“We should eat,” I say.
And so we join the feast. The pack is mostly female, I notice. There are a few males, but they are young and on the sickly side. I suppose that is why the alpha’s daughter is to be given to us. I do wonder what happened to the healthy warrior-aged men, but asking that at such a time feels like a misstep. These mountains are dangerous places. We have made our way up in daylight, but there is evidence to suggest the evening will be more perilous.
Tabby is shy and quiet. She sits and she eats and she answers Thorn’s questions with one-word answers while the pack’s youngest members do their best to steal the food from both their hands in a game that seems to amuse them greatly. Most of them are in their human forms, but a few turn to cubs and tangle and roll around on the rocky stone as if it were comfortable. Wolves here are made tough early, conditioned by the environment in which they live.
I feel some pity for Tabby. It is quite obvious she did not want to be given as a mate, but we need one, and we will not be leaving this place without her.
“You’re a tall one,” a pretty, more mature woman approaches me. “Handsome, like your brothers.”
“Thank you,” I reply. She smiles broadly and archly, her eyes sparkling. The old man alpha of this pack clearly doesn’t attend to the needs of all his many mates that often. The three of us are swiftly engaged in conversation by other women of the pack who take an obvious interest in us. Tabby, meanwhile, seems mostly interested in the food.
“It’s a pity,” the she-wolf speaking to me says.
“What’s a pity?”
Her lips part and draw back over shining teeth in a smile that is not at all friendly.
“You should be careful. The mountains are inhabited by all kinds of evil.” She laughs a little as she gives the warning, as if it is an amusing thing.
“I’ll keep an eye out for evil,” I say, turning and walking a short way away. There is drink here, a sort of mountain mead made from wild bees. I find the taste somewhat bitter, but on a night like this, any beverage is worth celebrating with.
I glance over at Tabby, who is sitting with her siblings, eating as though this might be her last meal.
I am glad for a moment to think about what I am going to do with this girl. She really is too young for Skor and me. Should we simply give her to Thorn? He is much closer to her age and seems enamored of her, though I notice that he too is being closely engaged by several other females.
The pack doesn’t seem to be short of women, and it seems as though we could all have been given our own mates, but Iam sure that a lot of the females here are the alpha’s mates, and of the others, I notice that most, if not all, are already mothers. Pups wander in and out, grabbing at their mother’s hands for attention and diving into the sweeter treats with great excitement.
“It comes in many forms,” the woman who approached me says, her voice floating to me from behind. “Much more than what you think. Don’t trust a tree if you didn’t think it was there before, that’s all I’ll say about that.”
Skor walks up and nudges me before I can ask about trees that are or are not there.
“Yes, brother?”
“Where’s our mate?”
I look around. I had assumed she was still eating, or perhaps playing with some of the pups. I saw a few of them clambering over her back and forth as if she were a climbing frame. The sight was quite cute. Reminded me of our own, much younger sister who still lives at home.
Right now, she is no longer in view.
We search for her, and ask after her, but judging by the grins and giggles of those who have a sense of her, it soon becomes apparent that our mate has left the feast.
“You are hunters, are you not?” her father booms when the question of Tabby’s whereabouts gets to him. “Hunt your mate!”
A cheer goes up from the pack. I get the impression this is part of the ritual, and that we were distracted on purpose to allow this moment to happen. They’ve given us a mate, but they’re going to make us claim her.
“They’re fucking with us,” Thorn says as we put some distance between ourselves and the feasting pack. “They think it’s funny.”
“Night is coming,” Skor adds. “The warnings about the night…”
“Yes, they’re not good. Let’s find her,” I say.
As we prepare to hunt our missing mate down, I wonder if this is a game that is all part of the ritual, or if she is running in fear, if the prospect of being mated is too terrible for her to face, if she is choosing death at the vile hands of twisted rotting things rather than be touched by us.
“We really need to find her,” Skor says, stating the obvious in a way that does not clarify matters at all. He seems more concerned than either Thorn or I. He likes her, clearly. He may even be feeling some kind of natural attraction in the form of the mate bond. I may also be feeling something I do not want to feel. No time to talk about it now.
We move out in human form, then when we have put enough distance between ourselves and the feast, we strip, hide our weapons, and slide into our wolf selves.
The moment I feel my fur, the world shifts. I no longer see mountains as a series of rocks, one bigger than the other. I scent the wind, find it full of creatures and darkness and the unmistakable scent of dead things.
