The creek did not ache down to a summer trickle.
March marched right on into the farm. Leaves turned a scintillating red and yellow. Winter feed stacked. Fields turned over to sit fallow. More wood chopped to keep the homestead and cottages running. Alison often complained about Tea’s jerky sawing motion. Tea brushed it off as weariness and Alison bought the excuse easily, disgusted. Though she tried her best with Alison and Carmel, the girls held to their wariness. Like they felt something about her, her fire, but couldn’t put their finger on it.
Tea’s exhaustion sprung from the deep ache that woke her in the night.
As March grew late, the sensation didn’t abate, settling into a dull throb that came and went like a tide. Though she thought the burden of her pain connection to her brother was hers to bear, she often saw flickers between the other two, like lightning between the clouds. Swift, hard, sharp, but gone in an instant. Grant in the yards or fields rubbing his joints like an arthritic. Izzy, usually staunch, complained of pain in her elbows.
Tea hid her pain. It took the last of her energy not to rush down to the creek and plunge her hands into the cool water, or keep her eelskin from turning at inappropriate moments. Her dreams became fretful and dark. She often woke with her fingers webbed and black. It took her longer for her human flesh to return from its slippery state, pulling hard on the hiss-feel. The hiss pulled right back.
*
“Come on, girl. Cows to milk. Upsy-daisy.”
Tea groaned. Her fingers were a normal tan-brown as she flipped over the calendar to Saturday, March the twenty-seventh.
Her arm settled into its daily ache.
“Oh, Bess. Stop being such a pest!” Tea slapped the rump of the fractious cow. “Give it up, there’s a good girl.”
“That’s the third time Clover has stood on my toes!” Izzy yelped. Her bucket clattered, and she gave an unladylike curse.
“When you girls have finished mucking around in there, that butter won’t churn itself,” Mr MacGregor bellowed. “And don’t forget rabbit cull starts this afternoon. We need all hands on deck.”
“Yessir!” they chorused.
In her mood, Tea decided, handling a gun would be just the thing. Mr MacGregor had grumbled about girls learning to shoot and handle the ferrets, but, as in everything, they were short-handed, and they couldn’t skip rabbit cull. The skins brought in good extra money. Three of the horses had almost been lamed by holes in the fields, more than enough sheep had been lost to broken legs, and there was damage to feed stock.
As they stalked through the thistles that forever needed grubbing and the gorse that scoured her skin, Izzy’s dark glances clawed at the surface of Tea’s patience.
“Stop it,” she hissed out the corner of her mouth. Spotting movement, she loaded, shouldered, and popped off. The rabbit dropped, but with the kickback of the rifle, the pain in Tea’s shoulder increased. Good God, if Mum knew I was using a rifle …
“Stop what?” Izzy demanded once the boom-ring of the shot died down.
“You’re staring at me. Like I’m about to … turn into something.”
“What bee you got in your bonnet? You on the rag?”
Tea blushed. “What if I am?”
“Your blood is up. Thought so.” Those canine senses of hers!
They picked up some dropped rabbits, and Tea stomped back to the dray to empty her sack into the bloody morass. The stink helped maintain the potency of her mood, ignore the pinch and flutter of her bicep. She should apologise. Izzy was a good friend but for some reason today the thought of how easily she could slide in and out of her fur annoyed Tea no end.
A scratch against her skin. Dry. With the stench of iron and salt. Not the fullness of her menses or the softness of the creek. More … something that wasn’t of here.
“Hey.” Izzy’s soft interjection made Tea jump. She tilted her head like an inquisitive dog, and the words settled across her mind. Something’s happening, isn’t it? “Making sure you’re alright.”
“I’m fine,” Tea snapped, unable to stop the words. “I’m not a baby. You’re not my mother. I take care of myself.”
She sounded like …
… sounded like Robbie.
Yes. Izzy was definitely in her head.
Tea squeezed her eyes shut, clenched her fist, and flinched again at a spasm in her arm. Thank goodness the rifle pops from MacGregor and the other girls came from another field beyond a stand of pines.
“Robbie would sound like that—”
“—when he came back from dances. I know.”
Izzy tilted her head the other way. “Dances?”
“He used to get in a lot of fights. Over girls.”
A small, sad smile hooked at the corner of Izzy’s mouth. “Oh, Tea.”
A crack-crack. Tea jerked her head towards the sound.
But there was no-one with rifles that way.
Rattle-crack.
No rifles that way either.
Blackness seethed around the edges of Tea’s vision. She held tight to the edge of the dray to stop herself from falling. The darkness boiled like thrashing water. Water against stone. Tide rolling over. Waves sweeping away, damn whatever was in its way.
“Tea. Izzy.”
A voice in the here and now. Grant. He never yelled, not even at the animals. But the cut of his voice held stone in it, the heaviness of earth.
“Tea?” Izzy’s voice had that growl, like she was right on the edge of change, too restless for her skin.
Both voices slurred through air that had thickened around Tea’s head. She tried to shake herself free of the strange grip. The effort to breathe exhausted her.
Two pairs of hands gripped her arms, took the rifle from her.
“It’s here … it’s here …”
“What is, Tea?” Izzy asked.
“That storm,” Grant said. “Tea can feel something going on, over there. But I told you, the dust …”
“That’s your sneezes.”
“Be fair, Izz. I might not be as strong as Tea or you or … or Robbie, but I know when things aren’t right.”
“My arm … Robbie’s hurt …”
“My hand has been giving me heck all day, Izz.”
“You shouldn’t be able to feel it at this distance.”
“Tea can.”
“What are you talking about? You can feel … the storm, the fight, that Robbie’s in?”