Hadley backed away from the dogs pinning the three humans to the ground. She pushed Drew closer behind her and carefully moved to the left, near Brielle and the others. She tightened the grip around her axe. The dogs were waiting for something. She heard a crunch of leaves to her right, her head snapping to the sound.

"Drew, hold Brownie," Hadley said, trying to peer through the trees and their shadows. "Make sure he doesn't leave your side, okay?"

"Okay, Hadley." The little boy whispered. The attempt to keep his fear-laced voice steady was admirable, especially because he was struggling to hold Brownie back. The dog's growling had deepened and was garbled. His fangs were down, and he was itching for a fight.

A vampire slowly walked out of the thick undergrowth, clad in a fitting dark green suit with vertical, clipped black streaks, his hands deep in the pockets of a long coat that matched. He was a head taller than Hadley, lanky, with thin, curly, dishevelled hair that he ran his hand through as he flashed her a grin. Teroi said that vampires kept the body they were turned in. It made her wonder if this man had wanted to keep his wiry frame or had been forced to for his Master's pleasure.

"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" the vampire asked. He walked up to the dog restraining Brielle and pet its head. The vampire dog leaned into the touch.

Hadley narrowed her eyes. These dogs' crimson eyes were tinged heavily green. They weren't Venoms, but they were still vampire dogs. Still incredibly dangerous and murderous, especially as they weren't fully fed. Brownie stayed fed at all times to, Hadley presumed, keep his control. How were these other dogs so calm while at the edge of being blood starved?

"What do you want?" Hadley asked.

There was a reason she wasn't in the same position as the humans pinned to the ground.

"What I want is to know how you managed to get him to stay with you," the vampire said, pointing to a spot behind Hadley. She knew he was pointing to Brownie. The vampire's voice went higher and higher and more demanding with each statement. "And I want to know why you would let an insipid little human child control that much power. And why you would torture a vampire by keeping it from feeding on human blood!"

Hadley swished her axe in warning. "Stay away from us!"

"How ungrateful you are!" the vampire said. He pointed at the three humans. "They were stalking you! Hunting you! I turned your stalkers into the stalked. Your hunters into the hunted! I did that for you! We can rule them all with the dogs by our side. But you must let me Turn you and you must let me teach you how to treat these glorious creatures with respect. You must!"

Hadley looked down at Brielle. The woman was struggling against her dog, they all were. These dogs were much larger than most of the vampire dogs Hadley had seen before. At an order from the vampire, the dogs lowered their fangs snapping close to the human necks, forcing Brielle and the others to stop squirming. Brielle looked up at Hadley. Hadley expected to see fear in Brielle's eyes but saw something else. Brielle had a plan. Hadley gave her the smallest nod, then turned back to face the vampire.

"I'm not interested in anything you have to offer," Hadley said.

The second the words hit him, he yelled in rage. "You don't deserve that dog! You don't deserve anything! Apollo! Attack!"

The dog pinning Brielle snapped its head to its Master, who was pointing at Hadley. It then turned to Hadley and snarled. There was a second of hesitation before it pounced. That second was all Hadley needed. She threw the axe, which flew straight and true, right into the green-clad vampire's chest. The man's scream got lost in the ensuing chaos and confusion.

Immediately after throwing the axe, Hadley dropped into a forward roll and the dog, Apollo, flew over her, missing her by inches. It lost no time turning around to finish the job of attacking Hadley, but Hadley had picked up a thick branch she now swung as hard as she could. The branch connected solidly with the dog's jaw, half of it shattering at impact. Apollo whimpered as he fell. Hadley turned to find Brielle fighting the vampire man, but before Hadley could move to help, the other two dogs followed Apollo's lead and pounced on her.

One dog sank its teeth into Hadley's left thigh and the other went for her throat, although its teeth smashed into the broken branch Hadley was still holding. The dog snapped at the branch again and again, taking pieces off with each snap. It was only a matter of time before one of those snaps crushed Hadley's throat. Suddenly, a brown blur rushed past, taking the snapping dog with it. Brownie! Hadley took the chance to focus on the dog with its teeth deep in her thigh, shaking its head, about to rip her leg off.

But something strange happened.

The dog froze before hinging its jaw wide open to let go of her. It began to gag and hit its snout with its paws, frantically retreating from Hadley. Its eyes went wild, and it whimpered helplessly before its back legs buckled, then its forelegs. It collapsed on its side, struggling to breathe for a few moments, then it stopped and just stared at Hadley, surprised and afraid. Hadley kept watching until the dog's eyes glazed over.

"Hadley!"

The shout brought Hadley back to her senses and she turned to it. Two dogs were dead. The third, Apollo, was nowhere to be seen and must have escaped. The axe she'd embedded in the vampire's chest was on the ground, soaked in blood, but there was no sign of the vampire either. Hadley remembered seeing the Wildling man and Chasina eventually joining Brielle in fighting the vampire, but all three had clearly been overpowered. They were pretty banged up, but still alive. Chasina and the man were tending to their wounds. Brielle, the one who'd called out Hadley's name, was currently fussing over her.

"Your leg!" Brielle was saying, tearing strips of her shirt and wrapping them tightly around Hadley's bleeding thigh. She needn't have bothered. A telltale sizzling itch meant the wound was already stitching itself back together, healing, but she didn't stop Brielle. "You'll be okay, Hadley! Don't worry. I got it. You'll be okay."

Hadley turned her attention away from Brielle.

"Drew!" Hadley called out. Brownie had attacked the dog that almost killed Hadley and hadn't been protecting Drew! Hadley needed to know the little boy was okay. Drew came running from the trees towards Hadley, Brownie by his side. The dog's snout was wet with blood, but his tongue lolled to the side in his signature grin.

"Hadley! I told Brownie to come save you!" the boy declared, giggling with excitement, and pumping his hands, shadow boxing. "Did you see him! He saved you!"

Hadley laughed as the boy jumped on her and gave her a big hug.

"I saw him," Hadley said, squeezing Drew tight. She let Brownie join them in the hug. "My heroes!"

The levity didn't last long. Brielle spoke, shattering it.

"We need to get that wound checked out, Hadley. It's really..." Brielle was saying.

Hadley cut her off.

"Why were you following us?" Hadley's voice was ice cold.

"Hadley, your wound needs..."

"Why. Were. You. Following us?"

Brielle took a moment to answer. "We needed to know where you were going."

"Where were we going? We weren't going anywhere!" Hadley said. "We've been walking through this wilderness, looking for anyone to help us, and the first people we find want to kill us! Then you promise to let us go, but now we find out you've been stalking us?"

Hadley stood up and stumbled. The wound was healing, but the dog's bite was incredibly deep and hurt like hell. Hadley barely noticed it though; her mind buzzing! Something had happened to that vampire dog that bit her. Hadley had been trying so hard to ignore reality. To focus on her and Drew and Brownie and living a simple, happy life in the woods, playing, and bonding and getting used to being the mismatched family for her daughter, but she couldn't ignore reality anymore.

Ever since she'd woken up in that underground clinic, Hadley knew that something was wrong with her, and that dog's corpse was the final inescapable, awful personification of the truth she'd been trying so hard to escape.

"I know that what we did sucks," Brielle said. She moved closer to help Hadley walk. "But you've got to let us help you. That bite, Hadley, it's deep. We need to get it checked by a Healer."

"Why would you help me now?" Hadley asked, wobbling away from Brielle as she slowly tested putting a little pressure on her injured leg.

Brielle sighed.

"Because... what you did... you saved my life. I owe you.," she said, turning to the other two. "We all do. Please. Let us get you to a Healer."

Hadley considered the offer.

A Healer.

The last time she'd accepted help from someone claiming to be a Healer, that hadn't gone so well.

But because a Healer had caused what was happening to her, maybe another could tell her exactly what had been done to her and, more importantly, Hadley needed to know if her baby was okay. At three months pregnant now, her body had gone through too much and she was desperate to know how it had all affected the child. Despite her skills as a Medic, there was only so much she could do herself in the middle of the jungle to ascertain the child's wellbeing. Especially now when there was something clearly very wrong with her. Did it extend to her unborn child? Had the child even survived whatever the Healer had done to Hadley's body?

Going back to Brielle's Wildling Tribe was the last thing Hadley wanted to do, but she had to know that her baby was okay.

Her daughter was the only reason she was out here!

The only reason she'd gone through everything she had.

"Fine," Hadley said. "I'll see a Healer."

***

It took almost a whole day to track down the tribe. Hadley wasn't the only one wounded badly enough to slow them down. The Wildling man, whose name she learnt was Max, was nursing a broken arm. Both the ulna and radius of his right arm were almost poking out of his skin. Hadley was in too much pain to stand up long enough to physically help him, but she informed them she was a Medic and Brielle and Chasina did their best to stabilise the injury by following her instructions. Max was putting up a good front, but hiking through the trees wasn't easy for him. The two Wildling women hadn't escaped injuries either, with Brielle walking on a sprained ankle and Chasina constantly pulling her straw-coloured bangs forward to hide a massive lump on her forehead.

But they finally found the tribe and were ushered into a triage or first aid tent. There were three other Wildlings in there with them, two of them with visible injuries and the other grabbing their stomach and writhing on their cot.

"How's your leg?" Brielle asked Hadley from the opposite cot to hers.

"How's your twisted ankle?" Hadley asked back.

"They say I'll live." Brielle replied, gingerly twisting her foot. "Chasina isn't happy I'll be bossing her around again soon. I've survived so many close calls, she's about ready to start a coup at this point."

"I'm right here," Chasina chimed from a cot next to Brielle, making everyone laugh.

"Brielle!" Came a vexed shout from outside the triage tent.

"Grandma incoming!" Max warned. The Wildling Healer had realigned his broken arm bones, carefully wrapped his arm in gauze and set the break using a white powder to create a thick cast around the arm. Hadley had never seen anything like it, only ever having used 3D printed mesh casts to set broken bones. The white cast was incredibly primitive medicine, which finally fit Aunt Zee's anti-tech description of the Wildlings, unlike the underground Clinic of the eye-patch Healer.

At hearing her name, Brielle pressed a pillow to her face and groaned.

A woman entered the tent then and Hadley gasped! Aunt Zee had told her that Wildlings lived to grow older than forty-five, unlike the humans who lived in Compounds, but up until that very moment, Hadley had never really imagined what that meant. And even if she would have tried imagining a person older than forty-five, this woman would have never crossed her mind!

She had thick silver-grey hair streaked with a few black strands, arranged artfully in a styled afro. Her face was thoroughly wrinkled but held incredible warmth as most of the lines settled comfortably in her smile at Hadley. Even the frown on her face when she turned to Brielle didn't come naturally. Her ears were decked with simple, small hoop, silver earrings and she wore a matching chain with a leaf-shaped pendant. None of the other Wildlings wore any jewellery. Like most of the others, however, the woman had on a simple teak brown leather jacket, cream shirt, and a pair of green sturdy canvas pants, all embroidered with the symbol of an axe.

"Is it true what they tell me? That vampires are now controlling vampire dogs? And that you brought a vampire dog here with you? You just had to dive headfirst into all this mess, didn't you?" the woman said, her eyes pinned on Brielle, who'd resurfaced from under her pillow and looked properly chastised. Brielle was about to say something, but the old woman continued, cutting her off. "What's with you and trying to kill yourself?"

Brielle face went unnaturally still before contorting into an ugly mug.

She exploded!

"Hello pot, my name is kettle!" Brielle spat, the acid in her voice inducing a harsh fog of tension in the tent, making Hadley shuffle uneasily in the long silence that followed.

Brielle and the woman stared each other down for what felt like forever.

The woman yielded first, tearing her eyes from Brielle, and turning to face Hadley. She smiled sweetly.

"Hadley Fisher," the woman said, breaking the painfully uncomfortable silence. Hadley didn't miss the reverence poured into her name, or the shaking hand the woman offered. "How lovely it is to finally meet you."

She accepted the woman's hand. It was soft and had more skin than Hadley was used to.

"You look so much like her," the woman said, softly rubbing the back of Hadley's hand, which felt weird, especially because she held on for far too long. "So much like Aadya."

"You knew my mother?" Hadley's heart hammered against her sternum.

Had she finally found them? Had she found her mother's people? Wildlings who would actually help her and her baby?

The woman gave Hadley a small nod.

"I'm nothing like her." Hadley asserted, managing their expectations from the start if they were going to help her.

The woman laughed. "Of course not! You're here, aren't you? You're home. She isn't."

Hadley wasn't sure how to respond to that, but she was grateful for the woman letting go of her hand and walking out of the tent.

"I need a drink!" Brielle said with a groan. She swung her legs off her cot and gingerly put pressure on her wrapped sprained leg before grabbing a wooden crutch next to her cot and heading out of the tent.

"Me too." Max said, following Brielle.

"Me three." Chasina chimed in.

Before leaving the tent, Brielle turned to Hadley.

"You coming?" Brielle asked.

Hadley shook her head. "Axel isn't back yet, and he asked me to wait, remember?"

"Right," Brielle shrugged and the three of them left. "See you out there when you're done."

In the sudden, lonesome silence, Hadley took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Hadley Fisher. That name again! Hadley gritted her teeth and balled her fists but resisted the urge to scream in frustration. Her nails bit into her palms and she gratefully embraced the pain as Mrs. Smith's words played through her mind yet again.

"You don't know who you are, do you?"

This was becoming more than annoying now, but Hadley was now, as the old woman had so succinctly put it, home. Her reason to leave the Compound was to find the Wildlings and have them help her, and if Hadley was to go on how they'd been received by this tribe, she'd finally fulfilled that. However, if she was going to find her place here, a place for her daughter, she would have to know why they called her that and what it would mean for how they were treated.

The Tribe Healer walked into the tent, breaking through Hadley's thoughts.

Axel had been a surprise to Hadley from the first time she'd laid eyes on him. It wasn't just that he was yet another man – Hadley was still getting used to interacting with men – and it wasn't his kind jade green eyes, or his short, dishevelled, teak brown hair or the crooked grin that seemed permanent on his soft pink lips. It was his leg. His left leg. It was twisted back at the knee and shaped oddly, narrowing down into a distorted foot that curved inwardly and that was much too small in proportion to his body. Axel used a hand carved wooden crutch to walk, and it was this object that finally pulled Hadley's eyes from his leg. Whoever had carved the crutch had done a terrible job – she'd have to get her hands on a whittling knife and make him something better.

"It's a congenital deformation," Axel said, pulling Hadley's eyes to his face.

"I'm sorry?"

"My left leg. I was born with it that way." Axel smiled. "You've stared at it every time I've walked in here."

Hadley blushed and wished the cot would grow a mouth and swallow her.

"I'm sorry."

Hadley groaned inwardly. Were those the only words she knew?

Axel laughed. "It's okay. I'm sure you get the same with your eyes."

Hadley nodded, appreciating his easy-going attitude.

It was then that Hadley noticed the stone pestle in Axel's hand filled to the brim with mashed up green and brown foliage.

"The way Brielle described your injury I was expecting a lot more carnage." Axel said, examining the vampire dog bite. He'd cleaned it pretty well before and Hadley was thoroughly impressed by how compassionate, professional and detail oriented he was. Every single Compound Medic she knew would have drooled over his sewing skills – her stitches looked amazing. She'd ask for lessons later.

"It looked worse than it was." Hadley replied with a smile.

Until she found out why they called her Hadley Fisher, she was going to keep the secret of her newfound generative healing ability to herself. Not that she could even explain it if she wanted to.

The only substance in the world she knew to have close to that effect on the human body was vampire blood, but Ruqwik had distinctly explained that whatever Mrs. Smith had fed her would work itself out of her system, not to mention the fact that it only worked to heal if ingested after the injury, not before. This was different. This was the eye-patch Healer's doing. And because she was also a Wildling, Hadley trusted Axel and this new Wildling tribe only as far as she could throw them. It only made sense to keep her secrets.

Most of them.

Axel was gentle as he dressed Hadley's stitched up wound with a poultice of the mashed leaves in the pestle. Despite her reticence towards Wildlings, she felt at home in his presence.

"Alright," Axel finally said, stashing away the pestle. "I can't see any signs of infection or sepsis, but if that changes, the poultice will help. Everything's seems to be healing well though, so feel free to join the others."

Hadley remained seated on the cot, wringing her fingers. Axel cocked his head at her, his brow furrowed.

"I was hoping you could help me with one more thing, Axel." Hadley finally said, her voice shaking ever so slightly. She cleared her throat and looked down, more than a little irked she couldn't do this on her own.

"Sure! Anything. Within reason, of course," he gushed. Hadley looked up and found him giving her a shy smile. "Although, for you, Hadley Fisher, I'd probably consider stepping outside reason."

There was that reverence added to her name again. Hadley didn't know what to say to that, and she couldn't tell if he was flirting or being serious – or both.

"I'm pregnant," Hadley said, choosing to cut to the chase.

Axel's smile disappeared.