Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
He growls. “I’m not the alpha.” He strides forward, picks up my wolf and the little gray pup, and tucks one of us under each arm. “You don’t need an alpha to tell you what to do. You need common sense, so some of you are out of luck, but that doesn’t mean I need to step into the breach.”
He keeps grumbling as he marches over to the black wolf and gently sets her pup at her feet. The black wolf butts his leg and rumbles her thanks. The pup whines and props her little paws on his other leg to try and reach me. My wolf bends over Justus’s forearm and gives her a few reassuring yips that she’ll see her soon. The pup isn’t the least bit upset by the events of the past few minutes. If anything, she smells excited. Like a pup who’s going to be hard to put to bed.
I watch from the boundary between my wolf and me where I’ve crept, stealthy and uncertain, so I can memorize the pup’s twig of a tail and her downy belly fur and her tufty ears. She captivates me.
And it’s not just that she’s precious. Or that she’s the first of her kind I’ve ever seen.
She’s not afraid. She should be. She’s small. Defenseless.
It’s not that she’s particularly fearless. Her siblings don’t smell cowed, either.
Justus carries me away, and I crane my neck to see the pup join her brother and sister to tumble together and sniff and snuffle like it’s been five years, not five minutes.
She’s not afraid. Nothing’s hurt her yet, not badly.
As Justus walks through the pack to the far side of the clearing, I watch as his packmates stand, dust off their knees, and start to chat and laugh and bicker again. They duck their heads when Justus passes, giving me a once-over from the corner of their averted eyes, but they’re not afraid, either.
They’re curious.
The atmosphere feels exactly like it did in class at Moon Lake Academy after a badly behaved student got it from the instructor—that giddy release of tension and effort to look innocent and obedient.
What is going on in this pack?
And where are we going?
8
ANNIE
Carrying my wolf like a sack of potatoes, Justus hikes up a narrow switchback path that runs along the steep incline surrounding the clearing that acts as their commons. There are no buildings, but the higher we get, the better I’m able to make out how the camp is organized.
At the end furthest from the dens, there is an area for tanning with the lowest branches of a magnolia scraped smooth to act as a frame and drying racks. At the center of the clearing, around the huge bonfire, there are spits and barrels and long, sturdy wooden tables for cooking and eating.
Moving away from the center of camp, I see crescent-shaped herb gardens and vegetable patches, and various small groups of packmates. Elders in rocking chairs snooze or play a game with stones on a table carved with blocks like a chess board. Males wrestle or squat on stools, whittling and mending, or nap on their backs, gathered near clusters of canvas tents situated around small fire pits.
I only see one group of females, and they’re mostly hidden underneath a canopy of deer skins battened to posts sunk in the ground. They watch over pups who swarm a tall sycamore strung with ropes and ladders and swings.
When we reach the highest level, I can finally see the water source that I heard below, a rushing stream—not quite a river, but too wide for a wolf to leap across—that meanders the perimeter of the camp. I count three rough-hewn bridges at three different oxbows.
The stream’s headwater seems to be the mountain to the north, and it enters camp via an unlikely opening through the rocks, visible now that we’re above the canopy. It doesn’t seem natural, but I can’t imagine how a tunnel could be bored through the rock and then made to look like a haphazard arch of fallen rocks.
From this height, I can also trace the curving dirt paths that run between and among all the various areas of activity. Exactly like the males’ maze of swirl tattoos.
The fur along my spine bristles. There is magic here. It tickles my nose like it does in Abertha’s cottage.
If it were this time of day at Quarry Pack, no one would be outside. I’d be in the lodge’s kitchen, prepping dinner with Mari, Kennedy, and Old Noreen—and the Z-roster males still under punishment from backing the traitors. The other males would be training in the gym, and the females would be working at the laundry or the commissary or in their cabins, tending their pups. No matter what exactly they were doing, they’d be busy.
Not so here. Some of the Last Pack folks are working on something, but most are lounging or chatting or napping or roughhousing. There’s lots of roughhousing.
No patrol. No guards. Nowhere to hide but these dens. These traps.
The voice is back, and no surprise, she has concerns. My nerves twist tighter—there isn’t even a guard posted at the narrow entrance—but I can’t tear my eyes away from the scene.
It’s so peaceful. Like a lazy dance.
When I started watching, there was a single, older male at the long table by the fire, peeling carrots, naked except for his long, swishing tail. After a while, another, younger male joins him. He grabs a carrot and pops it in his mouth.
The older male cuffs him upside the head. The youngster, not chastened in the least, leaves with the carrot dangling from his lips like a cigarette. I figure he’s been chased off, but he returns a minute later with a milk crate full of potatoes. He sits down and joins the older male to do the prep work.
A little later, a pup wanders over on two legs with paws for feet. The older male tosses him a raw potato chunk, and he snaps it out of mid-air, like a dog with a treat. The older male then asks him something, pointing to the far side of the clearing. The pup waits until the older male tosses another potato chunk before he heads off on his errand.
I track him as he meanders off. His route is not straight.
First, a gang of wolf pups race across his path, and he detours to chase them. When they shift to human and haul themselves into the sycamore like monkeys, the helper pup loses interest and continues on his way.
He passes the deer skin canopy, and a female calls him over and hands him a wide-brimmed straw hat. He carries it awhile, spinning it on a finger like a frisbee. When he passes a group of elders, he places it carefully on the bald head of a snoozing, gray-bearded male. The others raise their trembling, gnarled hands, and he brushes their fingers with his own, a brief show of casual affection, like bumping noses.
We don’t really touch like that in Quarry Pack, not unless the person is blood. I’ve worked with Old Noreen in the kitchens for years, but I don’t think we’ve ever touched except by accident. The gesture is still familiar somehow, though. It reminds me of how the pack’s wolves act after they return from a run when they’re resting in the commons before shifting back.
We don’t nuzzle packmates in our human skins. Our males spar. That’s about it.
It’s strange to watch as the helper pup passes his people. It’s like a daisy chain of touch—his back is clapped, his hair riffled, his shoulder bumped in greeting, his leg clung to by a little guy with chubby arms and an octopus’s grip. Except for the octopus hitching a ride, the helper pup hardly seems to notice. He reciprocates automatically.
Like it’s perfectly natural to touch and be touched.
Like it never hurt.
Eventually, after dropping the octopus off with his sire, the helper pup arrives at his destination, the only solid structure I’ve seen so far, a tall and narrow wooden shack resting on a platform of stacked slabs of stone. Smoke puffs from a tin pipe on the roof.
Unlike the entrance to the pack land, the shed is well-guarded by a trio of grizzled males with full complements of claws and fangs, but not a patch of fur between them. There is a lot of conversation and gesticulation between the helper pup and the males before a haunch of meat is taken down from a hook and handed over on a platter that, from this distance, looks very much like an upside-down metal trash can lid.
The helper pup carries the meat back to the fire, knees bent and arms straining. He takes the direct route this time.
When he returns to the fire, others have gathered and formed something of an assembly line. It looks like they’re making a stew. Besides the potatoes and carrots, they’re chopping onions, mushrooms, parsnips, and some kind of green herb, maybe parsley. They fill one huge cast iron cauldron after another and hang them on tripods set about the fire.
The wind is too brisk this high, and it’s blowing the wrong way, so I can’t smell the cooking, but my wolf’s stomach grumbles anyway.
“Once you’re settled, I’ll go fetch us a bowl,” Justus says.
My wolf startles. We both forgot ourselves. How long have we been standing here, letting him hold us? A good while.
My wolf yips to be let down, but Justus lifts her a little closer and bends his head to talk into her ear. “The pup is Griff. He’s Elspeth’s oldest. He does take his good ol’ time, but he can be relied upon not to nibble the beef on his way back with it.”
Justus points my wolf at the older male who started chopping carrots. “That’s Tarquin. If no one else makes a move to get dinner together, he’ll do it once he gets hungry, but he only ever makes stew.”
So the males cook in this pack? None of the females are helping. As far as I can tell, they’re all still lounging under their canopy.
“The male with the black and white ears is Pierce. The skinny one thieving meat is Colm.”
I watch Colm, who is tall and lanky as a beanpole, carve a haunch into bite-size pieces, pausing every so often when no one’s watching to toss a hunk into the air, snap it up with his teeth, and scarf it down.
Why is Justus telling me their names?
It feels like the first day of school at Moon Lake Academy when the human instructors would make everyone introduce themselves and do something silly like tell two truths and one lie about themselves. The humans sailed through the assignment, but we shifters were various degrees of terrible.
I might have been the worst. One year, I said that my name was Mari, and I love knitting and gardening. The instructor said I needed to say one more thing, so I said I was looking forward to the class, which I figured she could take as the truth if she wanted, but it was a massive lie. She called me Mari all year long.
Anyway, we did introductions because we were going to be there together for a while. I am not going to be here long. This is a kidnapping.
I think.
Even Justus said I’m not going to be here long. When the wolf called Khalil asked how long a false trail would fool Killian, Justus said, “Long enough.” That means he’s going to take me back soon.
If it hurts my heart, it’s only because of the reminder that I’m not going to get what other females have. A mate. A pup. A home of my own.
I could never belong here, even if Justus decided to keep me, which he wouldn’t. There aren’t any doors, any locks. There’s nothing to hide behind.
Long enough.
The pecking voice won’t let that rest. She wants to know—long enough for what?
I worry, and my wolf squirms. Justus sets her down. She wanders away from the ledge-side path, through a small, mossy patch with two skyrocket junipers growing like sentries beside a crack in the rock.
The place smells like Justus, as if this is where his scent comes from, this is the earth that exactly matches his earthiness. The ache in my heart turns to butterflies in my belly.