Jed did not return the sniffing favor. He seemed disinterested in the lot of them, including the lithe silver one who licked his jaw, pawed at him, and rubbed herself against him like a cat.
More movement on the hill, still cautious, more pairs of eyes catching white glints of moonlight.
When they’d had their fill of him, Jed jogged away. The pale one bounded after him, both of them heading for me.
I shifted onto my knees, but didn’t stand up, waiting.
She must have caught the scent as she drew close. Or maybe saw the shape of me in the silver glow. Twenty yards out, as Jed kept trotting to me, the smaller wolf stopped on a dime, ears leaping forward, head up, staring at me. In the next second, she must have decided her senses were not playing tricks on her because she let out a sharp alarm cry, something between a bark and a yelp, and bolted for the hill like a flash of lightening.
At the sound of her cry, every wolf around the hill vanished. By the time she reached them and dived for the tree roots, there was not a thing stirring on the hill.
Jed, who never looked around or reacted to the warning, padded up to me.
“I’ve already worn out my welcome,” I whispered, shivering and stiff from so long on the ground.
Jed waited for me to get to my feet. Still, I hesitated before following, though he’d already taken a couple of steps back and seemed to be expecting me.
“Can’t we wait until they’re home?” I spoke as softly as I could. “They’re obviously not happy to see people when they’re out like this.”
He twitched his ears as if a fly were buzzing around them. Otherwise ignored me.
I walked with him back toward the hill, feeling my courage coming into question the closer we got. Now they were hiding. What happened to a predator in flight mode if you cornered it?
How many were there really? And where were they? They had some kind of wolf den in this hill, but that wasn’t where they all vanished to. I was sure some were simply hidden in the long grass, behind trees or brush, or were in scrapes in the earth that I couldn’t see in the dark. They hadn’t all darted down one hole. Which meant, by the time Jed and I reached the base of the hill, I was also sure we were at least partially surrounded.
Jed sat down against my right leg and waited, watching the tree roots.
Nothing moved.
I clenched my hands together, feeling warmer as my pulse quickened, eyes straining to every shadow and twisting blade of grass.
After a minute, the pale wolf reappeared at the tree roots. She did indeed pull herself from the mouth of a den hidden in twisted wood.
I looked at her, looked at Jed, and felt more than scared. Felt … really stupid. He’d said we had to see them at night. But, obviously, that was a bad idea. Was he playing a trick on me? He must have known they spent their nights in fur out here, running about when no humans were in the park. Nice introduction.
But someone had to do something. I couldn’t just tell this wolf we’d made a mistake and I’d call ahead next time.
When Jed only sat there like a stump, I sank to my knees beside him until my eye-level was below his, and held out my hand to the silver wolf.
“My name is Cassia,” I whispered, watching her ears twitch at the unfamiliar sound. “I’m human, but I’m a witch, part of your community. And I’m a friend of Jed’s. I’m very sorry I scared you.”
She did not approach, only watched me, head moving up and down, catching my scent from her vantage above us.
“I’m trying to help the South Coast Cooperative,” I went on just as quietly. “I asked Jed about meeting you because we’re looking for information.”
She stepped forward, crouching lower as she came, ready to spring away in an instant, until she got within a foot of my hand with her quivering nose.
I leaned closer but that sent her hopping back. She skirted around Jed, putting him between us, and peeped at me past his chocolatey ruff.
“We can wait until you’re changed.” I gave Jed a glare. “This is not a good time. I never meant to frighten you.”
She wagged her tail a bit and I noticed movement around us, lifting of heads from grass, a long muzzle poking from another tunnel into the earth.
I took the liberty of sliding my fingers into Jed’s extremely thick fur over his chest, again reaching my hand out toward the silver wolf.
In this way, she put her nose down to sniff my hand. She wagged her tail more, then lifted her head to lick Jed’s cheek—running across his eye and making him flinch—then bounced away. She looked back for Jed to follow, as if deciding she could ignore me as long as I remained quietly in that spot.
“What am I supposed to do?” I whispered in Jed’s ear as wolf shapes began to materialize by moonlight around us. “They can’t answer questions like this.” I was so irritated and still rather nervous, it was hard to keep my voice soft.
He gave me a blank stare from very close range. Being nose-to-nose with him like that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“We’ll have to come back…” I trailed off and sighed. The night was almost over. Dusk no more than a few hours away. “Or just stay until morning if they’ll let us?”
That was what we did. And a strange experience it was.
To a wolf, they were nervous about me. Some, smallest and youngest, downright terrified and wouldn’t even come up from dens more than a nose. The elders, a few quite gray-muzzled, did eventually come up to give me a sniff. I introduced myself again, telling them there was a great deal of trouble for wolves in the South of England and I wanted to help them—mindful all the time that if these creatures were indeed the killers we were after, I could be signing my own death warrant by saying such things.
Unlike my dealings with Jed, Jason, and Andrew in fur, these wolves gave no hint of understanding my words. They did not follow what I said with moving ears or anthropomorphic gestures like a toss of the head. They only watched me, sniffed, and moved on.
Again, I wondered. Were they shifters at all? Was this a joke? But … a pack of wolves living in a forest in southern England? Never…
I couldn’t imagine being able to sleep out here, yet fatigue was grinding my eyelids closed by then and I was once more shivering.
I moved away from den mouths to give them space and, finally able to get into my backpack, put on the hoodie and pulled an extra pair of socks onto my hands. With the leather jacket back on, grateful to have it, I made a pillow of the backpack and curled up as well as I could on a slight uphill, forcing my mind away from spiders.
Typical scrubby, rocky packed dirt in the middle of summer is much harder than one realizes unless one is taking a spade to it, or trying to make a bed of it. Still, it wasn’t the discomfort or the spiders that were really getting to me. It was the cold.
Even with the hood pulled up and socks on my hands, it was a drop in the bucket. I lay there, curled on my side, slightly propped up, watching the wolves milling—often looking over at me, seeming to discuss my presence as they interacted, pacing around the hill—and wondered what was to be done next.
Jed was off in the grass with the silver wolf, finally running with her—just a little. As if he didn’t know how to play, or didn’t want to let himself, while she kept dancing around him, dashing off, bounding back.
Really werewolves?
I had to assume yes. Which brought back the first question.
Our killers?
I didn’t think so. Still an odd bunch. This had to be the entire pack. And they all changed every night? What about those puppies? I’d never had a good enough look at one of the youngsters to say if it seemed dog or wolf.
Answers in the morning.
But I lay there another hour, wondering about Beeches and shivering, not only incapable of sleep, but afraid to.
Jed eventually returned to me, startling me and making me realize I actually had been dozing off when I discovered him looming. He scraped at the earth with his great paws, turned a circle, then l
ay down against me. Greedily, I burrowed into his fur, even my face in his ruff, and felt as if someone had bundled a wooly electric blanket against my front.
He wasn’t a bad guy, really. At least as long as he couldn’t talk.
Chapter 23
I woke to Jed stirring against me. The sky was charcoal, lighter in the east. Morning birds burst with song all around. Heavy cloud cover in part explained the temperature drop last night.
I let him go as the dark fur eased away, rolling from his side to his chest. Only then, blinking and rubbing my eyes, did I see the silver wolf on the slope beside us. She had approached with a dead hare in her mouth. It dangled limp with ludicrously long ears and hind legs, making a mockery of the crushed body.
She walked up timidly while we both watched, then set the hare down at Jed’s forepaws. She stepped back, wagging her tail, and sat, watching us with bright yellow eyes.
By tentative daylight her coat was a mix of soft browns and grays on top, fading to cream and white underparts. Her limbs were long and delicate, her muzzle fine and head elegant. A beautiful animal. With a bit of blood around her whiskers that she was licking off.
Jed regarded the hare. He sat up, yawning, and nosed it over at my face. The eyes were open and glazed, the body still freshly warm and pathetic.
I recoiled, but stopped myself, looking quickly to our hostess in the gloomy gray of dawn.
“Thank you. You’re very kind. It’s … only … rather early for me for breakfast. Thanks, though.”
Jed stood up, towering over me like a bear, shook himself, picked up the hare by the skull, and paced over to the pale wolf. He placed the body at her feet. Then walked away, stretching as he went.
I sat up, watching them, brushing dew from the leather jacket. One of the socks had come off my hands, which had been tucked into Jed’s fur. I stuffed both socks back in my bag.
The she-wolf sat on the slope above me, gazing down at the hare, then after Jed. There was something in her expression, canine as it was, that made a lump come to my throat. From eager and expectant a moment ago, presenting us with a gift, she looked like a dog at a closed door, eyes miserable, ears down.
Soon, ignoring me, she took up the hare and walked away to the tree root den, probably to give it to pups inside.
I rinsed out my mouth with my water bottle, spitting on the ground, needing to pee, but hoping I could wait, and watched for activity around me.
It turned out there were many more than one or two entrances. Many holes had been dug into the earth, cleverly concealed in tree roots, under brush, or in overgrown dips in the hill itself.
With the newly rising light of day, the wolves were yawning and disappearing inside this network like gophers.
I clambered to my knees and tried a few times when they came near me.
“Please? Could you help us? If we could talk…”
They gave me timid or blank looks and vanished around me like mist, ready for bed.
Then I knew. As if it had all come to me in those two or three hours of sleep. As if I’d known from the moment I first saw them. As if it made sense after all.
And the lump in my throat grew and grew while I gathered my things and got to my feet.
Off at the edge of the forest, where we’d come in the night before, Jed was already waiting for me. The visit was over.
While I started for Jed, the pale wolf climbed again from the den to stand on the heaped old roots, gazing through this open grove after him.
When I had almost reached him, Jed turned from me, walking back the way we’d come.
Behind us, the she-wolf howled. A short, high, almost desperate note that tore at my heart. Jed flattened his ears, lowered his head, and broke into a trot, never looking back.
By the time we reached the motorcycle, in full light of an overcast day, I was no longer fighting back tears, though felt sick all the same.
There were two cars already in the lot, probably early joggers before work, but the place was quiet aside from a hundred bird calls.
There was a public restroom there that I hadn’t seen the night before. I collected Jed’s things, including boots, paid the coins for him to go in one, opening the door and dropping his clothes on the floor. Then let myself into the other with another fifty pence.
I was first out and walked past the bike to sit on a wooden bench at the edge of the forest. With my head in my hands, I listened to birds, thinking of other wild creatures until I heard Jed’s boots on the gravel and sat back.
He stood there, the stubble on his face just about returned to its usual pronounced style, hands in the pockets of his black jeans with his thumbs sticking out, looking at the ground at the end of my bench.
After a while, I said, “They’re so smart, they can hide everything. Their kills, their homes, their whole existence. They must bury their dead and the bones of anything they kill. New Forest is home to a wolf pack and no one knows. Totally normal wolves aside from the extra cleverness. They didn’t kill anyone. Not one of them has changed into their skin in … how long?”
Jed shrugged. “No idea. They’ll pass a message to Diana now and then. An elder will change to write on a card and drop it in a postbox. But it’s been several years since they went underground.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me? Why don’t you tell the Sables? If they don’t use skin forms, they can’t have done any of this.”
Jed didn’t answer.
“What about the pups? I thought werewolves can’t change until puberty? The transition? How do their children change?”
“They don’t. They’re born that way.”
I just sat there for a minute, even more horrified. “That’s possible?”
“Cute for a few weeks, isn’t it? Not those naked little red flesh things. But those pups will grow, and much faster than skin versions. We age faster in fur. It doesn’t matter for nightly changes, but if you stay in fur for months or years, it will take many years off your life. So they grow. In a few years they hit their own transition. Then they’ll start to change and fight it.”
His neutral tone began to sound angry. All the time, he stared at the ground, not me. “You can learn to go the other way. You grow up in skin, then learn to deal with your fur, your tail and teeth, and learn to run. We’re ready for it. We’ve watched elders in fur all our lives and understand it. Then we’re trained personally, each individual mentored by our orataj, core members who guide us through Moon’s transition.
“But, going the other way, they’ve never seen skin, never seen worms other than fleeting glimpses in the forest, perhaps. No idea what is happening to them. Only fear, only fight and make themselves stay wolves as they go through growing pains. They can’t function at all upright at that point. They can’t stand, don’t know how. They can’t talk or understand Lucannis or English. They don’t understand their own bodies. They’re only in pain, terrified, completely alone as far as anyone to explain to them what’s happening. Until they hit that age, or unless they saw it happen to another, they don’t even know what they are. The youngest generation there thinks they are total wolves. Simple as that.”
“How do you know?” I asked, breathless, appalled by the idea.
“I saw it happen.” He paced away, silent.
I thought he was done, that was as much as I’d ever get. Then he started back and forth on the gravel by the bench, talking again.
“I lived with them for three seasons. It’s monstrous, raising pups like that. The pack lives in constant fear. I thought she could see my world also. But she was too young to have known the change like her parents. I went to her in skin. She understood who I was but she wouldn’t even try to change. I only knew why once I saw the yearlings—what was happening. So I left. They’re sick. What they’re doing… But…” He stopped, breathing hard, and dragged a hand down his face, eyes shut.
“But they’re not murderers,” I said softly. “Whoever is doing this has thumbs.”
Jed nodded.
“Diana has a good idea how they live. She said right away they were no killers and we must leave them alone to respect the path they took for themselves. That stopped anyone going out and hunting them down. But it didn’t stop many from believing they’re still guilty. No one knows what it’s really like.”
“You’ve got to speak up, Jed.”
He shook his head violently. “No. But you can.”
“Me?”
“No one listens to a thing I say. You’ve seen how much my own pack respects me.” At last, he met my eyes. “You think I’d say the Beeches could not possibly be the killers and the Sables would say all right? Never. But you can say you saw them and used your magic to look and you know it wasn’t them. Not what they are. Not where they live so any bastard in the South Coast Cooperative can find them. Only that you know. You’re silver in Diana’s eyes right now. You tell them and they’ll leave the Beeches alone. Then maybe we can get on with finding who’s really responsible.”
Silence, save for the birds.
A car pulled into the lot. A woman got out, let a Dalmatian out of the back, and walked briskly off down the trail. The dog kept looking around, sniffing in Jed’s direction as it went.
Finally, I said, “You still love her? She thought, just for a minute, that you’d come back to her.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You’ve never seen her in skin?”
He shook his head. “I don’t even know her name.”
That one stopped me, somehow summing up the true depth of the situation, making my eyes fill again.
I admired Diana’s live and let live policy. I agreed. So I would have said a minute ago. But I agreed to the point of no one getting hurt.
If wolves could hide themselves and look after themselves and not be found out, fine. But someone was being hurt. Every generation. At least to my eyes. And to his—who’d seen their lives intimately, who knew them better than anyone else.
Yet, what options for “helping” them when they were already peaceful and happy as they were? At least most of the time?
Moonlight Hunters: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 2) Page 15
