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“You need to relax,” I tell him. “Like, all your muscles.”
“I do not need to be told how to behave, human… grrrrr…” He lets out a growl of pain as Wulf’s teeth close harder on his hide. He should be careful; the wild thing will not hesitate to rip him open if he deems it necessary. I have seen them teach one another very violent lessons when need be.
I shrug. If he wants to learn the hard way, I’m not going to stop him.
Several minutes pass by before he is permitted to rise to his feet again. Finally Wulf moves away enough to let him rise. I can see how it galls him, being treated this way. He immediately returns to me. Clearly he has a bone to pick. He is not a friend. He might even be an enemy. But I am more protected than any other creature on the planet at this moment. If I decide I do not want him in my presence it will take no more than a flick of a brow to have him moved on. And if I were to scream, or show any sign of fear, that would be the bloody end of him.
“You should probably be careful,” I tell him. “They don’t like it when I’m threatened.”
“I see that.” His voice is raspy, and his throat is matted wet with the angry saliva of my protector.
“Have some soup,” I encourage him. “You could use something to eat. It’s made of local plants, sort of like pumpkins. Very nutritious and quite tasty.”
“I will not eat your human food. I came here to eat what the ancestors eat.”
“Right now, the ancestors are eating my food,” I point out with impeccable logic.
He growls under his breath, then looks around to ensure that nobody else heard him. Of course they did. He is in serious danger of receiving pack discipline he will not like if he is not careful. They may not understand his words, but they know what tones mean.
“You are human,” he says, putting on a fake warm voice the way people do when they amuse themselves by saying horrible things to their pets in a singsong-y jerk tone. He thinks he is fooling the wild ones. He is not. They are not easily fooled.
“You are vermin,” he smiles through sharp teeth. “You should be eradicated from every inch of the universe.”
He is not a pleasant creature. He is an angry, cocky, crude, nasty piece of work. But he is quite literally my only outlet for conversation and I’m not going to let that pass.
“Where did you come from?” I change the subject, the one where I get eradicated like vermin, to a question about him. In all times and all places throughout the universe, narcissistic dudes love talking about themselves.
I do not care what he thinks of me, but I am getting the feeling he is not of this planet. He has the aggrieved air of a tourist who has gone somewhere only to discover that it has already been ruined by people who got there first, but never seems to make the connection that he is no different than they are. Like someone who hates being in traffic, not knowing that they are traffic. Generally lacking self-awareness.
He is handsome, though. I mean, for a furred beast with a shitty attitude. He’s broad shouldered and narrow hipped, and the cocky kind of arrogant I always seem to fall for though I know I shouldn’t. Kurt and Steve were always very clear that it would not be a good idea to fall for, and especially not mate with, any alien species. So even if this one didn’t hate me with an apparent blood lust bordering on the psychotic, I’d probably be tempted, on account of my oppositional personality.
He looks at me askance. “I tell you that you should be put to death and you ask me where I am from?”
“You have less chance of killing me than my emotional support goat has of killing you.” I smile at him in that same fake sort of way he was just talking to me. He can dish it out. I hope he can take it.
I have been horribly lonely. I will take a conversation with a mortal enemy over nothing at all. When you haven’t talked to anybody in over a year, or what certainly feels like one, plans to destroy you forever sound as pleasant as plans for a romantic interlude.
“What did you do to them? How did you charm them?” He is questioning me more forcefully now, not noticing that Nya, the alpha female, is approaching him from the rear with an expression somewhere between the furious and lascivious. She had three whelps this year, but I believe her heat may be on the way.
