CHAPTER ONE, PT 2

                                    

                                          

"Did I give you permission to climb my mountain?" His cold, powerful voice echoed around as if the gray haze of the summit was one giant atrium focusing all the noise back into Nora's brain. The Wolf seemed unperturbed for the fact that his makeshift pantry was being raided, more aggravated by the invasions of privacy—as if he had anything to hide in his sorry excuse for a home. 
Nora hesitated, but not for long. Not wanting to see what Hwpz's next actions towards her would be, she shifted into an orange-and-black-striped tiger and jumped into the haze over the East edge.  
The speed was incredible. If she wasn't an 800-pound tiger jumping off a mountain, she might have even enjoyed it. She was one to find pleasure in more "dangerous" activities, after all. Still, it wasn't as fun as it could have been. She tried touching the wall, but that just ended up propelling her forward, adding to the speed.  
Nora watched the ground barreling up to meet her and, at the last minute, jumped and rolled, shifting back into a human in midair. She shook herself out, stood up, and made sure to poke at herself a little bit. 
"Oh, good," she muttered, not sounding pleased in the slightest. Then again, she never did. "I'm fully intact." 
But just as she took another step, the headaches came back, rushing into her brain out of nowhere and together all at once. She fell forward, clutching her head, her stolen fish smacking unhelpfully against her back. Her head buzzed. Her vision blurred.  
But there was one thing outside the pain that she could focus on—the mountain. She had expected Hwpz to come charging down as soon as she leapt. Instead, there was no sign of him. Maybe, maybe, he took the back way. But why wouldn't he just go the way she came? Certainly that would be the quickest way to catch her. 
No time to dwell, she told herself. Only time to run before he thinks better of letting me go. 
Nora ran as fast as she could back home, back to her lab. The whole way, she looked back, expecting to see the Wolf running behind her. Nothing. It was unsettling. Was he planning something? Was he thinking through his revenge for her stealing his fish? Or was he simply not coming after her? The idea that he might just let it slide unsettled her more than any of the other scenarios she could think up.  . 
Nora's lab, in her opinion, was the best place on the island. Even better than being in the middle of the wildest bits of the jungle, better than climbing to the tops of trees or hills just to look out on the land. She loved being in nature, but at this point the entrance to her home was so overgrown and the windows and skylights so riddled with vines that her lab was just another part of the island's ecosystem.  
She swung in the front door, the white exterior of the building barely visible behind the leafy branches of the trees, the green and brown vines wrapped around it bursting with flowers. It wasn't a stoic place, no matter how bright it may have been. She didn't like it that way. She preferred it full of life—plant life. 
Nora didn't fully remember her childhood. She remembered some snippets from when she was little, growing up in the lab, encouraging the vines and trees to grow around and inside of it in her free time. She remembered a man—her father?—but none of the clearer, more definitive memories she had of growing up seemed to house him.  
Nora shoved the fish in her freezer, trying to shake those thoughts. She'd spent plenty of her life dwelling on questions. Where was her father? Was he that man? Where did he go? Did she have a mom? She only knew those words and their meanings from the few books the man left with her in her small library, tucked behind the piece of wall jutting out that separated part of her lab from the rest of the small bungalow.  
Luckily, before she could begin overthinking everything and go back to hide in her books and potions, she heard something outside.