for a bandage, yet what I touched felt an awful lot like a leaf. Wolf’s gazed snapped up and in an instant he’d jumped over to me.
“Don’t touch it now. It needs time to work.”
“What is it?”
“Lavawort covered with gum leaf.”
Hi, I’m Caroline, and I’ve just moved into Fairy Land where everything is cured with lavawort and gumleaf and magic apples, how are you?
“Oh.”
The air around us was cooling down for the night, but the fire was nice and cozy. I gazed at Wolf. He was rather well put together with his brown overcoat, white dress shirt and crimson vest, though his pants were oddly baggy. He had a belt keeping them in place. He still needed a shave though, his jaw line covered in dark stubble. It made him look just that much rougher, but still, somehow, approachable. His eyes were indeed hazel, with no trace of the red-gold I’d seen earlier. His nostrils flared as he breathed in, a pleased smirk on his face. I almost couldn’t believe he was the same person who had come at me and Marianne with a knife earlier in the day. He was…handsome.
“How did you know how to make a fire?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Just because I’m a wolf doesn’t mean I don’t know how to start fires. By the way, do you know magic? Because those little sticks are amazing.”
I frowned in confusion. “Sticks?”
“You know, the ones you just scrape on something and boom! Fire comes out.”
“You mean matches? Wait.” I blinked a few times. “How did you get my matches?”
He pointed to a lump beside the fire. “You left it in the cottage when you ran out like a wild woman.”
My daypack. He’d scared me so much standing over Marianne I’d just dropped it then and there. “You went back and got it?”
“I bought it with me when I followed you. You had some tasty things in there.” His eyes glittered in the firelight—or did they do that on their own?
“You ate everything?”
“Of course not, my heart. I saved some for you.”
I hoped so. The last thing I needed was for this guy to be running on power bars and Snickers.
“How do you know my name, anyway?”
“I found a thing in your pack with your name on it. You look delicious in the picture, but not as delicious as you are in the flesh. Your hair was much shorter then.”
My driver’s license. Then I remembered. I had bear mace in that pack. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier?
“Could I have my pack please?”
“Yes, of course, my sweet Caroline.”
I half waited for him to start singing the song, but he’d called me sweet Caroline in earnest, not some stupid joke like so many other guys did. He crawled over and dragged the pack to me. Good boy, I thought involuntarily. I opened it up to rifle through it.
“So,” I said, hoping to distract him, “why exactly were you attacking Marianne? You’ve never given me a straight answer.”
He huffed and made quiet growling noises, looking into the fire and scratching at his neck. “I wasn’t attacking her. I was…” His mouth twitched. “Someone made a request for me regarding that girl. But I wasn’t going to eat her. That knife was all for show. Scared kids do what they’re told right? Although she did look every bit the succulent meal like a fresh lamb playing in the fields, those delicate curls of hers bouncing in the sunshine and her dainty dress like bluebells swaying in the meadow.”
He’d gone somewhere off the deep end I suspected, gazing into the distance with a dreamy grin on his face, all his teeth showing—including those abnormally sharp canines. Then he seemed to catch himself and regroup.
“Not that I eat young girls—or any girls for that matter. I only attacked you because you attacked me. I don’t eat people at all, no matter what all the stories say. It only invites trouble and makes a wolf more worse off than he already is.”
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself just as much as he was trying to convince me. Hopefully he had more luck on himself, because I certainly wasn’t going to buy it. And where the hell was my bear spray?
“So who wanted Marianne and what for? If you resorted to using a knife, it doesn’t sound like anything good.” I managed to keep my voice level. Where was that damn mace? Sure, he’d helped me, but I couldn’t stick around with someone