Celestial Heartbeat (Book One) COMPLETE

Chapter One - Cousins

The paw prints in the snow suddenly ended.

The small ginger wolf had padded away, but the constant swishing of its tail had made sure that its pathway was flat enough that the snow would soon cover it over again. Before I would be able to follow the tracks very far.

It was the second time tonight that the wolf had shown up on my very doorstep and the second time tonight that my mother had ordered we go into lockdown in our house. I tried to remind her for the thousandth time that wolves were fairly harmless. They avoided confrontation as much as they could, and only ever really preyed on the weak, sick or small animals. The wolves that lived around our town seemed particularly harmless; there’d never been a reported case of a wolf attack in this town in the whole seventeen years of my life that I’d spent here. Yet my mother still feared them.

So I’d had to convince my mother that I’d live out the lockdown in my room, and then snuck out to see the wolf.

I was never afraid of him. The ginger wolf, that is.

He probably could have taken down an elephant with little help from anyone else, but his eyes were always measuring, waiting. They never locked onto me or looked as ferocious as the rest of him. His body never resumed a threatening or ready stance. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. Not right now. Not like this.

I wanted to reach out to him, and let him know that I wouldn’t hurt him either. But every time I reached out to him, his ears flicked straight back and he would dart in the opposite direction, back into the forest.

And so I waited for the day I could put my hands into his fur.

**

Wandering into my first class for the school year, I had my head hung low and my expectations even lower. Of course, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d lived in Sannah since the day I was born and seen it for what it was really worth, I might have had relatively high hopes for the year, the second last year before heading off to college seemed like when school really started to intensify, and get exciting, if not a little scary. But as I took in the interior of the class, all I could see was a sea of dropping faces matching up to my own, the amount of despair we wore on our faces; it was like the classroom was about to disappear at any minute and turn into death row. The only thing that had a hope at humoring us in our current state were the walls lined only with the black and white figures of historic leaders, who, whether by choice or by the tip of a students sharpie all fashioned a similar thick black mustache. So this was going to be my new history class, I thought, staring down again at my brand new timetable; still warm from the printer, the reminder of my subject choices made me wonder why my last year self had had a death wish out for me.

Other walls supported similar black and white pictures of war zones, pre and post war and other historic figures. Cello-taped roughly to the front of the black board, facing towards where the twenty or so students I had been acquainted for my whole life, would be sitting was a rather large black and white picture of what looked like it could have been tiny gum diggers huts from the late 1800’s, the image itself looked like what could have been a copy of one of the worlds first photographs, torn and faded, barely distinguishable through all of his grit and wear. Underneath, in bold chalk stood the heading “Sannah’s History” making me question once again, why the towns history was even a choice of subject, the town was so small that I highly doubted it’s history would drag on long enough to be taught during the three senior years of high school. Nevertheless I was here inside of the classroom, ready to be taught.

“Yo! Evie babe, looks like we’re not the only hotties in this class anymore.” Violet Reed hollered at me, waving her arms frantically enough that she could’ve landed the next Boeing 787 that headed our way. I grinned at her; walking towards her seat she had craftily acquired us right at the back. It wasn’t really a seating position I was used to; Vi was known notoriously for getting me into trouble with my teachers for talking or doing something stupid and usually I would say that the back is exactly where the teachers kept their eyes on, but it had become a more than well known fact with all of the students that our teacher was beginning to lose his sight in his old age, and it appeared that us students that sat in the back were just becoming a little too fuzzy for him to make out.