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“There are no threats that work on you, are there,” he sighs. “Absolutely incorrigible human brat.”
I smile and swing in my disciplinary cocoon, sharing his wondering of what will work. I really don’t know. We’ve run and we’ve hidden. That should be enough, right?
Order’s plane sits in the shadow of acacias and corkwoods, hidden from the skies above. Nobody can find us, even if they wanted to. This is the closest to a happily ever after we’re going to get. But it doesn’t feel like everything is over. It feels like we’ve taken a step out of an ongoing mystery, one that’s going on without me. I do hate that. I wonder what’s happening with Chief Connor, and Sally. I wonder if she’s had a dozen more babies. I wonder if he is hunting her the way he hunted me, and if he intends to turn her into a werewolf as well.
“Does it ever bother you that all that is going on over there and we’re just… here?”
“No,” Order says. “The moment I was forced to choose between you and them, I chose you, and in choosing you I chose to leave them all behind. The war, such as it is, will never be ended, and we as a family are fractured. Our purpose has evaporated, and now we must find our own lives, our own purposes. Mine is you.”
“You’re the sweetest,” I say, my voice cracking just a little with emotion. I have been chosen by him. I have his faith and his love and everything else I could ever want.
“Yes, I am,” he agrees.
We have escaped to an antipodean idyll, but sometimes escape isn’t as complete as one imagines. And sometimes, others continue to choose us even when we no longer choose them.
On this fine afternoon, the past is closer to the present than either one of us expects.
A shadow passes over the scrub nearby. A moment later, wings overhead make us both look up as great spans of orange and black block out the sun with an oversized yet whimsical fluttering.
“The absolute fuck,” I curse to myself, sounding very New York all of a sudden. I had started to develop a faint Australian accent, but that’s gone instantly.
Order leaps for me and cuts me down immediately. He is trying to free me as quickly as possible, and he is so focused on me he cannot turn to face the potential enemy that just landed nearby.
“Shift,” he growls. “Shift. And run. Do not allow yourself to be caught. I will find you again.”
“I’m not running,” I growl. The wolf is rising in me, but it has not taken over yet. I am still human, and I can still think like a human - though that conscious control is slipping by the second.
“The king has come,” Order hisses. “The monarch is here.”
The way he says those words is so intense, I feel all the hairs on my skin rise up with sudden goosebumps.
I look over his shoulder as the last of the web falls from my body, and I see a creature more impressive than almost any I have seen so far. The monarch is very tall, and has an air of ominous authority.
He has very dark skin, dotted here and there with white spots that nature clearly intended to look like either eyes or some kind of prototypical morse code threat. Unlike Order, who can at least somewhat pass as being human for as long as it takes to buy supplies from a drunk miner, there is no way this mutant is ever going to fit in with human society. He’s as strange as strange can be. I stare, mouth open, thoroughly impressed and frankly, more than a little afraid.
There’s something very intense about his bearing. His eyes are dark and though there are only two of them, which might make him look more humanoid, they are very large and absolutely pitch black. Two vengeful voids, you might say if you were poetically inclined.
It’s his wings that draw the most attention though. They are broad, black and orange, each of them twice as large as his body. He looks like a walking stained glass sculpture as he strides toward us. This is the butterfly that beats its wings and changes the fate of the world.
“There you are,” he says, his first words containing bass and dominance and more than a little irritation. “I have searched the world for you, Order. Did you really think I would not find you?”
Order turns toward his older brother. “I know monarchs are capable of migrating great distances,” he says. “I didn’t think you’d bother, given all that has happened, and all that has not.”
“Monarchs are capable of asking you why you suddenly thought running away was a good choice, given the war has escalated.”
“Wait,” I whisper in Order’s ear. “Is he a monarch as in butterfly, or is he a monarch as in king?”
“I am the oldest among us,” the monarch says, hearing my question and choosing to answer it. “And you are the second human to infiltrate our…”
“Not actually technically a human anymph…”
I don’t get a chance to finish the sentence, because Order has clapped his webby hand over my mouth and quite literally stuck it shut so I can’t say anything else.
“I know what happened to her,” the monarch says. “I have been briefed by Justice and Stealth.”
That news makes Order bristle. “If you’ve come to try to force me to abandon her, you are wasting your time, Fury.”
“I have not come to force you to do anything. I’m not going to make that kind of mistake. Nobody has ever been able to tell you anything, Order. You’ve always had a strong sense of duty, and I can see that continues.”
