Enstranged Hearts

A Life About to Change

Aria had a feeling her life was about to change, it wasn’t with drama; but rather with a quiet trembling in the ambient sounds of the forest.

Suddenly the birdsong went silent, the normal morning chorus. Then the wind, gesticulating in the rustling of pine branches, had ceased moving at all. Predator instinct. She knew these signals from enough time spent in wilderness.

Something was watching. Something was hunting.

“Ordinary” encounters like this, she quickly knew, were a thing of the past. Its fur was a complex tapestry of silver and charcoal, and limply rippled muscles lay underneath a coat that seemed to absorb the morning light like a species devoid of pigment. The part that really set this creature apart though, were the eyes, intelligent and calculating and with an appetite that went beyond mere physical hunger.She tried to regain control. Pulling slowly from the belt on her hip, she reached for her bear spray.

Normally wolves did not attack humans, but this was no ordinary wolf. Too deliberate, too focused was its movements, its gaze. From the mist two more wolves appeared. Pack hunters. Coordinated. Methodical.

They weren’t hunting deer. They were hunting her.

Sinuously graceful now, the alpha started to move. One step. Then another. They closed the distance with a predatory calculation which sent ice down Aria’s veins. She hung her camera uselessly around her neck, her constant companion. No time for photographs. Survival now. When the attack came it was explosive. A missile of muscle and fang sped toward her throat as alpha lunged, and she couldn't perceive her blur. Aria knew that she was going to die.Except she didn’t. Mid leap, a wolf leaped on, and a figure that appeared from out of the mist with impossible speed, caught the wolf in mid leap. It was so violent you could feel it in the air.

A brief glimpse of muscle arm, too fast even to rip apart light, and the smell of growl, even more of human than other. Kai Wolfe. A whirlwind of defensive motion was the mysterious stranger of yesterday’s dawn photoshoot. He moved with a primal ferocity that seemed to defy natural law, where the wolves moved with pack coordination. The movements were precise, powerful, transforming the forest floor into a battlefield of supernatural intensity.

Two down almost at once, thrown with a force almost too severe for the laws of physics to accommodate. The third—alpha—fought with an intelligence that surpassed simply that predatory animal instinct. All she could do was watch, her terror and some sort of fascination trapped in the middle of her.It only lasted less than two minutes. Silence came again, and Kai fell to his knees in the fallen wolves, huffing.

His shirt had been torn and his muscles slipped out… strange markings? Tattoos? Scars?He turned to her, “Are you hurt?”His voice was as deep baritone as a ringing baritone, but mellower. Amber eyes, same impossible colour she had seen yesterday, staring at her, staring at her as if locking eyes, exposing her and shielding her at the same time.Aria, clearly, had to force the word out between the shatters of her professionalism.

“Who are you?” His lips curled slightly. Not a friendly smile. It came out more like someone was admitting the same reality with a complicated truth it wouldn’t take too long to explain.“Kai Wolfe,” he said simply. “And you’re not safe here.

He did something extraordinary before she could answer. He lifted the massive wolf bodies, familiar with how much they weighed, well over 100 pounds each, and moved them into the dense forest, out of her line of sight with what seemed like casual effort. A naturalist, Aria Lockhart, had seen a good number of people, and knew all the rules, had spent her whole professional life watching and logging the natural world, only to be surprised by a moment that has no place in science as she knows it. Something had changed fundamentally. She knew, with an absolute sense that this carefully crafted world would never be the same.

A week after the wolf attack, it was a proving that she had such a remarkable ability to deny. Bombarded by what felt like gunshots in the forest, she carried on with extraordinary events, determined to be normal. In her mountain cabin, her studio was a refuge of rational thought, a carefully ordered space with photographic collections coddled by doggedly descriptive labelling, scientific journals whose logic was as predictable as the room’s layout, and helpful editing equipment.

Something had fundamentally changed, yet. The anamolies that were appearing in the photographs she was making on recent expeditions she couldn’t explain. Images with subtle shadows in the edges. Goned by blurred movements that he could never wrap his mind around. Something watching right beyond the frame. Kai Wolfe was everywhere and nowhere. On her photography expeditions she’d catch fleeting glimpses of a shadow, a figure moving through between trees, a shadow passing by her cabin’s periphery, a sense of being observed that prickled along her skin like static electricity.

None of that was given to us by Silver local community. More like someone acknowledging a complicated truth that would take far too long to explain. But offers from Silver Ridge’s local community were silent. The town still bounded along as towns do, small businesses, retired mountain dwellers, outdoors people, the occasional tourist. Mysterious wolf attacks, supernatural encounters had brought out nobody. Her professional contacts sort of became her refuge.

There was a scheduled meeting with Dr. Elena Rodriguez, a wildlife biologist with the state university, giving me a brief mental escape into pure scientific discourse. Dr. Rodriguez examined Aria’s recent photographic evidence and noted it was 'unusual wolf behavior in the region'! “It’s been a changing of the pack dynamics.” But we’ve also found genetic variations that don’t match up with what we expect for traditional wolf populations.”

She waited, listening with a grace that almost concealed her, for some rationality that might reduce the growing uncertainty, if only a little, sweeping it under the rug. The scientific language provided structure for the increasing non structure of her inner world. ''Have you seen anything ... weird?'' A trained eye caught something from Aria’s demeanor, and Dr. Rodriguez asked. “Unusual how?” Her voice having carefully been neutral, became a deflection.She studied her for a moment and smiled. “Just checking. I've always loved the way you've been able to capture nuanced wildlife interactions. But I have a bad feeling about this one”