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Caleb does everything Rachel tells him to. Rachel is a rare combination of bottomless empathy and ruthless pragmatism. She will happily aim a shotgun at any threat towards her—their—son. She never hesitates to hold the hand of someone who truly needs it. It’s an interesting duality that he hadn’t fully appreciated when they were together the first time around, pre-bloodlust. Back then, she hadn’t had cause to show just how deadly she can be.
But she’s got no time for petty power trips. Rachel tests Caleb to see what he’ll do. She’ll give him a ridiculous task to complete like pick up three different shades of blue nail polish at the CVS (if Caleb had minded, he would have stared pointedly at her plain, unpainted nails that haven’t seen her usual simple clear coat for months, let alone colors she wouldn’t be caught dead in), or the even more ludicrous find a necklace with a pony on it, which she delivers in a deadpan voice.
Every time her eyes land on her latest request placed calmly on the motel room nightstand, she’ll slowly let out a seething breath, roll her eyes and move on without comment to whatever she was doing. Caleb knows the unquestioning compliance routine is driving her up the wall. He doesn’t act out of spite.
The nail polish gets tossed in the Bible drawer, but he turns his head before she can catch his smirk when she pockets the unicorn charm dangling from a thin gold chain, which was the closest thing to a pony available at the local general store.
No matter how many bags of black jellybeans Rachel tells him to buy, Caleb’s not going to bitch or argue. She’s not stupid. She can tell he doesn’t obey out of some reverse psychology bullshit resentment. He doesn’t bother saying it out loud. She’s smart enough to see he just doesn’t trust himself with decisions anymore. Or at least, doesn’t think he’s earned them.
Rachel’s wish is his command: partly out of penance, partly to soothe her justifiable fury he’s sure is buried in there. To not add to her anxiety, he makes himself as non-combative and useful as possible (though he still fails miserably. Like forgetting his son needs some kind of education and that public school for the forseeable future is a no-go, as long as skinwalkers are still trying to kill him.)
Rachel’s losing her last bit of patience because Caleb’s got all the arguments ready, none of which he needs to say out loud:
* what he did to Katherine (and it’s baffling that Tim doesn’t hate him for that alone)
* what he did to Jonas
* what he did to all the others who’d fought to hold on to their souls and protect humanity from the uncontrollable bloodthirst
* what he did to his own mother
* what he did to Sonja, who who’d been dragged down to his level of depravity and was dead at such a young age
They can’t afford the time, energy, or distraction for Caleb to indulge in his countless regrets and trauma, so he takes turns imagining he’s floating away from himself and getting lost in the physical sensations of filling up the motel’s ice bucket, the comfortable, secure feeling of pulling on and tying well-made boots, the sharp green tang of freshly mown grass at a rest stop, the surety of his fingers disassembling and reassembling his guns—almost entirely by feel at this point, the solid warmth of Rachel at his side as they fight to protect their son.
He wakes up in the middle of the night to a new sense—one caught somewhere between the tangible and intangible that knocks him out of the new and aspiringly-improved version of himself. After facing down another block of night without sleep, he starts the process all over again when he brushes his teeth in the morning.
***
Timothy adapts so well to being a nomad with no friends—without even the skinwalker family he used to have—that Caleb starts to worry about its pathological nature. The fact that Tim had to make friends with such a small community—all adults—is one thing. The fact that Tim’s now on the run with his absentee monster dad who tortured and killed them all is another. Caleb adds it to the list of reasons why he lost his right to exist as an independant thinker.
What really haunts him is that his son is a cheerful little weirdo who enthusiastically offers up his own blood “to help people.” And an outrageous flirt with older women, apparently, judging by the way he talks to the waitress taking their order.
Even after all the death and evidence of the world being far more in line with a horror movie than Tim had any reason to believe, the kid’s still trying to convince Becca the Twentysomething Waitress With the Big Blue Eyes that his pancakes should come with extra chocolate chips for his “cuteness points”.
If Caleb hadn’t experienced firsthand Tim’s bottomless capacity for empathy, he would’ve assumed his defective genes had produced a grade A sociopath. But Timothy’s just, at his core, an alarmingly optimistic, resiliant kid who does the best with what he has.
Caleb has no idea where he gets it from. Rachel’s just as kind, but even she has her limits in staving off cynicism. And she’s not known for her flirting technique, either.
Maybe Jonas and the others had a hand in that. Maybe they over-socialized him to make up for his limited world. Before Caleb and his pack gunned them all down, anyway.
* * *
Caleb tries to keep his true level of bleakness to himself, so it doesn’t get in the way of being useful to his surviving family. He’s definitely not going to mention the feeling that keeps jolting him out of his dreamless dreams in the middle of the night. Or the fact that it’s happening more and more frequently lately. The Wolf, though sleeping, survives. Every night—and it is every night at this point—the Wolf shakes itself awake inside his skin. Caleb can feel the brush of it’s fur, tickling his insides. But what jolts hims awake and sitting up in the middle of the night is the way the Wolf senses an almost-presence. Somewhere out there in the woods where Jonas and Caleb used to camp when they were much younger, there is a tether: a sorrowful song he senses not with his ears but with a sharp magnetc pull in his gut.
*
Wolves are everywhere in pop culture. They’re impossible to avoid. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf in a bookstore display. Werewolves in horror movies that are usually way off, but not always. The howling of a studio’s audiovisual logo during the end credits of a procedural cop show. Commercials that guarantee your Dalmatian or terrier can bring out their inner wolf with a dog food that contains the right nutrients and proteins. Calendars at the Yellowstone gift shop. The high school mascot ona passing teenager’s hoodie.
All of these places and organizations that want a piece of the Wolf, when he was the Wolf. Caleb can’t help mourning what he lost even though he knows the ruin that it lead him to, and that he’s unfathomably lucky to have anything left. He knows that to miss the force responsible for such devastation and loss makes him dangerous and undeserving.
* * *
His grief for the loss of the Wolf is premature. The Wolf remains. More than some of it. Maybe all of it.
Caleb’s at the point where he can’t deny what’s happening to him anymore. One night he sits bolt upright with the feeling of the Wolf still rubbing against the wrong side of his skin. He runs out into a clear, frosty night in nothing more than a short-sleeve t-shirt and sweatpants. He can taste the ghost of freedom through his bare feet as he spins around in the motel parking lot like a dog thrown off by the earth’s magnetic poles. He sucks in a white cloudy breath as he catches the tether. It feels like snatching the tail of a ghost in his teeth and clamping down while it vibrates all up and down his skeleton.
Whatever is calling him is really calling him this time. It is not just his grief and despair. It will not be denied.
Rachel’s and Tim’s alarmed voices chase after the edge of his consciousness, but if he doesn’t follow this trail that’s not even a scent or a sound, but something else, something deeper, he’ll go insane. He’s been insane before. It hadn’t worked out well for anyone near him.
* * *
Jonas is waiting for him there, at the place among a creekbed where they used to camp. When they were mich younger and Caleb hadn’t murdered anyone yet. The shock to his nerve-endings to see him again feels like slamming into an invisible wall, if the wall was a forcefield that lengthens his teeth and raises every hair on his body.
But it’s not a surprise. Somehow, Katherine is the bigger surprise. And in some ways more gutwrenching. Caleb didn’t even know he could cry anymore, but he can feel the evidence slipping down his face without warning when he sees her. She’s whole and unscarred, no less beautiful than she’s always been.
“It’s okay,” Jonas says, like he knows Caleb’s working himself up to looking at him right now.
Caleb whips his head around. “Okay?”
“I forgive you.”
“How can you.”
“I felt what it was like to be you for only seconds, a minute. That was enough to understand true bloodlust.” Jonas breathed in through his nose. “What it does to your mind.” He pauses again. “To your soul.”
* * *
It isn’t long before Rachel and Tim catch up. Caleb has the supernatural speed and endurance to run barefoot for miles without feeling it, but they had the car and Rachel’s foot preesing down on the gas the entire way.
Apparently Tim’s empathy can be used as a homing device while they drive around. Tim just shrugs and says, “I just followed your Misery Trail. But it feels better now. You feel better now, right?”
Tim looks hopefully up at him. Caleb hadn’t been aware he has a Misery Trail, or that his son could sense it so strongly that he’d named it. And since Caleb at the very least feels less panicked and doomed, he was spared having to lie to his son’s face.
“Yes.”
Apparently this is convincing enough that Tim runs off to fling himself into Katherine’s arms. Rachel gives Caleb an assessing onceover, then greets his brother with an exaggeratedly casual “Jonas”, before joining Tim and Katherine to make smores.
Jonas turns to him. “You know, the Wolf itself is not what needed to be cured. It’s part of nature. Your son,” he nods in Tim’s direction, “is more than what’s in his blood. He’s also part of nature. And so are you.”
“Rachel and I weren’t even—”
“You weren’t even supposed to be with Rachel. But if you’d actually listened and done what you were supposed to, not falling in love with a human woman, Tim wouldn’t exist. And without Tim there wouldn’t have been salvation for any of us. Not to mention the fact that despite his dubious heritage, Timothy is a pretty great fuckin’ kid.”
Caleb decides to save wondering just how many of “us” there were for later.
They watched Tim present Katherine with a perfectly toasted marshmallow, while she ruffles his hair in approval. Caleb keeps his gaze on his family.
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t listen to you.”
He can’t hold a straight face anymore when Jonas yanks him by the back of his neck and draws him into his broad chest. It’s been years since he last felt his brother’s strong arms around him. But it’s the rough noogie that stabbs him in the heart.
“It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum,” Jonas says into his hair.
Caleb snorts. “You and your philosophical conundrums.”
“I think you do the best you can to do what’s right as you understand it at the time. And to move forward past any tragedy, you learn and save what you can save and cherish what should be cherished. You make amends where you can. Live long enough and well enough to put yourself in a position to do all that.”
Jonas taps the place where Caleb’s gun rests tucked in his sweatpants. He hadn’t realized he’d taken it with him in his mad dash out of the motel. “No easy outs, if you really wanna be useful.”
“No easy outs,” Caleb promises, looking straight ahead and locking eyes with Rachel, which catches Tim’s attention and causes him to gaze at Caleb from that short distance. The wind kicks up suddenly, a beating of owl’s wings overhead. Caleb fails to suppress the pleasant shiver over his hackles of one wild predator passing another. He can feel Jonas doing the same. Tim’s watching Katherine notice as well, experiencing what she’s experiencing just by being in her proximity. He points for Rachel’s benefit. Whatever Caleb’s son is, he’s more than just the utility of his blood.
“Also,” Jonas starts up again, because he never lets anything go, “it’s okay to accept the joy and wonder that crosses your path.”
Caleb meets Jonas’s golden gaze with his own, seeing nothing but uncompromising love and trust, and thinks, maybe. Maybe, maybe.
“Also,” and Caleb side-eyes him. “Clearly you’re working Rachel’s last goddamn nerve.”
Before he can respond to that, something wet SPLATS! right in his face. It smells earthy. And scatty. With some pond scum and . . . marshmallow? thrown in. Caleb looks up to see Tim wearing a look warring between shock and utter delight. Anyone creature can be caught off guard when they fail to anticipate a threat.
“Whoops?” Tim offers.
“Whoops?”
“Katherine and Rachel bet me the last of the marshmallows I couldn’t make a solid enough mudpie and throw it to where you’re standing.”
“Did they.”
Rachel and Katherine scream with laughter from over by the fire.
Jonas starts shaking next to him. His wide, fanged smile present in his voice. Caleb refuses to give him the satisfaction of looking at him to see it. “Great aim, kiddo.”
Caleb smiles his own long-toothed smile. Tim, unafraid, smiles back excitedly. If he was a puppy, he’d be dancing around in a circle.
Caleb swipes at the mud clinging to his eyelashes. “I bet you can’t do that again in the opposite direction.”
Jonas lets loose a human sound of delight that doesn’t quite avoid the shape of a howl. Caleb answers back with one of his own, answered again by Katherine. Coyotes yip their own chorus in the distance. Rachel’s auburn hair catches the firelight and glows like a ruby as she tosses it over her shoulder to meet his eyes. She doesn’t flinch from the sight of the gold irises. The wind delivers to him the barest whisper. Come and get me.