“Usually, there’s two lines of them on either side of the gate and we run out between them and they’re on us before they even shut us out here,” said Noah. “Why are they inthose little groups like that?”
I didn’t know.
But the tithes were moving. Most of them were taking off their clothes, folding them up and handing them off to a guard as they went through the gate. It was up to me if I wanted to do that. If I didn’t, I had been told it was highly likely my clothes would be ripped up and destroyed out there and then I’d have to find some way home naked tomorrow. But if I took them off now, the guards who were here could all leer at me the way they were leering at the tithes who were heading out.
Of course, I guess they probably perched up top of the wall and watched us get fucked, didn’t they? I was going to go have sex outside in a field, with a bunch of werewolves, practically in public.
When it was my turn, I took everything off and handed it over.
Noah was talking to the guard as I was stripping down. “What’s going on with them? Why aren’t they doing anything?” He nodded outside the gate.
The guards shrugged. “Who knows? Who understands those things?”
I looked back at Noah just in time to see him drop his pants, to see his hairy legs and his hairy genitalia, which might have been technically female but didn’t look particularly feminine to me, somehow. Maybe I stared too long.
Noah pressed into me from behind, naked. “Staring,” he teased.
“You look…” I turned around. “Good.”
He laughed into the nape of my neck. “Down girl, there’s lots of wolf action to go around.” He gave me a nudge. “Probably.”
I walked through the gate, and I saw that the other tithes were standing in a line, most of them with their arms crossed over their breasts, and their legs together, covering themselves.
The wolves prowled around on the perimeter, not one ofthem making any sort of move towards us.
I walked until I fell into line behind the tithe in front of me and then I stood in much the same way, trying to cover my nakedness, looking out at the wolves surrounding us.
Noah stood next to me, but he had his hands on his hips, not covering himself, and I decided I didn’t want to cover myself either, so I put my hands on my hips too, and then I started seeing other tithes doing the same thing.
We waited.
“What the fuck?” muttered Noah.
One of the other tithes yelled out, “Something wrong with you this month?”
A wolf darted out, grabbed the woman, tossed her over his shoulder and leaped off into the trees with her as she squealed.
A moment passed, and then it was as if we all decided to move at once.
The tithes took off in all directions and the wolves came after us.
I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. Noah had said it was dumb to run, but I was running. I ran, past wolves, past other tithes who were running, past the trees.
I ran past a wolf whose nostrils pricked the air and then turned to come after me.
I ran faster, looking over my shoulder at him. He was behind me, running behind me, chasing me, but he wasn’t overtaking me. I got the impression he was just keeping pace behind me, letting me run.
I went even faster. I crested up over another hill, wove through the trunks of trees, and when I looked back, there were two other wolves behind me too, flanking the first one.
I was out of breath. I was getting a stitch in my side.
Why was I even running?
I stopped. Just like that, I came to a halt, at the crest of the hill, between the trunks of two tall oak trees which had both left a carpet of leaves in a circle on the ground. In the light of the moon, they looked purplish instead of red and orange.
I panted and the three wolves moved around me in a circle, sniffing the air, sniffing me, looking me over.
I should have been cold, but I wasn’t. Maybe it was because I’d been running. Maybe it was because of being a tithe, the way it had altered my body.
