WC 314
It was nice to think about their father, even for the brief moment that Orin’s broken heart allowed her to conjure up the memory of their parents. To this day, it was still a mystery to Orin why the sylvan wolf brought his family into a place like the slums of Florida after all the lessons of the woods and forest it seemed he tried to teach his offspring. Thankfully, she had a piece of each of them in Niro, and she would never let that go. But, just as Orin so often did, she had quickly pushed away the touching moment for more silly things.
As she scuttled out of the room and heard him yelp after his cake, she called over her shoulder, “Come get it.” And then, when she was halfway down the stairs and he still hadn’t caught up, “Hey, it’s only our first birthday. Are you a grey-muzzle already?”
She knew her brother would obtain retribution for her teasing, and she loved every second of it. By the time he was in the main hall with her, she was settled comfortably into a large chair as though she had been waiting for him for hours, happily scooping the frosting off of his side of the cake. When he seized the plate from her, she gasped dramatically and jumped to her feet, reaching up for the plate, but her small physique was no competition for her brother’s height. “No fair! You’re cheating!”
She jumped up onto the chair, reaching for the coveted pastry, then in a moment of ingenuity, her ears laid back against her head as she flung herself against Niro. Her limbs wrapped around him, legs at his waist, arms at his shoulders, clinging and shimmying for higher ground until her fingertips began to close around the plate and tried to yank it from his evil brotherly clutches.