Free House of Mercy by Erin Healy Page A

like a toddler wasted of energy after a tantrum, the cooling caldera had settled into a peaceful sleep.
    At the base of Beth’s volcanic rock, clean snowmelt continued to run through the creek even at this time of year. The runoff had come down out of the mountains, racing downhill east of the Continental Divide toward the larger streams and rivers, watering the valley. It was pure water, famed water that poured out of these Rocky Mountains, and to Beth it represented hope. God willing, she too might emerge clean from the volcanic disaster of her own making.
    From her perch she was able to lie down on her stomach and scoop a palmful of water from the stream. She drank, then washed her face and neck. After her shift at the feed-and-tack, she smelled like a barn and was covered in oat dust. Her hair, sweaty from her efforts to relocate pallets of feed sacks, had dried in stiff strands at the base of her neck and the tops of her ears.
    Beth sensed the wolf before she saw it. The depression behind her collarbone seemed to deepen, and the faintest remnants of the claw tracks along her neck began to itch, way under her skin where she couldn’t have scratched. It came onto the scene like wind, not there when she reached out for the water, there when she lifted her face and felt the cool liquid running off her nose and chin. It stood on the opposite bank, head low, smudges of blood on its white muzzle.
    The canine’s eyes were clear and piercing. She didn’t feel fear, not right away, though her nerves sent a low vibration along the surface of her ribs. The beast had passed up the opportunity to kill her at least once.
    It was both beautiful and awful. In that instant of realizing she was not alone, before the fear set in, she felt aware that some imbalance in the world was shifting, correcting itself, that something bigger than her own trouble was about to unsettle all of her assumptions about how God worked.
    Beth wiped the water off her cheek with her shoulder, eyes wide and locked on the wolf, seeing it in daylight for the first time. A male, tall and strong. It was true that the “common” Canis lupis had been hunted into exile by Colorado’s ranchers and hunters as World War II was dawning. But this animal was no ghost or spirit of the past. The light in his golden eyes was real, and the blood on his jaw glistened like the silver water between them, and his growl warned her that there might be a real, non-ghostly cost to her if she continued to lie there on the rock.
    He was much larger than Beth in her limited experience had imagined wolves to be, at least twice the size of Herriot. The wolf’s legs were longer than she expected, and its wide head was almost too big for its slender body.
    Beth stood slowly and whistled for Hastings, then sent up a prayer for God’s protection on them both. She hoped the bloody muzzle meant the wolf was no longer hungry. As her spine straightened, the wolf blinked and his shoulders relaxed, the same way Herriot did just before a stretch and a yawn.
    Beth stepped off the rock. The wolf matched her step and entered the water. She headed downstream, toward the place she’d last seen Hastings, keeping the wolf in her peripheral vision. The beast crossed swiftly and came up on her side of the bank.
    Dark memories of long claws at her throat and hot breath on her eyes quickened her pace. Was this the same animal that had attacked her? The seed of fear in her mind bloomed. Could he detect this emotion, the way predators could sense which targets were easiest to catch? Her airways seemed inflamed. She began to jog, her ankles wobbling on uneven ground. His stride matched hers, an easy trot.
    “God have mercy,” she whispered as she ran. Last time, he had.
    I will show you mercy .
    The voice that answered was not her own, wasn’t audible to her ears, but to her heart, the same as before. This time, though, the words filled her with peace instead of foreboding.
    Nothing, nothing about this