Skor looks at me, as if he expects me to respond.
“We are going to have to find a way to share her that we are all happy with, but I think letting her sleep now is a good idea. When she wakes, she’s all yours.”
That satisfies Thorn.
“Good. Then I am going in to watch her sleep. Someone should be with her. The two of you can find some other way to entertain yourselves.”
He steps into the cabin and shuts the door behind him quietly.
Skor looks at me. “This is not going to be easy.”
What a hell of an understatement.
CHAPTER 7
Thorn
The train rolls into Broken Belly just as night is falling. There’s no dinner car yet, and all the passengers are hungry. My hunger is for more than food. I have been watching Tabby sleep for hours, and thinking about what I am going to do about my overbearing brothers in arms. I will not be pushed around. Rank and age have no place in this equation. I am also a force to be reckoned with, even if I am not an aged, tortured warrior. I think Tabby quietly likes me the best.
She starts to stir as the train slows.
She opens her eyes and smiles at me.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I say back. “We’re coming into town.”
“Why’s it called Broken Belly?”
“Because some settlers came out this way a few hundred years ago and starved,” Krall says.
I want to stake out a claim on Tabby, something she’ll remember like the candy store.
“I’m taking her to have some dinner when we stop. We’ll be there overnight, and it’s a bigger town. Better food.”
Krall and Skor exchange looks. I sense they’re about to tell me no because they don’t want her loose among people. But they promised, and if we are going to take her to Eclipse City she has to get used to the world a little at a time.
“I want dinner,” Tabby says. “I’m ravenous.”
They don’t want to set her off. So they agree. The dynamics of our little pack are already starting to shift in favor of this magic she-wolf.
Tabby
There are people everywhere in this town. Dozens of them throng the streets. I find myself feeling a strange mixture of feelings I can only describe as predatory repulsion.
Thorn was right. This town is much larger. It has dozens upon dozens of buildings, and roads paved between them. There are even smaller versions of the train that trundle around, and even smaller versions that have wheels and can go wherever. I find myself wide-eyed and overstimulated, but still hungry.
Thorn leads me into a building that smells like a lot of food—amazing, and like a lot of humans—awful.
“This is a restaurant,” he explains. “They cook meals here. There will be foods you’ve never had before. Try whatever you want.”
The restaurant is full of people, all seated around us. I’ve never been around this much anything before. Even when the pack gathered in the mountains, there were less than twenty of us. This is… unbearable.
Thorn lifts a small book that contains a list of foods we can eat. I don’t recognize most of the food, and I am far too distracted by everything going on around me to care.
“What would you like?” A young woman in a white shirt and short black skirt comes and takes our order. She gives me a slightly quizzical look, and I become immediately aware that I am not dressed the way others in the restaurant are.
My dress has been through days of hard magical battle and even harder travel and skirmishes on trains, and multiple rough breeding sessions. My hair is long and wild compared to hers, which is sleek and tied back. I look like a mess, and that matters.
