In Heat - Jenlisa

Chapter 104 - Cold

Lisa doesn't sleep for very long and what little she does dream is fraught and full of shadows.

An hour before dawn, she gives up and leaves her nest. Though the floorboards creak beneath her sock feet, Jennie remains as still as a corpse, breathing evenly on her back in perfect embalming position. She's beautiful, Lisa thinks, recognition forming cold and hard in her stomach. She trusts Jennie's strength, but hunts have made meat of stronger wolves than her, and Jennie doesn't have the same natural advantages they do. There's always the risk of tragedy when a packmember ventures from the village.

Lisa's twisting and turning through the night had all but destroyed her nest, leaving her many sleeping blankets strewn about Jennie's feet, but she doesn't care about the state of her bed so much as the fact that the temperature dropped severely in the night, unusual for this close to summer, and what little of Jennie's skin she can see is covered in goosebumps. Lisa feels a bit like she's risking her life as she gingerly tucks her favorite blue blanket over Jennie's thighs. Has anyone dared to touch Jennie Kim while she was asleep? It doesn't seem likely. Jennie's known to sleep armed.

Once Jennie is suitably covered, Lisa nods and leaves the room as quietly as possible. The house smells stale and cold, no trace of Suga's apples or Jungkook's roasted chestnuts in the hallway. Lisa imagines a world where her house smells like Jennie instead of her parents—where even the foundation of their home smells of honey and funeral lilies, a constant comfort no matter where Lisa walks—and her cheeks grow warm at the thought. She probably has more pressing concerns than entertaining fantasies of building a house with Jennie in some distant, uncertain future. Jennie might not even want to erect a permanent homestead the way wolves do.

Lisa passes a few vaguely familiar packmembers as she leaves the Manobal property, but none do more than nod in her direction. Most will be congregating to the north, she knows, hauling vats of clay paint and food and supplies for the party once the hunters return. When the moon is full and the warriors have come down off the mountain, they'll roast cobs of corn and sausages on the fire while the unmated wolves dance with the bloody furs brought back by their chosen partners.

Lisa never stayed for very long at these sorts of celebrations before, always leaving early with the other underage wolves, but she can only imagine what havoc Jennie would wreak if she knew butchering was an integral part of the feast.

"Fuck," she whispers to herself, skin prickling at the thought of Jennie blooding herself on a deer carcass or whatever else she manages to drag home from the hunt. It's barbaric, really, but California Trad wolves are barbaric. It's in her blood to find such savagery appealing.

The trees around her seem to agree, swaying in a sort of laughing acknowledgment that needles across her shoulders in a gush of cold air. Lisa takes a single step off the path, ignoring the branches that catch on her hair and smooth out the tangles, squinting through the dark in search of what's causing the forest to feel so restless around her. An Eater wouldn't dare venture this close to the village, surely, but she can't help feeling a bit like Red Riding Hood. She wasn't supposed to leave the path, either.

There's a sudden spill of wind over her collar, so familiar and welcoming a touch that any dread of forest monsters disappears at once. Lisa knows this breeze. She's heard this song before.

Without another thought to her original intention of doing a lap around the house to calm her nerves so she can catch another hour of sleep curled up beside Jennie before the gathering begins, Lisa leaves the path and sets off into the forest. She crunches her way eastward until she hits the square, already bustling at this early hour, and then, rising from the dark like an old tooth in the same yawning mouth she's known her whole life—the church. Lisa smells Aminder before she sees her.