He was so fucking old, his body withered and gnarled, as he lay on a pallet on the ground. He looked like an ancient, petrified tree, but his eyes glowed brightly even in the darkness. “Who are you?” His voice sounded rough, like he didn’t speak much.
“Uh, I’m Corvin Fletcher, and this is my Packmate, Beckett Reid. We, uh, stumbled across the girl in the forest.”
The girl said something incomprehensible, and the old man grunted back. “She says you caught her in a trap.”
“We were after rabbits, I swear, Sir. We couldn’t have known…” That an ancient fucking Manix lived in the forest with a kid.
“No, I suppose you couldn’t.” He let out a deep sigh. “I’m glad. The Ancestors have been calling me home for a while now, but I couldn’t leave her out here defenseless. Couldn’t send her there. You’ll take care of her now.”
His breath rattled, like he was moments from death, making my heart thunder a million miles a minute. “What? No, wait. You can’t die!”
He grunted a laugh. “No one’s dying this minute, boy. Sit down and ask your questions.”
Oh man, did I have a thousand goddamn questions.
Six years later
It was hard to believe the girl in front of us was the same creature we’d caught in a net over half a decade ago. Her dark brown hair was shiny and full, her body slightly plumper now she didn’t have to hunt for all her food.
She sifted through the box of essentials we’d brought with us, cooing at the things she liked as she packed away the food. Beckett watched her, his eyes shining with affection.
She hadn’t had a name when we met her, but now we called her Kitten. Lorso had just called her Girl.
Fate was funny. Lorso had died days after we first met him and Kitten, like he’d been waiting for someone to shoulder the burden he’d been carrying. Turns out, Kitten was actually a teen when we met her, not a child like we’d thought. She was just tiny for her age, a little due to malnutrition, and a little because of genetics. Lorso said he’d found her abandoned on the northern perimeter of the Packlands, close to death by exposure, only a few weeks old.
He’d intended to take her to town, but he’d run into Legion soldiers bragging about beating the shit out of a half-blood for fun, and heard how the Alpha General had just laughed when the half-breed complained. Lorso had decided that a life as a hermit was better than a life of torment.
So, he’d raised the baby, and taken care of her long after his spirit became restless and ready to move on. But he’d held onto life, because in his own way, he’d loved her.
After his death, we’d started bringing her food and clothes—she’d been wearing rough dresses fashioned from Lorso’s scraps when we met her. We’d taught her to speak English, which was its own hurdle. She was fiery, our Kitten. And easily frustrated. But then we’d introduced her to books, and it was like she was a sunflower in full bloom. You couldn’t help but stare at her brilliance. She still couldn’t write, but at least she could read.
Every week we’d visit, until it became the best part of our week. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this author to release the sequel. Thank you, Beckett.” She hugged my Packmate, and he held her tightly.
“I found you something else,” Beckett told her, pulling out a laminated card from his back pocket. “Four-leaf clover. People say they’re good luck. Thought you could use it as a bookmark.”
She took the card, and read it slowly. Beckett had inscribed something on the back, though wouldn’t show me what it was. Kitten looked up and gave him a smile so joyous, it made my heart want to burst.
“Thank you, Beck. I’ll keep it forever.” She walked over to her bed and pulled out a small metal box, no bigger than a loaf of bread. An old munitions box was my guess. We’d both seen the box before—it held the keepsakes of a girl who had no need for material possessions. It wasn’t jewels she kept in there, but the wing of a butterfly she found, and the stick and string doll Lorso had made for her when she was a child. Dried flowers and shiny rocks. A small hunk of gold she found in the creek bed sat right next to a piece of river-polished quartz. She didn’t see that one was worth more than the other.
She went outside to collect some of the wood I’d just chopped, and we followed behind her. It was hard to tell when we’d stopped being kids raising another kid, and started acting like a Pack, but at some point it had just occurred naturally. Not officially, though, because Lorso had instilled a fear so deep into Kitten that it was part of her core nature.
That fear? Maxton and the other Manix.
We hadn’t tried to dissuade her—partly because we liked not having to share her. She was our Kitten, and we were inherently selfish.
But everything changes eventually.
“Kitten?”
“Yes, Corvin?” she mocked, mimicking my deep voice.
“Do you want to be part of our Pack?”
She froze, then turned slowly toward me. “Would you move out here?”
I chewed my lip. We couldn’t. I had an apprenticeship as a Legion mechanic, and Beckett taught at the high school. Plus there was—
“We can’t. You’d have to move to Maxton,” Beckett said softly.
