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A STORM MAKES LANDFALL
There was nothing Freya wanted so much as a bath to wash away the feeling of the smelly were-fox hands on her. Unfortunately, with the storm already beginning to hit the town, and presumably her house still undefended - unless her Mum and sister had made some progress with storm defences - there was no chance of doing what she wanted. She slumped against the wall for a moment, before she made her way dripping into the lounge, pausing only to push off her sodden boots and hang her wet anorak onto one of the pegs by the door. It hurt to get the anorak off.
“Mum!” she called, a note of hysteria in her voice now that she was away from the immediate threat. “Tammy! Are you home?”
“Back here.” Her mother’s voice came from the lean-to kitchen at the back of the house. Freya made her way to the kitchen, every muscle protesting the abuse it had received as she did so. As Freya appeared in the kitchen door, her mother gasped.
“What happened to you?” Tammy was in the kitchen too, her stiff movements suggesting that whatever she was doing, she didn’t want to be doing it.
“I had a run-in with a pack of were-foxes. Did you know there were some in this town?” said Freya.
“I did,” Tammy said unexpectedly, in a flat voice. “I’ve run into them a few times. I didn’t think they’d go after you though.” There was an odd note in her voice. “I told them to leave my family alone.”
“Well, I sure wish they had listened to you.” Freya couldn’t help the bit of whine that crept into her voice. She was feeling sore, and more than a little sorry for herself. “They waited for me in an alley on the way home. I thought I’d gotten rid of them...” she paused, not wanting to mention the summoning she’d done to her mum, since that was something Tammy had taught her to do, and Mum had never mentioned the possibilities of summoning. Freya had a sneaking suspicion that their summoning abilities came from their Dad, who was never mentioned these days.
“So, what happened?” asked Danae.
“Well, then they jumped me just before our street. I hurt all over. They really had it in for me, even though I’d never met them before. Incidentally, I don’t think much of the citizenry in this town. No-one tried to save me until a stranger stepped in. And even he wouldn’t say why he did.” Freya wasn’t sure why she didn’t tell her Mum about Lio, who was not, after all, a stranger. Perhaps it was just that it would be so awkward explaining all those stormy nights she’d gone out alone or with her cat. She felt an almost physical stab of loss at the memory of Mr Fluffbum. She still didn’t know exactly what had happened to him. She’d spent a lot of time in the last few weeks trying to work out how a lost cat might find its way home, when its home had changed location. She hadn’t come up with an answer.
“Well, I’m glad someone did help you out. Do you know who he was, so we can thank him?”
“Mum, I told you he was a stranger. And he disappeared pretty much as soon as the weres did. Look, are you going to help me out or just stand there asking about other people?”
Freya’s Mum stepped forward as though to give her a hug, but stopped short.
“Why, Freya, you’re soaking! And some of those injuries look painful. Look, we’ve got to get the house sorted for the storm, but we’ll give you some first aid too. Here, take the frozen peas and put them on your eye while Tammy and I finish boarding up the windows in here. Does anything need bandaging? OK, I’ll tear up some curtains, they’re not doing much good anyway.” Her mother put actions to words, passing Freya a packet of frozen vegetables to use as an icepack, and cutting, rather than tearing, the old, somewhat mouldy curtains from the kitchen windows.
“Ugh, Mum, that can’t be healthy to put on a wound.”
“We don’t have any regular bandages, you’ll have to make do. Now, I’ve decided that since the windows here are closest to the ground, they’re probably the easiest to defend. Also, if there’s a tornado we don’t want to be on the top level of the house.” Danae paused, the tattered remainder of the curtains in her hand.
“Those weres. They’re not waiting at the front door or anything are they?”
“No,” said Freya. “Someone chased them away before I got home. But Mum - they could smell that I wasn’t mundane - not just a human. They said so. And they smelled pretty bad too. Even worse than you’d guess for something hanging around in a gross alleyway. And Mum, they beat me up, hurt me, and I couldn’t do anything! Why haven’t you taught us to defend ourselves? And are we safe here if they know what we are?”
Danae sighed. This time she did hug Freya.
“I guess I hoped you wouldn’t ever have to be in a situation where you had to physically defend yourself. I’m sorry you’ve experienced that. This house had the cheapest rent, and there was a job going. We had to come here. But weres - that’s bad news. Weres and demis have never got on well. Maybe because weres always can tell that we’re different.”
Freya noticed her Mum’s hands were fidgeting, moving a ring up and down on her little finger.
“Still. There’s nothing to be done today. We need to get a move on, I can hear the wind rising out there.” As she said this, a tremendous wind gust hammered the windows, which Freya now saw were partially covered with large, flattened cardboard boxes. Someone had evidently got to the local supermarket or greengrocer for supplies.
“I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I can hardly move. What windows are left to go? And do we have candles? I don’t fancy sitting in the dark during a storm.”
“Don’t worry about that yet, we’re almost out of cardboard, anyway. Give yourself a few minutes. There’s the solar lantern if we lose power.” The lights were still on, so they hadn’t yet lost electricity. However, in Freya’s experience, electricity would quickly be lost in a storm this size. She wished they did have a basement to retreat to. Some of the houses she’d lived in had had that, and while unpleasant on a typical day, they were a haven in a storm. The cold outside seemed to reach inside her, and she had a sudden, intense craving for a steaming mug of hot chocolate. She wondered if they had any left, and if there was a chance of boiling water before they lost power.
“Can I get some hot chocolate? Then maybe I’ll be up to helping you,” she suggested.
“There’s a tiny bit left in the bottom of the jar. I boiled the kettle before we started on the windows. You can use that. Hurry though, the wind isn’t waiting for us.” As Danae spoke, Freya could hear the howl of the wind rising. Rain battered against the windows, louder where they weren’t covered with card. Every so often the rain was mixed with hail, making a sharper sound against the glass. There was still half of the kitchen to go. Tammy was flattening more boxes over by the cooker. Freya scooted past her mother to get to that end of the kitchen. It was just about the smallest room in the house, built as a lean-to on the end of an older brick structure.
The kettle was on the cooker, so Freya busied herself getting the chocolate, stepping awkwardly around her sister. The mundane task calming her racing heart. She scraped the powder into three mugs, topping it off with the cooling hot water. Her mother and sister must have been at this a while. There was half a bottle of milk remaining in the fridge, but Freya suspected that they would be low on supplies if the storm kept them inside a while. Best to save that for later. Oh well, it won’t be the first time I’ve drunk hot chocolate without the milk it deserves. She replaced the peas in the freezer. They were getting warm, and there was every chance that the family would need to eat them, later. She drank her chocolate, appreciating the sugar rush it gave her, making her feel closer to normality. She offered the other mugs to Tammy and her mum, and took Tammy’s place flattening the remaining boxes while Tammy drank her own chocolate.
“I’ll have mine in a bit,” said her mother when Freya offered her a mug. She was using masking tape in tiny sections to attach the card to the window-frame of the last window in the kitchen. It was dark inside the kitchen when she’d finished, despite the uncovered electric bulb. Done at last, she downed the final mug of chocolate in a long series of gulps.
“Right then. This is our safe place. If the roof lifts, we come in here. Same thing if there’s a sprite strike. The walls should hold, they’re pretty solid. Do you girls want to bring in some pillows and blankets? We’ve probably just got time. Freya, if you need more first aid than just those peas and curtains, now’s the moment,” announced Danae.
Freya wasn’t sure what could be done about all her scrapes and bruises, but she definitely felt in need of sympathy.
“Sure, Mum. That’d be good.”
When she tried to stand up from her spot on the floor, she found all her muscles had stiffened up. She groaned aloud.
“Ow, ow ow. I am so taking up fitness classes after this. I can’t even walk without hurting after all that running. Damned weres.”
“Freya, mind your language. I know for a fact that weres aren’t damned,” snapped her mother.
Freya let her head fall backwards against the cooker door, dramatically.
“Come on Mum, they beat me up. Now is hardly the time to debate their theological position.”
Her mother gave her a more contrite glance.
“I suppose not, but you know I hate loose language. It can get you into trouble,” she said.
“I feel like I’ve already got into trouble. We’re probably OK while the storm lasts, but what do we do now we know we’re living in a were-town?” Freya replied grumpily.
“That’s too much trouble for one night,” her mother replied stiffly. “Let’s deal with that situation in the morning. Right now, I want you and Tammy on lookout duty. Get that bedding in here, then check on the other rooms. I didn’t have a chance to cover the allotment, not that it was producing much yet. We’ll be short on food for a while after this storm. Make sure you bring in any supplies from the bedrooms.” Her mother clearly expected action now, whatever state her daughter was in. First aid seemed to be forgotten.
Freya gave another sigh, and levered herself to her feet. She staggered to her room near the front of the house, upstairs, to collect her private supply of snack food. In the last few years they had started to keep a stash of snacks in their rooms, so that if anything happened to the supplies in one room, they had something to fall back on. Life could be detrimental to food stores when the unpredictable powers of three demis were concentrated in one house. Tammy had once accidentally summoned a naiad into the kitchen, which had drenched everything edible in the house, and a fair amount that wasn’t edible, too. Freya was sure she’d never done anything like that, but her Mum claimed she had induced their firewood to grow into trees when she was a toddler. Privately, Freya thought that if she could do that when she was a toddler, she would be much better at growing things now, rather than the bean-killing failure of a crop and fertility demi-goddess she knew herself to be.
Freya was halfway under her bed when the tree fell. She’d been easing herself out, hoarded snacks in hand, when an enormous crashing, splintering sound made her try to leap up, bashing her head on the underside of her bed.
“Ow, I so didn’t need that,” she muttered to herself. She had a sudden sense of deja vu, and remembered her last moments in that cottage on the cliffs, so long ago. She was aware of wind tugging at her clothing in the previously still room. Pushing herself all the way out from under the bed, she got her head clear at last.
“Fafnir’s breath, lucky I was under there!” she exclaimed. The tall oak tree that stood near their front door had toppled onto the house. Most of the front of her room was no longer there, crushed by the weight of the tree. Freya’s pillow was pinned down by a branch, and rain was drenching the remainder of her bedding. Slates from the roof pattered onto the floor. Dislodged by wind-sprites, or just by wind? Or by something else? It was hard to know.
“Mum!” yelled Freya. “Mum, did we have a deposit on this house? ‘Cos I don’t think we’re getting it back!” Realising that her Mum probably couldn’t hear her over the storm - which was even louder now that the walls and roof were breached - Freya clutched her snacks with one hand, gave a tug at the soggy bedclothes with the other, then gave up bedding retrieval as a lost cause. She was lucky there was still a door to exit her room, she thought. She certainly didn’t want to try climbing down from her second-storey bedroom window.
Fortunately, the tree seemed to have destroyed only her room at the corner of the house.
It’s hard to see my room being destroyed as fortunate.
She was able to descend the stairs, limping a little, and made her way to the kitchen with her meagre supplies. Her mother was back in the kitchen, her own bedding tidily arranged in a stack in the corner away from the cooker, against the back door.
"What happened, Freya? I heard a crash. And you don't have your bedding."
Typical. A tree destroys half the house and she doesn't come to see what happened, just asks where my blankets are. Maybe this is why she never keeps a job long and we're always having to move.
Freya loved her Mum, and knew that she was at least more stable than her now-absent father. But at times like this, Freya couldn’t wait to be old enough to move out of home. She and Tammy had not been close since what Freya thought of as the summoning summer, but Freya sometimes wondered why Tammy had stuck with the family. Perhaps she didn’t find her mother as infuriating as Freya did. She certainly wasn't driven by any obvious ambition, the way Freya was.
"Mum, didn’t you hear me yell? I told you, a tree fell on the house. It fell on my bed. I'm lucky I wasn't killed. I would have been if I'd gone to bed the way I want to." Her voice shook a little as the shock caught up with her. Her mother replied apparently casually,
"Oh, sorry. I was trying to get these windows sprite-proof.” She indicated some thin wire that criss-crossed the card in patterns. Freya hadn’t noticed it earlier. “But if the house has a breach already, there's no point. We may have to make some personal protection instead. If you want to lie down meanwhile, you can use my bedding. But get those wet things off first, please."
"Mum! I'm not stripping naked in the kitchen. My other clothes were under the tree-trunk. I'll just- just- oh, I don't know what to do." To her own horror, Freya found herself sobbing.
It's just the shock, she told herself. Everyone feels odd after a shock.
She was ready for this day to be over. If she had a bed remaining to sleep in, she would pull the covers over her head and pretend that the rest of the world didn't exist.
She found her mother giving her a blessedly gentle hug, and wrapping one of her own blankets around her.
"Sorry, Freya. You always seem so resilient, it's hard to remember that you need a bit of comfort too."
Freya allowed herself to relax in her mother's arms for a moment before pushing those arms away. She wiped her wet face on her even wetter sleeve. Not much drying had happened since she made it indoors.
"I'll just sit down for a bit here. Where is Tammy?"
Her mother replied vaguely.
“Oh, she’ll be down in a bit. Sooner if the wind gets worse and starts lifting the roof. She was pretty upset, seeing what those weres did to you.”
Freya frowned. Something odd was going on with Tammy. It sounded like weres might have something to do with it. But right now it was all too hard to think about. Freya sank onto the pile of bedding and closed her eyes.
***
