A wolf, whiter than the endless winter, stood taller than the man’s shoulder. Its diamond eyes looked back at me. Its lips peeled away from its dripping fangs as the rumbling snarl shook the frost upon which it stood. I looked back at the beast within me. Knowing it protected my human, I loved every hair and dripping tooth of my new, monstrous form.
I salivated as I imagined sinking my teeth into his flesh, bone bursting from joints as it ripped beneath my divine wrath.
I’d been a terrifying wolf for barely three seconds before realizing if I had caused the man fear, then even with the bond, the presence of an enormous beast may start to scare the girl. I hadn’t spent much time around mortal animals, but I’d seen the domesticated cats, dogs, and birds that humans often kept as pets. With the man still scrambling backward in abject terror, I turned my attention toward my human. I lowered my ears, looked back at her with wide, peaceful eyes, and dipped my head as close to the ice as I could to try to win her favor.
The wind sang a song of its own, drowning out the whimpering cowardice of a male who failed to matter.
Like Shala in the cave, or Eleni on the steps, she should have screamed.
But she didn’t.
She said something I didn’t understand.
I’d learned seventy-seven Semitic languages, including dozens of Afroasiatic dialects. Indo-European languages, proto-Balto-Slavic languages, one at a time. I’d begun to learn the curious Germanic sound shift in the first millennium.
How many languages could humans invent? How many ways could I misunderstand my human? How could I tell her she was safe with me if I couldn’t speak to her?
But…I didn’t have to.
She asked me a question I didn’t understand, but I memorized the sounds, knowing I’d learn her language and interpret it the moment I was able.
“Will you stay?” Her question, the cord that tethered our souls.
I didn’t speak the language yet. It spoke through me, into me, all around me, and I knew.
This human did not fear me, despite the general terror.
Whether she had a death wish or no sense of self-preservation, the result was the same. She didn’t recoil, nor did she panic in the life-saving way that had spared so many humans. She was meant to fight, fly, or freeze. I would have accepted the fawn of an extended hand to sniff her fingers, to try to win a beast.
I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d ran. Hell, Iwantedher to be terrified, if only to know she had the instincts required to stay alive.
Coal-black eyes looked back at me with the sort of trust that cupped my heart in her two small hands, cracking it as she held it. She wore the weariness of someone far beyond her years as she stared through me, into me, despite my beastly shape. Perhaps she was too tired to be afraid. Maybe she was ready for it to be over. I couldn’t say. All I knew for sure was that no man would touch her again.
Myths had been started by less than what happened that day on the ice.
Dozens of witnesses attested to the otherwise unbelievable event.
A throng of her people watched as an enormous wolf forged of frost and fangs appeared out of thin air to defend an innocent.
A protector, a rescuer, a spirit who’d emerged from the realms beyond reason to put itself between a girl and her attacker. An ice-white monster, half the size of a mammoth, springing to a girl’s rescue and staying by her side was the stuff of legends. I accepted my role in the tale, so long as I wasn’t the story’s protagonist.
She was the center of their story even before I knew her name.
She stuck her hands in my fur, threw a leg over me, and sat upon my back. I hoped she could feel my smile at her strange, brave gesture. I would have applauded if I’d had hands.
They weren’t wrong to revere my human.
She was blessed, and they treated her as such. She may as well have been a god from the way her people revered her from that day forward. Unlike Shala and Eleni before her, I vowed not to leave her side, even for sixty Hellish seconds. Until her dying breath, she would have the resources of an immortal at her fingertips. I endured the blizzards and long nights and harsh terrain for as long as it took to bring her a spark of joy.
The frigid night of my arrival, a recently widowed woman took in the girl—my human—which was fortunate, as I would never again let her earthly father anywhere near her. I would have torn his jugular from its throat and left it freezing on the ice if I hadn’t thought his blood would upset her.
The new woman received the blessed girl and became her world guardian as a surrogate mother, and as such, made her soup, lit her fires, provided her furs, and never spoke an ill word of the daughter she’d taken in.
My people called me Prince. Her tribe called me Hero. At least, I grew to understand that’s what the word meant.
My human called me Fluffy.
I supposed I could be both.
