12
clementine
“I’LL TALK TO him,” Paladin was saying. “I’ll get him to change his mind. You, too, Lazarus, right?”
I looked at Lazarus, who seemed entirely closed off now. “Hey, look, I don’t really understand how it works, but you said that things are muted, that you don’t have control during a shift, so that means it wasn’t really you who did that.”
“It was me,” said Lazarus curtly.
“But—”
“I raped her to death. I had a fucking orgasm while she was bleeding out,” he said. “I did it, and while I was doing it, I liked it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“You’re a tithe,” he said. “You heal better than she did.” He finished his coffee in one long swig and then went over to put the mug in the sink. He took Kestrel’s mug, too. He set them in there, ran water over them, and then walked out of the room without giving me another look.
I was shaken, and I had to admit it.
“Don’t worry,” said Paladin. “The night of the Change was different. Neither Kestrel nor I killed anyone during our first shift.”
“That was because we knew better what the signs were, though, right?” I said. “For shifts now, we know that wolves won’t attack blood family, that if you surround them with men or female family members, they won’t mount and fuck anything. I imagine that’s why you didn’t do anything.”
Paladin nodded. “Yeah. Probably.”
I sighed, looking glumly into my coffee.
“But also,” said Paladin, “I’ve never seen a tithe at any of the gatherings be seriously hurt. She always heals and she always walks out of it, and I’ve seen wolves claw into the tithes in bad ways.”
I had to admit that during the full moon, even bad injuries, like when that wolf had dragged me with his teeth deep in my ankle, felt really fucking good . And they healed up right away. I nodded.
“Anyway,” said Paladin, “why are you here?”
“I want to stay,” I said.
His eyes widened and he smiled really big. “Really?” He sounded like a kid who’s just been told he could open his Christmas presents early.
Something in my stomach flipped over at that, at how happy the prospect of my being here made him. “Really,” I breathed.
He leaned over and kissed me.
I sighed into his mouth.
He pulled me into his lap.
I straddled him and started giving him deep kisses, our tongues working against each other as I rubbed into the growing stiffness I could feel rubbing at the center of me.
He moaned. He was only wearing boxers, and I was just in a robe.
He reached between us to push the robe out of the way and found me all hot and wet and eager there. “Clementine, I want to shove right up in you right now,” he told me. “I know I shouldn’t—”
“You should,” I said, rubbing against him, feeling him pressing against the thin fabric of his boxers.
He groaned, rolling his hips.
I felt a little bit of his bare skin and then he burst through the flap of his boxers .
“Shit,” I breathed, dragging my clit over the hard length of him, gasping.
He grunted and moved his hips, moved them and moved them and—
Oh, there he was, inside .
“Sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t mean—”
“Never apologize for this,” I gasped back, pumping my hips against his.
He held onto me and started to thrust in earnest.
We started kissing again.
He pushed my robe out of the way and started toying with my breasts.
I sighed out my encouragement, telling him how good it felt.
“I never felt anything as good as you,” he told me. “I never saw a woman nearly as pretty as you. I never touched anything like you. You’re this perfect goddess.”
I touched his face. “I’m just a girl.”
“No, no, you’re everything,” he told me. “I’m in love with you.”
“I know,” I said. “Me too. We can’t help it, and it’s nice, so—”
“I can help it,” he said.
I laughed.
“No, I mean, I would fall in love with you no matter what. If you weren’t a tithe, I would love you. If you weren’t a woman, I would love you. If you weren’t—”
“You can’t even know that.” I was touched. I kissed him. “I love you, too, Paladin,” I murmured against his lips. He was sweeter than the others, less hardened, somehow. I wondered if Paladin hadn’t been through as many bad things as they had? I wondered how Paladin had retained this sweetness out here in this rough, harsh, place.
“I worship you, Clementine,” he said in a low voice. “I adore you. I’m all yours, forever.”
“And I’m yours,” I told him. “I’m yours.”
He groaned into my skin. “I want to make you come. Help me. I don’t know how you like to be touched or fucked. Help me, please.”
So, I took his hand and moved his fingers so that they were barely nudging my clit, and I fucked him into his chair, fucked my clit against his fingers, fucked myself on the thick gloriousness of his cock buried all the way inside me. I fucked him until I came, and he came almost immediately after I did.
Afterwards, my coffee was cold.
He insisted on making me a fresh cup.
kestrel
I DID CHORES , because they still needed done. I was used to checking on whatever Paladin’s responsibilities were to see if he’d actually done them, because it was a fifty-fifty chance he’d just forget. So, it wasn’t a big deal to do Paladin’s chores, too.
But then I realized Lazarus wasn’t doing anything either, and this pissed me off.
I could have gone and talked to Lazarus about it, which was what a leader should do, undoubtedly. But I didn’t like yelling at people, really. I didn’t like throwing around my weight. So, instead, I just got the plow and took it out into the field to do Lazarus’s plowing.
He’d left the tractor out there, which was when I remembered that there were issues with the plow, and that he hadn’t explained to me what was going on.
So, it wasn’t the plow. It was the tractor, which wasn’t starting.
He had a bunch of stuff out there, some gasoline and some tools, and I just started running through a battery of ideas that I had in my head.
Turned out the fuel filter was clogged.
I found the clog, but couldn’t get to it with my fingers, so I went back to the garage attached to the farmhouse, got a tool that could snake down further, and was able to yank it out. It looked sort of waxy. I had no idea what it was.
Whatever, the tractor started now .
I hooked the plow attachment up to the tractor and started working on the field. It was best to get these fields plowed now in the fall, so that they could sit and be ready for planting in the spring. We had other fields that were growing crops right now, but we would not plant those next year. We were rotating them. If you plant in the same soil over and over, you deplete it, apparently. Farming is more complicated than it sounds.
I finished one field, and I probably could have done more, because Lazarus was days behind, and if he’d just taken my help with the stupid tractor, we wouldn’t be behind like this, but I was kind of done at that point.
I had this low-level buzz of anger at the base of my skull, radiating down over my shoulders.
Fuck them for doing nothing.
Fuck them for leaving everything to me.
Fuck them for thinking they could keep the damn tithe.
I stomped into the house, to find her and Paladin in the kitchen, flour everywhere, kissing next to the counter.
“Lucky I’m around to take care of all your responsibilities,” I threw over my shoulder as I headed towards the shower.
“Did you do my chores again?” Paladin said.
I rolled my eyes, moving out of the room.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Paladin.
I heard her voice, soft, asking questions. Whatever. I didn’t stop to listen to them. I went into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and got into the shower.
Only a few minutes later, there was a soft knock on the bathroom door.
“I’m in here,” I said, although if the guys wanted to take a piss while I was showering, they didn’t usually knock, so I knew it was her.
She opened the door. I should have fucking locked it. “Hey, Kestrel, I just wanted to say that I want to pull my weight around here. If I’m going to live here, I’ll help. I guess it’s probably a lot of work, a farm.”
I snorted into the shower streaming over my head .
“What is it?” she said. “I know it’s not that you don’t want me out here. I know you want me.”
“Oh, you do, huh?” I muttered.
“Yes,” she said. “You know I want you, too.”
I yanked the shower curtain aside to look at her. “Someone has to keep their head on straight. You can’t be here, Clementine. It’s bad news for everyone.” I yanked the shower curtain closed again. “Now, get the fuck out of the bathroom.”
clementine
WHEN KESTREL GOT out of the shower, I decided I’d go after him again, but this time with cookies. Paladin and I had spent the afternoon making them.
I wasn’t really great at making cookies or anything, but my grandmother had taught me to make cookies when I was a little girl. She died when I was twelve, but before that, she was there for me when Angela was the absolute worst. She was a mother-figure when I needed one. So, anyway, I knew enough about cookies to determine that we had the proper ingredients to make them—butter, flour, sugar, mostly. I would have liked some baking soda or baking powder, but they came out mostly fine without that.
The trick to cookies was that you didn’t bake them until they were done. You took them out of the oven when they still seemed gooey and raw in the middle, and then, you let them cool, after which they became perfectly chewy and delightful.
Of course, not going to lie, we’d had to check Paladin’s phone for a recipe to make sure we got the oven temperature and timing right.
Still, I was pretty proud of the cookies. I hadn’t made cookies on my own ever, once. And it had been since I was a kid that I’d make them with my grandmother. I would have been feeling pretty triumphant if it weren’t for what Kestrel was saying.
Kestrel took a cookie. He was in his bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, his chest bare. He looked good. “What, this is your idea of winning me over? Sweet baked goods?”
I shrugged. “We made cookies for everyone to eat.”
He bit into the cookie, chewed, swallowed, gave me a little smile. “Good cookie.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He shifted on his feet, and that was when I realized he had a hard-on underneath that towel of his.
I giggled. “You aroused because I can bake or just because I’m close?”
He laughed. “I mean, the baking doesn’t hurt.”
I giggled harder. I stepped closer, reaching down to stroke him through his towel. “Maybe if I present my arguments while I’m touching you?”
“No,” he said, regretful, gentle, extricating my hand from his erection. “No, sweetheart, it’s not that way. I’m the fucking leader here, so I have to make the hard decisions.” He nudged me out of the room.
I stood on the other side of the door and tried to talk to him, tried to explain the things I’d explained to Lazarus, that we had to make the best of it out here, and that there were certain things that were going to be difficult, but that we’d just have to work around them.
He didn’t say anything, however.
He ignored me.
Eventually, annoyed, I left and went back to the kitchen.
Paladin was cleaning up from our cookie making adventure, and I felt bad for sticking him with the clean-up, but he said it was no big deal, that he didn’t mind. We cleaned the kitchen together, and then we ended up kissing more.
I let Paladin take me out of the kitchen and back to his room, where he went down on me until I came and then we had sex, chests pressed together, both gasping, looking directly into each other’s eyes. He told me he loved me, and I said it back. Afterwards, we dozed in the afternoon light in each other’s arms .
I awoke later to the sound of the kitchen door slamming closed.
“What the fuck, Kestrel?” came Lazarus’s booming voice.
Lazarus moved through the house loudly.
I sat up and started getting dressed.
Paladin shook his head at me. “If he’s like that, it’s better to stay out of it.”
I didn’t feel like that was right, though. I shrugged and continued to get dressed.
Lazarus pounded on Kestrel’s bedroom door. “Open the fuck up.”
By the time Kestrel was opening the door, I was out there in the hallway, dressed in baggy sweats that belonged to Paladin, surveying the two men. Paladin was inside his doorway, peering out. He looked nervous.
“Oh, this is predictable,” said Kestrel. “ You’re annoyed because I fixed the tractor, that it?”
“No,” said Lazarus in a very defensive voice which let me know that was, um, exactly why he was annoyed and now he felt stupid about it.
“It was the fuel filter,” Kestrel said.
“Oh, shit, it was clogged,” said Lazarus, rubbing his forehead. “Of course. I thought about that, but then I got distracted with trying to troubleshoot some other shit, and I never went back to it.”
“Look, your shit, I’ve had it with it,” said Kestrel. “You have this thing where you can’t let anyone help you, where you gotta figure it out and be the big man, and usually I let you, but this is ridiculous. If we aren’t working together out here, what’s the point of even being a pack? If you want to be on your own so much, Lazarus, just fucking go.”
Lazarus straightened up, shocked. “You kicking me out?”
“No, I’m saying, you know, stop getting all uptight when someone tries to help you, that’s all.”
Lazarus folded his arms over his chest, surveying Kestrel. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, today, did you even come to talk to me, or did you just decide to go out there and do my chores for the day without one iota of communication?”
“I mean, it needed done.”
“It needed done, and now you will resent me forever and you’ll keep it in a special little place to pull out every time we have an argument, to prove whatever point you want to prove about me. You’ll be all, ‘I did you a favor when I did your chores,’ and I will pay through the nose for that favor, for the rest of all time. Do me a favor and don’t do me anymore favors, Kestrel. I don’t like being in your debt.”
Kestrel threw up his hands. “Are you serious?”
“You have a lot of nerve anyway,” said Lazarus. “First, you bring up the worst night of my entire life, and you know how I feel about that shit, and then you act like I should be fine to go out and troubleshoot a goddamned plow while I’m stuck back in that emotional hellscape that is the night of the Change. You fuckwad, man.”
Kestrel flinched, bowing his head. “Okay, okay, point taken, Lazarus. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”
Lazarus’s shoulders sagged. “You really shouldn’t have.”
“I guess I was angry, too,” said Kestrel. “I wanted to show you up. You’ve been messing with that damned tractor for days now, and if you would have just let me help you—”
“And if you would have just given me time to get to it, maybe I would have figured it out on my own today.”
“Maybe,” said Kestrel. “Or maybe not. Anyway, all of this is a distraction from the actual problem, which is her.” He pointed at me.
I lifted my chin. “Hey. The actual problem, reporting for duty.”
Paladin snickered from behind the doorway.
Lazarus’s lips might have quirked a little, towards a smile.
Kestrel did not look amused. “This is it, exactly, though. You all want to play house with her, let her bake us cookies and play with our dicks, and it sounds nice to me, too. I also want to play hide and seek with my cock and all her holes. I want her just as much as you do. Whatever this fucked up mating bond thing is, it’s affecting me, too. But I’m the leader, so I can’t do that. Because I also have to protect us, all of us, including her, and the safest thing for everyone is to send her back.”
“It’s not, though,” I said. “You’re only thinking about physical safety. If I go back there, away from my mates, I won’t survive in another way, a deep-down way.” I touched my chest to illustrate.
Kestrel scoffed.
“And you might not either,” I said, gesturing around. “Maybe you need me that way, too. I don’t know. I think we might all need each other. I really think—”
“If we are dead,” said Kestrel, “it doesn’t matter.”
I was quiet.
“How’d you do it?” said Lazarus softly. “How’d you get to us without any of the other wolves fucking you?”
I looked up at him, surprised by this subject change.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” said Kestrel.
“Did they leave you alone?” said Lazarus, raising his eyebrows. “Maybe they scented something—”
“We all had to fight that lone wolf off,” said Kestrel. “You were fucking there. He was two seconds from raping her—”
“Can you let her talk?” said Lazarus, glaring at Kestrel.
Kestrel rolled his eyes.
But then they were both looking at me.
I spread my hands. “They didn’t leave me alone, exactly, but they did scent something. They smelled my, um.” I blushed, which was dumb, because they’d seen me naked and fucked me in all my secret places, and what the hell? “My pussy,” I muttered, “and then they kind of backed off. But I started running, and that made them chase me again, and so I realized I had to walk away from them instead of running, and then they let me go.”
Lazarus grinned. “There.”
“What?” said Kestrel.
“She’s ours, that’s what,” said Lazarus. “That scent. It’s a thing. I read about it online. It apparently hits your wolf in a weird way. You can override it, obviously, but a part of you doesn’t want to. Griff’s wolves, they may not want her as badly as you think they will.”
Kestrel furrowed his brow.
“Also, I don’t know,” said Lazarus. “Maybe I’ve lost my damned mind, but what if it works out? This place out west, they started encouraging one-on-one fucking during the gatherings, and the tithes started mating left and right, and the wolves, once they were mated, it soothed a ton of the aggressive tendencies that were happening in the area. Once they had a mate to take care of, it was like they just stopped engaging in all these petty fights for resources and food and even status. It’s—”
“Mates cure everything, huh?” said Kestrel sarcastically.
“I don’t know about that,” said Lazarus, “but it’s something.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, “this is sounding like some kind of incel wet dream.”
“Huh?” said Kestrel.
“You guys know about incels?”
They blinked at me.
“It’s, um, involuntary celibate men, mostly big dorks who live in their parents basement and post angry things on Reddit—” I broke off, shaking my head. “You know what? Never mind. Not important. I mean, there’s a world where we can all make arguments about how men are not entitled to fuck women and that women should get to choose and stuff. And then there’s the world that the four of us actually live in, where…” I shrugged, feeling my chest tighten.
Was this a good idea, my coming out here?
Or had I legitimately lost my mind, my will, and my identity? Did I even belong to myself at all anymore, or was I just a vessel for werewolf pleasure?
Fuck.
Tears blinded my eyes. I pushed between them, down the hall, and out onto the lawn.