I watch her rump move beneath the green dress she’s still wearing. She has a shapely ass. The memory of being balls deep in that snug little hole is giving me great pleasure even now.
“Yes,” I agree. “She did.”
“We owe her the same level of protection,” he says. “She doesn’t know what’s going to be good for her yet, but we can show her a world she has no notion even exists. Did you see that camp where they all lived?”
I did. It was a ramshackle shit hole with nothing to recommend it. An idle king at a dead hearth, surrounded by brides who seemed far too closely related to him to be suitable mates, trading off the daughter of some poor creature who was given to him in the hopes of finding favor.
Tabby’s father plays on his role as the Alpha at the End of the World to full advantage, but there’s nothing really in it for him. Nothing for him to spend his riches on, nobody to lord his power over. He is a haunted, hunted king, and we just took his crown jewel.
He won’t like that. We were supposed to die last night, and she was supposed to return to him with a belly full of pups. He mightsimply write our disappearance off as us all having perished, but I am certain I felt eyes on us as we packed camp to leave.
“Skor?”
I realize I forgot to reply to Krall.
“Yes,” I say. “It was fucking grim.”
“It was a hole in a rock,” he says. “She deserves more than that. There’s a nobility to her that transcends that origin.”
He’s putting a lot of polite and pretty words on the fact that she’s smart, fuckable, and of course, filled to the brim with magical energy that prevented her from becoming just another frostbitten mangy mountain wolf.
“She’s going to be happy with us,” he says.
By the gods of fang and fur, he is so determined to cast himself as her savior even as he forces her to leave her home against her will. I am aware that I am not a good man. I am not even adjacent to good. I am selfish. I am cruel. I have ulterior motives that make me untrustworthy. But I will never tell myself that I am doing my victims a favor. I am doing myself one.
CHAPTER 5
Tabby
“Is that it? Is that Last Stop?”
There are three squat, low-slung buildings crouching against the sunset, and a sort of spiky building that must be the church. Or maybe the candy store. Thorn has told me all about the various kinds of candy that can be obtained, and I am interested to try some before I inevitably escape.
“This is it,” Thorn yawns.
I pick up my pace, running toward the town. My mates follow in my wake. They are tired, but they are conditioned through battle and stuff, I guess. I don’t know exactly what they were doing before they came to get me, but the fact they wear uniforms makes me think they were doing some war stuff of one kind or another.
Thorn catches up, grabs me by the hand and leads me into town.
One of the buildings saysTrainon it. There’s metal tracks leading up to it, a and a big snorting metal creature standing outside. It is black and shiny and the size of a… nothing I’ve ever seen before. It looks like a building on wheels in some way. I suppose it could be alive, animated by a working of magic I am yet to experience.
“What’s that?”
“That’s a train,” Thorn says. “You can get inside it and it runs along those tracks and you can travel long distances without walking.”
“Nice,” I say.
I know what trains are, sort of theoretically. My mother’s books had references to some non-magical things here and there, but seeing things for real is always different than imagining them based on text on a page.
“Come. The candy store is right here,” Thorn says, taking me by the hand and tugging me away from the train station. He leads me into a building, which is a novel experience all of its own. Walls have been constructed to cut out the view from the inside, and a roof protects the interior from elements. Our pack dwells in caves, not in constructions. So this is quite a fascinating experience. I like the way the walls here have been amended so as to allow various wares to be displayed upon them. Every inch of the place shows some kind of thought and delight.
A lovely-looking elderly woman with thick spectacles and a gingham apron smiles at us over her counter, which is almost taller than she is.
“Hello, dearies,” she says. “What sweeties would you like today?”
I am surrounded by food. Not meat food, but very human fare. There is no sugar in the mountains, except very rarely in packages that come from travelers. I can smell the sweetness so intensely it feels as though it is already inside me.
I don’t know what any of these items are, so I look to Thorn. He seems like the sort to know what to get.
