Big Bad

WOLVES

A wolf scampered off in a forest in New England not far from a stream on an awfully rainy night. It shouldn't have been there. Ask any animal behavior specialist and they could tell you that wolves had been irradiated from the area in the eighteenth century, and yet there it was, wild and free.

A wild thing doesn't care for borders, state lines, or scientific estimations about its whereabouts. Nothing wild cares where it was meant to be, only where it needs to be for survival. At the moment, nothing mattered more to the wolf than being in that particular forest.

The wolf had come mere inches from a human before disappearing off using stealth and skill. It had a good sense of nature, something most humans had forgotten. It could hear better, see farther, and run faster than any civilized creature. As such the wolf could sense the fear of the first human, along with the footsteps of the second.

Usually he'd avoid being seen at all, but his mission necessitated his seeing of one of the two humans. That was dangerous too, but some things are more important than safety. Regardless, almost being sighted by another was too close. It was messy. The wolf wasn't usually that messy, but he was overtaken with emotion, his senses overwhelmed. He knew he should have left sooner, but he couldn't, so the wolf had waited until the last possible second before brambling out of sight.

He ran deep into the forest. He could hear the footsteps of the humans, catch bits of their conversation even over the rain, and even sense how far they'd traversed. They were moving in the opposite direction, that was good. The wolf needed to be far far away.

There was a clearing several miles from the town in the forest that separated it from the other nearby towns and cut it off from most of the outside world. It was marked by an old tree with a deep crook in it, large enough that if somebody had been so inclined they could have climbed up and sat there. Standing already in the clearing were two tall figures, a girl with streaked wild hair caught somewhere in the crossfire between blonde and brown and a boy with thick black hair that swirled in the wind at the base of his neck where it hung nearly to his shoulders.

Such figures were tall, almost too tall to be human, and each bore a deep striking face carved by definite figures. The girl's eyes which had a strange luminescent quality appeared blue and deep, the boy's were a calm steely gray. Neither's face would have betrayed any emotion to another, but they deeply understood each other.

Both of them were soaked to the bone and they looked at each other, anxious to be back inside.

"Stop worrying." The boy stated in a gruff tone.

"We haven't seen him. He said to wait an hour and then–"

"It's only been forty-five minutes." The man reminded her.

"I know." Her complacent face didn't match her tone. "You don't think he'll be seen? It makes me nervous being so close to..."

"If the mission's successful we'll be getting a lot closer, so you'd better fix that."

The girl said nothing. Her eyes darkened to a bluish purple– perhaps just from the light, but somehow clearer.

The silence remained over the pair for a brief moment. The girl checked her watch again, glaring at it for reflecting that it had only been two minutes and she still was unable to properly panic like she wanted to.

"Shouldn't he at least be heading back by now?"

"I can hear him." The man quipped. "Can't you?"

It wasn't meant as an insult, but the woman frowned regardless. Her hearing in no way matched his, and she wasn't happy to have been proven wrong.