Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

Her wolf nodded. “You are indebted to them now. I won’t say that was ill-done, but…”

“You will think it.”

He shrugged.

“So you will go now,” he said.

“Soon. But first, I...”

Shyness overcame her courage for a moment. He gave her a quizzical look.

“That blanket you packed in my suitcase,” she said. “Do you think you could take it out and lay it here on the grass? My… my hands are still tender, but perhaps you will let me hold you in other ways…”

A great stillness fell between them. Then her wolf smiled and lifted the thong to his neck, tying it in place so that his milagro hung just in the hollow of his own throat. He shook out the blanket and stood there on it, waiting until she rose from the stones by the pool to join him.

“Mi lobo,” she murmured as he lowered her to the blanket.

Then his lips were on hers and there was no more need for words.

The ice storm lasted until the end of the week, driving the city completely to its knees. By the middle of the following week, basic services had been restored throughout most of the city, but there were still hundreds of homes in outlying regions without power and the cleanup of downed branches and utility poles, while progressing, seemed to operate at a snail’s pace. There was simply so much damage and the onslaught of a new cold front didn’t make anyone’s job easier. The temperature dropped steadily through the weekend and by Monday they were gripped in a deep freeze as vicious as the one that had plagued the city in December.

Ellie immersed herself in the Angel Outreach program as soon as the Creek sisters let her off at her apartment. She went upstairs only long enough to have a shower and change before heading over to Angel’s Grasso Street office to see if she could be of any use. She found the place in chaos and was soon working long days and nights, catching up on sleep when she could, which, as often as not, was on a cot in the back of the office.

The deep cold made her sojourn in some otherworldly desert all the easier to put on a backburner. The truth was she needed something like this—the cold and the hard work—to ground her after all she’d been through. She didn’t want time to think. Not about Donal or monsters, mysterious otherworldly deserts, or this magic she was supposed to have inside her that had gotten her mixed up in all that craziness in the first place. Thinking could come later. Right now she only wanted to be busy, to fill every waking moment with work so that when she did catch some sleep, it was deep and dreamless.

With Tommy recuperating up on the rez and so much work for the volunteers to do, she usually found herself taking the van out on her own. Angel didn’t like it; she always wanted her people paired and she especially didn’t want women out alone in the vans, but everyone was overworked and there was simply too much that needed to get done for them to be able to follow protocol.

For her part, Ellie wasn’t nervous being out on her own, but she couldn’t explain why to Angel without sounding like an idiot. “You see,” she would have had to say, “after facing down some huge tree monster in Nevernever-land, it’s kind of hard to get worked up about anything the streets could throw at me right now.”

Besides, a general air of community seemed to have taken over the city, with everybody lending a hand to their neighbors, and even to strangers. There were stories about generators going missing, of lowlifes stealing from people they were pretending to help, but the numbers were far fewer than one might have expected in the chaos left behind the storm.

Most of the street people still weren’t interested in the shelters, never mind the severe turn the weather had taken, but even they appeared to have acquired more of a Good Samaritan spirit. She found them actively keeping tabs on each other, steering her to people who needed help, and a couple of times she’d had a half-dozen of them pushing the van back onto the streets when she’d gotten stuck.

Not having to see her friends helped a lot. And even when she did, it was easy to put the haunted look in her eyes down to simple weariness.

“You okay?” Jilly asked her one afternoon when they were working side by side, washing up dishes in the makeshift soup kitchen that had been set up in the basement of St. Paul’s. “You’ve got a look…”

If anyone could listen to her story with an open ear, it would be Jilly, and at some point Ellie knew she would talk to her about what she’d experienced, but she wasn’t ready to do it yet.

“I’m just tired,” she said.

Jilly nodded. “Tell me about it. I usually make do on four or five hours of sleep a night myself, but I’m not even getting that these days.”

Ellie only smiled in response.

In the end, she’d done such a good job of putting aside the weird turn her life had taken prior to the ice storm that she was startled to get a call from Hunter that Wednesday afternoon when she was in the office on Grasso Street, putting together a new load of supplies for the evening’s run in the van. Startled, but pleased, especially when she found out he was calling to ask if he could lend a hand after he’d closed the store that day.

“I could use some company in the van tonight,” she told him.

“Okay. Sounds like a plan. Where should I meet you?”

“I’ll pick you up at the store. What time do you close?”

“Six.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Great.” She could almost feel his smile through the phone line as he added, “So is this, like, another one of our dates?”

She laughed. “Dress warm,” she told him. “The van’s heater is pretty much a rumor.”

She was surprised at how happy she was to see him waiting for her when she pulled up in front of Gypsy Records at a little after six that evening, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his parka, hood up against the wind. The temperature had dropped even more this evening. Coupled with a fierce wind that had already rocked the van a few times on the drive over, it was serious frostbite weather out there tonight.

“Hey,” Hunter said as he got in on the passenger’s side and fastened his seat belt. “It’s great to see you.”

“You, too.”

“I tried calling you a bunch of times, but there was never any answer at your place.”

“I’ve been working kind of non-stop with Angel since we got back.”

Hunter nodded. “That’s what I finally figured out. So I looked up Angel’s office number.”

“I’m glad you did.”

And she was. She didn’t know how committed he was to the work that she was doing for Angel—it was pretty obvious that he’d offered to help out with the Outreach program as an excuse to see her—but she was flattered by the attention and couldn’t really blame him. She hadn’t exactly made herself available to anybody since she’d gotten back.

Hunter dug in his pocket and pulled out a cassette.

“Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I made this for you.”

Ellie smiled. “Jilly’s told me about this—it’s like a record store guy thing, right?”

“I guess. Though Fiona makes them, too.”

She looked at the label he’d made up for the cassette and started reading some of the names of the artists. “Ani DiFranco. Sonny Rollins. Solas. The Walkabouts. John Coltrane.” She glanced at him. “This is… eclectic.”

“Actually,” Hunter said, “it’s kind of a Miki tape. I got the feeling that you knew Donal a lot better than you did her and I thought maybe you’d understand her better if you could listen to some of the stuff she loves.”