Chapter 3 Wild New World
Wild New World
By the time I made an appointment for later in the afternoon, the dog had fallen asleep.
I crouched by his head and watched his body rise and fall with his deep breathing.
Now that his piercing arctic-blue gaze wasn’t following my every move, I allowed myself to put my hand over his shimmering bronze fur.
He felt so soft, like touching a fluffy cloud. I stroked down his sides, careful to avoid the wounded area, and felt his muscles, tense even in his sleep, relax under my touch. I’d never felt something as soft as him.
There was also a distinct smell to him that made me take a deep breath, inhaling the scent. He smelled like freshly cut grass or the damp earth after a rainy night.
It made me want to borrow my head into his fur and breathe him in.
But I had no time for this. I had to work if I wanted to afford the vet’s visit—and also keep a roof over my head and food on the table.
Reluctantly, I withdrew my hand and headed to the desk, settling behind it on the broken, worn chair and flipping the laptop open.
First things first: My article regarding the Sunset Boulevard killing was approved. That meant I would see the money in my account tomorrow.
Next, I began researching for my personal project. I wanted to find more murder cases similar to the one on Sunset Boulevard. Shadow marks appeared only at violent crime scenes, after all.
Unlike with sigils, I didn’t quite understand the point of shadow marks.
Seeing nothing noteworthy in the news—no new crimes that raised my supernatural-acute alarm—I decided to shift gears and start working on my next piece.
After seeing the unknown sigil on the dog’s back, I had found yet another mystery to look into. Besides, it’d been a while since I wrote about sigils.
Most people don’t look at a knife wound and think, magic, I typed. But I do.
From there, I let my fingers lead the way, and for the next few hours, all I did was type, look in my sigils notebook, and contemplate a name to call the sigil on the dog’s back.
During breaks, I poured water into a bowl and held it for the dog to drink. I was worried he hadn’t eaten or drunk in a while, so I was determined to get him to consume what he needed to, if he wanted to survive.
The dog hesitated at first, refusing to drink the water from the bowl in my hands, but after I told him, “You don’t want to die from dehydration, do you?” he seemed to relent and drank the bowl dry.
Then, after simple online research, I found I could feed him some meat and rice, in case I didn’t have dog food available. When I checked how much dog food cost, I opted to go for the chicken thighs and simple white rice.
Again, the dog seemed unhappy when I brought the plate to his snout. But this time, I didn’t need to convince him to eat, because his hunger seemed to do him in, and he cleaned the plate in less than a minute.
After I got myself some rice and chicken, too, and sprinkled them with salt and some other spices so they had a better taste, I sat on the couch, facing the dog, who narrowed his eyes at my plate.
I found myself smirking. “I don’t know what you are yet,” I informed him, “so I’m treating you like a regular dog for now. Meaning you can’t have spices.”
If the dog was human, I would’ve thought my words pissed him off. He had that kind of look.
After taking a bite of the chicken thigh, I pointed my fork at him and said, “You know, if you’re capable of human speech, you can simply tell me what you are.”
The dog growled in response, but for some reason, I didn’t find him threatening. Usually, such a humongous dog growling at me would’ve made me think twice about my safety, but something about him put me at ease.
Maybe it was the fact he was currently too incapacitated by his wound to actually do anything to me.
“Obviously, you understand me,” I deduced, taking a bite of the rice. “Now the question remains, how can I get you to communicate with me?”
This seemed to annoy him, because he made an irritated huff, and leaned his head down on his large paws and closed his eyes. But his tail was flicking back and forth sharply, like my cat’s used to do when he was agitated.
I wondered if it meant the same for dogs.
After lunch, I got back to my computer, and instead of continuing to work on my new article, I made a slight detour and searched for canine supernatural creatures online before pulling out my thick folder from the desk drawer.
The list was longer than I thought.
Opening the folder, I looked through my own lists. Much like with sigils, I documented all kinds of supernatural creatures I believed—or rather, knew—were real and walking among us, along with the evidence I’d collected for each.
I had mermaids, sorcerers, succubi, and even Harpies, among many others. But when it came to the canine types, there were only three I had listed.
Hellhounds, Aralez, and werewolves.
Hellhounds referred to the creatures who served the guardian of Hell, according to many mythologies.
They were mostly known as the helpers of Cerberus from Greek mythology, but whether Cerberus, or even Hell, was real, I had yet to find proof.
As for hellhounds, though, there was plenty of evidence.
What they actually were, I didn’t know. I simply named them hellhounds because, according to certain sightings, especially in the Nordic countries, they looked like large dogs with demonic horns.
The Aralez, on the other hand, were creatures from Armenian mythology, depicted as winged, doglike creatures who descended from the heavens to lick the wounds of fallen heroes.
According to the testaments I had found, there were reports of terminally ill people who were visited by a large canine-ish creature during one night, and the next day, they were completely healed.
Those people, coincidentally, were all very altruistic, helping their communities while seeking no compensation for their good deeds.
Thus I named those creatures the Aralez.
Werewolves were self-explanatory, really: creatures who were part wolf, part human.
They were quite popular in modern literature, movies, and shows, and there were thousands of people online who claimed to have seen one.
There were countless “witness statements” about different kinds of werewolves: those who looked like a nightmare standing on two feet, with fur covering their limbs and sharp teeth, or black wolves with golden eyes and piercing fangs.
Throughout the last several years of researching the supernatural, I had learned one thing for sure: Ironically enough, when so many people thought something was real, yet all proofs contrasted with one another, the odds were that something might not actually be real at all.
And even if werewolves were real, and I went by the descriptions of those online who claimed to have seen one, the dog didn’t exactly fit any of them—except, perhaps, for his size.
As for hellhounds and Aralez . . . well, I highly doubted he was either of those.
He was far too pretty to be a hellhound—not to mention the lack of demonic horns, or the fact he was in the States rather than in Norway or something—and yet his temperament didn’t feel like it could belong to an Aralez.
If I was going by my own personal lists, he didn’t fit anything. But searches online showed me plenty of different options, and since I knew that I didn’t even scratch the surface when it came to my supernatural investigations, any of those options could be plausible.
A knock on the door made me jump, snapping me out of my deep thoughts. “Shit,” I murmured as I rose to my feet, ignoring the dog’s stare as I headed to the door and opened it.
There stood a woman in medical gear, holding a black briefcase. She gave me a friendly smile and said, “Miss Colter? I’m Dr. Alicia Danvers.”
“Oh, hi, yes,” I said, blinking rapidly as I returned to reality after my hours-long session staring at the laptop. “Come on in.”
I moved aside, letting the vet inside, and closed the door behind her. She fixed her bushy dark hair into a ponytail and peered at the sofa, where the dog was staring at her with a low growl. “I’m guessing this is the dog in question?”
“Yeah,” I said, moving to crouch by the dog’s head. “Feel free to check him and see what you can do.”
Dr. Danvers nodded and put the briefcase down before she crouched next to me by the dog’s head. He seemed to really hate it, because his growls grew louder, and he began baring his teeth.
But Dr. Danvers didn’t seem fazed. Not by his behavior, at least. “He’s the most stunning dog I’ve ever seen,” she said, her dark eyes roaming over him in curiosity and wonder.
“But I’ve never seen one this large. A Saint Bernard mix?
No.” She shook her head, then frowned as she pulled out a stethoscope from her briefcase.
“He doesn’t seem like an ordinary dog, though. ”
Before I could tell her about my suspicions, she held her hand up to tell me to be quiet and checked the dog’s side. His growls were now really loud, to the point I could swear the sofa itself was moving from their vibrations.
I was half afraid he would literally bite the good doctor’s head off, but thankfully, she withdrew from him and rose to her feet. “You said the wound’s on his back, right?” she asked, a frown on her face.
“Yes,” I replied, frowning as well. What was she thinking about?
Dr. Danvers reached with her hand toward the wound, or rather, the knife-carved sigil on the dog’s back, but before she could even touch the skin, the dog seemed to have been pushed over the edge.
It all happened so fast. In one blurry moment, the dog jumped off the sofa and backed away from Dr. Danvers, his back hunched, his hair standing on end, and his teeth fully bared.
His growls were no longer merely loud. They were literally making the floor shake.
Dr. Danvers stood there, frozen, watching the dog with wide eyes. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dog, either, but more out of worry. Because I could see a trail of blood flowing out of his wound and down his side, and dripping on the parquet floor.
“Jesus,” Dr. Danvers now said, turning to look at me. “I don’t think I can treat him. And neither should you.”
I glanced at her, shocked. “What the fuck do you mean, you can’t treat him?”
“Miss Colter,” she said slowly, carefully, her voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s not a dog.”
Huh?
She swallowed hard before returning her gaze to the beast and said, “It’s a wolf.”