Chapter 11
Wolf Moon, waxing crescent
I’m still high on what happened in church when I wake up the next morning. Still so pleased that they listened to me. That they engaged with me. That they didn’t dismiss me out of hand as Ty’s problematic fated mate.
I snuggle a little deeper beneath the covers in Ty’s bed and, for once, don’t find myself wishing for windows.
Instead I find myself wondering how many times Ty has defended me like that to them before—or to anyone else in the pack, even—no matter how many times he’s gotten in my face in private.
I wake Ty then the way he loves best, even though he threw himself into bed with me only a few hours ago.
I crawl down his body and take him in my mouth while he’s still soft, getting to experience the rush of blood that fills his cock as I taste him.
The way he groans as he wakes and realizes what’s happening.
The way he wraps his fist in my hair, slowly exerting more control the more awake he gets.
Until he’s slamming into me, pumping himself into my mouth, and then emptying himself with a scalding rush down my throat.
He stretches as I crawl back up the bed and flop beside him. He smiles over at me, looking lazy and satisfied, and I feel everything in me shudder—and not just with our typical heat.
It’s like my heart doesn’t know how to beat anymore unless it’s for him.
“Come on,” he says after a moment that seems to stretch out too long, his voice rough. And not, I think, from whatever carrying-on he did last night. “Let’s run.”
We shift and pad out of the den, taking one of the secret entryways that only the top leaders of the pack are meant to know. Once outside, he breaks into a lope. I follow.
We run and run, letting our legs stretch and our breath get hot.
We run through the cold morning in that pretty predawn half-light before Savi sends the fog in again.
There’s a sprinkling of snow on the ground in the higher elevations.
I can feel the cold on my paws, and I like it.
Our breath makes its own mist. I can see the heat coming off Ty’s huge body and my own, too.
The only sound out here is us, like we’re all alone in this ruined world of ours.
When he turns to look at me, we’re high on a ridge above the Applegate Valley. Once this offshoot valley was all farms and vineyards, but it long since fell from human control into the hands of various warring bands of ogres, trolls, and anarchist goblins. Among many other unpleasant things.
I can tell by that gleam in his eyes that Ty has other things in mind than a pretty hike.
Turns out, I can feel that same gleam inside me, too. I bare my teeth at him. I start the dance.
I make him chase me, because that’s part of the thrill. There’s no surrender without a fight. That’s not who we are.
Ty is bigger than me and faster than me, but I can corner like lightning. I’m not afraid of a little roughhousing, either.
I give him a good run, but the end is a foregone conclusion.
That’s part of why I find it so exhilarating, so all-consuming. It’s also one of the reasons I’ve been so wary of a claiming run. How can I possibly survive it and still be me when our normal, everyday runs are like this?
Yet as I run, Ty on my heels and his breath rough behind me, it’s hard to remember why I care who I am. Not when there’s the sheer, elemental glory of this.
He swerves, slamming into me. I try to throw myself into the spin, but this time he’s on me.
Moon help me, the way he’s on me.
He pins me down, his teeth on my neck. I feel that huge, gloriously perfect body of his on my back, holding me where he wants me before he slams himself deep inside me.
Wolf fucking is different from human fucking in one very specific way. There is no pretending here. No frills. No experimenting with creative ideas. That’s for skin.
Fur is basic.
He holds me down by my neck, I submit, and he fucks me long, hard, and deep until he’s done.
Every version of me loves it when Ty takes control, but especially my wolf.
I start coming immediately. With every hard, deep thrust. He takes his time, letting me shake and whine.
He doesn’t hurry. He never hurries. He does exactly as he likes.
Because he knows I like it too.
When he’s done, we lie there together in the snow with him still too big inside me to pull out. We stay there and we breathe.
His snout on my shoulder. His legs caging mine. We feel each other’s hearts beat. First hot and hard. Then gradually, over time, slow and steady.
I try to imagine what this would be like if I was mating with some wolf I didn’t even like on a full moon night. When after the actual sex, there was this forced bit of intimacy.
Humans, I think, have no idea how lucky they have it that they can disengage at will.
I’m luckier still because I’ll never have to know what it’s like not to love simply melting into him. What it’s like to not let my eyes close, knowing that when he’s got me I don’t have to do a single thing and he can worry about the rest.
We lie there until the cold seeps in beneath our fur.
“That was a very nice speech you made yesterday,” I say as we head back toward the den.
The fog has already rolled in, obscuring any daylight that might try to peek its way through the trees.
“Wasn’t a speech,” Ty replies, in more of a grunt. “I was delivering facts. Nothing more and nothing less.”
But the way he looks at me says otherwise, and I let that warm me all over.
Back at the den, he peels off to confer with scowling males in low tones.
I hear one of them say something about stealing our shit, but that could mean anything.
What’s important, I’m well aware, is that after a show of independence and what will be seen as a bid for power unbecoming of a female—because anything they don’t like is always considered unbecoming of a female—I need to make a show of putting myself back into the domestic sphere.
It’s important to keep the men feeling safe, after all.
The women have gathered up on the open hilltop to lay out food today.
Some are cooking over fires, honoring the old ways.
Others are hauling in coolers filled with prepared food from elsewhere.
The bitten women are up on the hill too, helping where and how they can—but always careful in the presence of the blood females, who have been known to bite them on occasion.
I move around from one group to another, acting like the hostess my mother keeps telling me I am. It doesn’t matter if I’m unofficial. I’m still Ty’s, and that means something.
More to the point, it would be taken as meaning something else if I didn’t.
I low-key expect everyone to be talking about the fact that I dominated in church yesterday, but they’re not, and I know it’s not because they haven’t heard about it.
Few people talk shit more than werewolf males.
But instead of sly comments about when I’m planning to ride with the males and what kind of Harley I like—the kind of thing I’m expecting—there’s a lot of muttering that doesn’t seem pointed at me in particular.
I know better than to ask about it directly.
The thing about female wolf spaces is that everyone gossips, everyone pretends that they don’t, and trying to approach these things head-on is the quickest way to learn nothing from anyone. Direct is always interpreted as rude.
This is why it takes me nearly to the lunch we’ve been preparing to understand that one of the packs is missing some of their weapons and explosives, which sound like insane things to travel with until you remember that at any moment a person might be called upon to blow up a nest of manticores or a swarm of werebees while moving around the post-Reveal country.
Taking away someone’s ability to protect themselves and their pack is going to lead to a bloody fight right here in the middle of the gathering. Everyone is amped for it. The only question is—with who?
Accusations are flying hard and fast.
Some folks think it’s the Denver pack, who everyone considers untrustworthy since they separated pretty dishonorably from a greater Midwest pack sixty years ago. Others are certain that it’s the New York pack, because everybody lives to hate New Yorkers.
The Denver and New York packs, obviously, vehemently deny the suggestion that they would need shady weapons from a pissant pack that can’t keep track of their own shit.
By the time the men roll in, the women have managed to litigate these issues about a hundred different times, winding everyone up in the process.
I don’t have to tell Ty any of this. He likely knew before I did, if what I overheard earlier was about this. And besides, he takes one look at the crowd and reads the mood.
“I think it’s high time for an update on our mating rituals,” he announces from his favorite ledge, shifting everyone’s focus immediately.
Not just because it’s fun to be a little voyeuristic about other people’s romantic lives, though it is.
But also because females leave their packs and go to their mates’ packs, so the rituals will shift pack dynamics.
If all my brothers win mates this week, that’s three more females in our pack and more young, swelling our ranks.
Some packs will lose their unmated females and have no one to replace them, meaning their future will be dimmer when they leave.
Mating, as I have been told my whole life, has almost nothing at all to do with the individuals involved.
When I think about it that way, it’s no wonder that so many wolves have an issue with me.
I don’t really want to think about that, so I focus on the unmated women as they take their spots on the staging rock.
None of them have dropped out—which doesn’t happen very often, but could.
Fewer males step forward to fight for them, however.
Every night, when all the packs gather together to eat and drink and talk about brotherhood and unity despite their little factions and petty wars, there’s been more fighting.