid down to sit on the floor with him, stroking his back till he calmed down enough to try again. She couldn’t fault him. When Delphine had poured her a first glass of water she’d choked on it as well, despite the mouthful from the creek. “He needs to see a vet,” she said, looking up at Delphine (as Hecuba put both feet on the table and helped herself to the rest of the roast meat.)“Can you help?”
The single vet in the small town was closed for the night, but Delphine’s cousin had dated him a few years back, and while the relationship had ended (and the cousin left town) their friendship remained. Hecate was too tired, too worn, to remember a lot of the details but in the time before the vet arrived, Delphine led them back to her house, Keziah disappeared somewhere, a stunned but game husband arrived with a pot of tea and biscuits (Hecate ate at least half of them, but couldn’t have told anyone what flavour they were.) A change of clothes was acquired, a woolen blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and a fire built up high behind a grate in a small, cozy living room.
Delphine left them under Mattie’s watchful collie eye (“I hope yours isn’t a great fighter,” she’d said, with a cautious look at the looming bulk of Hecuba) while she went to ring the vet. Hecate fed the last of Kaden’s bloody clothes to the flames before they could inspire any questions, and sat cross legged on the rug, using a bowl of water and a clean cloth to slowly squeeze water into Kaden’s mouth.
In the electric light, she could see how dull his coat was, and the broken, twisted mess of his leg. The skin wasn’t broken – at least she’d managed that much before she passed out, or she might yet have lost him to infection – but the bones and muscles beneath the skin were crunched and torn. Whenever she tried to inspect his throat, he yelped and growled and tried to escape, and though he was not strong enough to wriggle out of her grip, she could see that he was terrified. Hecate promised out loud not to touch his throat unless she had to, but warned him gently that the vet might need to.
She didn’t know how much he understood.
She hadn’t been at her best when she transformed him; she didn’t know how much of him was still Kaden.
For now it had to be enough that he was alive.
The vet, a grey haired, large bearded man by the name of Jack, pronounced Kaden dehydrated and malnourished, with a very odd looking problem with his leg that he’d need an x-ray to properly understand. It wasn’t far from what Hecate had expected. The dehydration she was already working on, and she hoped he’d gain the strength to eat after a sleep in front of a fire.
The leg, she hoped, she’d be able to fix in the future. But she didn’t know, and was too exhausted to think. Jack had given Kaden a shot for the pain, and he fell asleep in her arms, and… she couldn’t see what else she could do.
Sleep was desperate to reclaim her, as she stretched out on Delphine’s couch, Kaden asleep in her arms, Hecuba on the floor, and Mattie keeping an eye on them all from her bed near the fire. She needed to get home. Back across the border she might be able to tap into a little more magic, might be able to ease his pain completely, but she’d crossed the border by magical means, and that path was no longer open to her.
Down by the side of the couch, her phone was plugged in, slowly charging. It buzzed, over and over, as messages came through. The ones from Marcie and Qebhet particularly tore at her heart, the message from Luna about how good Serene was had warmed it.
It had been days since Marcie’s last message. Hecate looked down at Kaden’s sleeping form and wanted to give Marcie better news than she had. Was too tired to piece together the news. Needed sleep. Needed to be home. Needed her magic.
… Or maybe a little borrowed magic from an old friend. Someone powerful, someone unconnected with Olympus, and, most important of all in this situations, someone who knew how to keep a witch’s secret as only another witch could.
She sent the message, and let sleep swallow her up.