title: The Wolf at the Window
author: Inclan, Jessica / Inclan, Jessica Barksdale
description: Talaith and Kaherdin should never meet. They should never know each other. They and their people are at war. Her people hold onto the very magic that would change his people’s lives. His people want to kill hers and take what has been withheld for so long. To find each other, to fall in love with each other, to want each other could cause the fragile balance in both their worlds to crack and shatter, changing more than just their own two lives.
   The Wolf at the Window is the story of lovers brought together from two different, opposing, warring worlds, a shapeshifting Romeo and Juliet set in a post apocalyptic world, but a story with a happy ending.
   In our distant future, the world has suffered a series of apocalyptic events. Before society as we know it was destroyed, human cultures tried ways to alter human DNA in order to enable us to withstand the environmental and toxic accidents that plagued the lands. Using various animal DNA strands, scientists tried to make the human body better able to endure the remaining landscape. These experiments would produce a healthy, hearty, almost immortal group of human beings able to live with and even thrive despite the toxins, the climate, the poisons left by disasters. Sadly, these experiments backfired in unforeseeable ways, and this story starts with two people who come from opposite ends of those desperate, questionable, and devastating medical experiments.
   One is Kaherdin, who lives in the compound with his pack. As the word pack suggests, the people living in the compound shapeshift, turning into wolves at night, forced to live animal lives due to the DNA experiments. For over 1000 years, they have been fighting with the people who live in the Colonies, Talaith Rikala the leader of one of them. Those in the Colonies have a cure, an elixir, handed out yearly by the leader of all the Colonies, Jodoc Rikala, Talaith’s father. Talaith has grown up understanding that The Others—as the packs are called—have refused the elixir because of their desire and preference for their animal natures. She and the Colonists believe that The Others fight them in order to take over their lands and their lives. Kaherdin and the pack believe that they are fighting for the very cure that the Colonists keep from them.
   During this long, relentless war, Kaherdin and Talaith meet in an interstitial land of in between, dreaming of each other, seeing each other through the window of their dreams. Talaith knows she should be afraid of Kaherdin, and Kaherdin knows he can never reach her. He knows they will never meet—until they do, first in their minds and then for real. Finally together, they know that they can never be separated and forge a plan that will enable them to stay together, despite all that should keep them apart.
   Battling their own differences, their own people and beliefs, and the clock that is running on Talaith’s dose of elixir, they must find a way to connect their two worlds and bring their people together before both worlds are destroyed. Along the way, they learn about their own inner strengths, their love for each other, and their desire to right a world gone sadly wrong.