Chapter 1 #3
I am glad for a moment to think about what I am going to do with this girl. She really is too young for Skor and me. Should we simply give her to Thorn? He is much closer to her age and seems enamored of her, though I notice that he too is being closely engaged by several other females.
The pack doesn’t seem to be short of women, and it seems as though we could all have been given our own mates, but I am sure that a lot of the females here are the alpha’s mates, and of the others, I notice that most, if not all, are already mothers.
Pups wander in and out, grabbing at their mother’s hands for attention and diving into the sweeter treats with great excitement.
“It comes in many forms,” the woman who approached me says, her voice floating to me from behind. “Much more than what you think. Don’t trust a tree if you didn’t think it was there before, that’s all I’ll say about that.”
Skor walks up and nudges me before I can ask about trees that are or are not there.
“Yes, brother?”
“Where’s our mate?”
I look around. I had assumed she was still eating, or perhaps playing with some of the pups. I saw a few of them clambering over her back and forth as if she were a climbing frame. The sight was quite cute. Reminded me of our own, much younger sister who still lives at home.
Right now, she is no longer in view.
We search for her, and ask after her, but judging by the grins and giggles of those who have a sense of her, it soon becomes apparent that our mate has left the feast.
“You are hunters, are you not?” her father booms when the question of Tabby’s whereabouts gets to him. “Hunt your mate!”
A cheer goes up from the pack. I get the impression this is part of the ritual, and that we were distracted on purpose to allow this moment to happen. They’ve given us a mate, but they’re going to make us claim her.
“They’re fucking with us,” Thorn says as we put some distance between ourselves and the feasting pack. “They think it’s funny.”
“Night is coming,” Skor adds. “The warnings about the night…”
“Yes, they’re not good. Let’s find her,” I say.
As we prepare to hunt our missing mate down, I wonder if this is a game that is all part of the ritual, or if she is running in fear, if the prospect of being mated is too terrible for her to face, if she is choosing death at the vile hands of twisted rotting things rather than be touched by us.
“We really need to find her,” Skor says, stating the obvious in a way that does not clarify matters at all.
He seems more concerned than either Thorn or I.
He likes her, clearly. He may even be feeling some kind of natural attraction in the form of the mate bond.
I may also be feeling something I do not want to feel. No time to talk about it now.
We move out in human form, then when we have put enough distance between ourselves and the feast, we strip, hide our weapons, and slide into our wolf selves.
The moment I feel my fur, the world shifts. I no longer see mountains as a series of rocks, one bigger than the other. I scent the wind, find it full of creatures and darkness and the unmistakable scent of dead things.
There is something else, too. Something sweet. Something I caught in a much muted form when we were human, and now experience in a much fuller way. Our mate smells like something wicked, wild wind and sweet berries. There is a purity to her that I instinctively want to protect.
She has been caught up in this ritual, something she did not choose, something she cannot possibly know if she actually wants. A pang of guilt makes its way through to my wolf heart.
The mate bond is a cruel thing.
Normally it is felt between compatible partners, but out here, in these lands, with this pack, it is something that will often be forced through intercourse.
I hope she feels the bond when she is taken for the first time.
I think Thorn is smitten. He would be the best choice.
He is the youngest of us, and the kindest of us.
We head in the direction our mate has taken, moving over ridges and through gullies with eager paws.
Her scent grows stronger as we move, but the day is also fading and the sun is descending faster than we can run.
We chase our mate through the twilight and into the dark, fanning out to cover more area.
As a deep chill starts to settle over the land, Skor lets out an excited yelp in the mid-distance.
He has spotted her. We turn toward him. I see her instantly, a flash of red hair on a moonlit horizon that looks as foreign and strange as another planet.
She has a staff of some kind, or walking stick, in hand, and she appears to be using it to ascend part of the mountain.
But she is not alone.
Another figure is moving toward her.
Vampire.
I know it instantly because the wind carries the scent of congealed blood to me.
There is something very strange and stomach turning about the scent of the undead.
It’s blood that is perpetually on the turn, a sort of stench that cannot be ignored.
Truly dead things become like earth over time, but these creatures will never smell like soil.
They impede the natural cycle of things, turning life essence into a void of ravenous existence.
Our mate is being hunted. She doesn’t seem to notice it. She keeps moving up the hill with a painstakingly slow gait that allows the thing to draw closer. In its stalking mode, it is relatively sedate, but once it comes within range, it rushes toward her in a sudden flurry of movement.
We are not close enough to stop him, but we are close enough to see what is going to happen. At full sprint, we are going to watch our mate die before our eyes.
She turns at the very last moment and faces the thing that wishes to undo her. The vampire screeches with a kind of stupid bloodlust no real predator would ever allow to overcome it. True predators strike in silence.
She hasn’t even shifted. That would give her some chance of holding the thing off, even through the merit of a thicker hide.
She’s holding the staff in her hand, as if a bit of stick is going to save her from a vampire.
I am certain I am about to watch her die.
I run as fast as I can go, closing the distance with desperation.
We are only a couple dozen feet away, but it is still not close enough.
She lifts the stave high and brings it down on the ground.
We shouldn’t be able to hear a noise from it, but there is a loud boom that shakes the earth itself. We stumble over our feet as the sky turns green, and a bolt of searing light emerges from the clouds in a bright beam that turns the vampire to dust almost instantly.
Skidding up to her, I take my human form. I have many questions that will never be answered if I remain in my wolf skin.
“What was that?”
“Vampire,” she says, her face turning bright red as she looks me up and down. I wonder if I am the first naked man she has ever seen. I note that her gaze hangs around my crotch for a long moment before she drags it away, avoiding my gaze.
“I mean what was the thing you did?”
“Summon sunlight,” she says with a little shrug. “It’s a simple cantrip. I learned it so I could go for walks at night. They never see it coming. I was surprised that the vampires didn’t start to learn, but then I realized that the ones who experience it never get the chance to tell anyone else.”
She lets out a little giggle.
“That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my fucking life,” Thorn breathes. “That was so fucking amazing.”
Skor and I exchange looks.
She’s practicing magic.
Our mate is a witch.
This situation was dire to begin with. We were given one scrap of a whelp to mate with and now it turns out that she practices forbidden arts.
Magic is not permitted where we are from.
The consequences of magical actions are too dark and too damaging for it to be practiced.
Most wolves and people think that it is not real.
They have very little capacity for it, and no knowledge of it whatsoever.
Our family has a particularly dark and negative association with all things magic.
It has taken more from us than I can ever express.
I cannot stand it. I will not suffer it to exist in my presence.
“Seriously, baby,” Thorn is saying. “You’re so talented. I would have had to have bitten him or staked him or something.”
Tabby smiles, pleased.
The magic will have to be curbed, but I am not sure if that is the main problem in this moment. I am more concerned with her absconding from the feast.
“You left without us. Where were you going?”
“Oh,” she says. “Away.”
“Away.”
“Yes.” She’s smirking at me with obvious enjoyment, but I think I see a glimmer of fear in her pretty eyes. She wants me to think she’s a feisty little mountain she-wolf, but she’s hiding a frightened pup inside.
She is afraid of us. She was not prepared to be given to three males. She is a virgin and she fears for her body and what we will do to it later.
“We did not give you permission to leave without us,” I say, making no mention of her magic power.
We will have to discuss that revelation privately and decide what to do about it.
In the world we intend to live, a single little witch could be more trouble than the entire mountain range of undead beasts.
She stares at me blankly.
“You need to obey us,” I tell her.
“The summon sunlight cantrip isn’t the only one I know,” she says, looking at me with a stormy expression. “I don’t need to obey you. You just saw I can protect myself.”