Ourselves Read online

  ALSO BY S.G. REDLING

  Flowertown

  Damocles

  Braid: Three Twisted Stories

  The Widow File (A Dani Britton Thriller)

  Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 S.G. Redling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477820391

  ISBN-10: 1477820396

  Cover design by Stewart A. Williams

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912636

  This book is for my agent, friend, and separated-at-birth sister, Christine Witthohn. Thanks for never giving up on this story.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  Chapter One: NAHAN DA LI

  Chapter Two: AVALENTU

  Chapter Three: R ‘ACUL

  Chapter Four: OSVIAT

  Chapter Five: ACTE

  Chapter Six: DA SUTE

  Chapter Seven: VINT

  Chapter Eight: DI CRUN FETA

  Chapter Nine: PETILN

  Chapter Ten: TU BITH

  Chapter Eleven: NAHAN

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY OF NAHAN WORDS AND PHRASES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  We have always been among you.

  Since humanity first huddled together on the windswept plains of Asia Minor, cobbled shelters on the steppes of Russia, and carved viable land in the cliffs of Liguria, we’ve been in your midst. Were we ever as you are? When did our paths diverge? We are blue-eyed people with the dark hair of the east and the pale skin of the north. Nowhere in our line are there tales of tenderness or frailty. Our heroes, our legends are full of cunning and lust and appetite.

  You’ve passed down names for us for a thousand years. “Still Ones” in the ancient language of the mountains; “Terrible Night” among the desert dwellers; the indigenous people of a rainy area charmed us with the title “Those Who Hold the Sky in their Eyes.”

  Who are we?

  In our tongue, we are Nahan, “Ourselves.”

  You are simply the common.

  Our children are in your schools. We live in your neighborhoods and work side by side with you in every profession. Our world within your world touches you in a thousand ways you can never imagine. You have your massive population, your gods, your technology, and your fears. We have only Ourselves.

  We are the Nahan and we have always been among you.

  Chapter One:

  NAHAN DA LI

  Nahan da li: literally, Are you Nahan? A traditional welcome, a friendly greeting, affectionate

  Stell knew there was something wrong with her. Something dark lived inside of her. She didn’t know what it was or how the others could see it. She might not even have known about it herself if she didn’t see it in the eyes of the congregation and feel it in the fists of her uncle. When she was little, she used to look for it in the ribbons of blood that poured from her body when the ritual knives cut into her.

  Now she knew better.

  Whatever was wrong with her couldn’t be cut out like a splinter underneath her skin. Whatever was wrong with her was wrong to the bone.

  Since she couldn’t cut it out or pray it out, Stell took herself and her darkness out of the compound at every opportunity. She’d climb through the hole in the wall behind her bed, crawl through the forsythia, and run hard and fast up the steep western side of Calstow Mountain. She’d run like someone chased her although she knew the congregation wouldn’t miss her. Her classmates wouldn’t. Stell drew the wrath of Uncle Rom like a magnet to a lodestone and everyone gave Stell a wide berth.

  She thought maybe her mother missed her when she took off into the woods of Calstow Mountain. She thought maybe Malbette might worry about her daughter alone in the darkness of the mountain forests, might wonder if her child was safe and unharmed running through streams and climbing trees, sleeping under the stars and waking in beds of pine needles day after day. She thought her mother might miss her but Malbette’s eyes had a distance in them that was impossible to read so Stell didn’t think about her mother much.

  After all, Stell wasn’t a kid anymore. She had to be at least twenty by now. Maybe closer to twenty-five.

  Nobody had ever told Stell how old she was. Nobody ever told Stell anything except to shut up and to repent and to pray. Nobody cared whether or not she could read. (She could but she hated to.) The teachers didn’t care that Stell never looked at the maps or listened to the Traditions or that she learned her numbers quickly. Stell never asked questions and nobody noticed or cared.

  When she was little, before she knew better, she’d asked questions.

  She’d asked why she had to pray so hard, why she had to bleed into the bowls in the filthy church room. She’d stomped her foot and cried and clung to her silent mother as the two of them were led to Uncle Rom’s waiting ritual chamber to be cut and bled before the pale faces of the congregation.

  Uncle Rom had answered those questions with snarls and threats and long recitations of Tradition but those weren’t the questions that silenced Stell. Malbette had done that.

  Stell had asked about her father.

  She didn’t know how old she was when she’d asked but since she hadn’t been tall enough to look out the window, Stell figured she’d been pretty young. Young enough to press her luck. Stell had demanded her mother tell her why she didn’t have a father like the other kids in the compound. Stell had shouted and pled, whined and wept, badgering Malbette to tell her who her father was and why he wasn’t with them and why nobody would tell her anything about him.

  Malbette hadn’t answered her. Instead, she ignored her daughter’s dirty, grasping hands and settled into the only chair in the small shack they called a home. She folded her hands in her lap, stared into the grimy wood of the near wall, and fell silent. At first Stell had raged as small children do. She cried and pulled but Malbette wouldn’t move. She climbed into her mother’s lap but the larger hands made no move to comfort her. And finally Stell got quiet too. She curled up on the floor beside her mother’s chair, thumb tucked securely in her mouth, her cheeks pressed into the scratchy wool of her mother’s skirts.

  They sat that way for three days.

  When Malbette rose from the chair on the third day, smoothing her skirts, and walking off as if nothing unusual had happened, Stell wiped at the tears and spit and snot that had dried on her face. She headed into her room, pulled the cot away from the wall, and kicked at the loose board behind it. She crawled through that hole and ran up to the mountain.

  On Calstow Mountain it didn’t matter what was wrong with Stell. Whatever darkness she had inside her didn’t bother the raccoons or opossum or hawks. The wild turkeys kept their distance but the streams and poplars didn’t mind her. The only ones that screamed at her were the blue jays and they screamed at everything. They even screamed at the common.

  Stell loved those moments when she heard something crashing through the brush louder than any forest creature would. Birds would fly and Stell would climb as fast as she could up into the nearest tree, folding into herself and being as silent as an owl so she could watch and listen to the strangely dressed, heavily burdened common making their way along the
forest trails. She listened to their voices; their English sounded so different from hers, no trace of a Nahan accent at all. And sometimes if she really stared at one of them, if she really focused on one particular part of one particular common, that common would freeze. Stell would bite her lip, trying not to giggle as they scanned the forest around them, some ancient instinct alerting them to a danger they couldn’t see.

  Stell didn’t know why they would fear her but she loved it when that happened.

  Maybe that had something to do with the darkness within her.

  She didn’t care. The common would go and Stell would climb down and the mountain would be hers again. It was hers today and Stell lay in her favorite spot, a thick blanket of moss between the creek bed and a thicket of blackberry bushes. Summer had only just started warming up the mountain and it would be weeks until the blackberries appeared but Stell had peeled off her gray, woolen dress as she always did once the snow melted. She’d tossed the hated garment up into the poplar branches and sprawled out along the chilly moss.

  The canopy overhead hadn’t thickened fully yet and the sun warmed her pale skin. Bits of mud flaked off her body as she stretched long. She must have fallen asleep because she didn’t hear the rattling of the blackberry branches or the swearing until it was too late to hide. Stell leapt to her feet, blinking away the sleep, as the branches closed together, catching the skin of a young man who pulled at the thorns.

  They stared at each other. Stell knew her eyes and mouth were as wide open as his.

  He was Nahan. She could see it and smell it and feel it.

  And he was beautiful.

  “Nahan da li?” she asked, smiling at this wondrous sight before her.

  He looked nothing like the congregation. His clothes weren’t drab and rough. His skin shone with a health she had never seen. And most wondrous of all? His surprised gape turned into a smile.

  “What? Oh yeah, yeah.” He nodded but Stell didn’t think he blinked. “I’m Nahan. I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m Thomas. Tomas. Tomas is my real, you know, my real name, um, that we, you know, use here because my grandparents . . . that’s my name when I’m here. I mean it’s my name but I use Thomas when I’m home but here I use, you know, my name. Tomas.”

  Stell watched the words pour out of his beautiful mouth. She wanted to touch the shadows of pink that rose on his pale cheeks as he talked and talked. He said more to her in that minute than anyone had said to Stell in months.

  “I’m Stell,” she said but he seemed to want more. “All the time. I’m only ever Stell.”

  The pink on his cheeks settled into a glorious rose shade that matched the lower lip he licked. His teeth shone white as he bit into it and Stell couldn’t think of a single reason to ever look at anything else again. She watched his mouth move and waited for more words.

  “Why are you naked?”

  “My dress is in the tree.”

  “Do you want me to get it down?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  Everyone thought there was something wrong with Tomas. He knew it. And they were probably right. His cousin Louis had spent a lifetime taking care of him—defending him in school-yard fights and smoothing things over for him socially. Aricelli and the other girls in their group hid their eye rolls, ruffling his hair and treating him more like a puppy than a guy. It wasn’t just because he was the youngest in the group either, although that didn’t help. Especially since it took him longer to graduate from high school than anyone else.

  Even among the Nahan, twenty-four was a little old to be taking high school chemistry.

  The Nahan aged differently than the common, much more slowly, so it wasn’t unheard of to take that long to graduate but it was more than just being a late bloomer. Tomas could never get the hang of social interaction. Louis assured him that even with his awkwardness, his looks more than made up for his shortcomings with the girls. Or would if he ever got up the courage to try.

  The problem was, his problem wasn’t just with girls. It was people in general—Nahan and common. Crowds unnerved Tomas and four voices speaking in a room at a time sounded like thousands to him. The Nahan community in Deerfield assumed he was just shy, sheltered as he was by his socially cunning cousin, and so let Tomas slide under the radar. But now he had graduated, a moment the group had been waiting for so everyone could take their avalentu, the Nahan word for flight.

  That was the plan for the summer, to map out their routes, to solidify their arrangements, and pick their travel mates. Tomas would travel with Louis. Aricelli and Kitty would no doubt travel together. They’d crisscross the country, away from their families and the watchful eye of the Council for the first times in their lives. There would be no Heritage School, no parents, no rules. They could explore and party and feed from the common with a freedom they never knew at home. Avalentu served as a rite of passage into adulthood for the Nahan and the thought of it scared the crap out of Tomas.

  But he’d come to his grandparents’ farm here in upstate New York as he did every summer. Louis and Aricelli and the others would be showing up soon too as they always did. They’d have a few weeks to get the last pieces of advice and to make their last-minute arrangements and then they’d be off.

  Tomas would be in a pick-up truck for weeks with Louis. His cousin wanted to head west. There would be bars and parties and festivals. There would be girls both Nahan and common. There would be guys too for Louis, who made no effort to hide his preference. And for Tomas there would be an unrelenting pressure to interact and open up and drown himself in the hammering wall of noise that came with people people people.

  So he’d run up onto the mountain.

  The higher he ran up the eastern side of the slope, the calmer he felt. Noises from the town below him fell away and the feel of voices ringing in his ears grew fainter with each step. He didn’t worry about getting lost; he’d been running on this hill every summer of his life although today he’d climbed higher than ever before. The mountain leveled out here and there and the forest stretched out in every direction. He heard a creek running behind a thicket of blackberry bushes and Tomas didn’t let himself question the wisdom of charging through the thorny bushes in just his shorts and t-shirt.

  And there in the clearing stood a completely naked girl.

  Tomas felt his cheeks redden and could feel his usual stammer coming on but something about the way she just stood there, smiling at him, made his nerves melt away. She looked nothing like the girls in his group and not just because she was naked. Her long, black hair hung matted and clumped with leaves and dirt and he’d never seen eyes so pale. She didn’t move to hide herself. Mud streaked across her small breasts and green and brown stains on her kneecaps broke up the line of her long, slim legs.

  She looked like a wild creature.

  “I’m Stell,” she said and he heard Nahan in her voice. “All the time. I’m only ever Stell.”

  Something inside his chest loosened. He couldn’t think of anywhere he would rather be at that or any moment. He thought that Louis would be proud of him for stepping forward and taking the girl’s hand. They sat together on the moss and started to talk.

  Tomas played a precarious game of avoiding his grandparents and assuaging the curiosity of his cousin.

  “Just tell me who she is,” Louis demanded.

  Tomas sighed. “I don’t know.”

  It was a lie and it was the truth. Nothing had prepared him for what was happening on Calstow Mountain. Heritage classes at the Council, brutal social coaching from his cousin, everything he thought he had learned slid from his mind with Stell. Just saying her name made him light-headed. He wanted to talk to Louis about what was happening but it seemed too enormous an experience to pull from his mouth with words.

  He knew it would seem ordinary to his far more experienced cousin, and that more than anything kept him silent. Really, what had he and Stell done that thousands of other Nahan kids weren’t doing any given hour of any given day
? If anything, their slow, sweet encounters on the forest floor would probably seem tame. They talked forever.

  Or really, Tomas admitted with a stab of anxiety, he did most of the talking, didn’t he? Did he talk too much?

  He could see Stell sprawled out beside him, her pale body draped over dark green moss, as she listened to his stories, her mouth slightly open, her eyes almost closed. He told her stories of Nahan legends. He told her plots of science fiction movies. He made up stories from the shadows in the farthest corners of his mind. She would laugh and she would shudder and occasionally interrupt in that strange combined Nahan and English of hers to voice a concern or applaud a heroic action. He couldn’t tell if she understood that the stories were fantasy. She would listen and listen and then reach for him, running her hands over his face and neck and chest as if she could divine the source of this wellspring of adventure.

  Their kisses were slow and long, sometimes lingering to the point that Tomas would snap out of their trance with a jolt, wondering if he were taking too long doing what they should have been doing. He would open his eyes and see her pale blue eyes hooded under heavy lids, that small smile lingering in the corners of her mouth.

  In many ways, she frightened him. She could be so still, so utterly and perfectly still. When she moved, she moved into his hands like water, warm and filling every crease.

  Naked with her on the fallen leaves and stones and mosses, his body felt like an explorer on an alien planet. Stell was not only the alien lifeform; she was the entire climate, the blue sun, the salty wind, the whisper of strange red stones.

  While his mind wandered, his body moved to its own natural desire, tasting her skin, arching to feel her teeth on his shoulder, his chest, his stomach. She would straddle him, sliding him inside of her, rocking gently at first then increasing in speed and need, finally wrapping herself around him to roll on the earth until the sweetness of her would make him cry out in release. They would lie there, tangled together, feeling as if his heart was her heart and, just when he was sure he would never know a moment sweeter, he could feel his body tell him “More.”