As it happened, Florian’s newfound friend knew a place where they could stop for the rest of the day. It wasn’t all that far from the highway, and aside from a couple more mundane wildlife that Florian was able to scare away, their little jaunt through the abandoned farmlands – their fields unharvested and filled with weeds – ended at a small vineyard complete with a little storage house.

The place was remote, and the dust within the house clung to everything like glue. Still, Florian could see where the man had created for himself a bed on the floor from some of the bags that were scattered throughout the house. Compared to his modest bed in Dover, this was positively spartan, but the sturdy house was better than nothing.

Jake ran past Florian and up the stairs to the second floor, stopping on the last stair and gasping in delight. “Mister Florian, there’s toys up here!” Those words were like magic. Ellie sprinted like an Olympic athlete, no doubt determined to stake her claim to whatever they found up there. Even Joe slowly shuffled up the stairs, hands stuffed in his pockets and back ramrod straight. Florian chuckled as Joe’s pace gradually increased the closer he got to the top.

Florian followed the man deeper into the first floor of the little building, arriving in a little kitchenette complete with a refrigerator that smelled of long-rotten food and spoiled milk. His new friend ignored the smell for the most part, though Florian could see the man’s nose scrunch up. He sat down at the only table in the room, motioning for Florian to do the same.

“Name?” the man asked, flooring Florian in the process.

“F-Florian? I thought you didn’t speak English!” Florian accused, pointing at the smug-looking mac across from him with his index finger.

“Translation magic. Hurts to talk,” the man winced. “My name is Theodosius.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Theodosius,” Florian stuck out his hand. Theo – Florian decided that Theodosius was a mouthful – looked at the hand with confusion.

Florian grinned, in part to mask his own confusion over the idea that a thing like translation magic existed. “You take your hand and shake mine. It’s a sign of respect.” Theo’s eyes lit up and shook Florian’s hand with great vigor. So that particular skill would take some refinement, but Florian knew three people who had nothing better to do with their time than shake Theo’s hand.

Theo offered Florian a glass of water, though how the other man had procured either was a total mystery to him. Either way, water was water, and Florian hadn’t had a drink since he’d left Dover that morning.

“Teach me to speak your language. I teach you after,” Theo said as he massaged his forehead, the sentence longer than any before it. It didn’t Florian much more encouragement than that to launch into rudimentary English lessons.

While he wasn’t a master by any means, he’d taken enough foreign languages courses to know exactly what not to do. The first thing that he couldn’t do was skip the alphabet; Florian still wondered how that would have worked, but he had dropped that class faster than a football player slammed the football onto the grass post-Touchdown. Oh, how he missed football – the real one, not soccer.

The lessons went surprisingly well, Theo proving to be an astute learner and picking up the sounds of all the letters by the time the first Hellwolf howled. That bone-chilling noise interrupted him mid-explanation of why a word like “through” sounded a lot like “threw” and not at all like “trough.”

Jake called from upstairs, “Mister Florian, can you come up for a minute? I need to show you something!” Panic laced the little boy’s words, and Joe echoed the request a moment later. Florian started to worry, then, and navigated up the stairs as fast as his leg and a half could take him.

The children waited for him by a single window, the small thing overlooking the entirety of the front half of the vineyard. Wolves, as far as the eye could see, encircled the land, with more pouring out from neighboring fields and out from behind trees. Far more than the dozen or so that had been active during the day, the hundreds of Hellwolves outside could rend their shelter to pieces.

Their golden eyes sparkled with an unnatural glow, and their golden scales reflected the moonlight that had by now become the only source of light beyond the candle they had found in a cabinet downstairs.

“Fuck!” Florian cursed. He’d completely forgotten that the Hellwolves hunted most at night, something he should have internalized long ago.

Florian shuffled back down the way he came, extinguishing the candle and replacing the armor that he had taken off earlier in the day. Theo, meanwhile, sat at the table, eyes closed and breathing measured. It looked like the older man was meditating. Florian hoped that it had something to do with magic, because now was absolutely not the time for some self-awareness.

“Mister Florian, they’re getting closer!” Jake whisper-shouted, his voice quivering. Florian picked up his mace, the faithful weapon on its last legs after the journey here. He didn’t know how much Theo could do in the way of stopping the horde outside, but defeating even the dozen wolves earlier in the day had rendered the magic-man unconscious.

Florian readied himself, but nothing could have prepared him for what Joe called out next.

“Florian, they’re leaving!”

“Huh?” Florian said aloud, climbing the stairs again to find that wolves were indeed retreating from the little storage house, vanishing into the night as if they had never been there in the first place.

Florian had never known the Hellwolves to retreat like this, before they even engaged their prey. Every night, Dover defended itself from the beasts, and they continued to come back again and again. He sought an answer from Theo, but Theo simply sat there, unresponsive to any of Florian’s questions.

Must be magic, Florian decided. Still, as the Moon continued its path across the night sky, Florian refused to remove his equipment as he stood guard by the front door, occasionally glancing at Theo, who remained unmoving, sweat dripping from his forehead. He could hardly wait for the sun to rise in the morning, and as soon as the first rays of sunlight crested the horizon, he let his eyes close as he fell asleep in his chair, mace heavy in his lap.