Wolf Home
By Zoe Chant
Copyright Zoe Chant 2015
All Rights Reserved
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Epilogue
Chapter One
Nicole spent the first half of the drive home with all four of the windows rolled down, blaring pop music on the radio and coming within ten miles of the speed limit only when she had to choose between that and totaling the car.
She wanted to stay like that: carefully, determinedly not thinking about anything but the smell of the mountains coming in with the air, the way the bass in the music vibrated in her chest, and the feel of handling the car on curves. She wanted to keep driving north instead of turning to make her way towards her home village. Better yet, she wanted to be back in her apartment in New York City, making lunch with her roommate and singing along with the radio. Or more likely, working on the final part of her thesis.
She tried to feel guilty for abandoning her thesis, briefly entertained the thought that she would work on it tonight, but that painfully human Nicole had already been pushed away like her human skin when she turned her shape. Maybe her New York City self was even less real than that, an illusion put on for the good of her professors, classmates and friends.
She didn't think so. Her life for the past ten years wasn't all a lie, was it? She'd been happy, even through her loneliness. For all she lacked a pack or family, for all her connections with human men would inevitably for temporary, for all she'd had no one to howl or run with. She had had friends, people she could grow to think of as family, and a field of study she'd loved. More than that, she'd had freedom: the freedom to talk to whoever she wanted, wear whatever she wanted, be as rude or polite to whoever she met, and even to have sex with whoever she wanted. Sure, it would never end well, human men were not meant to be with wolves, but at least she'd been allowed to try.
She felt that happiness stripping off now with the wind. Every mile closer to home was another mile off of the cushion of space that kept her family from knowing about her choices to object to them.
Reluctantly, Nicole slowed the car to a reasonable speed, turned down the radio, and closed the windows to think. The lyrics on the radio, something about small towns, were about equally as distracting as the scent of deer (how long had it been since she'd smelled deer on the air instead of car exhaust and fast food?) to her in this mixed state. She needed to think.
The first message she'd received several days ago had been an email asking her to come home after the landslides this year had destroyed buildings belonging to several packs, so she could help them decide where it would be safe to rebuild. That kind of thing was ostensibly the reason she'd left to go to college, and then begged another six years for grad school, in the first place. It shouldn't take all that long, either; she'd promised to come down that weekend, figuring she'd spent all of spring break working, so she could take a few days to help her family even in the final month of her degree.
That would have been fine. That was the kind of time she owed her family for raising her, for paying for as much of her education as she could, for being her family .
The reason she was leaving on Friday morning, skipping her own classes in the morning and the class she was supposed to TA in the afternoon, was the urgent phone call she'd received at two AM.
Her father's voice rose unbidden in her memory: “There were some injuries in the disaster. Your mother lost another baby, and – the doctors don't think there's going to be another. Nicole, you need to come home.”
She snarled to herself, hands tightening on the steering wheel. She was twenty-eight years old, not twelve anymore, but her parents commanded her life as surely as they had when she was a child. That was how
By Zoe Chant
Copyright Zoe Chant 2015
All Rights Reserved
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Epilogue
Chapter One
Nicole spent the first half of the drive home with all four of the windows rolled down, blaring pop music on the radio and coming within ten miles of the speed limit only when she had to choose between that and totaling the car.
She wanted to stay like that: carefully, determinedly not thinking about anything but the smell of the mountains coming in with the air, the way the bass in the music vibrated in her chest, and the feel of handling the car on curves. She wanted to keep driving north instead of turning to make her way towards her home village. Better yet, she wanted to be back in her apartment in New York City, making lunch with her roommate and singing along with the radio. Or more likely, working on the final part of her thesis.
She tried to feel guilty for abandoning her thesis, briefly entertained the thought that she would work on it tonight, but that painfully human Nicole had already been pushed away like her human skin when she turned her shape. Maybe her New York City self was even less real than that, an illusion put on for the good of her professors, classmates and friends.
She didn't think so. Her life for the past ten years wasn't all a lie, was it? She'd been happy, even through her loneliness. For all she lacked a pack or family, for all her connections with human men would inevitably for temporary, for all she'd had no one to howl or run with. She had had friends, people she could grow to think of as family, and a field of study she'd loved. More than that, she'd had freedom: the freedom to talk to whoever she wanted, wear whatever she wanted, be as rude or polite to whoever she met, and even to have sex with whoever she wanted. Sure, it would never end well, human men were not meant to be with wolves, but at least she'd been allowed to try.
She felt that happiness stripping off now with the wind. Every mile closer to home was another mile off of the cushion of space that kept her family from knowing about her choices to object to them.
Reluctantly, Nicole slowed the car to a reasonable speed, turned down the radio, and closed the windows to think. The lyrics on the radio, something about small towns, were about equally as distracting as the scent of deer (how long had it been since she'd smelled deer on the air instead of car exhaust and fast food?) to her in this mixed state. She needed to think.
The first message she'd received several days ago had been an email asking her to come home after the landslides this year had destroyed buildings belonging to several packs, so she could help them decide where it would be safe to rebuild. That kind of thing was ostensibly the reason she'd left to go to college, and then begged another six years for grad school, in the first place. It shouldn't take all that long, either; she'd promised to come down that weekend, figuring she'd spent all of spring break working, so she could take a few days to help her family even in the final month of her degree.
That would have been fine. That was the kind of time she owed her family for raising her, for paying for as much of her education as she could, for being her family .
The reason she was leaving on Friday morning, skipping her own classes in the morning and the class she was supposed to TA in the afternoon, was the urgent phone call she'd received at two AM.
Her father's voice rose unbidden in her memory: “There were some injuries in the disaster. Your mother lost another baby, and – the doctors don't think there's going to be another. Nicole, you need to come home.”
She snarled to herself, hands tightening on the steering wheel. She was twenty-eight years old, not twelve anymore, but her parents commanded her life as surely as they had when she was a child. That was how
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