Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay by Babette Jongh (best fantasy books to read TXT) 📕

he admired her ability to separate work and real life by setting regular hours and not being a slave to her phone during the time she’d chosen to block out for living her life. At the time, he’d meant it. They’d been dating then, and he’d been glad she wasn’t always available—to her clients or to him—because he didn’t plan to be all that available, either.

Now, he wished she wasn’t quite so disciplined.

He checked his phone, just in case, but no. Nothing. He tried to call her again, but got the same message he remembered from before: Sorry I missed your call. I’m out of the office until Monday. Please hang up and leave a text message.

He’d have to wait until tomorrow to do anything, so he might as well put it out of his mind until then. Fortunately, Quinn was good at sticking his head in the sand; he’d done it for at least a decade of his marriage. He popped the cap off a Stella Artois and turned on the TV, planning to zone out until time to go next door and feed the animals.

* * *

Wolf was taking an afternoon nap on a newly built and not-quite-soft bed of leaves. Recent rains had taken his old bed from soft to soggy, and the scant supply of new-fallen leaves was only just now dry enough to make a bed. Not quite asleep, less than awake, he drifted in between, wishing he felt safe enough to stay in his soft dirt den under the farmhouse porch.

He missed pillows.

Ever since he’d seen the kitten curled up on a pillow inside Abby’s house, resting in the secure knowledge that she could sleep deeply without worry, he’d been dreaming of pillows. Big pillows, little pillows. Fluffy pillows, flat pillows. Pillows in sunlight and pillows in shade. Pillows on the ground and pillows elevated off the ground by wooden blocks. When he saw himself floating in the air on a pillow that turned out to be a cloud, he had a thought: Now, I’m falling asleep. Now, I’m dreaming.

His soft cloud-pillow bumped into another one. He looked up, surprised to see his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since the alpha took him away from her. At first, he’d been proud to be chosen and had hardly looked back at his mother, who was busy sniffing at the round, rubbery-smelling feet of the big metal thing—which he later learned was a truck—that the alpha had dumped him into before driving away. That was when Wolf realized that his mother wasn’t coming with him, and that he would never see her again.

In the dream, his mother sat upright and howled, her nose tilted upward to an evening sky that was streaked with orange and purple and many other colors he didn’t have names for. Silhouetted against the setting sun, she looked so beautiful, her gray fur tipped with black, her golden eyes half-closed, her ears tilted back as she gave herself to the end of another day. Then, she turned and leaped onto his cloud, scratching at his side. “Wake up,” she moaned, scratching him again. “Hurry. Please wake up. I need your help.”

Mother had never asked for his help before. She had always been the one to help him and his siblings. He tried to wake, to rouse himself, to come to her aid, but he couldn’t. She scratched at him again, and the cloud she’d been sitting on floated away. Suddenly, she wasn’t beside him anymore, but sitting by herself on a cloud that drifted farther and farther away from him on the uncaring breath of the wind. “Mama!” he whined, trying to call back her comforting scent of milk and dirt.

She scratched him again…even from so far away? She scratched him…and he woke.

Georgia, her eyes pleading, whined and worried and pawed at his side. “Help. I did a bad thing, and I think I hurt Abby. Can you help?”

He sat up. “What happened?”

She sent her thoughts and fears at him so quickly he couldn’t keep up. All he got was a sense of panic. He stood and shook himself. “Show me.”

She scurried through the forest, streaked across the road, and bolted down the driveway. “Hurry, hurry!” Her tail waved like a flag, not in happiness, but in anxiety and warning. On the way, she kept trying to explain what happened, but with his own emotions churning, he didn’t understand.

He followed, his nose on her tail. He followed, ready to defend her and her loved ones from anything, even if it meant he had to give his life to do it.

She led him to the opening of the barn, where Abby sat on the floor next to a bent hunk of metal. He saw that Abby wasn’t hurt, and his adrenaline rush subsided. Finally, Georgia’s explanation sank into his consciousness. “I got scared and I pulled and I ran away. I made her fall, and she needs help.”

When Abby noticed them, she inched toward them in an awkward, scrambling movement like an upside-down spider. “Georgia!”

Georgia turned and ran, leaving Wolf alone with Abby, who didn’t seem to be hurt—but it didn’t look like she could stand up, either. He sat, panting with anxiety. I don’t know what to do.

“Get help.”

Wolf didn’t understand the words, but he knew what she meant. He ran down the drive, turned the corner, and ran to the frog pool that had killed all the frogs. Sounds came from behind the hard see-through door that was covered by a dark cloth. He scratched at the door, but nothing happened. Georgia crept up to sit beside him. “I’ve tried that already.”

Wolf scratched again, pawed at the see-through door with as much strength as he could muster, and Georgia helped.

But she was right; it wasn’t working. The hard surface resisted his claws, no matter how much he tried to break through it. He stopped pawing at the door and sat. Turning his nose up to the sky the way he had