CHAPTER TEN - Bolt From The Blue

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Four days later, the power was back on and Henry came home from his first day back at work to find Timber asleep in the upstairs bathroom in her wolf form. Henry wasn't too worried. She had been spontaneously falling asleep in random places since she had gotten sick on Sunday. As a result, she hadn't left the house except for the hunt on Monday night which ended early when Timber vomited and gave them away to the deer they were tracking. She had managed to take the Halloween decorations down but the box was still in the living room. Not much else around the house was getting done except food and dishes.

Henry lifted her up to put her in bed when he noticed how light she was. As a wolf, Timber was two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle, though it felt to Henry as though she had lost twenty pounds in just three days. Immediately worried, Henry set her in bed and went downstairs to call Grace.

"Hello, Henry," said Grace's voice through the phone speaker. "Is everythin' alright?"

"Could you come over after work?" asked Henry. "There's something wrong with Timber. She's been really sick and has been falling asleep randomly for almost a week. Today I found her in the bathroom but when I picked her up, she felt too light. She wasn't this light three days ago."

"I'm off right now," said Grace. "I was just gettin' into my car. I'll be right over, Honey. I need to stop at home to get a few things first."

"Thank you," said Henry.

He hung up the phone. Realizing that he was hungry and Timber was in no condition to cook, he went to the refrigerator only to find it half empty and disheveled. Startled by the lack of food and usual organization, he tried to visualize what they had the last time he looked. Then he realized Timber had developed an eating pattern. He did some digging in the once neat pantry and noticed all the mason jars of marinara sauce were gone but there were still plenty of noodles. There were pizza rolls missing from the freezer. Everything with marinara and tomatoes had been eaten as well as all of the unfrozen meat.

Henry was completely confused. If Timber had been eating so much, why was she losing weight? He looked into the garbage and found the meat wrappers and food containers ripped to shreds which told Henry that Timber was in her wolf form and using her claws and teeth to open the food. He also found small bits of glass and drips of marinara sauce. Henry could only conclude that Timber had smashed the jar against the cabinet and licked it up from the floor and the cabinet side.

He looked outside and peaked into Timber's herb garden and saw paw marks in the dirt and then he noticed that one of the plants had been chewed to shreds but not eaten. He had never known Timber to behave like this. She was usually organized and clean and cautious about how much she ate after she had lost weight and worked so hard to tone her figure. Henry just stood in confusion as he tried to make sense of Timber's odd behavior. It was almost as if she had been losing herself to her wolf and forgetting who she was completely. She seemed to be running on the instinct to eat but that didn't explain why she formed a pattern. Henry pondered furiously until his head hurt.

Thirty minutes after he called Grace, the doorbell rang and Henry let her inside. She was carrying a large white box in her left hand that Henry knew was the medical kit she had put together specifically for Timber. Grace stepped over the threshold and set her kit down on the coffee table before looking around for her niece.

"Where is she?" she asked.

"Sleeping upstairs," said Henry. "I went to the fridge to get food, earlier. It's half-empty. She's been eating like crazy the last couple of days but she's losing weight. She's also staying in her wolf form. I found a jar of marinara that looked like Timber smashed open. I checked her for a fever but she's normal."

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