Filed to story: The Healer and The Wolf PDF Free
Short, sharp barks. The kind that would tell my pack members to?-
Wait.
Where were my pack members?
I had a pack, didn’t I? What kind of wolf didn’t have a pack? But if I had one, where were they?
All those questions only made me bark louder.
“Stop it right now!” the woman yelled.
Silence actually fell, and something strange formed in my gut. It took me a moment to understand what it was, and I realized I was embarrassed.
What the fuck was ’embarrassed’?
The woman said something else, and her voice was trembling so much I almost didn’t understand. But after a bit, I understood that she was telling me I couldn’t be there.
But… but I didn’t want to go.
There was something about her shelter that seemed both incredibly familiar and so foreign. Like a place I was meant to be. Plus, it smelled nice.
It smelled like her.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but she really was beautiful in her strange way. Her only fur was atop her head, but it was thick and shiny. Her eyes were deep and dark, but they were kind. Her figure was… lacking two legs, yet I liked it. Was drawn to it. Liked watching the way that she moved.
So, I lay right back down, belly pressed to the floor once more, and let out a long, heavy sigh.
“Are you really not going to leave?”
She was asking me a question. I didn’t really understand how I knew her language, but I huffed back at her.
To my delight, she didn’t insist I leave. She herded her strange creatures into another space before returning to the room I was half-lying in. While she didn’t pay attention to me, she did proceed to do a lot of things that confused me but seemed important to her, including summoning water from a… from a…
Some very deep part of me knew what the thing was called, but I couldn’t bring the word to the forefront of my mind, as if it was from another life that was just beyond my reach.
I watched her, enjoying her company. She put a small, squarish flat rock on the table, and pleasant sounds came from it. I liked it, even if it sounded a bit shrill and tinny, but nothing could prepare me for when she started howling.
Wait, no, it wasn’t howling. Something different. Her voice went from note to note, and it was so utterly beautiful that I truly wasn’t prepared for the emotions that surged through me. Soft. Sweet. A rumbling sort of undertone from it. Was… was she some sort of bird? Because that was the only other creature I knew that could create such melodies.
I was wholly enraptured. Some of the clouds in my mind were drifting away, leaving the true me-whoever and whatever that was-and her in the space.
Wait, I remembered.
She was singing.
My entire brain lit up in such a strange way that I could not describe, and the next thing I knew, I was howling along with it.
The woman froze, and for a moment, the entire room stank of fear, but I persisted, keeping my body language and yowling gentle, hoping she understood. I was pretty sure she did, because after a painfully long pause, she started singing with me.
We were singing together.
Together.
The word echoed through my mind, something beautiful and sacred. I had been alone for so, so long, and now I wasn’t. It was overwhelming in a painful, beautiful way and, once again, my mind was growing confused from it all.
But that confusion couldn’t take away from the beauty, not even when it grew dark, and the woman looked out the window with a sigh.
“It’s time for you to get some rest.”
Ah. I was being dismissed.
I didn’t want to go, but I understood that she was asking me kindly, so I should respect her wishes. Letting out a sound I couldn’t rightly define, I retreated to the greenhouse.
But even though I was alone again, I felt so much less lonely.
Maybe soon we could sing together again?
VANESSA
I mindlessly stocked shelves as I replayed the incident of the previous day in my head. In the growing drama between my cats, Fork had decided to sleep right on top of the much smaller Mudpie, pinning her to the tallest perch on the cat tree in the living room. That had been a splurge purchase the previous year which I couldn’t really afford, but that’s what tax-returns were for, right? Buying little things that made life easier or more pleasant in order to endure all the drudgery and bullshit for the rest of the year.
I had just finished extracting my extremely clingy, orange-flavored son from his tortie sister when I returned to the kitchen to find a literal wolf partially in my doorway.
And somehow, that wasn’t the start of a horror story. In fact, everything had turned out all right. Better than all right, really. He’d kept me company while I did my mundane nightly chores: washing the dishes, sweeping, mopping, making my lunch for the next day. And I’d even managed to sing with him.
I had to be crazy. That was the only solution. Especially since I was missing the freaking wolf.
I was so concerned with what that could mean, I didn’t realize someone was approaching me until the man cleared his throat a foot or so away from me. I nearly screamed yet again-I’d been doing a lot of that lately-but this time managed to tamp down the instinct.