Erica Reyes was fearless, mostly.
For @lovemea-malia and the rest of the pack. <3
-x-
Erica Reyes has always been fearless. Well, mostly. She’s afraid of her illness, of dying somewhere the bane of someone’s joke or alone where no one can find her. She’s afraid of dying slowly.
But otherwise, she’s always been a wolf in a girl’s body, ready for the next adventure. Except, her girl’s body was a broken one, good for little else but walking slowly and looking for handholds that didn’t exist.
When she was fourteen though, she snuck out at night because her parents hadn’t let her out in the weeks since her last hospitalization and she was tired of being cooped up with nothing but the same books for company and a television set that only sometimes got all the cable channels.
If she was going to die, she wanted it on her terms doing something she wanted to do without a care in the world.
She went to the preserve. It wasn’t that she wanted to die–she didn’t. The fact of the matter was, more than anything else in the world, she wanted to *live*. She wanted to be normal, but since her diagnosis, she hadn’t been.
It was easy to get lost, one girl who rarely went outside and hardly knew what she was doing. The adventures she read about–they helped, some. But they weren’t enough.
The woods were “lovely dark and deep”, and she was so small and fragile.
She didn’t see the animal before it was close enough to bite, white fangs gleaming in the moonlight, a growl emanating from its throat. A coyote, a juvenile girl if she had to guess. Not full grown, not according to the Discovery channel.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, unsure what to do or what to say. She didn’t want to die, but if she was going to, surely this would be better?
Except… except for this coyote, who was dirty, a ring of dark, dried blood around one leg trapped in a bear trap.
She was trapped too, as surely as Erica was tapped in her body.
“Let me help you,” she said, aware that there was no way the coyote would understand but saying not anyway, dropping to her knees on the ground so fast she felt woozy.
The coyote snarled a little, and Erica could feel the animal’s slobber drop down on her fingers but she didn’t back down. She wasn’t strong enough to pull the jaws open very far, she couldn’t have at her best. But the coyote was small and Erica was determined and it was enough.
The coyote scampered off without another sound and Erica fell back and let out a shuddering breath.
She made it back home just before daylight, creeping into her house as quietly as she could manage and falling asleep still in her clothes. She slept the whole day, and didn’t protest when her mother kept her home from school the next day too.
A week later, she crept back out into the woods with a steak she’d bought with her allowance at the grocers. She walked and walked until she found an old abandoned car, a coyote standing guard with a mouth full of teeth and ardent defense.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, kneeling slowly and throwing the steak in front of the coyote. It slowly came forward and sniffed at the meat, snapping it up with a gnashing of teeth that reminded her of late night horror movies and hungry nights staring at hospital trays she could never finish.
She came every Thursday night for months, eventually getting close enough to scratch the coyote behind the ears.
One night she didn’t make it to the woods before she fell on the sidewalk just outside her house and seized, waking up the next morning to the hospital and her mother’s frowning.
Two weeks later, she was a wolf, and she never got close enough to touch the coyote again.
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