Page 9 of The Healer and the Wolf, Part One

9

LEO

I was eating.

Not with my muzzle and sharp canines, but with an entirely different mouth and blunt teeth. My stomach was smaller, too, and it craved things I didn’t understand.

I was confused.

I scared the woman, yet she was still feeding me. She’d let me into her home, which she hadn’t allowed before.

Everything had changed. I didn’t know how or why, but I was in my human form again, able to do things I hadn’t in a very, very long time.

One of those things was remembering that I could be human at all. I was a wolf for so long that there hadn’t been anything else. Now, it was like an entire deluge flooding my mind, and I slowly worked through each detail and memory. It felt a bit like being drunk, except when I paused to think about that I realized I had no idea what it meant to be drunk.

My mind was full of so many of the same jumbles. It suggested something I should know, but when I examined it, there was just… nothing.

What the hell had happened to me?

I didn’t have the foggiest idea. What I did know, though, was that my savior, my friend, was beautiful.

I’d been aware of it before when I was a wolf and it didn’t quite make sense, but now? Looking directly at her was difficult because she was so utterly gorgeous. Her skin was the sweetest, creamiest, golden-tinted alabaster, her cheeks as rosy as her lips. And those dark eyes of hers I’d noticed before? They were somehow even more entrancing now. Such a deep, deep brown, I thought I was staring into the earth itself. I was certain that if she stood in a sunbeam, they’d glow like honey.

Everything about her was poetry, even if I couldn’t recall what poetry was like. The curves of her body were plenty, bountiful, the kind meant for broad hands and a strong grip. She was the type I absolutely would have been attracted to back when?—

Back when…

Back when what?

My head throbbed, and I shook it, belatedly realizing that my stunning savior had been asking me more questions.

Her voice was so sweet, so pleasant, with a huskiness to it that it was easy to forget the beginning of her question by the time she got to the end of it. Thankfully, she didn’t seem upset when she had to repeat things.

In fact, she was dealing with the whole situation pretty well. It was one thing to be suddenly introduced to shifters and another thing to have to deal with an amnesiac.

Because that’s what I was, wasn’t I? I couldn’t remember who I was or how I’d come to be stuck as a wolf, so I was pretty sure that was what it meant.

“How did you get here?”

“Followed you. After you helped.”

It still wasn’t very easy to talk, but the food and drink helped. I was trying to pace myself, certain that inhaling the meal wouldn’t be good for me, and I didn’t want to spend some of my first hours as a human again throwing up.

“No, I mean your humanness.”

Ah, right. I supposed that was a pretty significant issue.

“You broke the spell.”

The woman’s reaction was strange, but I could scent something like disbelief coming from her. Well, if she didn’t know about shifters, she likely didn’t know about witches or magic either.

Did I know about witches and magic?

Apparently so. More things were coming back to me, but it was all so disjointed and scattered.

“I… did not mean to be a wolf. You saved me.”

“So, you’re saying something turned you into a wolf? You’re, like, a regular guy and not a werewolf?”

I stopped eating while I pieced together what she meant. That was when a little voice in the back of my mind told me that shifters were supposed to be secretive. I was breaking our code by exposing us to her. But after everything she’d done for me, the woman deserved an explanation.

Explaining wasn’t exactly easy to do considering how goddamn delicious the food was. It was like I was rediscovering an entire world where seasoning existed. Salt! Pepper! How could I have forgotten about those?

How could I have forgotten about everything ?

Honestly, it was enough to make me want to weep, but my eyes and emotions couldn’t quite figure themselves out enough to do that. So, instead, I explained between bites.

“No, I’m a shifter.”

“A shifter?”

“Yes.”

She waited for more, then cleared her throat. “What is that?”

“Shifters can move between an animal and human form. I’m a wolf shifter.”

“You say that like there are different kinds.”

“There are.”

She swallowed hard, and I studied her to see if I had said something wrong. She still smelled of anxiety and worry, which I hated, but none of it ever reached those gorgeous eyes of hers. They were just filled with kindness and curiosity, and I kind of wanted them to never look away.

“So, you’re a shifter but someone forced you to be a wolf?”

“They took away my human form,” I said slowly, closing my eyes and looking deeper at the mess of memories. “Locked me as a wolf. We’re two parts of a whole. We’re not meant to be just one or the other.”

The more I spoke, the more I began to understand how torturous the situation I’d endured was. I was a shifter. A man and a wolf. Two parts working in harmony to be a complete being. We were nature and humanity, bound together to bolster each other’s weaknesses and celebrate each other’s strengths.

Half of myself had been stolen from me.

But why?

Who would want to hurt me in that way?

As she continued to ask simple questions, the largest not-fox-not-wolf came in and sat by the door of the?—

Wait.

Cat.

It was a cat.

I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten what cats were. Andromeda used to have the fattest, most orange cat when I was a tee?—

Who was Andromeda?

Too many questions. I couldn’t linger on all of them. The two other cats joined the first. As if it could hear my thoughts about the old, mystery cat in my memories, the orange cat approached me.

I ignored him, at least outwardly, and let him sniff me. I had the faintest memory that cats much preferred to approach on their own terms rather than have people aggressively greet them.

And my strategy turned out to be pretty sound, because by the time I was done eating, one cat was beside me on the table, one was a few feet from the chair, and finally, one hopped into my lap.

It felt like a badge of honor, and I tried not to preen. I felt useless, stupid, and more than a little confused, but at least the woman’s pack was accepting me.

Wait, pack.

I did have a pack; I remembered that now.

But where were they? Why was I separated from them, and how had I been stuck as a wolf?

“My cats are usually pretty picky,” she remarked as if she were trying to inflate my ego. Oh, they were, were they? “In your lap is Fork. He’s my chaos gremlin. On the table is Goober; you’ve met him before. And by your chair is Mudpie. She’s my oldest.” The woman seemed to consider something before continuing. “Oh, and I’m Vanessa.”

Vanessa.

What a beautiful name. It was fitting for someone like her. While I had found it difficult to look straight at her at first, now I found myself wanting to stare at every feature of her face until I could paint it with my eyes closed. Not that I knew how to paint.

Did I?

I was pretty sure I didn’t. My memory had more holes than Swiss cheese, but I didn’t remember any sort of artistic talent like that.

Weird, I remembered Swiss cheese. That was random.

“I’m Leo,” I said belatedly, once my words came back to me.

“Yes, you mentioned that before,” she said. Her smile was like the sun emerging from a cloud. “What’s that short for?”

“Leo.”

“Ah.” She chuckled a bit, although I didn’t understand the joke. “Well, for the record, I prefer to be called Ven.”

“Ven?” I parroted. She nodded. “Then, I shall call you Ven.”

“Thank you.”

Something about her smile and the depth of her eyes called to me like a siren at sea. I found myself wanting to lean toward her, drawn by the sheer gravitational pull of her.

Ha, it looked like I remembered some basic science now. That seemed like a good thing.

“I owe you my life.”

She made a vague gesture as if to wave away my ardent claim, still smiling softly. “I was just doing what was right.”

“You did far more than that.” I’d been trapped in the mind of an animal, locked inside a half-existence that denied me peace. But when she sang to me… It was a fleeting moment of tranquility in the storm of whatever cursed me.

And I would never forget that.

“Do you have anywhere to go? Is there anyone who would be missing you?”

“I… I don’t know.”

She nodded and took my empty plate away to place it in the sink. My eyelids began to flutter, and a strange slowness started to take me over.

“Are you tired?”

I nodded; a bit surprised that I was. I supposed that shifting for the first time in… how long? Too long. It had really wiped me out.

She smelled a bit like fear again, but her concern outweighed it. “Would you like some tea?”

Tea? I thought I might remember that, so I nodded again. “I would like that.”

Nodding, too, she put a kettle on to boil. With each passing second, more and more things were coming back to me. Little flashes and bits of information, all of them needing to be mentally decoded.

As the water boiled, my brain had time to cool off without any more new queries being loaded into it. I could simply feel for a moment. And I sure had a whole lot to feel.

But then Vaness—no, Ven, —brought me a steaming cup of hot liquid and set it in front of me.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” she murmured before disappearing.

Part of me wanted to grab her hand and beg her to stay, but she’d already done so much for me. It would be incredibly selfish of me to demand a thing more.

I picked up the heated mug and slowly sipped at it. Warmth flowed through me, soothing like an intangible blanket, and more flashes of memories returned.

I did have a family. At least I’d had a family at one point. I caught glimpses of being around a table, laughing with the blurry faces of the people I loved. Although I couldn’t identify any of them or pull up any more information, I knew without a doubt that every person at that table was incredibly important to me.

I couldn’t say how long Ven was gone, but when she returned, she waited for me to finish the somewhat bitter but wonderful drink before guiding me to her couch, which she had made up into a bed.

When was the last time I’d slept on anything that even resembled a mattress? I had no idea, but suddenly, I was incredibly eager to do so. I found myself getting emotional again. Silly, I know, but when last had anyone been so incredibly kind to me?

“Thank you,” I managed to ground out. “So much.”

“It wasn’t too much of a challenge,” Ven said, giving me that same smile.

Lord on high, had I managed to fall into the presence of a saint? Or maybe a real-life angel? That was the only explanation that made any sense to me.

“Do you need anything else?”

I shook my head and eagerly lay down on the sheets she’d tucked into the couch. They were like sheer silk along my skin. Such comfort! How was it possible for something so simple to feel so good?

“Goodnight, Leo.”

“Goodnight, Ven,” I said, so full of emotion I was sure she could hear it in my voice. But I didn’t care. Ven had seen me nearly dying and had never once judged me. Although she wasn’t a shifter, she seemed to understand why my situation was so confounding.

I listened as she went upstairs with all three of her cats in tow, then heard a click that had to be her locking a door.

She was afraid, which I understood, but she didn’t need to be. She didn’t know it yet, but I was resolved to keep her safe no matter what. Nothing would ever harm a hair on Ven’s head while I was alive.

With that thought in mind, I waited until I heard her breaths even out into the rhythmic falls of sleep before passing out myself.