25
KOJO
Iwake to the sound of her breathing and the scent of rain on dry earth mixed with what was not there before — my scent. It has woven itself into hers, threaded through the wild honey and the damp clay until the two are inseparable, and when I inhale I cannot tell where she ends and I begin. The claim mark on her neck is a raised bite that has already begun to scar into permanence, and I trace it with my eyes without touching it. She is sleeping, and I will not wake her.
Twelve,my Bouda says, and I close my eyes.
Twelve cubs minimum, Alemayehu. Six males and six females. The females will carry the sovereign frequency and the males will be hunters. We will need a large dwelling. Multiple rooms. A courtyard for training. I have been thinking about the layout while you were sleeping and I believe--
“She has been my mate for less than a week,” I whisper, and my Bouda’s response is immediate.The Matriarch would have had us breeding within the hour. You are soft, Alemayehu. Soft and slow and excessively romantic. It is embarrassing.
I look at Kendra’s face in the darkness, the curve of her cheek, her hand resting near her neck where the mark sits. Herbreathing is deep and even, her body still recovering from what we did to each other, and the memory of it sends heat through me that has nothing to do with my furnace. How she climbed on top of me and took control. How she looked down at me with those dark eyes and told me I was not going anywhere. The sounds she made when she found her rhythm, sounds I will carry in my chest for the rest of my life.
You are thinking about it again,my Bouda observes.Your temperature just spiked again. If you keep this up you will cook her in her sleep.
I ease my arm from beneath the blanket and sit up slowly, keeping my weight off the mattress so it does not shift. She does not stir. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand, bare feet pressing into the wooden floor, and I look back at her. The blanket has slipped from her shoulder and the mark is fully visible, dark against her skin, the edges raised where teeth broke through. Mine. My Bouda’s. I did that without permission, and the guilt of it sits in me.
Stop,my Bouda says, and the humor drops from his voice.She told you. She chose you. Every part, she said. Do not poison this with guilt, Alemayehu, or I will make your next shift so painful you will feel it in your teeth for a week.
I go to the bathroom and run warm water over a cloth, wringing it until it is damp and not dripping. I carry it back to the bed and kneel beside her, pulling the blanket down gently to her waist. She has dried sweat on her collarbone and the faint salt residue of tears on her cheeks, and I clean her with careful strokes, the cloth moving across her skin. Her neck first, around the mark but not over it, the wound is still fresh and tender. Her shoulders, the slope of them, the place where my hands gripped her while she rode me. Her arms, the insides of her wrists where the veins run blue beneath the dark skin.
She murmurs in her sleep and turns toward my hand, her face pressing into the warmth of the cloth, and the trust in that unconscious movement almost undoes me.
You did well,my Bouda says quietly. No sarcasm. No commentary about cubs or breeding or the urgency of our bloodline.
I finish cleaning her, pull the blanket up to her chin, tuck the edges around her shoulders, and press my lips to the crown of her head. She smells like home.
Now,my Bouda says, and the sarcasm returns in full force.I have been patient. I have been respectful. I have waited while you performed your mating ritual and your cleaning ritual and your staring-at-her-face ritual. But my body has been vibrating since you claimed her and if you do not let me run in the next sixty seconds I am going to shift you on this bedroom floor and break every piece of furniture on my way out.
I walk down the stairs, through the front room, and out the cabin door into the night. The cold hits my bare skin and my furnace compensates immediately, steam curling off my shoulders in the dark air. The snow has melted from the paths but it clings to the treeline in patches, white against the dark trunks, and the sky above the pines is clear enough to show stars. I breathe in and my nose separates the forest into layers, wet bark, pine sap, the mineral tang of snowmelt running through cold earth, the distant musk of a deer herd bedded down somewhere north of the community lands.
I check the cabin one more time, listening for her heartbeat through the walls. Steady. Slow. Safe. “Take us,” I say, and I surrender the reins.
The shift rips through me and my Bouda does not waste a single second on the other side of it. His paws hit the wet ground and he is running before the last bone finishes cracking into place, low and fast through the trees, his ridge erect andvibrating with an energy I have never felt from him before. Joy. Uncomplicated, unfiltered, animal joy — no language or context or justification required. He is running. He has a mate and a mark and a future and he cannot contain it.
The snow,I observe from within, watching the wet slush splash up against his belly as he cuts through a patch that has not yet melted.You hate the snow.
My Bouda does not respond. He tears through another drift, sending a spray of white into the dark air behind him, and I feel his amusement ripple through our shared body like a current. He does not hate the snow tonight. Tonight he does not hate anything.
He runs the perimeter of the community lands first, a wide loop that takes him past the darkened cabins and the shuttered market stalls and the carnival with its dormant lights, his nose cataloging every scent, every creature, every shift in the air. Then he turns north toward the border, where the forest thickens and the pines give way to older growth, oaks and birches with trunks too wide for a man to wrap his arms around, their branches bare and pale against the night sky.
His nose catches the elk before his eyes find it. A bull, old and heavy, bedded down in a hollow between two fallen oaks, his antlers resting against the bark. My Bouda slows to a walk, then stops, pressing low to the ground, his breathing so shallow that the steam from his muzzle barely rises.
Watch,I tell him, and the word carries something I have not given him before. Not a command. An invitation.
My Bouda tilts his head, considering the elk, and I feel the calculation moving through him, the angles and distances and wind directions processing faster than any human mind could manage. He does not charge. A wolf would charge. A lion would circle and pounce. My Bouda opens his mouth and releases a cackle, low and tight, aimed not at the elk but at the ground tothe bull’s left. The frequency bounces off the frozen earth and the fallen oak and reaches the elk’s ears from the wrong direction.
The bull’s head snaps left. His body tenses toward the phantom sound, muscles bunching for a sprint away from a predator that is not there. In the half second his attention commits to the wrong direction, my Bouda is already moving, not toward the elk but in a wide arc to the right, silent, his paws finding the soft earth between the patches of snow. He circles behind the hollow and comes up on the elk’s blind side, the side the animal just decided was safe, and by the time the bull registers the real threat it is too late.
My Bouda’s jaw closes on the elk’s throat, clean and absolute, and the animal drops without a sound. His teeth hold the pressure until the pulse stops, and then he releases and steps back.
I am proud of you,I tell him, and I mean it with everything I have.You are brilliant, Bouda. You have always been brilliant, and I have not said it enough.
My Bouda stands over the kill, chest heaving, steam pouring from his muzzle in the cold air, and I feel something move through him that he does not have the words for either. He lifts his head and lets out a cackle, long and high, the sound rolling through the trees and bouncing off the water in the distance. It is not a weapon this time. It is a celebration.
Then his ears flatten and his body goes rigid. A scent cuts through the blood and the pine and the snowmelt, one my Bouda recognizes before I do. Ozone and magic. Old power. Sandalwood so deep it sits in the back of the throat.
A shape moves between the trees to our left. Jet black fur, larger than my Bouda’s body, with gold eyes that catch the starlight and throw it back. The ridge along his back is massive, the spikes taller and more symmetrical than mine, and his paws leave no prints in the snow they melt. King Amir’s Bouda formmoves without sound, his body gliding between the trunks — the forest rearranging itself to let him pass.
