The Wolf & The Witch

Claire woke warm, and hungry. And, once again, naked. She sat up and looked at her feet- they weren’t black with frostbite and frozen to the touch, but warm. She ran her right hand over her face, then her body- not frozen, not frostbitten. She had to wonder if she had found herself in this situation: sent naked to some godforsaken dead white city, if she would’ve survived without him. She thought so. Instead of pulling the iron bars into their cell she would’ve pushed them out. Instead of following the water in the sewer she would’ve walked against it. She didn’t need him to make fire, and if she wasn’t cuffed to him she might be able to use her magic at full strength. She would’ve been fine. She looked down, to her left- the damned wolf was still alive, still cuffed to her. He was not covering himself- splayed out naked for all to see.

The room was dim, and empty. A pile of warm embers and a chunk of table burning down. There were no curtains, no fabric or chairs or dressers. She leaned back and looked to the right- another dim room, empty of everything but dust and the cobwebs that collected the dust. But her feet were warm, which meant, as stupid and useless as this damned wolf was, at least he kept her feet near the fire. But if he touched her ankles and feet, what else did he touch? She imagined the long hours of night, the crackling fire, with nothing for a wolf to do but enjoy her naked, limp body. She looked down and touched her breasts- they didn’t feel tender as if he had groped them all night.

Claire was not a cocky, arrogant woman, but she knew, with certainty, that she was one of the more beautiful witches in her coven. The number of suitors her father, and then the priestess, forced on her proved that. Always dress certain ways for certain wolves, and for certain men. Well, now she was undressed. She looked down at him- his chest, stomach, his dick- limp, but large enough. Claire blushed and turned away- she was a virgin, and the way her life was going all of a sudden she might always be a virgin. Fine. She would rather stay a virgin than touch him. So many witches mated wolves, and gave themselves to wolves, only to be lied to, and cheated on, and degraded. Sometimes outright humiliated. Sometimes paraded around like a trophy. From love, to ownership; from a ring, to a collar. Fuck him. She jerked her left hand up, tugging his right, and he roused, and turned over, taking her left hand with him. “Get up.”

He grumbled, and cursed, and scooted across the stone floor closer to the fire.

“Get up.”

“I stayed awake all night keeping us warm. Sit there like a good girl, shut up, and let me sleep.”

A good girl? She nearly slapped him. This son of a bitch. “I hope you die in your sleep.” She tried to pull her arm back and he held tight, and fell back to sleep- the low, shallow breathing of heavy sleep. She sighed to herself, then waited a moment, then another, making sure he was asleep, then she went up on her knees, her nakedness on full display, and looked out the window, wide open, the glass long ago spilled out of its frame and the shutters long ago deteriorated to dust: a stone city- no sounds, no smoke from fires, no movement- empty, echoing silence. Most of the wooden supports for porches and paths were broken and decayed and stone arches had fallen in on themselves, blocking the narrow streets, and all the wooden shutters had fallen in and, in the distance, the remains of a purple curtain swept back and forth in a dark window.

Where in the hell was she? There were no other people here. At all. And it looked like there hadn’t been for hundreds of years.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and scooted closer to the dying fire. Her goals were the same: remove this metal cuff, find clothes, and get home, and she might have just accomplished one of those with the curtains. Progress. But she knew, in her heart, as she looked out the open window, at the city of gray mortar and white dust, and the white mountains in the distance, and the gray clouds in the sky, like chains, that she might never return home.

He woke three hours later as the fire died and the cold crept up along the stones, and the wolf and the witch left their small house and ventured into the city.

By the end of the day they had gathered a heap of wooden doors, a little bit of usable hemp rope, some sharp pieces of glass, a rusted, but solid, iron bar, and one curtain that didn’t fall apart in their hands. This city was preserved dust- motes that remembered the form of things long forgotten. Nearly everything they touched dissolved and fell away in their hands and the cold air took the dust and carried if off into the long red clay fields beyond the stone wall. And though they didn’t say it, they were running out of wood to burn, and there was no food- this city was dead for a reason.

Claire was gentle with the curtain- very gentle, as if this curtain was the delicate lace of bridal lingerie. And like lingerie intended for a single use, the curtain laid across her shoulders, draped down over her breasts and covered them, though just barely- the soft, white curve below the hem of the curtain jiggled with each step, and it only took a few steps before the curtain disintegrated stitch by stitch, thread by thread, and fell to dust. “God damn it all,” she growled. There was one purple string left on her shoulder.

“I don’t care about your tits, witch.”

Claire didn’t respond, but growled the way any wolf would- not because he didn’t find her attractive- good; he shouldn’t. She growled because they were expending all their damn time and energy to simply not freeze. They had no food, and had found only a little water in the hollows of worn stones, and they weren’t even that goddamn warm.

Three days of scouring a dead city and they finally found bones as brittle as icicles. And in the same house they found a cloth map on a stone wall and did not touch it- it would crumble. They stood side by side, his right, and her left, wrists cuffed together, naked in the gray and starving day, and they saw where they were: the City of Menny, and they saw a dot and a name they both knew at the very bottom of the map, the village of Bekedes. The witch and the wolf were from Itthon, which was two pack villages, and one coven sabat, which was two-hundred miles south of Bekedes. Which, if the scale on this map on the wall was accurate, was two-thousand miles from Menny.

To get home they had to travel over two-thousand miles. Neither the witch, nor the wolf, spoke. Claire took a deep breath and lowered her head. Impossible. It was cold where they were now; and even if they started walking south today, as fast as they could, winter would follow them. It would take seven months to walk that far, which meant the entire way, assuming they could find food, boots, shelter- winter would follow them. Winter, with its coat of white fur and a mouth full of sharp, white fangs, would follow them every step of the way. She pulled her hand back to rip the map to dust and Lestat jerked her back.

“Study it. Memorize it. Learn our way back home.”

“Study it,” Claire scoffed, and snorted. “Here’s how this is going to end- we’re either freezing to death, or starving to death. We can’t outrun winter.”

“Memorize it, witch.” He didn’t look at her; he was looking at the map. Was there a wall around this land?

“Stop giving me fucking orders.”

He turned to face her. “Then start doing something fucking useful.”

“You know what? You can go to hell. We’ve nearly died twice because of your dumb ass. I’m not your fucking slave, and if you speak like that to me again I’m going to smack the shit out of you, fucking asshole.”

“Bitch, I could’ve let you freeze in your sleep, broken your arm off in a door frame, and been done with your ass.”

Claire pulled her right hand back and slapped him, and the sound rang out through the dead city.

Lestat pulled his left hand back and slapped her, and the sound rang out through the dead city.

The witch and the wolf stood in the dying light, facing each other, naked, glaring. Then, out of the corners of their eyes they noticed the map. One thread of paper at the bottom, like a flake of birch bark, fell, and then the entire map unraveled and crumbled to dust and was gone in the cold air before it hit the stone floor. They shut their eyes, and clinched their fists and their jaws, and groaned at themselves- the way home, gone, in the echo of two slaps. They knew the direction, but had just lost every border, every town, ever river, and ravine, every bridge, and every forest, gone, as the echoes were gone.