Wolver's Rescue

by Jacqueline Rhoades

  Time and nature had done their best to disguise the crumpled station wagon below, though there were still spots of bright red paint to prove its original color. It rested almost upright on its nose, the front half disappearing in the underbrush. A tree had forced its way up into the engine compartment and torn its way through the buckled hood that couldn’t be seen, but Bull knew was there. Above the tangle of surrounding greenery, the tailgate, window shattered, was otherwise intact. The car had been there for almost thirty years.

  He is alone and has been alone for a long time. He has no sense of days or months, only long time and short. His human mind, Billy’s mind, tries to hang on to those memories of long ago, but it’s becoming harder and harder to remember what it was like to walk on two legs, sit in a chair, eat from a plate, or drink from a cup. He loses a little more of his humanity with every sunrise he awakens as a wolf. The moon calls to him in a different way than it did in that long ago.

  His wolf is dominant now, has been for some time. His wolf likes living wild, likes the feeling of being uncontained. He has tried to join the local wolf pack, but they have no use for him. He is at that in-between time, too small to be called adult, too large to be a cub. He doesn’t have the strength to fight for his place as a newcomer to the pack. They drive him off. His wolf feels a desperate need to join the pack, but Billy prefers to run alone. He wants no part of the closeness of the pack, though he can’t always recall why.

  He is hungry and on the hunt. It’s cold and his belly hurts with the hunger. Hunting as a lone wolf is hard and small game never quite satisfies the needs of his growing body. His life is a constant cycle of hunt, eat, drink, and sleep. He has been tracking a deer, injured and dragging one leg as it runs. He sees it cross the road below and is about to run after it when he sees the headlights coming and then a second set of headlights. Strange to see two cars on this road so close together when it’s rarely travelled at all.

  Under the cover of the trees, he waits and watches as the second car deliberately runs the first off the road. Billy can hear the screams of the occupants and the crunching of metal as it tumbles over and over down the mountain. Two men emerge from the second car, run to the shoulder of the road and look over the side. They begin to argue, gesticulating wildly with their arms.

  The view from his vantage point is distant enough to make the figures look like characters on a television screen. This is obviously a human matter and Billy has no use for humans, fears them in fact, but his wolf is strangely curious and wants to see how this plays out. The boy inside the wolf shrugs.

  “Know your enemy,” he agrees.

  He watches closely, head cocked as the two shout at each other. His hearing is excellent, but at this distance, he can’t hear the words, only the sound of their voices. One is furious. Billy slinks down the hill in the same manner in which he stalks prey, belly low to the ground, tail straight out behind him. He only hears a few words before things fall apart.

  They grapple and one pulls a gun. The gun’s report echoes through the night. Billy is not surprised by this. The human predators use guns instead of teeth, though he has never seen them turn the weapon on one of their kind.

  The shooter returns to the car and emerges with something in his hand. Billy thinks it must be a radio like the one his father used, though later recognizes it as a satellite phone. He has no idea what the large device is back then, only that it was big and by the way the human holds it, heavy.

  The guy is shouting into it, angry and frantic.

  The next thing he sees does shock him. A bright light flashes from somewhere below the talking man, from down where the car has crashed. Billy knows that light and when the shadow, darker than the night, leaps up and over the shoulder of the road, he knows what it is.

  The phone flies out of the man’s hand. The gun he holds in the other comes up. Billy sees the short burst of fire followed instantaneously by the boom of sound. It is a direct hit to the wolf’s chest, but the shot doesn’t take the wolf down. The wolf lands on the shooter. Bull sees a flash of teeth almost as bright as the flash of light that took the male over the moon and into wolf form. They fall behind the car, blocking his view, but the man’s scream ending in a choked gurgle of sound tells him all he needs to know. He waits for the wolf’s victorious howl, but nothing follows the short battle but silence.

  Billy is no fool. He waits as his father taught him. Long time. He watches. He listens. He moves stealthily closer, painfully aware of the gun and what guns can do. When he reaches the road, he peers beneath the car and sees both the man and the beast. The smell of death is on the wolf and the stink of fear on the man.

  The man is barely alive and trapped beneath the heavy body of the big red wolf. Billy sniffs at him, pokes the man with his snout and jumps back, startled, when the man’s eyes open. There’s a slight shift beneath the dead wolf’s body and Billy shifts with it, stepping back and searching for the cause.

  He sees the hand with the gun and though he knows the hand has no strength left to fire it, Billy does not like guns. He snarls and lunges for the wrist of the hand holding the gun. The satisfying crunch of bone between his jaws tells him that in spite of the constant hunger, he is growing stronger every day.

  Lids close over terror filled eyes and the man takes a last bubbling breath. Billy wastes no time feeling sorry for the man or the dead animal. His wolf has taken over enough of his being that such things no longer bother him. Dead is dead. He has mourned for the loss of his pack. He will not mourn again.

  Death doesn’t bother him, but something else does. The dead wolf is a wolver, just as Billy is. Sooner or later, the car and two dead men will draw another human’s attention. They must not find the wolver. He must move the carcass to a place where it will never be found. Gripping the dead wolf’s ruff, Billy begins to drag the wolf down the steep incline that ends in the sheer drop-off of a narrow ravine.

  Halfway down, he hears it, the cry of a pup. Billy doesn’t want to leave the dead wolf until the job is done. It wasn’t humans who destroyed his pack. They only did what all predators do; prey on those beneath them. It was the wolver who foolishly let his wolf rule his human and drew attention to their small pack that had lived in this territory for years. He can’t leave this wolver behind to draw attention to their kind. Nothing matters more than this.

  Billy the wolf has other ideas. He likes pups, as all wolves do, and since he has control of the four legs, Billy the human has no choice but to go with his wolf half and follow the sound which has become an earsplitting wail.

  The female pup is on her side, strapped to a plastic car seat. A few yards away, a female is slumped forward in the passenger seat of the car. The blood on her forehead is still wet, but her heart is no longer pumping. Seeing the mother and child, Billy now understands the actions of the dead male.

  Wolf must not fight man, nor man, wolf. Kill not for murder or revenge. These were Primal Laws every wolver pup knew and yet this adult male had broken both in an instant. Unarmed, he’d broken those Laws to follow another; to protect his mate and cub.

  Without fingers to unbuckle the belt of the seat, there is little Billy can do for the cub but paw the contraption into an upright position. He licks her face clean of dirt and tears and something dark and sweet.

  “Chocolate.” The human Billy reminds his wolf. He remembers the treats his mother bought for them on the rare occasions when she went to the store.

  When the pup’s face is clean, he nuzzles her with his snout as he’d seen his own mother do to his sister and brother. Her screams settle into heartbreaking sobs. She can’t be more than two or three and her cries for her Mama and Papa bring back memories he can’t bear. He has to get away from this rerun of the past.

  Billy’s wolf fights him when he leaves the child, but this time, Billy fights back as he hasn’t in months. There is a job to do. He has to dispose of the red male. He has to cover their tracks. The night is cold. Trapped as she is, unable to move, the pup wil
l die. There is nothing he can do about that. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.

  His wolf snarls a reminder of Primal Law. “Protect the cub.”

  “I can’t protect her,” Billy argues with his wolf. “You can’t protect her. Or have you forgotten that, too? Let the cold take her. That’s the way it will end no matter what we do. The quicker, the better.”

  His time will be better spent preparing a place to bury her. Digging a hole in the frozen ground with paws and claws is hard work and takes time. He knows this. He’s done it before. Twice.

  The pup screeches when he leaves her and screams while he drags her sire’s body to the ravine. She bellows with anger while he does what he can to cover all signs of his presence. The tone of her voice changes and she shouts unintelligible infant swear words while he digs her shallow grave. She won’t stop and the noise hurts his sensitive ears.

  And then the crying stops and so does his heart. It won’t start again until he finds her, diapered rear end bulging in her blue denim overalls, backing out of the car with a scrap of green blanket clutched in her hand. He yips with relief. The blanket isn’t big or heavy enough to keep her warm, but she isn’t looking for warmth. She is looking for comfort. She rubs the baby blanket against her cheek.

  “Bankie,” she says before she runs to him and buries her face in his ruff. “Mama seepin’. You take care me. Bankie.” She rubs the green cloth against his muzzle as if it will comfort him, too.

  Billy’s heart melts just enough to make room for a little dark haired girl with big brown eyes. His wolf sighs.

  He finds her tiny jacket in the car, but there is nothing else to keep her warm. She struggles into the jacket and stamps her foot in frustration when her little fingers can’t work the zipper. In spite of their circumstances, Billy chuffs a laugh when she slaps the zipper pull and mutters something that sounds like “Shit”. His nose is the next thing she slaps.

  “No,” she says, indignant that he laughed at her failed efforts. He chuffs again and shakes his head.

  They spend the night and some of the next day in the shallow grave, his body curled around hers. She sleeps and chatters, sleeps and chatters until he hears a car stop on the highway above and hears the voices of men.

  He has to use force to pull away from the tiny arms around his neck. As he slinks away to disappear into the forest that is his home, he hears her cry.

  “My woof. My woof. Come back.”

  Bull shook off the memory and looked down at the little wolver beside him. He gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze and kissed her on the nose. “A car wreck. It happened a long time ago. A man and a woman died, but the little girl survived.”

  And so had he. For the next twelve moons, he worked to find a way to shift his body back to human. His wolf fought him every step of the way, but the human Billy won the battle. Billy became Bill and Bill became Bull, who went on to rescue a wolver named Tommie, who rescued him in return.

  He’d checked on the car frequently over the years and after all this time, still wondered at how one family’s tragedy had become his salvation. The memory of that night and its aftermath was always with him.

  Along with a taste for chocolate.

  ###

  For my readers,

  Thanks for reading Wolvers Rescue. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like an advanced announcement of dates for coming books I’ll be happy to add you to our Newsletter list. Just email me at jackie3049@gmail.com or sign up at my website http://www.jacquelinerhoades.com .

  On a more personal note, if you have read and enjoyed one (or all) of my books, and would be so kind, please leave a short review saying so on the site where you purchased it. Multiple good reviews and word-of-mouth are the lifeblood of Indie authors like me.

  Thanks in advance and, as always, Bless you,

  Jackie

  About the Author

  Jacqueline, known as Jackie to her friends, lives in rural southern Ohio with one lovable husband, one spoiled dog and one disinterested cat. She believes coffee is a food group and always has a pot brewing. When not writing, she can usually be found with her nose in someone else's book or working in her garden. She also spends a great deal of time chasing deer and rabbits who apparently also like gardening.

  Jackie loves hearing from her readers and is always willing to chat. She can be reached through her website, http://www.jacquelinerhoades.com/ or at jackie3049@gmail.com

  Other Books by Jacqueline Rhoades

  Paranormal Romances by Jacqueline Rhoades

  The Guardians Of The Race

  Guardian's Grace

  Guardian's Hope #2

  Guardian's Joy #3

  Guardian’s Faith #4

  Guardian’s Patience #5

  The Wolvers

  The Alpha's Mate

  The Alpha's Choice

  The Alpha’s Daughter

  Rabbit Creek Santa (novella)

  Wolver’s Gold

  Contemporary Romances by the author

  Hidden Mountain Series

  Preston's Mill

  Changing Times

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