Page 5 of The Lone Wolf Café
But tonight wasn’t the time to worry about long-term plans. I’d find food and shelter, get some rest, and make more important decisions in the morning.
Tonight, I was just a wolf in the woods.
One that wasn’t running away from her fate.
Chapter Two
By the time I caught a quick dinner – I couldn’t find a rabbit, so I settled for a gamey little squirrel – and curled up on the nearby beach, I was so exhausted that sleep came almost instantly. My thick fur coat kept me warm as the ocean breeze whipped at my curled-up form, and the low roar of the waves lapping the shore was a gentle, familiar lullaby.
Since I was so tired, I hadn’t taken much notice of my surroundings. So, when I awoke the next morning to the sour, tingly scent of magic trailing out from the nearby forest, I nearly jumped out of my fur.
My initial concern was that it was other werewolves. Packs were tight-knit communities made up of several family groups, and outside of arranged mate bonds to promote the health of our kind’s genes, they had little interaction with other packs. Werewolves weren’t inherently hostile toward one another, but a young female alone in foreign territory would raise suspicion. If I overstayed my welcome, they’d see me as a drain on their pack’s limited resources and urge me to move on.
I stood up, shook the sand and rocks out of my fur, and dragged my long nose across the ground. I wasn’t certain if the scent of magic was coming from another pack, but there was only one way to find out.
This is stupid.A little voice in my head nagged me as I paced toward the forest. I had to travel over the quiet, single-lane road to do so, and unlike ordinary wolves, I had the common sense to look both ways before crossing.You know this is dangerous. Why do you put yourself at risk just because you’re curious?
I knew it was my human half doing the mental scolding, since my wolf half would never question my natural curiosity. Werewolves were insatiable when it came to investigatingthings. My father claimed it was part of our instinct to fully understand our surroundings and scope out danger. But as I grew up, I began to doubt that explanation. Being nosy had gotten me into trouble more times than I could count.
Curiosity killed the cat.I scoffed.It should be curiosity killed the wolf.
The scent was stronger in the forest. Sharper. It tingled my nose and made me want to sneeze, like sniffing black pepper.
I paused, lowering my nose again and taking several long, deep inhales.
This doesn’t smell like werewolves.
It didn’t smell like anything I had ever encountered before.
I could feel my human half panicking and my wolf half goading me onward as I wove through dense clusters of trees. Since Maine was well into autumn, the forest was on fire with reds, oranges, and yellows, contrasted by the enduring, vibrant green of the pines. The deciduous trees had already started to shed their colors, and the fallen leaves carpeted the ground like a thick patchwork quilt. I enjoyed how they crunched under my paw pads as I walked.
For almost a mile, there was nothing in front of me other than the colorful canopy of trees. Endless forest. But the scent was getting stronger.
By the time I saw the first building, it was overpowering.
I was so startled that I immediately shifted back into my human form, nearly losing my footing in the process. An instinctual reaction to being near civilization – far better to be caught as a human than as a wolf.
An entire town… in the middle of the woods? With no roads?
I stepped toward the first building, painfully aware of how much noise my large human feet were making as they walked over the fallen leaves. The town was made up of small wooden cottages, with much simpler construction than the buildingsback in Bar Harbor. Instead of bright colors, they were dull shades of brown with similarly-colored roofs. As if the entire village was trying to blend in with the forest.
They look cozy, though.I meandered around the humble buildings, studying their exteriors. The largest was a general store, and through the windows I saw rows of homemade soaps and candles, shelves of hygiene products, and more of those cinnamon-scented brooms. There was one on the front porch, and I picked it up and gently swept its bristles across the dirty, leaf-strewn ground.Doesn’t seem to be very useful for cleaning.
The smaller, shabbier building next door was some sort of antiques or odds-and-ends store. Similar to the general store, I could only see what was on the porch or visible through the display windows, but I could still tell this shop was overflowing with the oddest collection of goods I’d ever seen. There were ornate lamps with beaded fringe dangling from the lampshades, various metal sculptures of deities I didn’t recognize, and an entire tea set that was at least a century old and coated in a thick layer of tarnish.
I slowly backed away, as if these eclectic goods could pop out and attack me at any moment, and strolled over to the next shop.
It was smaller than the other two buildings – in fact, it seemed to be the smallest building in the town square. It had a wraparound front porch with two rusted cast-iron chairs perched around an equally rusted table, and from the front door wafted the strong, earthy scent of freshly brewed tea.
Ugh.I wrinkled my nose. I hated tea. My father drank the vile stuff every morning back home. I’d always preferred coffee, but it was a difficult commodity to acquire on Hollenboro. Plus, I was the only one in my family who drank it.
As I was about to walk away, the large, ornate wooden sign bolted above the front porch caught my attention. It was painteda deep forest green, with THE LONE WOLF CAFÉ engraved in a thick, swirling script.
Lone… wolf?
Werewolves. It had to be. I’d come across a werewolf town.
On Hollenboro, our community chose to isolate itself by settling on an island, separated from the rest of the world by the vast ocean. But for magical beings on the mainland, avoiding humans wasn’t as easy. Settling in remote areas, such as in the middle of a forest, was how they lived in secrecy; able to practice their traditions and customs away from the non-magical humans that feared them.
