Free Boundary Lines by Melissa F. Olson

evening. I spent a fair amount of my spare time babysitting for free, which allowed me to call in such favors when necessary. I grabbed a big to-go cup of coffee at Magic Beans and was on the road to Wyoming by one.
    I had a date with a werewolf.

Chapter 10
    I’ve spent so much of my life in Boulder—pretty much all of it, minus my time overseas—that sometimes I forget that there are other places. That sounds childish, I know, but I love Colorado, and the hour and a half drive up to Wyoming was a nice, scenic reminder of why. I hadn’t had much sleep, and I’d spent most of the previous night in the car too, but damn if I didn’t have a large delicious coffee, a padded seat, and Brandi Carlile on the old car’s sound system. It was weirdly relaxing. By the time I reached Cheyenne, I had shed most of the anxiety and sense of wrongness that the gastric pellet had stirred up in me.
    And also I really had to pee.
    Pit stop accomplished, I followed directions on my phone until I pulled into the gate of the Southern Wyoming Sanctuary for Wolves. It was a large wooded property spread out over a series of small hills, and the whole thing was divided into multiple fenced-in paddocks. As I parked the car and walked up the muddy driveway to the welcome center, I could see a pair of wolves peering at me through one of the massive chain-link fences, about twenty feet away.
    I stopped in my tracks, gaping at them for a moment. I’d expected them to be big, of course, but I realized in that moment that I had imagined big dogs , like Chip and Cody. The wolves just felt different from any of my dogs. They didn’t bark when a stranger approached, for one thing, and they gave off an air of detached assessment, like I was being sized up as a food source. Which I probably was. I kept my eyes on the ground and hurried forward to the sanctuary building.
    Just inside the door was an enormous wooden receptionist desk, which formed a sort of gateway to the rest of the main room. There was a big cash register on the desk, and most of the room beyond appeared to be devoted to selling wolf-themed objects.
    “Good afternoon!” chirped the receptionist, a pretty teenager with a dark curly ponytail spilling out of a khaki hat. The letters “SWSW” were embroidered on both the hat and her polar fleece jacket. She had an ID badge on a lanyard around her neck that read “Christy.” “Welcome to the Sanctuary for Wolves! Are you here for the feeding tour?”
    Excessively cheerful people unnerve me. “Um, yeah,” I said awkwardly. “Am I early?”
    “Just a bit! Your tour guide will be taking you guys out in about ten minutes,” she promised. I nodded my thanks and wandered around the small gift shop area, examining the wolf-themed trinkets and posters, from “dog tag” necklaces (cute) to mugs to posters and T-shirts. Behind the merchandise, the walls were decorated with newspaper articles about wolves and signs directing the reader to call their congressman about wolf protection laws.
    I raised my phone and snapped a picture of the instructions, thinking I might do that when the current crisis was over. I had nothing against wolves, per se. If anything, I felt a little sorry for them, because a long time ago some shapeshifting conduits—the ancestors of all Old World creatures, myself included—had decided to limit their magic to one animal transformation, and they’d chosen wolves as their alternate form. Wolves hadn’t asked to be infiltrated by magical human hybrids who would go on to commit terrible acts, any more than regular red blood cells ask to be infiltrated by cancer.
    The rest of the tour group arrived: half a dozen high school kids and a chaperone, some sort of after-school nature club. The kids were jocular and teasing, bumping around the crowded retail space like so many overgrown pups. After one of them sent a display of necklaces crashing to the ground, the middle-aged chaperone lost her patience and threatened to