Heartbound Chronicles: Sparrow’s Heart of Belongin

Chapter 1

I was having a perfect rock day.

That's a real category of day, and I will not be taking criticism on it. The light was doing that golden thing through the trees, my pockets were already full of shiny ones, and I'd just found a piece of quartz that caught the sun like it was showing off. I was holding it up going "LOOK AT YOU, you absolute—"

And then the woods went quiet.

Not normal quiet. It wasn't that the forest had gone silent. It was that something had taken the sound. The birds didn't trail off, they just stopped, mid-chirp, like the air had been wrung out. The quiet had weight. It pressed on my ears until my own heartbeat sounded wrong and too loud, and the air went cold in a way that had nothing to do with weather.

Something was here. Or something had just left.

That's when I heard the breathing. Wet. Labored. Wrong.

I should have walked away. Any sensible person would have walked away. I have never once in my life been a sensible person, so I followed it.

He was enormous. That's the first thing. A black wolf the size of a Shetland pony, collapsed on his side in a hollow between the roots of an old oak, and my brain did the sensible thing for exactly three seconds: that's a wolf, Sparrow, that's a whole wolf, run.

Then I saw the wound, and I stopped being afraid of the wolf, because the wound was worse.

It ran along his ribs in a long, ragged tear, and the edges were moving. Not bleeding. The flesh around it looked unmade, like someone had taken an eraser to the world and scrubbed too hard. Shadows pooled in the torn places, thick as oil, shifting against the light, and there was a sound coming off it. Not a smell. A sound. A low, thin whispering, like voices talking very far away in a language made of static.

I knew, with total animal certainty, that whatever made that wound was not an animal. Was not anything natural. Was not anything that should exist.

"Hi," I whispered, which is a deeply stupid thing to say to a dying wolf next to a wound that whispers, but it was all I had. "Hi, okay. You're huge. You're so huge. That's fine. Everything's fine."

One eye opened. Gold, impossibly intelligent, and so tired it made my chest hurt.

And then his head came up. Just barely. His ears went flat, and a growl rolled out of his chest, low and furious, and he was looking past me.

I turned.

At the treeline, between two oaks, something was standing where the shadows were thickest. It was shaped like a hound the way a nightmare is shaped like a hound, all wrong angles and too-long legs, its body made of solid dark that drank the light around it. It didn't have a face. It had eyes, though. Pale, dying-star eyes, fixed on me.

It had been watching. Maybe it had been waiting to finish what it started.

The wolf, bleeding and half-dead, tried to stand. Tried to put himself between me and it. His legs buckled and he went down hard with a whine that sounded almost human, but he kept growling, kept himself between me and the treeline with sheer stubborn will.

"Oh, no you don't," I breathed. "Don't you dare be brave right now."

The thing at the treeline tilted its head. Considering. And then, slowly, like ink dispersing in water, it dissolved into the dark between the trees. Gone.

The silence stayed for one more heartbeat. Then, all at once, the birds started again, like someone had unpressed the mute button, and I realized I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering.

"You look like a shadow," I told the wolf, because my mouth has never learned when to shut up, especially when I'm terrified. "A big, fluffy, bleeding shadow. Okay. Shadow. That's your name now. Congratulations, it's official. No take-backs."

He huffed. I chose to interpret that as agreement.

When I pressed my hand near the wound to check it, the cold bit through my sleeve like teeth, and for one second I felt something that wasn't pain at all. It was aloneness. Total, hollow, last-person-in-the-world aloneness, like the wound wasn't just in his side but in the world itself, a hole where connection was supposed to be.

I yanked my hand back, gasping.

"Okay," I said out loud, to him, to myself, to the suddenly-normal woods. "Okay. We're leaving. Right now."

Now, the practical problem: Shadow weighed roughly as much as my entire cottage. I tried lifting him. That went exactly as well as you'd expect. I ended up flat on my back in the leaves with a wolf nose approximately one inch from my face, and he made a sound that I swear was judgmental.

"Don't look at me like that," I told him, sitting up and wiping leaves out of my hair. "We're doing this. I just named you. That's basically a commitment."

So I did what any rational person would do: I took off my jacket, laid it flat, rolled him onto it with a truly undignified amount of grunting, piled fallen branches underneath for runners, and grabbed the sleeves.

I dragged a two-hundred-pound wolf through the woods on a jacket-sled.

It took an hour. I tripped over roots. I tripped over nothing. At one point I fell directly on top of him and apologized so profusely he closed his eye like he was embarrassed for me. I talked the entire way, because that's what I do when I'm scared: I told him about the quartz, about my cottage, about how he was absolutely not allowed to die because I'd already decided he was mine. I did not mention the thing at the treeline. I was trying not to think about it.

By the time we reached the porch, my arms were jelly and my jacket was ruined and he was barely conscious. But he was breathing. Still breathing.

I got him inside.

Reality set in, and reality was: I had a two-hundred-pound supernatural wolf bleeding whispering shadow-wounds on my hearth rug, and my first-aid kit was mostly dinosaur bandaids.

"Okay," I told him, very calmly, the way you talk when you are not calm at all. "Okay. I'm going to help you. This is going to be great. You're going to love my medical care. I have watched so many medical dramas."

He watched me boil water with those gold eyes, head on his paws, and I tried not to think about the treeline. About the thing that had stood there. Watching me drag him home.

The wound was worse up close. The shadows in it moved like oil when the light hit them, and when I pressed a warm cloth near the edges, the cold bit straight through to my fingers, teeth-cold, wrong-cold. The whispering rose up, thin and staticky, and underneath it came that feeling again. That hollowed-out aloneness, like the wound wasn't just torn flesh but a hole where something was supposed to connect.

I had to sit down on the floor for a minute.

"That's rude," I informed the wound. "You don't get to do that in my house."

I cleaned around it as best I could and wrapped it in gauze, layer after layer, and the cold seeped through all of it within minutes. It was the best I could do, and I told him so, and he looked at me like he knew, and like he was grateful anyway, and I had to look away because my eyes were doing something embarrassing.

Then came the question of dinner.

I stood in my kitchen holding two chicken breasts, the ones I'd been saving for actual human food, and looked at the wolf, and looked at the chicken. "I don't know the etiquette here," I admitted. "Do I cook it? That feels wrong. Do I just... hand you raw chicken? That feels like I've given up on being a host."

I gave him the raw chicken. He inhaled it in approximately four seconds. I gave him water in my biggest mixing bowl. He drank the whole thing. I offered him a piece of cheese, because it was there, and he sniffed it with an expression of such profound aristocratic disappointment that I actually apologized.

"Sorry. Sorry, the cheese was a mistake. I don't know what I was thinking."

I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw those dying-star eyes at the treeline. So I did what I always do when the world is too much: I grabbed my book, sat on the floor by the hearth, and read out loud.

He listened. Head on his paws, eyes half-closed, ears twitching at the good parts. Like he understood.

When I finally couldn't keep my eyes open, I made him a nest. My softest blanket, the good one, the one I don't let anyone touch. He was getting the good blanket. I didn't even think about it.

"Stay," I told him, pointing at the nest like he was a golden retriever and not a creature the size of a pony. "Sleep. Heal. I'll check on you. Goodnight, Shadow."

He huffed. I took it as a promise.

I woke at 3 a.m. with my heart hammering and no idea why, and went to check on him, and the hearth was empty.

The blanket was empty. The rug was empty.

"No," I said out loud, already moving. "No no no, you do not get to die in my hallway, I did not drag you through the woods for—"

He was at my bedroom door.

He'd gotten up, dragged himself down the hall on that ruined side without making a single sound, and parked his enormous body directly across my doorway. Between me and the rest of the house. Between me and the dark outside it.

Guarding.

I stood there in my pajamas with my hand over my mouth, and he lifted his head, and his tail thumped once against the floorboards. You're safe. Go back to sleep.

"You idiot," I whispered, and sat down next to him, and dragged the good blanket down the hall, and covered us both with it. He rested his enormous head on my knee, careful, so careful, like he knew exactly how breakable I was.

In the dark, his eyes opened. Gold catching the hallway light.

And for one heartbeat, they didn't look like a wolf's eyes at all.

They looked human. And unbearably sad.

I told myself I was dreaming. I almost believed me. I fell asleep with my hand buried in his fur, and the whispering from his wound, very faint, like something trying to remember a word.