Eyes of the Wolf

35
I wake up in a much bigger group of wolves than I recall being friends with yesterday. As my feet get underneath me again, they stir, but nobody wakes but me.

“Well, aren’t you brightly colored,” somebody comments dryly to my left. Human. I turn my head and look her over, trying to decide if I like her. She smiles without exposing her teeth, which I decide is smart in the back of my brain, since I would probably take a grin as teeth-baring. She smells familiar too, but not as familiar as my other friends.

Rain, my brain finally provides for me. Niko’s mom.

“Sorry about how this all turned out,” she tells me. I look to her eyes, but they seem to be avoiding mine. Why? “You probably can’t even understand me right now. Have you even remembered to be human again?”

I exhale sharply through my nose and trot to my camisole, crawling through it as I slowly change back. As everything recedes, I decide with my human brain that the Change is kinda like climbing out of a tight swimsuit—not entirely comfortable, but like shedding a skin until you’re finally free.

I came to my human self on my belly, and I stood and pulled the cami over my head and then grabbed the sweats and underwear.

“Is that a yes?” Rain asked, her tone tinged with amusement as I hopped on one foot in my boxers, trying to put a foot through my sweats.

“I understood you fine,” I told her.

“Have you seen your wolf form? You’re very bright. The Alpha will have fun naming you.”

“I haven’t seen it.” What did she want? Last time we had spoken, she seemed to disapprove of me. Had that changed, now that I was like her? Hadn’t she heard that I had broken up with Niko?

“I suppose you haven’t. Our vision isn’t at its best when we’re wolves.” She laughed.

“Is there something you want, ma’am?”

She looked me in the eyes now, but she quickly dropped her gaze. “Only to see if there was anything I could do to help.”

The despair that had driven me to my wolf form was creeping back to me, making me tired and impatient. “I’m fine.”

She hesitated. “Did you want to meet my son?”

“Not right now.”

“You don’t have to be mad anymore. It wasn’t him that made you Change.”

I growled, a deep sound that tore at my human throat. She stepped back.

“Leave me alone, ma’am.” She nodded and walked away.

I watched her go and fumed. What the hell made her think she could nose her way into my business? Her son was an adult—he could look after himself by now, I should think.

“You want breakfast?” One of the wolves in the big dogpile next to me had shifted to a human and watched me. I thought about it and nodded. She smiled and stood, naked, then walked to me. Her hair was short and dark, though in this light I couldn’t tell the exact color. She looked Asian, though.

“You caused quite a stir last night,” she told me, as we walked to the houses. I was only half paying attention to her—the other half was deciding whether or not her nudity bothered me or not. Usually I would be shocked, but it seemed that running around as a wolf had taken some of that self consciousness away. Hell, I had just gotten dressed right in front of Niko’s mom, with human-brained wolves just behind me. I decided that half of me could get over it.

“Did I?” I asked. Her mouth twitched.

“Half the pack responded to your mourning last night. You’re pretty dominant.”

“Dominant?”

“You’d have to be, to be able to get a response like that.” She offered her hand. “I’m Eagle, by the way.”

For a moment, I had a ridiculous problem in which I wondered if the proffered hand was for me to shake or sniff. I shook my head clear of that odd question and took the hand in mine.

“Maya,” I said. She nodded and we entered one of the houses.

“Sorry about running around all stark naked and everything—I guess you’re not used to it, huh?”

“Huh?”

“You’ll get used to it after awhile. After awhile in the Pack, nobody cares anymore. It’s too difficult to haul clothes all over the place with all the form shifting. Wolf, human. Wolf, human. About once a month Alpha orders a bunch of cheap clothes from Costco in bulk, just so we don’t rip up absolutely all our clothes. It’d be a little awkward if we’re visited by a park ranger and we’re all in the nude around all our really big dogs. Make everybody think we’re a bunch of bestial furries or something.”

I realized I had followed her to one of the big dressers in the house, and she was throwing on a bunch of clothes similar to mine, but instead of the cami she threw on a snap-up shirt. Well, I guess if you can walk around naked, going commando doesn’t really bother you either.

“What was that you said? About being ‘dominant?’” I asked.

“Dominance? Oh.” She tilted her head back and thought. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like…your capability of influencing the other wolves. You’re strongest, and wolves want to listen to you. Alpha’s the most dominant, always. But there’s no real measurement, it’s just how you measure up to the other wolves. All wolves are dominant to some degree, and if you’re more dominant, you can get wolves to obey you, without even trying. Though I’m surprised you could control so many—you’re fresh bitten, and not even Pack yet. The Alpha’s son was there, and even Blaze was there, and he’s looking to be Alpha.”

“The Alpha has a son?”

“Yeah, but he’s a bit of an oddball. He doesn’t seem to be very dominant, but it’s hard to be dominant around him. He’s just…he’s weird, Sparrow is.”

“Sparrow?” Adam was the Alpha’s son?

“Yeah,” she said, walking briskly out of the room and making a beeline for the fridge. “Alpha just brought him around a couple years ago, and for a born wolf he doesn’t seem to have as much control of his wolf as we do.” She was opening and closing drawers, apparently trying to find something that sounded good. “He likes going to town and stuff, but Alpha doesn’t bug him for it, not like he gets after Paint. His control over changing forms is pretty tight, though, so I guess he can be trusted out there better. Still, it’s weird. We don’t generally like being away from Pack, and he’ll be gone for days at a time.”

“And Paint doesn’t?”

“Paint’s always back pretty quick.” She pulled out a Tupperware with a bunch of lettuce and began fingering through the dressings. “Though I doubt his running around the town’s gonna last much longer. He’s on house arrest for disobeying the Alpha about…something or other.” The last bit seemed to be some attempt to smooth over a slip of the tongue. Her anxiety was very tangible to me, which made me wonder if that was something she could control. “What kinda salad do you want? The only thing close you can get out there is grass and stuff, so eat up while you can. I’ll throw a tri-tip in the microwave. Can’t have an empty stomach all the time, or you’ll end up getting all hungry and cranky and your wolf gets harder to control.”

It was odd, I thought, that her talking so much seemed to be calming me down. I didn’t feel so depressed. Maybe it was because I was so accustomed to listening to Chris talk her mouth off all the time.

If I was a wolf, she wouldn’t recognize me, would she? I could check on her if I wanted. Wouldn’t be any big deal—I could just stay a bit away, downwind so Roy didn’t smell me or anything, and stay far enough away that she would think I was some stray trotting around the property like usual. The thought soothed me. I could do that when my control was good enough.

“So what went on between you and Paint anyway?” Eagle gave me a tubful of lettuce, with what smelled like raspberry vinaigrette liberally slathered over it. The smell was strong, and I sneezed. “I know, the smell’s pretty strong until you get used to it.”

“Paint and I broke up,” I told her, wrinkling my nose until the tickling stopped bothering me so much.

“Really? He seemed pretty convinced that you were his mate for awhile there.”

“I told him I wasn’t. I’m too young to get pregnant.”

Eagle looked me over as I started eating. “Being mates is a lifelong thing, you know. It doesn’t go away if you break up. You can’t break up.”

“I’m not his mate.”

“Did you have sex?”

“No.” That shut her up. That was good, ‘cause this was a conversation I really hated.

“If you weren’t his mate, why were you with him?” I bristled, convinced now that she was not a bitten wolf—I was pretty sure that a bitten wolf would understand the whole process of “dating.”

I continued eating, and after a moment looked around. Eagle was at the other end of the table, looking uncomfortable. When she noticed my eyes on her, she looked at the table.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

“When you’re dominant, you can get wolves to obey you, without even trying.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I told her, my anger dissipating. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to lose control of my temper.”

She glanced up at me again and gave me a strained smile. “I guess you don’t, uh, you don’t wanna talk about that much, huh?”

“Yeah.” Now that I had literally sent her a couple yards away with a mood swing, I felt like I owed her at least some of that conversation. “If I’d had sex with Niko, would we be mates?”

“Pretty much. You can’t go back on that, either.”

“Good thing I didn’t then,” I breathed, giving a relieved laugh. It was a very good thing that I had come to my senses before anything had really happened.

She smiled again, and pulled out the tri-tip so we could split it evenly between us. I ate the salad and the meat until it was gone, as did she, and by the time we were finished, we napped on the couches in the living room, sated.