FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

71

She was waiting for him in the snow. The red, red snow... pulsating, throbbing like a heartbeat...

"Banno, I'm cold..." she said, holding out her arms. The sun was shining through the trees and playing across her face in shifting patches of light and shadow. "Will you hold me?"

One rabbit trail leads to another...

He had found her. After so many days of fruitless searching, he had finally found her. The poor thing... How long had she been stuck out here, waiting for him? All alone and afraid, crying herself to sleep every night... looking for a way home...

Looking for him.

"Vallah..."

Reaching out to him with that brilliant smile on her face, so happy, so eager.

Banno wanted to go to her, but something was holding him back. He looked down and saw a hollow egg shell clinging to his hand.

No, wait... not hollow. Not hollow at all. There was something beautiful in that shell. A yolk full of life.

He dragged it across the threshold, into the chilling winds. He was not worried. The shell was thick enough. It would protect her. That was the reason it existed. The reason he had failed to break it the first time. It was all for this...

He walked down the steps, dragging the shell through the snow. He liked the whispering sound it made, like a mother soothing a child to sleep.

Valery was waiting, almost bursting with excitement. The firelight from the open doorway at his back flowed around his shadow, as if to frame her in gold.

She was shivering, the poor thing. Her slender body, her arms, her legs, they were all covered in a thin frosting of snow. But despite all that, she was still smiling. Just for him... Even though she must be in a lot of pain... because...

Because she had stepped in a rabbit hole. That's why she couldn't make her way back. Her ankle is sprained... maybe broken...

Down on a carpet of leaves... her cheeks washed with lines of dried tears, following the same path over and over again... days and nights of crushing loneliness... but no more. He was here for her now. He was here to take all her pain away.

"Banno..." she said, looking up him with those beautiful blue eyes. "I knew you'd come for me."

The sound of birds in the treetops. The buzzing of dragonflies.

"I'm here, Vallah... I'm here... I finally found you..."

"Hold me..."

He dropped down to his knees and enfolded Valery in his arms, hugging her tight, feeling her small body shivering against his own. "I've got you... It's okay now, I've got you..." He could feel the warmth of her breath against his neck. Her hands on his body. Her scant chest, rising and falling. The smell of her...

"Can we stay like this for a while?" she whispered in his ear, sending tingles throughout his entire body.

"We can stay like this for as long as you like."

"Can we stay like this... forever?"

Banno pulled back a little and brushed the hair out of her eyes... and away from her neck. The colour of sunflowers. The delicate hills and valleys formed by the tender muscles... the veins... pulsating so warmly...

Forever...

Banno opened his mouth and he felt her stiffen in his arms. Her heart was racing. Her breath was pluming from her nostrils in quick bursts. She was a bit nervous, but that was okay. That was good. This was a moment to be savoured.

He leaned in closer...

"You didn't forget about Ander, did you?"

Banno stopped. His breath washed over Vallah's neck in a cloud of vapour, conforming to all the lines and contours. The muscle connecting her shoulder shifted and rolled as she turned her head to look up at him. Sunlight shone through the red snow, landing on her cheeks and melting into tears of blood, dripping down into bottomless shadows...

"She's not ready yet," she said, holding her palms out for him to see. There were thin red lines going through each one, steaming in the cold. "And neither are you."

"But I love you..." Banno said, holding her close, just as she had asked of him. "I want to taste you..."

"Ander is coming for the shell, Banno. He'll be here soon."

It was lying right beside him, the mouth slightly open, the hair spilling across the snow, slowly being entombed. The blood, frozen into its cheeks.

The shell... and the third... sleeping soundly inside...

"You planned for this, Banno," Vallah said, looking him directly in the eye. "You need to remember."

Blood... on a tree...

"Yes. You left him a message. You wanted him to come after you. You wanted him here. Remember!"

Water spraying in his face. Something heavy pulling him down. The deadly tip of an arrowhead, swallowing half the world in a flash of red. Gritty, brown mudwater pouring into his mouth, and then nothing but blackness. Strong hands buffeting him in every direction. Twigs and branches stinging his body like bees. Teeth around his ankle, biting into his flesh, holding him in place...

Ander...

It was all supposed to come together...

"Yes!" Vallah whispered, ecstatic. "We are the waters and you are the centre of the maelstrom. If we all coalesce at the exact same time, all of our feelings flowing into you, can you even imagine? That's what you've been striving towards, Banno! Your whole life, it's all been leading up to this!"

Banno lightly touched the shell's exposed belly, tracing the gentle curve with his fingertips. How could he have forgotten? The moment he first realised... when he tasted the yolk on her freshly spilled tears... that was when he knew everything. That was when he knew exactly what he had to do.

"Is it coming back?" Vallah asked, squirming in his arms and snuggling up against him, getting every inch of her body as close as she possibly could. "Do you remember now?"

She will experience a pain unlike anything ever felt by Fox or Wolf, and Ander will be there to see it all.

"And me..." Vallah said, lightly caressing the side of his face. Her hand was warm. "And Valery, too. We'll watch it together."

"Together..."

"This is the way it's supposed to happen, Banno. You have me, you have Valery, you have Kiana, you have the life growing inside of her, and Ander will be the last."

He remembered now. The reason for all this.

"You will break every bone in his body until he can only crawl along the ground like the snake he is. You will take his head in your hands and make him watch every moment." Vallah's voice trailed off and her eye took on a faraway, dreamy look, like she was seeing it all unfold right in front of her, completely enraptured.

"I want him to look his beloved in the eye as her life drains away..." Banno continued for her, seeing exactly what she was seeing, feeling exactly what she was feeling. "It will tear him apart, and all that sadness and misery will come spilling out and I will take it into myself and turn it into satisfaction... satisfaction at finally getting back at him after so long..."

"And will it make us happy?" Valery asked. She had covered most of her face with her tail, and was peeking out at him from behind bushy tufts of golden fur, speckled with snow. Such a shy little thing. Such a beautiful little thing. Such a real little thing...

"It will make you so happy," Banno said, running his fingers down her sides, liking the way her clothes whispered against her body. "And that will make _me_happy. And that will make the moment of our merger taste oh so sweet..."

*

Banno was close, too close, squeezing her so hard she could barely move. His face was only a hand's breadth away from hers, taking up her entire field of vision, and his breath kept washing over her numb lips, a putrid shock of warmth followed immediately after by the cutting wind. She couldn't stop shivering, but Banno was hardly moving at all. In fact, he didn't even seem to be here at all. He kept calling her 'Vallah', and although she at first dismissed it a mispronunciation of her actual name, the more and more he talked, the more she was convinced that this 'Vallah' was a different person altogether.

And also that Banno was becoming more and more insane with every passing moment.

No, he's always been this insane. It's just his mask that's crumbling away.

"Banno?" she whispered, not liking the way he seemed to inhale the puff of breath from her mouth, as if he were trying to eat her voice. "Are you... here?"

Banno didn't answer. He just stared. Even with the wind blasting them both in the face, he barely even blinked.

Valery waved her hand in front of his face, but there was no reaction at all. He was just gone.

She slowly brought the sliver of glass out from behind her tail, convinced that his vacant expression would clear and contort with fury at the sight of it, but he just kept staring straight ahead, his head slightly cocked, as if listening to something.

Valery licked her dry, ice-chapped lips and began to cock back her arm, wondering what she should aim for. She had never killed so much as a mouse before, and now... now the lives of her entire family revolved around her ability to end the life of this Wolf, slowly running his hands up and down her sides, dripping blood onto her upturned face. She could barely even feel the glass inside her shaking hand, and now she was supposed to... put it...

Go for the neck... a voice inside her whispered, a voice that sounded nothing like her own. Just take the glass and shove it into his throat. Push it in as deep as you can, and then drag it across from ear to ear. Don't stop for anything.

Valery's arm was as far back as it could go, and still Banno was just staring at her, a fine smattering of snow stuck to his fur.

Twist it before you pull it out. Then shove it back in again. And again. And again. Don't stop until the glass breaks off in your fingers. Don't stop until his blood pours out all over your face in a steaming shower. Don't stop until he's dead.

This voice. This terrible, awful voice... dripping with so much hatred and bitterness. This voice wasn't a part of her at all! This was...

This was a different person altogether...

Valery gritted her teeth and increased her grip on the shard of glass until she could feel it through the numbing cold once again, biting into her palm. It was real. This was real.

Do it.

She swung the glass over her head, shining like a pale gemstone in the night, smeared with blood and snow.

Banno grabbed her hand without even looking, his eye still frozen in place, and the tip of the shard disappeared into his palm, slicing through flesh, slipping between bone, and bursting out the other side as a crimson thorn.

"Nooo!" Valery screamed as Banno slammed her onto her back in a puff of snow. His weight pushed her almost all the way down to the frozen ground, walls of white rising up on either side like cliffs, and immediately her senses were overcome with two conflicting extremes. Frigid snow against her back, in her hair, in her ears, and Banno staring down at her from above, enfolding her like a blanket, baking hot, dribbling blood and diseased puss onto her squirming face, explosions of heat landing on her numb lips.

She tried to break free, but Banno had her pinned by the hands. She could feel the blood gushing out of his pierced palm and flowing all over her fingers. She thought of his blood pouring over the cut in her own palm, as if they were forming some kind of blood pact with each other, and burst into tears all over again. She was just a little girl, facing a monster all by herself, out in the cold and in the dark, and she was afraid.

"Why are you crying, Valery?" Banno asked. His face was so close that Valery could see the tiny little wrinkles in his snout, the wriggly veins in his eye.

"I want my daddy..." Valery sobbed, unable to keep it in any longer. She had taken on too much. There was no thought of lies or deception left, no cunning tricks, no plans for survival. She had gambled everything and she had lost. All that remained was pure and total honesty in the face of death. "I want my mommy... I want Luke and Tim... I want my family... I want

*

you, Banno," Valery said. "You, and_only_ you." The tears in her eyes gave off a beautiful sheen, making the blue stand out even brighter, like the waters of a mountain spring. The leaves crackled beneath her body as he leaned in close and licked the tears off her face. The salty taste sent shockwaves of pleasure racing through his body. For years, he had been dying of thirst, and now he could finally drink...

"But your brother will try to stop us..." she sniffed and moaned at the same time, caught between worry and pleasure. "He'll try to keep us apart, just like my daddy, just like my brothers..."

"He won't touch you. I won't

*

let him touch you..." Banno dragged his tongue along Valery's cheek, licking up her freshly spilled tears before they could freeze into her fur. She tried to pull away, but that just gave him an even better angle at the other side, and he greedily lapped at her eye, smearing his blood all over her face. She told herself to stop crying over and over again, but she couldn't, and the tears kept spilling, mixing with the blood, inviting Banno to come back in with that gigantic maw lined with teeth, and every time he did, she wondered if this would be the last thing she ever saw before her life was swallowed whole, just like the tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Ander can't stop us..." Banno whispered even as he dragged his tongue across the corner of her mouth, caressing her face with the stench of his breath. "I don't want him to stop us, and that means he can't. I only want him to try, and that means he will. It's all for you, Valery. It's all for you... Just be patient a little while longer... When all five of you come together, when all your flavours mix... that's when you'll taste the best..."

It was as if a flash of lightning had gone off in her head. That name. Ander. She knew that name. She remembered that name.

There are Wolves in the Valley, James. Quite a few. Six or seven, I think. And two of them are the brothers of that Banno guy who nearly killed you.

Uncle Jon had talked about a small group of Wolves in the valley, how they had shown up out of the blue one day. It was a scary thought, knowing there were other Wolves out there, possibly just as big and dangerous as Banno, but Uncle Jon had talked about them like they were friends. Valery had been half asleep when he said that, dead tired, nodding off and jerking awake again, but she distinctly remembered how he had gone out of his way to convince them that these Wolves were no threat, that they were friendly, that they were practically family.

Heck, Ander even fixed m' wagon for me one time. Lifted the whole thing like it was nothing. Awful polite sort, maybe even overly so. Prob'ly cause Jonah here was just about shakin' in his boots the entire time.

That had to be the same Ander. It just had to be.

Banno's brother? Valery thought, hardly daring to believe it. And he's coming here? He's on his way right now?

"Banno, what will - Mmm!" She had to shut her mouth as Banno's vile tongue slid across her lips in what had to be the most disgusting 'kiss' anyone has ever had to suffer through, hot and wet. She didn't want to talk for fear of all that bloody saliva stretching between her lips in filthy ropes, hanging suspended, and then dripping into her open mouth, but she had to. She steeled herself and tried again. "What will

*

happen when he gets here?" she asked, greedily licking her lips. Banno couldn't blame her. She had been waiting her whole life for this, only to be teased so cruelly at the final hour.

But this was part of her flavour, too. The anticipation...

"There's going to be a massacre..." Banno said, adoring the way she was squirming beneath his body. He could feel every gasp, every fluttering heartbeat. She was practically shivering with excitement. "Everything he did to me, I will return a hundredfold. I will break his bones. I will tear out his eye and swallow it right in front of him. I will cut him. Bleed him. Tear him. Rip his flesh apart until he begs for death. And then... when he can take no more..."

Banno felt a smile

*

spreading across his face, but it wasn't really a smile at all, it was a gash in his head, filled with bloody teeth. And then he said something that didn't make any sense at all, but sent a chill running through her spine regardless, a chill that not even the howling wind could match. "I'll crack the shell open..." he breathed. "See the yolk drip down..."

It would have been so easy to give up just then. To say something without thinking, something that would snap Banno out of his deranged thoughts and bring him back to the real world. Perhaps some part of her even wanted it to happen, to just let Banno do whatever it was he intended to do and get it over with. That small part of her was willing to pay with any amount of pain, just so she wouldn't have to feel so scared anymore. But she couldn't. She couldn't. She was still alive, she was still breathing, and as long as those things were true, she couldn't just give up. To do that would be to condemn her entire family. There was simply no choice in the matter. She had to calm down and think, and she had to do it quickly.

Valery took a deep, shuddering breath and went over all the horrible things Banno had said. Most of it was just terrifying, but there was some other information in there, too, information that might prove crucial, like the fact that Banno didn't intend to... 'merge' with her until his brother arrived, the brother he so deeply despised. That much was obvious just from all the things he had said, about the torture he was going to put him through, how he was going to 'get back at him'. Banno might be a cunning deceiver who had pulled the wool over her eyes for the longest time, but in some strange and unexpected ways he was shockingly open and honest, and she believed every word that was coming from his mouth. Or, at the very least, she believed that _he_believed them.

If Ander was Banno's enemy, did that not make Ander her friend? A friend who was on his way here, right now? A friend who, by Banno's own words, was coming to stop him?

It wasn't much, but it was something. It was hope, and hope could make all the difference. Without hope, her thoughts were just a muddled mess; broken, scattered. But with hope (even just a tiny bit), everything changed. If there was hope, then that meant her actions actually meant something, and thinking about that made her aware of how vulnerable her family really was, how she would be the one responsible for getting them out of this alive. It was a scary thought, but it was also a focussing thought.

Keeping them safe entailed only two things: keeping Banno away from them, and buying enough time for Ander to make it here, hopefully with all his Wolf friends in tow.

Could she do those two things by herself?

She didn't have a choice.

Banno ran his tongue over his teeth, licking some of the blood away and leaving them gleaming inside his mouth like slimy spearheads. He was watching her in that 'inside' way of his, like she was a great big chicken pie and he just wanted to gobble her right up.

"What are you thinking about, Vallah?" he asked, making her jump. It was like he had taken a peek inside her head and didn't like what he saw. Not one bit. How long had she been lying here, making a wingless snow angel, thinking about everything she could possibly think about? Long enough for the walls of snow to collapse in on her arms. Long enough for her fingers and toes to go numb.

Long enough for Daddy to bleed out all over the living room floor...?

Please be okay, Daddy. Please, please be okay...

"I was thinking about you," Valery answered, not quite able to look Banno in the eye. "About what you want to do. About what we want to do, and about how your brother is going to try and stop us. I was thinking about how I don't want that to happen."

"It won't, Valery. I don't want that to happen either, and that means it can't."

Valery could hardly fathom Banno's way of thinking. He seemed to believe that, if he wanted something to happen a certain way, then it simply would. There was no doubt in his mind at all.

"You're going to stop him."

"Of course."

"There's going to be a massacre."

"I will butcher him."

"Then I... I want to be able to watch you do it. I want to watch you fight and win. All those things you said, about the broken bones and the... and the blood. I want to watch it all."

"I knew you were still real," he said. "I knew it wasn't too late."

"But

*

we can't do it here," Vallah said, looking up at him in that coy way of hers, with her head slightly tilted down. "This place isn't right."

"No... it isn't..." Banno looked up at the sun, creating shifting spots of blinding light in the thick, forest canopy. But the longer he looked, the more those dazzling spots of white started to look like snowflakes, raining down from a shadowy sky.

The wind was picking up, too, dragging claws of ice across his face. Burning cold.

"You can't go back into the house," Vallah said, speaking quickly, urgently. "It's too small for you. You can't even stand up straight, let alone fight properly. Even worse, Ander is a coward. Instead of facing you directly, he might try to steal the egg away. He might try to steal me away."

Banno's

*

grin disappeared, at least from the half of his face that wasn't stuck that way, creating an asymmetry that hurt her eyes; one half a smile of gore, the other a furious snarl.

Be very careful, Val. Be very, very careful...

"If he's going to try to stop us from... being together..." Just saying those words made her flesh crawl, but she powered on, knowing that if she messed up now, she might break the delicate spell between them, "then it would make more sense for him to come after me than fight you directly. He would be a fool to try that. You're so big and strong, after all, and I'm so little."

Banno growled, but strangely, it didn't frighten her as badly as it once would have. She was becoming more in tune with his expressions, and she instinctively knew he wasn't growling at her, he was growling at Ander.

Valery put on her most earnest face and said, "We need to go to a place where he can't hide -"

An open place where you'll be exposed.

"- a place with enough room for you to go all-out -"

A big place where you can be outnumbered.

"- a place where he can't get to me, but I'll still be able to watch everything."

A place that's not this house. A place that's as far away from my family as possible.

"Where...?" he asked, sucking on his broken teeth in anticipation. "Where?"

Not knowing if she would ever see her family again, Valery gave Banno the smile he so desperately wanted, keeping all her tears on the inside, and

*

turned her head to the left.

Banno followed her gaze along the winding forest paths, but that wasn't quite right anymore.

He blinked the blood out of his eye and the sun, shining so brilliantly, simply faded away, as if the deepest, darkest cloud had swallowed it up, casting its shadow over the entire world. The trees, with their autumn colours of red and brown, shrivelled and blackened, charred by invisible flames, until they were reduced to empty fields of nothingness. The leaves falling past his face, whispering in the wind and crackling underfoot, weren't really leaves at all. They were snowflakes, carried by the breath of the storm. Freezing, burning, blowing sideways. And through this black and grey haze of falling snow and icy winds, a shape began to emerge.

It was the tower he had spotted from the bottom of the hill. The pointed tower with the giant wooden cross protruding from its face, creaking and groaning in the gale.