“Have you ever seen one? A wolf with blue eyes?”

“Not in the wild, no.” He does not add, Why do you ask? though the question is in his face as he decants the formula into a newly sterilized bottle.

She has no answer to that question that she is willing to give him; no answer that she is willing to give anyone . I saw one in a dream. I saw those same eyes in your sister’s face. Instead she says, “Can I feed him? I’ve raised orphan puppies before.”

“Sure,” he answers, handing her the bottle. “That’ll give me a chance to check on mama and give her meds.”

“Is she still too sick to nurse him?”

Tacoma hunkers down in front of one of the lower tiers against the opposite wall. “She wants to, and she can care for him otherwise, but she hasn’t enough milk. She was really badly dehydrated when she came in. She’s still on IV’s.” As he speaks, he checks the drip in the long, clear plastic tube that runs from a flaccid plastic bag hooked onto the bars of the cage above. “Time to hang some more Ringer’s on her.”

He removes the empty bag and steps out into the larger ward, pausing without apparent thought to step in and out of the disinfectant. It seems to be something he does the way he breathes, so long accustomed as to be automatic. She is irrationally pleased that she seems to be acquiring the habit herself, almost without having to remind herself. She is fitting in. She is not terribly sure yet what exactly she is fitting into, but she knows in her bones that she has not wanted to fit into anything so badly since she was a child, cut off from the outside world first by her up-the-wall-and-into-the-ozone IQ, then from almost all the rest of it by her deafness. Perversely, the lack of sound had been a comfort, undemanding in its enforced silence.

For the moment, though, she is this small wild thing’s surrogate mother. Kirsten settles herself against the back of the rocker with the pup against her midsection. The chair, which Tacoma had filled to overflowing, very nearly swallows her so that she finds her feet dangling, toes just brushing the concrete floor. She pushes off from it, setting the chair to rocking gently. The pup, gazing up at her with half-closed eyes, perfectly trusting, evokes instincts she would deny possessing, deny with her last breath. Protect. Nurture. Love. He takes the elongated plastic nipple with no more hesitation than if he were snuggled up to his wolf mother herself. He fumbles at it a bit because he still cannot see clearly, gives a couple of smacks and snorts until he gets the suction going. The level of milk in the bottle begins to fall, slowly but steadily..

Protect. Nurture. They are instincts which Tacoma seems to possess without embarrassment. It is not a lack of macho; Christ, she has seen him on the battlefield, spraying death from an M-16 on full automatic, lobbing round after round of explosives into the lines of mixed droid and humans. With a chill that shivers her spine, she remembers the moment when he called in the strike on his own position, and Dakota’s berserkergang that had lifted Maggie, herself, their whole army up and out of themselves and made of their small makeshift force an invincible, unified instrument of one woman’s will.

From the lowest tier of cages across from her comes a shifting of weight, a low, searching whimper. The mother wolf, looking for her cub. Careful not to dislodge the bottle, Kirsten rises from the chair, crosses the space between and lowers herself into a cross-legged position in front of the cage. “Here he is, mama,” she says softly. “I’ve got him. He’s safe.”

Seemingly reassured, the mother settles her head on her paws, her eyes never leaving Kirsten. They are the color of old bronze coins, not blue, but they have in them the courage and the steadfastness of the eyes she has seen in dreams. The eyes that somehow are both a wolf’s eyes and Dakota Rivers’.

“Christ, you’re dumb.” Without realizing it, she has spoken aloud. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place, locking smoothly and without seam. Item: Dakota Rivers has blue eyes. Blue eyes that, strictly speaking, ethnically speaking, she should not have. Item: the wolf of Kirsten’s dreams, or hallucinations or whatever they were, also has blue eyes. Item: Dakota has—her throat tightens with the thought and salt stings her eyes— or had a somehow intimate and loving relationship with the alpha wolf who was this small scrap’s father. The wolf, obviously, is Dakota’s spirit animal, with whatever that entails for someone who, unlike herself, has been brought up fully accepting that the barriers between the human and non-human worlds are both fragile and fluid. That one can have friends and relations who do not walk on two legs and who do have fur. That one can. . .

Another shiver passes over her, uncontrollable as the thought that spawns it. That one can, somehow, become a non-human being, in spirit and perhaps even . . . But she cannot bring herself even to finish that thought. It is too alien, too far from the familiar terrain of logic, of the physical determinism that has bounded her thought all her thinking life.

And that, in turn, brings her around to a mouthy, cynical raccoon speaking in riddles by a thawing stream. Her spirit animal. A creature who bears the same relation to her that the alpha wolf did to Dakota.

A creature notorious for curiosity and its long, clever, mischief-making hands. A masked creature, not given to self-revelation. A creature, Dakota had said, whose stock in trade is transformation.

Kirsten can feel that transformation at work in herself, however hard she works to ignore it. She is here on the floor of a veterinary isolation ward with the pungent perfume of Clorox in her nostrils not because she has “just happened” to follow Asi’s pursuit of a birch twig, not even because she has genuinely wanted to visit the wolf mother and her baby. (Maybe even pet them? Make friends as she has with domestic dogs all her life?) She is here because this is Dakota’s place. Here she can be close to the woman whose many skills she is only beginning to understand, and to feelings in herself that she is not anywhere close to beginning to understand. It occurs to her that Tacoma is taking an unusually long time to fetch a bag of saline and a syringe of antibiotic. Perhaps he senses her need—an idea she finds half embarrassing and half comforting—and is too polite to intrude.

Halfway down the bottle, the nipple falls out of the pups mouth. Eyes closed, his head drops back against her arm, himself into a wolf’s dreams. After a few moments, his paws and eyelids begin to twitch, his breath coming in soft whuffles. His mother seems to have dropped off, too, no longer unsure of her infant or her infant’s new nursemaid. Briefly Kirsten considers opening the cage to lay the cub beside her. Discretion, Little K. Discretion is almost always the better part of valor. Common sense almost never kills anybody. Go with the stats. Odd, how she can still hear her father’s voice in her head after all these years, remembered from years when she could not hear at all.

Shifting her legs beneath her, she settles down to wait.

Twice she catches her own head beginning to fall onto her chest. The pup’s contentment and his mother’s calm must be contagious. Twice she pulls herself up, wide-eyed, from the edge of sleep. She cannot think what is keeping Tacoma. Perhaps she should put the pup down and offer to help with whatever it is.

The thought passes, though, as once again the light seems to change around her. She is standing on a green hill far away, distant in time and the stretch of miles. Below her lies a valley dotted with campfires in the dusk, a long white twilight that pales the summer stars. Behind her is her own fire, ringed with stones and set within a grove of birch and ancient oak. A woman stands beside her, tall and slender and naked except for her boots and the high-bossed oval shield, painted with unfurling dragon wings, that leans against her knee. Her right hand holds a spear, butted against the ground; the strap of her baldric defines the valley of her breasts with its own stream of blue and silver. Kirsten takes in the proud body, painted in whorls and starbursts of the same deep blue that matches her eyes, scarred here and there with the marks of battle. The woman’s coppery hair wreathes her head in an intricate arrangement of braids: the mionn, meant to deny an enemy’s hands a hold.

With a shock, Kirsten realizes that she, too, is nearly naked. Not just naked but almost identically painted and armed except that she holds a crescent-shaped axe in her left hand, and only a hair’s less high than the woman beside her. The tightness of her scalp tells her that she is likewise crowned with braids, a glance downward that her own hair is black as a raven’s wing. In a language at once musical and harsh, the red woman says softly, “And the hero-light shone about you that time I first saw you on the banks of the Dubhglass, anama-chara, and I knew then I would do anything to have you for my soul-friend.”

“And now that you have me, mo cridh, what will you do with me?”

The other woman’s free hand caresses her shoulder. “Come back to our fire, and I will show you.”

The snap of a closing door brings Kirsten gasping out of her dream. It is one she has dreamed the past night and the night before that, ever since her conversation with the raccoon in the woods. The red woman is one of those who warned her back in her spiral toward death, but the rest is both new and strangely familiar. Before she can make sense of it, a voice cuts through the fog that surrounds her, lightly amused and male. “Sorry to wake you. You three look really comfortable together.”

Tacoma, returning with a bag of Ringer’s and a hypodermic filled with a milky liquid. Kirsten feels her cheeks flame as she remembers twice waking from the dream with her thighs sticky and her heart pounding;. A brief inventory assures her that she has awakened in time to avoid embarrassment, the pup still firmly held against her, still snoring softly. His milky scent comes to her on his breath.