Chapter 006

Outside Olympia, Washington, the wolves sunned themselves in their enclosures. Sunshine was increasingly rare this time of year, and the wolves — some of them dog-hybrids, others full-bred that had been kept as pets or rescued injured from the wild — lay contended in the dirt. They were mostly in mated pairs, some in smaller pack groups. They’d been fed for the day and had gotten the latest round of veterinary check-ups. The rest of the day was for lounging around, occasionally deigning to howl on request for the tour groups that came through Wolf Haven or casually lifting their heads to “smile” for the many cameras.

It wasn’t a bad life, but it wasn’t like the wild, either.

A lump of dark gray and black fur stretched out beneath a young pine tree, Fenrir growled in his sleep, awakening his enclosure mate, Alice.

He wasn’t particularly fond of Alice, with all of her preening and posing. She actually flirted with the human visitors, coming up to the fence and batting her pretty eyes at them. It wasn’t food she was after — assuming any of the visitors could have snuck any treats into the sanctuary to begin with. But she wanted to get them excited, to hear them coo and fawn over her, to make the children laugh and exclaim. A wolf-labrador hybrid, she’d been kept as a pet for three years — and had destroyed four sofas, two backyard fences (one electric), three sets of draperies, and two of the family cats — before she’d been turned over to Wolf Haven as a failed house pet.

But Alice missed her human family. Fenrir always stood back from the fence, watching her perform for the people, while he shook his coat in disgust. It was bad enough being enclosed, kept, even in a sanctuary such as this one. It was worse being put on display for the paying public. But at least Alice wasn’t as bad as the one they’d previously paired him with, Innara. She’d been impossibly insecure and had clung to him night and day, unable to be even two feet away from him. She still haunted his dreams, but at least then he’d had the satisfaction of ripping her limb from limb and ripping out her throat.

Where he came from, that’s how such weakness and instability was dealt with.

Good thing he’d kept his instincts reigned in. If he’d given in to such fantasies outside of his dreams, he would have been put down.

Put down. Since when did humans exercise such dominion over wolves?

Fenrir shook again in his sleep, feet twitching as he ran free through his dreams. Alice got up lazily from her perch on a grassy mound and ambled over to him. She sniffed at Fenrir’s ears, then at his nose, backing off only when he bared his teeth in semi-consciousness. A new tour group rounded the corner, and Alice trotted off toward the fence to put on another show.

Fenrir lifted his head. He watched Alice’s pathetic bid for attention, then got up from his comfortable spot in the sun and retreated deeper into the enclosure, out of sight of the humans. He heard a few disappointed voices as he skulked off, and that made him smile. Safely hidden behind another small hill and a clump of shrubbery, Fenrir shook the dust from his thick coat and stretched out on the soft bed of dying grass and dry pine needles. He lifted his nose skyward and gazed up at the quarter moon already in the sky.

“FEN!”

The wolf peaked his head out from behind the grassy mound toward the fence. One of his keepers, the one who called herself Tara, stood at the front of yet another infernal tour group. Alice stood before her, wagging her bushy tail and pawing at the air, to the delight of the children. Fenrir blinked lazily at Tara.

“Fen, come on out here!” she sang to him, hoping to entice him out for the entertainment of the visitors.

Not bloody likely. Fenrir laid his head down, still within site of the humans at the fence, just to taunt them. He’d make himself just barely visible, out of reach, and then would completely ignore them.

“Fen!” Tara pleaded with him. “He’s not the most sociable of wolves,” Fenrir heard Tara explain to her tour group. “But he is one of the most handsome.”

That brought a smile to his furry face. Even in this animal form, he was a sight to behold. Mostly black, with a black and gray mask, and a dark gray patch on his chest. Shades of gray capped his large feet and tipped his full tail. No one at Wolf Haven had seen marking like his before, or so they kept telling their visitors. Fenrir was like no wolf they’d ever hosted before at the sanctuary.

If they only knew, Fenrir whispered to himself, sometimes with a chuckle, other times in lament.

He looked back up at the moon again and let out a small wail.

“Good boy, Fen!” Tara called out to him. “Why don’t you come out and see us, and we can howl together?”

Fenrir rested his head back down and grimaced. He hated being little more than a trained monkey — or in this case, little better than the semi-domesticated wolf-dogs that made up the majority of Wolf Haven’s residents. He missed the wild hunt, missed howling full-throated at the moon, missed the look of terror in the eyes of the humans he’d terrorized. Mostly, though, he missed the gods, and the fear and hatred he had inspired in them.

Which is what had landed him here in the first place. After centuries of roaming free as a wolf who hunted on two legs — and inspiring local lore across more than one continent — he’d been consigned here by his coward of a father. Forever stuck as only half of his true nature, and subjected to the indignation of being put on display for paying guests. He cursed Loki’s name daily.

“FEN!” Tara called to him again. “Fenrir!”

A small shiver ran down the length of the wolf’s spine at the sound of his full name. But it’s what he heard next that had him prick up his ears.

“Fenrir?” asked a heavily accented male voice. “That’s the slayer of Odin, in Viking legend.”

Fenrir sniffed at the air, trying to pick up the man’s scent. This was no one of Nordic blood, nor one of the old gods. No one he recognized. Fenrir opened his eyes and peaked around the grassy mound again.

“I think that’s right,” Tara answered, her back to the pen. She was standing directly in front of the questioner, blocking him from Fenrir’s view. And there was stupid Alice, prancing up and down at the fence, pandering to the crowd.

“A lot of our wolves and hybrids have Native American names, others from different branches of mythology,” Tara continued. “But we keep whatever names they come to us with. Fenrir was already named when he first came to Wolf Haven. He was transferred here from another sanctuary a few years back.”

Fenrir growled low in his throat, too quietly for the humans to hear. He’d been passed from one facility to another for too long to remember. Every time the end of a normal wolf’s life-span drew near, he was transferred once again to make a new start. He’d been called Blackie, Timber, Nightmare, Coal, Onyx, Jet, Spalding, even the humiliating Cocoa.

At least this time they’d given him back his own name.

“That’s a dangerous name for a wolf,” the man responded in the sing-song lilt of the Indian subcontinent.

Tara laughed, and Fenrir saw her thick shoulder and upper back shake under her thick, blonde ponytail. “No, our Fennie is a real sweetheart. Aren’t you, Fen?”

She turned and caught him looking at them, then she laughed again. “See? He’s just as curious about you as you are about him.”

Tara took another step toward the fence and started pleading with him again, her movement just enough that Fenrir could get a look at the short, dark-skinned man behind her.

“Yes, he looks like a Fenrir,” the man said, gesturing toward the wolf. Then the man shook his head, never taking his eyes off of Fenrir. “Dangerous. Not a friendly name, not at all.”