GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 1: THE HOUSE OF FEAR
CHAPTER 1: THE SOUND IN THE DRIVEWAY
A house keeps out the cold.
A home lets you walk out the door.
The kitchen smelled like tomatoes and warm bread, and Damien had decided the wolf on his paper needed a bigger tail.
He was lying on his stomach on the floor with his crayons spread around him in a loose circle, the way his mother let him spread them when it was only the two of them.
The green one had rolled under the table.
He would get it later.
Right now the brown wolf mattered more, because a wolf needed a good tail to look brave, and a brave tail took work.
Above him, his mother hummed.
She always hummed when she cooked, a soft up-and-down song with no words he knew, a song from before, from the place she called back home.
When she hummed, her whole body swayed a little at the stove, her hip bumping the counter, the wooden spoon tapping the side of the pot.
The window over the sink was open.
The curtains moved.
Yellow afternoon light lay across the floor in a long stripe, and Damien had drawn his wolf right in the middle of it so the fur would look warm.
“Mamá.” He rolled onto his back to see her upside down.
“Do wolves get cold?”
“In the winter, mijo, yes. That’s why they have thick fur.”
“But their feet. Their feet don’t have fur.”
She turned from the pot, the spoon still in her hand, and looked at him like the question was the most important thing anyone had asked her all day.
That was one of the best things about her.
She never made his questions feel small.
“Their feet are tougher than ours,” she said.
“The pads are like leather. And when it’s very cold, they curl up together, the whole family, and they put their noses under their tails and they keep each other warm. Nobody freezes when everybody shares.”
Damien thought about a pile of wolves, all noses and tails, and laughed.
“That’s silly.”
“It’s smart. Silly and smart are sometimes the same thing.” She pointed the spoon at his drawing.
“Show me. Who is that one?”
He held the paper up over his head so she could see it upside down too.
“It’s the wolf. And that’s going to be you.” He tapped an empty space beside the wolf.
“You’re the big one. You’re not done.”
Something moved across her face, quick and soft, there and gone.
“The big one,” she repeated.
“The big one who watches everybody.”
“Ah.” She turned back to the pot to hide her smile, but he saw it anyway in the way her shoulders lifted.
“Then you’d better make me strong. Big shoulders. And angry eyebrows, so nothing bothers my little wolf.”
“You don’t have angry eyebrows.”
“I can. When I need them.” She lowered her voice and made a monster face over her shoulder, eyebrows down, teeth out, and Damien shrieked and kicked his feet against the floor with the pure delight of it, because his mother could be scary and it was the safest thing in the world, because it was pretend.
She laughed with him.
Steam rose behind her head.
On the little radio by the toaster a man sang in Spanish, fast and happy, and she reached over without looking and turned it up one notch, and for a while the kitchen was only that — the song, the steam, the crayons, the light, the good ache in Damien’s cheeks from grinning.
This, he thought, was what a house was.
Warm and loud and yours.
He did not have the words for it, not really.
He only knew that when it was the two of them, the walls felt like arms, and he was never once afraid.
“Taste,” his mother said, and crouched down beside him with the spoon held in her cupped hand so it wouldn’t drip.
He blew on it the way she’d taught him and then slurped it, and it was hot and bright and a little sweet.
“More salt,” he announced, very serious, because that was what she always said.
“More salt.” She kissed the top of his head.
Her hand smelled like garlic and like her, underneath, the smell that meant safe.
“You’ll be a cook yet. Or a wolf. A cooking wolf. God help us all.”
He went back to her shoulders on the paper.
He wanted to get them right.
He was pressing hard with the brown, tongue between his teeth, making her big and strong the way she’d asked, when the sound came up the driveway.
Tires on gravel.
He felt it before he understood it.
His crayon stopped.
Above him, his mother’s humming stopped too, in the middle of a note, as if a hand had closed around the song.
The truck.
He knew the truck the way he knew his own name.
He knew the exact crunch of its tires turning off the road, the low grinding roll as it came up the drive, the way the engine kept running for a moment after it stopped, idling, ticking, deciding.
Other trucks passed on the road all day and he never looked up.
This one he heard in his stomach.
His mother straightened.
Everything about her changed, and it changed fast, and it changed quietly, and that was the part that always frightened him most — how quiet it was.
She did not gasp.
She did not say a bad word.
She set the spoon down across the top of the pot without a sound.
She stepped to the radio and turned it off, all the way off, and the kitchen that had been so full went thin and empty.
She looked around the room once, quickly, the way she looked for a lost shoe when they were late, except her eyes were doing something else.
Counting.
Fixing.
She moved a dish towel from the counter to the oven handle.
She pushed her own coffee cup into the sink and ran water over it.
She wiped her hands down the front of her jeans.
Outside, the engine cut off.
The ticking stayed.
Damien had already gathered his crayons.
He did it without being told, sweeping them into the tin with the flat of his hand, quiet, careful, no clatter.
He folded the wolf drawing in half and slid it under the leg of the couch where it wouldn’t be seen.
He did not decide to do any of these things.
His hands did them.
His hands had learned.
A door slammed out front.
Not the house door — the truck door, heavy, metal, final.
Then keys.
Then the boots on the porch steps, slow and even, one, two, three, and Damien counted them without meaning to, listening for what the footsteps would tell him.
Sometimes the boots came up fast and light and it meant a good night, a night with the television and a bag of something greasy and maybe even a joke.
Sometimes they came slow and dragging and heavy, like now, and the slow ones were worse, because slow meant tired, and tired meant looking for a reason.
His mother crouched in front of him.
She put two fingers against the inside of her own wrist, pressed there a second, then turned her eyes toward the hallway.
That was all.
That was the whole thing.
He never needed more.
Go to your room.
Don’t talk.
Stay small.
Wait for me.
He went.
He didn’t run — running made noise, running looked like guilt — he walked fast and soft on the sides of his feet down the hall, past the bathroom, into his room, and there he did the last part, the part he hated, which was the part where he left the door open.
He could not close it.
He had learned that too, a long time ago, or what felt like a long time to a boy who had only been alive five years.
A closed door made his father’s face go still.
A closed door, his father said, was a door somebody was hiding behind, and people who hid were people who had done something, and a boy in his own house had nothing to hide, did he, so the door stayed open, always, so his father could see in whenever he liked.
So Damien left it open.
He crossed to the far corner, the dark one, the space between the end of his dresser and the wall where the light from the hall couldn’t reach, and he folded himself down into it and made himself into the smallest shape he could.
From there he could see a slice of the hallway and a slice of the kitchen doorway beyond it.
From there he could hear everything.
The open door meant he could not shut the house out.
It came into the room whether he wanted it or not.
The front door opened.
“Elena.” His father’s voice.
Just her name.
Damien listened to how it was said.
Not shouting.
Almost ordinary.
That was good, maybe.
Almost ordinary was a coin still spinning in the air.
It could come down either side.
“You’re home early,” his mother said.
Her voice had changed too, gone smoother, lighter, careful in a way that would have sounded like nothing to a stranger.
To Damien it sounded like her holding a full glass without spilling it.
“Job got rained out.” A chair pulled from the table, scraped, settled under his father’s weight.
“Whole crew stood around three hours getting soaked, then Marty says go home, no pay. No pay, Elena.” The refrigerator opened.
The clink of glass.
The soft hiss and pop.
“You believe that? Three hours.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair, no.” A long swallow.
A breath let out.
“What’s on the stove.”
“Sauce. Bread’s warming. It’ll be ready soon.”
“Soon.” He said the word like he was turning it over, checking it for something.
“It’s after six.”
“I know. I’ll have it right up.”
“You knew I might be back.”
“I did, I—” A small pause, the tiniest catch, and Damien’s whole body went tight, because he knew that catch, he knew his mother had heard the trap in it and was choosing her next words the way you choose where to put your foot on ice.
“I wasn’t sure of the time. It’s nearly done, I promise. Sit, I’ll bring it to you.”
The television came on.
Loud, then quieter as she turned it down for him, then a man’s flat voice reading numbers, sports scores, something.
His father grunted.
For a minute there was only the television and the sound of the spoon in the pot again and Damien let himself believe, the way he always let himself believe, that it might be nothing tonight.
That the coin might come down flat and quiet and safe.
He pressed his back into the corner and watched his slice of the hall.
Then his father said, “Where’s the boy.”
“In his room. Drawing.”
“He didn’t come say hello.”
“He didn’t hear you, mi amor, the truck—”
“He hears everything. He hears me pull in from a mile off, that kid. He hears me and he goes and hides in his room.” The chair scraped again.
“Doesn’t come say hello to his own father.”
“He was right in the middle of a picture. He gets so—”
“You always do that.” Something changed in the voice, dropped lower, went flat and cold in a way that raised every hair on Damien’s arms.
“You always got a reason. Every time. For him, for you, for money. Where’d the twenty go, Elena, out of the jar. There was a twenty in the jar.”
“I bought bread. And the milk was—”
“The jar’s my jar.”
“I know it is.”
Damien pressed his knuckles against his mouth.
He wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to walk out into that kitchen.
He was five and he weighed almost nothing and he could do almost nothing, but the want was enormous, it filled him up to the throat — to walk out and stand in the doorway and say here I am, I’m here, say hello to me, look at me instead.
Because he knew, even now, even this small, that if his father was looking at him then his father was not looking at her.
But he stayed in the corner, and the reason he stayed was a picture in his own head, a memory, and the memory was this: the last time.
The last time he had run out.
The time he had cried stop, stop, don’t, and his mother had turned to reach for him, to push him back, to put herself in front — and how the turning had made it worse, how it had given his father two of them to be angry at instead of one, how she had ended up on the floor by the cabinet and how it had gone on longer, so much longer, because Damien had come out.
He had learned the terrible lesson of it.
When he came out, she got hurt more, because she stopped protecting herself to protect him.
His being there did not help her.
His being there cost her.
So he did the only thing he had.
He was silent.
He made himself into nothing in the corner, a boy-shaped absence, and he told himself that the nothing was a gift he was giving her, the only gift he had, and he hated it, and he gave it anyway.
In the kitchen his mother’s voice went lower, steadier, and she stepped — he heard her step — toward the hall, toward Damien’s door, so that his father would have to turn away from the room where the boy was to keep talking to her.
She was moving herself.
She was making herself the thing in the middle of the room.
Damien understood exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it and he pressed his knuckles harder against his teeth until it hurt.
“Look at me,” she said, gentle, to the man who was frightening her.
“It’s me. Talk to me. Leave him out of it. This is about me and you.”
“Everything’s about you,” his father said.
And then the coin came down.
Damien did not see most of it.
His slice of the doorway showed him a shoulder, a shadow swinging across the wall, the blue flicker of the television painting everything and then going strange as a body passed in front of it.
He heard the chair go over, a hard flat bang of wood on tile.
He heard his mother’s voice, and the thing about her voice that he would remember for the rest of both his lives was that it stayed level.
It did not scream.
It stayed steady and low and almost kind, saying his father’s name, saying Dale, Dale, okay, okay, the way you talk to a dog that might bite, the way you talk to something you are trying to bring back down, and under the steadiness he could hear how much it cost her to keep it there.
He heard the sound of a hand.
He knew that sound.
It was flat and it was quick and there was no mistaking it for anything else in the world, and his whole body flinched at it as if it had landed on him, and in a way it had, in a way it always would.
He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms over the top of his head and pressed his ears down with his forearms, but pressing didn’t help, he could hear it through his own arms, through the floor, through the walls of a house that would not let him close a single door.
Something glass went off the counter and broke.
A bright shatter, then smaller pieces skittering.
His mother made a sound then, just one, low, bitten off almost before it started, and then she was quiet, and the being-quiet was worse than the sound had been.
Then footsteps, heavy, moving away.
The screen door.
The porch.
The truck door, again, that same final metal slam.
The engine turning over, catching, the tires backing over the gravel and out onto the road, the grinding roll of it fading, fading, gone.
The house went completely still.
Damien did not move.
He had learned that too — that the leaving was not always the end, that sometimes the truck went to the end of the road and came back, and you had to wait, you had to be sure.
So he waited in his corner and he counted, one, two, on up past a hundred, losing his place and starting over, listening to the refrigerator hum and the television talk to nobody and, under it, so quiet he might have imagined it, his mother breathing.
Then her footsteps in the hall.
Slow.
Careful.
Not the truck’s footsteps.
Hers.
She came into the doorway and stopped there, and for a moment she was only a shape against the hall light, and then she crossed the room and lowered herself down onto the floor beside him in the dark corner, slowly, the way she moved when her body hurt, one hand on the dresser to hold herself.
“Hey,” she whispered.
“Hey, my love. It’s over. It’s just us now.”
He uncurled and looked at her.
There was blood on her lip, a dark split at the corner of it, and the whole side of her cheek had gone red and would go worse.
She was holding her right hand a little against her body, and when the hall light caught her wrist he could see it already darkening, a ring of it, the shape of fingers.
Her hair had come loose.
She smiled at him anyway, careful, so the split wouldn’t tear, and the smile was so much braver than any tail he had ever drawn on any wolf that he began, silently, to cry.
“No, no,” she breathed, and gathered him in, and he went into her side even though he was afraid of hurting her more, and she held him with the arm that wasn’t bruised.
“None of that. I’m all right. Look. I’m right here.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, into her shirt.
“I’m sorry, Mamá. I’m sorry.”
“For what, mijo? What did you do?”
“I didn’t come out. I heard and I didn’t come out.”
She went very still.
Then she pulled back just far enough to hold his face in her good hand, the whole of his small face in her one warm hand, and she looked at him so seriously that he stopped breathing.
“You listen to me now. You did exactly right. Do you hear me? Exactly right. You stayed where I told you, and you were quiet, and that is what kept you safe, and keeping you safe is the only thing — the only thing — I care about in this whole world.” Her thumb wiped under his eye.
“This is not your fault. Not one bit of it, not one speck. Whatever he says, whatever he ever says. A man decides what he does. Nobody makes him. Not you. Not me. Not a bottle. He decides, and that means it’s his, all of it, do you understand?”
He didn’t, not fully.
But he nodded, because she needed him to, and because some small deep part of him took the words and buried them like a seed, to grow later, in another life, in the cold.
She settled her back against the wall and drew him against her side and for a while neither of them spoke.
The television murmured on in the kitchen.
Broken glass lay on the floor out there, waiting to be swept.
Through his window the light had gone from yellow to a deep gold, evening coming on, and Damien watched the stripe of it climb slowly up the wall as the sun dropped, and he felt his mother’s chest rise and fall against his cheek, and slowly, slowly, the terrible tightness in him loosened.
“Can I tell you something?” she said at last, very quietly.
“Something I want you to keep.”
“Okay.”
“When someone loves you, you should never have to be afraid of them. That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it. Love and fear don’t belong in the same house.” She was looking at the doorway when she said it, at the open door and the hall beyond.
“When a person you love comes home, your heart should get lighter. It should. That’s how you know. That’s how you’ll always know, your whole life. Who makes you lighter when they walk in, and who makes you smaller.”
“He makes me smaller,” Damien said.
Her arm tightened around him.
“I know, baby.”
“Then why don’t we go?”
He felt her breathe in.
He felt her decide to answer him honestly, felt it the way you feel a door open in another room, a change of air.
“Because some people,” she said, “aren’t who they show you at first. They’re kind and they’re funny and they help the neighbors carry things, and everyone says what a good man, and you believe it, because they want you to believe it, right up until they think you can’t leave anymore. And then they let you see the rest.” She turned her bruised wrist over slowly, looking at it like it belonged to someone else.
“I chose wrong, mijo. That’s the truth. Nobody thinks they will, and I did, and now here we are. And when you choose right — and you will, someday, you’ll choose someone who makes you lighter — it can be the best thing in a whole life. And when you choose wrong, it can be this.” She pressed her lips to his hair.
“So you watch. You watch how people are when they think nobody good is looking. That tells you everything.”
“But we could just leave. Now. Tonight.”
“It’s not that simple, my love.”
“Why?”
She was quiet a moment.
When she answered, her voice was low and steady and certain, and it went into him and stayed there, one of the first true things he ever kept.
“Because I need to know I can get you out safely,” she said.
“Not just fast. Safely. Leaving a man like your father is the most dangerous part of the whole thing — more dangerous than staying, if you do it wrong, if you’re not ready. I only get one try at it. And I will not spend it until I know that when we go, we’re gone, and he can’t follow us, and you are safe on the other side of it. Do you see? I’m not staying because I’m weak. I’m staying because I’m getting us ready. There’s a difference, and one day you’ll understand it.”
Damien did not understand all of it.
But he understood that his mother was not trapped and stupid the way the leaving in his head had made her seem.
She was waiting on purpose.
She was making a plan.
And a plan was a thing you could hold on to.
“And listen.” She tipped his chin up so he had to look at her.
“I need you to learn something, and I need you to carry it, because it’s important, and I might not always be right beside you to say it. Are you listening with the whole of you?”
“Yes.”
“You always, always know where the door is. In any house. Any room. Wherever you ever go in your life. You find the door first, and you keep it in your mind, and you know how you’d get to it. That’s not being scared. That’s being smart. A wolf knows every way out of the woods.” Her eyes held his.
“And you leave when staying costs you more than going. Say it back to me.”
“You leave when staying costs you more than going.”
“Again.”
“You leave when staying costs you more than going.”
“Good.” She let out a breath, and something eased in her, as if setting the words down inside him had lightened her own load.
“Good boy. My good, brave boy.”
She got up then, slowly, wincing, and she went and swept the glass in the kitchen so he wouldn’t step on it later, and she turned off the television, and she brought him his bowl of the sauce and the warm bread even though it was late and the day had gone all wrong, and she sat on the edge of his bed while he ate it, and it was still good, still bright and a little sweet, more salt and all.
When he was done she pulled the wolf drawing out from under the couch where he’d hidden it, smoothed the fold flat with her hand, and set it on his dresser where he could see it.
“You have to finish the big one,” she said.
“The one who watches everybody. Tomorrow.”
“With angry eyebrows.”
“The angriest.” She almost laughed, then touched her lip and thought better of it.
“Sleep now.”
She lay down on top of the blanket beside him, on her good side, and put her unbruised arm over him, and he curled into the curve of her the way she’d said the wolves did, everybody keeping everybody warm, nobody freezing.
Her breathing slowed.
His slowed to meet it.
But before sleep took him, Damien lay looking past her shoulder at the doorway.
At the open door.
At the strip of hall light lying across his floor, and the dark house beyond it, and the driveway out there in the dark that he could not see but could always, always hear.
He had believed, that morning, drawing on the warm floor, that home was safe whenever his mother was in it.
That her being there was a wall nothing could get through.
He loved her more than the whole world, and she was here, holding him, and she had told him true things and given him a bowl of sauce, and still — this was the new thing, the thing that had come into him tonight and would never fully leave — she had a split lip and a bruised wrist and she had not been able to stop any of it.
Her arms could hold him.
They could not hold the door shut.
Nobody in this house could hold the door shut, because his father would not let a single door in it ever close.
His mother could make him feel safe.
She could not make the house safe.
Not while his father lived in it.
Those were two different things, and Damien had not known that when the sun came up, and he knew it now, and knowing it changed him a little, the way the first cold night of the year changes the shape of everything that has to live through the winter.
He listened to the driveway.
There was nothing there.
Only crickets, and the tick of the cooling house, and his mother breathing.
But he listened to it anyway, out in the dark, waiting, the way he would go on listening for the rest of that life and into a second one he could not yet imagine — for tires on gravel, for an engine slowing, for the sound of someone arriving who made the whole house smaller.
The door stayed open.
He did not sleep for a long time.