6 Months Later
Bianca
The wind is pelting and howling furiously against the tent. It feels just like home with the way the cold seeps from outside into the small, enclosed space.
Most of my body is covered under layers of thermic clothes while I curl into my sleeping back. Except for my hands—these are out and wrapped around my book and flashlight.
It's pitch black dark outside. Whatever stars we'd be able to see are completely clouded by the storm that's raging. It feels downright wrathful and we haven't been able to move for two days.
Though, I'm used to the cold and dark. Frankly, I feel at home.
My copy of Alexander Dumas' The Black Tulip is a paperback edition my mother bought me when I was young. It's worn down entirely with a flimsy cover and spine. It's the only book I carry with me whenever I leave home.
Not that I leave often. Or ever. Not since I was a little girl when my mother took me.
I wouldn't say I have much warmth towards my mother, but I can acknowledge that this gift was probably the only happy reminisce I have of her. Whenever she caught me reading for pleasure, she would snatch the book from my hands only to replace it with some 'real' literature or novels regarding strategy, psychology, and even history.
I remember reading Harry Potter as a child. Ron made me laugh out loud, or maybe it was Harry saying something snarky. Regardless, the sound of my laugh gave me away. My mother took the book and swapped it with The Poetic Edda—in its original Old Norse. It gaze me an atrocious headache trying to read.
"If you want to read about magic, Bianca." My mother would tell me when I exclaimed my displeasure. "Then you read about our culture. Not this fictional nonsense."
At the time, there was nothing more that I wanted to do but make her happy. I abided to her blindly, willfully—downright, stupidly.
Even then, when my birthday came around and she handed me my present, I fully expected something like War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. I was utterly surprised, but not as shocked as my wolf, when I opened the wrapped to find The Black Tulip.
"Happy birthday, dóttir." She said with a rare genuine smile. "You deserve it."
That was years ago and probably my fondest memory of my mother. She was cold and strict. Seemingly only good to me. She was better to my father, the warmest whenever he was around.
But she was a monster to my brother, Alexander. And my baby brother—Montgomery—she died before she could mess him up as terribly as she affected us.
I smile to myself as I reach one of my favorite quotes in the novel. I underlined it with a pencil years ago. Now the lead is smudged and gray.
If you don't go to sleep now, My wolf voices with a light purr like she's crossing her paws in front of her. A huff comes from her nostrils. You'll be cranky in the morning.
One more chapter. I tell her.
Right. She rolls her eyes. Sleep, Bianca.
Always taking care of me. I snort in response.
She swishes her tail. If a wolf could smile, she does. Always.
I flip a page and read on with the comforting sounds of the wind hurling snow and ice outside in the dark night.
***
"Rise and shine." Parvati opens the flap of my tent. Her Nepali accent thick in her English. "That's the saying, yes?"
YOU ARE READING
The Broken Wolf
Werewolf"Killian what?" She asks while scribbling my name on the book. "Just Killian." She looks up at me with furrowed eyebrows. "No surname?" I smile faintly. You can't have a surname if you don't remember it. You can't have a surname if it was brutally...
