Chapter 7 #2
“I am going to go back and pay for the damages,” I say. “You two keep an eye on her. There’s a hot dog stand down the road that might not provoke her rage.”
I go to the restaurant to make amends, which are significant. As wolves in a largely human world, the need to fix what we have broken is sometimes necessary. I might have to expand the fund significantly now that Tabby is in our lives. She seems like one to cause perpetual chaos.
“You broke our window, sir,” the manager says.
Broken Belly isn’t a big enough town to have more than one nice restaurant, but the one nice restaurant is big enough to have a manager who wears a suit and has a well-oiled mustache and probably a reckoning of what was broken to the decimal point.
I want to avoid unnecessary conflict.
“Yes, we did. Very sorry about that. We thought it was open.”
He stares at me, as if he is considering calling me stupid.
“You thought we had a large open…”
“Yes. We thought perhaps it was a sliding or folding doors situation.”
“I see,” the manager says, sounding unconvinced. Fortunately, I am a very imposing creature and he has no interest in provoking further violence.
“The cost to replace is…”
“Considerable, I am sure,” I say, handing over a small purse.
“Gold,” I tell him. “Mountain gold. Worth more than any coin. This should compensate you for materials, labor, and general trouble.”
He opens the pouch and takes out the small nugget. He bites it, and a small indentation appears. It’s real. It’s more money than he’s seen in his life, I’d bet.
“I hope that this incident will be forgotten soon enough,” I say suggestively.
I do not want this story getting out. There are those who hunt wolves for bounties from some human funds who reward shifter deaths, and stories like this will draw them.
Odd outbursts, wild behaviors, they use those as data points to track us.
“This will be suitable, thank you,” he says.
I turn and walk away. I do not care about the gold, or the window, or the scene we no doubt made. I am concerned about Tabby. She has so little self-control.
I never imagined a wolf from the mountains would be such a wild creature, but the more I think about it, the more I realize what a naive perspective that was.
Of course she is wild. Of course she is uncivilized.
She has never had to interact with humans at all.
She’s told us several times how uncomfortable she is, in ways small and now rather large.
I don’t know how she is going to adapt to Eclipse City.
She will be in a constant state of annoyance and probably rage.
I hope she can learn to adapt to the world I want to bring her to.
When I get back to the others, they are having a heated discussion.
“I didn’t like it in there! I don’t want to be in towns! I want to go back to the mountains!”
“But you can’t,” Skor says firmly. “So you may as well learn to adapt.”
“Let’s all relax,” I say.
“I don’t like humans,” Tabby growls.
“Yes,” Thorn agrees. “Humans are gross.”
“Yes,” I say. “They are. But they are also to be pitied. They are stuck in the one body. There is no ability for them to enjoy true wildness. All they can do is look out at nature. They rarely enjoy being truly one with it.”
“We are also human!” Skor exclaims. “There’s very little difference between ourselves and humans besides a curse.”
“A curse that makes us better than them,” Tabby mumbles.
“I am going to thrash you,” Skor threatens. “You will need to adapt to humans. They are no worse than limbless shambling zombies, and you didn’t seem to mind them terribly much.”
“But I get to destroy zombies. I have to listen to humans… exist,” Tabby says.
I am torn in this discussion. Tabby is clearly sensitive, but she is also showing herself to be an absolute brat. She acts out impulsively, sometimes with magic, other times with other people’s beverages. We can’t have her causing scenes everywhere we go. People will talk, and perhaps do more.
Wolves are powerful, but there are plenty of people who are openly hostile to super-naturals, and outside sanctuaries like Eclipse City, there are plenty of places where we could be attacked and even killed and nothing would be done.
That is why Skor is so aggressively stating we are human—because in the eyes of much of the world, we are anything but.
She is a danger to herself at the moment. And that has to change.
“We need to talk about appropriate behavior,” I tell her.
“No. You need to let me go,” she says boldly, fixing me with that wild green stare, and a look of fierce determination that tells me she has no intention of submitting to me on this matter.
“That’s not going to happen,” Skor says.
Thorn nods.
This is the one thing we are all absolutely aligned on. She’s not going anywhere.
“You are ours,” I tell her. “That is simply a truth you will have to accept. You were given to us by your father, and we survived the night with you. We have mated. We are bonded.”
“Then come and be my mates in the mountains. These human towns have nothing to offer besides noise.”
“That’s not true.”
She screws her face up in frustration. “It is true. I hate everything about these places. I hate everything I’ve seen. I hate how I have to hide myself, and my magic. And I hate you!”
She spits the last words with hurtful venom, but I know the tone of a child’s tantrum all too well. She’s not going to get away with this, and I have no intention of responding to the vicious little jab she just took.
“You are going back to the train cabin,” I tell her. “We all are.”
She doesn’t want to submit to this decision, but she knows we can just pick her up and carry her there if we have to.
I can almost feel her thoughts, a thousand angry little plans buzzing about in her mind like a nest of annoyed wasps. She wants to act out. She wants to run away. She wants to shift and eat all these humans, bound from one to the other, ripping their throats out.
Or maybe that’s just my fantasy, projected onto her.
Tabby
I want to bite everyone in the neck and I want them to all fucking bleed out begging for their worthless lives. I also don’t really want to hurt anyone. That doesn’t make sense, I suppose. It’s not these people’s fault that they suck so very much.
We go back past the restaurant, which is still serving customers. They’ve put a big board of wood up over the window where Krall and Skor came through like wild beasts. They stayed in their people forms though. Disappointing.
I have only seen my mates’ wild forms once, when they hunted me down in the mountains. They were larger than most of the mountain wolves, better fed, and much more powerful. I want to see them again. I want to take my own form. I want to be free.
I think they want to be free as well, underneath it all. They say they want to take me to some awful city, but they were attracted to the wild thing in the mountains. They came to a terrible place, and they have to expect to have picked up a terrible creature.
Maybe I haven’t been bad enough yet? A petty little whine about some noisy human is nothing. I dropped some drink on hum. I could have hit him with a thunderbolt. I could have set his hair on fire. I could have…
“I can feel your vicious little thoughts, and I like them,” Skor murmurs in my ear as we climb back into the train.
“What?”
“I can hear them,” he repeats, flickering a wink at me.
I am inclined to take that statement literally.
“Then get out of my head. Creep.”
“Oh, she’s feisty tonight,” he grins. “Coming out of your shell? Careful. You might be coming out just to get smacked into line.”
He says that just as we step into the cabin. And I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s his tone. Maybe I’m still hungry. Maybe I know I need to give these guys a demonstration that will make them let me go. Whatever it is, it’s the final straw.
Krall
I have seen many shifters take their wolf forms in the past. Usually it is a smooth physical transition. When my brothers and I take our wolf shapes, it is silent and it is clean.
Blam!
Tabby mutters a word and a thunderclap issues from some unseen storm. There is a thick cloudy haze in the air around Tabby. When it clears, a silver and white wolf with incredible phosphorescent green eyes is staring at us.
“That was amazing!” Thorn claps his hands approvingly. We really need to start working all together when it comes to handling this girl. We cannot be undermining one another over and over again. She’s smart enough to take advantage of any little fractures in our alliance.
“Back into your human form,” I say. “Now. If someone sees you, there’s a real chance we will be discovered, and that could make the journey very dangerous.”
She lunges at me, jaws open and snapping at my face in an aggressive display.
She’s much larger and heavier as a wolf, so she is able to knock me back against the cabin door.
If I were to shift as well, I could easily dominate and pin her, but I don’t want to do that.
We are remaining civilized and under cover.
That’s a decision I made a while ago, and I want it respected.
She comes at me again, this time knocking me to the floor. She gets her jaws around her neck, threatening me, knowing that she will suffer for this soon enough. I do not move.
But Skor does. He strips off his clothing and he shifts. In an instant, there are two wolves in the cabin. He sinks his teeth into the back of Tabby’s neck, and I feel her jaws loosen as he bites harder than she expects, forcing her to yelp and whimper.
I get up, a trickle of blood running from my neck.
“Are you okay?” Thorn asks the question, looking worried. “She’s acting crazy. This is…”
“She’s uncivilized,” I say. Skor still has her in his jaws. Every time she tries to escape, he releases and then bites again. It’s got to be hurting, but she deserves the pain.
Tabby