Page 2 of A Wolf's Heart

My life. Or his.

1

LILA

It was still dark out, yet Max stood next to the bed, his nose close to my face as his hot breath blew across my cheek, demanding attention. He gave a huff, his wet nose spraying on me. It was the same routine every morning. I reached up to wipe my face with the blanket, letting out a sigh.

That was all the confirmation my furry friend needed that I was finally getting up. After a bark of excitement and a twirl, my German shepherd partner stared at me with a tilted head.

“Yes, Max, I’m up,” I mumbled, pulling the covers up higher in an attempt to snuggle back down into warmth.

Not that it worked. Max grabbed the corner of the comforter and began tugging. I didn’t bother putting up a fight. I never won when it came to him. I sat up on the edge of the bed to get my bearings while Max retrieved my slippers and dropped them off next to my feet, taking a few steps back and sitting down. I probably abused his police dog abilities a bit, using his smarts for my own personal gain, but this wasn’t a trick I’d taught him. He just knew getting my slippers on was one step closer to going outside.

“You know there’s a doggy door, right? That it’s always open for you to go in and out whenever you want…right?”

Max gave a little huff and sneezed, obviously letting me know that he needed a morning walk with me and was not going out there alone.

“Okay, tough guy, let’s go.” I stretched and yawned before slipping my feet into the soft, fluffy slippers. Walking out of the small master of my two-bedroom bungalow, I went right for the coffeepot.

My house wasn’t the most extravagant. The decor was from my late adoptive mother, and I hadn’t gotten around to changing it because, well, it was home. The two bedrooms were on opposite sides of the one hall, the tiny, practically half-bath, bathroom at the end. A single linen closet was situated in the middle of the hall, and then the house opened into the kitchen and living room.

I remembered there being a wall dividing the kitchen and living room at one point, but my adoptive father had taken it down when Mom was going through her “we need more space” phase. I was young at the time and thought the place was practically a gymnasium, with all the open room. Now it was just Max and me, and the four paces it took to get from the microwave to the couch remained perfect for me.

My coffee mug was already in place from the night before, so I stuck a pod in the single-cup-dispensing machine and pressed the button. The aroma of caffeine filled me with such joy. Max waited patiently, understanding it took me some time to fully wake.

As the coffee poured, I reached for the hook next to the back door and pulled my pink, fluffy housecoat around me. It wasn’t long before I was sipping on the hot liquid gold and walking through my backyard.

The air was cool enough outside that my breath came out in white puffs. A heavy fog fell around the forest that surrounded my property. Leaves were just turning color now, gracefullyfalling to the ground and crunching beneath my slippers with each step. What my house lacked in square footage, it made up for with property size and lack of surrounding neighbors.

I lived on the outskirts of a little town named Port Renderson. It was only a twenty-minute drive to the next city in either direction, though those twenty minutes were peacefully spent driving through acres and acres of protected forest land. Land that I had been guarding since I was a young pup.

Max came jogging back to me, standing a few feet away and tilting his head to the side as if to ask,are you ready yet?

I took a final sip of my coffee, emptying my mug before setting it down on a rock. Slipping off my housecoat, I hung it on a tree as I began stripping out of my pajama shorts and shirt. I stood in my slippers, naked as the day I was born, my clothing neatly hung on the tree. The cold didn’t bother me, but I hated my feet touching the frozen morning ground.

With the first snap of my bones, Max’s tail began to wag, his excitement growing. My shifting phase had sped up over the years, but it still took me a minute as bones and organs broke, pulled, and rearranged, making room and morphing into shapes not humanly possible. White hair grew at an impossible rate, thick and heavy, covering my entire body.

I could feel a part of me relax. My ears twitched on the top of my head, picking up sounds I wouldn’t have been able to hear in my human form. My eyes could focus more deeply, taking in details I hadn’t seen before, while also negating certain color hues that my human eyes were able to detect.

It was always my sense of smell that astounded me, though. Right away, I threw my nose up into the air and took a few deep breaths. A herd of deer had been here last night, no…they were here early this morning. Maybe two hours before Max and I had come outside. One, two, three… I could pick up six different scent signatures.

My wolf was excited, wanting to go after the deer and chase them down, but Max had other things on his mind. Besides, it was rare I chased the local wildlife. I had no desire to frighten them, no matter how much adrenaline coursed through my wolfy veins.

Max waited patiently for me, allowing me time to get accustomed to my senses. Once my eyes focused on my pup, we both froze, each one waiting for the signal, before he jumped and I sprang forward.

I couldn’t run at full speed with him, but we were going fast enough that someone might mistake me for a white husky. As long as I didn’t pause long enough for them to see the size difference between Max and me. Only once did we end up on the community bulletin board, during hunting season. Poor old Dan Huely had gone on and on about the ghost wolf that haunted the forests. He would never live that down; I’d heard them teasing him last Friday at the pub.

We didn’t have enough time during the work week to run the whole perimeter of the town, but we ate up a good distance. Besides giving Max a run before he had to put his vest on, this gave me a chance to spread my scent. To markmyterritory.

Despite being a wolf shifter—or werewolf or whatever proper terminology I was supposed to use—I didn’t know much of the shifter world. I’d been a newborn when I was left on the doorstep of my adoptive parents, but my exact age was unknown. My birthday became the day I was found, swaddled in a thick white blanket with two sprigs from a lilac tree resting on top. Lila was the name my mother, Hannah Evans, had given me.

All I knew about my kind were from fiction novels, movies, and shows. I picked and chose what sounded like it could be legit and what was too far out of this world, except was there really such a thing as too far-fetched? My human bones literally snapped and molded into place to form a massive wolf.

The first time I had shifted in front of my parents, I was four years old. Hannah screamed in horror at the cracking of bones, but once the shift was complete, she had surprisingly calmed down, even when in shock.

She played with me as a wolf pup, keeping me occupied until Jacob, my father, returned home from work. He never would’ve believed her, stating he was sure she had traded me for a puppy, if I hadn’t shifted back in front of him. That day was the one and only time Hannah and Jacob told me to keep a secret. It was a heavy secret I kept to myself to this day, even after their passing.

No one could know the truth about me, ever. The consequences could be dire.

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