We Meet Again

Levent Kartal · 01-21-2012, 09:42 PM

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Aaaand Raze wrote a lot for no reason. <3 I figured the attacker could be part of the group Amy took over who realizes what the mark means, just to make things interesting. Wink

/ sswm 834

North America—the wild continent, full of barbarians or full of true wolves depending on who was asked. No matter what everyone else claimed, however, the Eurasian wolf found it intellectually and instinctually stimulating. He lived almost like a beast when it amused him, hunting on all fours and passing off for a juvenile-minded but normal wolf until he stopped to chat with a squirrel in a tree. Other days, he returned to the little hovel tucked into the woods, taking a lazy day or venturing back into Freetown to pick up women and wares. He was without responsibility here, in possession of enough goods to trade if something caught his fancy, but with more land to hunt in than there had been in the more bustling Europe, he did not have to rely on books and knickknacks to make a living.

Today—like most days recently—Levent slept in until past noon. It was about this hour that Wilson rose from his catnap, having been busy hunting and exploring in the morn, and leaped down from the nearest shelf onto the wolf’s chest. As the man startled awake, the tomcat slipped into the crook between chin and shoulder, curled up purring in his own special greeting.

“Ahhh…iyi günler, arkadaş.”

The Turkish merchant pushed the cat lightly off him then stood, stretching his arms and taking in the sunlight through the small dirty windows. It wasn’t the best home they could have chosen for themselves, but it had been rat-infested enough for any other passersby to immediately lose interest. Now it was free and rat-free, and Wilson was at a healthy weight.

“Do you want to go for a run today?” Levent asked, grinning as he tied the orange and yellow slashed cloth around his head. When he leaned down to the feline’s level on the mattress, the tom batted at the blue strip hanging from the cloth then meowed an affirmative.

The weather was nice, the sun shining despite the past few days being generally overcast and depressing. The air was cool and crisp, and Levent was shifted down into his four-legged shape. A pouch fashioned to be worn in all of his forms held his throwing knives as well as a few petty rings—payment in case brigands attacked him on the road. It was best to have something to trade your life for, as long as fighting back didn’t work first.

The wolf galloped through the wilds west of Freetown, tail waving behind him, tongue lolling from his jaws. Sprinting beside him was the white cat; and together they made about the strangest pair that anyone had ever seen. Occasionally, the canine would have to slow his pace, as he was built more for endurance than his small friend, but they made good progress through sparse trees and fields and hills. They passed some rural houses and saw a broken raised highway in the distance. They walked and ran until it was evening, and Levent had to decide whether to turn around or try to find somewhere habitable for the night.

Before that, however, the male was thirsty. He wandered in the direction of a murmuring stream, dipping his head to drink. Wilson settled down on the bank beside him and stared into the water, perhaps to look for fish—and with a swipe of his paw sent some of the water at his friend. Levent shifted his paw to keep his headband—the cloth now wrapped around an ankle—from getting wet and growled playfully before moving further downstream.

As he lapped water into his dry mouth, the dark-saddled wolf allowed his mind to drift. There were many possibilities here, but it was Nova Scotia he really needed to explore—the eastern peninsula where many packs of many different customs were said to be gathered. If it didn’t turn out to be as interesting as he had hoped it would be, he could head further out west, or north, or south—hell, there was an entire continent for him to explore. The carefree thought made him smile before he happened to glance upwards at a shape bounding through the stream.

“Dikkat!” Levent hurled the word at his friend then hurled himself into the body of the wolf that had been leaping toward Wilson. He rammed his head and shoulders into the other’s side, knocking them down into the water. The wolf recovered and flipped back onto all fours, spinning around, ears pinned back and nasty teeth bared.

And then the wolf’s eyes widened in terror, fixating on one place: Levent’s shoulder and the deep bite scar there. It froze, at a complete loss for what to do, and Lev could only narrow his eyes and tilt his head in confusion. “Bu ne…” he murmured, but then Wilson, tail puffed up like a bottlebrush, scrambled toward him and trembled between his forelegs. He lowered his head to lick the tom between the ears then stared once more at the frozen wolf.

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