by SJ Himes
He lowered himself down, head on his paws, tail tucked around him, and waited. The woods were quiet, and the soft lights he could see with his vision were dim and barely noticeable. The trees slept and there was nothing larger than an owl within striking distance. It was strange; with this new sight, he could see behind himself as well as to either side, all without turning his head in that direction. He mentally explored the sleeping woods in his immediate area, still staring at the road, and he could see the tiny dulls stars that belonged to humans inside each vehicle as they passed his hiding place.
Ghost began to count the humans, slowly, trying to remember what the woman with the long, dark red hair had taught him all those years ago as they sat at the kitchen table, his siblings playing loudly in the living room. He was thinking about whether or not fourteen came before or after thirteen when he saw Glen’s truck coasting along the curve of the road, Cat’s window open, her anxious face peering out into the darkness. He sat up fast, and darted down to meet them, stepping out in front of the truck. Glen slammed on the brakes, and Ghost wagged his tail as his human alpha shook his head, Cat letting out a squeal as they stopped a few feet away.
Cat opened the rear cab door, and Ghost wasted no time getting in the truck. Glen pulled them back into traffic, and Ghost rested his muzzle on the human’s shoulder. His head was bigger than Glen’s, and his human’s shoulders, while broad, were barely big enough to support him.
“Don’t try and snuggle with me, buddy. I said run across the border, not scare the crap out of half of US Border Patrol and Customs. They shut the whole border down when the shots started. It took them over an hour to figure out what happened and start letting people through again.” Glen sounded mad, but Ghost could smell his human’s concern and fear. He licked Glen’s cheek and snuggled in closer, as well as he could while sitting on the backseat. Glen sighed, and reached up a hand, scratching the little divot between his eyes, a place he could never reach on his own. “I really wish you could talk, this would be so much easier.”
Ghost gave his human a soft growl in agreement, and sighed as well. He really did wish he could talk. If only he could remember how to find his human form again. He didn’t even remember what having fingers felt like, much less how to speak like a person. He had trouble remembering his birth name, let alone how to form sentences and what words to use. He’d been Ghost, the wolf, for so very long that Luca the wolfkin boy was a distant dream, indistinct and far away.
Cat snuggled back up to the both of them, and Ghost let himself drift, sandwiched between the two people in the world who he knew loved him, even if he was broken.
He rarely dreamed. Life as wolf was simple, uncomplicated, and he had little to sort out in his head as he slept. Yet when he did dream, the dream was always the same. It was a torture he could have done without, but he yearned for the pain of it all the same. He dreamt of a wide field covered in snow, nothing but a brilliant canvas of stars above and the company of the wind as he ran. He would stop, in this lonely dream of his, and lift his jaws to the heavens and call. Again and again his cry would go unanswered, for what seemed like lifetimes. He would fall to the snow, hopeless in his loneliness and grief, willing the cold to take him…until a howl reached him, an echoing answer winging over the snowy fields. He would leap to his feet and race up a small hill, to see a dark silhouette of a wolf standing at the crest. Yet, no matter how hard he tried, he could never get to the top, the black shadow of the mystery wolf forever out of his reach.
It was a dream he hated having, and he thankfully only experienced it a few times a year since he reached what he assumed was his majority, his time as a pup over.
When he was still little he crept into bed with Glen and Cat, sleeping at the bottom of their bed, their feet tucked under his ribs for warmth. When he got too big for that, Cat got him a thick, comfy rug that she put near the door of their inner den, what she called their bedroom, and he slept across the door, guarding his humans. Some nights, especially during the summer, he spent the nights out in the woods, hunting, running, and calling to the moon. He always got an answer from the sanctuary wolves, but he never once heard the cries of his own kind. He was far away from them and couldn’t remember how to find his way back. Loneliness followed him through the forest, and he eventually stopped going out alone at night, staying with his humans, unable to bear the ache in his heart. He had people who loved him, but they weren’t his people. Yet what they gave him was all he had, and he loved them back. Even if they spent years thinking him a tame, overly large animal. He spent most of his years with them thinking the same, since he couldn’t make himself be a person again. He’d stopped trying, the pain of failure too much to bear again and again.
The truck’s motion on the road rocked him gently, and he pulled away from his humans, stretching out as best he could on the backseat. Sleep found him slowly, peacefully, and he went willingly into the rare dream he sensed waiting for him. He expected to see the snow fields, and braced himself for the loneliness to crawl out from his spirit.
This was a new dream.
He was at the river, soaking wet, and it was dark. He wasn’t a cub anymore, and he felt new, different, his heart full of pain and a weird eagerness that left him off balance. The logs around him were damp, and the air was cool. Insects sang and buzzed, and he kept his head low as bats flew above him, snagging tiny biting bugs from the air. His new ears twitched and pointed at each noise he heard in the dark, and he waited. He was scared, but he would wait, just as Grandpa Shadow told him to. Kane was coming, he had to wait for Kane. Grandpa Shadow told him Kane would keep him safe. He heard a whisper of a thought, in a beloved voice that made his heart hurt with a sharp sting of grief.
He’s searching for you. Hide until Kane finds you. Kane will keep you safe.
He was aware he was dreaming, the world around him immaterial no matter how real it felt. So, when the night brightened, the humans never found him hiding in the logs, and he looked up in the gray light of predawn and saw a great black wolf standing over him, he knew at some level that this never happened. Yet, it felt like it was supposed to…that this is what his morning after a night of horrible heart break was meant to be.
The scent of warm fur, sweet breath, and the dark eyes above him were so familiar, as if he’d run beside this wolf every night for eons. There was a heaviness to his body, a heat that ran through his blood and made his limbs shake. His heart thrummed madly, and every sense exploded. The ground under his paws was richer, steadier, the strength of it more tangible. The wind was cool and gentle, and smelled of living things and clean water. It carried the black wolf’s intoxicating aroma to him, swirling around his head, over his muzzle, across his tongue. His ears heard the deep bass of a powerful heart, beating slowly, each thump comforting and alluring.
He didn’t feel the same anymore, yet he’d never felt more real, more like himself. This was a dream, he was never more certain, but he ached for this reality and wanted to stay here, content and whole.
The black wolf stepped closer, and looked down at him where he hid in the broken pile of logs and bushes. No aggression, no threat was in the lines of that powerful body. Only a sense of waiting, of patience. As if he was asking something, and Ghost… Luca… had the answer.
He wasn’t afraid. Kane had found him.
Ghost stood from his hiding place beside the river, and stepped free, standing tall, fully grown and strong of body, mind, and heart. He felt a sensation of rightness, of equilibrium, and reached out his head and the great black wolf met him halfway.
A FLARE of light across his eyes woke him, yanking him rudely from the riverside dream. Ghost sat up, as a large semi roared past the truck, horn blaring. Dawn sent an overcast and seedy glow over the road, and Ghost curled his lip at the noisy vehicle as it pulled away. They were still driving, Cat passed out, Glen with one hand on the wheel, the other buried in her red hair, as she slept with her head
on his leg.
Ghost growled softly so his human would not hear, upset to be woken from the rare peace he’d felt. He missed the dream with an ache that threatened to steal the breath from his chest, and he wished desperately for the sense of comfort and subtle joy that it had brought him. He recalled parts of it, and he felt a pang of loss to be taken out of that peaceful place. The image of the great black wolf sent a lance of sharp yearning through his heart, and he lay back down, whining.
He wanted to go home. Trouble was, he didn’t remember where it was, or who was waiting for him. He struggled to remember Luca, the boy he had been, yet even those days of walking upright and having hands were dim and ethereal, vanishing if he got too close. He had a horrible, sinking feeling that he’d been the wolf too long and the hope to one day be a man was out of his reach. He sensed he no longer thought as a man; that his mind was too much like an animal’s, regardless of the realization of his calling. Shaman he may be, but untrained and foreign to the ways of the magic that pooled and flowed around him, visible to him even as they traveled over the human’s roads in a machine of steel and fuel.
What good was being a shaman and having magic if he couldn’t fix himself?
Thinner Than Water
“GIVE ME a guarantee I’ll have more concrete results in hand by this time next week,” he said softly, hissing in Dr. Harmon’s ear, “or you’ll wish that magical dog had burned you to a crisp.”
Simon Remus dropped the sniveling doctor back on his feet, and his legs promptly gave out on him, spilling him to the floor on his plump ass. Dr. Harmon scrambled to his feet, one arm bandaged in thick white gauze, most of his exposed skin red and blistered, but for where it was a pallid, leeched shade due to sick dread. Simon smiled, a wolfish expression, and that one look sent the fat little doctor running from the room, mumbling assurances before his off-kilter footsteps sprinted down the hall to the laboratory.
“Fucking humans, none of you are worth more than the stink of your fear.”
Simon straightened his suit jacket, brushing invisible lint from the immaculate gray wool, tugging on his cuffs. The stitches on his right hand itched, but he resisted the urge to scratch at them. He took his time, calming his heartbeat, before spinning to his guest.
The man, or beast, really, was unchanged by the years. Simon, now in his mid-thirties, was still in the prime of his life and fit; whereas this thing, this wolf, masquerading in the form of a human man, appeared to be in his early twenties, ridiculously youthful and in pristine condition for a being that claimed to be centuries old. It was his desire for that near immortality that made Simon mind his tongue and hold back his real thoughts.
“What we lack in bravado, I assure you, we make up in intellect, and where brains fail us, treachery compensates,” Simon said as he walked to his desk, glaring at the irritating folder that bore the lackluster results from his scientists’ failed experiments. Their attempt to genetically graft shaman DNA to a human was a non-starter—the dissimilarities between the two species was too vast. It was that distance in their species that drove Simon to maintain the uneasy truce he had with the werewolf—if he could meld a shaman’s DNA to that of an alpha’s, then he was one step closer to completing his goal. The lone sample they had was almost gone, degraded by time and diluted.
“Treachery,” scoffed the werewolf, “is hardly worth mentioning as a virtue. Didn’t you arrange the dethroning of your own brother?” The hulking brute threw himself down on the couch in Simon’s office, disregarding his glare when a pair of leather boots unceremoniously dropped themselves down on his mahogany coffee table.
Simon dropped his glower when it became obvious the werewolf was unaffected, and he picked up the manila folder and threw it at the werewolf, the stack of papers inside giving it enough heft to make the distance. He snorted when the animal in man’s clothing caught the folder without a single paper being lost and without once taking his eyes off the ceiling. He was gifted with a return toss, and the papers scattered across the office when he failed to catch the folder as elegantly as his guest had.
“You’re hardly one to talk of treachery, aren’t you? How many of your own people have you killed in the last twenty years?”
“All lesser wolves, beta and alpha alike,” the monster growled, and he finally chose that moment to look at Simon directly, eyes flat and cold. “And I’ll kill whoever I need to, to get what I want.”
“Your loyalty to your species is laudable,” Simon muttered, and picked up a stray piece of paper from the mess that littered his desk running a finger over the DNA sequencing codes. Simon lifted his eyes, frustration at the lack of progress in their experiments and his minor burns and cuts on his hands and forearms digging at him. “Why are you here?”
“None of your business,” Roman McLennan snarled, dropping his feet to the floor with a thud and standing to his full height. Simon eyed him warily, and made a conscious effort to restrain his own anger. “I’m on a sabbatical, that’s all you need to know.”
Simon snorted in disbelief, rolling his eyes, not buying it. Looked like Caius finally kicked his son to the curb.
Simon reached down for another piece of paper, this time a color photo, one of a large gray wolf with odd patterns in his coat and bright silver eyes. The same wolf that nearly burnt him and Harmon alive in Canada days earlier, and the one who made the gun explode in his hand, earning him the stitches. It was his first encounter with a shaman directly, and he wasn’t looking forward to a repeat of the experience. He suppressed his rage, and held out the photo.
“Since you’re here, make yourself useful—do you know this wolf?” Simon asked, holding out the picture, and Roman took it after a short pause.
He was watching carefully, as the Clan Leader’s son had a habit of not sharing everything he knew, choosing to parse out information in increments. So he saw the tightening of his grip on the paper, the way his eyes flew open wide, and the stuttered breathing as he took in the gray wolf’s visage.
“Where did you get this?” Roman asked harshly, hands shaking.
“That’s the shaman who nearly burned me and Harmon alive a few days ago in Canada,” Simon said casually, leaning back on the edge of his desk, crossing his arms, mindful of his injuries. “We thought he was a beta due to his size. I wasn’t expecting to see a shaman outside of clan lands.”
“Canada? A few days ago? But… this wolf is dead,” Roman breathed, and Simon got a good look at his face as the werewolf lifted his head, staring at the far wall, face leached of color.
“He certainly is not dead, whoever that mutt is,” Simon replied, still watching. This was interesting. “You told me shamans never leave the clans, their duties. So do you care to tell me what a shaman was doing at a wolf sanctuary in New Brunswick, masquerading as a pet?”
“What?” Roman snapped, looking back at the picture, fingers running over the gray wolf. “What the fuck are you going on about?”
“Harmon, through his contacts with the conservation departments in New Brunswick, was contacted by a woman who runs a wolf sanctuary in Canada. She claimed she had a new subspecies of gray wolf she needed help identifying. Harmon asked for blood samples and more information. The woman sent the samples, which we coded, and it came back as werewolf. He was the only one, and the sample was unique. We wanted more, since what she sent didn’t survive the coding process. It was unique enough to warrant a trip over the border to collect him.”
“This is the wolf?” Roman asked, waving the picture at Simon.
“Yes! Who the hell is that?”
Roman pulled in a deep breath, and for the first time in nearly fifteen years, Simon saw what looked like fear on the creature’s face.
“This wolf… this shaman… should be dead.” Roman held the picture facing Simon, and he looked at it, not knowing where Roman was going with this. He sucked in a noticeable breath again, and exhaled roughly. “If I h
adn’t seen his fucking corpse with my own eyes the day he was killed, I would swear to the Goddess that this was Shaman Gray Shadow.”
“He’s….that Shaman is dead,” Simon said, hope stirring. Gray Shadow’s bloodline was severed, the world’s most powerful shaman dead these last several years, slain in an attempt to kidnap him and his descendants. If Gray Shadow was alive, then their work may actually come to fruition.
“I know he’s dead, so this picture makes no sense. I took the blood sample for you from his corpse before they burned him, I know he’s dead for certain. That wolf, whoever the hell he is, is identical to the wolf I knew as Gray Shadow. He must be related somehow….” Roman asserted firmly, then his voice trailed off, and his tanned face grew even paler. “Not possible,” he whispered. “He died. He fell in the river, and drowned.”
“Make sense, you fool,” Simon snapped. “Who the hell are you talking about? Is this the other shaman, the grandson who was already apprenticed when Gray Shadow died?”
“No. No…this is not Ezekiel. He’s still in Russia, his apprenticeship is over this summer. And his wolf-form is a deep auburn and black, subtle coloration, with green and brown eyes. Not this wolf.”
“You told me, when we first began this venture together, that Gray Shadow only had one grandson who was a shaman. None of his sons became shamans, and only this grandson became a shaman. He’s out of reach in another country on the other side of the world in the wilderness somewhere, so deep my agents never found him. If this demon-wolf—,” Simon stabbed at the picture with a stiff finger, “—looks exactly like Gray Shadow, and you’re certain the old shaman is really dead, then who the fuck is this?”
“All of Gray Shadow’s line is accounted for. All of them, even the ones who died at the gathering, were accounted for, with the dead burned on the funeral pyres that night….all but one,” Roman growled, and his eyes glowed for a second, a wild thing coming to life in their dark depths. “My nephew, Luca, went into the river that day, and his body was never found. He is the only wolfkin unaccounted for after the kidnapping attempt.”