Don't Call the Wolf

by Aleksandra Ross

But the dead didn’t need to worry about pain. That was the burden of the living.

It was unfair, she thought. She wished she was still alone; she wished they had never met; she never wanted to leave any of them again. Unfair that if you loved people, you had to feel this way.

“I am not afraid of death,” he said. “It is not the death that inspires fear,” said the domowik, said the ancient creature, the guardian of households, the last echo of humanity in a death-swept town. “It is the dying.”

“I am so many things,” said Ren. “I am mostly terrible things, honestly. But of one thing I am sure: I am not just a girl.”