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.
