Arielle and the Three Wolves (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (2 page)

The animal took labored breaths. This was a noble animal, and she knew she had to save it. It was a wild animal, but somehow after it gave her that stare that seemed to search her soul out of its deep-brown eyes, she knew she didn’t have to fear it.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you, boy,” she told it. She got back to her feet and ran through the rain. When she got back to her Suburban, she put it in reverse and drove the distance back to the side of the wolf, where the rear door was parked by the side of the stricken animal.

She worked quickly to get the supplies she needed from her backseat. Fortunately she had just left her last appointment of the day and had her vet’s bag with her. She rifled through the bag and hoped to find the muzzle she often used on some of the larger dogs she treated. Her last appointment had been at a farm on the outskirts of the county to deliver a foal that had become stuck in the mother’s birth canal. She had not brought the muzzle with her. She would have to make do without it.

She took out a needle and syringe and filled it with a strong tranquilizer. Her heart started to race again, and her body went tense when she approached the wolf. It probably wouldn’t like to get a shot. Already it was in a lot of pain, and to jab a needle in it might push it over the edge and make it go crazy. The tranquilizer would put it out, but not before it could reach up and do her some serious damage if it wanted to.

She looked back into those gentle eyes. They were watching her, and she didn’t think she had anything to fear.

On her hands and knees, she approached the wolf. “I’m not going to hurt you, boy. Please don’t hurt me either. Okay?” She gritted her teeth and plunged the needle into the wolf’s hip. All the while it just stared at her. It still held her eyes. This was a remarkable animal. She would have to puzzle over it later when she had more time. Right now she had to get it off the road and into her car.

The wolf was too heavy for her to lift, but she had a tarp in her back seat that she sometimes used to reposition the larger barn yard animals. She got it beneath the wolf’s prone body. It took her about five minutes to get it secured. At the end of this time she looked down at the wolf. It slept. The tranquilizer had done its job.

She used the tarp to move the wolf to her SUV. It was a difficult struggle to lift this much weight. The back of her vehicle was equipped with an automatic pulley she used to lift larger barnyard animals. She used this to get the wolf in the back. When she got back behind the wheel of the Suburban and was ready to drive off, her clothes were running with rain water and soaked the carpet inside.

She turned the wipers on once more and started forward. Briefly she considered where to take the wolf. Perhaps she should take it into her animal clinic in town. She had a kennel there and cages to house sick animals. However, none of those cages would be large enough to hold the wolf, and the clinic was too far away to try and make the drive tonight in this storm. Her home was less than five miles from here. When the accident occurred she had almost been safely back there.

Unfortunately she was left with only one choice, and that was to take the wolf back home with her. She had most of the necessary supplies there to treat it and those she didn’t have she could get from the clinic in the morning.

“I’m crazy,” she said to herself and wiped rain water away from her eyes. “You have positively lost your mind this time, girl. You’re about to take a wolf inside your house.”

* * * *

The key fit snugly into the lock. Arielle opened the front door. She had left a light on in the living room because she knew she wouldn’t be home until after dark. Everything was just as she had left it and looked warm and comfortable. When she stepped over the threshold, the rainwater still dripped off her clothes.

She took off her jacket with the hood. It was awkward. Her arms didn’t want to fit through the sleeves because they had become so wet. After it was off she hung it neatly in the closet by the door. Her shoulder-length hair was a tangled mess. She had to flip it back a couple of times as it was an annoyance and fell into her eyes. She was glad she didn’t have a living room mirror because she knew she looked haggard and foolish after the storm had buffeted her for the last half hour. She probably looked more like the Wicked Witch of the East than a small-town vet.

She went quickly through the house to the den in back that she had set up as an office. Occasionally she would treat animals at her home. It was a small town, and people liked to bring their sick pets by the house. Technically it was against the state health codes, and the insurance company would have had a fit if they’d known, but things were casual in a small town, more old-fashioned and traditional.

She would need to make a quick decision as to where she wanted to put the injured wolf. It had been five hours ago that she had left the house when she got the call from the Clarkson farm. They asked her to come out immediately because they didn’t think they could coax the foal out of the mother’s birth canal.

The steamy romance novel she had just started still lay on the coffee table right where she had left it. A fast glance down the hall showed her bath robe on top of the bed where she had discarded it to change into her work clothes. When she walked through the dining room, she remembered she had just set the table with the single place mat. Fortunately she hadn’t forgotten to put the food back in the refrigerator out in the kitchen. If she hadn’t, the chicken and broccoli would have spoiled by now.

She was a vet and loved all animals, yet she didn’t have any pets of her own. In fact, she had never owned any. She always guessed it was because she saw so many during the course of a routine work day that when she came home she liked to escape and be by herself. Recently she had thought about adopting a dog or a cat at the local pound. They would make good pets, but she never got around to it. Now she was happy she had not made that decision. Another animal in the house would have made it impossible to take the wolf inside.

She stood in the center of the living room carpet and debated where the best place in her house was to put the wolf once she got it inside. All of her veterinary supplies were in her office, but it was too small. The living room, the dining room, and the kitchen were out because she needed those for her own life. The front porch would have been great because it was the summer and warm out most of the time. However it had a leak in the roof, one she had kept obstinately reminding herself to fix. Perhaps tomorrow after it stopped raining and had a chance to dry out a little, she could keep the wolf out there, but for the moment she would to have to make room in her one-bedroom house for the animal.

Again she used the automatic pulley in the back of the vehicle to lift the wolf back to the ground. The wolf was still asleep on top of the tarp when she dragged it up the front steps and inside her home. As soon as the wolf was inside with her, even though it was still knocked out by the tranquilizer, she felt a strange sense envelop her. It was like what she felt when she had company in the house. She had gotten used to solitude over the course of the last two years and become set in her ways. Even last year when her sister and her husband had visited for a week, it had felt strange.

Now that the wolf was inside her home she felt the presence of something different in her life. She wouldn’t have time to be lonely for a little while. She had a lot of work to do and for all she knew, the wolf could still die.

She let the wolf lie in the center of her living room. From out of her office in the back of the home, she brought her large black leather vet’s bag. Just to be on the safe side, she readied another tranquilizer. It would serve two purposes. She didn’t want the wolf to wake up and attack her in the middle of the night, and she knew it was in a lot of pain and it was more humane this way.

With the wolf safely put down for the rest of the night, she went into her bedroom at the end of the hall and stripped out of her wet clothes. There was no time for a shower, and she merely toweled herself dry from the rainwater as best she could then slipped into some sweats and a pullover shirt.

Back out in the living room she had her first good chance to examine the wolf’s injuries at length. His right hind leg had been broken in three places. There was no outward sign of wounds to any other part of its body, no swelling on the head or abdominal region. So the good news was there were no head or internal injuries, and the prognosis for the wounded animal went up somewhat. The bad news was that the wound in its leg was still open and bleeding. It was a good thing it still laid on the tarp or her living room carpet would have been permanently stained.

She had been up since the crack of dawn that morning. A full round of the county farms had been made in the morning. In the afternoon she had stopped by her clinic in town to receive more patients. Then when she got home and was about ready to relax with the steamy romance novel and dinner, her phone had rang. Old Mr. Clarkson had pleaded with her to come out to his place, which was thirty miles away, and help deliver the foal that just wouldn’t come out of its mother. Then of course the incident with hitting the wolf had occurred, and now it was one o’clock in the morning. She was dead tired.

For the next two hours she worked diligently on the wolf. She cleaned the wound with antiseptic and bandaged it the best she could. She gave it another injection, this time of antibiotics to prevent an infection. Next she went about the long, arduous task of setting its fractured leg. She frowned as she worked the delicate splint around the leg. If the wolf could never walk straight or even run again, it would never be able to live in the forest, and wolves didn’t domesticate well like dogs did. The likely prognosis was that it would die or need to be euthanized. In fact she was likely fighting a losing battle, but she knew how that felt from the last ten years spent on work with sick animals.

After the leg was set she reexamined it and realized that it would never hold. This wolf would need surgery if it was to ever have any hope of a recovery. She sighed and sat back on the floor of her living room and rested her back against the feet of her couch. Tomorrow was her single day of the week off, and she had planned to read and watch old movies on TV all day. She had not planned to perform an operation on a wolf.

She looked across the floor at the wolf. It was huge, positively a monster wolf. She had never treated a wolf before but didn’t think they ever got up to more than one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy pounds in weight, and that was in extreme cases. Now that she had a chance to more closely inspect the wolf she realized it topped two hundred pounds. He was not fat either. All of that weight distributed across its body was pure muscle. It was a young male and in the prime of its life and strength.

She remembered how it had looked at her while lying out on the county road. It was so intelligent, so brave. It had been in obvious pain but had seemed to put up a valiant front for her. When it stared into her eyes, it was like it tried to communicate. Those brown eyes had been deeper than any animal eyes she had ever seen before. The pupils were smaller than they should have been, like there was real thought behind them, even intelligence.

There was a storm, and she was tired and upset when she hit it. Perhaps she had only imagined the look out of its eyes. She didn’t think so, however. An animal, and most especially a wolf, would never look a human in the eye unless it was about to go for the jugular and kill them. This wolf had shown her no violence when it peered up at her. It was like it tried to lift its head from the pavement and speak to her.

She pushed her still-damp hair out of her face and climbed up off the floor. “You must be losing your mind, Arielle,” she told herself.

Another snap decision was made. She decided she didn’t want to leave the wolf out of her sight while it was inside her home, and she wasn’t about to sleep out in the living room with it. The weight of the animal on top of the tarp was heavy as she dragged it across the carpet. She had to use both arms and pull it behind her. Her bedroom door was half shut, and she kicked it open to allow a big enough entrance to the room.

Her bedroom was the largest room of the house. In the daytime it looked out onto her garden in the backyard. At night when the moon was out, she could lie in bed and watch the moon shine off the Teton Mountains to the west.

With a queasy stomach, she dragged the wolf inside her bedroom. It was better this way, she tried to tell herself. At least she would not be constantly worried as to whether it had awakened in the night. It was so large she suspected she may not have given it enough tranquilizers.

She backed away from it and stood in the center of her room and looked down at the black form. It felt odd to have it here inside her bedroom, and a tiny bolt of fear shot up her spine. She thought about what she should do next for a moment and then realized she was too muddled from exhaustion to think clearly anymore that night. She had already brought a wolf back to her home and carried it into her bedroom. She couldn’t have been thinking too clearly.

One last thought occurred to her, and she ran out of her bedroom and down the hall to her office. “Thank God!” she said to herself as she found what she looked for and ran back to the animal on her bedroom floor.

She fit the muzzle over the wolf’s snout. It barely fit, but after it was secure, she felt a little safer.

When she crawled under the covers of her bed, she was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow. She had vivid dreams that night, but she didn’t dream about the wolf. Instead she dreamed about a big man.