Page 4 of The Healer and the Wolf, Part One

4

VANESSA

I woke up slowly, certain I’d just had the most vivid dream of my life, because there was no way, literally no way , that the wolf from before had showed up out of nowhere and pretty much asked me to take care of it.

It simply wasn’t possible. Things like that didn’t happen. That was what I kept telling myself as I got dressed and headed downstairs to feed my cats.

I knew I should take the time to feed myself, too, but I needed to know if I’d imagined taking care of the wolf and applying a new poultice to it not even twelve hours earlier. I went to my greenhouse, wondering if I was hoping if I was right or wrong.

Relief flooded me when I didn’t see a large, furry mass outside of my greenhouse, along with a bit of disappointment. Both those feelings turned to pure shock when I reached the door.

“What the fuck,” I whispered, hardly daring to breathe.

There was a wolf in my greenhouse.

I’d never thought I’d have to deal with a situation like this, and it was damn terrifying to boot. In my hurry to get inside the night before, I must have accidentally left the back door of the greenhouse open slightly ajar, and that was how the animal had gotten in. A stupid mistake on my part, yet who could blame me?

The giant, dangerous predator looked almost cute, sprawled out on the pine shavings I’d left on the ground when I’d built the last shelves in my greenhouse. Almost like a dog waiting for his owner to return. Except he was big enough to take up ninety percent of the ground and was a wild animal.

He had no master.

I needed to keep that in mind. Although it had felt like he was literally asking me for my help the previous night, it didn’t mean he wouldn’t happily eat me now. Besides, hadn’t I learned that often, when animals were acting strange, rabies could be involved? Really, I needed to be way more careful.

Deciding to let him rest and then wander off on his own, I turned around and marched inside. I needed to get ready for work, anyway.

It was a bit of a surreal experience trying to ignore the dire-wolf-shaped problem I had hanging out in my greenhouse, but I did my best. It helped that apparently chaos wanted to reign, because while I was gone, Mudpie had decided to bully Goober away from his food bowl. Was the gray cat twice her size? Yes. Did that matter? Absolutely not.

I gave her a quick spritz with the spray bottle to tell her to back off, then coaxed Goober out of the half bath. I put him in front of his bowl and made sure he ate his bigger portion. The other two likely thought it was unfair that he got double their servings, but he needed it.

Once I got Goober settled, Fork decided, in all of his orangeness, that he wanted to fall asleep in Mudpie’s food bowl. Not eat what was left of her food, just lie on it, which was just great in his thick fur.

“Fork, get up from there right now,” I told him firmly after shushing Mudpie, who was sitting next to him and screaming her little kitty lungs out. “And you better hope none of that is stuck in your coat, because I will give you a bath.”

At that, Fork abandoned his perishable mattress and sauntered off, no doubt to do more orangey things. I had no doubt his food was already inhaled. Even with a food mat to slow him down, Fork preferred to eat everything with the same speed as an unrelenting black hole.

Things calmed down a bit after that, so I got ready and headed to work. Once more, I was struck by the dissonance of it all, biking to go spend eight hours of my life at a grocery store while a wounded wolf was chilling in my greenhouse. It simply wasn’t a situation I found myself in all that often.

Should I call the rangers? I would if the wolf was still there when I got home. After all, I would be gone for ten hours total. Plenty of time for him to sleep and move right along. It wasn’t like he could get into my house. I’d locked it up tightly to make sure my kitties were safe. If anything ever happened to them, I wouldn’t survive it—a sobering thought, and one I tried not to return to.

Instead, I focused on my work, which was much easier to do before Tiffany sauntered up to me, looking like the cat that ate the cream. I’d worked with her long enough to know exactly what that meant, and I braced myself for whatever bullshit she was about to lay on me.

“Hey, Venny girl!”

“It’s Ven,” I corrected tersely. We had this conversation at least twice a week, yet Tiffany always came up with new and annoying ways to butcher my nickname. I didn’t need any other nicknames. I had one. And while I didn’t mind some people being a little informal, Tiffany wasn’t coming from that direction. She never was.

“Righty-o. Hey, listen, there was a major blowout in the men’s bathroom.”

“You’re on bathroom duty today,” I said, already seeing exactly where the conversation was going.

“ Yeah , I know, but I’m going on lunch, so I can’t do it. Need you to cover for me.”

“No—” I started, but she was already bounding off.

“Thank you so much for your help. See you later! Toodles!”

I stood, fuming, and figured I had two options. One, I could do it, and it would be handled, and the entire front of the store wouldn’t stink. Two, I could not do it, wait for Tiffany to get back from her lunch break, cause a whole bunch of drama with her, have the front area of the store stink for goodness knows how long, then get in trouble for not being a team player,

Life was really fucking unfair sometimes.

Grumbling to myself, I got the cleaning supplies and trudged into the men’s bathroom. Blow out wasn’t an exaggeration. I had no idea how we had grown adults coming into our store who didn’t know how to use the bathroom, but I did my best to breathe slowly through my mask and not think about it too hard.

Who knew, maybe the guy had gotten sick unexpectedly? Or maybe his coffee had hit on the wrong way. I always tried to look for the best in people, but more often than not, the best in people wasn’t all that great to begin with.

At least I got to listen to my music. I couldn’t do that when stocking the shelves because then I wouldn’t hear customers approaching, so my ears were perpetually tortured with the tinny oldies playing on the overhead speakers. But in the bathroom? I could rock out to some, well, rock, pop, and pretty much anything I wanted to.

I was doing exactly that when someone tapped me on my shoulder. I nearly jumped through my own skin, letting out an undignified yelp. Rolling around, I saw it was yet another grumpy old man. So far this week, I was 0 for 1, and the expression on the man’s face told me he would not be improving that ratio.

“This is the men’s room,” he blathered like I wasn’t aware.

“I know, sir. I did put a cleaning sign outside the?—”

“Get out of here. You can’t be in here.”

“Sir, I have to clean?—”

“This is ridiculous. They don’t have a male worker to do this?”

“Not right now, no?—”

“Right, sure. And if I talk to the manager, I’m sure they’ll tell me the same thing?”

Did this guy think I was getting my jollies from cleaning the bathroom? It was my job. What was it about the suburbs that made people think they could treat service workers like the scum of the earth?

“Yes, he will,” I said, already packing up the cleaning gear. “You have a good day, sir.”

I cleared out of the bathroom and bristled for the rest of my shift. I really could have used my vacation to destress from all the stupid people I had to deal with, but no, that was postponed, yet again.

Naturally, I wasn’t exactly feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed when my manager approached me at the end of my shift.

“Got a complaint about you.”

I sighed. “He was a pleasant one, wasn’t he?”

“A real piece of work, for sure. But listen, Vanessa, you gotta start standing up for yourself. Nobody likes a doormat.”

A doormat?

I stared at him, trying to calculate exactly how to reply to that , but he was already sauntering off.

I wasn’t a doormat. Was I? Yeah, I’d ended up cleaning the bathroom when it was Tiffany’s responsibility, but it needed to be done. And, yeah, I’d let Chuck move my approved time off, but that also needed to be done. Was I supposed to be a team player or not?

God, I hated my job.

My thoughts were so stormy on my bike ride home that I somehow forgot about the wolf. All I wanted was to be in my greenhouse with my plants. Belatedly, I remembered the space might be occupied.

I hoped not. While the wolf situation was as cool as it was mindboggling, I had shit to do, and I wanted to decompress in a space that had always been wonderful to me.

Hard to do with an apex predator in it.

Once I was home, I fed the cats and changed out of my uniform. Apparently, the drama from that morning was continuing, because Fork’s bowl had been pushed all the way into the far corner of the kitchen and had a crumpled paper towel in it. That had Mudpie written all over it. She was a real sweetheart most of the time, but if she felt that anyone had crossed her, well… she could be a little bit of a drama queen.

I had no idea where she got that trait from.

Once the cats were settled and eating dinner, I put some ground burger out to thaw in the sink, then headed outside.

The wolf was sitting in front of my greenhouse, his paws crossed politely.

What the fuck?

I blinked at him, which was probably a stupid thing to do, but it was so surreal to see him sitting so patiently, his amber eyes boring into me.

We stayed like that for several beats until his stomach audibly growled, and he whined.

Was… was he asking for food?