Page 55 of Feral Werewolves

Shit. I took him by the shoulder and squeezed it. “Can you go make nice with them until I can get in there?”

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Should I leave her hidden?”

I tried to make a decision, but I wasn’t sure. Could he handle making the call? “What do you think?”

But he met my gaze, steady again. “I think bring her out and introduce her to them. I think we need to find out which wolves have mates, because when Griff is challenged, that’s who will be ready and willing to defend him. If Griff’s smart, he’ll be amassing allies now.”

“That could be why he’s here,” I said softly. “Yeah, okay, bring Clementine out there, then.”

clementine

MY HEART WASpounding as Paladin led me out the following afternoon. I hadn’t expected this to be so soon. Paladin was trying to explain to me that everything was probably going to be okay, but I didn’t know if he was right.

It seemed to me as if the first domino in a long row had toppled, and now I was on the way to some sort of grim doom.

But then I met Madrigal.

She had short-cropped black hair and olive-colored skin. She was lovely, with this sort of inner glow to her. I didn’t know if I’d ever met someone who seemed so happy. She shook my hand and wouldn’t stop grinning. “It’s working, Griff. You can see that it’s working. And so fast, too.”

Griff shook my hand, too, grinning at me as well. “Congratulations. Are you mated to Paladin?”

“All of them,” I said.

Griff turned to Madrigal. “That’s a first, hmm?”

“All of them?” She laughed. “Is that really the case, though, or—”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s definitely all of them, trust me.” The funny thing was, I’d never questioned that, though I knew that the idea of mating to more than one wolf was both rareand controversial. Obviously, since there were so many wolves out here, there was pressure on wolves to share their mates, and sometimes women apparently were coerced into claiming more than one man out of fear. This was nothing like that, though.

“Well, we’ll see,” she said. “Maybe if there were more tithes out here, and everyone had their own mate, you could—”

“No,” said Kestrel, coming into the kitchen. “I don’t think it’s like that with us.” He came and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You were already so very egalitarian out here, if I remember correctly,” said Griff, shaking Kestrel’s hand. “Not a lot of packs quite like this. Maybe that’s why.”

Paladin set down glasses of dried berry iced tea in front of them. The berry bushes were on the outskirts of the farm. He’d shown me where they gathered them in the summer.

“Maybe I could talk to her,” said Madrigal. “Just us girls.”

“Sure,” said Kestrel. “If you want to, Clementine.”

“Okay,” I said.

Madrigal brought her glass of tea, and we went out onto the front porch together. I noticed her setting her hand on her belly in such a way—there was only barely a little bit of roundedness there. She didn’t look pregnant. But I knew she was. I didn’t say anything, though. It seemed rude. She smiled at me. “So, how are you really?”

“Um…?” I raised my eyebrows. What kind of question was that?

“I ran from Griff five times, you know,” she said. “The first time I was out here, I wasn’t only with him. It was him and only God knows how many other wolves. He had me to himself at the end of it, though. He even ended up knotting me, but in the morning light, he was cruel to me. He told me to never to come near him again, to keep my distance at the full moons. Only. We couldn’t.”

“Keep your distance, you mean?”

She nodded. “He came across the wall for me once, and we went walking on the streets of the city, and we talkedand talked, and I thought he was the worst man I’d ever heart of. He terrified me. He was violent and he had no moral compass. He said these things about women that made me horrified. I ran. Right in the middle of it, just ran off. I thought about reporting him to the police, and I can’t say why I didn’t. One time, after a full moon, I stayed, and he showed me around his compound, told me that if I stayed, I’d be with the other women there, who were all the combined property of every single wolf in the place. I ran. Another time, he tore some other wolf off me during a gathering, and I watched him break the other wolf’s leg, and then he just wentatme, so brutal, and the next morning… I ran.”

“Why’d you stop running?” I said softly.

“He changed,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Did he?”

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