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“Where are you from? I mean—” Luca shrugged. “How did you get here?”
Despite the insidious aura radiating from Nash Kelli, Isaiah still smiled. “Are you asking me as in what country or what solar system?”
Luca shrugged and fiddled with his fork before laying it beside his paper plate. “I… I…” Luca huffed. “I don’t know.”
“Here. Just like humans. We evolved alongside them.” As a primitive race, humans had been weaker, but their ability to adapt had given them an advantage even the Fenrir didn’t anticipate. Strength and cunning meant nothing when your competitor could create tools and weapons.
“But I’ve never—” Luca pressed his lips together.
“You’ve never…”
“I don’t know… it’s weird. I’d think I would have met one of you before. But that doesn’t make sense and at the same time…” He glanced at the shell of a man housing the most dangerous creature ever created. A man Luca clearly loved.
“When you met us, you felt like you should know us?” Isaiah already knew the answer.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what I felt.”
Nash shifted in his seat.
“It’s normal. We can recognize our own when we’re paired with a wolf. Our Betas have exceedingly strong instincts even without a wolf.” To Nash, Isaiah said, “As I’m sure you’ve experienced with Luca.”
A vee formed between Nash’s eyes. “What are you trying to say?”
“That Luca is one of us and you—you used to be.”
Both Luca and Nash exchanged confused expressions.
“You think I’m one of you?” Luca said.
“I know you are. And if Mr. Kelli hadn’t been, he wouldn’t be able to house the Anubis.”
Nash sat back. “Past tense?”
It hurt Isaiah’s heart to know the man had once been his people. “You died and were infected by the ichor.” Now he was one of the untouchables who no longer had a home.
“My parents were from North Carolina. I was born there. My grandparents from Mexico.” Luca laughed a little. “We’d know if we weren’t human.”
“There was an event, a very long time ago, called the Cataclysm. Varu without wolves were absorbed into the human population. And their descents, like you, have no idea who they really are.” Despite dominant genes, the knowledge of self was lost. And without a wolf, they'd grow old and die.
“The rest of us were separated from our wolves.” And most had succumbed to the shock or the sense of hopelessness that followed. “Because of that, we don’t age, we don’t die a natural death, we cannot have children.”
Although some fates were worse. The Anubis being the worst of them.
“What do you mean by separated?” Luca said.
“We used to share forms. They us and we them.”
“You could Phase,” Nash said.
“Yes.” When the voice of Isaiah’s Fenrir kept him company, when it shared the rush of the change from one life form to another. When life had purpose rather than existing and hoping tomorrow his world—the world of his people—would change.
Now with Luca, it could.
“Then your wolves—Fenrir—are like the Anubis?” There was only innocence in Luca’s eyes. But then, how could he know?
At least Isaiah managed not to flinch. “No. There is nothing else like the Anubis. It is...unique.”
“I’ve killed an awful lot of them for it to be unique.”
