CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mori
Nightshade Bear Territory
That evening, I couldn’t help but notice that Lero didn’t come to unwrap his presents with the rest of us.
I didn’t point it out and hoped that he was home with his parents because Colton wasn’t around either.
I didn’t point out their absence because I didn’t want to draw any more attention to Lero than he already drew to himself.
After all the presents were unwrapped, I slipped outside, almost wishing that I smoked because that would be a reason to slink off.
I sat in the rocking chair on the porch that had been here since my namesake built the house years before my parents even met.
I tried to imagine him sitting in the other rocking chair, sipping coffee.
A wild wolf ran by with a partially eaten spiral ham in her mouth with a teenager chasing behind her.
I had bad news for him, he wasn’t getting his ham back.
For the most part, the wild wolf pack that lived around my parents’ home didn’t cause trouble but sometimes they decided it was easier to hunt our dinners than it was to hunt deer or rabbits in the woods.
I didn’t blame them. Everyone wanted to take a break during the holiday season.
Not that my parents didn’t make sure they had plenty to eat.
The snow started to fall again in those big, fluffy white flakes that always let me know I was home.
A wolf walked through the snow, head down, carrying something in her mouth.
I chuckled, thinking she’d stolen part of someone’s dinner too but she stopped and looked up at me.
If that was her dinner, it was still wiggling and the wild wolves around here didn’t torment their prey.
They knew my carrier would never let them hear the end of it if they did.
“Hey, mama,” I called out to her, wondering if she was trying to move her puppies during a snowstorm and needed help.
Her tail wagged once, something that happened more and more as the pack lived with us generation after generation.
She started toward the porch and when she came up into the dim glow of the porch light I saw that she wasn’t carrying a wolf pup in her mouth but a puppy of a domestic dog.
It was a fluffy thing – too fluffy – its long ears and brown and white pattern made it look like a basset hound but it’s fluffiness spoke of a saint bernard.
“Where’d this little guy come from?” I asked as she sat him down on my lap and wagged her tail.
She hadn’t had any puppies yet. She was a bit on the young side to take up with her own mate.
No one in the village had a dog capable of producing such puppies as far as I knew.
The little puppy shivered and I looked toward the kitchen window.
I could take him inside to warm up but the merrymaking was still going on.
Instead, I stood up and headed up. The wolf raced off the way she came from.
I clutched the little guy to my chest, realizing I had left my gifts behind at my parents’ house and hoped that Wess and Preston brought them home for me.
But this little guy melted something inside me.
He was small and still had his tiny little milk teeth.
His breath smelled like that of a puppy but some wolf had given him milk too.
Perhaps whichever one had would’ve kept it up if the other shewolf didn’t take him away or perhaps she’d grown tired of feeding the strange looking puppy.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to him as he whimpered. “It’s too cold for a little guy to be out here in all this snow, huh? You’re all covered in it. We’ll call you Snowy. You sure have thick enough fur for it, huh?”
Little did I know that stepping out onto the porch for a breather would give me a friend who would stay on my heels for all of his days but Snowy was exactly who I needed.
He didn’t care about magic or true-mates.
He just wanted someone to cuddle up with to stay warm and someone who preferably had thumbs to feed him.
Later, he’d learn to play and do tricks that made us all laugh.
It all played out before my eyes. He’d be there when I met my mate and he’d be there in the room when our first baby was born.
My mate would wear the Grim Howler shirt Dern talked about on the day our first child came into the world.
Somehow, Snowy not only brought down to earth but also lifted me out of whatever funk the failed fight against fate had unfurled inside me even if I didn’t yet know what mayhem we’d wake up to later that night.
It was him that woke us up to let us know that the world might just crack apart if we didn’t get out of bed and face down evil in our living room.