Wheeling Gull Isle fried chicken

Coelacanth does her best to suppress or set aside any negative feelings when she is ensconced in the Labyrinth with her mate and children. The world will hurt them someday, but she is determined — and perhaps this is evidence of her own lingering naïveté — to shield them from it for as long as she can. Today her longing to flee the island and sojourn to Morningside is nigh insurmountable, and she is drawn to the water’s edge, her sad, cerulean eyes gazing across the sea, but her paws set firmly in the sand.

It is a choking, sputtering sound that catches her attention; she fears immediately that it is one of her children, even though she trusts Moorhen and Stockholm to guard them well. Fleet paws kick up a flurry of sand as she wheels around; she is still carrying more weight than she is accustomed to, but the baby weight has already begun to shed. She arrives to see a waterlogged raccoon, still breathing, and though one part of her brain — the wolf; the provider; the huntress — sees the creature as an easy meal, her heightened maternal instinct overrides it. She curls herself decisively around the sodden lump.

Wake up, she urges without speaking, trying to bathe the salt from the raccoon’s face.