Town of Walters, est. 1834
Upstate New York
Lydia Susi’s Destiny came for her in the veil, on a random Thursday in the early spring.
As she ran along the wooded trail, two miles into a loop that would
take her through the preserve’s northeastern acreage, she was measuring
the glowing line that topped the contours of the mountains. Soon, the
stripe would expand to an aura, and after that, the sun would accept the
handoff from the moon, and day would arrive.
Her grandfather
had always told her there were two twilights, two gloamings, and if you
wanted to find your past, you went into the pines in the evening as the
sun went down. If you wanted your future to come to you, you went alone
into the forest in the veil, during that sacred transition of night into
morning. There, he’d told her, when the distinction between that which
ruled the light and that which held domain over the dark was at its
narrowest, when the moon and the sun reached for each other before the
rotations of their orbits tore them asunder, there was when the mortal
could brush up against the infinite and seek answers, direction,
guidance.
Of course, that did not mean you got good news. Or what you wanted.
But
life was not an à la carte buffet where you could choose everything
that went on your plate—another words-of-wisdom from a man who had lived
to be 101 years old still smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of sima
after his dinner year round.
Why limit spring to just Vappu? he’d said.
Lydia
had never believed in his superstitions. She was a researcher, a
scientist, and the kinds of things that her isoisa had gone on about did
not fit in with that Ph.D. in biology she’d bought on layaway from the
federal government and was still paying off.
So no, she was not
out looking for any prognostication from the universe this morning. She
was getting her workout done before she headed into her office at the
Wolf Study Project. With the way things had been going lately, she was
going to blink and it would be seven at night. Short-staffed and
under-funded, everything was a fight for resources at WSP, and by the
time she locked things up every evening, she was exhausted. So Carpe
Cardio was her motto and why she was out in this misty darkness—
Lydia let her stride peter to a halt.
Her
breath pumped in clouds that captured and held the moonlight, and as a
breeze came across the trail, her body did the same with the chill,
grabbing it out of the air and bringing it in under her wind-breaker.
As
she shivered, she looked behind herself. The trail she was on was the
widest one in the preserve, a highway rather than a street, but she
couldn’t see much into the trees. Pines crowded up close to the
shoulders of the packed path, and the fog wafting through the craggy
trunks and fluffy boughs obscured the forest even more.
In a
quick calculation, she figured she was a good three miles from any other
human, two miles from her car at the trailhead’s parking area, and a
hundred yards from what had caught her attention.
There, up ahead, something was close to the ground, moving.
Fight or flight, Lydia, she thought. What’s it going to be.
She reached around to the small of her back. There were two cylinders
mounted on the strap of her fanny pack, and she left the Mace where it
was. Clicking on her flashlight and bringing it forward, she swung the
beam in a wide arc—
The eyes flashed over on the left, a set of
retinas flaring the light back at her as pinpoints. The stare was about
three feet from the ground and the pupils were set close together, as
predators’ were.
Lydia looked around again.
“I’m not going to bother you,” she said. But like the gray wolf spoke English?
The growl was soft. And then came the rustling. The animal was prowling toward her.
“Oh, shit.”
Except...
Lydia
kept the beam down on the fallen pine needles as she, too, walked
forward. Something was wrong with the wolf, its gait wobbly and uneven.
Yet the spirit of the hunter remained undeterred—and she was identified
as its target.
She was about twenty feet away when she got a
sense of the fully mature male. He was filled out, at a healthy weight
of about a hundred and thirty pounds, and his mottled white, gray, and
brown fur was thick and lush, especially at the tail. But his head was
hanging at a bad angle, and he was dragging his back paws as he
continued to close the distance between them.
It was obvious
when the wolf was going to collapse. Though his head remained forward,
his body listed to the side, his will staying strong even as his rear
legs, and then his forelegs, gave out.
He landed on the soft bed
of pine needles on his side, and the struggle was immediate, useless
paws batting at thin air and ground cover. As Lydia drew a little closer
to him, he snarled, flashing long white fangs, his golden eyes
narrowing.
“Shh...” she said as she kneeled down.
Her
hand shook as she got out her cell phone. As she called a number from
her favorites, she tried to keep her breathing steady.
In the flashlight’s beam, she could see the grayness of those gums. The wolf was dying—and she knew why.
“God damn it, pick up, pick up—” Her words ma-chine gun’d from her
mouth. “Rick? Wake up, I’ve got another one. On the main trail—what?
Yes, it’s the same—enough with the talking, get your ass out of bed. I’m
on the loop, about two miles into the—huh? Yes, bring everything, and
hurry.”
She cut the connection as her voice gave out.
Letting herself fall back to a sit, she stared into those beautiful eyes
and tried to project love, acceptance, gentleness...compassion. And
something got through, the majestic male’s muzzle relaxing, its paws
falling still, his flank rising and falling in a shuddering breath.
Or maybe it was dying right now.
“Help is coming,” she said hoarsely to the animal.
J.R. Ward is the #1 New York
Times bestselling author of numerous novels, including the Black Dagger
Brotherhood series. She lives in the South her family.
Links: http://www.jrward.com/
(1) Paperback copy of CLAIMED - Open to US only.
