Emma
My parents said it was a dream. That the wolf I saw so clearly in the middle of the night was a figment of my imagination.
The nurses at the ward weren't any better.
But I remembered him. My wolf. His silver eyes. His warm fur against my skin.
I could almost feel his hands on my face, his wolf's cold nose on the palm of my hand. It was how I woke every morning, bleary-eyed and much too soon for the dream to end.
Too awake to return to my wolf, I blinked at the early morning light. White walls with bars on the windows surrounded me. The ratty old mattress screeched under my weight as I rolled over to look at the piles of books collected in every corner of the room.
Books about wolves, werewolves, and anything else I could get my hands on. But no matter how much I read, no matter how hard I tried to remember, nothing explained what my wolf had been or why he hadn’t come back for me.
The staff at the ward insisted I hadn’t seen him at all, and if it weren't for how real my dreams felt, I might have believed them. For years, I'd struggled with the truth. Six years later, and I still remembered him.
He’d taken me as far into the woods as we could go. And, pressing his forehead to mine, he’d shown me events that hadn’t happened yet and things he’d experienced long ago. A black tree. The Earth’s essence—a green stream of energy siphoned from the ground with heavy machinery. The more we took from the Earth, the darker the ground became.
The Earth was dying, and even though everyone else at the ward could see it, I was the only one who could hear it. When my folks couldn’t stand my stories any longer, I was dumped here—far away from home and, more importantly, my wolf.
Rousing myself, I fixed my nightgown, then closed my hands around the bars guarding the window. I studied the world outside and searched for Tucker's silhouette just as I'd done every morning since I'd arrived. He wasn't there.
A bleak sky hung overhead, but I knew better than to hope for rain. Broken roads and tall cranes jutted from the ground in place of the trees I remembered from my childhood. There were no colors, no green grass or wildflowers like the ones from my books. That part of my world had disappeared shortly after my fifth birthday, into memory and fiction.
Storms of ash and rain scarred the landscape, painting the world in gray undertones. As the Earth died, mankind tried to save what they could by building machines, ones capable of draining the essence from the Earth. This essence, or the core as some called it, was hidden far beneath the surface. It was what brought life to the flowers, fields and farms.
We'd discovered the stream by mistake. Wherever the green streams touched, flowers bloomed. Consumed by greed, we built even more machines—turning the Earth’s essence into useable energy.
Children started to vanish after that.
"It's the Earth's price," Tucker had said. "It struggles to keep the balance, but it was lost long ago."
"Emma, are you awake?"
A knock on the door thrust me from my thoughts.
"Am I ever not awake?" I asked, going over to greet the nurse.
"Good point." An older woman poked her head into the room. She glared at my mess of hair, the unmade bed and the books lining the walls. She handed me a cup of pills and some water with a sigh. "I take it the new medication isn’t helping?"
Damn straight. It's not working because I’m not taking it. I bit my lip and shook my head. As soon as the staff had stopped supervising me, I'd weaned myself off the mindless drugs—they'd been strong enough to put me out, but too weak to do much else.
"I'll have them up the dose, then," the woman said, rummaging in her pocket for a pad of paper so she could write it down. "Perhaps we need to do a few more tests," she mused, stepping into the hall to retrieve a tray of foodstuffs. After depositing my first meal of the day onto the table beside my bed, she paused in the doorway. "Will you be needing anything else?"
"I could use a new notebook. My last one’s full," I replied.
"But we gave you one last week."
"What else do you expect me to do in here?"
"You really should go to the activity room more often. They miss you down there."
My vision narrowed. "And waste my thoughts when I could be writing them down? No thanks."
The woman shrugged. "I have you scheduled for a shower later this afternoon. I should have a new notebook for you by then."
"I smell that bad?"
The woman smiled, her eyes wrinkling at the corners. "You look even worse," she teased, excusing herself from the room.
I pressed my back against the door until it clicked, taking a few short breaths before sliding my bedside table away from the wall. It was somewhere they never looked, not even during inspection. I stashed the new pills in the wall before replacing the table.
The food was as unappetizing as ever—an overcooked egg, a piece of toast slathered with so much butter it was probably cold, a few strips of bacon and a child’s juice box. I ignored it all, including my stomach, which protested when I moved to the other side of the room.
I was about to look through one of my notebooks when a second nurse knocked on my door.
The door opened, followed by a whoosh of cool air from the hallway.
"Gather your things," a younger woman ordered, her voice sounding more miserable than the first. "Someone’s come for you."
I turned on my heels, expecting the woman’s expression to be one of amusement, as if this were a practical joke. It wasn’t. The woman didn’t move, her lips as motionless as the rest of her. Something squeezed around my heart. No one ever comes for me anymore. Not even to visit. I knew it wouldn't be my parents. They’d stopped visiting years ago, and it had been almost as long since their last call. It can’t be them. Even if it was, if they’d had a change of heart, I wouldn’t go with them.
"My parents?" I asked, turning back to my collection of notebooks before picking them up off the floor.
"Your brother's waiting at the front desk with your papers."
Brother? I didn't have any siblings. Then again, seeing as my parents dumped me here, maybe I had relatives they'd never told me about. Maybe even before I was born.
Feeling more self-conscious than before, I combed my fingers through my tangled hair and followed the nurse into the hall. As we walked single file to the reception desk, I considered the idea of my parents coming to release me into the world. What’s left of it, anyway. I pushed the possibility to the side, however, as soon as we rounded the corner. That voice.
The man, the one Tucker had shown me from his memories, was standing at the front desk. I sucked in a breath. Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I averted my eyes. Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. Don’t. Freak—
"Hello, Emma," came an all too familiar voice. Wearing a thin leather jacket and a torn pair of jeans, Tucker looked as comfortable in his human skin as he had as a wolf.
This is a dream. It had to be. Humans didn’t turn into wolves, and it certainly didn’t happen the other way around.
"And you said you you're her brother?" the gentleman behind the desk asked.
"Half-bother," Tucker said, pushing a hand through his short brown hair.
"You parents never spoke of..."
"Dad doesn’t know," Tucker added, cutting the man off. "I have our papers." He retrieved a set of documents from inside his jacket pocket and handed them in.
He was there, right beside me, and it took every bit of strength I had not to freak out. I reminded myself to breathe and hugged an arm around Tucker’s when he offered it to me. He flashed me a smile, and that recognition alone sent a shiver down my spine.
"She'll need to get dressed," the man behind the desk said, raising his eyebrows in my direction.
"We're only going to the car," Tucker said. "She'll sleep most of the way home anyway. She was always good at dozing off in the backseat. Isn't that right, Em?"
I swallowed hard and, after a long moment, I murmured an acceptable reply. He's taken this long to find you. Shouldn't you look somewhat presentable? He'd already seen me in a gown—twice, actually—and I refused to head back down the hall.
While I did my best not to fall, face first, onto the floor, Tucker collected my things and placed my notebooks into a duffle bag.
"Go on outside." He leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. "The car’s waiting out front."
Fire spread from his kiss, melting a hole through my skin long after his lips were gone. I wanted to ask him what car. What did it look like? Instead, I locked my jaw and did my best to hide the shaking of my hands as I wrapped them around his waist. Tucker glanced at me, his eyes a mix of emotions I couldn’t read.
"Go on," he said, untangling my arms from around his middle.
I smiled, and when he returned it, my grin widened. Giddy from the sudden contact, I swallowed around my excitement and tried to look as serious as he did. It wasn’t easy. Not only was I getting out of the building full of white walls and sleepless nights, I was going with him—the very thing my parents had insisted wasn’t real. And to think, I almost believed them.
A soft breeze kissed my cheeks as I opened the front doors. The gray clouds from before were beginning to melt away as small patches of blue filled the gaps.
I almost looked down at my feet to see if the green cracks still stretched across the ground when a hand touched my shoulder.
"Eyes forward," Tucker said, his voice firm. "Where we’re going, the Earth isn't broken." He stopped and turned me around so I was facing him. His eyes mimicked the gray before an oncoming storm, silent and calm. "Do you remember what I told you so many years ago?"
"To come to you when I was ready," I said, staring at my hands.
"And if you got lost, I’d find you instead. Are you ready to join me?"
I glanced over my shoulder at the building we'd walked out of. "Do I have a choice?"
"You do, though I’d hope my offer is more appealing than staying here."
My nightgown suddenly felt too small, too thin. "I’m a mess," I warned, nodding to his duffle bag.
"I’m sure that isn’t true. Come on. There will be a fresh change of clothes and a hot shower waiting for you at home." He guided me to a yellow pickup.
"And where is home?" I asked when he opened the passenger side door for me.
"A world away from here."
I furrowed my brow when he slid into his side of the car, turning the keys in the ignition.
"What I showed you was only a glimpse of what it truly is," he explained. "I had to give you a reason to remember me, to remember what I told you—for me to imprint on you, and for you to do the same."
"Imprinting?"
Tucker set his hands on the wheel. "I promise to explain everything once we get home."
I settled back in my seat and watched out the window. I tried not to think of how close we were or how badly I wanted to kiss him like I’d done so many times in my dreams.
I don’t know how long I’d been staring at him before Tucker met my gaze. He tossed me a knowing smile, which made matters even worse. I bit my lip and closed my eyes as he pulled out of the parking lot.
I counted his breaths and drew in a lungful of air, tasting the faint remnants of pine and wolf on my tongue.
We're going home. Mine or his, I didn't care. So long as it wasn't here.