__The Bird Bone Flute__part 7
By Blackmare



The sun falling through the open door woke Giles. He surfaced more slowly than usual, a bit disoriented but calm in spite of finding himself on his back on the floor with the substantial weight of a wolf's head pinning down his midsection. He raised his head and looked down at her. She looked completely at ease there, her ears soft in sleep. He left hand nested in her shoulder ruff and he could feel the slow tide of her breathing. The night's terrors stirred in his memory but subsided again, unable to disturb Giles' strange and profound peace.

Safe, he thought, I don't know when I have ever felt so safe.

Unfortunately, she had settled herself almost exactly over his bladder. The warmth of her beside him had also encouraged his usual morning erection and these two insistent pressures definitely threatened the domestic tableau. Giles laid his head back down and tried meditating, with only marginal success. Finally, knowing this wonderful moment might never occur again, he stroked her neck. She woke abruptly, snatching herself away from him so sharply he felt a sharp pang of loss.

"I'm sorry, love, please - " he said softly, reaching up to her. She froze, blinked, and looked down at him, her ears flat and her eyes glinting wild gold. Giles stayed very still. She blinked again, then flopped heavily down beside him with a snuffly oomph.

"You okay?" he asked, slowly rolling over to face her, tentatively touching her shoulder. She sneezed, shook her head, sneezed again.

"Oh great, you're allergic to me." He found himself looking right down her throat through the most impressive canine yawn he had ever seen.

"Wow. What big teeth you have. I'll have to get a red riding hood." Her jaws finally shut and she leaned over and gave him a moist nose kiss. Giles grinned, stroking the wonderfully soft fur of her cheek. She leaned into his hand, lowered her head to invite his fingers back toward her ear.

"Of course this would entail getting you into Granny's nightgown and cap, which does seem rather unlikely," he laughed when she yawned enormously again, "and imprudent." The wolf laid her head down on her extended forelegs and shut her eyes, basking in his touch. Her ribs swelled and she released a long sigh through her nose. Giles propped himself on his elbow and let his hand slide deeply into her fur. Even when she was this relaxed, the muscles of her neck and shoulder felt solid. His fingertips found several narrow ridges of scar tissue hidden under her coat.

"You really are an old warrior, aren't you?" he said softly. Running the pad of his thumb up the elegant slope of her muzzle to the rise of her forehead, he wondered how old she really was. The details he remembered from his dream of her suggested bronze age technology, but he wasn't sure where that village was, and that made a considerable difference to any estimate. She rolled over onto her side so he could reach the rest of her face. Giles' fingers glided over the whisker dimples of her muzzle then swept up to circle her eye. Her expressive wolf brows twitched slightly before going slack under his gentle, circular strokes. He pulled lightly up her ear several times, then swirled his forefinger around the base of it, enjoying the wooly quality of the fur there. She sighed again and he heard her breathing slow and deepen as she eased back into sleep. The ache in his groin had lessened, but the signal from his bladder was now officially an emergency. Moving very slowly, he shifted onto his hands and knees, pushed up. The wolf's eyes flicked open and followed him for a few seconds, then they slid shut again. Reassured that he wasn't disturbing her, he stood and headed for the toilet.

Giles methodically completed his morning ablutions, dressed, and had the kettle on for tea before he allowed himself to think about what had happened the night before. The horrors of the dream and his subsequent epiphany were terribly raw, yet they were also oddly contained by the wonder of the wolf's actions. While the leaves steeped he watched her sleeping. After two cups of strong, milky tea he settled across the room in the easy chair, not wanting to disturb her. He felt ready to examine the dream.

He started with a simple meditation, centering and calming himself before going deeper into his memory. Then, in the clear, quiet space created by the mantra, he discovered the soft blue fire of her presence. She was there. It wasn't the blaze that erupted in him the first time they met, or its milder echo after he dreamed of her in the garden and woke to find her nearby. It was smaller, better defined, and exquisitely gentle, like a single candle in a large, dark chamber. None of his Council training in hypnosis or the various forms of cognitive magic prepared him for this. Giles did not feel threatened, invaded, or manipulated. She was just there, with him. Waiting. And something else, a quality he could not identify, like a faint strain of music he might have known if he could catch a little more of it.

He sensed the light brighten slightly, shift. The wolf had come over and laid her head across his thigh.

Coherence. Giles felt his entire being align again, tasted that astonishing potential and the answering flare from his own center as a wave of ecstasy rolled through him and was gone. He erupted from the surface of his trance like a swimmer from deep water, hearing his own cry ringing in the sunlit stone room. It took him several minutes to catch his breath. He moved only to lay his hand on the wolf's head, sliding down the wide curve of her skull to rest behind her ears. She stayed still. Eventually he looked down and met her golden green eyes, found her, at once alien and familiar; animal and, he decided, angel.

The wolf stepped away from him and stretched gloriously, lowering her shoulders to the floor and leaving her rump up high, her tail arched higher. A muscular ripple traveled from her hips down her spine and out to the very tips of her front toes which flared as it passed. She reversed the curve, pulling herself up on tiptoe on straight forelegs while drawing away from her sloping hindquarter. She lifted first one hind leg, then the other, reaching far back beyond her tail to flare those toes, draining away the last vestiges of sleep. Then she sat down and grinned at him, ready for whatever he might suggest.

"Shall we go for a run, then, beautiful?" Giles asked, amused and mildly envious of her fluidity after a night on the floor. He pulled a bottle of water and a couple of hard-boiled eggs from the fridge, and tucked them with an apple into a fanny pack designed for runners. He put on his shoes, stepped out onto the porch and drew the door closed behind them, drinking in the cool, recently washed morning air.

He let her lead, but kept the pace to a walk for the first half mile. At the top of the hill above the cottage he asked her to wait while he stretched. Giles nodded to her and she set out down the path in a long, swinging trot that nicely matched his own stride. The wolf took him out along the high ridges that ran parallel to the river for the first two miles, then swung down a shallow incline into mixed woodland. As before, she drifted here and there checking details of the country they passed through. When their route took them across a pasture of black-faced sheep, he was not surprised that they largely ignored her even when she glided right through a group of stragglers.

By the fourth mile Giles was feeling the challenge of this rolling country and made himself slow down. The wolf did not decrease her pace, but made larger investigative loops, often disappearing from sight completely only to reappear in a completely different quarter of the compass a few minutes later. Giles admired the perfect rhythm of her gait, unchanging over any terrain, steady as a heartbeat.

After walking a mile to cool down, Giles stretched again by doing a mixed form kata barefoot on a soft sand spit beside the river. He felt marvelous. The river was much narrower here, with stretches of strong rapids. When the wolf swept back past him from one of her patrols, he pointed to a large rock in the swirling shallows to show her where he would be. He had to reach it by jumping along several smaller stones, but she arrived beside him there in a single bound from the bank. Dangling his bare feet down over the busy current, he took a long pull from his water bottle and started peeling one of the eggs.

The wolf found this process fascinating. He flicked the last bits of shell off the smooth white form and her curious nose reached over for a strong sniff. She looked up at him and he offered the egg to her in the bowl of his palm. Tipping her head, she picked it up and closed her mouth around it, then froze. Giles laughed at her startled expression as her tongue tried to fathom the rubbery but oddly enticing item. Finally, she set it down on the stone and sniffed it again, giving it a couple of tentative licks. Unfortunately for her, the stone slanted slightly and in her two seconds of uncertainty the bright egg rolled merrily off the edge and plopped into the river. She stood looking down over the edge, then flopped her butt onto the rock and let out a little squeak.

"And that would be lupine for 'Oops,' my love?" he chuckled. The wolf looked over her shoulder at him, her ears flattening slightly in disappointment.

"Hey, c'mere, I'll share the other one." Deftly he cleaned the second egg. This time he bit it neatly in two and held the larger half out to her. Her ears came up and she stepped over to accept his offering. This time she bit down on it immediately, chewed a few times and swallowed, her eyes reflective. While he was still chewing his own half she reached over and gave him a slightly eggy kiss, then lay down beside him on the warm stone. Her forelegs hung over the front of the stone and her hind legs were tucked under and she held her head up, watching the far riverbank intently.

"You look like Anubis when you sit like that," Giles said, "well, Anubis dressed for a Norwegian holiday." She looked up at him, her ears softening for a moment, her eyes warm. Then she went back to her survey of the other shore. She was definitely looking for something, and her ears twitched slightly as they scanned. Giles paralleled her line of sight, but had no idea what she might be seeking.

A flock of rooks boiled into sight above the hill opposite them. The smaller birds were pursuing a larger bird but they weren't quite fast enough to reach it. This was definitely what the wolf was looking for. She rose into a crouch, aimed at the next stone large enough to hold her, and launched herself over the water. She landed lightly and arced from that stone to the far shore where she stayed low, gliding along the bank into an alder thicket. Her eyes stayed locked on the approaching birds and their target.

There was no question that she was hunting. Giles quickly put on his shoes and buckled the fanny back around himself. He hoped to be able to follow wherever she needed to go. The mobbing rooks were swearing like stevedores at the bird they followed, and their invective attracted the attention of a pair of magpies, who swooped up to join the chase. Giles could see the quarry better now and it was definitely tiring. Just above the river it abandoned the strategy of outdistancing its pursuers and started veering wildly in an attempt to tangle the following flock around itself. The rooks responded by dividing into two groups, deflecting the larger bird back over the far shore and driving it closer to the ground. Giles realized the birds knew the wolf waited in the shadows; they were beating the game down to her.

The bird in question was close enough now that Giles could see it wasn't any species he recognized. It was larger than a raven, with a longer neck. When it executed a tight banking turn he saw that there were long legs lying parallel to the tail and that the tail didn't move like a bird's tail would, flaring into the turn. His heart raced and he grinned: this was something he had never expected to see. A family of jays crossed the river to join the fray. Their arrival blocked the creature's attempt to turn toward the water and sent it low along the bank past the ambush. The wolf exploded upward and caught the thing's body, snatching it right out of the air and bearing it down through a storm of screaming birds. She gave it a single sharp snap and it went limp.

Giles scrambled down from his perch and crossed the river as quickly as he could, wet to the waist with chilly water by the time he arrived on the far side. The rioting rooks had regrouped and headed back the way they had come, jeering and turning tricks in the wind. The jays and 'pies settled nearby to provide running commentary. Giles reached her just as she set the dead thing down and prodded it with her muzzle. She glanced up at him and the piercing glint of her eyes stopped him cold. He quite stood still while she sniffed the body thoroughly. Then she sat back and shook her head, sneezing hard several times. Finally she put down her nose and scraped at it with a foreleg, opening and closing her mouth, her tongue curled in irritation. Giles crouched slowly.

"Can I help you?" he said quietly in Latin. The wolf's eyes opened abruptly and she looked over at him as if she were considering some possibility. Her ears and tail welcomed him because the rest of her face was quite busy dealing with something else. He moved over to kneel in front of her, placing his hands on either side of her neck and trying to get a sense of what the problem was. Finally he had to grasp her head and hold it still for a moment.

"Ah. You got a mouthful of spines," he said gently, "Shhh, try to be still so I can have a look." The wolf gave one more powerful sneeze then sat down in front of him, her eyes squinty and perhaps a bit embarrassed.

"Here," he said, probing carefully, "relax your jaw and keep your mouth open." She obliged, shutting her eyes and trying to keep her tongue from twitching. The wolf's chest rumbled, a growl so low that Giles felt it more than he heard it, and it would have really frightened him if she wasn't sitting so quietly. He also detected a frustrated, edgy quality to it and realized that this was lupine invective, the equivalent of his own fluent string of choice expletives in several languages whenever he smashed some sensitive part of his person.

"Nice to know that you can swear a blue streak when you need to," he said, gliding his fingertips carefully along her gums. Giles found three clusters of thin black spines, two of the sets embedded in her gums, and one set in her tongue. They were all about a half inch long and came free readily enough when he grasped them with the longer nails of his right hand.

"Aren't you lucky I play guitar?" he said softly in English as he worked, knowing that the words didn't really matter as much as the tone. "Built-in tweezers are perfect for little emergencies like this. I sure hope these things aren't toxic." Giles cleared the spines one by one, then ran his forefinger carefully across her palette then up and down her gum line, checking inside and out of her formidable dentition. He grasped her tongue and gently turned it over, inspected both sides, then he checked the underside of her flews where he found and removed fourth cluster. Sticky wolf saliva trailed down his wrists in long strands.

"I am so grateful that you don't have dog breathe, y'know." Having satisfied himself that the inside of her mouth was clear, he inspected her muzzle thoroughly with his fingers and eyes and found nothing more. He stroked her mouth closed and sat back. The growling stopped immediately. She leaned forward and touched his forehead with her nose.

"You're welcome. And now I will always know how those little birds feel as they clean the crocodile's teeth under the watchful eye of Sir David Attenborough. So, what'd you catch, anyway?"

She turned back to the dead thing. Giles was astonished to see that it was softening fast. The thing looked like a bird initially, but instead of a bill the creature had a long, toothy snout that ended in a short, claw-shaped boney beak. Its glazed eyes were green with vertical pupils. It did have feathers, but as Giles poked through them with a twig he saw the defensive spines among them. The taloned feet were powerful and the thighs heavily muscled. The tail was oddest of all, resembling a short reptile tail that had been upholstered with feathers to create a flexible airfoil. The body reeked like scorched rubber.

"I've never seen anything like it or even seen pictures of such a thing. It reminds me of some artist's interpretation of Archaeopteryx, only really vile and much better armed. More of a malteryx," he said, "an 'evil-wing'" He gave it another poke and the twig slide easily into the body. Even the bones were dissolving. "Doesn't look like I'm going to get to carry it back for a drawing." The wolf shook her head one more time, sneezed, and stepped down to the water for a long drink. She stood completely at ease, clearly satisfied that her task here was finished. Giles took a last look at the stinking body which was now more of a gelid mass, shrugged, and stood up to join her.

"Hey, thanks for letting me watch." She nodded and turned away, setting off at a casual pace. She led him very directly back to the cottage, taking a beeline down the river to a shallow ford, then straight up hill and down the far side to his door. Giles kept to a walk, enjoying the morning immensely while ransacking his memory for even the slightest fragment about the kind of creature he'd just seen. The wolf escorted him to the porch and then faded back.

"Not coming in?" Giles asked. She took another step away, but her tail waved slightly and her face was calm. "Ah. Business elsewhere. Well, I'm just going to shower and get to work here," he walked over to her and squatted down. "I'll leave the door open. You're always welcome here," he added in Latin.

She reached over and touched her nose to his cheek, then turned and set off back up the hill at a brisk trot. He sat on his heels and watched her go, startled by the sharp twist of sadness he felt at her departure. Giles didn't rise until she had disappeared from view. Sighing, he closed his eyes and withdrew from the bright world for a moment, dropping back toward his center to regain his composure.

There. She was there with him, still. His breath caught for a moment at this unexpected gift. He could feel her, sensed her within like a soft azure glow, just a bit of light, just a bit of warmth. She hadn't really left him alone at all, she had just physically gone away for a while. Giles's smile blossomed into a grin and he stood, calmer, the ache easing, and a delicious, novel joy took root in its place.

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