Page 26 of A Malicious Menagerie
I never closed the divider.
My heart begins to pound, bruising the inside of my rib cage, and all the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Slowly, I turn my head toward the door to find the dire wolf standing between me and the exit.
It was easy, when he was caged and I was secure in my safety, to forget how big he is. Like talking to an oversized Great Dane. But now, only a few feet away and with no barrier between us, I’m struck again by his size. He must be six or seven hundred pounds, most of that thick slabs of muscle across his shoulders and haunches. His eyes, intent on me, are the color of burnished gold, his ear pricked, and I feel like a hare trapped in a predator’s gaze.
After a long, dense silence, I manage to squeak, “Hi.” Then, “I forgot the divider.”
I mean, obviously, but the nervous chatter won’t stop. “I missed you the past couple of days. When I was picking up ground beef to make tacos the other night, I wondered if you would like them. Have you ever had them? Tacos? Probably not, I guess. I’d invite you over to try them, but jeez, can you imagine? A wolf in my townhouse. What would the neighbors say? Mavis already turns her nose up at Candace’s little chihuahuas. Me bringing a wolf home might give her a coronary.”
Before any more nonsense can erupt, the wolf takes a step toward me. I backpedal with a squawk. His second step forward has me falling on my ass, and suddenly, there he is, looming over me, his black fur and starry eyestaking up my entire field of vision. It’s like looking into a black hole, or the abyss Nietzsche was so fond of, and this abyss is mostdefinitelylooking back.
All words—the entire English language—fly right out of my brain. I can only sit there, mute, with my heart trying to vacate my chest and run for safety. As I contemplate all the things I never got to do—visit Japan, see Billy Joel in concert, fall in love—the wolf drops his massive head down. I wait for a flash of silver fangs and pain, but it never comes.
Instead, he presses his big, wet nose against the top of my head and inhales, his heavy breaths stirring the hair in my ponytail and warming my scalp. For an eternal moment, he fills his lungs with my scent. Then he emits a low, resonant rumble that makes my heart skitter and juke like a mouse fleeing from a cat. I flinch, and he freezes in place, his snout pressed against my hair. Slowly, so slowly, he moves his nose away and drops his head so he can nudge my chin up with his muzzle. His hot, damp breath gusts against my throat, and I shudder, sure that this is it, that he’s going for my jugular. But he only leans back and peers down into my eyes with an inscrutable expression.
Then, without warning, he lies down in front of me. I gasp as his muzzle worms its way into my lap until his huge cement block of a head is resting on my thighs. He looks up at me with a contented sigh before his eyes slide shut, and slowly, so slowly, I begin to relax. After a few minutes, I raise a tentative hand to stroke over his forehead. He makes a pleased grunt as I begin to pet and rub circles over one fine-tipped ear. “So soft,” I murmur, mesmerized by the texture. While he has coarse guard hairs over his head and down his back, his ears are softer than anything I’ve ever felt, even chinchilla fur.
We stay like that for what feels like an eternity and yet not nearly long enough. I tell him in a hushed voice about my weekend—about the petty drama of the ridiculous reality TV show I indulged in and my first hot shower in months. I probably spend way too long harping on how the hot water felt, but he seems happy enough to rest in my lap and listen to the cadence of my voice, so I can’t bring myself to feel too self-conscious.
Eventually, reality begins to knock uninvited. I feel each second ticking by while jobs go unfinished and John probably confirms to himself that I am the lazy, conniving ne’er-do-well he thinks I am.
“I have to go,” I murmur gently to the wolf as I give his ear one last fond scratch.
He grumbles, the sound displeased now instead of content, and opens one eye to give me a disgruntled look. “I know, I know,” I tell him teasingly. “These bony thighs are justsocomfortable.”
He rolls his eyes, and I freeze, again thrown off by how…humanhis expression is sometimes. There have been so many instances when I’ve known, without a sliver of doubt, that he understands me. But to think he knows enough about human social cues to do something like roll his eyes…
“Where did you come from?” I whisper, amazed.
He stares silently up at me for a long, pregnant moment before huffing a sigh and lifting his head from my lap. My legs feel cold and oddly light without him, and it’s like standing on a pair of matchsticks as I push myself off the ground. The wolf stands up as well and looks toward the dinner I left for him before making his customary chuffing sound. “You’re welcome,” I tell him warmly. Boldly, I reach out to stroke his shoulder as I pass him, and he leans into my touch with a rumble I suspect would be a purr if he were a cat. “I’ll be back to say goodbye before I leave. Be good.”
There. Another eye roll. But he grins, too, so he can’t pretend too much that he doesn’t like it when I tell him that.
As I leave the enclosure, I can’t help but turn back and look at the wolf. At his glistening black fur and gemstone eyes that shine out from the gloom like twin moons. At his strength and the cunning in his gaze. He doesn’t belong here, languishing like a collectible gathering dust on a shelf.
“You should be free,” I tell him wistfully, and his ears perk up at the words. I can almost imagine that he looks a little wistful, too.
As I pick my way back around the iron bars and through the undergrowth to the main road, a familiar voice stops me dead. “Hello, Anna!”
Wincing, I take a moment to school my expression into something welcoming before turning to my boss. “Hello, Mr. Mathis.”
The older man is coming up the path from the direction of the carousel, more casual today in chinos and a white button-down shirt. Instantly, nerves assault me—did he hear me talking to the wolf? But he appears relaxed and,based on his trajectory, looks to have only just arrived from the menagerie’s front entrance.
“Taking care of my wolf, I see,” Mathis comments as he joins me in front of the exhibit. “He can be a prickly one. Has he been giving you much trouble?”
“Not at all,” I hedge. “I’ve been using the divider.”
Well, until my mistake today, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“Good, good,” Mathis hums with an approving nod. “I’d hate for anything to happen to my newest employee. After all, who would take care of your grandmother?”
I tense at his words. His tone is still cheerful, but this time, I’m even more certain that that was a threat.
“Do you know how I made my fortune, Anna?” Mathis asks abruptly, startling me from the panicked static in my brain.
“No, sir.”
“I was a young man on a diplomatic trip with my father,” Mathis begins, his gaze turned toward the dense woods but hazy as if he’s somewhere else. “He was a prominent man, known for his ability to soothe ruffled feathers in a time when Africa was racked with civil war and chaos. Despite being a powerful man, he was not a rich man… well, not by my standards, anyway.” Here, he gives me a sharp grin. “In any case, as a boy of seventeen, I did not want to be in Africa. I wanted to be back home spending time with friends and chasing girls. And so, with little else to do, I explored.
