Something Magic Read online

  Something Magic

  Justine Taylor

  Contents

  Content Warning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Content Warning

  This erotic novella contains explicit content, including:

  cis male/cis male sexual intercourse

  unprotected sexual intercourse

  werewolf sexuality, including consensual knotting and shifting during sex

  Other potentially difficult content for some readers includes brief mentions of an adult woman abusing a teenage boy, and brief violence. Alcohol and marijuana consumption is also depicted.

  Please take heed of these warnings in regard to your own comfort level with these topics.

  1

  Caleb has dreamed of the Wolf.

  Always been a vivid dreamer, Caleb’s dreams have often seemed more real than his waking life. Despite being dictated by that peculiar dream logic that makes the impossible seem mundane, they are vibrantly visceral, Everything about them, is amplified; each of his senses seem heightened, his emotions more deeply rooted in his body. Often there’s something tugging just at the edge of his awareness, a deeply felt sense that there’s something he should know but can’t quite grasp, can’t quite name, a word is just on the tip of his tongue, a shape on the periphery that disappears the moment he turns toward it. The feeling chases after him long after he wakes. Having lived so vividly in his dreams from his earliest memories, he had become so accustomed to their residual presence in his waking life that it became something like second nature to brush up against the edges of his all-too limited reality. It becomes a part of him, just like the Wolf, which makes a kind of sense, he supposes, since the feeling is always stronger when dreams of the Wolf.

  One of Caleb’s earliest memories is the dream of the Wolf. He remembers awaking in the middle of the night to see the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling shining a faint greenish yellow. His mother had put the glowing plastic stars on his ceiling in lieu of the nightlight he declared himself too old for at the tender age of four, and they had become his most trusted way to reorient himself to wakefulness. Even after he moved out of his childhood home and into the various college apartments and rundown houses he shared, he had always glued a single star to the ceiling above his bed; it was the first thing he did when he moved into his first solo apartment after college. His mother’s constellations, and then the single star: anchors to waking life. His real life, he sometimes has to remind himself.

  The stars on the ceiling of his childhood bedroom were nothing like the stars in his Wolf dream. Those stars shone with an almost blinding white light in the dark sky that curved tightly over the tree-encircled meadow in which he stood at the center. He had no sense of what he looked like, but he felt older, like a grown up. There was snow on the ground, a lot of it, but he wasn’t cold, and the moonlight that reflected on it sparkled brightly as the stars. It felt like his entire existence was rooted there like he was waiting for something. In the elastic time of dreams, he had both always been there and had just arrived.

  When the Wolf arrived, the stars and snowy moonlight mellowed, as if someone had turned a dimmer switch, like the one in the dining room he liked to spin back and forth as fast as he could to make himself dizzy. Even when everything else looked washed out and pale, the Wolf’s eyes always burned a fiery, rich, glowing red, the only color in a sea of gray.

  The Wolf is the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, awake or asleep. He’s very large, with an inky black coat that shimmers in the light over the muscular strength beneath. Caleb has never been scared of him; indeed, he’s always wanted to run to him, has always wanted to touch him and feel the soft thick fur and look closer into eyes, which glowed an impossible red. But he’s never been able to move in the dream. He’s always just simply watched as the Wolf trots out toward him from the tree line and stops about ten feet away to stare at him with a remarkably humanlike expression of confusion on his noble lupine face.

  And that’s the dream. One moment he’s there, gazing into those red Wolf eyes, and then he’s awake, blinking at plastic stars. For years, sometimes three or four times a week, it was always the same. The first time he had the dream as a kid, he got up the next morning and declared to his parents that he loved wolves, and that he needed to learn everything he possibly could about them.

  “Wolves, huh?” his dad asked, ruffling his hair as he walked through the kitchen to the coffee pot. “Where did this come from?”

  “My dream,” he said, as if should have been obvious.

  His mother put another piece of French toast on his plate and kissed his head. “Duh, John,” she had said, smiling. She turned on the old-timey radio she kept on the windowsill above the kitchen sink to her favorite oldies station, and his dad, dressed in his deputy’s uniform, grabbed her hand and danced her around the kitchen to “Brown-Eyed Girl” while she laughed and twirled, the long, flowing skirt she was wearing spinning around them like a bird’s wings. He devoured the rest of his breakfast while laughing at them. When he carried his plate from the kitchen table to the sink his mom grabbed his hand and the three of them danced in the kitchen until it was time for Caleb to go to school and for his parents to go to work.

  When he returned home from playing at his best friend Leo’s house that evening, his mother presented him with a stuffed wolf, the first of many wolf-related purchases that she would make for him. The plush wolf was gray and white, not black like one in his dream but that was okay, because he hadn’t told her yet what the Wolf looked like. She also bought him two books, one an illustrated kid’s book that told the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the Big Bad Wolf’s point of view, and another that he couldn’t quite read yet that was full of photos and facts about wolves. They read them together every night.

  Two months after the first Wolf dream, he received what would be the first of many certificates in the mail. The one was from the World Wildlife Foundation paperwork and declared Caleb Cavanaugh the proud guardian of a Canadian Timber Wolf named Apollo; according to the 8x10 glossy photo that accompanied the certificate, Apollo was dark gray with a white chest and golden eyes. Caleb tacked the photo and the certificate on the wall next to his bed, which he continued to do with each one he received. There was no rhyme or reason to when his mother would make a donation in his name, but over the years the wall steadily filled with certificates and photos, some from WWF, Wolf Haven International, Wildlife Defenders. When he couldn’t sleep, he would close his eyes and list the names of all of the wolves his mother had adopted in his name: Apollo, Thor, Mariposa, Duke, Odin, Athena. He would picture each one in his mind and whisper their names into a mantra that lulled him to sleep and welcomed him into his dreams.

  Then, one night when he was twelve years old, the dream changed. The Wolf walked up to him in the center of the meadow, but instead of standing and staring at him like he always did, he sat back on his haunches and howled. It was a piercing, heartbreaking sound, a howl alive with pain and rage. Caleb tried to run to him, but he couldn’t make his body move. The Wolf howled on and on, a long plaintive cry that cut Caleb to the core and echoed off the moon and ricocheted against the stars. Caleb woke with a gasp, the Wolf’s pained howl reverberating.

  The dream upset him so much he refused to go to school the next day, and for some reason, his parents
didn’t fight him on it too much on it. Instead, he went to work with his dad at the sheriff’s station, where he spent the morning behind the front desk with Rhonda, the daytime receptionist. He was drawing a wolf on a scrap paper he pulled out of the recycling bin when his mom walked in. She had two teenagers behind her – a boy and a girl, twins by the look of them, probably students of hers at the high school. She was escorting them to the station to talk to his dad, who had rushed out sometime before with a few deputies, yelling at Caleb to stay put and listen to Rhonda. His dad walked in not long after his mom did, and they both looked at him and smiled softly, the expression not reaching their eyes, as they took the two teenagers into his office. Rhonda was sniffling and wiping her nose with her hand while she was trying to answer the phone, so Caleb jumped down from his chair and headed towards the bathroom to get her toilet paper.

  On his way back to the receptionist desk he stopped for a moment, looking into the not-quite-closed door of his dad’s office. He could hear his mother gently consoling the girl, and from where he stood, the only person he could see was the boy. He had striking green eyes and a shock of black hair, and his face was pale and severe with grief. He stared straight ahead at Caleb, but it was clear that he was looking right through him.

  Caleb was just a kid, but he could tell that the boy was broken, and for some reason the look on his face made the memory of the Wolf’s howl echo even louder in his head. So loud he didn’t hear Rhonda calling for him until she was standing right next him, sighing and pulling him back to her desk. She thanked him for the tissues and gave him a dollar to buy a Reese’s from the vending machine, but he didn’t feel like eating.

  When he saw the Wolf again a week later, the dream was back to normal.

  Caleb’s wolf obsession continued unabated throughout his childhood, until he was too old to be obsessed with things from his youth. Until his mother died when he was twelve. After her funeral, he removed the pictures and the certificates from his wall. .

  Every year since, on her birthday, Caleb adopts a wolf in the name of Claudia Cavanaugh.

  He doesn’t open the large envelopes that arrive a month later.

  2

  Despite the devastating death of his mother and his father’s subsequent flirtation with alcoholism, Caleb’s life, for all and intents and purposes, is good. His father loves him dearly; learning how to be a family of two had made them close. He grew up comfortably in the small northern California town where his dad eventually became sheriff, and Caleb had his best friends Leo and Abbie. Daisy moved to town right before freshman year, and she fit seamlessly into their small but loyal group of eccentric but well-liked outsiders.,

  Their little group had had the typical high school drama, of course, but nothing major. The worst thing that had happened to Caleb when he was a teenager was getting rejected when he asked his totally out-of-his league crush to prom. A wound to his ego more than anything else, he got over it quickly and moved on to other flirtations and brief high school dalliances. He attended Berkeley on a partial academic scholarship, majoring in English with a minor in web design. Leo spent two years in community college before transferring, and they had lived together for all four years of college, during which they had an absolute blast and further solidified their friendship into the brotherhood it was always meant to be, something that’s about to become legal when his dad marries Leo’s mom, Ramona, this coming Christmas.

  During sophomore year of college, Caleb had stumbled into a fairly intense burnout phase, during which he began to worry about the vividness of his dreams. Among other things, he convinced himself that feeling more awake while dreaming meant that he was actually dead in real life and only alive in his dreams: convoluted stoner logic that seemed epiphanic at the time. He told Leo about it, who laughed and told him to do his laundry because all of his clothes smelled like bong water.

  A few months later when he finally forced himself to be a more responsible stoner – only after eight pm on weekdays, and no more going to class high – he rescued his GPA and stopped getting into his head about it too much. But he still couldn’t quite shake the thought that there was something off about his dreams, and by default, about him too. Maybe the dreams were a symptom of some yet-to-be-diagnosed psychosis that would make itself more fully known at any moment; maybe it was a side effect of his ADHD. Whatever the cause, he knew it was wrong somehow, to feel so alive in his dreams when his waking life was good. He felt guilty, like he didn’t have the right to escape to a dreamworld, something his logical, self-effacing tendencies told him was a privilege reserved for those who had lives troubled enough to warrant such a dramatic escape.

  It’s not that he’s unhappy; far from it. There’s just something more in his dreams that always makes him a bit wistful and even a little sad when he wakes up, filled with the sense that’s he’s lost something before he’s even had the chance to have it.

  It’s worse when he dreams of the Wolf.

  In all the years that he’s been dreaming of the big black Wolf with red eyes, not a single detail of the dream has changed, with the exception of that one night when he was twelve. What has changed, however, is how he feels when he wakens. As he’s gotten older, that feeling of loss at waking that strikes him after seeing the Wolf has gotten stronger with each passing year. Once, in his senior year of college, right after an exhausting week of midterms, he woke up sobbing, feeling like his heart was being torn out of his chest, the loss of the dream hitting him harder than any loss he had felt since his mother’s death. Leo and his girlfriend Kelsey, who was pretty much living with them by then, had run to his room to make sure he was okay. He lied and said it was a nightmare. They both crawled into his bed and held him until he fell asleep again.

  By some miracle, Caleb lands a great job right out of undergrad with a publisher in Seattle. It’s a small house, and Caleb is paying his dues copyediting, managing the various author websites, and reading the slush pile, but he's been promised opportunities to develop his own projects soon.The office is located in a renovated historic house in upper Queen Anne, and Caleb gets an apartment at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill and, having lived in Berkeley the past four years, has no problem adjusting to Seattle life. He quickly makes friends with a few of his coworkers and one of his neighbors, and counts himself lucky that he can wear tattered graphic tees and a beanie to work. The music scene is incredible, and legal weed? Pretty fucking legit. He even likes the rain. It sucks to be so far away from his dad, but there are promises of frequent visits and his dad has Melissa now, so Caleb doesn't feel too bad about leaving him alone. Plus, Leo and Stevi got jobs in Portland and are only a three hour drive away, and Abbie called just yesterday to tell him that she’s been accepted to med school at University of Washington and will be moving to Seattle in a month. Caleb is thrilled and utterly relieved when she immediately rejects his offer to let her move in with him, even though he only has a one bedroom. “Caleb, you know I love you, but if we lived together I would fucking murder you and no one would ever find your body,” she says sweetly, and they both know it’s true.

  He’s been in Seattle for nearly six months when he has the Wolf dream again, only the fourth time since he’s moved, the longest he’s ever gone without it. When he wakes, the familiar pang of loss is there, but so is the relief that he hasn’t lost the dream because he had been starting to worry that the Wolf wasn’t coming back. He sighs heavily, glancing at his phone where it’s charging on the nightstand. It’s nearly six am, and he’s wide awake. Might as well get up.

  He stumbles to the kitchen to make coffee, red eyes and black fur on his mind, thinking that, with the exception of Leo, who he met in preschool, the Wolf is his oldest friend. It might be a further sign of his vaguely-defined weirdness that he considers a creature invented by his childhood subconscious to be a friend, but oh well. The Wolf is part of him; part of him that he doesn’t understand fully, but an important part of him nonetheless. Caleb decides right then he wants to acknowl
edge the Wolf somehow, acknowledge his admittedly strange but compelling presence in his life.

  And just like that, he decides to get a wolf tattoo. No, not a wolf. The Wolf. His Wolf. He leaves his coffee to brew and slips on some flip flops to walk down to his storage closet in the basement of his apartment building, not bothering to change out of his pajamas. There, among the many boxes of books he doesn’t have the shelf space for but he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of (and choosing which ones would live on the wall of bookshelves in his apartment and which ones would wither and die in storage was torture), is the box that holds an eclectic mix of childhood memorabilia, most of it wolf-related.

  It’s a beat-up old file box with a lid and he lets his fingers dance nervously over the lid before he opens it. After steeling himself with a deep breath, he slips the lid off the box of memories, resolutely not allowing his eyes to focus on the unopened envelopes stacked on top of the pile – eleven of them, now. He’ll add the twelfth in a few months.

  He reaches beneath the stack to a file folder filled with tattered-edge pages and bent-edged photos, just as he’s open to put the lid back on the box, Caleb grabs the stuffed gray and white wolf too, which is just as ragged-edged as the photos.

  Back in his apartment with a mug of coffee, Caleb pulls the photos from the folder and spreads across the kitchen table and retrieves some plain printer paper and a few sharp pencils. He’s not a particularly talented artist, but he understands perspective and lines well enough. He draws the Wolf from memory, using the photos of his adopted wolves for reference. It takes several attempts to get the shape of the just right, and the line of the Wolf’s powerful jaws eludes him through several cups of coffee. More than a dozen balled-up pieces of paper later, he has something he’s mostly satisfied with. He has to stop so he won’t be late to work, and he doesn’t even notice until he’s in the shower that he’s been whispering to himself since he started drawing.