by R. Lee Smith
Souring the meat so no one else could eat it.
Something nudged her arm. Nakaroth, trying to direct her attention to Kruin, who was dividing the deer down so that everyone in the pack could have some in celebration of what was happening up in Burgash’s cave.
Burgash had already removed the lower entrails and one of the inner loins. Now Kruin removed the other, took the first bite, raw, and passed the rest to his mates. He cracked the ribs, pried the chest open, and tore out the heart. He offered it, thick blood dripping between his fingers, to Nakaroth, who turned and presented it to Nona.
And she was hungry, that was the worst part. Even after everything she’d witnessed, Nona was still hungry. It was like she didn’t care.
“I don’t want it,” she said and tried to walk away.
Nakaroth stepped in front of her.
“It is our way,” he told her, offering the heart again, if ‘offer’ was even the word for the way he held it out. “It is a good match. This is how we honor it. Feast with your pack.”
Her stomach growled.
“You want to throw a party to celebrate this ‘good match’ of yours, huh? Is it the one I just saw? The one where the girl was terrified to the point of tears and the guy made it, wow, just painfully obvious he didn’t want her, he just didn’t want to watch her get torn apart by the pack of rabid animals you want me to feast with now? Yeah, good match,” she said, shouldering past him. “Great match. So much there to honor, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Feast away, but do it without me.”
She went to Nakaroth’s den and he let her go alone, but as she was wrapping herself in the bed-furs with her back to the cave’s mouth, she heard his toe-claws scratch on the stone. He stood for a time, his gaze itching at her stiff back, then came over and sat beside her, not touching her.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. He smelled like a stranger. She wondered if she did too, if every emotion had its own smell and if so, what was hers right now? Maybe if she could smell them, she could figure out what the hell they were.
“I know this is the best way things could have possibly turned out,” she said finally, because he was just sitting there, silent as a gravestone. “Believe it or not, I’m glad it was him, if it had to be someone. But I am not celebrating this. What’s happening in there is not a wedding. It’s a funeral. So if you’re sitting there with that stupid heart, you can take it right back out and burn it. Give it to your Anu. Burn it for the death of the life she was supposed to have, because it’s over now. You get that? It’s over.”
Weight shifted. She heard the scratch of claws through thick fur, a deeper sound than she was familiar with. Scratching his chest, not the white mark on his neck.
“No, I know you don’t get that. All you see is that she’s got a nice cave to live in and a good match to give her lots and lots of puppies and she can just spend the rest of her life in High Rock and for you, that’s a happy ending. Fuck you. I’m sorry,” she said, slapping and shoving at her eyes. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but fuck you. She came with me because she thought I could save her. I was supposed to find a way back to Earth. This was supposed to end. Look at her now! I couldn’t take her home. I couldn’t lead her someplace warm and safe. Leila and June and Tanya are all dead because I was the one who was there when they needed saving, and I brought Heather here. Was that even worth it? Should I have even tried? How is this any better?” Nona’s voice cracked. She clenched her jaws like she thought she could bite the wound shut, but it kept bleeding and kept pouring out of her. “I wish…and I’m sorry, I know it’s not fair, but if this is what I saved her for, maybe it would have been better if she’d just died with the rest of them. If this was the happy ending.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Nona’s entire body clenched like a fist. That wasn’t Nakaroth’s voice. That was Kruin.
“You are her chief,” Kruin said. “You have starved to see her fed, endured the cold to see her warmed. You would have suffered any pain to make her safe…in this world that promises no safety. Because you are her chief.”
Ashamed as she was, she was just bitch enough to mutter, “Not anymore.”
“Always. You will always carry her, as you carry all your lost pack, and it will always hurt when you think you could have done more. You will forget their names and faces and all the things you did for them and remember only the pain and the failure. I would take that from you if I could. I would carry it, bleeding, in my own heart without hesitation. Because I am your chief.”
She lay looking at the wall.
He sat scratching his chest.
At last, she rolled over and sat up, although she still didn’t look at him. “Burgash will be good to her. I know that. What I’m feeling has nothing to do with him.”
“I know,” he said dispassionately. “You’re angry with me.”
She tried to think of some polite denial for that, but she didn’t try very damn hard.
“Are you surprised?” she demanded. “That was the worst thing—! Okay, maybe that wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but that was definitely the worst thing I ever had to be a part of, and I’ve killed ten people! And they only stole her! You sold her! Stop that,” she said, catching his wrist and pulling his hand away from his chest, where his fur had become a bit bloodstained from the scratching. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I know it’s not your fault.”
“Fault,” he echoed and looked at her, not accusingly but with a kind of wistful confusion. “Why do you humans have that word? What is the good of it? How does it help to have blame?”
She shrugged, picking grit and tieneedles out of the fur blanket and flicking them off onto the floor. “It doesn’t. And neither does sitting in here sulking, is that what you want me to say? Well, what do you expect me to do? Go out there and act like I’m happy for her?”
“Yes.”
She couldn’t force a sneeze, so she laughed at him. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because you are her chief, here—” He touched a claw to her chest, over her heart. “—and always will be. You know she will look to you to see how to go on. And no matter your own feelings, you want her to think of this night as a beginning, not an ending. You want her to believe it is a beginning worth celebrating.”
“It isn’t.”
They sat.
“He is a good man, isn’t he?” Nona muttered, then sighed and rubbed at her face some more. “Is that even okay to say? Is it an insult to call one of you a man? Like I’m so worried about insulting you, right? God damn me.”
The next thing she knew, he put his arm around her, clumsily but firmly pulling her toward him. She stiffened, thinking he meant to kiss her, so unsure of how or even if she should resist that the chance passed her by and in the end, she only sat there, wooden in his wolfish embrace. It was not sensual—that much was evident as soon as the shock of the moment had faded—but it was intimate, in its own way as much as anything she’d done with Nakaroth. Kruin pressed the top of his head to the side of hers, and in that touch, for just one moment, she felt the smallest sliver of understanding what it was to be him…and knew he felt a full and perfect understanding of what it was to be her.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. When he released her, she tipped her chin up instinctively and accepted the warm brush of his tongue as a child accepts a father’s forgiving kiss after the scolding is done. Then he got up, still without speaking, and left the cave.
He didn’t beckon. He didn’t have to. She followed him.
They walked down the slope together, until he turned aside to the raised rock and she went on alone to the firepit, where Nakaroth was waiting. He had the heart cut up already and cooking on skewers. He gave her one when she sat down beside him. The meat was tough, but not bitter. It should have been, but it wasn’t. As she chewed, she listened to the stilted and self-aware moans that emanated from Burgash’s den. It was hard to imagine anyone hearing it coul
d mistake them for sounds of pleasure, but at least Heather was trying.
When the feast was finally over, Kruin came to the fire with the last bit of deer meat in his hand. He set it directly on the coals, as the lycan often did when cooking, and sat for a while, just staring at it until the juices bubbled up and the edges began to turn black. Then he looked at her, firelight reflected in his eyes and glowing over his fur.
They watched the meat burn together. Neither of them spoke.
The lycan surrounding them did not notice. They were lost in their own conversations, their own thoughts. Some of the Fringes had begun to bed down, their violent rivalry forgotten or at least suspended as they huddled together against the cold. Ararro carried Basharo to the mouth of her cave and settled herself to nurse him, looking in now and then and wagging her tail supportively at whatever she was seeing. Vru squatted beside his ruined lizard, head down, glaring at either Nona or Kruin, it was impossible to say which. Those few still sharing the warmth of this dying fire kept their eyes politely averted from their chief. Only Nakaroth watched them and even he asked no questions.
When the meat was nothing but greasy char, Kruin picked up a stick and broke it apart, then raked the ashes from the outer edges of the fire inward over the last, low embers. He glanced up to study the sky, where a few determined stars managed to pierce the cloudcover. “It is a dark night,” he observed.
She looked up obediently, and only coincidentally showing him her throat for the whole pack to see. “Sure is.”
“Yet dawn is coming. Even the darkest nights end.”
Nona nodded. “Every day, a new beginning,” she said with morose enthusiasm.
Kruin touched her shoulder, then straightened up, gathered his mates with a gesture, and went to his den.
When he was gone, Nona turned and looked at Nakaroth.
He stood without a word and took her to bed. In his arms, it was over, finally over. It wasn’t happy, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t hopeful, but it was over. ‘And in the morning,’ she thought as she drifted off, locked in his uncompromising embrace, ‘I can begin.’
27. A New Day
Nona woke too early and for no reason. She hadn’t had any bad dreams, or any dreams at all that she could remember. The only sounds were forest sounds and Nakaroth breathing in her ear. No icy blast of wind had made it past the curved cave entry and no sunlight, although she felt as though there might be some grey in the sky, if she could be bothered to get out of this warm bed and go look at it. The night was over, maybe, but the dawn wasn’t quite here yet.
She didn’t want to get up and didn’t have to yet, so she lay there, but could not lie quiet. The furs that covered her had bunched up in odd ways during the night, and since none of them were really blanket-sized, disturbing their precise arrangement allowed a number of drafts to creep in. She couldn’t see them and didn’t want to pull them away from Nakaroth, so she just tried to curl up a little smaller and make what she had fit better, but the mat wasn’t wide enough.
“Are you awake?” Nakaroth murmured.
“Yeah,” she whispered guiltily. “Sorry.”
“Mm. Do you need light?”
“No. Sorry,” she said again, feeling her way through the furs and layering them around her blindly. “I’m done. Go back to sleep.”
“I woke some time ago. I have only been waiting for the sun to rise.”
“It won’t be much longer.”
His hand moved from her hip, over her stomach, between her thighs. “What shall we do while we wait?”
“I think we should sleep,” she said reluctantly, even as her hips pushed forward against his hand. “Feels like it’s going to be a long day.”
“Then it should have the best beginning.”
“You didn’t get enough of that last night?”
His arm tightened, pulling her backwards across the few inches of mat between them so that her butt bumped solidly against his hips. “There is no ‘enough,’” he growled, letting her feel the heat and hardness of his desire. “Do you know what you do to me? Do you know what a torment it is, to breathe in the scent of your pleasure all night, to mount you in dreams, only to wake and find you sleeping? Unaware of the wolf beside you and how he hungers.”
“I was never unaware of you.”
“Mm.” He caught her chin, pushing her head back so that he could scrape his teeth along her naked neck.
“Specifically, I was aware of how much room you take up sprawling over this tiny mat like you’ve never had to share it before.”
He barked a laugh, then kicked off the furs and pushed her onto her back in the middle of the bed, surrendering it all while he crouched somewhere off to the side.
“And how cold your nose is,” said Nona.
He nuzzled her, cold nose coming out of the darkness, followed by his warm breath. He started at her throat, bathing it in long, lingering passes of his tongue, working his way lower and lower. Between the cold, the tickle of his fur, and the anticipation of what was to come, her nipples had hardened to aching points, and when he came to her breast at long, long last, the feel of his tongue rasping over the tender bud briefly washed her mind out to a brilliant absence of thought. Only sensation existed…only that one sensation.
He noticed. His next breath was a thoughtful rumble. He found his way back to her nipple and licked it again, even slower, while she fought not to make a sound.
“You’re not breathing,” he remarked.
“It’s too early.”
“To breathe?”
“To do this.” Nona covered her breasts, wincing a little at the feel of even her own palms rubbing at her nipples. She had never known they could be this sensitive. This wasn’t even pleasure, this hurt! “We shouldn’t do this.”
“Now I think we must.”
But then he rolled over, away from her. Again, she tried not to react, and again, she must have, because he chuckled as he did whatever it was he was doing over there, off the edge of the bed.
Stones struck. Light bloomed. Nakaroth lit a tallow bowl and set it well out of the reach of any careless kicking leg or swinging arm, then came back to her and firmly pulled her hands away from their protective clutch. His ears tipped forward. He bent.
“Don’t.”
He stopped, raising just his eyes to look at her. “Do you mean that?”
She shivered.
He waited.
“No,” she whispered.
Keeping his eyes locked on hers, he lowered his head deliberately. Hot breath. Cold nose. He licked her. She felt every part of it—the broad warm wash, the soft pebbly texture, the prod of the pointed tip. He licked her again. And again. And then closed his wolfish mouth around her nipple and suckled.
She clapped a hand over her mouth.
He reached up without unfastening himself from her breast and pulled it firmly away, then placed her hand on her other breast, fitting his fingers along hers. He squeezed; she cupped herself. He flexed; she kneaded. Their thumbs circled her nipple, plucking and teasing at it, making it ready for his mouth so that when he finally released the one, she arched her back and groaned out loud even before he closed on the other.
“There’s music,” he said with a low laugh. “Kruin is right. This is a good way to mate. Odd and uncomfortable…weird and deviant,” he corrected with a toothy grin, “but I like to see your face.” He latched onto her breast again, alternately forceful and gentle, always watchful, bringing her unbelievably right to the edge of orgasm before releasing her with a last almost cavalier lick to study the effects he’d wrought while she lay dazed beneath him. “I think I have never known what mating is. I think I never would have known, if I had never met you.” He shifted to frown down at himself. “I can only hope I become better at it with practice. I can’t think what to do with my legs. Yours, however, know well their purpose.”
She wrapped them tight around his hips, trapping his cock between them in the slick cradle of her sex, rubbing herself against hi
m with abandon.
His ears snapped flat with sudden strain. He shuddered, motionless above her, eyes shut and body like stone beneath his thick pelt. Abruptly, he laughed, even as his muscles clenched tighter. “You make it so easy to lose myself. To take, as I have always taken. To revel, as I have never reveled until I knew you. But it is not enough, I think, for you to be mine.”
And with that, he threw himself onto his back beside the mat. Lacing his arms behind his head, he grinned up at her, his ears flopped forward against gravity’s pull. “I think now I am yours,” he told her. “Mount me.”
Something in the way he said it implied a broader sense of consequence than Nona could see in a simple change of position. She rolled onto her knees, put a hand on his chest, and said, “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She moved her hand lower, stroking through the soft belly fur and finding scars beneath. She explored them carefully, caressed them, swept his fur aside to kiss them (his legs twitched, curling protectively around his exposed loins, even as the proof of his arousal jutted impatiently), then looked him in the eyes. “Does this mean something?” she asked, meaning, of course, did being on top somehow change the dynamic of whatever this was between them and was he sure he was okay with it?
His broad smile faded and all at once, he was brooding Nakaroth once more. Nakaroth, on his back for perhaps the first time in his life…and he let her know it. He reached up, claws brushing at the very tips of her hair where it hung down around her face, then cupped her cheek, thumb-claw dimpling at her lower lip.
“Yes,” he said. “It means everything. Have me, my mate. Make me yours.”