Hideaway Strath I’ll shoulder the load, and I’ll swallow the shame

Arturo Fearghal doesn’t believe in curses. Or rather, he never used to. He had never listened to his mother’s claims, never believed in her soothsayers and curses and fae. His mind, geared more towards the rational, spurned such notions with a scoff and a roll of his eyes. He wants to greet the idea with the old reactions to it: a scoff and a roll of his eyes. Oh, how does he want to. But he cannot. Too much has happened. Teaghlaigh is …surviving; but he wonders just how barely they are putting along. He cannot help but feel, at times, that they are just treading water: on the cusp of giving up and sinking into the depths of the ocean below. They had thrived once; until Olive had brought Dakarai into their midst. From that moment everything changed and looking back on it Arturo should have chased him, bloodied and injured from escaping Blackfeather Woods far away from Teaghlaigh. Olive, too, because he thinks that the pack’s suffered inflictions have originated and revolved around the pair. Did they bring with them a curse that is not plaguing the pack? Or is it just him? Roarke is gone, very possibly dead and it has been some time since he’s seen hide or hair of Molly; and he now, despite that, it was very possible that Hemlock and him had conceived; that she is expecting. If she is, has he, too doomed her and the children to the same curse that inflicts him? God, he hopes not.

He is in a downward spiral, a pit of seeing his fortunes be a mere echo of what they were at the beginning. The gangster has always believed that he makes his own fortunes, and perhaps the moment he realizes that he is under no curse and that it is his own paranoia that is causing this downward spiral; but being stabbed in the back by one whose opinions you had once treasured left scars. That is a betrayal that time only festers. It is hard to forget and impossible to forgive. The coy wolf knows he needs to snap himself out of this. He knows it. He wants to. If he is weak then Riptide is strong …and the last thing he needs is the parasite coming back to wreck his life even more.

He is broken from his (depressing) thoughts as he catches the scent of Hemlock, his attention focusing upon finding her, and then her when he does come across her, his steps slowing to a halt, a wave of his tail given to accommodate the low rumbled “Hemlock,” he offers her in greeting. He is eager to change the dark path of his thoughts and welcomes the distraction she provides for him.