Wheeling Gull Isle Washed up

The little sheepdog watched Dakarai and Faeryn interact from a distance, every nerve etched in wariness — but when Olive’s name for her fell from Dakarai’s lips, her tufted ears flattened abruptly and she deliberately turned away, muzzle tipping with sharp alacrity toward the sea lions. It was a pointed rebuff. She had not allowed Szymon to use Doe’s name for her, and she would not allow Dakarai to use Olive’s. To the tiny Groenendael, names were sacred things — and although being reunited with Axolotl, Ixchel, and Komodo meant that more wolves would learn her true name, she still relished the names given to her by others.

Coelacanth’s Neptune gaze tiptoed along the horizon line, cutting a wide swath around Dakarai’s swarthy silhouette, and came to rest on the blue she-wolf. She seemed friendly enough, so Seelie demurely angled her muzzle and entreatingly lifted one catlike paw.

Despite her firm rejection of the name he’d used, Coelacanth was not a creature to whom such brusque mannerisms came naturally, and guilt was already pressing hot fingers into her gamine flesh. There had been tears on Dakarai’s cheeks the day he had summoned her to her inevitable demise, and the grief writ upon his grim-lined face had been practically tangible to the atramentous empath — but her imprisonment had changed her. She was not as forgiving as she had been prior to that experience. She was clearly uncomfortable with his appearance on the island she had called sanctuary, but she had no desire to drive him from it — so she made up her mind to give him what she assumed he’d come for: her forgiveness.

She made herself look at him, cerulean meeting stormy blue, and although her heart turned over at the remorse in his keening whine, her expression was quiet and serene. She dipped her muzzle low in acknowledgement and acceptance of the apology she’d initially left hanging in midair, and issued a soft, soothing, “Shh…” — one of the few sounds she was able to make, as it did not require the thrum of a functioning set of vocal cords.