by Apollo Surge
Sawyer shook his head hard, ears flapping with the force. None of that mattered. The Erlking was sealed. And the Moon had proven she would tell him what he needed to know when he needed to know it. She didn’t hide things for no reason.
“No, thank you,” he said, with as much politeness as he could manage. “Not tonight.”
“If you change your mind, I’ll still be here,” the spirit called after him as Sawyer trotted away, building up to a run. “Any time! I’ll be right here waiting…”
Chapter Two
Sawyer found his way off the mountain around midmorning the next day, when the full moon's impact wore off and he was able to shift back to his human shape again. He stayed a wolf until he could make his way into the barn where he'd left his clothes the night before. He'd just finished pulling on his pants when Mateo stumbled in after him, already human and looking thoroughly bedraggled. The Argentinian man, a few years younger than Sawyer and by all accounts devastatingly handsome, managed to make even a post-full-moon hangover seem glamorous. Judging by his squint he wasn't feeling particularly amazing however.
"Sawyer, you lived!" he said, scrubbing at his eyes. "Where did you wander off to?"
"I'm not answering any questions until you're wearing pants," Sawyer said evasively, throwing Mateo's clothes at him. Mateo missed the catch spectacularly, catching the leg of his jeans right in his face. Sawyer stifled a snicker.
"What happened to you last night?" Sawyer asked as the other man struggled to dress himself. "You look like you got hit by a truck."
"I may have been," Mateo said, squinting down at himself. "I have foggy memories of chasing a fat squirrel down the mountain and I woke up with an empty belly and a terrible headache."
Sawyer could see the gears grinding in the other man's head as he tried to remember more and failed. Finally he threw his hands up in defeat.
"Nothing else remains," he said. "What can you do?"
"Full moon is like that sometimes," Sawyer agreed with a shrug. Generally, wolf shifters lost all voluntarily control of their wolves during the full moon. For the duration of the night they were only animals, their human minds retreating under basic wolf instinct. At least, that was how it was meant to work. Of the five or six full moons Sawyer had experienced so far, it seemed like he'd been conscious for at least part of the night during most of them. He supposed that was par for the course for him though. The idea of letting go and not being in control and on high alert at all times, even for one night, was too terrifying to contemplate. He'd never let it happen, even for a single night.
"You had better get inside either way," Mateo advised him. "Elliot was worried when you weren't with the rest of the pack this morning. He's probably planning a search party already."
"Yeah, that sounds like him," Sawyer said, smiling despite the anxiety that stirred in him at the thought of his lover. His hand moved absently to his stomach and the ugly secret it hid. He shook it off quickly and finished dressing, heading toward the house.
Connor Farm lay on a several acres of land and backed up directly on to a state park established around their sacred mountain. The mountain was not a large one. A human could probably hike to the top in a day, and the wolves could run up and down it again in a few hours.
Connor Farm itself was not actually a farm, but a homestead. The garden was impressive, with mounded beds usually overflowing with herbs and vegetables, a row of healthy young fruit trees, angora rabbits, goats, a beehive, and more flowers than you could shake a stick at. The produce stocked the little general store they ran in town. Past the back fence was the barn where the goats were kept during winter, the small greenhouse, a workshop, and a well.
The house itself was a large two-story white Italianate, old and beautiful and well cared for over the decades it had served as the center of the pack's life. There were also two cabins and a trailer on the property to accommodate everyone in the pack. It was one of those cabins Sawyer now shared with Elliot. And, possibly, someday soon, with a child. The thought made Sawyer a little queasy and he stopped with his hand on the back gate to gather himself.
"Mornin' Sawyer."
Sawyer looked up to catch Alicia, yawning as she waved to him, emerging from the goat pen. She was careful to shut it before Domino, their resident escape artist, could rush out after her.
"Morning, Alicia," Sawyer said, mustering a smile for the woman. She was only nineteen, with long, stick straight blond hair the pale color of corn tassels. She and her brother Paul were the only surviving members of the Connor family for which the farm had been named. Her mother Antonia, her brother Henry, and Paul's twin sister Penny had all died in the confrontation with the witches only a few months ago. And her father, Duncan, had died only at the beginning of January. All things considered, she was holding up well, or at least doing a good job of acting like it. For a while, she'd been the only one holding them all together.
"Chores already?" Sawyer asked.
"Somebody's gotta feed the animals, even the day after a full moon," Alicia said with another yawn.
"Doesn't mean it has to be you," Sawyer replied. It was something he said to her too often, every time she decided to shoulder some burden she could easily have left to someone else. Alicia just waved him off impatiently, too tired to argue. Sawyer understood the compulsion to focus on the work, to the grateful exclusion of everything else. He just worried about her.
"Go get breakfast and see your stupid husband," Alicia said. "He's been fussing all morning, thinks you fell in to a gorge and got stuck or something."
"Right." Sawyer swallowed the nausea that tried to creep up his throat again and pushed open the garden gate.
He'd barely stepped through when he heard the back door of the house open and a cocker spaniel collided with his knees.
"Oof! Good morning, Jingle," Sawyer muttered a little resentfully, patting the excited dog.
Jacob, tall and lean and dark haired, was leaning out of the back door through which Jingle had just run. Jacob was only a few years older than Sawyer, but tended to come across as the most mature of them all. He had a solemn, somewhat reserved nature and tended to be overly formal. He was also, as it happened, a phenomenal cook.
"Alicia, breakfast is ready," he called, then noticed Sawyer and blessed him with a small, rare smile. "I made a plate for you too, Sawyer, even though Elliot seems convinced you were picked up by animal control during the night."
Sawyer could smell breakfast through the open door and was already practically salivating.
"You're a saint, Jacob," he said in absolute honesty, problems momentarily forgotten at the prospect of food.
Jacob stepped back inside and Jingle followed close at Sawyer's heel as he climbed the steps into the house.
The kitchen was alive with good smells and noisy, cheerful activity. Paul, usually quiet, was laughing at some joke of Serena's and trying not to drop his pancake.
Paul was a few years older than his sister, with dark brown hair and strangely silver eyes. He'd barely spoken since the death of his sister, but since Christmas he'd been slowly opening up again. And in the interim, it seemed he'd made some kind of unprecedented personal connection with the Moon. Who now, on at least two occasions Sawyer could think of off the top of his head, sometimes used Paul as a living avatar, speaking through him when Her message needed to be particularly clear.
Serena was about Alicia's age, with hair dyed a kind of silvery lavender grey and a sense of fashion that trended decidedly gothic.
Serena was not a member of the pack at all, but leader of the local coven of magic users. The same that had caused the massacre a few months ago. The leader who'd been responsible for the deaths, Raven, had been taken into custody by the Council, a group of elder magic users who were the closest thing the magical community had to a governing body. They didn't interfere often, except to keep inter-community feuds from escalating and to prevent the exposure of the community to the world at large.
Serena had take
n control of the coven afterwards and worked to repair the relationship between the witches and the shifters. She'd been critical to their efforts to stop the Erlking and had nearly died in the process. She was also not-so-secretly dating Alicia, which had motivated her to be at the house fairly regularly lately.
Sawyer said hello as he sat down and dragged a plate toward him, Jingle settling down immediately on top of his feet.
"Alicia should be inside in a minute if you're waiting for her," Sawyer said.
"I'm actually here for Paul today," Serena replied, quickly moving several sheets of paper out of the way as Sawyer reached for the leaky carafe of syrup. She spread the papers out again when it was safe, revealing a set of complex star charts and calculations of lunar phases. "I'm doing some research on his... uh, whatever this thing he has going on with the Moon is."
She gestured at all of Paul with a slightly baffled expression. Paul just smiled.
"If he's genuinely an avatar of a literal deity, it's the first time that's happened in thousands of years. As far as I know anyway. I figured someone should probably, you know, write shit down. For posterity."
"Makes sense," Sawyer agreed, a bit distracted by trying to hoover up as many pancakes as possible.
"I should see if I can get you a phone call with my mother," Jacob said, setting one last stack of pancakes on the table and sitting down with them. "Up north our relationship with the Moon is a bit more intense due to the unusual day/night cycles. I remember stories of people 'channeling the Moon' on occasion. Nothing as permanent as Paul's situation of course. But she's the last one who knows most of the old stories and lore."
Jacob had come to them from the Far Northern pack, which lived somewhere in the Yukon wilderness. They'd been decimated by a series of disasters that had forced them out of their territory and reduced their numbers to a bare handful. Jacob and his two brothers, all alphas, had left to seek help from other packs around the world. Jacob had decided to stay here with them while he searched for a solution.
"That'd be great," Serena agreed. "That's some shit that needs to be written down as well. You guys really need to modernize. Oral tradition really isn't working out."
"Who's talking about oral?" Alicia asked as she shouldered her way through the back door, Mateo trailing behind her and still looking half asleep.
"Oral tradition," Jacob corrected while Serena and Sawyer tried not to laugh. "Serena thinks we need to modernize."
"She's damn right," Alicia agreed, pulling up a chair. "I've been digitizing Mom's old notes. And I'm adding some of my own. Actually useful stuff about shifter biology, you know. So that the next time an omega comes along we aren't all caught with our pants down."
"We should definitely set up a video call with your Mom," Serena said, pointing a fork at Jacob. "And see if we can't contact some of the other permanent packs as well. Set up some kind of database."
"I'm not sure the South American pack would cooperate," Mateo said with a rueful expression. "The Alpha is not exactly what you'd call sociable."
Mateo had fled the southern pack when his Alpha had tried to murder him. He was a tyrant who didn't allow other alphas in his pack, and killed them when they appeared. Mateo's mother had turned him in secret, knowing he would be an alpha, and Mateo had attempted to overthrow the old Alpha. It hadn't worked.
"The Eurasian pack is also fairly isolationist," Jacob added. "And very traditional. I'm not sure they agree with computers."
"What about the African packs? Or the Australian?" Alicia suggested.
"The South African packs and the Egyptian pack, maybe," Mateo said, scratching his chin. "The North African packs probably already have their own database, but they're hostile to everyone, not that I can blame them. From what I've heard, the Australian pack hasn't been seen or heard from in years. Their territory was already remote, but they started retreating even further around the height of British colonization. By the 1930's they were impossible to find. I heard one of the last of them died in a zoo."
There was a resounding grimace of sympathy from everyone at the table.
“Sawyer!”
All eyes turned to the hall door as Elliot, hair still wet from a shower, entered the kitchen and made an immediate beeline for his boyfriend, lifting him out of the chair into a bone breaking hug. Elliot was a big man, with something of the attitude of an overly friendly golden retriever.
“Where the heck did you go last night?” Elliot asked, burying his face in Sawyer’s hair. “It’s too soon after all that faerie shit to be disappearing on me!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Sawyer said, squeezing the other man. He was still uneasy about discussing what had happened, but it was easy to forget that when Elliot was holding him like this. “I spent the whole night following a rabbit around, that’s all. I’m fine.”
"Yeah, don't fuss so much Elliot," Alicia said. "Sawyer can handle himself."
"I know that," Elliot said defensively, holding Sawyer tighter. "I just don't think he should have to."
"I won't be able to if you break my ribs," Sawyer pointed out, squirming in Elliot's grip. The other man set him down, embarrassed.
"Sorry, I know I'm being silly," he admitted, looking at Sawyer with so much warmth in his gold-brown eyes that Sawyer could have melted, like a popsicle in the sun. "I just don't know what I'd do if I lost you."
Sawyer, flustered, looked away. He could feel the words 'I'm pregnant' on his lips, waiting to be said. He searched for the right way to say them, or even just something else to say, but found nothing.
"Come get a pancake you sap," Alicia said, filling in the silence before Sawyer could. "Before you give everyone cavities."
Elliot laughed and took the seat next to Sawyer, kissing his cheek and stealing one of his pancakes. Sawyer smiled, but the more wonderful and affectionate Elliot was the more uncomfortable Sawyer became.
"We were just talking about trying to set up some kind of database on the internet for information about wolf shifters," Serena told Elliot, restarting the conversation. "But it sounds like the packs don't cooperate very often. Why is that?"
"Hard to say," Elliot replied with a shrug. "Could be a wolfish thing. Most wolves don't like other packs moving in on their territory. And our difficulties with humans tend to make us reclusive. And there's a whole shifter attitude about self-reliance that I think makes us less likely to reach out. I mean, we didn't even know the Far Northern pack was in trouble until it had nearly been wiped out. We had no idea what was going on with the Southern pack. And we didn't tell them about everything with the witches and the Erlking either. There's a tendency not to think of them as being... part of our business, I guess."
"So, there's no practical reason?" Serena summarized.
"If that's the case, we could change things," Alicia agreed. "This database could be a step toward, I don't know, global pack unification or something."
"Is that something we want?" Mateo asked seriously. "No contact with other packs does mean we don't share information, but it also means men like my Alpha are limited in how much power they can end up with."
"But perhaps if your pack had not been isolated your Alpha would have been stopped before he took over your pack at all," Jacob suggested. "If we had some kind of... pack UN, where your pack could have expressed concerns about your Alpha and the other packs could have helped to remove him-"
"And how would they do that exactly? Marching warriors from some other pack into our territory to depose our leader? You can see where that starts to become a problem, yes?"
"You're right of course, but if the majority of the pack wants help and is asking for it, how else do we give it? Historically, arming a foreign rebellion doesn't go well either. And it's not like we can levy trade sanctions to try and pressure him out of office."
The conversation spun off into a political discussion about the merits of isolationism versus globalism that Sawyer was too wrapped up in his own problems to pay proper attention to. He pushed his eggs a
round his plate, worrying about how to tell Elliot.
The brush of fingers against his hand distracted him from his thoughts and he glanced up as Elliot laced their fingers under the table, his hand warm and calloused.
"You sure you're all right?" Elliot asked quietly, letting the rest of the table's heated discussion carry on without them. "You're quieter than usual."
Sawyer looked at him, wavering between decisions, the words right there in his mouth but unable to come out. Not yet, he decided. When they were alone, later.
"I'm just feeling a little off," he lied. "I think I ate something I shouldn't have last night."
"It happens," Elliot said with a sympathetic smile. "The wolf can be so stupid sometimes. Why do you think I had to shower before breakfast? Mine rolled in something that had to have been dead at least a week."
"Gross," Sawyer said, laughing under his breath. Elliot could always distract him, no matter how many worries were weighing him down.
"I mean, I hope it was something dead," Elliot went on with a grin, poking Sawyer in the ribs to make him laugh more. "That, or it went for a swim in a septic tank."
Sawyer made gagging noises that were only half faked.
"Stop," he begged through his smile. "I'll throw up, seriously. And if it turns out I ate whatever you rolled in I'll never forgive you."
Elliot laughed, pulled Sawyer close, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
"Go see Alicia when breakfast is over, all right?" he said.
"I don't need it," Sawyer said, embarrassed even as he leaned into Elliot's shoulder, relishing the contact. "It's just a stomach ache. It'll be gone by tomorrow."
"Do it for me," Elliot insisted. "Just in case."
"All right," Sawyer agreed, shaking his head and leaning away just far enough to kiss the corner of Elliot's mouth. "Since you're going to be a baby about it."
"A baby am I?" Elliot said, a wicked gleam in his eyes.
