Home -- Wolv book 3

Chapter 4 - Sloshed

She couldn't do it.

She lay in her bed, her feet and back burning with the pain of strained muscles, and her neck as tense as a rock. Every part of her body ached, and the next two days she had off were looking more and more like couch days. She'd wanted to go out tomorrow, but if she couldn't move, than the couch it would be.

She tossed around on the mattress, staring numbly at the little clock next to her. 11:00 p.m. Yuck. She rolled over and stared blankly at the ceiling, wishing that sleep would come. Great. I'll be sore AND tired on my days off. Isn't that just perfect!

I hate it here.

Four months. Four long, impossibly short months was all it had taken to break her. Four months of the endless drone of the warehouse, four months of the mindless bustle of the city, four months of dealing with condescending glares from annoyed customers.

Nadie wanted to go home.

She'd promised herself she would never admit it, but she missed Bloodvein. It was a wreck of a town, one with marginal living conditions compared to Winnipeg, but she missed it more than anything. She missed the open skies, the clean air, the icy waters of the Bloodvein River...she missed paddling down those waters, she missed visiting Atikaki once a month and camping alongside a lake shore, she missed...

Home.

She'd come to Winnipeg, naive and eager to work, only to be crushed by the cold reality of the city.

She hugged her little wolf plushie to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut as the tears threatened to fall. Yes, she missed the wolves, too. She'd promised her mother that she would return for Spring, but that seemed so far away--a whole winter away, in fact.

And what were the odds that she would be bitten during the short time she'd be there, back in Bloodvein?

Slim to none.

I just want to go home.

She nearly had--several times already. After one particularly hectic week, she'd angrily snatched her house keys and marched to the front door, ready to kick it down and throw her keys back down at Mrs. Olson's feet.

She would have, too. She would have packed up her meager belongings and chartered a flight back to Bloodvein; sure, she would have been admitting defeat, and she would crawl back home in shame, tail between her legs. She had tried to reach out to the few others who had left Bloodvein and moved to Winnipeg; those who she'd managed to contact--those who weren't dead or missing--didn't want to speak to her, least of all, about home.

Nadie had none of her own kind to talk to here. Aside from the two letters she'd received from her mother, she had no connection to Bloodvein, to her family and relatives, to her dream...

...Except for the airport. And it wouldn't have been difficult to drop everything and get on a plane home. At any given moment, it would only take her an hour at most to charter a flight back. Only an hour, and she'd finally be on her way.

But she had stayed. Because of Humfrey Michaels.

Poor, weak, shy, introverted little Humfrey, who rarely opened up about himself, who could cry in his car for hours one day, and still show up for work the next. Humfrey, who she knew so much about, yet at the same time, she didn't know the first thing about him; where he lived, who his parents were, who his family was--if he even had a family...

He was the only reason she still got up at unorthodox hours in the morning to walk several long, miserable block to work.

He was her friend. Always there, always willing to talk to her, always ready to be talked to. Everyone always said he was shy, they said he never smiled; yet, she saw him smile every time she saw him, and he had no problem starting or carrying on a conversation with her. And, unlike the jabbering cabbie she'd met months ago, Humfrey seemed to genuinely care about what she had to say.