by Leigh Evans
I had a body, a perfect instrument of balance and grace, and I enjoyed using it. As a mortal, I’d never been able to so much as jog to the kitchen before without being aware of my weight, of the heavy bounce of my breasts, of my feet slapping on the hardwood floors. But this was so much different. I knew my paws must have touched the ground.
I knew I didn’t fly.
Physically impossible, right? And yet running as a wolf was a very similar sensory experience to those times in Threall when I effortlessly skimmed the air above the ground, a bird without wings, a mortal without the fetters of gravity holding me earthbound.
Also? Nothing beat lupine concentration.
That’s the second thing that hooked my fascination. A wolf intent on hunt thought of little else, and let’s be honest. Mortal-me had the attention of a gnat.
Make no mistake. It was strangely addictive to be so single-mindedly focused. When you poured everything you had into one single activity, all the other crap was silenced.
No questions.
No anxiety.
No wandering down paths of needless speculation. I found the utter purity of unwavering commitment to be cleansing. I clung to that single-mindedness, diving deep into her mind-set, because the alternative was pacing under an overhang of rock. Glancing at the sky. Wondering where he was … No, not where, but if.
If he was still safe.
I sank deep inside her, and I let her carry me. We pursued the scent of the porcupine, snout to ground, tail fat with excitement. We ran; we veered; we crisscrossed our own path.
That is, until our prey found a tree.
And then, oh man, what I’d have done for a pair of opposable thumbs.
* * *
Enough; eighteen times around a tree does not make the porcupine fall from it. Once I recognized that, my joyous lupine moment deflated. What the hell was I doing? I shoved her out of the control seat and, with a heavy sigh, sat down, prepared to bring her to heel.
We’d covered an amazing amount of ground in that short spree and she and I were tired and very thirsty by the time we’d backtracked to the point where I could see the outcrop of rock again.
For the record, a thirsty wolf is far thirstier than a dry-parched mortal. I could smell water, and its scent struck me as sweeter than the honey the farmer’s market used to sell. I made a short detour, seeking to slake the ache in my throat. I found running water. Shallow, not very wide. Another one of Merenwyn’s freaking rivers or, more likely, another annoying tributary that led to the River of Penance.
I hoped it was the latter. I could still visualize the map Trowbridge had drawn me. Once I got back to the overhang where I’d left Ralph, I’d perform a recon and use the river as a reference.
I padded into the stream, then unhinged my jaw and let my tongue unroll.
Oh yes.
I lapped, and lapped, and lapped. As a method of drinking, the furry version was messy and a lot of work, but it felt far better than downing a glass of juice. Maybe it was all those taste nodules. Maybe it’s because of my lupine one-thing-at-a-time absorption in the task.
The water’s surface was a wavering mirror.
Well, hello, beautiful.
My wolf had nice ears.
We heard a rumble and we lifted our head to gaze at the sky. It was clear. The moon baleful, the stars bright dots of light around it.
Another low grumble of distant thunder.
My left ear pivoted.
There. In the northeast. Together, my wolf and I searched the night sky again, cringing when it was lit up by a jagged flash of lightning in the distant northwest.
A single thundercloud, a personal hellhound.
Trowbridge.
We paced; we watched; we listened. The thunder rumbled eight more times, but there were no more strikes beyond that single abbreviated fork of electricity, issued from a single small storm cloud that hovered low over the distant hills.
Finally, the cloud began to move again. We watched it until we could see it no more.
The need to howl was deep inside me. I kept it smothered. I kept it leashed.
But how I wanted to howl.
* * *
The path of the least resistance is a well-trod one. That’s one of those sayings you frequently stumble over. Either in essays preaching moral turpitude or in one of those entertainment magazines that are trying to be sly as they dispassionately detail a starlet’s slow slide to a dismal future.
Anyhow, the cliché is worn but true.
I was dog tired. And worried about the storm cloud, and Trowbridge, and the day ahead of me. My mortal anxiety provoked a terrible hunger. For food. For my mate. For warmth. For my mother-that-wasn’t, for Harry, for Anu, for Biggs … for people I knew but didn’t even like.
I was filled with the need to be connected with something living, even if it wasn’t my species. I nosed the ground. A large animal—a deer from the scent of it—had left a trail. The scent of it made my salivary glands flood.
I followed the tracks, ever so often glancing upward to make sure that I wasn’t getting too off course from my intended destination.
It happened where the path narrowed to thread itself between two trees.
There was a click.
My ears heard it—What was that? Then before my brain could catch up to what I was hearing there was a snap.
Excruciating pressure on my hind leg.
Oh Goddess, what’s got me?
Around ankle—paw—leg—what was it? The closed jaw of metal teeth.
Get it off!
Chapter Seven
Ugly. Black. Metal. Thing.
Teeth biting me. Metal mouth closed on my hind leg. Long chain attached to the thing. Staked somewhere. Couldn’t see where.
Trapped.
My wolf’s panic flooded me. And whatever slender control I owned over her feral nature broke. I was all animal, beyond reasoning, a senseless crazed beast who didn’t understand that it was a Fae-made device that had me caught in its teeth.
To my wolf it was a thing. A terrible thing.
In frantic fear, we thrashed and rolled, heedless to the injuries we were adding in our desperate attempt to flee the jaws biting down on us. A horrible repetition of action began: lunge, yelp, nip, chew.
Freedom. Fight. Live. Run.
Bad thing.
Bite.
My gums grew bloody. Caught in the cycle of reaction, time elongated and all mortal means of measuring it disappeared. My wolf fought; I endured, unable to wrestle control from her until her flight response receded into a dumb, blind resignation.
Exhaustion wore it out.
And finally, the moment came when I eased my wolf aside and took ownership of our body. Sides heaving, we lay on our side whimpering, our tortured leg pulled back behind us. I lifted my heavy head and assessed the device with mortal eyes, for a long sick moment.
Goddess.
And thus began the list of wants.
I wanted fingers and opposable thumbs; for my tongue’s sensory buds to be free of the copper taste; for my memory to be cleansed of the sight of my lacerated flesh.
I wanted to go back in time, to before the click and before the snick. To before Mad-one’s visit and her warnings about last chances.
I wanted my wolf’s innate healing process to kick in. Why wasn’t my flesh making an effort to knit back over like it should? Because it wasn’t showing any sign of regeneration at all. Not even on the outside margins of the wound.
How badly injured is a wolf when her body forgets how to heal itself?
More “wants.”
I wanted to tear at the pale throat of the monstrous Fae who’d planted the metal trap so carefully. To feast on the guts of the person who’d dug the hole, and buried the trap, and staked the end of it to the tree. To chew on the bones of the unseen enemy who’d trapped me with this steel-toothed device.
But most of all, I wished that the pain—pulsing, living, biting—would stop.
Ju
st. Stop.
The moon had moved from the middle of my horizon to a few degrees left. How long before I was found? How long did I have to live through this?
What if no one ever came?
A ripple of fear raised my fur into hackles.
I’d used my Goddess’s name a lot in my life. I’d raised it as shorthand for disbelief (Goddess, spare me the sight of another human) and I’d wasted her goodwill on stupid stuff (Goddess, don’t make me fat for eating this Kit Kat).
But now I really hoped that she could hear me.
For I knew that I had to wait.
And endure.
At the very least, until it was morning, when I had hands again, not paws that were useful for digging but lousy for grasping things. The trees around me blurred. Don’t go to Threall. I placed my muzzle upon my front paw. Inhaled the scent of bruised sweet peas and churned-up earth.
One last desperate quiet plea was quietly added before I passed out.
Goddess, I need you.
Please stay with me through the night.
* * *
You see, that’s when my luck started changing. Though I didn’t know it then. But really, few of us do sense a change in opportunity when we’re at the bottom of a very dark pit looking upward at the sunlight, do we? We just see the light and wish we could be teleported to it. We spend so much time longing for a new situation other than misery and hopelessness that we’re insensible to the moment someone scoops us up with gentle hands and lifts us higher.
But believe me. My luck had changed and my Goddess had heard me.
For I lost consciousness.
And that was a very good thing, for it gave my Goddess time to work things out with Karma.
* * *
I came to slowly. Automatically I moved slightly, hoping to ease the ache, and hot sensation corkscrewed through me, streaking upward from the fire that encircled my ankle.
“You don’t do things by half, do you, Hell?” I heard my twin murmur through my fog of pain.
Lexi?
A shudder of dread. Had I fallen asleep? Had I gone to Threall? I opened my wolf eyes. Saw nothing beyond me but the earth I’d churned up with my claws, and the fragments of broken bark, and the water that I wanted but could not have.
“You’re hurt. Tell me what’s happened,” said my brother’s voice. “Where are you?”
I’m here.
“I don’t know where ‘here’ is. Open your eyes again so I can see through them.” A hand stroked my fur, from my thick ruff to my rear flank. “Please, Hell. Show me what you see.”
I lifted my heavy lupine head and looked around me. There was no fog, no smoke, no mystwalker, no twin. Lexi was not by my flank. Not by the top of the narrow trail. Not by the ribbon of water. He was not there.
And there was nothing to see. Except my wolf’s mangled leg stretched behind me, and bits of fur and other stuff I didn’t want to look at.
“God’s teeth,” said my brother, shock sharpening his tone. “She’s caught in a trap.”
Get it off me.
My fur ruffled as phantom fingers moved down the tendons of my leg. “It’s bad.” His voice sounded terrible. Anger cutting into it. “She’s done a lot of damage. She’ll never get out of this on her own.”
Who was Lexi talking to?
Is Mad-one there?
I waited, ears pricked forward. Maybe Mad-one had more healing. Maybe she could come visit me and place her hand on my paw and I wouldn’t hurt so much. I waited a long time for an answer. Too long. My head grew weary of the effort of holding it high. I let it droop to my front paw. There was no one here, except me, and the trap. No people. No friends.
Alone.
“You’re not alone,” he told me, his tone rough. “We are all here.”
All? I repeated the word inside my head, knowing it was important. The reasoning part of me was dulled; my brain circled around the word “all” like a wolf examining something that smelled bad.
“Don’t think so hard,” said Lexi.
And then I felt it—the gentle push of his mind against mine, the knock-knock he used to send me before we exchanged a thought-picture.
Yes. I sighed, gratefully abandoning the task of thinking.
I opened my mind and felt him slip in. Warmth. Twin-ship—two vessels on the same current of emotion and thought.
I was not alone.
Then I felt an interior tug, one I’d never encountered before. Followed by the oddest stretching sensation, as if my twin had caught the tailing length of my pain and he was pulling it out of me and bringing along with it the awful memories of this night, and the night before that, and even beyond that, back to the dreary life between the night of his abduction and the day I found Trowbridge.
If only briefly, my twin emptied me of some of the awful, and, in return, he sent me an image. A thought-picture—of us, the summer before he was taken. A towheaded boy and a brown-haired girl sitting on a boulder, set by the edge of a pond. Dirty knees, sunburned cheeks.
I sent him back another image. Of the trail from the Creemore fairy pond that leads up to the Trowbridge ridge. Then, on the heels of that, another of the house that could have been made into a home.
I want Trowbridge. The thought was a cry.
The answer came after a long pause, during which my hopes climbed to pitiful heights and my little wolfish heart thudded hard. Eventually, my brother said quietly, “We can’t, shrimp. We can’t send him.”
Why not? I howled in frustration.
“Mad-one doesn’t know where to find his soul in Threall.”
Mad-one’s there?
“I’m talking through her.”
That didn’t make much sense to my lupine brain. I let out a whine of frustration and chewed at my paw. A moment later I received a hazy image of Mad-one’s hands pressed upon the spines of both trees.
Tell her to come. I need her to touch my leg. It hurts.
“She can’t, Hell.”
Then you come. Come and get me out of this. I want to be free.
“I can’t make it there in time, shrimp.” His tone was quiet, but remorse weighted every word. Thick as a raw steak and twice as bloody. “I’ll see you soon. Just rest. We’re sending someone to help you.”
No. I’m going to come to you. I won’t hurt in Threall.
“No! You must remain where you are. Help is on its way. It won’t be long.”
How. Long?
“A few hours.”
If he’d said “thirty minutes,” I’d have cringed. But hours … oh sweet heavens … hours. All those fears and whimpers I’d kept on lockdown broke free. I can’t do it. I can’t last that long. I’m so scared, Lexi. I don’t know where I am—
“But I do. You just have to wait. Then I’ll see you at Daniel’s Rock.”
I don’t know how to find my way there! I don’t know the land. I don’t speak the language—how can I find my way if I can’t speak the language? And I don’t know these people—oh, Lexi, what they’ve done to the wolves—
“Shrimp, you know the language.” Another stroke of an unseen hand. “You spoke it in Threall. You just need to remember it.”
I can’t—
“I’ll help you remember it. I have magic … it will help.”
Shivering, I leaned into the phantom’s cool caress.
“She’s in pain,” I heard Lexi say in a low voice. “Give me more magic, Mage; give me…”
Don’t make bargains with the wily old goat. He’s tainted, Lexi. His magic will be bad for you. Just stay here with me until help comes.
He wasn’t listening. Ever headstrong, he kept talking to the mage.
“Give me more magic!” Lexi shouted. “I don’t give a shit what it costs. You do this, Mage … Don’t tell me I’m not ready. I’ve been in this hell long enough. Don’t stand in my way—Yes! I’m guilty of a lot of things. Don’t lecture me now, Mage! Stars, I have not asked for much, but you will give me this. Give me the magic to take her pain.
”
Lexi. Don’t. You don’t want this pain.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said quickly. “You’re going to feel good soon; I promise.”
Don’t do it.
But had he ever listened to me? The pain … it had been a weighted blanket that I couldn’t remove. Suddenly I felt it lift, and now my legs could move without hurt and the air could circulate and the dreadful cloying heat of that horse blanket was gone … It was gone … It was gone …
“Don’t cry.” The pacing of his words was strange, as if he was talking between deep inhales.
I’m not. Wolves don’t cry.
He didn’t answer. Not for a long time. And then I felt his hand again, resting on the side of my fur. It trembled. And I did something that I didn’t understand but felt compelled to do anyhow.
I lifted my bloodstained snout to the moon and howled.
* * *
I woke to dulled sensation, half-aware of birds chirping and the vague distraction of other sundry “let’s greet the morning” forest sounds. I ached unbearably, both inside and out.
I knew myself to be alone.
And likely, I’d spent the night in solitude. For I was still here: near enough for the water’s scent to torture my throat, completely unable to slake my own thirst.
Lexi’s voice had been a hallucination, born of my loneliness and pain. I’d wanted to believe that my brother would rescue me like he had when were kids and playing Knights of the Round Table. I’d pleaded with my Goddess not to leave me to suffer alone. And when no one came, I’d created a piece of fiction to comfort myself.
Depression swelled.
I was still stuck in the trap. And now, smelling my own blood, I was utterly convinced that the conversation I’d held with my brother had been completely conducted in my own head. I’d needed him, so I’d presented myself with a facsimile. Not a walking-talking illusion such as Mad-one had presented me, mind you. Just a kindly voice to comfort myself.
It had promised me everything I wanted. Help on the way, a certificate of language proficiency, and of course the much-needed pain relief. The only thing my fantasy bro hadn’t volunteered to do was spring the damn trap himself.
