GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 1: THE HOUSE OF FEAR
CHAPTER 5: THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND
They can take the house, the jars, the car, the years.
They cannot take what you carried out in your two hands and your one heart.
Those, you keep.
They put Damien in a chair in a quiet room off the hallway, and he waited.
His arm was in its cast, heavy across his chest.
There were butterfly strips on his forehead and a deep ache in his hip where the belt had held him and a slower, farther-off ache behind everything that the pain medicine kept pushing back down whenever it tried to rise.
A nurse checked on him.
A woman with a soft cardigan and a lanyard sat with him for a while and asked gentle questions he mostly didn’t answer.
They were kind.
None of them were his mother.
He asked, each time someone new came through the door.
Where’s my mom.
Is she okay.
Can I see her.
And each time the answer had the same careful shape, the shape he’d learned his whole life to read and dread.
She was very hurt.
Her head.
Inside.
The doctors were working, they were doing everything, it was serious, it was critical, they would tell him the moment they knew.
He held the words doing everything the way you hold a railing on a stair with no bottom.
Doing everything meant she could still come back.
She had always come back.
There was a television bolted high in the corner, and it murmured to itself, and he half-watched it because watching it was easier than watching the door.
Then the ordinary program cut out, and there were the words BREAKING NEWS across the bottom, and a helicopter picture of a road at night, and a reporter’s voice going too fast, and Damien sat up because he knew that road.
He knew the truck, too.
Even smashed at the front, even from far above, even in the grainy dark.
He knew it the way he knew the sound of it on gravel.
A pursuit, the reporter was saying, a vehicle wanted in connection with a deliberate collision, a domestic incident, the driver refusing to stop — and Damien watched his father’s ruined truck run the roads he had grown up on, past the feed store, past the turn to his school, and he understood with a cold flat clarity that his father was going to Wade’s place, and then the truck turned in at Wade’s place, and he was right.
He didn’t feel much.
That was the strange thing.
He waited to feel something and mostly there was just a humming quiet.
The helicopter picture pulled back.
There were other lights now, many of them, red and blue swinging across a dirt yard, and the reporter’s voice got confused, saying they were trying to understand what was happening, that police had surrounded the property, that there appeared to be — and then a man came out of the house down there, a small dark shape, and there was a stutter of light from his hands, and the picture jerked, and the reporter stopped talking for a second and then started saying words very fast that didn’t fit together, shots, shots fired, please, we’re going to, and the camera swung up to the sky and back down.
It was quick.
It was confusing, the way the reporter kept saying it was confusing.
Officers behind their cars.
Wade firing from the porch the way Wade would, drunk and furious and sure the whole world was against a good man.
Damien’s father, for one moment, in the open, a shape he would have known anywhere.
Then a great deal of noise all at once, and more confusion, and the reporter’s voice going high and thin — and then, later, after a long muddled while, the flat official words.
The suspect was down.
The suspect had been pronounced.
His father was dead.
Damien sat very still in the chair and waited to feel glad, and did not feel glad, and did not feel sad, and hated himself a little for the small mean flicker of relief that came and went, and under all of it was only the humming quiet and one thought, clear as a struck glass: the man who decided everything in our whole house just died on a television, and it didn’t even make a sound in this room.
It should have shaken the building.
It should have changed the color of the air.
It hadn’t.
He was gone, and Damien did not feel safe, and he understood that he had been wrong his whole life to think that Dale being gone was the thing that would make him safe.
He looked back at the door his mother was somewhere behind.
That was the only thing left that mattered.
It was a long time before a doctor came, and when the doctor came he crouched down to Damien’s level, which was how Damien knew before a word was said.
The doctor told him the truth in small pieces, gently, the way you’d set something heavy down without dropping it.
The surgery had helped some things.
It could not help others.
His mother had been hurt very badly on the inside, and in her head, in ways the doctors could not fix, no matter how much they wanted to.
They had stopped some of the bleeding.
They could not stop all of it.
There was nothing more they could do now except keep her from hurting, and keep her comfortable, and let the people who loved her be close to her.
Damien listened to every word and understood most of them and refused the shape they made.
“But she’s awake sometimes,” he said.
“You said she wakes up. So she’s getting better.”
The doctor’s face did something terrible and kind.
“She may wake up a little,” he said.
“For a while. I want you to be able to see her, if you’d like to. Would you like to see her?”
“Yes.” Damien was already standing.
“Take me to her. Now.”
They tried, at the doorway of the room they’d moved her to, to hold him back.
A hand on his good shoulder, a voice saying just a moment, honey, let them finish—
Something came up out of Damien that he had spent two years learning to keep down, and it came up all at once.
He twisted.
He shoved.
When a bigger hand caught him he kicked at it and clawed at it and he heard himself screaming, high and ragged, let me in, let me in, I’m not supposed to leave her alone, I never leave her alone, she doesn’t face it alone, LET ME IN—and it took two of them, and he bit one, and he did not care.
Then a woman’s voice, the doctor’s or a nurse’s, cut across the others, low and fast.
Let him in.
Let him — there’s no time for this.
Let the boy in.
The hands let go.
Damien stumbled through the door.
She looked small in the bed.
That was the thing that undid him quietest of all.
His mother, his mama dragon, who had stood between him and the whole world, looked small and gray against the white, with a bandage wound around her head and tubes taped to her arm and a machine breathing numbers beside her.
But her eyes were open.
Her eyes found him, and something in her face eased, and one corner of her cracked mouth lifted.
“There he is,” she said.
Her voice was a ruin of itself, thin, slurring at the edges.
“There’s my—” She lost the word and found it.
“My wolf.”
He climbed up beside her, careful, so careful, cast held against his chest, and she got her arm around him, weak, barely a weight at all, and he fit himself against her the way he always had, the way the wolves in her story did, nobody freezing, and he felt how cool she was and pretended not to.
“Dale’s dead,” he told her, because he thought she’d want to know she was safe.
“I saw it. On the TV. He can’t — he can’t come anymore. We got away, Mamá. We almost made it to town.”
“Almost.” Her hand moved in his hair.
“We almost—” Her breath caught and she waited it out.
“Good boy. My good boy.”
And then the thing he had been carrying since the road came out of him, because he was nine and she was here and he had to say it before there was no one left to say it to.
“I’m sorry.” His voice shook apart.
“I’m sorry, Mamá. You should’ve — you should’ve gone without me. You’d have been faster. You could’ve just gone and he wouldn’t have — it’s because of me, he chased us because you wouldn’t leave me, he got you because you were always in front of me, all my life you were always in front of me and now you’re—” He couldn’t finish it.
“You should’ve left me. You’d be okay.”
For a moment she didn’t answer, and he thought maybe she hadn’t understood, or had drifted.
Then her hand tightened in his hair, and there was something fierce in it, weak as it was, the last of the dragon rising.
“No.” Her voice found a floor under itself and stood on it.
“No. You listen. You listen to me now, because I don’t—” A breath.
“Because I want you to have this right. In your head. For after.”
“Mamá—”
“You did not trap me.” Slow.
One piece at a time, resting between them.
“He trapped us. Him. Leaving wasn’t the mistake, mijo, leaving was — leaving was right, it was the bravest thing, we were right to go. Him following — that was the crime. His. Not the going. His.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite stay on him and she dragged them back.
“And I would do it again. All of it. Every day of it. You hear? I would choose you every single time.”
“But you got hurt. Because of me. Always because of me.”
“No.” And here she gathered something, some last reserve, and got the words out whole, the ones she needed him to keep.
“You were never the chain around my ankle. You were the reason I kept looking for the door.”
He pressed his face into her side and shook, and she held him as well as she could, and for a while neither of them said anything, and the machine counted her breaths, and outside the window the light was going gold and then gray.
“Tell me a story,” he whispered, when he could.
It was a small boy’s ask, and he heard how small it was, and didn’t care.
“Please. One more.”
She was quiet so long he thought she’d slipped away.
Then, faint, drifting, finding the old familiar shape of it the way you find a stair in the dark—
“There was a dragon,” she said.
“In a — in a broken valley. All ruined, that place. And she had a — a little wolf. That went with her everywhere.” A breath.
A pause he waited through.
“And a hunter came. For the wolf. And the dragon — she put herself in front. Like they do. And she got — she got hurt. Bad.”
“Because of the wolf,” Damien said, very low.
“The wolf thinks she’d have been safer without him.”
“The wolf’s a fool.” She almost laughed; it turned into something that hurt her, and she waited it out.
“That’s what she tells him. Listen. She says — safe isn’t — a life with no love in it, that’s not the same as safe, mijo, that’s just — empty. She chose him. Protecting somebody you love, that’s not a — a punishment. It’s not a debt. You don’t — spend your whole life trying to pay love back like you owe it.” Her hand moved, slow, in his hair.
“She tells him. Don’t do that. Don’t.”
He was crying without sound now, the way he was learning to, and he didn’t stop her, because he understood she was giving him something he would need.
“She tells him,” Elena went on, thread-thin, “make a place. Where people can — feel safe. That the door doesn’t scare anybody. And find your — your pack, little wolf, don’t you go through it all alone, I know you, I know how you are — you find your people and you let them—” She lost it, came back.
“And don’t let the fear — don’t let it turn you into the hunter. Whatever they do to you. You don’t become that. Promise me you won’t become that.”
“I promise.”
“And when she can’t—” Her voice was going.
“When the dragon can’t walk beside him anymore. He carries the fire. The good fire. The kind that — warms the house. Not the kind that burns it. He keeps that one. He keeps it for her.”
The story ran out.
Or she did.
Her eyes had closed but she was still there, still breathing, her hand still in his hair.
“The notebook’s in the bag,” she murmured, after a while, so quiet he had to still himself to hear it.
“You keep it. Keep the — the wolf and the dragon, the label, you keep that. And keep — writing in it. The things that work. The things that don’t. Both. Always both. Find the thing you love making, mijo, with your hands, and — fill the book up. Leave it fuller than—” The thought thinned into nothing.
“Than I found it,” he finished for her, into her side.
He felt her almost-smile.
“Little wolf,” she breathed.
“Mama dragon,” he answered.
And that was the last of the strength she had.
Her breathing went slow and even and far away, and her hand went still in his hair but stayed there, resting, and Damien lay against her and would not sleep, would not, kept his eyes open against the dark to keep watch the way she’d kept watch over him his whole life—
—and lost.
Exhaustion took him down into the dark with her hand still on his head, and somewhere in the night, while he slept against her, his mother slipped down under the surface of herself and did not come back up.
A nurse woke him in the gray morning with a hand on his shoulder.
His mother’s arm was still around him but it was only weight now, and her face had gone slack and peaceful and terribly far away, and the machine still counted breaths but a different machine did it for her now.
The nurse’s eyes were red.
She told him, gently, that his mom was still with them but sleeping very deeply now, a sleep she wasn’t going to wake up from, and that they were keeping her comfortable.
“I’m not leaving,” Damien said.
“I know. I know you’re not.” She crouched down.
“But you need to eat something, honey. When did you last eat? Your mom—” The nurse’s voice caught.
“Your mom would not want you going hungry. She wouldn’t. You know she wouldn’t.”
He knew she wouldn’t.
“Just to the end of the hall and back. Two minutes. Somebody will be with her every second, I promise you, she won’t be alone for a breath — and you come right back. All right? You bring it back here and you eat it right beside her. That’s the deal.”
He looked at his mother a long time.
Then he nodded, because the nurse was right about the one thing, and he let another nurse walk him down the hall.
He didn’t eat.
He took the little tray they gave him — a carton, something wrapped in plastic — and he carried it back the way he’d come, because the deal was he’d eat it beside her, and he meant to keep the deal.
He turned the corner into her hallway with the tray in his one good hand.
There were too many people at her door.
Doctors.
Nurses.
A cart he hadn’t seen before, and quick low voices, and bodies moving fast in the small space, and a back filling the doorway so he couldn’t see past it into the room, into her room, and the sound coming out of that room was not the slow patient counting anymore but something flat and continuous and wrong.
The tray hit the floor.
He didn’t feel it leave his hand.
He ran at the door.
He got two steps into the crowd of them before the hands closed on him again, and this time he fought like something wild, like something with nothing left to lose, because that was what he was — he screamed and twisted and clawed and drove his good elbow back and tried to bite the arm across his chest and kicked at shins and reached past all of them toward the door he could not reach, toward her, screaming the only thing there was, let me in, I have to be with her, I can’t leave her alone, I promised, I PROMISED—
He felt the small cold sting in his arm.
He kept fighting after it.
Then the fighting got heavy, and slow, and far away, and the hallway tilted and softened, and the last thing was someone catching him as he went down, and someone’s voice, kind, saying there, there, we’ve got you, we’ve got you, son, and then nothing at all.
When he woke it was in a bed, and there was a woman he didn’t know sitting beside it, the one with the soft cardigan, and her face told him before her mouth did.
“Damien.” She had his good hand in both of hers.
“Sweetheart. I’m so sorry. Your mama passed. She’s gone, honey. She died this morning. I am so, so sorry.”
He looked at her.
“Say it again.”
She said it again.
He looked at the door.
He waited for it to open and for his mother to come through it and tell them all they’d made a mistake, the way she fixed everything, the way she always came back — he waited, and the door stayed shut, and no one came through it.
“I left,” he said.
His voice had gone somewhere flat and even.
“I went to get breakfast. I wasn’t there.” He wasn’t asking anyone to answer.
“I left her alone.”
“No—oh, honey, no—”
But something in Damien had already begun, quietly, to close.
He stopped crying.
He had been crying and then he simply stopped, mid-breath, like a tap shut off.
He stopped screaming.
He stopped fighting.
He stopped asking the woman questions, because there was nothing any of them could tell him that would change the shut door, and asking was a thing you did when words could still fix something, and he understood now that words could not.
He went very still and very quiet, and the storm that had been tearing out of him for two days folded itself down small and went somewhere deep inside where no one could see it, and pulled a door shut behind it, and left his face smooth and empty.
“I want to see my mother,” he said, calmly.
“Please.”
They let him, because there was no one yet arranged to take him, and no reason left to say no.
She was still in the room.
They had turned the machines off and cleaned the blood from her face and folded her hands, and someone had opened the curtain so the morning came in.
Damien climbed carefully onto the chair beside the bed and took her hand in his good one.
Her hand was not warm.
That was all.
That was the whole of it.
Her hand had cooked and taught and written and measured and repaired and drawn the dragon and held his a thousand times in the dark, and now it lay in his and it was not warm, and it was not going to be warm again, and he sat with it and did not cry.
He held it.
He looked at her face, and then he looked at the window, and he stayed like that, absent, elsewhere, a boy-shaped quiet in the chair, while the light moved across the floor.
Outside, an engine started.
A big one.
Diesel, heavy, close — an ambulance pulling in below the window and idling there, the deep rumble of it coming up through the glass and the floor and into the chair and into him, the tires on the pavement, a door, the long low idle.
His whole body went rigid before his mind could catch it.
His grip clamped down around his mother’s cold hand.
Every muscle in him braced, and his eyes went to the door, and for one single instant that was pure animal, older than thought, he was five years old in a bright kitchen and the truck was in the driveway and he had to gather his crayons and go, get to his room, be quiet, be small, wait for her—
Then his mind caught up.
Dale was dead.
He had watched it on the television.
His mother was dead.
Her hand was cold in his.
There was no house anymore, no driveway, no truck, no door for anyone to come through and drag them back.
The sound was an ambulance.
Only an ambulance.
It had nothing to do with him.
No one was coming.
He knew all of that.
His body did not believe a word of it.
The engine outside rumbled for several minutes before falling silent.
Damien knew it was not Dale’s truck.
Dale was dead.
His mother was gone.
There was no house left for them to be dragged back to.
Still, his body remained frozen, waiting for the front door to open.
He held Elena’s hand until the room grew dark, and for the first time in his life, Damien Morales made no sound at all.
END OF PART ONE