Sorry. Her sheep sounded as baffled as it always did after something tripped its run-like-stink instincts. I just…
I know. You’re just looking out for me. I’m just glad Fiona and Rena aren’t here yet, they’d probably confiscate my passport.
Sheena brushed off her knees—it was more habit than anything else because she hadn’t actually gone head-over-feet in her rush to run, this time—and looked around.
She was in the right place, at least. That was a good start. For having just been caught up in her sheep’s flight-or-more-flight response, it was a really good start. The bus had dropped her just off South Highway 5, right in front of a billboard advertising Silver Springs. The sign had a picture of a serene town center on it, complete with a fountain and small children playing with a friendly dog, and a helpful note about there still being sections for sale.
And she had her backpack with her. Even better. Ten out of ten, Sheena told herself and her sheep.
Except her aunts weren’t there. Eight out of ten.
She checked her phone and swore. No signal. And since she’d been asleep for the last how-many kilometers, she had no idea how long she’d had no signal for. It could have been hours. Fiona and Rena could have been trying to get in touch with her most of the day to tell her the plans had changed, and she wouldn’t know.
Sheena let out a long, slow breath than plumed in the air. “Well I can’t sit on my arse here waiting,” she told the Silver Springs sign. “They might be ages. Anyway, there’s only the one road…”
Hitching her backpack higher on her shoulders, she started to walk down it.
Winter in the middle of the North Island was almost as good as winter down south, she decided. The air was sharply cold, clean and fresh with the promise that whatever came next—hail, snow, sleet—would be here to stay, blanketing the land in icy sheets. And something was definitely coming: the sky had darkened while Sheena napped, and the clouds were thick overhead. Much earlier, the bus driver had reminded everyone to hire a locator beacon if they were planning to get out on any tramping tracks, but Sheena strode out into the cold with all the confidence of someone who had her own long woolen coat on standby and no desire to go farther off the main road than required to get to a warm, insulated house.
As she made her way along the freshly sealed road, the rolling paddocks gave way to thick bush. Spiky-leaved manuka and tree ferns battled with bushy titi for space—or would when spring broke later in the year. Now they rested in each other’s arms like siblings who had forgotten what they were fighting about.
Sheena scowled. She wished she could forget her constant battles with her family. She loved them, but… sheesh. They just couldn’t find it in themselves to see her as anything other than an under-cooked, helpless lamb. They were so determined to cotton-wool her that none of them except Aroha would even give her the satisfaction of even a good argument about it! They thought she was so helpless. As though just because she was smaller than them, she couldn’t handle anything.
Bad enough being the youngest cousin, she thought, batting a low-hanging fern frond out of the way. Being literally tinier than some of my cousins’ kids when I’m shifted… No wonder no one takes me seriously.
Her sheep sighed. Remember when wee Mikey was the same size as me? He almost flattened me when he jumped on me the other day.
Well, there’s another upside to traveling by ourselves. No giant ten-year-olds tackling us to the ground. Sheena blew out a cloud of vapor and looked around.
Her breath wasn’t the only cloud under the trees. White steam seeped through the branches. Sheena sniffed.
“Oh, nasty,” she muttered at the smell of rotten eggs.
Silver Springs was a few kilometers out of Rotorua. Far enough she had no idea what direction the city was, close enough that the smell that made Roto-Vegas famous permeated the air. The geothermic activity around Rotorua gave it a distinct rotten-egg smell. She remembered the worst thing about it being that it wasn’t a constant smell. It came in waves. Stinky, stinky waves.
The hot pools made up for it, though. Maybe. If you had a blocked nose.
But the smell and the steam told her that there might be a creek nearby. A hot-water creek, even. Maybe she could get a soak in before she headed up to Auckland. She needed one, after that bus trip. And before the next trip. And the long-haul flight…
She was five meters into the bush before she realized what she was doing. Frozen leaf litter crackled under her feet as she stumped back towards the road.
“Come on,” she muttered at herself. “Dumbarse! Being a shifter won’t help me if I fall into another sinkhole. Remember last time?”
Sorry, her sheep bleated, and Sheena sighed as she made her way back to the road.
“It’s not you, it’s me. No wonder everyone still treats me like I’m a little lamb. I never stop and think…”
Sheena wrinkled her nose. That last blast of wholesome natural air hadn’t just smelled like sulfur. Her sheep wasn’t great at sorting scents into more categories than ‘try to eat it’ and ‘scary, run away’, but it smelled like… smoke.
Good smoke? her sheep suggested. Wood fire… bonfire… nice fires?
Could be. Could… not be.
It smelled like a lot of smoke. Bonfire? It’d have to be a massive one.
Something Aunt Fiona had said last Christmas trickled into Sheena’s mind. Building around Rotorua was a real hassle, she’d said, because even if the ground didn’t literally bubble away underneath you, the constant sulfuric gases ate away at the wiring.
Could something like that have happened and caused a fire at Silver Springs?
Forget stopping and thinking.
