Chapter 12: The White Wolf

Eight weeks in Velmoor and I had been avoiding a full shift.

Not out of fear exactly. More the way you avoid confirming something until you are ready to know what to do with the answer. The partial shifts had already told me enough to understand that what waited on the other side of a full shift was not what I had been living with for twenty-two years. Dr. Elan's protocols were working. I could feel it in small ways every day, a loosening, like the slow easing of something that had been held too tight for too long.

On a Wednesday night, eight weeks in, I decided I was ready.

I went to the forest preserve at eleven. The moon was full, an ordinary full moon with no ceremony attached to it, which I found preferable. I walked to the tree line with my shoes in my hand and the grass cold and specific under my feet.

I shifted.

Not the mechanics of it. Those are not the point. The point is what the shift felt like from the inside: release. The specific, physical relief of something that had been compressed finally being allowed to take up the space it needed. Like a breath held for a very long time being let go all at once.

I was larger. I knew this. I had known it from the partial shifts. Knowing and being inside the body and feeling it were two different things. The ground was closer than it should be. My stride covered more than I expected. I stood still for a moment at the tree line and felt the size of myself, this new dimension that had apparently been waiting the entire time.

Then I ran.

The run was the first uncomplicated thing I had felt in two months.

Not happiness exactly. Not relief. Something more basic than either of those, something that did not need a name because it existed below the place where names lived. I was fast. Faster than I had ever been. The trees came and went on either side of me, and the forest that had felt large on my first visit felt smaller now, more manageable, a space I could cross rather than one I was contained by.

I ran until I wanted to stop, which was longer than I expected.

Then I found the pond.

I had been to this pond before, on the first night I shifted in Velmoor, when I had stood at its edge in a body I did not recognize and thought, "Hm." That had been a partial shift, incomplete, with the suppression still mostly in place. I had seen enough to ask the question.

Tonight I will see the answer.

I came to the bank and stopped.

The water was still. The moon sat on it perfectly, a white disc on a black surface. I looked down.

White.

Not almost white. Not grey—the light was flattering. White, with silver at the tips of each strand of fur where the moonlight caught it, a coat that looked like it had been made to be seen exactly like this, at night, at the edge of still water. Large. My shoulders were level with the top of the reeds at the bank. My eyes in the reflection were storm-grey, the same eyes I had always had, but lit from somewhere inside in a way I did not have words for.

I looked at this wolf for a long time.

She looked back.

I thought, in the wordless way the wolf thinks when the human mind goes quiet, this is what I am.

Then the human part surfaced, slower and heavier and full of everything the wolf does not carry, and I thought, "Someone put me in a cage so small I did not know I had any more room than that."

I stood at the pond for a while longer.

I was not crying. I could not cry in this form. But there was something happening in my chest that would probably become something else later, in a kitchen at three in the morning, in the dark, when there was no one to observe it. For now it was just a present. A fullness. A weight that was not grief but was adjacent to it, the specific feeling of a thing returned that you had not known was missing because you had been told its absence was your natural state.

I shifted back.

I stood human in the clearing with my hands at my sides and the pond in front of me, and I let the shaking come. Not from the cold. Not from effort. From the particular feeling of something fundamental being handed back to you after a long time, and not knowing yet what to do with your own hands now that they were holding it.

I stood there until the shaking passed. Then I put my shoes on and walked back through the trees toward the path.

Near the edge of the forest, I passed two wolves coming the other way.

They were large, mid-shift, city wolves out for an evening run, the kind of casual recreational shift that people in Velmoor did without ceremony because this was a city where the forest preserve existed for exactly this purpose.

They saw me and stopped.

Both of them.

Not the polite pause of two wolves acknowledging each other on a path. A full stop, completely still, in the way of animals whose bodies have registered something before their minds have caught up with it. One of them took a small step back. The other went very still in the specific way of deciding whether to lower its head.

I walked past them without slowing.

I did not acknowledge them. I did not need to. I kept my eyes forward and my pace even, and I walked out of the tree line and onto the path that led back to the street.

I did not look back.

At home I showered. I stood under the water until it ran cold, and then I got out and dried off and stood in front of the bathroom mirror.

Five foot five. Brown hair is still damp. The Omega brand on my left wrist.

I looked at my own eyes in the mirror. Storm-grey. The same eyes that had looked back at me from the surface of the pond.

I thought, "The wolf I just saw in that water is not nothing."

I thought, I need to understand what she is. Not because someone told me to. Because she is mine, she has always been mine, and I have spent twenty-two years not knowing her.

I turned off the bathroom light.

I got into bed.

I did not dream.

I slept the way you sleep when you have finally found the right size for your own body, deep and still and without interruption, all the way through to morning.