Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,42

joints all but vanished.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I followed her example and stripped down, packing my meager possessions into the new bag, shivering as the cold air hit bare skin and goose bumps. It occurred to me that this time spent with the Family was starting to make me more comfortable in nothing but my own skin. I strapped the sword I’d taken from Kanazawa to my pack. Fatima paced impatiently and then paused so I could observe how she arranged the straps. After a moment, I’d done well enough to please her and feel comfortable in the rig.

I Changed.

We ran.

Fatima never led me astray. I felt like we were lost in the woods, only our tracks showing that anyone or anything had passed, which wasn’t such a bad thing. She’d done this before and her senses were more attuned to direction than mine. While she was fast and smart with maps and GPS, which she Changed to check every so often, she also sniffed the air for clues as to the best direction to take, and no doubt knew the northwestern plants well enough to take cues from the change in vegetation as well.

The weather grew gradually warmer, and with that, more of Fatima’s physical vitality seemed to return. Part of it had to be the relief of her long custodianship being over, her duty discharged. Still, while she always took the lead eagerly, she had to slow and rest long before I needed to. This gave me a chance to study how she chose her movements as a wolf. I hadn’t spent much time as my wolfself in the wild, and there was an art to paw placement and choice of gait in getting through the wilderness quietly and quickly. My nose became attuned to the smells of wind and weather, and I was pleased when I identified the presence of a bird before I startled it from the bush. Fatima had mentioned during one of our rest breaks that she had preferred life in the bush to the heat of Cairo. Now she reveled in the cool temperatures and wooded terrain.

We spent one night in the woods and I had the chance to ask her about her life in Egypt. From that we moved on to a discussion of werewolves in general, and how she believed that the man-beast Enkidu was a very early variation on the Fangborn story, dating back perhaps more than five thousand years. Enkidu was a creature made to protect other beasts and people from a predator, in this case Gilgamesh, who later learns to behave responsibly. Enkidu was not human, but molded in clay by the goddess of creation, with attributes of the sky and war gods; he eventually learned the ways of beasts and men. I was sold. Immediately resolving to do more research on this myth, I added Enkidu to my list of potential Fangborn origin stories.

“I’d read something about Enkidu going to the underworld to recover some lost artifacts,” I said. “Do you know—”

“Enough!” She laughed. “That’s enough for one night. I need rest if I’m going to—”

She was interrupted by the howling of wolves.

“What do we do?” I asked anxiously. “Are we supposed to answer back?”

“No. We try to leave true wolves be. We’re not wolves, Zoe, though we take that form. We’re not here to contest territory or mates with them. The less we interfere, the better for them.”

I fell asleep next to the dying fire, listening to the howling in the distance.

If we were not real wolves, we were much faster than them. The next morning, we broke camp, reassumed our packs, and Changed to our wolfselves. We ate up the distance as blurs across the rough terrain.

As soon as we crossed the United States border, I felt better. We left the national forest in Washington and continued on private lands, the trees becoming thinner, the smells of nearby towns coming more frequently.

A whirring noise appeared that I felt before I heard. Helicopters. Then . . . rifle shots.

Someone was hunting wolves. Or maybe they were hunting us.

It gave me some indication of just how old Fatima was when I realized that she didn’t hear it right away. I yipped, and tore ahead, faster than I knew I could run.

She followed me.

The helicopters followed us both, gaining on us. It was as if the ground was shaking, with the number of bullets thud-thud-thudding around us.

The cover of the tree line was too far away. We weren’t