Page 81 of Feral Werewolves

“Maybe cry,” he said. “I miss crying. I mean, I miss basically nothing about being a woman, trust me, but crying,shit. The testosterone, it really does make it harder to cry.”

I shook my head at him.

“Cry, sweetie. Trust me, it helps. A good shower cry. A nice, long, hot shower, all by yourself. Come with me.”

paladin

I WAS HAVINGone of my dreams when I woke myself from it, flailing and shrieking, but I wasn’t in the farmhouse, and I was naked and cold.

Kestrel was there, though, and he was pressed up against me from behind, one arm banded around my chest, his whiskered mouth at my ear, his voice soothing.

“I ate his face off!” I was screaming. “I ate his fuckingface.”

“That never happened, Paladin,” Kestrel breathed, sure and firm.

“No, no,” said Lazarus. He was there, too, his hands all over my face and my chest, insistent and reassuring. “That’s just a dream. You’re here with us. You’re safe.”

I liked to let myself believe them, usually, shut all that other stuff away.

But I was remembering where we were, in the quarry. I was remembering that they had taken Clementine, and I was realizing I couldn’t forget this morning. I needed that part of myself back from whatever dark hole inside myself that I’d shoved it.

Shit.

I shook, trembling against them, and my stupid body seemed so small and lithe and nothing like their strong and solid selves. I was weak. I was nothing. I wanted to rub into them and do what I usually did, regress into whatever I regressed into, that place where we all pretended like they saved me and that I didn’t have to step up and do the things that I sometimes had to do.

But.

Clementine.

So, I let myself tremble until the trembling stopped, and I took several deep breaths, and then I let my head roll back to rest against Kestrel’s shoulder and I said, “We all know that actually happened.”

They both went stiff against me.

Moments passed, and we all just breathed.

And then, carefully, slowly, I sat up, taking up space, and they shrank from me. I felt it coming off of them, the strange fear and respect that I hated. It made me feel all alone.

I stretched my neck. “You’re both probably angry I made us retreat,” I said in a low voice.

“No, it was the best call,” said Kestrel. “If we all died, we’d be useless to her.”

“Maybe if we’d done something else, though, maybe we could have brought her along,” said Lazarus.

“No,” I said. “No, I ran it in my head five ways, and they all ended up bad. This was the best way. I killed my three, but you two were both overpowered, and she was already being dragged off at that point.”

“You didn’t go after her?” said Lazarus.

I winced. “I need you both. I can’t get her back without your help. So, yes, I let them take her, because they won’t kill her. They want her alive, so—”

“But you know what they’re doing to her,” growled Lazarus.

“Not worse than what we’ve already done to her,” I countered.

Lazarus hung his head, accepting that.

“Bullshit,” muttered Kestrel. “Bullshit, you know that’s not true.”

Maybe. Maybe, yes. Because I’d made certain decisions, letting them treat me the way they treated me, like a tiny, broken thing that they sometimes liked to fuck, and I let that go on because I knew about the alternative, and they were better. But hadn’t I thought to myself that they were jerks to me sometimes? Of course, you know, they weremyjerks. My pack. My lovers. My men.