Lone Wolf - J.R. Rain Page 0,2
way. Yet, the dream had changed. Before I’d moved to Hope, Alaska, I woke up every night dreaming about an evening eight years ago when my fiancé, Nick, had been shot and killed, right in front of me. It was the reason I’d become a cop and the reason I’d moved to Alaska from Connecticut. Call it escaping the past or fleeing from reality, call it whatever you wanted.
Yet, ever since I’d moved to Hope, I hadn’t dreamt of Nick once. Instead, I’d had this dream or a variation of it. And it was always the same: a wolf—black and enormous and I could hear his voice in my head, telling me he needed me.
I shook my head as I put on the annoyingly fuzzy slippers and then plodded into the living room, the milky-white moonlight guiding my way. The clock on the stove revealed it was 2:00 a.m.
“One of these days,” I said with a sigh, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I was trying to tell myself. One of these days, I’d actually sleep through the night? One of these days, I’d stop having this weird dream about a talking wolf with steel gray eyes?
Gus, my overweight and overloud roommate, plunged off the couch from where he’d been napping and assaulted me with what sounded like an overture of bleating sheep. It was the sound he made when he was hungry and he was always hungry.
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered as he weaved his white, portly body in between my ankles, nearly tripping me in the process.
He sat down next to his kitty bowl and then looked up at me with an impatient expression pasted across his flat face. I flipped on the light switch and suddenly felt like my eyes were being burned out of my head as they fought to acclimate themselves to the fluorescence overhead. Once I was able to see through the narrow slits of my squinting eyes, I pulled open the pantry door. Gus’ rows of Fancy Feast cans took prime position up front and center, outnumbering my human food five to one.
“Dr. Ivers is going to be upset with me,” I reprimanded the uninterested Persian cat. “You know we’re supposed to be watching your weight.”
Even if Gus could have understood me, he probably would have responded with something along the lines of, “I’m hungry, so Dr. Ivers can shove it.” As it was, he just licked his chops as I opened the can. I leaned down to spoon out the nasty stuff, but Gus dove for it before I had the chance to empty all of it into his bowl. The guy was serious about his victuals.
I plopped the can into the recycle bin and then stood back as I studied Gus with my arms crossed against my chest. He made a funny sort of humming sound as he vacuumed the food in his bowl. For myself, I couldn’t even remember if I’d eaten dinner the night before.
“Maybe if I shaved you, you’d look thinner and we’d be able to pull one over on the good doctor,” I said, legitimately concerned about the scolding I was sure to get from Dr. Ivers.
Gus finished his chicken pâté in record time and made a beeline again for the living room. He flopped onto the sofa, curled into a big, white ball and promptly went back to sleep.
“Not even a thank you, ungrateful cat,” I grumbled as I turned off the solar flares overhead and made my way back into my living room. “And what does it say about me that the most conversation I’ve had all week is with you?” I sighed and wondered whether this self-imposed loneliness was going to wreak long-term havoc on me.
I stood in front of the sliding glass doors that overlooked the harsh Alaskan winter, debating whether or not to make a new pot of coffee or just heat up the leftovers from yesterday. The moonlight reflected against the blanket of white that covered what was, in the summer, a meadow. Beyond the blanketed meadow was the open wilderness, delineated by the pine tree line. In my small community of Pine Hill, everyone kept their animals indoors. Not just in winter, either. In summer, too. If you didn’t, you’d never see them again. Courtesy of the wolves.
I shivered in spite of myself as I remembered the eyes of the body of the man whom Miguel and I had found preserved in the icy tundra. I’d seen