by J. L. Wilder
The taste was wonderful—rich and juicy and completely fulfilling. She closed her eyes and savored it. “This is great,” she said.
Louis smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “Xavier says I’m a pretty good cook. His standards are low, though. He’d probably eat termites right out of the dirt if it weren’t for me.”
“You’re a wild alpha too?” she asked.
Louis shook his head. “I’m a beta,” he said. “Xavier and I have been packmates since childhood. When we were growing up, I always knew that he would be my alpha someday, when he was ready to take over the pack. So when he decided to run away, I felt committed to him already. I decided to come along.”
Zoe was surprised. “He ran away? Why would anybody do that?” She had assumed that the feral alphas had all been born in the borderlands, that none of them had ever been civilized and that was why they were the way they were now. But to hear Louis tell it, he and Xavier had once been part of a traditional pack but had made the decision to leave.
“He didn’t like the way our pack did things,” Louis said. “Xavier’s very invested in his animal side, as you might have gathered already. Our old pack...they were more human.”
Zoe felt awkward. The pack she had come from had been an exceptionally human pack. Even Daphne, who definitely did not live in a cave, had always said so. What would Xavier think of her if he knew that?
Why do I suddenly care what Xavier thinks of me?
“You look better than you did earlier,” Louis said.
“Do I?” Zoe was glad for the change of subject.
“Yeah,” Louis said. “I think your fever might have gone down. Your face isn’t so red, and your eyes are clearer. How do you feel?”
“Better,” Zoe said. “Just exhausted.”
“That makes sense,” Louis said. “You haven’t eaten in a couple of days.”
“It’s been a couple of days?”
“About a day and a half,” Louis said.
“I have to get back!” Zoe cried. “My friends, my professor—they’re going to be so worried about me. They’re going to think those bears killed me. Or worse.”
“It’s all right,” Xavier spoke from behind her, startling Zoe. She hadn’t noticed him waking up. “When you’re ready to travel, I’ll run you south, back to the school.”
“Do you know where the school is?” Zoe asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “Everyone knows Omega University. I would have gone to Shifter U myself if I hadn’t left home.”
“But I should really go now,” Zoe said. “I hate to think of them worrying about me.”
Louis shook his head. “You can’t,” he said. “You’re not in good shape. I know you’re feeling better, and that’s great, but you still haven’t slept more than a couple of hours at a time, and it’s been a long time since you’ve eaten a full meal.”
“Not to mention the wounds on her back,” Xavier said. “They’re healing, but if they opened up again—”
Louis nodded. “She could end up bleeding out in the middle of the woods.”
“And blood would draw in the bears,” Xavier added. “I know you’re eager to get back, but it’s really not a good idea to leave the cave until you’re fully recovered, Zoe.”
“Eat some more squirrel,” Louis suggested.
Zoe stared down at the strip of meat in her hand, feeling suddenly sick. “This is squirrel?”
“We don’t get to choose what kinds of animals wander into our snares,” Louis said patiently. “Have you never eaten squirrel before?”
“Squirrels aren’t food,” Zoe said. “They’re...they’re rodents.”
“Of course they’re food,” Xavier said. “They have plenty of meat on their bones. They’re easy to catch with a good snare. And, okay, sure, rabbit tastes a little nicer—”
“A little nicer?”
“But we can’t always be particular,” Xavier said. “Keeping ourselves fed is more important. Now that your fever is under control and we’ve gotten you a blanket, Louis and I can take turns going out hunting. We’ll be able to bring back fish, and hopefully birds as well. But in the meantime...eat your squirrel.”
Zoe frowned down at the meat in her hand. It was basically a rat.
And yet...she had been enjoying it before she had known what it was. It had tasted good. And Xavier was right. He and Louis had done a lot for her, and she didn’t want to turn up her nose at their generosity. She wasn’t too good for the food they had provided.
She swallowed and took another bite of the meat. Beef jerky, she told herself. Pork. Bacon.
She swallowed. As long as she didn’t think too hard about what she was doing, it was easy to get the meat down.
And Louis had been right—she really did need it. She could feel herself beginning to get stronger, to take nourishment, almost at once. “I really haven’t eaten in all this time?” she asked.
“Nope,” Xavier said. “Of course, you were in and out of consciousness, so it’s not like you were using a ton of calories. But you were also running a fever for a while, and that takes energy.”
“I guess that’s why I’m so exhausted,” Zoe mused.
“Probably,” Xavier agreed. “Your body’s reserves are used up. But you’re going to be fine now. It was touch and go there for a while, and I wasn’t sure you were going to pull through, but you’re all right.”
“I might have died, you mean?” Zoe was startled to hear it. The idea hadn’t occurred to her, not since she had escaped from the immediate threat of the bears.
“The first night was bad,” Louis said.
“Do you remember trying to leave?” Xavier asked. “After I cleaned your wound?”
Zoe faintly remembered her panic, her determination to get back to camp. “I tried to get up and fell right back down,” she said.
“You passed out from blood loss,” Xavier said. “And that night, your fever shot up. We didn’t know if you would have the strength to fight off the infection.”
“Why did you keep me here?” Zoe asked.
Xavier frowned. “What do you mean?” he asked. “You weren’t in any condition to go anywhere. You couldn’t even stay on your feet.”
“No,” Zoe said. “I mean, why did you keep me with you? If you thought I was going to die, why didn’t you just...I don’t know. Dump me somewhere?”
“What, abandon you to die?” Xavier asked. “I told you already. Wolves look after each other. Didn’t they teach you that at your fancy school?”
“I’m a threat to you,” Zoe said.
Xavier scoffed. “I don’t see how.”
“If the bears come looking for me, they might find this cave,” Zoe explained. “And I do get why you would want to help a fellow wolf if you could. But if you thought I was going to die, why would you be willing to let me die here? It would have put you in danger. It would have made your cave easier for the bears to find.”
Xavier and Louis exchanged glances. Neither one of them said anything.
They’re not the way I thought they would be at all, Zoe realized.
Professor Browning had described the feral alphas as so wild, they were practically rabid. And there was plenty of wildness here. But there was also kindness and empathy.
Zoe had always assumed those were human qualities.
Now, looking at these two feral wolves, she found she wasn’t so sure.
Chapter Nine
XAVIER
For four years, Xavier’s world had consisted of just himself and Louis. For four years, he had thought of nobody else.
Having someone new here changed everything in ways he didn’t fully understand yet.
He and Louis had developed an easy shorthand when it came to communication. Often, they didn’t even need to say things out loud. Xavier could tell by looking at Louis when he was hungry or tired or craving a run. He could read his friend’s body language effortlessly.
Zoe was completely different.
She huddled in the blanket
that Louis had swiped from a department store in town for her and picked apart her squirrel meat between her fingers, occasionally popping small bites into her mouth. Xavier couldn’t tell whether that meant she disliked it, wasn’t hungry, or was just distracted by other concerns.
You could ask her.
But he didn’t want to ask her. He didn’t want to reveal the fact that he found her so difficult to understand.
To avoid spending any more time looking at her, trying to figure out the subtleties of her facial expressions and the meaning behind everything she said, he decided to go out and try to fish. She needed more to eat than just squirrel, after all. She needed something that would give her an appetite, something she would be able to get excited about.
She’s from the school, he reminded himself as he crept through the trees on four paws, ears perked, listening carefully for the sound of bears. She lives a human life. She’s used to doing things like eating her meals at a table and sleeping in a bed. That’s why she was so uncomfortable when she first came to the cave, and that’s why the idea of eating squirrel is fucking with her head.
But humans ate fish all the time. If Xavier could come back with a fish, he would be able to give Zoe something she was familiar with, and that would make things easier for her.
I wish I knew why I was so preoccupied with making things easy for her.
It wasn’t as if she had made things easy for him. He recognized that it wasn’t her fault or anything, but still, from the moment they had met, Xavier’s life had become complicated.
He’d had to kill two bears, and that was no easy feat. He was still a little surprised he and Louis had managed it. If the bears had been able to shift back to their animal forms during that fight, they could easily have lost. It was only the element of surprise that had enabled them to win.
Zoe was also right to point out that her presence in the cave put Xavier and Louis in danger. There were more bears out there, and if they managed to piece together what had happened to their missing comrades, Xavier knew they would come looking for him. Zoe was an omega. Her scent would be easier to track through the woods than his own.
All of that would have been more than enough complication. But there was also the fact that, for the first time in a long time, Xavier was worried about someone other than himself and Louis.
Her question was a reasonable one, he knew. Why hadn’t he just left her to die? It might have been smarter. It would have been safer.
And his answer—wolves look after each other—well, that wasn’t exactly the truth, was it? Wolves looked after their own. Wolves defended their own packs. Xavier would have fought and died to keep Louis safe because Louis was his second, his packmate.
But who was Zoe?
Not his. Not a member of his pack. She was nothing to him.
She should be nothing to him.
Why was he protecting her, knowing that he was putting himself and Louis at increased risk to do so?
He didn’t know the answer. All he knew was that the thought troubled him deeply.
It was easy, thankfully, to lose himself in the routine of fishing. The pond at the bottom of the waterfall was well stocked, and if the lack of footprints and bear scent were anything to go by, it didn’t look as if their rivals had found this place yet. Soon, Xavier had caught three trout, all of them nice and fat. He carefully picked them up by their tails and jogged back to the cave.
He deposited his catch by the fire, shifted, and began to dress. He couldn’t help noticing how Zoe turned her head away as he did so.
He and Louis had been living wild together for so long, shifting back and forth, that nudity was something they hardly noticed anymore. But suddenly, it occurred to Xavier that that wouldn't be true for Zoe. He didn’t know how things worked at that school of hers, but he guessed people probably didn’t just take their clothes off in front of each other all the time.
“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed that he hadn’t thought about that before shifting.
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it.”
He cleared his throat. “Um. I got some fish. For supper.”
She looked at them. “They’re creepy.”
Xavier was surprised by how hurt he felt. He had hoped to please her with this meal. Now he felt as if she disapproved of everything he tried to do for her. “They just need to be cleaned,” he said.
Zoe pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her blanket more tightly around herself as if shielding herself from the very idea. “You’re going to do that right here?” she asked him.
“You’ve never seen a fish cleaned before, have you?” he realized.
“They’re usually cooked by the time they get to me,” she said.
“You should learn how to do this,” he said. “Everyone should know how to do this.”
“I don’t know if I want to learn how to do it.”
“It’s a good life skill,” he pressed. “They must teach it at the school, right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m a junior, and nobody ever mentioned anything in the past two and a half years about cleaning fish.”
“Well, okay,” he said. “But they brought you out here into the woods, right? Did you pack a lot of food for the trip?”
“No,” she admitted. “We were supposed to hunt and gather, only I never got to that part because the bears showed up first.”
“Well, if you’d been hunting, you would have had to clean your kill,” he said. “Fish is actually one of the easiest things to prepare. Come over here and help. You can clean yours.”
She scowled. “I thought I wasn’t well enough to travel.”
“You’re not.”
“Then I can’t really be well enough to clean fish, can I?”
Xavier rolled his eyes. “You can do it sitting down,” he said. “It’s not a strenuous activity. Come on; we’ll all work on ours together.”
Louis set down the pelt he had been working with. Xavier wondered whether he had mentioned the deer he had taken it from to Zoe, or if she thought he had just bought it at a store or something. He came over quietly, sat down beside the big rock in the center of the cave, and began to clean his fish.
Slowly, Zoe made her way over. She looked disturbed and upset, and her gaze went anywhere but to the work Louis was doing. “What do I have to do?” she asked miserably.
Xavier passed her a fish and his pocketknife. “Start by scraping off the scales,” he said.
She picked up the knife and poked at the fish. “It’s not still alive, is it?”
“No,” Xavier assured her.
She bit her lip and began to run the knife over the fish, head to tail.
“You’re doing that the wrong way,” he told her. He reached over and turned the fish under her hands.
“I don’t know about this,” she said.
“You can do it.” He wrapped his hand around her knife hand. “Hold the tail,” he told her.
She did.
He guided her knife hand to the scales and showed her how to scrape them away. “You don’t want to use too much pressure here, because you don’t want to ruin the meat,” he explained. “But you need to make sure you’re not doing it too lightly, because if you are, you won’t get all the scales off, and then you won’t be able to eat the fish.
She nodded. Her scraping was becoming more confident, and Xavier could see that her hesitation was fading. “It’s not so bad once you get going,” she said. “The thought of it is worse than actually doing it.”
“You’re probably right,” Xavier said. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought in a long time. It’s something I just do automatically now.”
Louis had finished with his fish. He got to his feet and took it out to the fire to fry it up.
Zoe watched him go. “How did he do that so fast?” she marveled.
“Years of practice,” Xavier said.
“Years?” She looked down at her fish and frowned. “How long have you been li
ving in the wild, exactly?”
“Four years now,” Xavier said. “And I’ve never been happier in my life.”
The expression on Zoe’s face suggested that she seriously doubted that was possible, but she said nothing and returned to the cleaning of her fish.
Xavier had finished with his own by now, but he set the meat aside and stayed with Zoe. She would need his help when it came time to move on to the next step in the process. Besides, she shouldn’t be left alone. Not while she was still recovering from her injuries.
At least, that was what he told himself.
He watched as she worked. She studied the fish so intently as if it was a problem to be solved. Everything about her approach was so different from the way he and Louis handled the things they did in their lives. She was rational and thoughtful, organized in her mind. Xavier was accustomed to acting on instinct.
If he had seen her now for the first time, if he had never seen her in her other form, it wouldn’t have even occurred to him to think that she might be a wolf.
“What’s the goal of this camping trip of yours?” he asked her.
She looked up at him. “What?”
“Well,” he expanded, “the students at the college don’t plan on living wild, do they? They’re going to want to be civilized after they graduate.”
“You say civilized like it’s a dirty word,” she said, laughing.
“It’s against our nature,” he said. “Forcing ourselves to fit into the human world, to move among them and disguise what we really are.”
“Why is that any more unnatural than denying our human sides altogether, the way you do?” she asked. “Living out here, like you actually are a wolf...I mean, you barely have enough clothes for two complete outfits.”
“Why the hell would I need two outfits? I can only wear one.”
“And when it gets dirty?”
“I wash it.” He shook his head. “At least I wear clothes. That’s pretty human of me.”
“You don’t seem to realize how often you don’t wear clothes,” she said. “I’ve been here for what, two days? And I’ve already seen you naked at least three times.”
“Clothes are not a natural thing,” he said. “You can’t tell me you think they are.”