Page 12 of The Healer and the Wolf: Part One

Pandemonium broke out. The not-wolf-fox was joined by two other, much smaller versions of itself, with drastically differently colored coats, all hissing and yowling, their backs arching.

Now, that was justannoying.

Huh. Annoyed. Yet another new emotion. And yet I couldn’t even process it because the creatures were all still warbling like the world’s most angry crows. It grew to be too much, too quickly, and I tried to tell them to stop.

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 likeher.

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 startedhowling.

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 singingtogether.

Together.

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