Page 21 of Feral Werewolves
“I get the feeling something else brought you out here,” said Kestrel.
“I found her,” I said. “The tithe. Clementine. On social media.”
Kestrel nearly dropped the eggs.
I had to reach out and steady the basket.
He yanked them back and stalked toward the house, fuming. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Paladin?”
I went after him. “I know it’s against the rules, but she wouldn’t report us. I know it. Besides, the punishment is usually just banishment from the gatherings for a few months, and we take months and months off all the time.”
There were two kinds of punishment that could be handed down out here. Punishment from the government, which tended to be sort of stupid and not that big of a deal. Or punishment from whatever chief werewolf ran the area, which tended towards the permanent, violent, and painful. Maiming, body parts being cut off, death. That kind of stuff.
Obviously, Griff, the boss wolf out here, would not give a fuck if we chatted online with a tithe, even before he’d gotten a mate and become super mate-positive. It wasn’t his rules it was against.
It was the government’s rules.
I remembered right after the Change when lots of debates were happening about what to do about wolves. There were a bunch of people who wanted us all rounded up and shot in the head. I was still only human back then, of course. I didn’t know I was going to shift in a few years. But the mass executions didn’t happen, so I guessed I should be grateful for that.
For the most part, the government seemed to shy away from doing anything decisive about us. It was a compromise, trying to appease the family members of the werewolves and the people who had family members dead at the werewolves’s hands. (Claws?) Of course, this had started to be all the same people as the issue went on, and I think everyone got confused. Sure, your niece had been killed by werewolves on the night of the Change—wait, no, they called it something else. The First Full Moon or something. I couldn’t remember. Anyway, your niece was dead, but also your cousin had shifted into a wolf and was hunkered down in your aunt’s basement freaking out that he was going to be killed.
“What do you think would happen if she accepted your friend request?” said Kestrel.
I lifted my shoulders. “Nothing.”
“Okay, then, why bother?”
I sighed. “All right, fine. I guess I feel like maybe it would be a good thing if we could get to know her a little, and then, if she comes back next month—”
“Get to know her before we gang-rape her again, you mean?” He snorted dismissively and started sorting through the eggs, moving the smaller ones to one side.
“You know it’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
So, then I started to help him put the smaller eggs in the container we used for the smaller eggs. We had electricity and we had plumbing and all of that out here. It was provided through some weird arrangement with the government and the utility companies. Certain utilitycompanies were totally local, and they’d been entirely subsumed into the exiled wilderness out here. If all of those companies had gone belly up right away, it would have had a bad effect on the economy, so they were subsidized.
Mostly, if things broke out here, though, we were on our own. We had to find someone who knew how to fix a leaking pipe or go around faulty electric wiring. A lot of times, we could. Or we watched YouTube videos and figured it out ourselves.
“You know they like it,” I said.
He picked up one of the eggs that I was putting with the small eggs and moved it into the container with the big eggs. We had old egg cartons from grocery stores—not the styrofoam kinds which tended to fall apart, but the plastic ones. “They do. But that doesn’t mean they really want it.”
“But what if she does really want it?”
“I don’t think you should get attached, Paladin,” he said. “She’s not, you know, like a stray cat or something. We can’t keep her.”
I lifted my chin. “You want to keep her, too.”
He wouldn’t meet my gaze. “She probably wouldn’t even want it to be us again when she comes back. She’d probably want to try out some other wolves, get a different experience. And whatever happens, it’s six or eight full moons for her, and then she’ll stop being a tithe and we’ll never see her again, so it’s stupid to care about her.”
“You want to keep her.”
“And even if it happened, like, even if we mated to her and she mated to us and stuff… even if I thought that was really real, which it isn’t. It’s just women who are wired strangely deciding to live with wolves forever for whatever reason. Even if that happened, someone will topple Griff down there and take over, and it might be Red, and if that happens, they will take her away from us and do God-knows-what to her at that compound.”
I drew back. “You really think that.”
“If Griff’s gone this soft, it’s a matter of time.”
