Chapter 27: Isabelle

There was nothing in the desert, and that had been why Isabelle liked it. Now she was staring out her captive window at the shrubs and the low growing cacti that stood like men at attention, and the horizon was so far away; every other town and any other person who could help her was so far away. The shuffling noise of Tara in the kitchen was her only distraction for the moment. Everything else was nothing.

A knock came lightly on the door. Isabelle thought maybe it was a noise from outside, from the ranch hands in the distance who seemed to laugh easily and loudly while she sat in a box that got creepingly hotter.

“It’s me, Isabelle,” Tara said from behind the door. “Ya want something to eat? I bring ya food.”

Aside from being polite, there was no reason for Tara to knock on the door. Isabelle had no way of locking it from the inside, and she was hoping that she hadn’t been locked in from the outside. Tara entered with her slow shuffle. In a moment of naked rebellion, Isabelle almost told the old lady to fuck right off and not bother her until Cormac agreed to drive her back to the train station. No, not the train station; the airport. Fuck Wes and all the rest of them back in Denver; fuck each pencil pusher allowed to slice the budget spent on her stories but no one else’s. She had to take trains, she had to spend weird, long nights at ranches where wolves called out in the distance and no one would answer her questions.

“I’m not very hungry, Tara,” Isabelle said as Tara rested a tray of food in front of her.

“‘Ave a little somethin’ to eat,” Tara insisted. “It would make me feel better to know you ‘ad somethin’ in your stomach.”

That naked rebellion reared up again. Isabelle bit her tongue to stop herself from going off on how she didn’t care how Tara felt. How any of them out there felt.

There had never been an emotion that coiled so intensely within her. Isabelle had spent plenty of her life being angry or scared but this was a whole new experience. It was akin to bloodlust, the salivating drive for vengeance. She wanted to escape from this place and drive as fast as she could to the nearest city; come back with cops and vigilantes and anyone else with a desire to snuff out the life of a beast. Here she was, a completely normal human being held captive by monsters. By creatures that could twist their bodies into animals.

“What did Cormac tell you?” Tara asked as she collected a few strewn articles of clothing that Isabelle hadn’t bothered to pick up off the floor. She handed them towards Isabelle who made no move to take them from her. “Did he tell you ‘bout us?”

“He didn’t tell me much.”

“Did he tell you about Maxine?” Isabelle shook her head. Tara sighed in response. “‘E should ‘ave.”

“I don’t know anything about Maxine. Gus said the same thing. Who was she?” Isabelle asked.

Tara fixed her gaze out the window at the men in the paddock. Isabelle repeated the question, watching Tara’s shoulders drop as memories encroached on the present moment, the precious, fleeting here and now.

“She was someone Cormac loved very much,” Tara answered without looking away from the ranch hands. One of them mounted a horse and took off riding then turned sharply and came back the same way. “She was taken from us.”

Isabelle didn’t want to feel guilty about how much pain she had wished upon Cormac but she couldn’t help it. The loss was there in Tara’s voice, endless and echoing. A cavern made by the removal of one specific soul.

“Was she Cormac’s…” She waited for Tara to fill in the blank.

“She and Cormac lived in that little ‘ouse over there.” Tara pointed out the window even though the cottage was obscured from Isabelle’s view from where she was sitting. “They lived together for a ‘ole long time. But a man from the town...one day, he…” Tara made her thumb and index finger into a gun and pointed it at Isabelle.

“He shot her?”

Tara nodded. “It ‘appened right out there.” She pointed to the paddock where the overgrown boys were still goofing around on their massive, muscular toys. “Cormac thought the man ‘ad shot ‘im. When ‘e first ‘eard the bullet, ‘e said ‘e was waiting to feel it then ‘e saw Maxine drop to the ground.”

Isabelle’s reporter’s instincts took over. She had to ask Tara everything she could, every question her brain was vomiting up at record speed. Did they know who this man was? Were they ever able to find him? To see justice served?

Each question weighed on Tara. Isabelle saw the pressure sinking the old woman’s shoulders, dropping her head into her chest as if she was moments away from crying. She culled the stream of inquiry for a moment, waiting to hear what Tara had to say. When Tara lifted her head, there were clear, rigid tears hanging on the crest of both her eyelids.

“We knew the man very well,” Tara said quietly, still looking out the window. It seemed impossible for her to make eye contact with Isabelle at all now. “‘Is ranch was only ‘bout twenty minutes from ‘ere. We used to trade eggs for ‘is ‘omemade cider.” She stared at Isabelle with a renewed intensity. “On Sundays sometimes ‘e would come for dinner. We thought ‘e was a good man.” Her voice broke. “But ‘e saw Maxine shifting one night. ‘E told us we let an evil into our ‘ome, and if we didn’t take care of it, ‘e would.”

“And that’s what he did.”

Tara nodded. Those rigid sparkling tears returned. “Cormac thought ‘e needed to go kill the man but me and Maxine-” she pressed a hand to her lips as her voice broke again- “we told ‘im no, that it was fine. That ‘e was just a scared old man who wouldn’t do nothing if we left it alone.”

“Tara, listen to me: I know you’re all scared and worried I’m going to do the same thing but I swear to god, I just want to leave. I’ll give you the film and I’ll never come back here again.”

“That wasn’t the first time this ‘appened,” Tara told her. “Our ‘istory is story after story of ‘umans trying to kill us.”

Isabelle was glad that Tara was speaking freely, and she didn’t have to ask any more questions. Tara told her of the decades their kind had spent hidden in the desert when at one time, they felt safe enough to live and work in cities.

“We were always out west,” Tara said, her finger in the air. This was a very important point to remember. “But could live anywhere we wanted to for a little while. When nobody knew ‘bout us, we could walk alongside ‘umans.”

There had been shifters working on the railroads, and shifters hitching rides to California to pan for gold. Tara knew that shifters existed long before there was any idea of manifest destiny or mirrored skyscrapers flowering out of the sand. Before places like Las Vegas and Phoenix existed, before the mountains in Utah and Nevada were seen as resorts vacations, shifters roamed. They could live in the desert; they could survive in the woods. Most of them lived as normal humans in relatively normal towns but a few liked to keep close to nature, to be a breath away from feral. The feral ones always thought that the foolish shifters navigating the human world were going to get them all discovered. As it so happened, it was the other way around.

For the shifters who lived in the budding society of the wild west, they were used to being cautious and watching who they trusted. A drunken man blathering on about how he could turn into a wolf and kill prey with only his teeth and claws can be dismissed as the temporary lunacy of a drunk. If someone was to hear these ramblings then catch a glimpse of a shifter in between forms, they might be able to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. With this in mind, anyone who lived among humans knew to do their best to keep their mouths shut and the suspicions of the town elsewhere.

The feral shifters had a more invincible image of themselves. Most of them disliked humans the way the spurned angel Lucifer did; humans were somehow the favorite of god while also being second best. Shifters could morph and sprint and kill. Humans couldn’t do much of anything.

An unknown feral had always been blamed for the purge of their species but as Tara saw it, the only people who were to blame were the ones that did the killing. It didn’t matter that the feral had gotten into a farmer’s chicken coops and had himself a meal fit for a dirty-nailed king; it didn’t matter that he tried to change back into a human before the farmer could take aim with his shotgun and load him full of buckshot, freezing him in the half-breed form that looked more monster than man.

“What mattered,” Tara told Isabelle emphatically, “was that these people thought with their fear, not their ‘eads. They let fear make decisions for them.”

From that moment on, it was a witch hunt. Anyone who had ever been under suspicion for being strange was sought out for questioning. Sheriffs’ offices sent messages and warnings to nearby towns that there was something bad happening; that there was a lot of evil in the air. Families were roused from their beds, slaughtered in the streets. By the end of it, the shifter population was decimated, and what had been a long-flung, widespread community became a cluster of refugees and orphans. Tara had been born less than fifty years after the killings. Her childhood had been saturated with tales of hatred of humans and danger from the likes of them.

“I know that don’t ‘ave to be true,” she said after she explained this to Isabelle who suddenly found herself without any questions to bring up. “I know we and ‘umans can live together. That’s why I tell Cormac not to kill the man.”

“But I actually mean you no harm, Tara,” Isabelle promised.

“It’s not my decision to make,” Tara told her, starting her shuffle towards the door. “I know you mean it though.”

Left alone again, Isabelle fell backward onto the bed, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. She was dizzy, drifting. The tray Tara had brought her had a huge glass of ice water on it. Isabelle grabbed it and swallowed down mouthfuls of it.

There was another knock on the door but this one was louder, more insistent. Isabelle, assuming it was Cormac, reluctantly called out for the person to come in. When Joey entered, she startled.

“Didn’t expect me, I guess,” he said with an airy snicker. “Maybe you thought Tara was bringing you more food.” He stared her down. “Or that Cormac was coming to let you out.”

“What do you want, Joey?”

He paced across the floor at the foot of her bed, stopping every few seconds to glance over at her. “I’m here to check on ya. Make sure ya got everything ya need.”

“That’s Tara’s job.”

Isabelle wasn’t sure if her stomach wanted to heave or her skin wanted to crawl. Joey looked at her as if he could tear her apart without thinking; rip her flesh to ribbons just because he wanted to.

“Get out of here, Joey,” she told him, shifting herself towards the pillows at the head of the bed and reclining. She felt like a teenager throwing a tantrum as she tucked her legs under her and faced away from him. “You make me sick to my stomach.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to do nothin’ to upset ya,” he said. He stopped pacing and leaned across the bed to get closer to Isabelle. “But let me tell ya something real quick before I leave ya all alone.”

“What?” Isabelle snapped.

Joey grinned at her, lupine and foul. She could already see the blood dripping off of his fangs. “You’re not gettin’ out of here alive, girl. If Cormac don’t have the sack to kill ya then I will.”

His eyes were beyond cold. They were frozen, lifeless and hateful. In them, Isabelle saw the reflection of herself, of someone suddenly so small and helpless. She saw Joey’s anger, his distrust of everything around him, what he saw made flesh in her: another source of danger, another threat to the life of the pack. His nose twitched as they stared at each other; she wondered if he was smelling her fear.

“Cormac wouldn’t let you,” she told him in a voice that gave away how frightened she was. “He’s not a piece of shit like you are.”

Joey stood up straight, his wolfish grin pulling to a strange, evil mask. Those eyes were still lifeless and filled with the worst of the world. “He didn’t have the balls to kill that old man that shot Maxine either,” he said. “But I took care of that one on my own.” He started towards the door, turning only to make sure Isabelle looked suitably frightened then motioned to the tray filled with food. “Might wanna eat something. Best not to die on an empty stomach.”

He slammed the door before Isabelle could say anything in response. She listened to his heavy work boots as he made his way back down the hallway. The door slammed, and Isabelle exhaled then inhaled rapidly then did it again and again and again until she managed to calm herself down.

From past the window, she could hear Joey talking and laughing. It was the voice of someone unfazed by the threat he had just made; the actions he might have to undertake. In a circuitous flash, that naked rebellion returned, and Isabelle got to her feet, hurling the tray of food against the wall. She watched the textures and colors run together in their mess of splatter, slinking slowly down the wall to puddle impotently on the hardwood floor.