Firestone Hot Springs come and lay your bones on the alabaster stones

Lotte worked busily, her teeth and tongue plucking ash, dead fur, and tendrils of leaf litter from her plush pelage. The steam from the pools helped to clear her lungs and sinuses, and she sighed deeply with contentment as she lost herself in the leisurely rhythm of her grooming. Eventually she fell into something of a light doze, her mind ceasing its wild whirring and her movements slowing their frenzied pace.

It was in this state of calm that she regarded the approach of the white wolf; his ears appeared ulcerated and raw, the fur below them streaked with the rust-brown stain of blood, but he appeared healthy otherwise and she did not mind sharing the space with him. In fact, a strange pull of her lower abdominal muscles and a hot churn of her gut seemed to clamor for his nearness — she rose from her relaxed posture and settled her moonbright eyes upon his face with a slow, sultry dip of her long lashes. Lotte didn’t have a willowy, lissome build, but there was something serpentine about her voluptuous musculature and ample curves as she rose to her full height and whined softly to him in greeting, her coal-colored tail waving amicably.

“Rakeet, herra,” she murmured, as inviting as any siren, her alto warm and mellifluous. She wondered idly if he would allow her to help clean the blood from his fur without bothering to ask herself why.