Shadowed Flame

by RJ Blain

  In the flickering illumination of the dying embers, they were gray, like everything else in my life. The embers were pale, fringing on white.

  Even in my dreams—my nightmares—I couldn’t capture a glimpse of any color. I sighed. If I moved, it’d only take a few feet to reach one of the piles of embers and the warmth they radiated.

  I lurched to my feet—my paws. The instinct to shake and rid myself of the snow clumped to my fur rose. The instant I braced and made the whipping motion, a yip tore out of my throat. Throbbing pain concentrated around my chest and ribs and my right front paw. The rest of my paws ached, but they tolerated my weight better. Stabbing jolts seared through my head.

  Focusing all my attention on the glowing point ahead of me, I forced one paw in front of the other. The logistics of working four paws in unison made me stumble and stagger the first few steps, but I kept upright. I was forced to climb over chunks of wood scattered over the floor.

  The snow and ice hid hot cores within the debris that singed my pads when I broke through the protective layers of cold. I yipped and whined, scrambling over the debris to reach the ruined wall.

  My eyes hadn’t betrayed me; warmth radiated from the glowing embers, and I huddled as close as I could get without getting burned. Through the gaps in the crumbling structure, a world of white stretched into the darkness.

  In the morning, I’d wake up from one nightmare and enter the next, but at least I’d be human.

  Chapter Eleven

  The bouncing beam of a flashlight played over the ruined structure. I blinked away the pain from the glare, huddling closer to the dying embers, which no longer provided enough heat to hold the late-season winter storm at bay.

  Feet crunched through the snow, and someone cursed, soft and vehement. I sniffed, and my nose identified a fresh scent. The hint of male in the air caught my attention and held it, and the part of me that was still definitely human recognized the sweet, spicy aroma of cinnamon.

  A new part of me, the one that liked having a fur coat, four paws, and sensitive nose, had certain ideas of what males were useful for, which fell in line with what had led me into photographing a man’s—Ryan’s—naked chest at LaGuardia.

  The fear Harthel had returned chilled me even more than the snow and ice, and I whimpered. I cowered among the debris. A soft whine escaped before I could control the impulse.

  Thrusting his hand through a gap in the burned-out structure, the male grabbed hold of my neck and pulled me through the hole. A yip burst out of me as pain seared across my ribs and through my chest.

  The backdrop of falling snow turned the man into a dark shadow, his figure tall and far more slender than Harthel’s obese bulk. He towered over me, lifting me up by my scruff before cradling me in his arm. With his other hand, he unzipped his jacket, which my nose identified as leather.

  While I squirmed and yipped and whined in my effort to free myself, he kept a firm hold on me. When I stopped struggling to catch my breath, he stuffed me inside his coat and pinned me to his chest, zipping it up until only the tip of my nose was exposed to the cold.

  “There you go, beautiful. You sit tight and warm up. I’ll have you to the car in no time.”

  My nose didn’t recognize the male, but I recognized his voice as the caller who had threatened Harthel.

  Holding one arm beneath me to keep me in place, he turned and left the lodge behind. I shuddered with his every step, and the pressure of his jacket against my sides made my ribs throb in beat with my heart. While he trudged through the snow, he murmured reassurances. Dark shadows marked his original path, which followed what I assumed was a road or a trail cutting through the forest.

  Headlights guided us to a dark-colored SUV. Its engine was still running, and after he opened the passenger side door, he eased me out of his jacket and set me on the seat.

  He closed the door, circled around the SUV, and slid behind the wheel, reaching up to turn on the car’s overhead light. Despite the illumination, my pain-blurred eyes couldn’t make out his features. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. The cops thought it was a good idea to close the main roads, so I had to take a detour.” Reaching into the back, he grabbed a blanket, which he tucked around me. I fell into exhausted slumber to the gentle touch of his fingers stroking my fur.

  I woke to warm water drumming my back, and the weight of my soaked fur pinned me as effectively as the methodical hand stroking my back and sides. The sweet scent of vanilla soap filled my nose. My muzzle, head, and ears remained out of the showering warmth. Blinking, I took in the granite counters and mosaic tiles of a kitchen, my gaze focusing on the bright light of the time on a coffee maker.

  Something about the numbers, which informed me it was two minutes after five, puzzled me. The gray was too bright, too vivid, but it wasn’t white, either. I stared at it, wondering if the dim overhead lighting in the kitchen was somehow affecting the clock on the machine.

  Maybe an animal’s eyes saw the color gray differently than human ones. I wasn’t even sure what sort of animal I was. Not a cat.

  Cats didn’t have longer muzzles like I did. A dog, probably. Did raccoons have long noses? Wait, I had paws. I definitely had paws. My front ones were draped over a very masculine arm, right along with my chin. They looked like dog paws, not that I had much experience with canines of any sort.

  Dad didn’t like dogs, and dogs didn’t like Dad.

  I had the strangest nightmares. Maybe it wasn’t even a nightmare, but the afterlife. I remembered fighting to breathe and the cold shower, and the way my body hurt, the snap of the bones in my wrist, and the incessant pain. No one could live through so much. Death made sense.

  It made a lot more sense than a person—me—becoming a dog.

  I sighed.

  The faucet turned off, and the arm I rested on shifted beneath me. Moments later, a hand stroked over my head, starting above my eyes and working over my ears to my neck. “Almost done, beautiful. There was a lot of soot and blood in your coat, but it’s almost all out. Just sit tight a little longer, okay? Then I’ll get you dried off and warm, and I’ll make you something to eat. You’ve got to be starving.”

  Did dead dogs need to eat in the afterlife? I didn’t think so, but the thought of waking up to be tormented by Harthel again sent a shudder through me, as did my thoughts of Dad.

  I had no way to tell him I wasn’t really hurting any more, even if I had slipped into a fantastical dream where a man with a nice voice didn’t think it strange I was a dog instead of a woman. There were benefits to being a dog, though.

  Dogs didn’t go to work. Dogs could sleep whenever they wanted. Dogs got away with atrocious behavior, including shoving their noses where they didn’t belong. Dogs could take up enough couch space for three and get away with it, too.

  I didn’t want to be a dog in the afterlife. I didn’t want an afterlife at all.

  I wanted to go home and tell Dad everything would be okay even though it wasn’t. I wanted to find a way to glue back together the shattered pieces of my life. I wanted to live.

  I didn’t want Harthel to win, and he had. Maybe my body no longer hurt, but my bones still ached and reminded me of what he had done and how he had enjoyed slowly beating the life out of me one kick at a time.

  When I kept quiet and still, the man resumed his work, turning the faucet back on to rid my fur of the evidence of what Harthel had done to me. I closed my eyes.

  The dream would end eventually, and reality would come back with a vengeance—or I’d realize I was actually dead. After all, women didn’t become dogs, and there was no way anyone could survive what I had endured.

  Some things were just impossible.

  Reality exerted itself the first time I tried to stand without help. Agony seared through my paw, up my leg, and flattened me, tearing a yelp out of my throat. I slid from the granite counter into the sink and shuddered against the stainless steel, whining with every breath.

  My cry brought the male with the
sweet cinnamon scent at a run, and my sensitive nose recognized the sharp bite of anxiety. The knowledge wasn’t mine; humans couldn’t identify such smells, could they?

  Working his hands beneath me, he lifted me out of the sink while I panted, shaking in the aftershocks of the pain. He stretched me out over a towel, and his fingers stroked down my leg to my throbbing paw.

  “He’ll pay for every broken bone.” While his anxiety remained as an undertone, his scent changed, and after a moment of consideration, I decided the putrid odor was his fury. Puzzled over the strength of his emotion, I turned my gaze to his face.

  While the kitchen remained dimly lit, the shock of recognition swept through me and numbed me to everything but Ryan’s face. The shadow of a new beard marked his jaw, but he hadn’t changed much from what I remembered.

  Of course I’d insert someone like Ryan into my dream. I had wanted nothing more than to see his snowcapped mountains and sapphire skies, but I hadn’t been able to find him, not while I had been alive and human.

  His attention was focused on my paw, and I yipped when his fingers found the injury. I whined.

  Something in me stirred and demanded I twist my ears back and bare my teeth to show my displeasure at the pain. I heeded the instinct, and I added a growl of my own accord.

  A sense of approval at my contribution warmed me from the inside.

  “I’ll wrap your paw so it doesn’t hurt as much, but there’s not much I can do for it. It has to heal on its own.” Ryan gently lowered my paw to the counter and splayed his hands flat beside me. The heated scent of his rage strengthened. “It’ll only take a few days. It shouldn’t even take that long. If I had gotten there sooner…”

  The anguish in his voice confused me almost as much as his ignorance. Broken bones took weeks to heal, sometimes months. I’d gotten lucky at LaGuardia. I had recovered from most of the cuts, scrapes, and bruises in the time I had been in the hospital, helped by the doctors and nurses who had fought to save my life. Ryan had, in a different way, saved me, too.

  My memories of LaGuardia remained blurred, but he had been there when I had needed someone the most.

  I had no idea how our paths had crossed again. If the limited amount I had heard on the phone was any indication, he didn’t even know my name. Yet, somehow, he had called Harthel and lived up to his word he would find me.

  In the real world, the one where I was alive and human, it was an impossibility. He didn’t know my name. I hadn’t given it to him. I had known his—or what he liked to go by—but Sam hadn’t been able to find him.

  How had Ryan found me? Nothing made sense, and I had no way of asking.

  Harthel had sent the photographs and videos to my father, but Dad didn’t know Ryan. Dad would have come on his own, his aura blacker than a night without stars. My eyes were still broken, but if Ryan had an aura, I was blind to it.

  Ryan growled, straightened, and stalked out of the kitchen, returning several minutes later with a first-aid kit, which he set on the counter beside me. Removing a roll of self-adhering wrap, he took hold of my leg and started bandaging.

  The pressure of the bandage hurt, but I swallowed my whines and watched him. When he finished, I couldn’t see any part of my paw and most of my leg was likewise covered.

  “I hope you like beef, because I wasn’t planning on guests. It might be a while before the snow lets up enough to go to the store.” Without waiting for me to reply, not that I could, Ryan went to his stainless refrigerator, pulled out enough paper-wrapped packages to feed five, and went to work.

  The steady thunk of Ryan chopping through meat accompanied his muttered curses. I wasn’t sure what he was upset about, but his cutting board would never be the same. His more enthusiastic strikes left grooves in the wood, and he had to yank on his knife to free it.

  Vegetables didn’t seem to be a part of Ryan’s idea of dinner. I should have been bothered by the exclusion, but watching him cut meat into cubes and roll them in pale flour flecked with spice roused my appetite.

  Standing with one of my paws completely encased in bandages proved a challenge, but I stayed upright. While Ryan had dried the water out of my fur, the need to shake washed over me. Any weight on my injured paw hurt, but I ignored the discomfort to indulge in a full body shake.

  My motion caught Ryan’s attention, and he paused in his chopping to watch me. “Be careful. It’ll hurt like hell if you fall.”

  I kept my distance from the edge and limped my way in his direction, halting at the sink, which served as an effective barricade. Eyeing the ledge behind the sink, I wondered if I could crawl my way across.

  The first victim of my attempt to cross the distance was the dish soap, which I knocked into one half of the divided sink. Ryan set his knife down and arched a brow at me.

  Without the soap in the way, I eased my way behind the faucet. Two sponges and a dish cloth joined the soap in the sink by the time I made it halfway across. My final opponent was a porcelain dish holding two sink stoppers.

  With a soft laugh, Ryan reached over, picked it up, and set it in the sink. “Not very satisfying prey, I’m afraid. Once you’ve recovered and have gained some size and weight, I’ll take you on a hunt. You’ll have to tolerate being an indoor wolf for a while.”

  I froze, staring at him. Wolf?

  Impossible.

  When I didn’t move, Ryan leaned towards me, stretched out his hand, and pressed his finger to the tip of my nose. “Wolves are far superior to poodles, don’t you think? They’re also far better than one of those yipping ankle biters. You’ll find others of our kind do not appreciate being called werewolves, but why try to cover the package with a pretty name? I should be apologizing for what I’ve done to you, but I won’t. I can’t. The alternative wasn’t acceptable.”

  I blinked and crossed my eyes so I could look down the length of my muzzle at his finger. Part of me wanted to bite him. The rest of me was confused and intrigued. Indecision kept me still, and Ryan tapped my nose a final time before turning his attention back to his cooking.

  What alternative?

  Death, I suppose, was a rather unacceptable alternative. But why did Ryan care?

  I made my way along the shelf behind the sink and sat on the other side, focusing my gaze on the meat he was cutting. Hunger cramped my stomach, and I licked my lips.

  Raw meat, including sushi, had never been something I had been brave enough to try. I wanted to grab the biggest chunk of meat Ryan hadn’t finished cutting up so I could sink my teeth into it. I swallowed, and a pleading whine worked its way out of my throat.

  “It’s been in the fridge too long for you to eat raw, beautiful. The last thing I want is to give you food poisoning right now. You’re healing too slow as it is.”

  I turned my ears back. While I didn’t know much about wolves, I was pretty certain the species scavenged for food and had no problems eating old meat. The gnawing pain of hunger distracted me from the other aches in my body, even my paw. The slick granite made it difficult to walk without sliding, so I adopted an odd waddle in my attempt to get closer to the cutting board.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” he said, reaching over and grabbing me by the scruff of my neck. He lifted me up, staring me in the eyes. “You can’t trick me. I’ve seen just how stubborn you are. You’re not getting raw meat. It’ll make you sick, and you’re sick enough.”

  Tucking me in the crook of his elbow, Ryan carried me out of the kitchen into an unlit living room. He dodged the dark outline of a coffee table on route to an armchair situated beside a small couch. Grabbing the throw pillows from the couch, he tossed them onto the floor before setting me on top of the pile. “Your job is to rest. My job is to cook. When it’s ready, you can eat everything you want.”

  Ryan crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me, although the corners of his mouth twitched as though he fought to hide a smile. I sniffed, and my nose agreed with my assessment; he wasn’t angry, and his amusement added a sweet undertone to his s
cent.

  When he returned to the kitchen, I contemplated the little bit I had learned. Were werewolves real?

  My paws and fur told me yes while the logical side of my head screamed no. Dreams, nightmares, and drug-induced hallucinations made sense to me.

  Women couldn’t become wolves.

  My doubts, however, remained. What if they could? What if I had?

  If I had, if I wasn’t actually dreaming, how had I become a werewolf? I had never been bitten by a dog, and the closest I’d ever been to a wolf was looking at one at the zoo as a child. Glass and concrete had separated us, although I still remembered the cunning gleam in its golden eyes.

  What had Ryan done to me? How had he done it?

  I narrowed my eyes and watched Ryan from my nest of pillows. All I knew of him was his love of the snow and sky. All he knew of me was the fact I had a stubborn streak a mile wide and had gone to extreme measures to search for Dad before changing my motivation to help myself—and others—survive the bombing at LaGuardia.

  With luck, maybe he didn’t realize or remember I had taken photographs of his chest before my life had turned into a miserable, pain-filled hell.

  Chapter Twelve

  Food revitalized me, and true to Ryan’s word, he let me eat as much as I wanted. Instead of water, he gave me a bowlful of broth to go along with the meat. I ate until my sides bulged and my ribs ached from the pressure of so much food in my stomach.

  Crouching down beside me, Ryan watched me while I engaged in a staring contest with the last chunk of meat in the bowl he had set down within easy reach. “Finished?”

  I snatched the piece of beef and growled, retreating with the last of my meal until I hunkered beneath the coffee table. I choked it down so it wouldn’t get taken from me.