Three months later…
I didn’t know whether to celebrate being here one year or cry. Baby Creek was three months old and could now hold his head up, so we didn’t need to worry about the floppy neck he’d had the first two months. I was sleep deprived as all hell, but Sage was such a huge help. Sometimes I just woke up in the middle of the night and Sage was holding the baby to my chest so he could breastfeed, then she would change him and bring him back to his bassinette.
We’d made some tightly packed cotton diaper pouches, but mostly we let him be naked and tried to take him outside often to pee or poo. I was probably completely psychologically damaging him by treating him like a dog in potty training, but we were doing the best we could. Slipping Creek into the carrier Sage had made me, I stepped outside to find her.
She was washing some tubers outside in a large clay pot. We knew nothing about when to feed a baby food, but baby Creek had started grabbing for our food at mealtimes, so we’d decided to try some mashed potatoes today.
“Hey, I was thinking of meditating for a bit, do you mind looking after him?” I asked Sage. “He’s just fed.”
Her hair was waist-length and braided into a thick red rope at her back. When she looked up at me, she smiled. “Absolutely. Come to Auntie, sunshine.” She dropped the tubers and held out her arms.
I quickly unslung him and handed him off. “Thanks.”
I’d been searching for a deeper meaning to everything lately. The universe, God, whatever Astra believed, something that would give order or meaning to my life in the grander picture. I just felt like there was a missing piece here and that it might be something spiritual within me that was broken and needed fixing. I began the meditation a week after baby Creek was born and I’d been doing it daily ever since. It helped with my stress of not being able to get back home, and the feelings of hopelessness quickly eased.
Today, I was going to search deep within myself and ask myself what I still needed to trust, because now that I had Creek, I couldn’t imagine raising him without his father and grandparents. And I missed my pack: Astra, Arrow, Willow, and even Rab. Today I would start cave hunting again on a daily basis until we got out of here.
Stepping away from Sage and the baby, I walked to the edge of our little meadow and sat down on the smooth flat rock that overlooked the steep embankment that led to the trickling creek, the creek I’d named my son after.
One year. One year ago today I entered the woods for my alpha trial … I told Sawyer I would see him in three days. I said three days and it had been a year.
Willow’s baby. The Paladin land. I’d ruined everything.
A sob formed in my throat but I swallowed it down. Now was not the time to be emotional. I’d spent a year having a pity party for myself. Now was the time to suck it up and get out of here.
Closing my eyes, I took in a deep cleansing breath through my nose and then exhaled through my mouth. The bubbling sounds of the creek water coupled with the rustling of the leaves put me into a calm state.
Plain as day once you trust.
The words of my ancestors looped in my head.
I found it. Trust. Plain as day. Trust, trust, trust.
I’d had a thought late last night. What if the trust was different for each alpha? What if Run never trusted the land, or his own heart, or something like that? What if each alpha had an issue trusting something in life and coming out here forced you to confront that?
Chills ran the length of my arms at the rightness of that thought.
Run loved my mom, that much was clear, but did he struggle with that love of a city girl? Did that stick him here for three years? Did he feel something was wrong with him for loving the enemy?
A great wind ripped through the canyon then; the leaves rustled as if trying to speak to me.
I breathed in slowly, feeling closer than ever to figuring this out.
“What don’t I trust?” I whispered out loud.
I trusted my heart, my love for Sawyer, this land that had kept me alive for years. I trusted all of that.
‘Yourself,’ my wolf whispered softly, startling me. ‘Your body.’
My throat tightened as images of my rape flashed through my mind. Silk sheets, muffled screams, blackness.
Shame. Defeat. Betrayal. Weakness.
The sob that bubbled to the surface now was too big to gulp down, so I opened my mouth and let it rip out of me as it transformed into a howl.
My wolf was right…
I’d stopped trusting my body the night I was raped. I was ashamed I couldn’t protect myself, ashamed I didn’t scream louder or fight harder. Ashamed that I didn’t do more to get Vicon arrested, although I knew that wasn’t true, that I wasn’t in the wrong, and had nothing to be ashamed of.
When I couldn’t protect myself, my soul split in two and my wolf had to protect us, had to be the badass, the strong one, the one I could always rely on when things got tough.
But hadn’t I just survived out here in the middle of the freaking woods with bears and the threat of starvation and pregnancy … all on my own? My wolf was with me yes, but she’d barely done anything to help out here. I fetched the water, I hiked the mountain, I hunted the meals, I built the addition to the cabin with my strong hands. I pushed a baby out of my damn vagina with no pain meds, not my wolf.
I was a badass and I needed to trust myself. This human part of Demi was anything but weak. Anything but full of shame.
Tears flowed down my cheeks as my throat tightened with emotion. “I trust myself,” I whispered.
“I trust my body.” I broke into a sob, my throat tightening to the point of pain as I tried to hold back my tears.
Something inside of me mended itself then. I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but it fused together in that moment … a rightness, an effervescent filling up the darkest part of my soul. I could trust myself to get us out of here. Just because my wolf and I were split didn’t mean we weren’t the same.
I was her, she was me. We were one. I saved myself that day with Vicon, and I was going to get us home now. Today.
My eyelids snapped open and I jumped up from where I sat.
“Sage!” I yelled, running full speed to where she was cutting the tubers with baby Creek on her back.
She looked up at me in alarm.
“I’m going to find the cave. Right now. I know where it is,” I told her. I didn’t actually know, but I knew it would reveal itself to me. I felt it.
True to our promise, I hadn’t gone looking for three months, I’d just spent time figuring this whole mom thing out.
She stilled, hands shaking slightly. “Did you?”
“Trust myself!” I burst into tears. “I needed to learn that I could trust myself to protect my body. Something I was never able to do when I was fifteen because of my attack.”
Sage dropped the knife, tears forming in her eyes as she nodded. Stepping over the pile of diced tubers, she opened her arms and pulled me into a hug. My face leaned over her shoulder, and then I was staring into the deep blue eyes of my baby.
This baby needed his dad. We needed to be a family. I needed Sawyer.
“Mommy’s going to get us home, okay, baby?” I told him.
This was the only home he’d ever known, but I wanted so much more for him.
My parents needed to meet him. Raven. Sawyer. I wanted my family.
Baby Creek blew spit bubbles with his mouth, giving me a gummy grin, and I pulled back from Sage. “Let’s go together, and then when I find the cave, you can wait outside with Creek?”
I didn’t want her attacked while I was gone. These woods were constantly trying to kill her if I wasn’t nearby.
She nodded. “Okay… you seem really sure…”
There was such a knowing inside of me—I just couldn’t explain it. “Sage, we’re going home. Today.”
Her eyes filled with more tears, and I walked into the cabin, grabbing a black chalk stick and writing an addition to the sentence that I had plastered on the wall. One day Creek might be out here, and he would find this.
Trust yourself, your heart, the land, whatever it is that is broken inside of you. Make peace with that and fully trust it, and the cave will show itself to you.
Throwing dirt on the fire, I watched as the smoke rose into the chimney in long, curling tendrils.
Sage stepped beside me and we looked at our small space.
Home.
“This is goodbye,” I told the small mud-plastered walls that I had insulated with my bare hands. Together, Sage and I quickly tidied up and prepared to leave our life here. I grabbed a sheepskin blanket in case the temperature dropped tonight and we were still finding our way out, but I left almost everything else. Anything left behind was something that would benefit my future children, and their children when they came out here.
We filled our canteens with water and tossed the rest from our storage pot so that it wouldn’t mold. I grabbed the clay rattle Sage had made Baby Creek, and then we left.
Placing one hand on the side of the house, I took in a deep breath. “Thank you.”
I would miss this place. As hard as it was here, it was a simple life, and I found a part of myself I didn’t know was missing in this cabin. A strong woman who could do anything. A leader. An alpha. A mother. A flawed but fierce woman who could survive hell and back.
