Chapter 50: Ryan

Ryan could tell from a distance that it was Joseph. There was still warmth in his body but he was unquestionably dead. His eyes were stuck open and seeing them like that, staring into nothing and glassy, empty orbs, tore Ryan’s heart out of his chest. The last few years, things had been tense between them, and Joseph tended to have a problem with everything Ryan and Rodrigo did once they moved out on their own but he had still been in Ryan’s corner when he needed him. He was still someone Ryan could count on no matter what was happening.

Most likely there would be no burial, no hero’s ceremony, sending him off into the ether like a Viking funeral. Ryan had no idea what to do with any of the bodies but especially not one that until recently belonged to someone important to him.

“Is he-”

Ryan startled at a voice being so close to him. Rodrigo, naked and battered but walking upright, was by his side, his hand pressing into a leaking wound on his stomach. The color in his face was high and compared to the bloodless pallor of Joseph, he appeared the picture of perfect health.

“I can’t believe it,” Ryan said, though that was completely untrue. He could believe it. For a long time now, their pack had done little in the way of real dangerous crimes and there was a false sense of security, like they were playing at power struggles and battles and no one was going to actually get hurt. Troy’s pack had been a different breed altogether. Going at them on their territory was more of a risk than they were ready for.

“What do we do now?” Rodrigo asked but Ryan had no answers. He never did anyway. It was a relief to stop pretending that maybe he could make sense of this.

The woman shifter who had taken out Troy made her slow loping way over to them. She and Rodrigo faced each other as equals, naked and sweaty in the chilly Bay Area night.

“Come inside,” she told them. “The least we can all do is take care of each other right now.”

Rodrigo nodded and followed behind her but Ryan stayed where he was, his hand resting on Joseph’s body. From across the lawn, he watched Helena bend forward and projectile thin, spitty vomit onto the ground.

“Helena,” he said, getting to his feet. When he got to her, she was shaking. “Helena, are you alright?”

“I want to leave,” she told him, her voice certain within the quivering.

“Ok, we can. We’re going to go inside for a minute-”

“No, Ryan, I want to leave.”

She spun on the balls of her feet and started walking towards the tree line. Ryan caught her hand and pulled her body back into his in a tight hug. He felt the tremors pulsing through her, felt her muscles like rubber bands held too tightly for a long time and now snapping over and over and over again.

“It’s ok, Helena. You’re alright now.”

When she pushed away from him, her countenance laid it out flat for him. There was a new hardness about her, a new obscurity in the depths of her eyes. She would never be alright again. Any illusion of safety, of love and protection, was flayed from her reality, skin sliced off muscle and fat so that everything was left raw and exposed.

Helena pressed a hand against Ryan’s chest and took a step back. “I want to leave.”

He watched the blonde of her hair begin to melt into the nighttime woods, and he hurried to catch up with her. If she was really that determined to, he would get her out of here. Otherwise, god only knew where she would end up and what might become of her.

“Look, Joseph’s truck is about a mile or so down the mountain. By the mouth of a hiking trail.” He touched her shoulder, relieved that she didn’t jerk away. “I’ll go with you, ok? Please, Helena. Let me bring you home.”

Her eyes were downcast and unblinking. She swallowed hard at the word ‘home.’ He was still touching her when the shaking started again. “I don’t have a home anymore.”

She strode ahead of him, tremors and all, a woman on a mission. It was like nothing could stop her, nothing could keep her at that compound for another second. Even if there was nowhere else for her to go, staying here wasn’t remotely an option.

They tracked through the woods in silence, Ryan leading Helena as gently as he could. Occasionally he reached out and took her by the elbow to pull her back the right way. For about a half an hour, they pushed through the thicket and underbrush until they landed on the trail that went to the truck in one direction and a campsite in the other. Ryan pointed where they should go; Helena followed the gesture wordlessly.

At the mouth of the hiking trail, Joseph’s truck was still there though the canvas covering the flatbed had been tossed up and a decent amount of their supplies had gone missing. Ryan hoped whomever had absconded with them needed them more than he did. He didn’t have enough energy left in his body to be angry at anything.

“Joseph left a set of keys hidden under the passenger’s seat,” Ryan told her. “In case…” He shook his head briskly. “We just didn’t know what might happen.”

Helena still didn’t say anything. She stood by the flatbed, her mouth closed in a soft sag and her eyes clouded, unfocused.

Ryan opened the passanger’s side door and reached up into the internal mechanics of the seat. The key was tucked up high into a small dip that was hard to get to, and Ryan felt the blunt edges of the metal biting into his skin. He knocked the key off the makeshift shelf and it landed on the worn carpet under the seat.

“Alright, let’s get out of here,” he said, lifting it up. When he turned to where Helena had been standing, she was gone. “Helena?”

Down the road a few paces, he saw the vague shape of blondeness just walking in the dark along a shoulderless road. Ryan sighed. “Jesus Christ, Helena.” He got into the driver’s side and started up the engine.

She was walking at a steady pace, the same fixed expression on her face. Ryan pulled up alongside her and it was as if she hardly even saw him.

“Helena, please get in the car.” He slowed to a crawl and moved with her. “Helena, we’re an hour away from everything. Please get in the car.”

She kept walking, unhearing, unblinking. Her arms hung slack at her sides. They hardly moved as she did.

“Helena, for the love of god, I’m begging you. Please, I’m not leaving here without you and you know it.”

That got her attention but when she turned to look at him, the blankness unseeing expression chilled him to the bone. In the time they had known each other, he had seen a few versions of this same girl. Here now was a new one, a haunted one, a version of herself he had hoped she would never have to be. Too many people in his life walked around with that look on their face, the nadir of their souls on display in the depths of their eyes.

Ryan pulled the brake and got out. Helena didn’t move as he got close so he opened the passenger side door for her and helped her in. She took to his guidance alright as if she was open to suggestion. Having to think, having to process even one more thing was going to cave in her head in its gory entirety but she could be led to warmth, safety, a place indoors where they lie next to each other.

Once Ryan was back behind the wheel and they were moving again, Helena finally spoke. “You should just let me go.”

“You can’t walk all the way back-”

She jutted a hand out to cut him off. “I mean, I can’t be with you. I can’t do this”

Ryan kept driving, gripping the wheel at ten and two. He wanted to pull over and look directly in her eyes as he told her that he couldn’t let her go; that all this had triggered a chain reaction inside of him and she was under his skin like no one else.

Helena was still staring straight ahead as if in a trance. “I don’t ever want to be around shifters again.”

“What if I leave the pack? We could go off together, the two of us.”

It wouldn’t have taken much at this point to get him to part ways. The way they had been living, the way so many people in the pack took without giving and expected others to shoulder their burden had broken stronger shifters than he. Nobody knew where Sheila had run off to and from what Ryan had observed, she was in no rush to return. If the pack’s time was over, then he might as well take this chance and start fresh, start a life with Helena in a place where their faces melted into the crowd and there wasn’t a single expectation on them.

“You’d leave the pack?” she asked. “You’d really never see any of these…people again?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Her face still distant, her expression still miles away and trapped wherever her mind was holding her hostage, Helena let her head bob in a diminutive nod. Ryan wanted to touch her, hands on her arms, her shoulders, brush his lips across her neck, pull her against him and feel her weight in his arms.

Helena’s mouth opened then closed. She swallowed. “I want to go to the beach.”

“What?” Ryan almost hit the brakes. “The beach?”

“Yes, take me to the beach.”

“Well, what beach?”

The way she was speaking unsettled him. The words were hollow; he heard the echo of the past twelve hours inside of them. She wasn’t blinking and her attention was fixed on the slice of blacktop under the follow spot of the headlights. Ryan had been face to face with trauma before but this was the first time he was seeing it in someone who had never experienced it. He had never witnessed the change of the soul, how it started its slow corrosion.

She moved her eyes to the side of his face. Ryan squirmed in his seat. “Ocean beach,” she said, finally blinking. “I want to go to Ocean Beach.”

“Helena, let’s just get you home.”

Her jaw visibly clenched. “Don’t say that word to me again. Take me to the beach.”

This time, Ryan didn’t argue. He hoped by the time they were back in the city, she would have come to her senses and her request could be forgotten.

The truck wound down the mountain like water finding its own level. Taciturn air sat between them. Ryan was dying to shatter it, to have a question or a comment cleft through, but his mind was racing and blank simultaneously. All he could do was follow Helena’s command and point the truck in the direction of the beach.