Wild Hearts

by Bridget Essex

  Sounds rise from behind me. They're sounds I'll never forget. Clicking and crunching and snapping...

  And then...

  A soft, final thud.

  And silence.

  The odor of blood is thick in the air. Nausea rises in me instantly, and I'm dry heaving again.

  I would normally give my full attention to this task.

  But I wipe the back of my hand over my mouth, grind my teeth together, force my jaws shut.

  I turn, and I look.

  The man's dead.

  I know he's dead the minute I get a glimpse of him.

  I've seen dead bodies before, but they were always carefully posed and covered in makeup, lying on satin in coffins.

  Restful.

  I've never seen anything like this.

  I don't make out much in my quick glance at the body.

  But what I do make out will remain in my head until my last day.

  I take in the pooling blood on the ground, his form heavy, limbs akimbo. It's an unnatural position to be in, an awful, crumpled heap.

  I'm dry heaving again, despite my resistance to it.

  I groan, curl my fingers into my palms against the ground, head hanging and heavy. Yes, the nausea is pulsing through me, but right alongside it is something else.

  Fear.

  I look up again, because I need to see where it is.

  And it's there, still there, standing over the body of the man.

  The wolf.

  Its fur ruff shines softly as it turns its massive head. Blood drips from its jaws. This is not normally something I'd be able to make out in the dark.

  But the wolf's fur shines.

  It shines everywhere the coat is not matted with blood.

  Its fur is slick and dark around its mouth, down the front of its chest.

  These parts do not shine.

  These parts are black as midnight.

  Devoid of light.

  The wolf closes its wide jaws, its lips easing down over its teeth. It lifts its great head, and it watches me with unblinking eyes. As closely as I watch it.

  The blood pools out slowly from the body, tracing its way across the linoleum.

  Soon it will touch the wolf's front paws.

  I stare down at the paws, and I blink, shake my head a little.

  Wait...

  That's strange.

  They look like paws, yes. But I thought, just then, that they also looked a little like...well...

  Hands.

  The wolf's toes are long. That's not something I noticed before. It's...odd. It makes the wolf appear sort of elongated, strange.

  Disproportional.

  I flick my gaze back up to the wolf's face.

  Or...

  What was the wolf's face.

  Wait.

  Wait a minute.

  I reach up with a shaking hand, press cold fingers to my forehead.

  My head must be bleeding.

  I've got to have a concussion.

  That's it.

  That explains it.

  Because nothing else can.

  I stare at what's in front of me, and, in some strange background place where my thoughts just keep on thinking without much input from me, a small voice tells me:

  Run. Get out of here. Everything about this is wrong.

  Go.

  Go now.

  But I don't listen.

  There should be fear rising in me. There should be terror, abject and absolute.

  But I don't feel anything like that.

  Instead, I stare at what's in front of me, and I feel nothing but that strange flicker from before.

  Awe, I suppose. There's awe in me as I watch what's happening.

  Because something is happening.

  Something is changing.

  The wolf rises before me. But this time, it's not leaping into the air, ascending over my head like so many stars.

  Instead, the creature is lifting its snout, is closing its eyes. Its spine is...lengthening, somehow. Its back legs, too. Is the fur falling off its sides? Or growing backwards, sinking into the beast? I don't know. There's light, actual light, rippling over its flanks, its ribs, its snout, and as the white fur recedes or falls away, I see skin.

  I don't know what wolf skin is supposed to look like, necessarily. It's not something you think about, pretty much ever. But whatever it's supposed to be...

  This isn't what I would have imagined.

  It looks like...

  Well, it reminds me of something...human.

  I stare at the wolf, and I realize that all of it is starting to remind me of something human.

  I know, I know: terror should be eating me up in great big bites right about now.

  I should be running out of this place screaming.

  And, at the moment, the sane, rational thoughts in the back of my head are certainly upset at me. They're screaming things on loop like get the hell out of here. And they're doing it as loudly as possible.

  But that's just the background noise.

  Everything is background noise, right now.

  Except this:

  The wolf lowers its head, muzzle almost level with the ground, and as it bends forward, I watch.

  I stare.

  The white fur at the back of the wolf's great skull...that fur doesn't recede.

  Instead...it grows.

  It grows long.

  Like...

  Like human hair.

  This is impossible. I know. It's absolutely impossible.

  Is this even real?

  I watch as toes become fingers.

  Fur-covered shoulders bend and reshape themselves to be of a contour I can understand. That's...familiar, somehow.

  My breath catches; my heart stutters. Everything inside of me slows down and just...stops.

  For the wolf in front of me...

  Isn't a wolf anymore.

  A woman crouches in the pool of blood.

  A woman.

  Not a beast.

  A human being.

  She's completely nude. One knee presses firmly against the ground. Her other knee is drawn up against her breast. Her fingers and palms are spread hard against the linoleum, and, as I watch, she slowly curls her fingers into fists.

  Her knuckles glare white in the darkness, as if she's gripping something defiantly.

  Her head is bowed to me, her long, white hair flowing down and over her face.

  White hair. It's incongruous with the rest of her, not necessarily because of the coloring, but because white hair usually equals age...doesn't it? But I don't think she's older; at least, that's not how her body looks to me. I can see the slant of her broad shoulders, can see the muscles clearly standing out in her thighs, can see the contours of her back, the slope of her spine, the curves of her hips...

  The place is dark, quiet, but as I concentrate hard on what's right in front of me, trying to make sense of it, I realize:

  I can hear her breathing.

  It's ragged, quick, which is why it became distinctive to me in the stillness. She's panting like she just ran a marathon...

  She's panting like she just killed a man.

  But I'm not even entertaining that thought, am I?

  It's not possible.

  It's not possible.

  This naked woman in front of me... She's not the wolf.

  She can't be.

  I blink, squeeze my eyes tightly shut, then open them again, as if that simple action could possibly alter what's right in front of me. But if I was hoping for some sort of explanation or for everything to go back to “normal”...I was sorely mistaken.

  Because when I open my eyes, there's still the dead body crumpled on the floor.

  There's still the pool of now-congealing blood.

  And in the very center of it is now crouched a naked, white-haired woman.

  Her head has been angled down, her hair sweeping down around her face so that I can't see it at all. I can only see her body. But, as the w
oman's panting starts to slow, she shakes her head a little from side to side, as if she, too, just hit her head on the old linoleum. As if she's trying to shake some normalcy back into the night.

  And then she lifts her chin.

  We stare at one another, across the small distance between us.

  Everything in me goes quiet.

  Her face is angular, with high cheekbones, a devilish jaw and a high, sloped nose: her face looks wolfish. I don't know why, but something about her strikes me as wry, almost cocky, as if she's used to wearing a crafty smile, and often. Her mouth is open as she pants, her full lips wet as she gazes at me.

  Oh, God...

  They're wet with blood.

  Our eyes catch.

  She holds my eye contact with a surprising level of dignity for a naked person crouching next to a dead body.

  It's those eyes that make me pause, those eyes that make me narrow my own, considering why I recognize them.

  But I don't have to think about it for long.

  I already know, know in an instant as we stare at one another in this strange, quiet place.

  Those eyes are ice blue eyes, eyes so bright they almost glow...

  The eyes that, up until a moment ago, existed in the face of a white wolf.

  And are now hers.

  Everything's so quiet that the roar of the storm outside is getting louder, noticeably so.

  But I don't look away, out the windows at the whirling snow.

  That's another world that does not concern me at present.

  This?

  This does.

  I open my mouth, and I shut it.

  And then I whisper:

  “What the hell is going on?”

  It's not emphatic. To my own ears, I sound mostly numb, partially dead: in a state of shock I have no idea how to come back from.

  Thankfully, the human body is resilient.

  I flick my gaze to the dead guy on the ground.

  Well.

  Mostly resilient.

  The woman lets out a sigh, and I find myself looking back at her. Anyway, she's a lot more pleasant to gaze at than a dead guy. Kind of really pleasant, now that I'm thinking about it.

  Not that I should be thinking about it, not at all, not even a little bit.

  But when she pushes up and off from the floor with her palms, rises evenly into a standing position, everything is just...well...

  I mean, she's very naked.

  I gulp down the cold air, try to think of something to say.

  Fail.

  So, instead, the woman speaks.

  She doesn't answer my question. Instead, she says: “We've got to get out of here.”

  Her words are matter-of-factly growled. She's got a no-nonsense tone that almost makes me obey, almost makes me get up myself.

  Almost.

  There's a lot of neurons firing in my brain currently, and a whole hell of a lot of processing going on, so I'm going to tell you everything that happens all at once, but I'm going to tell it calmly and rationally, so you can understand it perhaps a little better than I can.

  When she was crouching on the floor, I could make out that she had kind of an athletic build. I'm not the kind of gal who's ever seen the inside of a gym, much less worked out in one, but I'm pretty sure this lady has a favorite sport and knows how to play it.

  And how to play it well.

  Now that she's standing straight in front of me, I can see the slopes of her abs, the curves above her hips. She's muscled there. Not tremendously so, but the fact that she's in damn good shape is one of the first things I notice when she stands.

  One of the first things.

  I can already tell that my face is flushed, because despite my best intentions to absolutely, positively not look at anything below, say, her collarbone, my eyes just sort of drift there. I can't help it.

  But she's got this effortless grace to her, something evident in every slope of her body, in every shift of weight, settling into muscles that move fluidly, practically rippling beneath her skin.

  I blink.

  I clear my throat.

  I feel that maybe, possibly, probably, I'm going to faint.

  The woman in front of me frowns. It's a smooth motion, her full lips curling down slightly at the corners, a line appearing between her brows that wasn't there before.

  Her eyes narrow.

  “Don't pass out,” she commands.

  Again, the voice is low and throaty, and if I were at a dinner party in a party dress, laughing over cocktails with her, I'd compare her voice to velvet. But I am in a situation that's not even on the same planet as cocktails and party dresses, so: let's compare it to grating steel.

  I stare at her, she stares at me, and—again, despite the dead body, despite the blood, despite her nakedness—I actually bluster a little.

  “Screw you,” I tell her.

  Succinct.

  To the point.

  But perhaps not the best thing to say to a murderer.

  Or, perhaps, a wolf woman.

  A...werewolf.

  Because is that what I'm dealing with? Is that what this is? Seems absolutely ridiculous, like talking about Godzilla or Mothra or the Easter Bunny. But that's where we are currently.

  “Screw you” is the best I've got going right now.

  And that's why I say it.

  There's a small part of me that wonders if she's about to transform back into a wolf, and I'm about to get my jugular sawed in half. Maybe I'm about to cut out to darkness and oblivion and all of my many, many questions will simply remain unanswered (and who knows: I might become a great big question mark myself. Two random, inexplicable dead bodies don't usually show up in McKeesport convenience stores. Usually).

  But that's not what happens.

  Instead, the woman puts her head to the side.

  She considers me for a long moment as she raises a brow.

  She pins me in her sights.

  And she begins to chuckle.

  It's a low sound, so I wonder if I'm even hearing it at first. It almost blends with the thrum of the storm. But she's grinning when she glances my way, and her eyes, so bright, are brighter still as she shakes her head.

  She moves forward.

  She strides with a predatory grace that is sort of hypnotic.

  Maybe that's why she reaches me before I've even had a chance to react.

  She darts toward me, her hand closing tightly about my right wrist.

  And her laughter stops.

  “We've got to go now,” she growls to me.

  “Go?” I'm so shocked that she manages to pull me standing—not ungently—and then forward three steps, almost to the edge of the congealing pool of blood, before I put on the brakes.

  “I'm not going anywhere with you,” I gasp out.

  She shrugs, glances at me over her shoulder and then she just...

  She just lets me go.

  Just like that.

  Instantaneous.

  “Suit yourself,” she murmurs.

  She crouches down at the edge of the blood, glancing the man up and down with a small frown. “He'll have to do,” she mutters, and then she stands and—without an ounce of decency—she puts the ball of her right foot to his shoulder and shoves him over completely onto his back.

  I stare as she crouches down and begins to unbutton his coat.

  “See, in a couple of minutes,” she tells me, her fingers moving quickly down the line of buttons, then onto the buttons of his shirt, “they're going to get here. And then they're going to take you. And then you're going to die.”

  I'm shaking.

  When did I start shaking?

  “What are you talking about?” I whisper.

  “This fella,” she grunts, rolling him over onto his stomach so she can peel his shirt and coat off of one hairy shoulder, “was sent to kill you.”

  I don't say anything.

  I can't.

  She rolls him over completely, a three-sixty, and dislod
ges the coat and button-down shirt, tossing them into a pile over her shoulder where they lie just as haphazardly on the floor as the body at her feet.

  She begins to unbutton his jeans.

  “What are you doing?” I manage. Yes, I'm in shock. Yes, I've got absolutely no idea how to process this.

  But, I mean...she's undressing the dead guy.

  That kind of takes priority in my brain at the moment.

  “What does it look like I'm doing?” she asks me. The jeans button is undone, his zipper is down, and now she moves to his feet, tugging his boots off one by one.

  And now his socks.

  “Um...” I clear my throat. I refuse to sound hysterical, even though hysteria is bubbling at the edge of my vision, ready to froth up and over and carry me away.

  I'm stronger than this. I am. I curl my fingernails deep into my palms, clench my hands into fists.

  And it's then that she glances up at me.

  The jeans, the boots and the guy's socks are all in the pile of discarded clothing now. The guy lies in a much more grotesque heap, only wearing briefs. He looks so pale in the strange, soft light from the snowstorm.

  Pale and very, very dead.

  “You can believe what I tell you, or don't. That's not important to me,” she says with a shrug, but there's some thread of sympathy in her, because when she glances at me, her eyes have softened a little. At least, I hope that's what I'm seeing there. “The only important thing is that you get the hell out of here. But if you want a chance of survival, you're going to come with me.”

  I don't know what to say. She's sitting on the floor now, pulling the socks on over her feet, up her calves, following after that with the jeans.

  I'm in shock, I know I am.

  And I don't know what to do.

  “This...this doesn't make sense. This guy wanted to kill me? Why would anyone want to do that?” My questions are beseeching, as if she might be able to make sense if I ask her with enough conviction.

  The jeans are slid up and on, over her hips, and they're too big, but not by much. They gape open a little at the stomach as she stands. She tugs the shirt on over her shoulders. The gap of cream-colored skin down her middle disappears as she pulls the shirt's two sides together, starts doing up the buttons.

  “I hoped that I could stop them from getting to you right at their source. But I couldn't.” She's toeing on the guy's snow boots now. They're too big for her, but she yanks the shoelaces tight with a viciousness that surprises me.