A Wolf Steps in Blood

by Tamara Jerée

She feels empty and light when the pack sends up a howl to honor the big sky. Her voice is the smallest of them all.

We’ve lost so much that eroding the strongest, sharpest parts of myself makes a grim kind of sense. My ancestors didn’t evolve for this. What use are teeth against the systems that haunt my family, my pack?

I never asked if she did it because she felt powerful that way or because she felt safe. In the end, they were the same. Power was safety.

Shiara keeps one of his finger bones in her pocket, worrying it smooth like a river stone.

“You never try to take down the deer.” I fidget. “It’s not really my thing.” Shiara steps closer. “Blood isn’t your thing? Hunger isn’t your thing? I want to tear out the throat of the world.”

She’d lost her wolf while the magic manifested as intended in me. I could return to the wilderness, and she resented me for it.

So many of my coworkers had husbands or boyfriends who were their rides home. Men were always trying to flirt with me as I rang out their orders. Ruthie, as I’d feared, observed it all. I fumbled for an excuse, certain that if she continued with her reasoning, I’d find myself fired over some little incident and never able to get a job in Pickens County again. People talk, and news spreads fast. These old white ladies would shut me out and turn nice-nasty.

“I wasn’t trying to pry. You’re good here.” And she put her hand firmly down on the counter as if planting a shield between us and the rest of the world. “You understand me?” I surprised her and myself by bursting into tears on the spot, a fistful of bills I’d been counting clutched in my hand.

Mistake because she’s beautiful and very human and very much a witch. My gaze sweeps her up and down, frantic, but I can’t see the herbs she carries.

But as my gaze flicks back to her eyes, I realize what this looks like. “I’m sorry.” I apologize because what is there to say during an unexpected standoff with a witch you’ve unintentionally ogled? I resume my shamed trash-carrying gaze when she stops me.

Despite the stench of the herbs, I want to run to her, wagging my tail. I want her to grasp my fur in her hands. I want to guard her with my life.

“Nice truck,” I say. I’m not sure whether I actually think it’s nice, but it’s the kind of small talk my anxiety chooses. Not Who are you? or Where are you going? or Did you also feel the stars realign?

And we can tell when someone’s nervous. Or lying. The cabin doesn’t smell strongly of her, though the herbs are just beginning to settle into the upholstery. It smells like a man. And beneath his scent, the tang of old blood. So—stolen jacket. I was right before, though not in the way I’d anticipated. I’d thought stolen lovably, affectionately. Stolen as in I wore it so much it kinda just became mine. Stolen as in You can have this thing I love. Stolen jacket. Stolen truck? Did I just hop into a stolen truck for a pretty girl? Fuck. Fuck.

The scent of blood.

Her fear and sadness tug on the fairytale, the wolf, the mystical correctness of us together. But wolves have enough problems as it is. I don’t need to add more.

Red wolves haven’t lived in Alabama since the 1920s. Our ecological status is extirpated, a fancy word for locally extinct. Sometimes, I think of those last maligned wolves from a century ago, hunted and poisoned and trapped as the world closed in around them.

We had to adapt to a different world, a world that wanted us dead. We chose forms like the humans who had helped us only to learn that they too were hated by the two-legged world we sought to join. Even with our new hands, we could not enter the same doors as the lighter ones. Even though the woods were no longer our home, we couldn’t live in the same neighborhoods.

Some of us were still hunted, albeit in d...

Abby watches her go. “No one could pay me to go walking alone in the woods at night.” “It’s just her thing,” I say, popping open my door. “Don’t you go following her.”

Oh my gosh, the layers to this!!

Our water heater is small, and Mom hates when I use up all the hot water, but she won’t be home until morning. I allow myself this one indulgence, crying as if there’s something heavy inside me I have to purge. But it’s not like with food. The weight remains. There’s no relief.

The wolf dreams of running free. No pack, just her, and the thrill of a trail to follow.

I feel as if "The Wolf" is just Yasmine, but at present, she separates her identities—severs the connection between her "human" side and her natural, wolf side.

The wind sings through the trees, and the girl turns, her gaze immediately landing on the wolf. Awed, she whispers, “Yasmine.” The name is strong despite distance, as if the girl had kneeled to whisper it directly in the wolf’s ear, clear as destiny.

The dream feels like a vision, like knowledge. I wake with the certainty that I could find her if I tried.

Again, I feel as if Yasmine is separating her identities. "The dream" feels real, because it is real... I may be totally off-base here, though, and it is just a dream after all.

I’ve never shifted unconsciously before, and the possibility of it startles me.

Yet more evidence for the "dream" being reality.

Except suddenly, it’s not my body. It’s the wolf’s body, and I want mine back.

The focus on bodies, and the wolf not being Yasmine's actual body, is amazing.

I wipe my lips, and the back of my hand comes away smeared with her blood. Suddenly, I hate Shiara—how wolf she always is, how unashamed and unafraid. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I spit.

Instead, she kneels beside the tub again, cradling her chin in her hands as she continues to bleed. “You smelled like a strange girl last night. Then you must’ve dreamed about her—dreamed about her so hard you shifted. Why does that make you angry?”

Guess it was just a dream after all.

I scent the air, seeking the thread from my dream, and feel a tug in my chest. The response is dizzying. Near, I determine. She’s still close. I don’t know how I know, but I do. Seconds later, I feel another tug, as if someone down the line plucked a string leading straight to my heart.

Oh the soulmatism of it all!!

Before I can process the feeling, the wolf tears free.

She sniffs, wipes tears away, and untangles herself from her blankets. “Yasmine,” she says, like in the dream. She jumps down from the truck as if to run to the wolf, only to hesitate when her feet hit the ground. “Yasmine,” she repeats, kneeling, opening her arms.

She smells like salt and leather and coconut, and the wolf wants— I kiss her, the force of it bringing us to the ground. Kalta lands in a bed of pine needles and laughs against my lips, the sound turning to a sharp gasp when I nibble her jaw and kiss her throat. I breathe her in, humming against her soft skin. The world is pine and salt and leather and coconut.

I stand, and she looks me up and down, lips parted on words she’s forgotten. The pulse at her neck quickens, her gaze lingering on the hollow of my throat, my breasts, the hair between my legs. She swallows and takes a moment to find her feet.

She rearranges the blankets and wraps us together. The wolf loves this, the sharing of body heat.

I can’t distinguish my thoughts from the wolf’s.

“Together, both witch and wolf become greater than they could ever be alone. They’ll walk the earth like gods, transformed by wisdom and love.”

But Kalta’s passion rewrites my fate.

We are the figures of each other’s fairytales made flesh.

“It turned this big impersonal thing personal.”

She gasps, and her eyes roll briefly skyward. She is a goddess, already transformed.

She kisses me with her bloody mouth, and we’re tangled in the blankets.

Memories of last night return slowly—testing the link between us, the wolf’s mad dash to Kalta, the . . . bloody sex magic.

Daylight has turned us monstrous.

The wolf catalogs it all.

Kalta grins, and the wolf wants to howl. I love her smile.

I lean against her and breathe her in, the wolf unable to get enough of her scent.

My anxiety rises as we near the trailer, and between the wolf’s sensory distress and my own fears, I’m frayed when we arrive.

I hop down to the lawn wearing only a blanket and reevaluate all the choices that led me to this moment. I smell like blood and sex, and I’m certain my mother is storming across the lawn to murder me in front of my fated mate.

“You’re such a useless girl,” Mom cries, but her voice is tender as she says it, her tears soaking the blanket through. “I know,” I say, because I’ve always felt it, have always felt that she wanted to tell me exactly this.

“You’re a wolf?” she asks Kalta, squinting as if not seeing her right. “You’re Yasmine’s mate?” “I’m a witch,” Kalta answers.

Shiara looks at me as she did the night after the hunt. I hear her words again, this time like a prophecy. I want to tear out the throat of the world. You do too.