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“Alpha! My alpha! Alpha brothers. I can wait to speak to you no longer.” A young adult male comes through the dark and into the light of the fire. He looks worried and scared, both about the events of the day and about approaching Azlan.
“My mate was taken. She is about to have our cub. She could be giving birth any day. If she gives birth in his custody…”
“We understand,” Azlan says. “We fully intend to launch an assault on Leonidas and reclaim all the lost mates.”
“A full assault? With what? He came with his machines. We were unable to fight them, even with our most advanced weaponry,” Kain interjects.
“We are here now,” Azlan says in reassuring tones, shooting ashut the hell uplook at Kain, who does not take the hint at all.
“Sure. Here with a human bride.” The male dares to be resentful. “A mate Leonidas would not be interested in. She is safe, but our women are not.”
I’ve heard enough. I shift the two sleeping babies in my arms so I don’t get the blood-flow cut off and pins and needles setting in. “Listen,” I say. “We’re going to get all the females back. All the moms, all the mates, and all the maidens. They’re coming back.”
I expect the male to ignore me, or tell me to shut up, or behave in some other dismissive way, but instead he nods. “Thank you, pride mother.”
The respect throws me for a loop, but that’s okay, because it seems to have satisfied the male who takes his leave. I guess it wasn’t me he took issue with, but Azlan.
There’s a heavy silence, in which I try not to feel too pleased about things, given how awful they are.
“Tell me what I just said was true,” I say to Azlan. “Because I just promised a lot.”
“I will not allow Leonidas to make a liar of you,” Azlan says.
Nyan comes to join us by the fire. He says nothing but warms his hands near the flames. He’s a comforting, solid presence on a very dark night. I haven’t heard him say a word since we landed, except to comfort the wounded. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in commenting how terrible Leonidas is, or how he deserves to be killed, or not. He just is Nyan. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“I’m seeing why none of you had Leonid brides,” I say. “This is a nightmare. A literal fucking nightmare. These poor women. These poor babies. Doesn’t he care about any of them?”
When Azlan first revealed that he’d gotten a human to make a kid with, I thought he was paranoid. Now I realize he was just being practical. It is every bit as bad as he described, and worse. I used to think that human social dynamics were harsh. Now I think humans are actually pretty fucking cool. We at least attempt to put boundaries around our cruelties most of the time. There are exceptions, I suppose. Maybe Leonidas is an exception to Leonid behavior. Maybe that’s why he’s so effective.
“He does not care one bit,” Azlan says. “Any cub that is not of his blood is worth less to him than a leaf on the wind. Leonidas craves control and dominance. We are the oldest of his offspring, but there are dozens of others. He considers himself immortal through the spreading of his seed.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“He doesn’t believe it to be stupid.”
“That’s somewhat how stupid works. That’s actually entirely how stupid works. You don’t know you’re dumb, and that makes you feel smart.”
“He is not stupid. He is devastatingly intelligent. He knew precisely when to make his move to claim the remaining females.”
“How?”
“How?” He frowns the question back at me.
“How.” I repeat. “How did he know when to come? How did he time the attack so well? Luck? Does he have spies in your camp? Or did someone betray everyone.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “How. I need to look into this.”
“Right. You look into that,” I say. “I’m going to milk the goats again. Here. Nyan. Take these two.”
I schlump the babies into Nyan’s big furred arms and go to milk again.
“Azlan! Are you coming!?”
Azlan
She’s a bossy little thing, but I am too proud of her to chastise her for the way she’s ordering me around like her owned beast. Many would go to pieces at finding themselves in a war zone. When I first met her, she was panicking over Growlers. Now she is dealing with infants and saving lives. She is every inch the pride mother I needed her to be. She is able to adapt swiftly as the situation requires her to.
I happily hold the goats for her as she milks them out, talking about how the babies will probably need to be fed every few hours and being able to sterilize and store milk, and hopefully making a milking machine of some kind.
