Rory Ni Coileain

Hello, Snippetteers! — real life has had plans for me this week, plans that didn’t involve very much writing, so I thought I’d revisit “Wolf, Becoming,” my Russian shape-shifter novella from Dreamspinner. The setup for this snippet is that Volyk, a wolf with the ability to become human under certain limited circumstances, has just found Ilya (the “male” in this snippet) lying in the snow atop a frozen river; Volyk has just run off Ilya’s two older brothers, who had beaten him with an axe handle and were in the process of chopping a hole in the ice to dump Ilya in the river until Volyk intervened.

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The male’s eyes opened; his gaze wandered, unseeing, then fell on Volyk. Pale gray eyes widened, their lashes already burdened with snow. “A cleaner death than my brothers meant for me,” he murmured. “Bol’shoye spasibo.”

Volyk shook his head. I am not your death, he wanted to say. But he could smell death lurking too near the human, see it in the way the beautiful eyes stopped noticing him, the gray gaze wandered past him to contemplate something far off, in a place where nothing was.

I will not let you die.

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As usual, a few links for you —

Rainbow Snippets, your home for LGBTQIA+ goodness on Facebook:

WOLF, BECOMING on Amazon: http://ow.ly/IuP7304j9ZP
WOLF, BECOMING on Dreamspinner: https://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/books/wolf-becoming-by-rory-ni-coileain-3652-b

FLIGHT: Queer Sci Fi’s Third Annual Flash Fiction Contest — comes out September 21, available for preorder now, and my “life/flight” was chosen to kick it off! http://ow.ly/y57J304jafi