Wolf by Wolf

These were the names she whispered in the dark. These were the pieces she brought back into place. These were the wolves she rode to war.

Once upon a different time, there was a girl who lived in a kingdom of death. Wolves howled up her arm. A whole pack of them--made of tattoo ink and pain, memory and loss. It was the only thing about her that ever stayed the same.

The wolves of war are gathering. They sing a song of rotten bones.

I'm tired of fixing things that always break.

Her self-reflection was no reflection at all. It was a shattered mirror. Something she had to piece together, over and over again. Memory by memory. Loss by loss. Wolf by wolf.

So she traced and she named. She hurt and she raged. She remembered.

The world was not just moving. It was alive. And it was ready to fight.

The world is wrong. I'm just doing my part to fix it.

People were more than crooked type and swastika-stamped documents. No number of bullet points and biography facts could pin the soul behind the eyes.

Even at their most basic function, needles do two things: They give and they take away.

There would be no dressing up as a maid. No cyanide slipped into his crystal glass of mineral water. The Fuhrer’s death was to be a loud, screaming thing. A broadcast of blood over the Reichssender.

Hope. A strange word. In her past, it had been a light, wispy thing. Crushed as easily as a finger under a guard's boot. But now...now hope weighed so much, as if the Colosseum itself had collapsed on top of her. Mortar and suffering. Brick and time.

The guard grabbed Yael's hand, snapped his pen across her skin in two quick strikes. X marks the survivor.

She'd been trained to survive many things: starvation and bullet wounds. Winter nights and scouring sun. Double-tied knots and interrogations at knifepoint. But this? A boy's lips on hers. Moving and melding. Soft and strength, velvet and iron. Opposite elements that tugged and tor Yael from the inside. Feelings bloomed, hot and warm. Deep and dark.

The moreness of him was beginning to show. The way ruins were excavated by an archaeologist. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Bit by bit.

Yael was a cobweb version, composed of gaps and strings and fragile nothings.

Yes, Luka Löwe was a National Socialist, but he was different on the inside.

A different voice slid through the speakers now--his voice. The one that raised armies, toppled kingdoms. The one that sent the entire stadium into a hush. Even the raindrops hung back in the sky; the air cleared into a spitting drizzle." p65