Ghost Towns

Twenty Six

Rye awoke at once, quite suddenly. Her eyes shot open, though her sight was still blurred for a few moments, blinking against the morning light. Her mind was caught...it was still in that place in her dreams, a meadow... She wanted to remember it so badly. The details of her dream began to fade, but the all-consuming ache in her chest did not subside. Jax had been there, lying in the meadow, staring at the sky beside her. His hair had been tousled, somehow in perfect dissonance, no matter how much of a contradiction that was. And his eyes...bright and liquid as molten silver shifting in a glass vial.

What had awoken her?

If she could have willed herself back into the same dream, Rye would have shut her eyes right then.

There was shouting.

Slowly, Rye sat up, stretching her arms and rubbing at her eyelids.

She stilled when she heard Lisa's voice, shrill and loud, near to screaming.

"I told you already!" She yelled, "it can't be me!"

Someone growled a reply, and Rye winced from the other side of the wall. Was Alpha Adrian here?

"No!" Lisa insisted, "I was kept under lock and key and had a posted watch outside my door! And since I left, I can never go back! I'm barred from Goldcrest, Alpha. The minute he realized I was gone, my father probably set a bounty for my head! Do you know what I could do to him with the evidence I have?"

"What did you expect from me, then, Scarrow spawn?" Alpha Adrian's voice boomed through the cells, shaking every bit of stone and wood. "To waste my wolves on assassinating a man with guns? To bring open battle while we have women and children at this house? All I could easily do is set fire to your little human village again, but something tells me that there's very little left to burn."

There was silence at that, and Rye guessed that Lisa was trying her hardest not to scream.

"You are focused on the wrong enemy, Alpha," Lisa said, somewhat more calmly. Rye tensed. She and Lisa had talked long into the night, and Rye had told her own story to her. But now, she worried that Lisa might wield the narrative in a way that would only flare violence in every direction instead of only towards the Mayor. And Rye had to protect Jax at any cost. She had to.

She knocked on her cell's door, hard, knuckles stinging. "Alpha?" She called, as loudly and as clearly as she could.

The voices beyond the wall quieted. And then, belatedly, Alpha Adrian pulled her door open, roughly enough that some of the wood sounded as though it splintered. He pushed Lisa into Rye's cell ahead of him. She stumbled to the far side, and Rye reached up to steady her before she could fall.

He stared expectantly at Rye. "Have something to say?" He demanded.

For a moment, Rye considered this wolf in front of her. It seemed that after months of acting behind a false face of calculated menace and taunting, his patience had broken. There was no mask to the cruelty anymore. He was no longer toying with either of the two girls.

Rye cleared her throat. She clenched her fingers so they wouldn't shake. "No wolf can enter Goldcrest because of Mayor Scarrow's guard," she said, chastising herself internally for sounding so...small. It was not like her to be intimidated. But she was only a fraction now of what she had ever been with Jax. Before this horrible place. With a deep breath, Rye focused on the girl she had been once, willing to take the answers she wanted out of anybody.

"No wolf can walk into Goldcrest without being shot first," she said again, more confidently this time. "And all the townspeople know Lisa's face, and they think she has betrayed them."