Wheeling Gull Isle santeria

Throughout the first paragraph I just thought of the line in that Rent song where Mimi is talking about her father’s hands.

Komodo was stalwart, the supple steel of his musculature idyllic. With all four paws, Coelacanth strained against the soft sand in an attempt to bring herself closer — closer — closer still to the angakkuq. Trembling from the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail, from the tufts of her ears to the tips of her toes, Seelie burrowed into the wolf who remembered her and who called her by name. Four paws became three as she lifted one foreleg; became two as she lifted the other. She settled her weight daintily upon her haunches to push her velveteen crown into the crook of his throat and cling to him with a timorous clasp of her feathered forelegs. He knew her grandfather and grandmother, her aunts and uncles, her cousins. He knew her father and he knew Amoxtli, and he must know that she was only half a soul without her twin!

From some far off place, Coelacanth dimly heard the Earthstalker mention her hunger — but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the bristle of his coarse ruff against the sleek velvet of her tear-dampened cheeks, the warm solidness of him, the nickname that he’d given her when she was a fawn-fragile six month old that he uttered now with such poignant familiarity. Her stomach was empty, but her heart was so full!

Still, tangled in with the joy of their reunion was a deep-seated fear bred from experience: he would leave her as all the others had left her. If Amoxtli could, anyone could — and she had not yet found the magical formula to make them come back anymore than she had found the mystical concoction to make them stay. Coelacanth would never be able to tell Komodo what it cost her to unhook her delicate limbs from the slope of his neck and crest of his shoulders, to take a step back and rekindle the distance that separated them, to sit alone in the sand and simply look at him. She was a deeply despondent creature in the wake of her most recent failure, and she was afraid — so afraid! — that he, too, would leave her if she let herself love him too much. But she did love him. It was in her nature to give more than she’d ever hope to get.

Forlorn, the tiny Groenendael reneged on her resolution to stand strong and keep her distance, tucking herself once more beneath his chin with what was probably annoying insistence.