Gwen
She was so fluffy.
The bedraggled, snarling wolf now looked like a big, fluffy husky dog. Especially with those ice blue eyes. It took effort not to coo at her, but I didn’t think that would help. The area around her neck was still wet, but to my surprise, the shower the girl had taken left the wolf beautifully clean.
She was beautiful.
In every way, she was beautiful. Her human form was lithe, athletic - pretty much every wolf was, either from the constant exercise they got, or just because of what they were. There was no way of knowing. In this form, she was a gorgeous dog.
I wanted to see her roll in the snow like a husky. I wanted to pet her and play with her and take her for a walk.
I caught myself, explaining, answering the question in her blue eyes. "Unlike the collar, those bracelets have a mix of silver in it. A small enough amount that it doesn't burn you or significantly affect you, but werewolves can't shed silver when they transform. I made those to stretch and contract so they weren't at risk of breaking or falling off when the transformation changes someone's size." I walked close to the cage and gestured to her hated enemy. "We had a deal. Push it out of the cage."
The dog-wolf that was Victoria huffed as though I had asked her to leap over the moon, but where her attitude had been expected out of her human form, it was adorable in this one. She obeyed, knocking the steel collar out of the cage with a back paw. She turned and looked at me, watching. She wasn’t growling, she wasn’t snarling, she just watched me quietly.
"Thank you." I bent down and grabbed it. I decided to just leave it on the table, no reason to take it upstairs with me. Gathering my things, the book she had thrown at me, and setting the rifle gently back in the duffle bag, I couldn’t resist the corners of my mouth curling upward at her. She just watched. Some might find that stare unnerving, I didn’t. She was just… cute.
I was going to have to be careful not to let my guard slip around her, she was still incredibly dangerous even though she looked like a curious pup.
From the top of the stairs, as I flipped off the lights, I called down to her. “Goodnight, Victoria. We’ll talk more in the morning. Later in the morning.”
I left the bag in the kitchen, sighing wearily. My eyes felt exhausted, like someone had pressed them callously toward the back of my skull. I trudged back to the bedroom, hoping for a dreamless sleep. I’d rather not see the jet black werewolf again tonight. He’d haunted me enough.
Tossing the robe over a chair in the bedroom, I settled back under the blankets and flipped the lightswitch above my bed. In the dark, as I tried to relax, as I tried to settle back in, my mind turned to Victoria again.
The Victoria that had stepped out of the shower. I hadn’t meant to invade her privacy, I had been trying to give her space, but she had taken so long that I was starting to worry she was setting up a trap or something. It was a ridiculous, paranoid thought, but I had stepped in regardless.
Right as Victoria stepped, naked, out of the shower.
I savored the small smile that made its way across my lips. She really was gorgeous, and I was hoping I could make a real difference in her life. That I could help her break some of these bad, impulsive habits that always put her in danger, that she’d be able to join a pack - maybe even River’s - and live a full, safe life with her own kind. Safe from hunters, safe from humans, and safe from herself. She deserved it.
She had only been seventeen when her life had been flipped on its head. I had no idea what her first change had been like for her, but she had taken off to the wilds and managed to survive this long. Too young for that sort of tragedy, too young to have her life yanked out from under her like that.
The same age I had been when Granddad died. When my life had been flipped and my last living relative left me. When I had to face the world alone. When I had to chase nosy townsfolk and the local police away with a hunting bow like a stupid kid. It felt like such a long time ago now.
But I had been too young, just as Victoria had been too young.
There hadn’t been anyone to help me, just people who wanted to force me back into a system that wasn’t right for me, that didn’t care about me. The years I spent with granddad, just the two of us, had been the most healthy, fulfilling years of my young life. Even when my life had been “normal”, before I lost my parents, I had never fit in with the city kids. The summers here with Granddad and Granny had been the only thing that kept me sane.
I would never fit in with “normal people”, not before I knew what lurked in the darkness of the wilds, and certainly not afterward.
Grabbing my laptop, I opened the camera feed again. Victoria the husky had curled up, just as she said, her tail wrapped adorably around her body. Another soft smile found me, another small gift from Victoria that she didn’t know she was giving. The tail was the only real giveaway. She didn’t have the curl of a husky’s tail, hers was a wolf’s - but that was easy enough to explain away.
It was lonely out here when River was away for the winter, when she took what was ostensibly my only real friends with her. I dragged my fingers down the screen of the laptop, missing them. River, Hazel, Lily, Riggs, the newest member of the pack Juliette, and poor, odd Smoke. Technically, Smoke was still around, he stayed here in the winter, not wanting to go south to the warmth with the others. Victoria’s comment about humans and zoos rankled. I agreed with her, but I needed to keep the conversation on track - I’d seen firsthand what effects humans had on wolves with places like that.
They’d been gone for two months already and they wouldn’t be back until the spring. When the flowers bud and bees greet them. That’s how River put it, but the ones that had grown up as wolves tended to have a very different way of looking at the world.
I closed the laptop, wondering if I should call her and ask for help. Lily had a phone, I could always call her to get a hold of River… but I didn’t think River would exactly be happy that I had trapped a wolf, or that I had the ability to trap a wolf. I didn’t like lying to her, she was my friend, kind of like a wise old aunt to me. She had helped guide me in those teenage summers, after Dad died. I loved her like family.
I was continuing Granddad’s lie of omission. I knew that someday it would catch up with me, and calling River for advice would cause exactly that. Rubbing one eye and closing the laptop with the other, I laid back. Things were going well enough so far.
I could handle this.
I just had to deal, morally, with the fact that I had a twenty-one year old kid in a cage in my basement. It wasn’t her fault that she ended up this way, if she would open up about her story, it was most likely similar to Lily’s. Sure, I could handle this - but I was really wishing they were here, and the guilt of keeping information from River was compounded by the guilt I felt at how I had to treat Victoria.
But I did have to. What choice did I have, really? She broke into my house, she attacked me, she might have killed me if I hadn’t tranqed her. In the end, I was doing this for her good, and for the good of all humans she’d come across.
So why do I still feel rotten about it?
I wanted to like her. I wanted to look beyond her anger and see the person inside. All she had shown me was anger, but I could see the cracks in her armor. The way she looked at herself in the mirror, she had been happy to be clean. She had hesitated when I mentioned watching a movie - she probably hadn’t seen anything in four years. There were lots of little signs that I could reach her, I could connect with her if I could just get beyond her anger.
Rolling over, my hand finding the laptop. I could just peek in on her again, just to see if she was still asleep. Shaking my head, I sighed, I needed a plan. With the lights on again, I grabbed Granddad’s book.
I had to get past the anger, but how. Any emotion was better than anger. I pondered digging at her childhood to get at some of that pain, to see if she’d let sadness through, and thought better of it. She’d just shut down. Flipping through the book, I blushed suddenly and skipped several pages. Granddad had a concoction to induce heat in a wolf, to get past their anger through sexual stimulation.
There was no way I could do that to her. The unexpected fire of my blush extended damn near to my shoulders at the thought.
The next section was poisoning them so the wolf would be forced to submit to treatment and get past the anger by way of induced helplessness cured by caring. I couldn’t do that either, it felt wrong. To make her sick just to trick her, to make her think I cared about her?
Do I care about her?
I ignored my own question as I continued thumbing through the book.
Weakness. A mild poison that disrupted their magical connection to their wolf-self, leaving them almost entirely human for a short time. I read through the recipe and Granddad’s notes several times, thinking it over. She wouldn’t get sick from it, it would just… level the playing field a bit. The same thing I was doing with the weapons.
If I could strip her of her strength for just a while, I could push her, I could force her to submit to me in a way that fit in with the way she viewed the world, then I could be nice to her. I could care for her and show her that it wasn’t bullshit, that I really did want to help.
If I didn’t, her body count would only grow.