Blood Tide

The heat was already unbearable and the sun was still low in the sky. All the unwashed bodies packed outside the small temple did nothing to relieve the heat. The air buzzed with excitement as men with painted shoulders, bare chest, thin legs and a loin cloth passed out fried dough. Citali stood on the outside of all the commotion looking for a certain bald male. Coatl promised to meet her before the excitement started. She was scanning the crowd for the fourth time when she felt someone pressed against her. She knew right away it was Coatl, he seemed to think personal space was an option. He slid in front of her as she took him all in. He was tall, dark and seemed to be carved out of stone. His body was all hard lines. His black eyes were framed with dark lashes and lips always seemed to be stained with wine. He wore his traditional leather pants, beaded belt that had an assortment of blades, and like always his chest was bare other then the leather straps that cross his chest. Citali breath always stalled in her lungs when she first saw him. No matter how many times she told herself they were like family, yet she always felt a moment of lust every time. Next to him she looked like a lost peasant. Her black curls seemed faded compared to others. Her eyes were small and the color of water flooded mud. She wore a simple tan dress with a blue beaded hem.

“ I hope I am called today Coatl. Every year since the moon moved my tide I have prayed to be called.”

“I am glad I cannot be called.”

“Well of course this is the blood festival.”

“No I mean ever. My name will never be called for the time of Flesh. I have been picked to be a warrior. You know what that means?”

Of course he knew. In the eyes of everyone Coatl was now a man. He has been chosen to defend them and when time came he would be on the front line of battle. He could never be called to for the festival of the flesh, which was the opposite of today. Today was for blooded unmarried woman, the flesh was for males that were not boys, but not men. Also this meant he could take a wife. Her heart sank with that last thought.

“Of course.”

“Well then there something I need to ask you..I know I have steps to do first but I want to make sure you are okay with it. Will?”

Coatl words were drowned out by the sounds of drums. Every stilled as twelve elders piled out the small temple.  They took their place on a platform in front of the temple.  Without a signal they began reading out names. Citali was the third to last name called.  Her heart raced as she started the walk to the temple. This is what she wanted, things that she wanted never happen for her.  Her smile brightness rivaled the sun. Half way through the crowd she looked back at Coatl to see a look of pain on his face. She let the confusion play across her face for a moment before the smile came back.

Inside the temple things were cooler. Woven images of battles, birth, and sacrifice hung on the stone walls. Citali had only been in the temple once when she was born, so she didn’t really count that. Her lungs ached as the temple was filled with smoke from incense.  The elders led the girls down three hallways before leaving them in a plain room.

A small girl who hair was sea of black girls looked scared. She looked young, maybe even just having one tide. Citali gave her a reassuring smile. It was an honor to have made it this far, fear should never enter your heart. One by one the girls were called out and never returned. Citali was the third to last to be called. They lead her to a dark room with walls covered in animal fur. A small candle hung from the ceiling above the aging elder. He was all loose brown skin and bones. A strong gust of wind would break him. He wore a white beard down to his belly button and nothing else.  Lucky he was bent at an angle that Citali did not have to see what made him a man.

He reached out a long boney finger. Slowly she crossed the room and took a kneeled position in front of him. He grabbed the long curved blade from his side. She could see the girls before her blood dried on to it. With his other hand he grabbed a bowl and placed it between them. He gestured for her arm. Obeying she stretched her out over the bowl. With one quick motion he cut her deep right below the elbow.  Her blood flowed freely in to the bowl. He gestured for her to leave as he raised the bowl to his lips.

She ended up back in a room much like the first, except wooden benches line the wall. None of the girls spoke so Citali didn’t. Time seem to stop as they waited for the last two girls. Finally they were all together, but not for long. One of the elders waved them all out but Citali. He didn’t say anything to her as he left. She didn’t know how long she stayed on the bench before a older woman came to get her.

“Child you have been chosen.  The blood tasting relieved you are the blood that will grow a hearty crop.”

The old maiden took Citali back to her house where her family waited the news. The next morning she would head to temple and as the moon rises the ritual will begin. Her mother cried and hugged her, so did her sisters. Her father stood off the side with heavy eyes. 

With morning light the old maiden knocked on her family’s door.  Back at the temple they cut her long locks to a short sharp bob. Her skin was washed and perfumed. They lined her eyes with black and painted her lids red. Her lips were dyed blood red. Her outfit was simple, a skin tight red dress that fell to her knees. The middle had a complicated cut out showing bits of flesh as she moved.  She has seen girls before her so she knew how she looked, but the reflection in the water they brought her took her by surprised. She looked like a Goddess, this is why she was born.

After she was prepped and ready she was allowed to walk the crowds outside the temple. Towards the back was Coatl. He stood taller then all around him and his eyes were heavy with sadness.

“You are stunning Citali.”

“Then why do you look so sad my oldest friend.”

“Because life has been unfair to me. “

“How? You were picked to be a warrior. You will have any one as your bride, and you will bring such honor to your family.”

“Brides? I shall never marry Citali. I wanted…I wanted you. Don’t you see I was going to ask before they called your name. I love you and I was to save you.”

“Coatl..I do not know what say.”

Their conversation was ended once again with the drums. She didn’t bother looking back this time. She knew what she would see. With each step doubt took more of her heart. This is what she always wanted. To honor her family and to be a Goddess to her people.  But he loved her and he wanted her as his wife. She was on the platform before she knew it. The old maiden guided her to the chair made of stone. She tied her hands to the chair. This is what she wanted, this is what she wanted, she repeated it to herself as the elders began to chant.  The crowded cheered and prayed as her heart raced. It was quick and neat like it was for every sacrificed before her. The blade cut deep and fatal. Her blood freed from her body sprayed the ones in front of the platform. The last sound she heard was Coatl cry out. His voice raw with pain but through the crowd. Rain began to beat down in surprise as her body cooled and went rigid.

Naked Snow

The forest was white everywhere you looked. The trees wore snow like a winter sweater and the ground had the matching blanket. Everything was silent as the sun rose in from the east, everything but the young wolf creeping away from the center of the woods.  Her paws left a path in the otherwise unmark snow. With a bone snapping wet sound the paw prints turn to delicate footprints.  Snow knew she shouldn’t have been away from the pack, nor should she have shifted out in the open.  But Snow wasn’t known for following rules or thinking of consequences.   At the base of one of the otter trees was a paper bag with clothes.  She slipped in to the damp jeans and itchy over size sweater, nothing was a soft as your own fur.

                Just outside the woods was a highway and a mile down the highway was her Snow’s ride.  She had been walking this road for months now without incidents. Today was no different and she made it to the beat up red pickup in record time.

“Snow get in quickly you are going to freeze.”

“Clive, you worry too much, I am built for this weather. Why do you think they named me snow?” The words felt heavy and awkward coming from her mouth, but she was proud that she used the right words this time. The first few times they met Snow blurted out wrong words every sentence.  She knew how to speak and knew Basic English, but she had very little practical use for it.  A smile formed on her small mouth as she thought of how they met.

With first snow there was very little foraging and Snow refused to touch the flesh of another living creature. No matter how much her pack pushed and beat her down she held strong to her vegetarian diet.  So while everyone slept Snow followed her nose to the edge of the trees. When she was sure no one followed she shifted and began looking for food. Honestly Luck was on her side that day because no one was traveling to see the naked, pale , thin barely a woman running behind a local restaurant, well no one but Clive.

Clive watched as the woman with the long white hair dug at the garbage complete oblivious to the freezing temperature and that she was naked.

“Miss?’

Snow turned to stare at the intruder and froze.

“Miss it is mighty cold and well you are naked. Listen I mean you no harm I just worried, you see. So come to the truck I have a sweater and maybe even sweats.  We could head to the drive in and pick up food. This way you can warm up and not eat garbage, well at least not garbage out of the dumpster,” Clive couldn’t help but laugh at his own joke.

Snow didn’t know how to respond, but her wolf was not trying to fight or flee so she gave him a weak nod.

Snow fumbled on her words as they drove around but Clive didn’t seem to notice. He ended up buying of a salad after she cried when he mentioned a burger, and headed to local Wal-Mart and picked her up boots and jeans. As far as he could tell she was homeless, why she was naked he still didn’t know.

Clive’s voice brought snow back to the present.

“You can’t keep living on the street like this. I have been thinking and saving. I think I can afford a small place for us.”

Guilt sank Snow’s stomach. She knew this day would come when she had to risk being honest with him or risk breaking her heart. By the time they pulled into their normal place, an old abandoned farmhouse,  Snow had made up her mind.

“Clive I have something to tell you, and you are going to react badly I know it. But I love you and wait that not what I need to say.” A low whine escaped her. She opened the truck and stepped into the snow covered yard, she could hear Clive following her. With a sigh she began to shift. The transformation only two seconds but it felt like hours. First her joints popped in to place, her limbs bent, her skin pulled and her white fur pushed from under her skin.

To give Clive credit he did not scream, he fainted. Snow, fully in wolf form, ran to his side. She could hear his heart steadily beating in his chest so she sat down next to him.  After a few whines and face licks Clive started waking.

“Snow? Are you a wolf? Because werewolf do exist. “

Snow couldn’t speak in wolf form, well not to Clive. She gave a soft whine and nudged him with her snout.   Clive was now muttering nonsense so Snow shifted back to human. Her clothes were ruin so she was once again naked in front of him.

“So this is why you were naked the first time we met.”

“Yea, you are handling this well.”

“To be honest I do not know how. I think I might be in shock.”

If Snow was paying attention she would have heard the snap of a twig right after she shifted. She would have known that they were not alone, and that she was now in danger. Clive needed space so he drove to Wal-Mart to pick up more clothes for Snow then dropped her off at their meeting spot.

Snow walked back to their meeting spot everyday for a week and Clive never showed. She was about to give up and tell her pack the mistake she had made when Clive red truck was parked in it normal spot. Her heart race as she ran to the truck.  Clive was sitting inside, pale and white knuckling the steering wheel.

“I don’t understand Snow. I have been thinking all week and I just do not understand.”

“Can I get in? Maybe we can talk?’

“Fine.”

They drove to the drive in where they shared their first meal.

“Werewolves don’t exist, but that is what you are isn’t?”

“I don’t know. If you say yes, then yes. We don’t have a name. We are what we are. We have always lived on the outside of the human world. It how I know how to talk, not that I do often.  We spend most our time as beast, rarely in this form. Mostly for rituals. “

“…Do you eat people?”

“No..oh no..I can’t….no. Everyone else eats rabbits and deer. I am the only one who refuses flesh.  Please Clive…I love you.”

“I don’t know what is going on Snow, but I love you too.”

Tears freely fell from her eyes as she collapsed in his arms. They spent the next hour on the side of the highway talking. When the time came she headed back the way she came. After she was undressed and in wolf form was when the first shot fired. Three more followed. Clive didn’t know what made him go looking for her, but he followed his instinct and ran after her. He found his brother hovering over her bleeding form.

“What did you do Timmy?”

“I knew you would show. You’re a freak and going to hell laying with this demon.”

“You know nothing! I swear I will tear you apart with my own hands, but for now you better run. Don’t you think her family is near? Do you know what wolves do? Run Timmy and run far.”

Something clicked in Timmy’s head. He never thought about her family and what would happen when they found him. He dropped his rifle and ran. Clive lifted Snow and headed deep in the forest. Snow told him pieces about where she lived so he followed the best he could. He knew when he found the stalking wolfs he was in the right place. 

“I did not do this..I swear…but she bleeding and I do not know what do.  Please help her please!”

With tears burning his cheek he set her down and ran.

It took two months for Snow to fully heal. Wolf magic was slow, steady, and painful.  The first thing she heard when she finally came to.

“Snow you are never to see that human again.”

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.