Heart of the Wolf Goddess by Wolff Autumn

Author:Wolff, Autumn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Autumn Wolff
Published: 2023-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

I’d never climbed a mountain before in my life, at least, not as far as I could remember. Some small things had vanished from my mind as I slept last night. The taste of cheap ramen, my first Red Sox game, and whatever they called the subway back home. I think it was a single letter. The U?

My heart panicked a little when I found these holes in my mortal memories, like dropping on a roller coaster. But I’d always get distracted when I realized I’d traded Lea’s memories for more of Ruka’s. I remembered more of the simple things with Red, how she could never wait for food to cool down before digging in, and her aversion to the color yellow.

But one memory, in particular, came in harder than the rest.

***

The two of us sat on the banks of a lake called Gully Pond. I leaned back against my wife while my fishing pole was propped up by three carefully-placed flat rocks. The berserker preferred to keep hers in her hands.

With my eyes closed, I stretched, almost knocking my rod into the lake. Reaper flies and gnats hovered over parts of the water on the shore about 10-15 feet to our right. I’d learned long ago how to keep nuisances like them pushed back with just a small bit of my magic. It made summer much more tolerable.

The smell of cattails and algae filtered through our resting spot, and I sneezed.

“Easy there, Ruru. You’ll scare the fish away if you keep that up,” Red said, adjusting the shoulder I was lying against.

Clicking my tongue, I raised an eyebrow at my wife, but it was all in good fun. For the longest time, we sat there, tiny waves washing upon the shore whenever a boat would go by. The waves and clouds moved more than we did, but that was fine because we’d been running hard the previous two days to get out of Whale God territory.

“You two don’t get along very whale,” one of the god’s priests had said with a stupid grin before I scowled in his direction. He shrunk back pretty fast after that. I fucking hated puns. But I wasn’t going to piss off Blimos any more than necessary by attacking one of his holy men. We agreed to what the divine ones called Levmon, which essentially translated to “go separate ways.”

That was easier than starting a conflict between gods and goddesses, which could get bloody real quick.

But here under the afternoon sun with only the occasional fish biting to keep us distracted, the tension from that conflict melted away. I might have been on the way to a nap when Red asked me a question out of nowhere.

“Ruru, do you think you’ll ever get tired of me?” she asked with a vulnerability I didn’t anticipate. My wife was a proud and powerful woman. She didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She tucked the damn thing away in a coat pocket where you couldn’t see it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.