Page 17 of Stags

“Bruin,” called Stockton, who was starting across the crosswalk.

He tore himself away to follow Stockton.

WHEN LYALL BOUGHTthis place, he’d gotten a lecture from his brother about why it was a bad idea.

His brother had been standing on the porch out here, looking off into the tangle of trees and briars that made up Lyall’s back yard—well, front yard, really.

One of the things Lyall liked about this place was that it faced the woods, not the road. It put its back to the road, so different than most other houses, which displayed themselves to passersby and neighbors. This house was a house that only catered to its owner and the woods. Lyall liked that.

Of course, there were no other houses on this road, anyway, no one to see it besides him.

That was another thing he liked about it.

There was a stereotype about lone wolves and Lyall guessed he fit it well enough. This place was his dream house, isolated, surrounded by farmland on one side and butting up against the Cypress Center’s grounds and woods on the other side. He could walk out on his front porch naked with his coffee if he felt like it, swish his tail back and forth and stretch into the sunrise…

Did he do that?

Sometimes.

But anyway, his brother had been on the porch. Not naked. Everyone had been dressed at that point. His brother had said, “You’ll have to up and leave every weekend for the six weeks of deerkin season.”

Lyall had dismissed this. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“You’ll scent it,” said his brother. “It’s not as if it’s not going to call to some natural part of your hindbrain, some primeval time when wolves would chase fat little deerkin tail and feast for the winter.”

“Gross,” Lyall had said, because he was always disturbed when predatorkin made eating preykin sound sexual.

Anyway, he had been sure he would not scent it. The Center was not really that close. The grounds surrounding it spanned over a hundred acres. His house was all the way on the far side from where the deerkin would start out for their rite or rut or whatever they called it. They’d have to run long and hard to get here, to his place, and he was pretty sure they mostly wouldn’t, that they’d be tackled by their stags and pinned down and bred or whatever it was that they did out there to each other before any such scents could reach him.

Last year, the season had come and he’d been correct about it.

Mostly.

There had been a couple weekends, here and there, when maybe there had been a lingering scent.

Maybe it had made him twitch a little when he came out for his coffee in the mornings.

Made his tail twitch, that was, not his…

Okay, sometimes the scent did make other things twitch, but he didn’t know what that was about, not exactly. It was fucked up, that was what he thought.

On the other hand, wolfkin packed up with rabbitkin and chipmunkin and deerkin all the time. It was enough that she-wolves sometimes got up in arms about such things, angry that all their men were being taken by preykin women.

Lyall, however, had decided a long time ago that pack life wasn’t for him. No mate for him, not of any species.

He had been the odd one out growing up. He and his brother were part of a litter of three, and there was a generation above them, their older sisters—but his family was one of those crazy back-to-nature types, real religious, real on the let’s-make-lots-of-babies train. There were ten pups total, a pack of twelve. Maybe it was this kind of fanatical devotion to the family group that he rejected, not packs in general, he wasn’t sure.

Even so, whenever he thought of it, settling down with a woman, raising rugrats together, being a pack… it made him want to claw at his throat for air. He could notbreathein a life like that. He just knew it.

So, lone wolf, that was him.

Anyway, the scent—last year—it had been annoying, but it hadn’t been overwhelming. He knew this was the first weekend for the rite now.

There was always a midnight run on Fridays, but he’d be headed to bed then, so he wouldn’t even be affected by that one. It’d be tomorrow morning, probably, during his morning cups of coffee, of which he had too many, the last one usually around eleven o’clock, so stretching the meaning of morning coffee, anyway. It’d be then when he’d scent it, probably.

But he wasn’t worried.

Right, not worried. That was why he was gazing out into the woods now, on his porch, thinking about this. Because of his complete lack of worry.

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