Chapter 5

Sage starred at her hands, flexing the human finger and blinking human eyes. She found in that instance that she didn’t like it. It was strange, wrong. Sage swallowed and looked around the room, finding a mirror on the wall.

A woman starred back at her, with silvery eyes and straight black hair. A silver colored wolfs paw hung from a chain around her slim neck.

She tried to find her voice but it was still missing, so she whimpered.

There was a tug on her hand and she looked down slowly into Serri’s worried eyes.

“Are you okay?” She asked and Sage shook her head. She wanted to be back to normal, to have fur and fangs and claws. Serri sighed.

“You look like you don’t like it.” The little girl said and Sage shook her head again.

She took a long breath and closed her eyes again, remembering the away her muscles moved when she ran, the wind in her fur, and her wolves ears on the top of her head.

Sage felt her muscel slid and it hurt a little as her bone twisted and changed, but not a lot. It was more like forcing herself back threw that wall of water.

Sage’s legs gave out and she collaped onto the floor, exhausted. Serri scratched her ears and said. “You should keep practicing, but at least now you know how to do it.” Sage nodded, understanding that being human would come in handy once in awhile, but she didn’t have to like it.

That night Sage went to sleep on one side of the animal skin rug and Serri on the other. It was the closest she’d been to any living thing while she’d slept in a very long time.

Sage stayed with them for a long time by her standards, almost a full week, and when she left the little girl cried. Sage felt a small twinge of sadness as she headed out into the snow but nothing more. Living with the humans and the bear had stirred dreams of that night in her head. One that had all but been buried and she decided as she heard her packs screams echo in her mind that she wasn’t ready to trust the human race.

Sage ran for a long time after leaving that little northern village. Eventually the snowy tundra turned to into deep forests and the cold melted away into the summer seasons. She did run into towns and cities but she tended to go around them rather then run through them. There were way too many people in a city for her liking.

Of course in our world the things we don’t like seem to pop up sooner or later and Sage found herself sitting on a little hill stair with irritation at the sprawling city before her, with no way around. It was flanked by ocean on one side and an unknown expanse human suburbia on the other. From what she could tell it would be faster to go straight trough then to try and sneak around.

Sage growled and slunk forward, keeping low and moving in a steady line for the buildings. The wall of scents that hit her as she grew into the shadows almost knock her over. Vehicle fumes, fried food, oil, human swet, smog, and a thousand other things that made her sneeze. She had to take a few long minutes to get her mind off her nose, no matter how interesting the scents of this city were.

She stuck to the shadows for the first few hours, but as time pasted she came to notice that the human populous was extremely unobservant. The only ones that seemed to notice her existence was a random child here and there and when they mentioned her their keepers merely gave them a that’s nice dear, hurry up.

And even when they did give their little exclamations they always said the same, “Doggie!” Sage couldn’t believe it. Nobody realized what she was, they weren’t even close. She became much more relaxed as her time in the city wore on and the sky drew dark.

It was around midnight when she realized that she wasn’t looking for the way out anymore, that she was looking for a place to call her den.

Somehow without her realizing it she’d chosen this city to settle in. The something that she was looking for, the thing that had driven her for so many long years was here in this place.

Sage was starting to tire as the dawn drew near. She was irreversibly lost but that didn’t matter so much. She caught a glimpse of moment out of the corner of her eye she stop , ears up. She hadn’t heard anything, she didn’t smell anything, and yet she was sure that she’d seen a black shape duck around a corner to her right.

Curious she changed the direction she was going and crept towards the corned, peeking around it. Again she caught the shape, moving out of sight, going left this time.

Sage sniffed the ground, nothing, but there was a damp paw print on the pavement, a big one. A ghost of a breeze blew into her face and her head snapped up. There had been a scent being carried by it, so light that it almost wasn’t there. Maybe it really wasn’t there at all and it was just her imagination, Leon.

Sage moved forward again, and again she reached the corner just in time to see the shadow vanish out of sight. Sage took off after it, running for all she was worth, chasing it dark splotch of color through the maze of the city, never seeming to loose any ground but never gaining any either.

Then she turned a corner and there was the black wolf, sitting way down at the end of the ally. He was huge and familiar. Sage blinked and darted for that very familiar wolf, she sprang, meaning to pounce on him like when she was a pup, but he suddenly wasn’t there. She hit the ground awkwardly and rolled, getting dirt and dust in her coat and mouth.

Sage stood and look at where he been. She didn’t understand, she’d been so sure. But he wasn’t there. And there wasn’t any whiff of him, no prints in the dirt other then hers. Her felt as though her heart where breaking and if she’d been in a human form she’d be sobbing.

Sage lay where he’d been for a long time. And when she could bring herself to move she finally looked around. She was in a little nook of space, the back of building surrounding her on three sides, with the narrow alley on the forth. Opposite the ally was a little two story brick building, its door boarded up and the window next to it broken. There was a wooden box set under the window and it was the first bit of ground that wasn’t covered in concrete that she’d seen since entering the city.

Upon further inspection she found that there was a two foot wide space between the buildings that made up the nook, just big enough for her to get threw if she needed to make a quick getaway.

Looking at the forgotten house that her brother had led her too was when she made the conscious decision to stay. Sage decided that this would be as good a place as any to settle for awhile and she claimed the little brick house as her own.

Sage jumped onto the box and threw the broken window, surveying her new territory. It was dark and very dusty in the building. The window opened onto a large room with a few other scattered windows. There was broken glass, trash, and rusty beer cans on the wooden floor and it smelled like stale human.

Sage tipped her ears up and listened, there was no sound coming from inside the house so she proceeded through the door on the back wall. It lead a kitchen that was in even worse condition then the living room. There was garbage all over the table and floors, and she decided not to inhale too deeply as she picked her way around the junk. There where doors on the right wall, both open. She looked through the first, it was a small bedroom, and there was even a mattress on the floor.

The door next to it opened onto a hallway. She followed the door less hall around a corner and up a set of stairs. There was a scary looking bathroom and three larger empty rooms on the second floor.

Sage made her way back to the living room, this was her den and she liked the sound of the word in her head. She sneezed and shook herself; if she was going to reside her she was going to need to clean. That meant that she needed to be human for awhile. As stranger as walking on only two legs felt she was willing to deal with it to have thumbs.

I took two convenience store shop lifting sprees and four days but she got the downstairs clean and disinfected. The kitchen had been the worse, and sage had ended up using a dilapidated shovel and a pilfered trash can to cart all the filth to the dumpster two alleys over.

She was prowling the city streets the day after the completion of the downstairs, hunting for some food when she passed a mechanics shop in one of the poorer districts of the city. It was just a few blocks from the docks that were her destination.

A human man crouched on one knee working on a motorcycle. He was blond and the was grease on his hands and face. His goatee was neat though and he wasn’t overly muscled. He glanced up as she drew even with him; and his ice blue eye’s did a double take.

He made a strangled sound in his throat and sage paused to look at him. This was the most attention a human had given her since she came to this place.

“Frost?” He asked slowly.

That made her ears prick up, it was the name she’d been given while being held captive in the human zoo. Now she did look at him, taking in his sent. It was faintly familiar to her.

“You are her, aren’t you? How did you get to New York girl?” he asked.

Then Sage remembered. This was the boy that had bought her freedom from that be damned zoo. Sage gave him a small wag of her tail and stepped forward. A bit of friendliness was the least she could offer him now.

The boy, now more of a man reached out slowly, watching her as if asking her permission. Sage allowed him to scratch her ears, even enjoying the way his work calloused fingers felt in her fur.

Eric got to his feet and held a hand. “Stay here a moment, I’ll get you a drink.”

He disappeared inside the shop, and Sage sat on her haunches, waiting like he’d asked.

He returned a few moments later with a bowl of water in one hand, setting it on the ground before her. Sage got to her feet and looked at it, giving the water a careful sniff before lapping it up. The water was cold and clean, feeling glorious as it slid down her throat.

He smiled and patted her head again. “There’s a good girl.”

After that Eric left her be while he worked on the bike, she stayed to watch. She’d seen the motorcycles before and the devises intrigued her. She imagined it was a lot like running for the human. With the wind in their hair and the ground moving under them.

After awhile Eric stop and went back into the shop, when he returned he carried a blanket and a cooler that probably contained his lunch. He laid the blanket inside the garage, in an out of the way corner beside a door that lead to an office space. Then he moved her water bowl over to where the blanket was.

“There, if you want to hang out for awhile now you have a space.” He told he with a warm smile as he pulled a turkey sub sandwich out of his cooler. Eric ripped it in half and offered it to her. Sage sniffed and took it, she paused and then took the food to her blanket, curling up there to enjoy her meal.

Eric laughed. “Making yourself at home I see.”

Sage thumped her tail twice.

When Sage opened her eyes it was late in the evening and Eric was talking with someone out in the front where he’d been working all afternoon. Her ear pricked up because his voice was cold, and even from this distance she could sense his tense muscles.

“Forget it.” Eric was saying. “I’m not handing over this bike, or any cash, or anything else that enter your head. Now if you want a bike I can sell you one, but don’t think I’m going to let you just walk out with one.”

“You think you’re tough. I ain’t need your permission, how bout me n’ my boys just knock you the fuck out and take what we want!” Snarled a young male. Sage rolled to her feet and crouched, watching. There was a group of young men, pups by human standards. They were where too much jewelry and sage wonder how they walked without their briches falling off.

The tallest of the boys was very close to Eric, waving his arms and getting in the man’s face. Sage felt her hackels go up, the pups smelt like alchohal and stupidity.

“Why don’t you and your friends go home and do something constive toward socitiy with your live,” Eric growled. “Your not stealing from me, now git.”

The tall one made an angry noise. “You think your better then me! I’ll teach you not to disrespect me!” And the pup punch Eric square in the face.

Sage was on her feet in out of the garage in an instant. She jumped over Eric, who’d been taken off guard and knocked on the ground, landing by his legs. She put her head between her shoulder and snarled, all her teeth showing, her ear pinned flat and her hackles up. She may be small for werewolf but she was still a very big “dog”. All the pups turned white and fell back quite a few steps.

The one that seemed to be the pack leaded scowled. “Stupid mutt!” and he aimed a hard kick at her. Sage moved, pouncing to the side and avoiding his boot easily, then she sprang forward clamping her jaws around his dangly bits.

Mr. tough pup froze dead in his hand gripping her head. Sage heard Eric get to his feet and another one of the pups stuttered, “Yo, get control of your dumb dog!”

Eric chuckled darkly. “I’m not sure I can make her do anything, she ain’t my dog, she’s just a stray that’s been hangin’ around.”

Sage snarled and the boy she held captive locked up all his muscles. The scent of fear was rolling off of him.

“Come on man, do something!” the second pup pleaded.

Eric sighed and gave a whistle, “Frost… come on girl, drop him. You don’t know where he’s been…”

Sage gave a last growl and released the boy. He stumbled back, swet glistening on his face. He looked like he was going to say something so Sage gave a little jump forward with a bark. The pups turned and run for all they were worth. For an instant sage wanted to give chase, but she didn’t.

Eric put a hand on her furred shoulder. “Good girl,” He whispered. “The four of them probably would have attacked together, kids like that don’t fight fair.”