Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I personally don’t care that last month, when he dropped his pencil in Art Appreciation, and I handed it back, he said, “Thank you, Ruby.” Ruby’s a lot closer than I would have expected.
“They’re total opposites.” Nia keeps going. She senses weakness. “Brody wants to drive us out of Moon Lake like vermin. Cadoc would like us to be a little more discreet as we shame the pack with our mere existence.”
She does her fancy human lady accent for “a little more discreet.”
“See? Why would I pick either of them?”
“Because you have to. Biological imperative. Propagation of the species. We’re endangered, you know. It’s your duty.”
“Can I pick the bear shifter?”
“No. Play the game, Rosie.” Nia sighs and goes double-handed on the spoon. The dragon’s tongue must be almost too thick to stir. Abertha says that’s what we’re going for. “The consistency of hashish,” she said. I had to ask Uncle Dewey about that. He got all misty-eyed and told me it was like taffy.
“Nope. I don’t want either. Neither would claim me. I’d be stuck like Drona.” My older sister’s mate is a ranked shifter. He visits her when he wants some ass, impregnates her periodically, and otherwise lives his best life with a mid-rank female in a nice big house in the Estates on the other side of the lake.
“We’re not talking about shacking up.” Nia grimaces. “Fuck that noise. We’re just talking hot monkey sex.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“When the monkey shifters come out, I’m gonna tell them that you said so.” Nia cracks herself up, dissolving into a gale of giggles. I don’t think she slept much yesterday in school. She’s getting punch-drunk.
“Come on, Rosie. Pick. Pick or I stop stirring.” She lifts the spoon dramatically.
“Fine. Brody.” I can’t say Cadoc. The name won’t come out of my mouth.
“Wrong!” Nia’s face puckers in disgust. “For fuck’s sake, why?”
Why? Shit. Why, why, why—
“I prefer blonds?”
“Bull crap.”
“I like bad guys?”
She gives me duck lips. “No, you don’t.”
“All right, then. Cadoc.” Hot pinpricks dance across my skin.
“Why?”
I heave a sigh. “You’re a pain in the ass.”
“Come on. Entertain me!” She raises the spoon like a scepter. Fuck.
“Put it back in!”
She rounds her eyes and lifts it higher.
“Okay, okay. Fine. He—he talks nice.”
Her mouth falls open. The spoon’s still high in the air.
“Dammit, Nia! I do not want to spend another night doing this next month.”
She flicks her pointy ears like she’s shaking off fleas and goes back to stirring. She’s gone pensive. It makes me nervous.
“How does Cadoc talk?” she asks.
“You know.”
She blinks. “I have literally never paid attention when he speaks unless it’s a command, and then, to be honest, I just do what other folks start doin’.”
“Well, if you paid attention, you’d know.”
“Do you mean he uses big words and shit?”
He does. All the nobs talk like educated humans around the instructors, but Cadoc and his crew do it all the time. That’s not what I mean, though.
“He says ‘please’ and shit.” I toss a shoulder like it’s nothing. It is, and it isn’t. It’s a cheap thrill when the alpha heir says “thank you” after you hand him a pencil. Like Fate herself is deigning to notice you.
I’m expecting Nia to roast me, but she seems mystified more than anything else. “That’s really all it takes for you?”
“No, but for the purposes of this game, and to shut you up, yes—a please is all it takes.”
We both sit with that for a minute.
Eventually, Nia says, “You know, I don’t think Pritchard’s said ‘please’ once in his life.”
Her mate is sprawled on his back, paws up, big ol’ balls dangling in the dirt, tongue lolled. Nia sighs.
Poor Pritchard. He means well.
“My turn,” I say. We need a change in conversation. “Would you rather—“
“I don’t want to play anymore,” Nia interrupts, her shoulders slumping. That’s how she gets when we get on the subject of Pritchard. He’s not the mate she would’ve picked for herself. They say Fate doesn’t make mistakes, but Nia and Pritchard are pretty clear evidence to the contrary. “How much longer?”
I squint toward the east. A gray gloom is rising beyond the glittering glass and metal Tower where the high-ranking five families live. “Maybe twenty more minutes.”
“And then what?”
“We lock it in the trailer and let it cool.”
“And then?”
“Tonight, we grind it to powder with a mortar and pestle, and then we deliver it to a dude named John at the loading dock behind the hospital by the end of the week.”
“Don’t the nobs inject dragon’s tongue?”
“Yeah. Apparently, the hospital will mix it with human chemicals and put it in vials with labels and barcodes and shit. Make it look official.”
“They don’t smoke it?”
“Nope.”
“Wild.”
It is. The ranked wolves do almost everything the human way, though. If we did it in the dens, they want no part of it. They’d turn their wolves into house pets if they could. It’s a tragedy, and they don’t even know it.
“You’re cutting school on Friday then?” Nia asks.
“I have to.”
“I’ll see if my cousin Alys will cover for you.”
“Cheers.”
If scavenger attendance at the Academy drops under a certain number, the nobs reduce the Bog’s supply allotments. It’s important to them that they feel like they’re doing all they can for us before they consign us to the crap jobs and handouts. They don’t seem to care which of us show up, just that enough do. An older cousin will usually do a day for you in exchange for some food or a pair of gloves or something.
We lapse into silence, Nia leaning heavily on the spoon while I try to spot her so she doesn’t pass out into the kettle, but I keep getting distracted each time the fire spits sparks. My mind wanders, and probably because of the conversation, it casts up an old memory. I was a pup. My parents had gone for their walk a few months before, and the elders had finally wrangled me into going to the Academy.
Like most scavengers, I didn’t catch on to what was expected of me right away, and I’d venture from the classroom if the instructor wasn’t paying attention and the door was open. That must have been how I’d found myself alone in a hallway of the lower school.
I’d caught sight of a bottle cap on a high window ledge above a water fountain. It looked like the kind from Pa’s beer, and I knew in my soul it was a bread crumb or a clue or a talisman. I had to have it, but it was well out of my reach, even when I jumped.