Still Life with Shape-shifter by Sharon Shinn

summer. The thought made me smile.
    I ripped a hole in the top of the bag and left it on the very back edge of the property, in the V of a couple of deadfalls. Returning to the house, I washed the supper dishes and put them away. Then I made sure my mother traveled safely from the bathroom to the bedroom, where she flung herself facedown on the bed under the ceiling fan and asked me to make sure her alarm was set. It had to be ninety degrees upstairs, and just the effort of climbing the steps had made me break out in a sweat.
    “Maybe you should come outside for a while, at least until it cools down,” I said.
    She just grunted into the pillow. “It never cools down.”
    “Well—you want me to get you an ice pack? Put it on the back of your neck.”
    Her laugh was muffled against the pillows. “Sure. That would be nice.”
    I went downstairs and came back up in five minutes, but she was already asleep. I pushed aside her long black hair to set the ice pack on the top knob of her spine. She didn’t seem to notice.
    Back downstairs, I poured myself a glass of iced tea and carried it outside, along with a book and a flashlight. Once I was sitting in the lawn chair, I spent more time holding the cool, sweaty glass against my cheek than I did drinking the tea, and even so I passed the evening on the worn, gritty edge of wretched.
    Darkness fell a little after nine. My father returned at quarter to ten.
    The wolf came at midnight.
    I had fallen asleep at some point, but I woke up as I tried to shift positions and nearly fell out of the lawn chair. I turned on the flashlight to check my watch; the hands stood at 12:04. Then I swept the beam around the perimeter of the yard.
    The wolf was standing about ten feet away.
    I swallowed a squeak and scrambled out of the chair, which collapsed noisily behind me. It seemed rude to keep shining the light at my strange visitor, so I tilted it down, toward my feet, but then I couldn’t tell exactly where he was. The waning half-moon had barely poked its head above the horizon, and it wasn’t going to be much help anyway. I took a deep breath and stepped off the porch, surrendering to hope and faith.
    A few paces into the grass, I came to my knees, propped the flashlight on a branch, and extended my right hand. “Did you come back so I could bind your foot again?” I asked in a soft voice. “Do you think the Neosporin helped at all?”
    There was the faintest rustle of movement, and the wolf’s lower body moved into the circle of light. Three thin, sinewy legs covered in black fur—one carefully retracted leg covered with dirty gauze. Anyone who had happened to spot him from a distance must have thought he bore an unusual marking, a single milky-white paw. If he had been careless enough to let anyone catch sight of him.
    “Let me take a look at that,” I said, still in a soft voice, and he obediently lowered himself to the ground and rolled to his side. I was beyond being astonished by my ability to communicate with him. I simply cut away the bandage and picked up the light to examine the wound.
    It actually seemed as if it had improved in the past twenty-four hours; at any rate, it wasn’t worse. As before, I wiped it with alcohol, smeared it with ointment, and wrapped it with gauze. As before, the minute I was done, the wolf pushed himself to a seated position and watched me with an unwavering regard.
    “Did you find the dog food?” I asked. “But, hey, as long as you’re here, would you like more ground beef? Just stay where you are.”
    He was still waiting for me when I returned with food and water. He didn’t fall on either with the same famished gratitude as he had the night before, but he still polished off a pound of hamburger and most of a bowl of water. Then he lifted his head, licked his lips, and turned that yellow gaze on me once again.
    I couldn’t help it. He seemed so intelligent, so tame, that I had lost most of my fear, and I had an almost uncontrollable