Tooth and Claw

by R. Lee Smith

  “Isn’t it?”

  And that wasn’t fair and she knew it.

  In frustration, she yanked a bed-fur up over her hips, turned her face to the wall and just tried to pretend he wasn’t there. “I’m angry,” she said, not to him. He wasn’t there. She was talking to herself, that was all. A bad habit.

  “With me?”

  “I don’t know. With you, with me, with Heather and Kruin and those bastards that took us and everyone, Nakaroth. With everyone and everything and I…I want to be angry! Because if I’m not, then I give up! If I’m not, then it’s all okay now and this is not okay!”

  He said nothing. After a moment, he put his arm on her. Not around her, trapping her, but just along her side, his hand on her shoulder. “What can I do?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t know. If all you wanted was sex, I could do that. Last night was…not what I was expecting, but I sure can’t say I didn’t like it. And I…I like you. Don’t smirk,” she snapped, her back still to him. “I know you’re smirking.”

  “Smiling,” he corrected. “Should I not smile? My mate likes me. How rare and wonderful that is.”

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered, picking at loose hairs on her fur blanket. “All I’m saying is, I guess that part’s all right. But you…you don’t just want me. You want me to want you back. You want me to…want…this!”

  A tightness in her chest she had only been peripherally aware of suddenly snapped, opening into a great wash of icy heat, an orgasm of ugly emotion, and as hard as it had been to find words up to this moment, now it was impossible to shut up. “I hate this!” she said, too loud. “Being paraded in front of everyone! Passed out like a piece of meat from your hunt! Everyone watching! Everyone listening! All so everyone can know I couldn’t make it on my own! That I needed you! I needed you!”

  “What shame in that? I need you.”

  Her anger swelled like a bubble, then popped like one, leaving her with nothing but his hand gently cupping her bare throat and his body like an electric blanket warming hers. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You want me, you don’t need me. If you don’t have me in your life, you’ll mope around for a while and get someone else. If I don’t have you, I’ll fucking die.”

  “I need you,” he said and nuzzled her. “There is more to life than breath and feeding and the beating of a heart. I need all that you are. Your strength, your fear and yes, your need of me. The me that only you see.”

  She started to roll her eyes, but somehow that ended with her looking at him. Not at his fur or his ears or his muzzle. Not at anything that made them different. Not even at anything that made them the same. Just him. The shadow that walked with her in the darkest part of the forest.

  He touched her hair, then nuzzled at the sensitive underside of her chin, licking gently all along the slope of her neck as he traced the long-healed scratches of fellcat bites on her arm. Without thinking, she moved to find scars beneath his pelt and caress them in kind, and felt him hardening in the secret confines of his own body where it pressed against hers.

  “Would you have allowed yourself to be mated to any other?” he murmured.

  “No.”

  “No. Not even our lord himself. If it was need alone that moved you, you could have given yourself to anyone. You chose me. You need someone, yes, but you wanted me.”

  Nona said nothing. Her fingers moved through his fur, but found nothing to hold on to.

  “From the moment I saw you, I wanted you,” he said. “My best hunt, my finest prize. Then I came to know you, this…fiercely fragile thing that you are. You let me know you. You gave up your secret self, fearlessly. You saw mine, easily. Where shall I go without you now?” he asked, smiling everywhere but in his eyes. “Who shall I have, if not you? You have become my song of Endless. I wanted you, yes…and I need you.”

  She shook her head, silent.

  “It is a terrible thing to need,” he mused, watching her hand, unnaturally white against his black fur. “To finally and fully comprehend all that you lack. How can I ever again be content to be the wolf of Dark Water, the lord’s second, after I have been your Nakaroth? I have desired nothing as much as I have desired to claim you for my mate, to stand with you before all the pack and hear you choose me above all others. Now I have it, all that I have desired. I wear you like a trophy.” His hand moved, the very tip of his claw lightly drawing a line down her cheek, perhaps tracing the path of an old tear. “You wear me like a scar.”

  Something inside her, some weakened load-bearing wall, cracked. “I’m not hurting you,” she insisted. “You’ll find someone else when I’m gone. You’ll forget you ever knew me.”

  “Dark Water’s wolves do not forget.” He swept her hair back from her face in an effort to nuzzle at her cheek; she didn’t make it easy for him and he did not repeat the attempt. “Will you do something for me? For my pride, if you like.”

  She nodded, pressing her palm hard against her eyes, not wiping tears away as much as pushing them back in.

  “Lie with me tonight. I will not mount you,” he said before she could even finish her sigh. “I only want to breathe you in.”

  Breathe her in, right. And make sure he rubbed her smell all over him so he could swagger out of here in the morning and hold his head up around all those sharp-nosed lycan.

  She rolled over, pushing his arm off only to pull it back over her once she was settled against him. Easing her own arm around his waist, she rested her cheek against the uncomfortable pillow of his chest and tried to keep the quaver out of her voice when she said, “Long, cold nights, right?”

  “Just so.”

  She managed maybe a whole minute of unhappy silence and then blurted, “Promise not to cum in me.”

  “I have said I will not mount you.”

  “And I’m saying you can, if you promise not to cum in me.”

  He leaned back to look at her. She did not meet his eyes, just pushed the blanketing fur back and rolled onto her knees.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked guardedly, even as he rose and moved behind her. “Is it honest?”

  “I don’t know. I only know how awful I feel…and how good you made me feel last night. I hate this day. If I could cut it off, I would, but I can’t. Fuck it away for me. Just fuck it away. Only…Only promise…”

  “I won’t.”

  She opened her thighs. His clamped around her. He gripped her shoulders, his claws digging at her skin. It hurt, a little, but even the pain was welcome, giving everything that was wrong and ugly inside her a way to surface and finally bleed out. It left a hole; he filled it.

  Nona folded over, hiding her face in his bed, and sobbed. He let her cry. He held her. He stroked her hair. He licked her tears. And he fucked her until she came hard enough to taste metal in her mouth. She screamed into the furs and above her, Nakaroth yanked back on her shoulders so that she screamed into the night instead. It was a singularly unlovely sound—hoarse and harsh as a crow’s call, thick with tears, raw with need—but unlike every other scream of her life, each one that followed was stronger than the one before, until it wasn’t a scream at all, but a howl.

  He joined her and for an endless time, they were one voice, one body, one heartbeat.

  Then he was gone, tearing himself out of her and leaving her trapped at the edge of a great, awful emptiness. He dug at the bed, clawing furs aside to ejaculate with a shuddering groan on the old leather padding beneath. He dropped and rolled onto his back, still shivering slightly, and pressed one hand over his eyes. The other gripped his balls like she’d kicked him there.

  She thought she probably ought to say something, but asking if he was all right seemed unnecessarily cruel. She said, “That’s so unsanitary,” instead and slapped a hand over her own eyes. “Sorry. I don’t know how to talk to people.”

  “I like the way you talk,” he panted, his eyes still shut tight.

  “You do not. No one does.”

  “I do. I like the way you say
my name.”

  “Hint-hint,” she said with a snort. “You want me to shout it a few more times for the folks listening in?”

  “No. Not for the others. Quietly. Just for me. Say it in that human way.”

  She looked at him, uncertain, but didn’t see a joke. “Nakaroth,” she said.

  He fumbled for her blindly and when she put her hand in his, he pulled her over onto his chest and covered them both in a fellcat’s pelt. He wrapped her in his arms, too tightly for her to struggle, if she wanted to struggle.

  She didn’t. She lay her head on his furry shoulder and her open hand on his throat, framing that moon-shaped mark with the curve of her thumb and forefinger, and thought, ‘I like the way you hold me. I like the weight of your arms on my back and how solid you are under me. I like how there’s no room to move, there’s only just enough space for me. Like there was a hole and I fit. Like I finally fit.’

  She said none of this. In a moment of despairing determination, she made up her mind that she would, if he asked, or even if he said anything at all.

  He didn’t.

  Nakaroth’s tight grip gradually loosened, but never fell away, not even after his breathing took on that hoarse little grumble that was not quite a snore. Like the first night she’d come to this world, Nona lay awake a long time, but eventually, like that first night, she slept.

  23. Kruin

  The next day dawned grey and heavy, as if Kruin’s mood had affected the whole of the world. Sangar and Madira, infected by his restlessness in the night, left the den with him even before the sun was properly risen. Most of the pack was already gathered below, too many of them too close to the den appointed to the unmated bitches.

  Kruin put a hand on Madira while they were still high on the rock and out of easy earshot. “Do not go far today,” he told her, “and take Sangar with you. You need plants, I’m sure,” he added, looking at Sangar. “You always need plants?”

  There was no confusion in her eyes when she took in this admittedly strange request. On deeper thought, he supposed she understood far better than he the reason for it. She had been an unmated bitch once, given to Kruin by a chief who had not asked either of them their will, and opened without much consideration for her pleasure (or skill enough to give it, if the truth were known). She had been one of a very few bitches to resist the Betrayer, Ruaknar, and she had suffered for her loyalty, more than merely her enduring limp. Even before the Upheaval, the day after a claiming could be a dangerous time; she did not need Kruin to explain the reasons why.

  “I always need plants,” she said. Her eyes shifted to Ararro, crouching tensely in the mouth of her den. In a loud, clear voice, Sangar said, “But I have far to go to find a particular root and my leg is paining me.”

  “I should be grateful of a walk,” Ararro said, standing at once with her cub in her arms. “You have my arm, if you should need it.”

  “Wait.”

  Nona’s voice preceded her, thick and hoarse with sleep. She appeared, not entirely steady on her feet, attempting to neaten her ever-thinning coverings. Some of them had torn, exposing patches of pale skin beneath their faded colors. She must be cold, but was determined not to show it, hunching against the wind without acknowledging its bite. “I’m here, I’m here. I’m ready. No, wait!” She broke off, wheeling about to look at the empty place by the tieneedle tree where she had been sleeping, barren now. “My slingshot!”

  “I have it,” Madira said and held it up.

  “I didn’t mean to leave it,” Nona said, coming over with embarrassed color in her cheeks to claim it. “I just didn’t have time to…you know…get my stuff before…before that whole thing yesterday. Not that it’s technically ‘mine’—”

  Madira leaned in and licked her forgivingly.

  Nona flinched back, her color deepening, but managed a mumbled, “Yeah and good morning to you, too. Let’s get going.”

  “And what else are you forgetting?” Nakaroth called from inside his den. He stepped out of the shadows, beckoning her back to him with a broad smile.

  Nona went, not immediately but willingly. She said something when she reached him, too low for Kruin to make out. Whatever it was, Nakaroth laughed, then said, “No. I don’t expect that at all, although I would accept one if you offered. Here.” He pressed something into her hand—a long knife with a hilt made of horn and a metal blade that had once fit the broken hilt she carried.

  “I can’t believe you kept this,” she said, frowning. “I’m going to stab myself carrying it, you know that, right?”

  He gave her a sheath. Not merely a simple wrap, as a lycan might use for a simple lycan’s stone edge, but a mannish sheath for a mannish knife, new and still stiff enough to resist the blade she forced on it.

  “It doesn’t fit in my pocket,” she said then, attempting to wedge the sheathed knife into the carrying-things fold of her human coverings.

  “It’s meant to ride on a belt.”

  “I don’t have a—”

  Nakaroth was already holding one out, with a metal ring at one end.

  “Well, you just think of everything, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Nona accepted this rather lofty gift like a challenge, clamping the knife between her teeth while she struggled to work the belt on. She managed, with some difficulty, to secure it to her clothing and to thread the sheath on, but could not seem to cinch it through the loop. She kept throwing hot glances back at watching Sangar, Gef, even Kruin himself, as if daring them to say something, but what was there to say? Lycan did not wear belts. He could dimly see the sense of them but had no idea how they worked and no interest in learning, not today.

  Finally, Nona tied the belt on and moved the knife into a position at her hip that was, if not wholly satisfactory, at least acceptable. She turned around.

  “Good hunting, my mate.”

  “Yeah, um…you, too.” Nona started down the slope, only to stop, her head bent and her furless face dark with color. Then she turned again, walking in a swift, angry sort of stride back to him and when she reached him—

  —she put a hand on the side of his head to guide him close and pressed her mouth to the end of his muzzle. Then she turned around without speaking and stalked away, just as quickly, just as angry, to join the waiting party of bitches. They left together, with Nakaroth smiling after her.

  When she was gone, he at last descended the slope to join Kruin on the raised rock, moving with a self-satisfied limp. Nona’s scent was strong about him, pungent with the oils of her mating musk. “Even seeing you with Taryn, I was not prepared,” he announced, more loudly than was necessary to reach only Kruin’s ear. “Do all humans mate with such vigor?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Kruin said, staring past his second to the other males, now sharply focused on them. “I have known only one.”

  “A thousand times we mated. A thousand-thousand. Five. Never have I known such mating. She does not submit to me. She takes, hungry as a bitch in her first Heat.” He rubbed at his loins and sniffed deep, then sighed over his hand to send Nona’s scent towards them. Nearby wolves stole covert sniffs. Ears pricked. Hackles bristled. Nakaroth pretended ignorance, smiling at Kruin. “And her body…again and again, she struck and seized and never tied me.”

  “No,” said Kruin, eying those around them with unease. “Nor ever will. They are not formed as we are.”

  “So you said once, from your time with Taryn, yet I could not imagine what it meant. How I rode and rode and rode her and knew only free release.”

  Vru growled deep in his throat. His hand, too, dropped to press at his groin.

  Kruin could feel the air itself growing teeth with every passing moment. He could no longer see all the Fringe-wolves. He could no longer see all his own. And there stood Nakaroth like a fisher-spider, setting leaves in his web just so, plucking at this thread and that one, enticing minnows to leap at his lure. As soon as Heather emerged from her den, their eyes would be on her. Hunting eyes
.

  The threat was no greater for her than for any other unmated bitch—that this was true was shame enough—but Heather had no teeth, no claws, not even a broken stump of a knife and no will to use one even if Kruin put a blade of Cerosan steel in her human hand. She would be easy prey. The honorable wolves of his pack could sense it as surely as Kruin himself and they would set their sights on a finer prize. The others…

  The situation would resolve itself as soon as she was taken, and that would be very soon, but when did not matter to him now as much as how. And who.

  He had to do something. He, who had broken the way of chiefs who gave females like meat to the strongest hunters. He, who had made choice a right and that right into law.

  “Great wolves of High Pack, I will speak plainly,” said Kruin.

  Nakaroth gave him a sharp glance and a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. Do not speak, that warning look said, but his words had done enough damage. Kruin would not give them the chance to do more. He wanted this settled. Now.

  “The other human has come to High Pack,” Kruin announced. “She dens with the bitches for now, but she cannot remain with them for long. They are not blooded hunters yet and Heather may never be so. She must be cared for. Who will be her mate?”

  Feet shifted. Fangs gleamed. But only among the low wolves and the Fringes, who were not counted among the ‘great’. The ranking wolves, particularly those with mates already, avoided his eye. All but Nakaroth who stared at him with his ears folded back and an expression of very faint annoyance shining in his eyes.

  Kruin answered that stare, taking three steps forward to stand nose to nose with his second, and one step more to force Nakaroth to give ground. “Should you not have them both?” he asked boldly. “You who know the way of keeping humans so expertly?”

  “Nona needs time to learn how to be your bitch and my mate,” said Nakaroth after a long, expressionless silence. “If you put Heather in her den, she will go on being chief over her pack of one. That serves no one’s purposes, not yours, not mine, not Nona’s and especially not Heather’s. Apart from that, even if I made a claim, do you think Heather would ever choose me? I terrify her, as well you know.”