A Feral Storm

Maila can hardly stand the plane. This is one of the fallacies of being timeless; though she’s watched the sun bake the ruins of the Roman empire, and dawn anew on the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and shy away beneath the gray stormclouds on the day Alexander fell and the world knew a war like no other, it has never turned her skin to leather or boiled her flesh. She looks untouched, pristine, and has looked exactly this way for the span of several generations.

Such an existence is good for the complexion -- not so much for the flexibility it takes to contemplate soaring five thousand feet above the ground. More than once, Polly has had to clap her hands over the natural pout of her lips to silence a growl and lay to rest all her angry guttural murmurs. Polly knows that Maila has about T-minus six seconds before she’s reduced to a snapping, feral catastrophe.

The long hallway, with people cramming like sardines into escalators and boarding queues, is more Polly’s rhythm. While she’s glad that she had Maila to teach her how to be wild, how to eschew the constraints of a modern society, she’s pleased to be able to guide her through the luggage drop and pick out which bags are theirs.

“It’s cold,” Maila remarks, arms crossed around her torso. Again, Polly can see it: Maila would rather be head-to-toe in white fur, fur that wisps like smoke at the ends and burrows deep into her coat with roots that are as gray as a snow day sky.

Maila, tropical Maila, ever at home among wilting palms and white sands, will just have to get used to how vulnerable her human skin is. At least, until they find a taxi.

“Of course it’s cold. It’s winter,” Polly points out, handing Maila’s battered leather bag to her. Something rattles at the bottom, but it isn’t as heavy as Maila made it out to be. Polly sighs. “You actually pack anything?”

“What I need,” Maila responds, dragging a yard of beef jerky from the bag. She snaps into it with her teeth, and offers a length of her bounty that Polly refuses.

“Come on, Ensino Girl,” Polly says, referencing, as she always does, something she’s well aware that Maila will never understand. Maila is wordless all the way to the street outside, where she stands at attention and focuses her gaze on the heavy, woolen sky.

“We could move faster if--” Maila begins to point out, but Polly cuts her off there.

“Not yet. We’re in the city. They tend to frown upon wildlife roaming around the highway.”

The taxi takes them out of it, past the tombstone sprawl of the skyscrapers and out into the long stretches of land where all one can see is the violet endcap of the mountains in the distance. That is what catches Maila’s attention until they come upon the cabin, which Polly has rented for exactly this reaction.

Maila has never seen a mountain before. She is world-renowned, yes, but for haunting the island upon which her pack roams free. They operate as gods, their panicked denizens living in fear each moment that they might be sacrificed to the greater good of the island’s legends -- or, at least, to their legends’ stomachs.

In contrast to the purple majesty of the peaks beyond, the cabin is a cookie-cutter affair with architecture that is only as interesting as its gabled roofs and quaint, shuttered windows. The main space is affected by a rambling fireplace that is capped by a yawn of oak, upon which are settled a few knick knacks that its landlord must have thought would add to the kitschy ambiance.

Maila knows fire, at least, has danced around it for the better part of five hundred years, usually after a hunt. She offers to help with the firewood, and Polly, jet-lagged and already haggard from dealing with Maila’s tendency to wander off and find trouble even when there isn’t trouble to find, lets her have the job.

Of course, she’s two seconds into sinking against the couch -- admittedly a cozy couch, with the kind of give that only comes from well-loved furniture -- when she hears yipping in the distance.

There’s no mention of wolves in the brochure that Polly scoured when she was looking for this place -- but then, who would mention them? Still, Polly has a funny inkling that it isn’t a real wolf she’s hearing.

She steps outside and sure enough, there is a point where Maila’s footsteps dissipate and there are curious paw prints dug into the tender earth underfoot.

Maila is nowhere to be seen.

It looks like the first snow of the season is coming boldly upon them, fat flakes catching a ride on a howling gale that chills right through Polly’s sweater. This must be the problem; Polly doesn’t think that Maila’s ever seen snow before.

Sure enough, once Polly has ducked the overgrowth and let herself into a clearing by lifting an errant, rambling branch, there’s Maila, or Maila’s true self, trying to snap snow out of the sky with her teeth.

Not everyone can wolf-speak, understand the nuanced, fragile chemistry of body language and inaudible murmurs that comprise the entirety of Maila and her pack’s language, but Polly can.

It’s all coming down, Maila says, in her way, and she looks defeated. Polly can’t help but to throw herself down on her knees and wind her arms around the wolf, sinking her nose into Maila’s amply thick coat.

“Don’t worry,” Polly whispers. “It looks like there’s more than enough to go around.”

The resulting snap of Maila’s jaws and the unseemly grumble low in her throat that Polly can feel against her cheek tells her enough. You don’t always have to make fun of me, she seems to say.

“I keep you on your toes,” Polly says, but she spreads her hands -- her hands, which are barely hands now, but little nubs that are sprouting devastating claws. “Or paws, as it were.”

Maila’s deep gold eyes meet hers, and a word passes between them that transcends all language, wolf or otherwise. The sky dims more than it has already. The snow comes down so thickly that they cannot see one another for a moment.

But in that moment, they don’t need sight. Now there are smells, Polly’s olfactory senses shocked into vivid awareness. The whole world is illustrated for her in the scent of pine and wood swollen with wet earth.

By the time the ground has chilled beneath them, hardening so that their claws click when they trot beneath the evergreens and race across the mottled, dying grass, the snow begins to collect. Maila dips her paw for the first time into snow, and, gone feral though she has, Polly rolls into a bough of the white stuff, her laughter coming out in short, sharp, wheezing barks.

Maila tries to follow her pawprints through another acre of winterland, shaking off her paws at every step, and that’s about the time that Polly takes in a snorting lungful of air and redirects them toward the cabin. She has hands again by the time that she reaches for the doorknob -- which is good, because the door opens to the most inviting sight that Polly has ever seen.

For once, Maila, wet to the skin and blue in the lips, looks happy to be inside as well. Polly ends up being the one to start the fire after all, and the two don a pair of robes and slip beneath a wide, faux fur blanket to watch the flames consume the timber that Polly has fed into the hearth.

“All we need is hot chocolate,” Polly says, wriggling until her toes are beneath Maila’s robe. Maila, with all that sunshine humming under her skin, is always warmer.

As Polly has expected, Maila grumpily accepts her foot, and even wraps her fingers around one to galvanize the heat between them.

“I do not know what is hot chocolate,” she replies gruffly, though the pads of her fingers very softly and smoothly work the chill out of Polly’s skin.

“You taught me all the unpleasant things,” Polly points out. “Skinning people alive with my teeth, drinking blood out of a punctured jugular, that kind of thing. Now I teach you about hot chocolate and snow. I can’t say that sounds fair.”

“I can teach you pleasant things too,” Maila says, reflecting on some deep, inner scenario that Polly is not party to. Her meditation ends with a Maila Smile, which is a stark line at the corner of her lips where they were previously dipped into an eternal expression of disdain.

“Like what?” Polly asks, so relaxed that she is by now actually literally sinking into the sofa. Maila pulls her foot a little, so that Polly is beckoned closer. There is no difference between Maila’s robe and Polly’s robe now.

“The Pack. Family. A bond that is never broken,” Maila replies, not gazing at Polly, but knowing that forever they are intertwined, and summing all of that up in one furtive look.

“I think that is something we need to teach each other.” Polly smiles, and Maila makes the face again. They lean into one another and listen to the wind, crooning like a Sinatra, as it washes over the world outside the cabin with sparkling white and leaves the cabin inside that much cozier in comparison.

When Polly tries to move, Maila, deep in sleep, refuses to let her go.

Beaten, Polly decides that, despite any misgivings she might have had, this was a wonderful idea after all.