Sometimes it felt as if a vast army of microscopic and viciously malevolent imps had materialised inside him and were stripping his flesh from his bones from within, or dousing every muscle fibre with a caustic, burning liquid. Other times it felt as if this army of tiny demons had migrated to the inside of his skull and were crushing his brain with a tortuously furious pressure from all sides. In this agony he writhed and screamed for hours, for days, his back arched, sweat pouring from his skin, his eyes alternately wild and glazed, his face haggard, and his hair hanging in lank and greasy clumps from his scalp.
Finally, though, he emerged from the madness of the detox process. His body was both weaker and stronger at once, as was his mind. His beastwalker blood had, while healing his broken bones, also largely exorcised the most debilitating physical cravings for drugs from his body, but it had not been able to completely erase a lingering need for them in his very cells, nor had it had the power to banish the psychological desire for them. That would have to be a matter of both willpower and conscious self-love on William’s part, and compassion and patience from his friends.
Nevertheless, after a few days of hellish suffering William was back on his feet – dehydrated, weak, his mind a shattered wreck – but on the path to healing. When Zakaria and Njinga felt that he was no longer a flight risk, they unlocked the room that had served as his cell and allowed him free rein of the cabin and the surrounding forest.
Shortly after emerging from his cell he introduced himself to the teenagers and took a measure of their personalities. Jun had become even more reticent, unreadable and automaton-like than ever, retreating into a cocoon of impenetrable silence and glumness, and most of the time he chose solitude over the company of both his friends and the beastwalkers. He barely ate, nibbling listlessly at his food at mealtimes, and often sat alone in the room he shared with Daekwon, doing nothing but staring blankly at the walls for hours on end, it seemed.
Daekwon, on the other hand, was trying to handle things stoically, and he interacted frequently with the other teens, whom he tried to cheer up as best he could with jokes, witty banter and impromptu pep talks, although cracks were beginning to show in his façade of detached calm and unflappable determination. He found solace in the same place he always had: in gruelling, relentless physical exertion, but this time it was not in a boxing gym or on a running track. Instead it was with Zakaria, the old master of combat and countless styles of martial arts, who took with vigorous enthusiasm to the task of instructing the boy in the arts of war.
Paola was an absolute wreck, inconsolable with grief and consumed by gut-wrenching sorrow, spending her time either weeping, moping in sullen silence away from the others, or curled up in a ball in bed in the room she shared with Chloe. Both Chloe and Daekwon had been trying their best to raise her spirits, but even her crush on the latter, combined with his obviously reciprocal romantic interest in her, had little effect on her mood, and the dense, gloomy fog of sorrow and grief in which she was enshrouded could not be lifted.
Chloe, unlike the others, had not only taken the tragedy that had befallen them in her stride, she had eagerly embraced her fate, seeing it as a manifestation of some sort of divine destiny. On the cross-country trip that had taken them from New York to Northern California she had mourned briefly for the loss of her old life, but to her, it hadn’t been much of a life to grieve. Unlike Paola, who came from a large, close-knit family, Chloe had spent her life being shuttled from foster home to foster home, and with one parent dead and the other estranged and in prison, which had been how things had been since a very tender age, she had nobody in New York, aside from her close friends, whom she considered family. She knew that she would miss aspects of the city itself, for it had been the only home she had ever known, but from a young age she’d always felt that she had been drifting inexorably towards some sort of higher purpose, a undefined but undeniable calling, a grandiose mission she’d been destined from birth to fulfil. Falling by fate or accident into this secret war – this global conflict between a ruthlessly exploitative and destructive system and a group of apparently supernatural beings who claimed to be fighting for the living world, for Nature Herself – clicked with her sense of purpose in a way that nothing in her life ever had. The revolutionary fire that had simmered and hissed in her belly for so many years had, after she had come to terms with everything she’d learned in the past few days, become a glorious, furiously raging inferno of passion and inextinguishable drive.
She’d been spending many hours conversing with Njinga, who she was fast coming to both idolise and view as a mentor, and the latter’s disdain for William’s cowardice and his drug habit had rubbed off on her. Chloe thus acted cold and somewhat dismissive when it came to interacting with him, something that he found annoying, but which Njinga was rather amused by. There was also, of course, the fact that Chloe knew that he was a tiger and had seen him in his tiger form, which was a form of minor kryptonite for her since she’d been fairly besotted with big cats from an early age. Thus she was presented with a bit of a conundrum
