Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
“You have been taking my pack members. I want them back.”
He laughs, reaches into the bushes, and tosses me a sweater.
It is rust-red in color, and far too long for me. When I put it on, it smells like him. Like death, and like long summer nights asleep on the back seat of his car. It’s warmer than I expected it to be, and I find I don’t hate the stench.
“Follow me,” he says, turning and walking into the woods, toward the source of the scent.
I follow him. What else am I to do? I am barefoot in a forest, I am starting to get hungry again, and I cannot guarantee being able to find my way back again.
After a little while, I start to hear sounds. People talking. Doesn’t sound like they’re particularly anguished.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Cages with my missing pack in them, maybe.
Instead, I find the runners and the stragglers from my pack of Runaways going about what I can only describe as their business. My father never allowed anybody to live with him before. When I was younger, he avoided other wolves like the plague.
There are shelters built into the forest. They’re covered in netting and leaves and branches and such, designed to avoid detection from the sky, and maybe from casual hikers lost on their way, though judging by the smell, a casual hiker is not going to survive long here.
“You turned them all into flesh eaters?”
“Every wolf is a flesh eater,” he laughs. “Some of us are precious about it, but none of us are better than our basest desires and our fundamental hungers.”
He’s been working on that line for years. It’s starting to almost sound convincing.
“I can smell the human in your belly,” he growls with amusement, leaning into me. “You don’t have to pretend to be better than you are. Not here. This is the one place you will not be judged.”
“I only did what I did because I had to.”
“Oh, really? You had to kill and eat a man?”
“I had to kill him, and the eating part. It was more like a nibble. And I was hungry, and scared, and…”
My father puts his hand on my shoulder. “You ate because it was food, and because your instincts told you to. Don’t apologize for it.”
I spent years fearing this version of myself, and now it is here and now the father I missed for all that time is approving of me, and there is something so very intoxicating and fulfilling about being here with him.
Some of the pack call out to me with glee. They seem happy to see me. I wave back. They don’t approach. They respect my father too much. I have to wonder how he got them here. Did he steal them away? Or did he lure them with the promise of the kind of freedom only a man with no morals can offer?
“How did you get them here?”
“They were ready to come from the moment I met them,” he says. “You had nothing to offer wolves like these. You were doing what you’ve always done. Pretending to be human. Pretending to get along in a human world. They wanted what I offered them.”
“An outdoor toilet?”
He snorts. “Freedom. The real life of a wolf. You turned them into low-level workers. They need more than that. They need to hunt. They need to starve from time to time. They need to feast. We’re bred to fight for survival, kid. They do all that here.”
“And none of them left so much as a note. We’ve been worried about them.”
“You’ve not been worried about anything besides catting about,” he says. “Attracting the eye of Rex Regent, so I hear.”
“How did you…” I ask, then I realize that a few of the wolves out here in the forest shanties were around when Rex first showed up. He’s taken almost a dozen wolves from my pack. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I didn’t offer them what they really needed. Maybe I was always bad at leading them.
“Come and eat,” he says. “We have venison and sweet pork.”
I know what sweet pork means. I won’t be having any more of that. Having taken so much as a bite of my would-be attacker is making me feel nauseated enough as it is. I don’t want this life. I don’t want any part of my father’s world.
“Why didn’t you come and get me after they took me from the gas station? I waited for you to come. You never did.”
He turns and looks at me. “I told you to get in the car,” he says simply, as if that single act of disobedience justified the rest of his abandonment. “You chose differently. That’s what you wanted. I gave you what you wanted.”
“I was fourteen.”
“Old enough to make a decision,” he says. “And old enough to bear its consequences.”