He hadn’t shaven since the previous night, and I liked it under my hand. What would it feel like against my—
“You were thinking so many naughty thoughts last night, and here they are again.” He slid his hands into my hair and lifted large handfuls.
“You have holes in your leg.”
“So?” He pulled me down to him and whispered, “You smell of desire. That is all I care about. That desire, and fulfilling your every wanton need. Including the ones that maidenly you doesn’t yet realize she has.”
He tugged me against him with one hand, and the other slid up my thigh, under my skirt. I twitched and squirmed, his hand slid higher until his fingertips grazed the seam of my panties.
It was his leg. If he wanted to risk popping a stitch—
“Fine,” I breathed hard as I spoke, “but I get to be on top.”
So-Hot-For-Ink
Ten days.
Ten days until I’d see if our enemies would ruin our Solstice. Ten days until I’d affirm my Bond with Gabel under the Moon and before the pack.
Ten days until I would be the Luna of IronMoon.
Ten days until history will hold me as accountable as Gabel.
Ten days until I had to decide if I could remain an Oracle.
That last one was the crux of it: if I remained an Oracle, it would always put Gabel and I at odds. It would leave me subject to the whims of Elder Oracles. It would leave a huge open door with a neon blinking sign inviting all his enemies inside.
I stood out in the freezing cold. It was a miserable overcast winter day, it wasn’t snowing, and everything was just sort of frozen brown mud. supervised roasting pits being dug out of the frozen ground.
Two men walked by carrying something that looked like a large sawhorse, but the middle beam was covered in a sheet of metal to form a strange sort of pointed saddle. They disappeared into the house.
Odd. There weren’t any repairs going on in the house. The foyer had been cleaned up and basic repairs done, like fixing stairs and spackling over holes in walls. Actual craftsmen would have to come at a later time and repair the ruined tile and floors. It wasn’t going to happen before Solstice, so the foyer had just been cleaned up as much as possible. Because we were going to have guests in the house and of course... we meant to make this mess.
One of Gardenia’s little pack of females tip-toed out to me and murmured, “Alpha Gabel needs you. He is in the...basement.”
The basement. Gabel had finally decided what to do about the traitors.
Those wolves had sat and rotted in the basement since the night they had been locked down there. Gabel had been conjuring some especially horrible punishment for them. There hadn’t been any pressing reason to interrogate and punish them earlier. As if being in that basement for all this time wasn’t punishment enough.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t.
Noises from the basement, and the stench of crippling anxiety, but not so much fear. I gripped the banister. Damn, I hated going down there. These wolves deserved whatever horror Gabel conjured for them, but I didn’t take any enjoyment out of watching it.
Hix and Eroth were there, as were a few other males, along with Gabel. Gabel had on dark pants and a pale green shirt, with the sleeves rolled over his forearms and first button undone, like he was overseeing some board meeting.
“Gianna,” Gabel greeted me as I stepped off the last stair. “Sit.”
As before a single chair had been placed for me. In the center of the aisle between the two rows of cages was the sawhorse, which was much, much taller than I had originally thought. Not a normal sawhorse. Next to it were several large, very heavy kettlebells, and thick nylon ropes. The neon pink of the nylon was the brightest thing in the basement.
I took my seat, which was set a bit back from things.
“She does not need to be here for this,” Hix said. He firmly believed this sort of practical torture was appropriate only for males. For him this was no different than slaughtering pigs or cattle. It was dirty work to a female.
The Bond slipped beneath my awareness. All of Gabel was darkness and focus. “Which one should I start with, buttercup?”
Um... Sawhorse, kettlebells, nylon rope... what was I going to condemn one of these traitors to? And more importantly, how to choose?
Gabel picked up the nylon rope and wrapped it in a neat, slow coil while he waited for my answer.
The wolves were all unshaven and filthy. They all seemed beaten down, like the fight had been bled from their bones. Every single one looked between Gabel, myself and the sawhorse, trying to figure out what the hell was going to happen to them.
Well, what did these idiots think was going to happen when they attacked their own packmates?
“That one.” I pointed to the one I remembered best. I couldn’t recall exactly why he stuck out, but he did, and since I had to choose, I chose him.
Gabel snapped his fingers. Two of the warriors yanked open the rebar cage, grabbed the wolf, and dragged him out while he struggled and mewled. They cut off his filthy clothes and left him completely naked. Then they pulled him over to the sawhorse. Each one grabbed an arm and hefted him up, while another warrior grabbed his left leg. They lifted him over the point of the sawhorse, and a fourth warrior slid the sawhorse forward. When the wolf was middle over the sawhorse, they carefully lowered him. His feet didn’t touch the ground, and the point of the sawhorse’s metal saddle—
Let’s just say no female would have wanted to sit there, and a male even less.
The wolf grabbed the front of the saddle and lifted himself so that his privates weren’t bearing all his weight on the metal. Nobody moved to stop him. Eroth attached chains on the sawhorse’s legs to rings on the floor. It would rock a little bit but couldn’t be toppled.
Panting and whimpering, the traitor looked up as Gabel approached him, already streaming tears and blubbering from fear.
Gabel separated out two lengths of rope. One he looped through a ring on the front of the sawhorse, then tied a noose around the wolf’s waist, and fed the tail back through the ring, tying it off like he was tying off the rigging on a sailboat. He repeated this with a ring on the other end of the sawhorse. The end result was the wolf being tied by hot pink nylon cord around his middle to the front and back of the sawhorse.
After giving the wolf a few minutes to appreciate the severity of his plight, Gabel asked, “Did you believe you would succeed in killing Lady Gianna?”
The wolf breathed hard through his mouth and didn’t answer. He focused on trying to rock himself into some kind of position that wouldn’t punish his privates. Gabel let him squirm until he heaved and panted and his body shone with sweat. Only once the wolf stopped squirming so much did Gabel repeat the question. And repeated it, and repeated it, impassive and patient, dark and still, but now with a warm flicker of growing anger, like he was a banked coal.
“No,” the wolf finally sputtered, “we weren’t going to kill her!”
“Interesting. Then what were going to do to her?”
The wolf shook all over, his attention on keeping his tender bits off the saddle.
Gabel picked up one of the kettle bells. He looped some pink rope through the hoop at the top, then tied the kettlebell to the wolf’s ankle. He did this to the other ankle as well. The wolf howled and whimpered as the weight of the kettlebells pulled him square onto the saddle’s point.
“I’m disappointed.” Gabel leaned close, “You had the courage to attack your own pack member, your future Luna, and you can’t even face this with a little dignity? You can’t even spit in my face? Spit in my face at least. Tell me how much you hate me. You hate me.”
The wolf sobbed like a child and whimpered some pleas.
“Excellent choice, buttercup. You chose the coward of the group.”
“I chose the one I remembered most clearly.” I corrected, feeling unwell.
“Then the others aren’t going to be very interesting.” Gabel shoved a kettl
ebell with his foot. The wolf howled as his leg swung back and forth, grinding his bits into the saddle. “Do you know what this is called?” He directed this at the wolf.
The wolf shook his head, sputtering and bubbling around his lips, eyes bulging. The pendulum forced his leg to swing back and forth, grinding his tender bits and punishing the tiny muscles of his inner thigh.
“It’s called a Spanish Donkey. Variation of the Judas Chair. The human Spanish Inquisition was so... unrestrained in their torments. Something about punish the flesh to save the soul? That’s what they believed. What were you going to do with Lady Gianna?”
The wolf just blubbered and sobbed and whimpered for another half hour before Gabel, still impassive, decided he had other things to do.
The prisoner’s screams to not leave him like that followed me up the stairs until Gabel closed the door to the basement.
Eroth looked a little shaken. Hix was a stone. Gabel, an impassive hot coal, focused and perfectly calm.
I was as white as if I were about to start puking from the stomach flu. “What are you going to do with him?”
“See if he’s feeling more conversant later tonight. And if he’s not, if his friends are more motivated to talk.”
“Only if he knows something.” I licked my dry lips.
“They didn’t want to kill you. So what did they want? To use you as sport and some kind of trophy? Ransom you, perhaps? With what else has happened, I have to consider that it’s all related. I also have to make sure it never happens again.”
Hix nodded once.
My lips felt so cracked and parched. The tip of my tongue found a crack. I had bitten myself while down there. “You don’t think maybe just... revolt? Sport?”
“Of course I think that could be it. In their mind they think, ‘we’ll attack Gianna, defile her, weaken Gabel, overthrow him, and turn IronMoon into the pack that Romero promised us.’” Gabel’s eyes were the same color as the tourmaline. “I’d rather have that problem. That’s an easy one. If Aaron’s got his paws in my den, that’s much more concerning.”
“Don’t focus just on Aaron. Don’t lose track of Anders, SaltPaw, SableFur. Need I go on?” Aaron wasn’t the only problem out there. I wasn’t even sure he was the source of all of them. I worried the crack in my lip, and reconsidered Anita and I were wrong: Aaron was the Comet.
“Aaron would like to think he has all my attention, but he doesn’t. There is still plenty of me left for you.”
“Did you deliberately ignore my point?”
His smile had a cruel twist to it. “Yes.”
Going back outside to supervise the digging of roasting pits and playing lady-of-the-manor sounded much better than dealing with the aftermath of the Spanish donkey. I left the males to whatever else they had to do.
Much later in the evening, the doctor came by our rooms to change the dressing on Gabel’s thigh and examine the healing puncture wounds. Changing the dressing was a twice-a-day thing. The swelling had gone down a fair amount, but not entirely, and his leg was a mottled purple and magenta. The discoloration had also started to travel down the back of his thigh and made it to his knee.
“Why is he bruised down there?” I asked worriedly.
“Just gravity pulling the bruised blood down,” the doctor grumbled. “His body will clean it up eventually. I’m working, stop bothering me.”
I glared at him, but he ignored me and squirted saline over the holes. Gabel pulled at one end of a stitch.
“Don’t do that.” I chided him. Why did he do that? He had an injury and poked at it like a child poking something in one of those pet-the-wildlife aquariums.
He pulled at it a bit more. “Does it make you squeamish, buttercup?”
“It’s just not right, Gabel.”
Gabel released the stitch and smirked at me.
“He doesn’t need you babying him,” the doctor said. “And I don’t need supervision. You can leave.”
“I don’t think me telling him not to pull his stitches is babying him. I’m the one he’ll bleed on,” I snapped.
“She will remain if she wishes it,” Gabel informed the doctor with calm authority.
The doctor huffed but didn’t say anything, and finished wrapping Gabel’s thigh. When he finally got out of our rooms, I slammed the door after him and told Gabel, “If you told me he was conducting horrible experiments in his house and doctored IronMoon on the side, I’d believe you.”
“Don’t like him, buttercup?”
“I have never liked him and cringe at the idea of me ever needing him,” I said, annoyed. “He’s fine for dealing with rough warriors who need rough handling, but did he just tell me to get out of my own den? Where did you find him?”
“Literally, or what’s his past?”
“What’s his past? How did you acquire him? There aren’t a lot of werewolf doctors.” Many pack doctors were actually humans who had been brought into the fold.
“The story is that a she-wolf spurned him, so he lured her into his office, drugged her up, and proceeded to carve his name all over her back with a silver scalpel.”
My jaw went twhunk.
“He hadn’t gotten as far as the whole, how will I not get caught, was branded and thrown out. That scar on his neck?” Gabel pointed to the place. “It’s where he burned himself almost to death trying to hide it, but if you look very close, you’ll spot it. I found him stitching up drunks and scumbags in a mining town.”
“His pack didn’t kill him?” I asked. “They just set him loose?”
Gabel shrugged. “I don’t know those details. This was thirty years ago. I only know what he told me about him, and I don’t believe he lied, and I don’t believe he cares that anyone knows. I gave him a chance to get back around wolves, and he took it.”
“You will be my midwife. I’m not going to let that man perform so much as a pregnancy test on me!”
“Buttercup, do you—”
“I mean in the future.” I glowered.
“Find me another doctor.” Gabel shrugged again.
“Let’s recruit the vet.” The suggestion popped out of my mouth.
“The vet? You mean Doctor-So-Hot-For-Ink?”
Now that I had said it, it sounded like a great idea. She was already comfortable working beyond the fringes of the law. Vets made perfectly good pack doctors too, assuming they were willing to learn some human anatomy, and that vet already had some experience. Stitching up wounds and setting broken bones weren’t too different from animals, and the basic knowledge and techniques were all there. If I had to choose between Doctor-I-Carve-Up-Females and Doctor-So-Hot-For-Ink, I’d choose her.
“I am going to go tomorrow and do this, because the Moon save me if I need that doctor anytime soon,” I decided.
“There aren’t things here that need your attention?” Gabel asked.
“When was the last time we had sex?”
“Last night.”
“Exactly. I don’t know when I’m going to need my own doctor, but I know I never want him. This is my highest priority.”
I also didn’t want to do another day in the basement with the Spanish donkey. Recruiting a new pack doctor so that the females of IronMoon didn’t need to have Doctor-I-Tattoo-In-Blood touch them needed to happen right away.
Besides. It would distract me from the crushing weight of what I was about to become.
Student Loans and Ham
I took Eroth and one of the other hunters, Renzo.
Gabel shut down Hix’s insistence that he be the one to go and sent me on my way with the Second Beta and hunter.
“This is more depressing in daylight.” The night we had been there it had been vacant, which seemed normal. In broad daylight it was slightly-less-than-vacant with a few beaten up cars, and only three occupied businesses: the vet, a seedy mattress store, and a laundry mat.
“Fewer witnesses,” Renzo said.
“You’re only here to make sure I get back home in one piece.” I rem
inded him.
He held up both hands and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
The vet’s waiting room was empty, and she sat at the front desk with her feet up, tapping madly on her phone. “Don’t know why you’re here, Purple Dress, but I thought it was clear I don’t like to see my nighttime patients in the daytime. If he’s dead or infected, not my problem. I stopped the bleeding. That’s what you paid for.”
“No daytime clientèle today?”
“Have you seen this place?” She gestured. “It’s depressing, PurpleDress. People around here can barely afford to feed their pets, much less care for them. And you know, that’s not what pisses me off. You want to pay me with a ham? That’s fine. I can’t pay rent with a ham, but I can eat a ham. It’s that people are assholes. They come in here with some dog that has a mangled back leg that’s been rotting for five days and act like it’s a huge problem that Fido had the audacity to get hit by a car. But you know, they couldn’t be bothered to secure the dog so somehow it’s the dog’s fault you’re a horrible caretaker. When folks come in distressed and frantic and paying me in hams, that doesn’t make me mad. I’m talking about the assholes. And I see a lot of them. Oh no, kitty is diabetic and needs one shot a day and it’s too much a pain in the ass to bother with.”
She twirled around in her chair, kicked the wall as she passed, then gave me a look that could have melted glass. “What do you want, Purple Dress?”
“To offer you a job.” Given her bad disposition to-the-point seemed best.
“I don’t know what you’re into, but I probably don’t want any part of it.”
“It’s not illegal.” I hesitated. Well, it actually was, and humans would have something to say about it if they knew. “Mostly. It’s mostly not illegal. But it pays well.”
“How can it be mostly legal and pay well?”
“Are you interested? Because if you’re not interested, I won’t waste my time.”
She chewed on her cheek, then said, “Might be.”
Better make sure she didn’t know Anders and the GleamingFang first. Wait, who the hell cared if she did? That would make things so simple. “Unless you already know Anders and the GleamingFang.”
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