writing_shadows

Six o’clock. The arms of the clock are stretched as tight as a victim on the rack. Stretched between the six and the twelve, torn between night and day.

Rio doesn’t want the day to come. She doesn’t want the sun to rise. She doesn’t want time to move on any more. She wants time to stop still, dead, frozen. She wants this moment to never end, so she can stay as she is, right now.

Her daughter is sleeping in her arms. Holly’s not done that since she was tiny, when she and Rio used to share a bed at nights to keep warm whilst Lennie was out working. Rio isn’t used to it anymore. Normally she has Lennie in her bed, snoring occasionally and keeping her awake when she’s restless. He sleeps more easily than she does, although he suffers from bad dreams.

He isn’t there right now.

Rio really doesn’t want the day to come.

Right now, she can tell herself there’s been a mistake. So what if something funny happened to Lennie’s link to his packmates? That’s happened before, hasn’t it? He’s gone missing; he’s been knocked unconscious; he’s become entangled with spirits. That could be what’s happened? Couldn’t it?

Rio can’t focus on anything else. She can’t cope with any other thought. Anything else, she thinks, would break her.

It’s odd. She’s never really thought of Lennie dying. She’s imagined them breaking up, from time to time, but even that has never entirely seemed real. Who else would she be, if not Lennie’s wife? That’s all she knows how to do, albeit badly.

So he can’t be dead.

Lennie being dead is unthinkable, unimaginable. Who else can make her blood boil and her soul sing (often at the same time, in utterly contradictory ways)? Who else can grumble at her every single morning about his aching bones, despite the fact he isn’t yet fifty and is a full blood werewolf to boot? Who else could complain if she cooked bacon the British way, despite having lived in the UK for close on twenty years, and who else would insist that they light fireworks on 4th July? Who else would have the patience that both Holly and Rio lack, and the ability to keep them both stable when their tempers are rising?

Rio’s family is all she has.

Everything else was lost long ago.

She cried for a while, when the sky was velvet black and Holly was tossing and turning in pained dreams. She cried because she had loved Lennie and not told him enough. She cried because she had resented him, and had let him know. She cried because she loved her daughter, and remembered how much it hurt to lose your father. She had cried for her Pa, and he had been a rough snarling Rahu, not the patient gentle Elidoth that Lennie had been. She had cried for herself, and for all the things that she had given to the People.

Now there are no more tears left to cry.

The clock scratches out its painful crawl to dawn, like nails down a chalkboard. Rio wishes it would keep quiet. Every single tick means one tick closer to a phone call, to a visit, to the grim faced wolf (and what the hell do they know what they are talking about anyway? Not one of them has ever had to be the one who lets go, the one who stays behind) at the door.

Rio can’t bear that thought. Anything has to be better than that. Anything better than hearing that awful confirmation (which might not be true. Please, God, let it not be true. Let this be a mistake) that her husband is dead and he isn’t coming back.

Holly stirs, at last, as the sun rises grey in the sky. Rio shushes her back to sleep, afraid of what will come when her daughter wakes up. She buries her face in Holly’s hair, strawberry sweet.

And when dawn comes, Rio’s world falls apart again.