Page 11 of Camp Dire

This completely floors me. All the fight drains out of me and I sag against the wall. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired or confused as I do now.

“Oh my God! You weren’t the dick at the camp when you were ‘correcting’ little Ralfie. I was.”

He gives me a slow blink but doesn’t correct me either. I cautiously step forward, one foot in front of the other but go slowly so, that if he…attacks or charges or growls I can reclaim that space, and snatch the robe from his fingers.

“Please sit. I’ll sit over here in the chair if you sit on the bed. I worry some of this won’t be easy to…digest.”

“That…is a lousy choice of words.”

I quickly wrap the robe around me and cinch the belt as tight as I can before I sit down on the edge of the bed on one side. He pulls the chair up to the same side but leaves enough space that I don’t feel trapped.

“We are a species called Lupin.” I know enough to know that means wolf in a whole bunch of languages. “We don’t exactly know where we came from other than maybe Ancient Rome. Either way, there are small groups of us all around the world. We usually remain pretty self-contained for the most part, probably because we were hunted at one point or another throughout history.”

So, he’s telling me he and all of his friends are…not human. Sure. Cool. No biggie.

Chapter Eleven

Merrik

I can’t tell if she believes any of this or not, but she’s at least pretending to listen. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to tell her who I was but given the circumstances at least she isn’t questioning whether we really exist.

“Dire County is a little different than a lot of the other Lupin communities in the fact we are about half and half in our population demography.”

“Half and half? Half…what you are and half…?”

“Human.”

“Do, um, all the humans know…about you?”

“Not all of them. We have a college on the very edge of town and none of the humans there know unless they knew before they started.”

“Before?”

“People do know about us…when they have married into the Lupin community or one of their parents have married one of our wolves.”

“People marry into…? I mean, they can…um, you can…,” she interweaves her fingers together to try to show me what she means and is cute as hell doing it, “with humans?”

I nod. “Annie’s mother is one of the humans that have mated and married one of our wolves.”

“Annie? She…knows about you guys?”

I nod for her.

“She…has a…what do you call it? A mate? Annie has a mate?”

“If she would get her head out of her ass she’d have a mate in Larry.”

“You know about that?” I nod. “Is Larry a wolf?”

I shake my head this time. “I think that’s one of the problems. She’s watched her mom fall in love with a wolf who will stay true and devoted to her mother all his life and beyond and she thinks that is the only way to be sure someone really loves her.”

“You’re… different from…men when you, um, mate?”

“We have what’s known as a destined mate, the only woman or man who will hold our heart for the entirety of our lives.”

I can almost smell the curiosity coming from Piper now. “Destined mates? You marry only once?”

“Marry, have sex, go through life.”

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