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If only I could do something about this besides struggling to focus, feeding and warming my body, and waiting to die. It was not despair I felt; it was frustration. I had been out here for the first half of my self-exile, far from my territory in sector seven and my pack, and my symptoms were getting worse.
I had been alone in the jungle for almost sixty moonsets, and I awoke each morning gripped by the fear that this would be the day my true self finally vanished.
It was a slow death of the mind. My father had described it once as “the lights of a great sector winking out, one by one.” He had seen both his brothers go through it, and I was glad that he wasn’t alive to see it happening to me.
It had started in early spring with my sudden cravings for raw meat. Not rare, but still bleeding under my teeth. The craving, like my hunger for sex or the bone-deep loneliness, I had resisted for as long as I could, praying that it wasn’t a sign of what I thought it was.
But then my temper had gotten short and my violent impulses became more common even in my male form. I had felt my beast-self snarling and pacing inside me, as if my civilized self was a cage it aimed to break free from. And then I had known.
Delven—my Beta—had known as well. The horror on his face when he had realized my fate would stay with me until my last thought.
We had been fighting off a swarm of mudsnappers that had invaded the abandoned section of my sector, picking off our livestock. It had been a hard fight; mudsnappers were fast, limber and tough, with beaks as sharp as nano blades and enough strength to crush a grown male in their coils. But we had won. And in the aftermath, Delven had turned and seen me licking the blood off my hands.
“Naxer,” he had whispered, and I had looked up at him and realized what I had been doing. There had been no hiding it anymore. I had lowered my hands and simply nodded.
“How long?” His chest had heaved. He was a decade younger than I, and unmated as well. The fear of mating sickness already haunted him.
“Since the sun-cycle’s first flowering. I wasn’t certain then, but I am now.”
“We have to get you a female to mate with. One Earthling the Omers sells. That should calm your Wulfaen until…”
“No.”
His yellow-green eyes had widened in shock. “But Naxer…”
“You know how I feel about using slaves. I’ve spent too many meetings with the pack fighting to convince them that the practice of purchasing Earthlings is deplorable. It’s hypocritical to buy a female for myself.”
“But it could save you,” he replied.
“Not at that price. I will let myself fade away entirely before I let that happen.”
He had lifted his chin, found his courage, and looked resigned before saying, “We will have to tell the others.”
Doing so had been one of the hardest trials of my life. Giving up being Alpha and planning for the pack’s future after my death hadn’t been easy either. But next to all of this infernal waiting, it felt less so.
Delven was a good man, and he deserved better than what he would have to come and do once my degeneration was complete. Though I knew he would step up to lead after me as I had asked him to, his new position as Alpha of sector seven meant that Delven would be the one to kill me.
The night after I had told him, we had gotten very drunk on crimsonvine ale and talked of old victories and adventures with such gusto it was like we had been trying to scare off the darkness with our bravado. The grief had lain behind all that bragging and laughter while he had reminded me repeatedly of my great deeds and of a life well lived.
A third of a life. Barely that. But I had fought well. Led well. Not even my bitterest rival could say otherwise.If only…I shook my head, trying not to think about it. But the thought stuck in my head as I gnawed my dried branchrunner meat and then gave Chaser a meat strip of his own when he whined.
If only I had found my Sheleki, then I wouldn’t be in this predicament.Well, no Wulfaen Gladiator would.But as it stood, our race was running out of solutions to prevent extinction. We had tried a surrogate program, but that only produced males, and our interplanetary visits resulted in no females of breeding compatibility. Our race needed to find females for Gladiators to claim and mate, and despite the unseemly proposition of buying Earthling females from the Omers, most Gladiators believed that was our only solution for survival.
But I know better.
Our mating can’t be forced.
As it had been from the beginning of time, a Wulfaen chooses their Sheleki, and only that match allows them to breed strong female pups. In order to survive, the Wulfaen needed to find the perfect mate, a female destined for them alone, whose soul resonated with their Wulfaen and whose body and mind and heart were a perfect match for their own.
But instead of our race inviting the Earthlings, they had turned to something I deplored, buying females from the Omers. Now our potential mates were being abducted from Earth and other planets by the Omers and brought to this planet with the goal of forced matings. The act was cruel and unjust and ensured that any mating these females engaged in with us started with trauma. They introduced these females to this planet as slaves on an unfamiliar, dangerous planet.
Most Gladiators did not want to see their true mate treated that way, especially not me or most of my pack brothers. The only one of my pack that was a supporter of buying Earthlings was my cousin Torian, whose excesses had nearly gotten him expelled from our pack twice so far. I’d heard that many of the Earthlings who had escaped the Omers needed to find a place on Planet Omers to make their home. Their return to Earth would never happen—the only transport home was controlled by the slavers who abducted them. Given their plight, I had been planning to investigate ways to convince willing Earthlings to consider making sector seven their home, but the mating sickness had caught me first.How ironic.
Hopefully Delven will pick up where I left off.
Meanwhile, I had deliberately chosen my last stand as far into slaver territory as I could venture by myself. It was one of the roughest stretches of jungle on the planet, far from any proper civilization but not so far from our sector that Delven would get himself killed hunting me. My Wulfaen would give him trouble enough.
While I waited, however, I knew the only ones likely to stumble on me while I was at my most dangerous were the accursed slavers. And that was fine with me. And if they showed up before my higher mind guttered out like a flame in a high wind… Well, I had come armed and with more of a grudge than I expected them to handle.
