Black as Blood by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

The forest is never far from the surface in Seattle. I undid buttons as I fled across the city, my fingers following their familiar paths as my feet did the same: it has always been in me to run for safety, to seek the dark wood and the places no man goes. When the trees loomed before me like a promise I dove into them, and my frilled dress and lacy panties—the trappings of the civilization I aspired to and might never claim—fluttered behind me, caught on the branches of the guardian evergreens. I struck the forest floor like an attack, my hands and feet already stretching into paws, and still I ran.

Waheela leave no scent behind us in either our human or great-forms; we smell of clean water and nothingness, as befits the tundra’s greatest predator. When I had fled far enough that the angry yearning was no longer clasped in iron bands around my heart I slowed, flanks heaving, muzzle drooping low, and curled myself into a ball. I felt no cold, for my fur was made for colder climes than these. So I lay there, and I breathed in the scents of the forest, and I tried to push away the pain.

I had not been looking for a mate. Ryan needed to breed to keep his species alive, and he had pursued me, and I had not been averse to the idea. If I bred with Ryan, I could be a mother without being a mother to waheela; tanuki were special, somehow, on what our friend Verity called “a genetic level,” and any children Ryan sired would be tanuki, although they would borrow certain traits from a non-tanuki parent. Our children would be large for his species, and dark-furred, with muted scents that would keep them safer. But they would not be waheela, and they would not know the north wind. That had been so appealing. The idea that I could be a better mother than my mother was, just by freeing my descendants from the north wind’s call…

But that was not to be. Ryan’s family was his world, and they would not have me. We would return to New York together, and then we would become separate again. Perhaps his family was right; perhaps I would never be tamed, but would always be a beast from the top of the world, waiting for the day I must return there.

A deer walked by, tail flipping idly, unaware of my presence. My stomach grumbled, but I did not move. I just watched the deer. It lived here, in the woods on the verge of the city, and it did not fear, for it knew what it was and where it belonged. It fit into this wood, into this place. It lived as it wished. There was power in that, and I was not so hungry that I needed to take that power away.

I raised my head. The deer went bounding away, startled by the motion, and was gone. I could have pursued it, but I did not.

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