GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 1: THE HOUSE OF FEAR
CHAPTER 4: THE WAY OUT
The hardest part isn’t finding the door.
It’s that the thing you’re running from gets a vote on whether you make it through.
Damien had not really slept.
He’d done the thing his mother taught him — wolf-sleep, one ear open — lying on top of his blanket in his clothes with his shoes by his hand, and so he was awake the instant her fingers touched his shoulder.
She was a shape in the dark, and she pressed one finger to his lips before he could make a sound.
He nodded.
He was already reaching for his shoes.
“Shoes on,” she breathed, so quiet it was barely air.
“Carry only what I give you. Stay right behind me. Don’t talk. When I stop, you stop — freeze when I freeze, and don’t move again until I do. And whatever happens, we do not go back. Not for anything. Do you understand me?”
He nodded again.
His heart was going so hard he thought she must be able to hear it.
He tied his shoes the way she’d shown him, double-knotted, quiet.
Then, without thinking, out of an old deep habit, he went to the loose board — for the notebook, because the notebook was the thing he could not leave, the wolf and the dragon and all the years and his purple-smudged date, and if they were never coming back then—
Her hand caught his wrist.
She turned it over, pressed two fingers to the inside of it, their old signal, and shook her head.
And then she leaned close to his ear.
“It’s already in the bag,” she whispered.
“The notebook. The label. All of it. I packed it first, mijo. I would never leave that behind. I know what it is to you.”
Something in him steadied at that — that she’d known, that of everything in the house she’d thought of his one thing before her own.
He let go of the board.
He put his cold hand in her warm one, and she led him out into the hall.
The living room was full of blue flicker.
Dale was on the couch.
He’d dragged himself there sometime in the deep middle of the night with the bottle, and the television still ran with the sound off, throwing pale light across him — one boot still on, the other kicked half free, the whiskey gone brown and low in the bottle held loose against his chest.
His mouth hung open.
His breath came in the long dragging pull of a man too drunk to surface easily.
On the cushion beside his hand, close, waiting, was the gun.
His truck keys sat on the arm of the couch where he could reach them without getting up.
Elena went first.
She kept her body between Damien and the couch the whole way, so that if Dale’s eyes opened, they’d find her, not the boy.
She moved the way water moves downhill, without a sound, and Damien came behind her in her exact footsteps, breathing through his mouth, the emergency bag over her shoulder held tight against her side so it wouldn’t swing.
A floorboard creaked under him.
They froze.
Both of them, mid-step, statues.
On the couch Dale made a thick sound in his throat and shifted, and the bottle slid from his slack fingers and rolled off his chest and down onto the cushion and then to the floor, where it turned in a slow half-circle on the carpet, and Damien watched it and did not breathe and did not blink.
Dale muttered something, a wet slur of words with no shape, his hand twitching near the gun.
Elena’s hand found Damien’s shoulder and pressed, holding him where he was.
They waited.
The television flickered.
Dale’s breathing hitched, caught, and then dropped back down into the long deep drag, and his hand went still.
She waited three breaths more to be sure.
Then she pressed his shoulder once — now — and they crossed the last of the room, past the man and the gun and the keys, to the door.
The door opened without a sound.
She’d oiled the hinges.
Of course she had.
She’d thought of everything, over two years of somedays, and Damien understood as the cool night air touched his face that this was what all the waiting had been for.
The driveway was gravel and moonlight.
Her car sat where it always sat.
Dale’s truck loomed beside it, big and dark and asleep.
She got Damien into the back seat and pressed him low.
“Down. Head down. Good boy.” She swung the bag in beside him and slid into the driver’s seat and pulled her door to without latching it, just resting it shut.
She left the headlights off.
She put the key in.
She turned it.
The engine coughed.
Caught for half a second.
Died.
She turned it again.
The same cough, the same catch, the same nothing.
Damien’s whole body had gone to ice.
He knew that sound.
He knew what had been happening to this car for months, the wires that looked cut, the battery that went flat for no reason, and he understood now with a sick lurch what it had all been for.
“It does this sometimes.” His mother’s voice was calm.
Perfectly, deliberately calm, pitched low and easy for him, though her hands on the key had gone white at the knuckle.
“We’re all right. It does this. Just needs a minute.”
He watched the house through the gap in the seats.
The dark windows.
He watched for a curtain to move.
For a light to come on.
For a shape to fill the doorway they’d just come through.
The engine, when she tried it again, seemed impossibly loud in the still night, loud enough to wake the whole county, loud enough to wake the man on the couch fifteen feet away with a gun by his hand.
“Come on,” Elena whispered to the car, not to Damien.
“Come on. Come on, please.”
She turned it once more, slow, coaxing, her foot doing something careful on the pedals — and the engine caught, and shuddered, and held.
It rolled over into a rough uneven idle, alive.
She let out a breath that shook.
She backed out with the lights off, slow, so slow, easing over the gravel, the driveway crunching under the tires with a sound that Damien had spent his whole life dreading and that now meant the exact opposite of what it always had.
She did not speed up.
She rolled them down the drive in the dark, watching the house shrink in the mirror, until the tires found the smooth blacktop of the road — and only then, only when the house was behind them and gone, did she switch on the headlights, and press the pedal, and let the car run.
The driveway disappeared behind them into the dark.
Damien turned around in the seat and watched it go, the mouth of the drive, the black shape of the house, until the road bent and took it all away.
“We did it,” he whispered.
“We got out.”
“Almost.” She was checking her mirror, checking it again.
“We’re going to town, mijo. There’s a diner there that never closes. Sofie’s waiting for us in a booth, right now, tonight. We go to her, and we stay at her house, and in the morning she drives us far, far away — out of the state, somewhere he has no friends, no cousins, nobody. Somewhere that’s just ours.” Her eyes flicked to the mirror and back to the road.
“And if we don’t get there, she calls the police. So either way. Either way we’re all right now. We’re almost there.”
Somewhere he has no friends.
Somewhere that’s just ours.
Damien let himself, for the first time in his whole life, imagine it.
A different house.
A school where nobody knew to be sorry for him.
Brewing again at a sunny table, jars in a row with labels they drew.
And a bedroom — a bedroom with a door.
A door he could close.
A door he could close and it would stay closed and no one would call him secretive or defiant or a liar, a door that was only a door, that only meant this small room is mine.
He’d never had that.
He hadn’t known how much he wanted it until it was suddenly, dizzyingly close.
His mother kept checking the mirror.
Then headlights came up behind them.
Far back at first, then not far.
They came up too fast — much too fast — swelling in the rear window, and Elena’s eyes snapped to the mirror and stayed there a beat too long, and Damien felt the car surge as her foot went down.
He turned and looked.
He knew the lights.
He knew them the way he knew everything about the man — the height of them, set high off a big truck’s grille, the particular spacing, the shape of the dark bulk behind them.
He knew the engine sound as it closed the gap, deep and grinding and familiar as his own name.
“Mamá.” His voice came out very small.
“It’s the truck. It’s him.”
“I know.”
The truck came up on them and swung out and pulled alongside, into the empty oncoming lane, and Damien could see him now in the cab, lit from below by his own dash, his father’s face, and the window was down and his father was shouting across the gap, half his words torn away by the wind and the engines.
“—stealing my son—right out of my house—you think anybody’s gonna believe you? Nobody believes you, Elena, they never have—” The truck drifted closer, then away, then closer.
“That woman’s poison, she’s filling your head—we can fix this, we can still fix this, all of it, just pull over—PULL OVER—whatever happens now is on YOU, you hear me? Whatever happens is YOUR fault—”
“Don’t listen to him.” Elena didn’t so much as glance sideways.
Her hands were locked on the wheel, her eyes forward, her voice flat and fast.
“Damien. Look at me, not him. Buckle up — is your belt on? Tight?”
“Yes—”
“Get down. Get your head down below the window. Stay back against the seat.” The truck loomed and fell back and loomed again.
“Whatever happens — whatever happens — do not take off your seatbelt. Do you hear me? Not for anything.”
“Okay—”
“Say it back.”
“I won’t take off my seatbelt.”
“Good boy. Down. Head down.”
He got down.
He pressed himself into the seat with his head below the sill and his broken-nailed hands gripping the belt across his chest, and he could not see the road anymore, only the roof of the car and the strobing wash of light through the windows, and the sounds.
He learned the whole thing through sounds, the way he’d learned everything, in the dark, listening.
The truck’s horn, long and blaring.
The high beams flooding the car white, on and off, on and off.
The engine right behind them now, tailgating, close enough that its grille filled the whole rear window, then pulling out again alongside, his father’s voice still coming, threats and pleading tangled together, pull over, pull over, you’ll be arrested, they’ll take him from you anyway, at least this way we’re a family—
Then a sound Damien felt more than heard: the truck swerving in, and the jolt as it struck the side of the car, metal kissing metal, and the whole car shuddering and Elena fighting the wheel to hold the road.
The truck peeled away and came back and struck again, harder, trying to shove them sideways, trying to push them onto the shoulder and off it.
He heard his father’s arm come out the window.
He didn’t see the gun.
He didn’t have to.
He heard the change in his mother’s breathing, one sharp inhale, and knew.
She held the road.
She held it and held it, her hands and her whole body fighting the wheel, keeping them on the blacktop through every strike and shove, and up ahead — Damien risked lifting his head an inch — up ahead the black horizon had gone faintly orange.
The glow of town.
Lights.
Somewhere out there, a booth, a woman waiting, a phone.
Close.
So close.
The truck fell back.
It just — fell back.
The pushing stopped, the engine noise dropping behind them, and Elena’s breath caught on something that might have been hope.
Damien twisted around and looked out the back and saw the headlights shrinking, dropping away, farther and farther, until the bend of the road took them and he could not see the truck at all.
“He stopped,” Damien breathed.
“Mamá, he stopped, I can’t see him—”
Then the headlights came back all at once, enormous, roaring up out of the dark at a speed the little car could never match, and there was no time to say anything, no time at all, and his mother’s hand came off the wheel and reached back for him, reached for him, her fingers spread—
The truck hit them.
The world came apart.
The rear of the car leapt sideways.
The back window burst inward in a spray of glass.
Then the road and the sky traded places, once, twice — Damien didn’t know which way was down — the seatbelt bit into his shoulder and his hip so hard it drove the air out of him, and things flew loose in the cabin, the bag, glass, a shoe, everything weightless and wrong, metal shrieking and folding all around him, his mother’s name somewhere in his own throat, and then—
Stillness.
Sudden, ringing, enormous stillness.
The car had come to rest upright, off the road, tilted, ticking.
Something hissed.
Damien hung in his belt with his ears roaring.
He was breathing.
He hadn’t known he was breathing until he noticed it.
His right arm was wrong — it lay in his lap at an angle an arm shouldn’t make, and it didn’t hurt, not really, not yet, which some far-off part of him understood was strange and bad, but the pain was hiding somewhere behind a wall of white noise and it hadn’t come out yet.
“Mamá?”
She was slumped forward over the wheel.
Her hair had fallen across her face.
There was blood, dark, running from somewhere at her hairline, down along her cheek and off her jaw.
“Mamá.” His voice broke.
“Mamá, please—”
She moved.
Slowly, so slowly, she turned her head against the wheel, until one eye found him through the fallen hair, and her cracked lips shaped the only thing she cared about, the same thing she’d always cared about, in a whisper he barely heard over the ringing.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
He didn’t know if it was true.
His arm was wrong and the car was wrong and everything was wrong, but he said it, because she needed it, because it was the only thing he had ever been able to give her.
“I’m fine, Mamá. I’m okay. Don’t — stay awake. Stay awake, okay?”
Up on the road, the truck sat sideways, its own front end crushed and steaming, one headlight still burning.
And in the wash of that light Damien saw his father climb down out of the cab.
Slow.
Unsteady.
And in his father’s hand, hanging at his side, was the gun.
Dale stood at the edge of the road and looked down at the wrecked car, and Damien looked back up at him through the shattered window, and for a long stretched moment that had no bottom to it Damien understood that his father was deciding whether to walk down the embankment and finish it.
He couldn’t move.
He couldn’t have run if the whole world depended on it.
He just watched the shape of the man at the top of the slope, and waited to find out if they were going to die.
Then, down the road the way they’d come, more light.
Another set of headlights, slowing, a second vehicle pulling over, a door opening.
A voice calling out into the dark — Hey!
Hey, you okay down there?
Dale’s head turned toward the new lights.
He stood one more second.
Then he swore, and climbed back up into his ruined truck, and it lurched and ground and pulled away, dragging something, its one light shrinking off into the dark until it was gone.
Footsteps came sliding down the embankment.
A stranger’s face appeared at the broken window — a man, older, frightened, kind.
He had a phone already at his ear.
“Okay.
Okay, buddy, I’ve got you, I’m right here.” Into the phone: “There’s been a wreck, off the highway, a car’s gone off — there’s a kid, there’s a woman, she’s hurt bad — a truck ran them off and took off, big truck, front end all smashed up, went east, I saw it—” Back to Damien, gentler: “Hey.
Look at me.
Don’t go to sleep on me, all right?
You stay right here with me.
Your mom’s breathing.
You hear me?
I can see her breathing.
Help’s coming.
You just gotta stay awake.”
Damien held on to that.
Your mom’s breathing.
He held on to it and to the stranger’s voice, this stranger who had stopped, who had not driven past, who was down here in the dark and the glass with his hand on the door saying I’ve got you to a boy he’d never met.
Some cold locked part of Damien, the part that had learned that no outsider ever really helped, that no one came, felt the smallest crack run through it.
Then there were sirens.
Far, then near.
Then everywhere — red and blue light swinging across the dark field, and voices, many of them, and the scream of metal being pulled and cut, and someone saying the boy, get the boy, and his mother’s voice, thin and far away, asking about him, asking where he was, asking if he was okay — and someone saying, close to his ear, stay with me, son, don’t sleep, don’t sleep—
He slept.
White.
White ceiling.
White light.
A smell like nothing, like clean nothing, and a beeping somewhere, steady and strange.
Damien came up out of the dark all at once, and his right arm was heavy and hard and wrapped in white to the elbow, held across his chest, and it hurt now, a deep sick throb, the pain finally out from behind its wall.
He didn’t care about the arm.
He turned his head and there were curtains and machines and a nurse and none of them were his mother.
“Where is my mom?”
He was already trying to sit up, already pulling against the pain and the cast and the tubes.
A nurse was there, hands gentle on his good shoulder, a voice saying easy, easy, honey, lie back—
“Where’s my mom? Where is she?” His voice climbed and cracked.
The beeping sped up.
“She was hurt, her head was — where is she, where did you take her, I have to be with her, I’m not supposed to leave her alone, where is my mom—”
“She’s here. She’s here, sweetheart, she’s in the hospital, she’s with us.” The nurse’s face was kind and careful, too careful, and Damien had spent his whole life reading careful faces and this one frightened him more than any curtain ever had.
“Your mom’s very hurt, and the doctors are helping her right now. She’s in surgery. They’re doing everything they can for her. As soon as we know anything, I promise, we will tell you.”
In surgery.
Damien lay back against the pillow because the nurse’s hands made him, and he stared at the white ceiling, and he held on to the last thing he had, the same thing the stranger had given him in the dark.
She was breathing.
When they pulled her out, she’d been breathing.
She had always come back to him.
Every time, all his life, after every dark night, she had come back.
He held on to that, and he waited, and down some hallway he could not see, his mother was fighting for her life.