Silverblood

Instinct

When I was seven years old, my brother Nate was ten. We were inseparable back then. I was his shadow, following him everywhere like the annoying little sister that I was. He never complained once, always allowing me to go wherever he went and protecting me as an older brother would do. We were not only brother and sister, we were best friends.

I remember that, during the summer I turned seven, we went to Lake Michigan to spend the holidays with my father's family. On my birthday my parents decided to surprise me by taking me to the beach, a place I truly adored. I spent the day playing with Nate and my cousins in the water, screaming and giggling in joy and pretending to be a mermaid. At the time I had already taken swimming lesson, but as the skinny and gangly kid that I was, I was not a very skilled swimmer. Reason why I found myself being taken under by a wave. As my knight in shining armor, Nate promptly hitched me up by my armpits, patting me on the back while I coughed the water out of my throat. He always had my back and, needless to say, it was the last time I pretended to be a mermaid.
It was a memory full of warmth, of fraternal love, of happiness.

A memory I was now relieving with my own eyes.

The sun's warmth was kissing the skin of my face while I surveyed the four pups playing in the shallows. I was seated on the tallest rock, or the rock Hercules had specifically claimed as his own, at the border of the lake near my cabin.

I came here to think. Things were not going well at the pack, at least not for me.
Sarah's health was slowly deteriorating and the biopsy I had run this week revealed that it was, indeed, cancer. She took the fact surprisingly well, saying that she fully trusted me to bring her back on the way of recovery. I wasn't as optimistic as her. For the first time in my career I felt useless, completely and utterly useless. I knew how to treat the disease in humans, but I had no idea how to proceed in this situation. Would chemotherapy work on her? I didn't have a clue. Would I take the risk? I would. In addition, I didn't find anything remotely useful in the journals I had retrieved from the library, leaving me clueless as a first year student in front of a cardiac stent surgery.
I was still sure of my theory. I knew there was something preventing Sarah to heal, but I didn't know what.

Meeting Hercules to drop the bomb had been the cherry on top of the week. I had been avoiding him since the Gala night the prior weekend, so when I entered his study on Thursday saying that he was surprised to see me would be a reduction. His surprise swiftly turned in sadness when I told him about Sarah's condition. He was devastated. In that moment I knew that he truly and deeply cared for his pack members as none would have been able to fake such anguish.

So, two days later, I found myself here after having dosed Sarah with her first round of chemotherapy treatment. I had been watching the sun's reflections on the water to try to calm my raging mind until I had felt other four presences nearing the lake shore.

They turned out to be the four pups I was currently watching. Three of them I recognized, the other I didn't. They were the three children I had seen in the pack house when I met Layla for the first time, two boys and a girl. The youngest boy was merely an infant, three years old at maximum, while the other two seemed older, probably seven or eight years old. The one I didn't recognize was a preteen. I could smell the wolf in him, feeling his presence on his skin. If he hadn't already shifted, the day in which he would was not far.
I wondered what four younglings like them could be doing so far away from the pack house, especially without a supervisor.