IT WILL COME BACK / 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖙𝖜𝖔

The end happened as all ends happen: without him even realising it was happening in the moment.

This end was sudden — flash of light — Screech of engine — Splinter of metal — Rush of air.

A pain which conjoined the others. Mangling him. Setting flesh afire.

Although he wouldn't remember the other ends and deaths he'd acquired, this end, for just a moment, felt final.

It felt like the kind of end that could've been forever. The kind of sleep that he would not wake from, the kind of bones that would not heal or the wound that would not close.

For a moment, he felt like any other, something different to a being who was cursed to feel the end over and over but never meet it.

This end felt warm.

Painful but sweet. Petrifying and horrific and bloody and bruising but kind — gentle hands heaving him upwards and an apology his heaving body could not answer —

And then a face flickering away from his.

Soft and fearful and terrified, just like every part of him. Staring at the beast that was torn apart, limb from limb.

The soft, gentle face of an angel to wash his sins from him, like the blood that already bled from his veins—

And then she was gone and he was a monster again.

──────

Ella couldn't remember how old she'd been when she'd seen someone die for the first time.

She supposed: young enough to fail to really understand it. It was the kind of thing that was too much for a kid that small. She'd been to a lot of funerals, sat in a lot of hospital waiting rooms, watching a lot of last breaths –– but never, in her life, had she ever seen this much blood.

God. There was so, so much blood.

The wolf's fur was matted with it.

She'd seen Maren do some lifesaving shit that had been borderline impossible, piece roadkill back together as if it was all just some novelty puzzle that she'd been born to fix.

She'd assisted Maren through surgeries where they'd been so close to losing an animal and yet, against all odds, they'd pulled through.

But Ella wasn't Maren. She wasn't fluent in miracles – she considered herself far more a stranger to them. She didn't have the experience of a lifesaver like that; didn't have the training or even the supplies.

She was just Maren's assistant; paid to stand there and dream about all of the things she could have done with the dreams she'd once had, and occasionally help turn a mutt halfway through its surgery when Maren needed it.

But, Ella definitely had the determination. Or, maybe, more accurately named, the delusion. She also had an over-stocked emergency medical kit and the ransacked remnants of what once had been a very promising future in medicine.

She was going to make this right, and keep a promise in the meantime.

She held her breath, rifling through what she could find and making herself busy.

All the while, she was observed by the dying wolf on her kitchen table – a notoriously dangerous animal who's tail swished (although tired and limp) whenever she strayed too close.

It made Ella's heart trip a beat. She wasn't stupid. She knew that she was working on borrowed time. She didn't know what would happen first: this wolf die, or this wolf change it's mind, find some second wind and rip her throat out.

If she'd been thinking clearly at the beginning of this she would've remembered something Maren had said to her once, a serious comment when Ella had first considered going into this career:

"Wolves are different to other animals," She'd explained and Ella had looked up at her, and seen the slight shadow at the back of her usually bright eyes, "They're not the kind of animals that ever need our help. They live and die together in those packs of theirs... and when they're injured, they never forget the face of what did it to them..."

With Maren's voice flickering through her head, Ella figured she was screwed. Half of her was convinced she was gonna get taken out by some wolf mafia before sunrise— but they other half of her reasoned that if this wolf wanted her dead, or had the capacity to kill her, at least, it would've done it long before now.

She wasn't stupid. She knew the only reason she wasn't bleeding out on the floor, too, was because the wolf was letting her do this.

It was allowing her near it. This was all on their terms — whether they were fully conscious of it, it was letting her do this. It had the ability to kill her and it didn't.

(Maybe they both weren't thinking straight. Maybe the wolf should've killed Ella when it had the chance.)

Ella watched as it shifted, lungs shuddering as it flexed poorly.

Its paws curled up, claws retracted and breaths increasingly laboured. It was in so much pain, losing so much blood and Ella, for a startling moment, felt so foolish for thinking she could do anything––

She let out a shaky breath and turned her back. An even shakier hand raised to wipe under her nose as she drew a vial of sedative from out of the cooler Maren kept in the back of the truck.

She loaded it into a syringe and gently injected it into thick muscle tissue (the only stretch she could discern wasn't completely matted with blood.)

It thrashed against her touch and she winced.

"I know..." Ella murmured. She sniffed loudly, blinking wildly to unclump her eyelashes, "I know. I'm sorry."

She'd repeat it over and over and over, until everyone in the world believed it.

(All she could do was apologise. That'd be all the wolf would remember when it woke up. Her apologies. Her softness. Her tears.)

Her heart shuddered as the wolf's pained whines faded into almost a whisper.

Once she was sure the wolf was out, she let herself she tried to assess him, counting wound after wound after wound.

She ran a gentle hand across its fur, grimacing when she felt it's bloodstained, matted hair under her finger tips.

As time went by, her brow furrowed. She found herself unable to understand how the hell it'd ended up in this state in the first place.

Sure, the bumper of that truck was hard, but she'd barely even driven that fast.

The collision had been sudden, but she'd swerved (and months later, she'd recall that she'd clipped him somewhere below the flank. She hadn't even hit him head on).

It took her far longer than she would've liked to realise it didn't make sense.

How the hell had she inflicted so much damage?

It'd looked awful under the kitchen light and the wolf looked so much worse than she could have ever imagined under close inspection. Her chest tightened as she counted each welt and gash on the wolf's skin.

Twenty-five. No, twenty six.

Everytime she thought she'd counted them all, she found another.

Twenty-seven... Twenty eight––

Ella held her breath until she reached forty.

Forty?

Oh... Forty.

The realisation stumped her for a moment.

She stood in the centre of a house buried deep in the forest, gloved hands tipped with red and extended in front of her as a horror crept through her body — when she blinked, she saw heavy-footed, steel-capped boots, rifles, gunfire and bait.

When Ella took a moment to adjust herself, all she could hear was a gunshot and then the low, pained whine of an injured wolf dragging itself through the forest —

Her face twisted a second time (once again with the determination not to cry.)

She'd heard things in her time in Pierspoint, Washington, about how hunting wasn't the scene way out here. It was deep enough in the woods for everything to be quiet and still, largely, untouched.

She'd heard from Maren herself that the locals had an understanding of nature, and, despite how many wild animals ended up in the rescue and rehabilitation section of their clinic through dumb misfortune, they all understood how to treat it.

But this? Ella couldn't dream of a possible alternative.

Whatever had happened to this wolf had happened far before she'd had the misfortune of hitting it.

She didn't doubt that she'd done her fair share of harm to this animal. She didn't doubt she'd broken at least a few bones —but, the statement still rang cleanly through her skull, like a pickaxe down the centre of it: this wasn't all her. It couldn't have been.

Forty-three wounds on a wolf.

That wasn't the mark of a Chevy truck, those were war wounds.

"Oh sweetheart," Ella breathed to herself, "What did they do to you?"

She was sure she'd never met anyone so cruel.

Whoever it was that had done this had been intent on making this animal suffer.

Whoever it was that had inflicted such harm on another living thing was twisted and deranged out of Ella's comprehension.

She pressed her lips into a thin line and tried to push past it — the sick feeling that churned in her stomach wasn't productive and neither were her tears.

(For the thousandth time in her life, and that evening, Ella wished she wasn't such a crier. How much better she thought everything would be if her instinct wasn't to cry first.)

Her head turned to the side as she reached for the disinfectant, and when she looked back at the wolf, something caught her eye.

Something caught the glow of the kitchen light and Ella's eyes fixated on it. It just caught the light, gleaming from inside one of the wounds on the wolf's torso...

Something...

...

Ella held her breath, swapping her cloth for a pair of tweezers. She drew close to the wolf and gently pried a small lump from the open wound—

Her brow furrowed as she held it upwards, watching it, again, gleam under the kitchen light.

???

Something...silver?

Ella felt her mouth go dry.

Silver.

...

The realisation came with a bite..

Silver. Like a silver bullet for a werewolf.

Her heart squeezed unnaturally tight in her chest and she looked down at the animal on her table. Suddenly, blood was rushing to her ears and her fingertips felt cold and the room was horrifically and awfully hot —

Someone out there had a real sick sense of humour.

Ella would've rolled her eyes if it didn't make her jaw clench so hard she almost broke teeth.

Shards of silver were scattered across it. As she circled the table she saw it in every gash across its skin. It winked back at her, taunting her, whispering the secret of whatever torture this poor creature had been subject to.

Ella, again, had to try real hard not to lose it.

Her shoulders shuddered slightly. The silver made a light ping noise as she set it on a spare surgical tray from the truck.

She couldn't fathom how anyone could do this to an innocent animal.

She'd been beside herself knowing she'd caused it pain by accident, but doing it knowingly?

God. That made her sick to her stomach.

She clenched her teeth together, her fist clenching slightly as if it'd stop her eyes from welling again––

Only, this time, guilt wasn't the perpetrator.

Said tears slowly turned angry. Her jaw tensed and she had to blink, quickly, to chase away the frustrated burn in her throat. That sick feeling returned in her; it rolled in her stomach and made her mouth press in a thin, devastated line.

"Did someone do this to you?" She asked quietly, but she knew the answer.

As if stirred in its sleep to reply, the wolf let out a long, stifled huff.

──────

In the dark, he dreamt of nothing but the darkness.

Eyes closed tight, jaw clenched and muscles slack, his mind tumbled through the waves of sedative as his body burned brighter and brighter ––

He was on fire, he was so sure of it. He'd felt pain for so long it'd become his paramour.

Bones had broken and rearranged, leaving a mess of man and wolf in it's path.

A charred, bleeding animal howled in the sedated dream. In the back of his head he, could not, desperately, find where the two separated.

It fought him. It thrashed in agony. It pulled him apart, ripping muscle until it was torn and bloody, stretched like leather on a sunbleached rock. It marked him for dead. It burned up the heart of him and made everything else seem so silent –– until he heard it. Heard her.

He was resigned to the darkness, but both he and the monster could hear every word.

I know... the angel said, I know... I'm sorry.

He couldn't remember if he'd ever heard an apology before.

Did someone do this to you?

He didn't know. He couldn't remember if this was just how he'd been made.

──────

She sat there all night and picked out every shard of silver she could find.

It was a painstaking task, one that Ella knew was foolish, but it was the only thing she could think of to make this better.

She'd realised there was metal throughout it with a shuddered sigh, lips pressing its a thin line as she'd understood, unceremoniously, that this really was going to be a long .

"Okay," She'd breathed out, pulling up a chair and putting up her hair, "We've got this, big guy."

She did. She had this. She was determined to get through it. She was determined to give this wolf the best chance of pulling through.

(Death, frankly, was the kind of friend that Ella had vowed, years ago, never to let sit at her dinner table again, if she could help it.)

For hours, that was it. It was her, a sleeping creature and the gentle occasion clink of metal in an old chipped bowl on the kitchen table.

She studied it up close. She dressed the wounds she could and gently pried others open with a pair of tweezers she'd sterilised with an old bottle of gin she'd never actually used.

When she was content that the bleeding had stopped and the wound was cleaned, she sutured with a hand that once would've made a fine doctor.

Really, Ella knew, in her heart, that this poor guy would've probably had a better chance of surviving if she'd turned around on that road.

If she'd headed back to the clinic, she would've had something more professional to work with (a sterile operating room with prepared utensils and surgical lights) and this wolf would've had something more reassuring to wake up to than her old, dusty, kitchen light. That sentiment sometimes bled through in her apologies, even if she didn't realise it.

But, as her mind reminded her aching heart, she hadn't known how much time he had. She hadn't known if he'd have made it the hour journey back through the forest and through those dark, unlit roads...

At that thought, her eyes flickered to the head, turned away from her.

...

She still didn't know how much time he had.

Ever so often, beneath the sedation, she felt the wolf whimper and twitch in its sleep. Each time she'd freeze, her heart in her mouth as she watched an animal with the capacity to kill her in a heartbeat, shudder against the table.

For gods sake –– Ella sighed at herself. She knew if this wolf died, she'd be devastated.

So, she didn't move until way past the sun coming up.

She watched it stretch a weary hand through the net curtains, spilling across the old, scuffed linoleum floor. In the twilight, her house had felt strangely unfamiliar; after all, it was a home and, notedly, not an operating room) but, as the sun returned, the oddly unsettled feeling in her chest faded.

Slowly, the house filled with birdsong. The silence became drenched with it. It ticked over with the clink and the subtle rock of her chair as the gentle shushing that subconsciously fell past her lips whenever her patient wept.

She kept the kitchen light on above her but watched the golden dayglow creep its way across the room.

By then, she'd almost filled the bowl beside her. The sunrise glimmered off of the bloodstained metal and, when Ella was vaguely confident she'd gotten the most of it out, she held the bowl up by the window.

They were in shattered fragments and Ella didn't know enough about hunting to work out if they'd piece together a bullet. With the clarity of the morning, Ella figured that they weren't real silver –– that, she did know: people didn't hunt with silver bullets.

(Not in this part of Washington, anyway.)

Exhausted, dry eyes watched blood swirl at the bottom of her kitchen sink as she scrubbed, tirelessly, at her nails. Her eye twitched as she did it, lips downturning as she scrubbed so hard the skin bristled and went raw—

Eventually, she turned off the faucet and let out a shaky breath.

A hand pressed against her forehead.

She squeezed her eyes closed.

A gentle flush of air through her nose and out her lips.

Ella turned away and walked out of the kitchen.

──────

If you were to ask any average inhabitant of Pierspoint what they thought of the woman who lived in the house on the outskirts of town, they would have paused and struggled to picture her.

They knew the house: a stick style painted the colour of the trees around it, dark wood windows and a hastily locked door.

It was two floors of peeling paint but a garden that was neatly kept; pink, black and yellow flowers laced delicately into flower beds of herbs and vegetables. A front deck and a truck almost always on the drive, a window ajar and the sound of birds singing, softly, from the back room.

It was a house too far out from the important places for anyone to really drive by. It was obscure, wedged in between nowhere and nothing alongside the hundreds of thousands of trees that rode out the Olympic Peninsula. And, in the same way, so was she.

Most may have known her house but they were incapable of putting a name to Ella's face.

"Pierspoint Sheriff's office... how can we help?"

She craned her neck in the early daybreak, easing a muscle that hadn't unclenched since she'd stood up from that chair.

"Hi... uh, my name is Ella Davis..."

Her voice sounded strained, tired. It stammered slightly, just like the hand that held a house phone to her ear. A bright yellow cord spiralled on the floor behind her as she ambled a nervous pace up and down her hallway.

"I'm calling to report an injured animal..."

Her voice sounded so foreign to her. She'd gotten so used to the exhausted, breath murmur that'd come straight from her lungs over the past few hours.

"A wolf... just off of the 101..."

No matter how tired Ella felt, there was still a restlessness in her, as if the panic she'd felt was just trapped in her bones. She couldn't stop moving, wearing a line into the carpet underfoot. Absently, her nose scrunched as the officer on the line spoke back to her, asking her questions she'd been preparing herself to answer all morning.

"About six or seven hours ago..." She said and then shook her head, although they wouldn't be able to see. Ella grimaced, trying not to cry again over the question that came next: "I did hit him with my car, yeah...uh, he was in a pretty bad shape... but..."

But?

"I think he was injured before..."

The line filled with the jarring sound of typing keys as a report was written on the other end.

"No..." Ella denied, "Not from another animal... no, it didn't seem like a fight or... uh, like a natural wound..."

The officer's tone grew wary.

Ella wet her bottom lip, feeling oddly cold as she finished her sentence.

"It looks like he was hurt by someone," She said tightly and uncomfortably, "I think he was shot... shot a lot of times..."

With her free hand, she ran her fingers through the hair that was already falling out of its clip.

She was desperate for something to do with her hands, something to distract her from the conspiracy that had been trapped in her skull like an angry wasp, buzzing there relentlessly for hours.

The officer didn't sound sure.

Ella didn't exactly blame her. She felt the same hesitation about the whole thing. She'd seen it with her own eyes and still, she was so miffed and unsure about it ––

She still couldn't get her mind off of those wounds. So many of them... almost... almost in patterns that she couldn't follow or even understand... almost ritualistic... almost preplanned––

There was no other explanation. This was sick in ways Ella couldn't even (and would never) understand.

Everything about it screamed human-inflicted. There was no way this was natural. As far as Ella would be aware, there was not a single natural predator that could take out an apex predator like that with shards of metal.

Ella sighed, her throat tight, "He was... uh, well, there were bullets. There's loads of bullets, or metal like... I don't think me hitting him did all that damage..."

Her ears rang in the silence between her statements.

"Can I ask if you've had any reports of any hunting activity or...?"

Her shoulders fell slightly. With her back to the kitchen door, at the far end of her house, Ella chewed on the inside of her cheek.

"You can't say? Okay... uh, no, thanks, uh..."

She glanced back, almost mechanically, at the door in the distance.

"No, he's not still there, I, uh... I moved him..."

The officer sounded surprised.

"I work at the clinic just out on the other side of town..."

Ella almost tripped over herself to assert some kind of confidence here, as if it would help convince them. She was suddenly so worried they thought she was crazy –– as if everything last night had just been a bad dream.

"I work with wounded animals... victims of hit and runs and other things and..."

Ella rubbed at her forehead, wondering if, like her knuckles, the rest of her would bleed under too much force.

"So I, uh... I brought him home with me."

──────

In the absence of her, he bared his teeth, raw.

The silence took him bloody –– a pile of stitches and bruised, broken bone. Him and only him in this room, caged in by walls of sunlight and left heaving under a light bulb.

He knew her. Although the past two years had weathered Ella a stranger to many of Pierspoint's inhabitants, he knew her name.

The prisoner in his own skin. The victim of his own agony –– the wolf on the kitchen table knew her by name, by scent, by tears and by the fumbling beat of her heart.

She'd pressed a soft, harmless hand against his chest, just to feel it breathing and told it she was going to go clean up. The gentle touch of a bloodied palm; his blood, then hers.

All the while, he was locked within his scattered mind, feeling reality flicker and thin, as if it all balanced on the tip of her tongue––

She'd told him she'd stopped the bleeding.

She'd told him she was sorry it had taken so long (and it had, although it'd been hours, it'd felt like years –– he'd lived four sundeaths in the time it'd taken for her to extinguish him.)

She'd told him that there were still some broken bones that she still needed to set, but nothing looked to be displaced.

She'd told him that it should feel better now, that they'd weathered the worst of it ––

(But she didn't know that his bones were designed to break again.)

And without her, the pain came for him again. It came for him like a bite to the throat, a choking twitch that tore his stitches and thinned his skin. Whimpers, although so soft, turned to snarls.

He opened his eyes and saw the domestic outline of a life around him and realised, before his body twisted and broke again, that he was about to change it forever ––

For better or for worse.

──────

Ella left Maren a voicemail, too.

It was far more concise than the report she gave to the Sheriff's Office. (They'd kept her on the phone for a half hour, asking her over and over if she was sure that the wolf's wounds were inflicted by an illegal hunt. Was she sure that this wolf had been shot and just got away? Ella had gotten bored with repeating herself.)

Her message to Maren began and ended with a wince, as if it was speech punctuation, or a subconscious knowing that Maren was not going to be happy with whatever she had to say.

"Hey, it's me..." By then, she'd found her voice again. "I know you're on vacation with your wife and, uh... I really hope you're enjoying Hawaii... and I'm sorry to call––"

God, how many times had she said 'sorry' today?

"But, I... I just wanted to let you know that we've got a wolf coming into the clinic today." The specific details weren't that important, were they? "I'm gonna follow the protocol for dangerous patients and everything, but, uh... I found him on the side of the road looking like hell and I've just filed a police report so..."

So?

"It's nothing to worry about," Ella almost sounded convincing. Maybe she was a better liar than she thought. "I've got it handled... I just thought you'd wanna know that we're clearly doing really well without you..."

Her sarcasm was drier than her irritated eyes –– she smiled at herself and shook her head, sighing through her nose –– and she hung up before she could make a fool of herself.

Ella watched the phone fall back into its cradle on the wall (beside the door and the stairs) and felt her smile fade. Her hand lingered there: chipped nail varnish and the blood in her cuticles that just wouldn't budge.

Maren would've known what to do.

Maren would've known what to do with this violence. Maren would've known how the hell to get blood out of her towels. Maren would've single-handedly been able to make this situation a-okay –– Maren wouldn't have felt the impulse to apologise because she knew she wasn't enough.

Ella swallowed the lump in her throat and turned away, again, this time to go change her bloodied clothes.

She couldn't hear Maren's voice at the back of her head, couldn't feel her bosses' judgement over whether Ella had even remotely made the right call.

All she could hear was the subconscious whimpers of a dying wolf someone had probably intended on making into a rug, and the rush of her blood in her ears as she'd hauled its body into the back of her truck.

Ella had never been good with violence. She'd never understood why anyone would ever want to harm another living thing.

She'd never been good with blood, either, for the record, just the sight of it all over the wolf's fur and her dining table and her towels and her hands–– it had made her head go funny.

(Ella had never been good with many things, but she'd always had a good heart.)

Her whole life had been dedicated to caring for others, for healing, Ella couldn't fathom being the hand that caused the opposite. It was enough to make her skin numb and her mouth crumple into an almost-permanent frown.

No matter how sceptical the Sheriff's office was, Ella knew there was someone unkind out there, likely devastated at how they'd been so close to ending another living creatures li—

Ella froze.

She was in her bedroom when she heard it, pulling a t-shirt over her head–– a loud, unceremonious crash resonated through her home.

Her heart tripped into her throat, blood rushing to her ears as she stood there, fixed to the spot.

It came from the room directly beneath her and made the floor under her feet tremble slightly.

Oh god.

Her arms gently eased the t-shirt over her torso, bringing warm to her skin just as an unsettled chill descended over the rest of her ––

Oh No.

It took her a second longer than she would've liked to admit to do the geography. Her head wheeled around the house floorplan, stacking rooms on top of each other in the dark of her mind –– the family room was under the crawl-space, the bathroom was under the hall and under the bedroom was ––

Oh fuck.

Ella threw herself in the direction of the door, already moving downstairs before the logic had time to settle in.

The situation she knowing walked herself into was not, particularly sensible, but she didn't register that until she'd cleared the last step: that crash had just come from the kitchen, the very same room she'd left a fairly deadly creature in, under a sedation that was, apparently, swiftly wearing off ––

Ella didn't feel the fear until she was standing in the kitchen doorway.

The kitchen, to any other eye, looked no different from any other day (aside from, of course, the mass amount of blood she'd amassed on all of her towels.)

It was a small, earnest space. Two windows on the far wall overlooked the truck parked outside, with the door leading to it and a row of neatly-kept flower boxes. The countertops underneath were clear aside from a plate, a butter-knife and a few miscellaneous food-stuffs that she'd not yet put away–– but all of this was overshadowed by the same kitchen table she'd sat at through the twilight hours.

The empty table.

There, Ella's heart shuddered in her chest. She stumbled a handful of steps into the kitchen, her head bowed to stare at the blood-soaked surface.

A pause.

It struck her, in that moment how silent everything appeared. The birds had stopped their song and the quiet felt defeaning, lying thick over all like a suffocating hand. Ella felt her skin prickle and her stomach churn, sick. 

She was unable to look away from the blood.

Was it insane to say that her first thought was how devastated she was that it'd probably broken its stitches getting off that table––?

At that, a second crash sounded behind her.

This time, when Ella turned, it wasn't absence of something that troubled her –– on the contrary, being alone would've been so much kinder. What met her caused her eyes to widen and her whole being freeze in a chilling horror––

She wasn't alone in the forest anymore.

There was a stranger staring at her from the hallway.

　　AUTHOR'S NOTE ! . . .
feeling: feral, abt this all not going to lie.
there's so much to unpack about ella being a babygirl that doesn't think she's good enough but you know what! let's focus on the big naked wolf-man in the middle of her house!

WORD COUNT ! . . . 5090
WRITTEN ON THE 28H OF JUNE 2024