Page 124 of Feral Werewolves

I couldn’t truly forgive anyone until I owned up to what had happened to me.

It was hard.

When Kestrel said that you don’t ever get over it, sexual abuse, he was right. It makes a mark indelibly on your soulfor the rest of your life. You never get to be the same.

I had an experience where I felt like I connected to my dead mother, and I knew that Iwasher in a way, that she and I had both been fodder in this awful event, whatever it was, this tragedy that had been wrought on the world when half of the men went insane and shifted into beasts. I felt… this sounds weird and woo-woo, but I felt like we merged for a moment, across time. And I felt her love for me. And I felt like she forgave me for falling in love with werewolves, anyway. And I felt like something in me, some ragged wound, finally closed over.

After that, that was when I knew I wanted to be a mom myself.

But that didn’t happen for a while, because everything started ramping up after the podcast came out.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff going on out west with werewolf groups who were climbing over the walls to stage peaceful protests in the streets of the cities. Groups of men and women holding hands with their tiny children, carrying signs that read,Votes for WerewolvesandWe Are Your Brothers and Sisters in Exile.

Meanwhile, there was a place in the northeast (where there weren’t a lot of wolf areas at all, mostly just cities) which had started sending buses out to the gates to take werewolf children to public schools, and this had sparked a whole bunch of debate, with some people being really freaked out and other people staunchly on the side of every child deserving an education.

Our podcast blew up.

We spent that entire year doing interviews. We got flown on a plane to film an interview on a national news debate-style show, and Paladin ran circles around the guy sputtering out his stupid, hate-filled arguments about how werewolves didn’t deserve rights.

I never spearheaded a class action suit, but I did testify at the senate hearings.

They went on for three weeks.

At the end, they opened all the gates.

Just like that.

And then, in the coming weeks, private construction crews started showing up, all over the country, with bulldozers, and tearing down the walls. They didn’t have to do it, but they justdid. They showed up, all across the nation, and they freed us. It always amazes me how people see one token of goodwill and they mimic it. It always amazes me, because we all take for granted that hate and fear spread like a virus, but we don’t always acknowledge that positivity spreads the same way.

I remember I was pregnant at the time, barely pregnant, only three months along, but I was already all full of hormones, and I stood and watched those walls crumble to dust in front of us and sobbed in Lazarus’s arms.

Tears of joy, but it ached in my chest like someone had clawed open my heart.

And then, that was when things got really hard for the four of us.

We’d been distracted, was the thing, what with fixing the whole goddamned world, and it was easy to feel united when we were all fighting for the same purpose.

But then…

Done.

Walls down.

I was no longer the leader of a small government. My mates were no longer my advisers and enforcers. We were no longer trying to juggle running a small farm, running a government, and doing national-scale activism.

What we were was pregnant. And running a little farm which still only had one cow who wasn’t making milk anymore and needed to be bred again. Just us.

Don’t get me wrong, the sex was still amazing.

I have to say, if you ever get the chance to run under a bright summer full moon while six months pregnant and be worshiped and thoroughly filthily fucked by three werewolves who are head-over-heels in love with you and have also developed a fetish for your baby bump…do it. You will not regret it, trust me.

But I started to get the unnerving idea that we didn’t actuallyknoweach other.

We’d been together for almost a decade at that point, and we’d done unspeakable things to each and every one of each other’s holes and licked each other in all sorts of insane places, but we didn’t know much about each other’s pasts or the way each other grew up. We rarely talked much about our lives before.

And now the walls were down.

I was talking to my dad, and Lazarus’s sister was reaching out to him for the first time in years. Paladin had always been sort of in touch with his parents. They were paying for the cell phone they had used out here, for instance, things like that, but he had never talked to them about the realities of what had happened to him out here.

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