Page 35 of Feral
Mostly though, I let it go. Rosa was fierce, and it was time for a little bit of a shake up in the social hierarchy of the high school. The full-blooded Manix kids had kicked around the half-breeds for long enough, so sure of their superiority. They could learn a valuable lesson or two at the hands of this righteous tiger shifter.
So I didn’t interfere unless I thought it would cause injury, but I made a note to let Bonnie know that Rosa was fighting on school grounds for dominance every lunchtime. Seeing a tiger in the playground had scared the shit out of me the first time, and I didn’t think all the teachers would be so lenient.
Letting myself into the Sanctum quietly, I ran into Bonnie first. “Beckett,” she said with a wide smile. Beautiful, that’s what Bonnie had always been, but she was even more so now that she was content.
“Hey, Bon. Happy to be back?”
She grinned, grabbing up a toddler who was clinging to her leg and handing him to me. “Denis, look who it is! Becky!” Baby Denis wrapped his arms around my neck, blowing a wet kiss on my cheek. He was a cutie. “It's wonderful to be back, but I’d forgotten how exhausting it can be. It's been helpful having Darius and Kitten here today though.” She waggled her eyebrows at me. “She’s very pretty, Beckett. And obviously smitten with Darius.”
The subtext was there; she was wondering if we were going to bond Kitten, which was hilarious considering the fact Bonnie had avoided the same fate like the plague up until this year.
“Geez, Bonnie. Is Pack life treating you so good that you’re trying to convince everyone else to do the same?”
She waved a hand at me. “Beckett, we both know you want to. No point hiding it from me.” She patted me on the cheek. “Darius is upstairs helping Theodore with his algebra homework. Kitten is out the back with Alexi.”
“How did she go?” I whispered.
She gave me that maternal smile again. Yeah, Bonnie should have always been an Omega. “She was a bit put off during the morning insanity, but I think she’s relaxed into it. She definitely has a niche age though—old enough not to be breakable, young enough not to have an outrageous attitude.”
“Ah, the golden age,” I said with a laugh, trying to hand Denis back to her, but she waved me away.
“Nope, your limpet now.” Bonnie kissed the boy on the cheek, all but skipping away. I decided to leave Darius to his mathematics and searched out Kitten.
Stepping through the back door, I saw my Omega and a small boy both looking at the setting sun by the edge of the forest. Making a conspiratorial shushing noise at Denis, I watched her talking to the small boy. Alexi was a pretty quiet kid. He’d been dropped off when he was four, but I had a feeling he’d been neglected before that. He didn’t speak much, and had been pretty behind developmentally when he’d arrived. He’d caught up now, thanks to a lot of hard work from Bonnie and Darius, as well as Radic and my Pack. We all took turns spending one-on-one time with him, helping him become more confident. He was such a great kid.
Kitten squatted down, so she could touch the grass. “It’s not so hard to find if you know what you’re looking for. It becomes a bit like reading a book.”
“I can’t read words,” Alexi told her, his voice a little wobbly.
“There's no words out here? Can you see any?” Alexi shook his head. “It’s more like a picture book, where you look and see what's going on in each drawing, and after a while you get the whole story. Like this, you see this?”
Alexi squatted beside her. “It’s poop.”
She laughed softly. “It is. But it's small and round, so we know it's probably a rabbit. It’s also a little shiny, so you know that the rabbit has been here recently. That’s one picture.” She duck-walked over a few feet. “Now see this? This grass has been nibbled down, and if you look around, you can see that most of the grass around it has been too. That means there's a lot of rabbits around here somewhere, and that they’ll probably come back here again one day. So you can wait until the grass gets a little longer and come back to hunt a bunch all at once, or you can take a gamble that one unlucky rabbit will come back and snack some more, and you can catch your dinner.”
Alexi nodded, staring at the grass with intense concentration. “You’re a good hunter.”
She smiled at him. “It was that or starve. I learned around the same age as you are now. I learned to listen to what the woods were telling me. If they were sick, I was going to be sick too. If the food chain was upset by an influx of predators, then my food would be scarce too. It all trickles down from the Apex animal, right down to the mosquitoes.”
“The forest talks to you?” Alexi sounded skeptical.
“Not with words. Like how the leaves on this tree are curling and dying already, even though it's not even close to fall. Or the way the ground is hard and dry, because there's no damp rising up. The long grass that itches when it brushes your legs because it grew too well last year and then died off too quickly this summer. These are all whispers from the forest telling you that it's a really dry season and you have to be careful making fires, or using machinery outside. Listen to what the forest is telling you, and you’ll be safe.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever heard from her, and while her words weren’t perfect English, Alexi didn’t seem to mind. It was like he understood her—not just her words, but who she was. I guess, in a way, they’d had similar life experiences when it came to their early childhood. I pulled out my phone, snapping a picture of her with the small boy, because it was too perfect not to immortalize.
Finally, she seemed to realize I was there, or wanted to acknowledge I was there anyway. I didn’t think I’d actually managed to sneak up on her. She looked over her shoulder and smiled softly in the setting sun, and I wanted to freeze the moment forever. Instead, I took another picture.
Denis wiggled in my arms, and I put him down so he could toddle around the back deck. Unsurprisingly, he went straight to Kitten. When he reached her, he stood with his arms flailing in the air. Kitten just stared at him like he was doing the YMCA.
Alexi touched her elbow. “He wants you to pick him up.”
She frowned down at Denis, like he was a puzzle, before grabbing him around his middle and hefting him into the air. He giggled, grabbing her in a headlock and snuggling his nose into her neck. Cubs could scent the Omegas, and found comfort in their presence.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” she whispered, her eyes wide like he was a bomb strapped to her chest.
“You’re doing it. At this age, they’re basically spider monkeys. Just hold them however you’re comfortable and they’ll hang on right back. He’ll let you know when he’s done with you.” I walked over and wrapped my arm around her shoulders, patting Alexi on the head as well. “You’re good with them.”
“Liar,” she grumbled softly, though I noticed her stroking Denis’s back unconsciously. Yeah, Kitten might be worried about the whole cub thing, but I wasn’t. She was willing to try, and I thought that was more important than any natural skill.
