I spread apple butter on the thick buttered pancakes.
This meal, I discover from the chatty starstruck werewolf, is called Day Meat. There is one other meal called Evening Meat. In between, there are beavers, muskrats, voles (woodland and red-backed), lemmings, woodchucks.
In other words, breakfast, dinner, and rodents.
“So you’re telling me that neither Evening Meat nor Day Meat have any meat at all?”
“You mean carrion?” Ziggy says.
“Not carrion. Meat. Like bacon. I’d kill for some bacon.” I break open a hot biscuit and slather it with blueberry jam. “You do see the irony here.”
“No, I don’t. You may call old flesh you haven’t hunted ‘meat’ but we call it carrion.”
The Alpha’s voice precedes her down the hall. She is accompanied by two men. One in a suit walks beside her with a tablet. She listens for a moment before signing the tablet with her finger. Another man—tall, with a stringy, dark-blond beard that he combs repeatedly with his fingers—leans into the back of her neck, his nose under her hair.
As I turn away, feeling suddenly irritable, Ziggy rustles the paper, positioning it in front of his whole eye.
“What happened to your face?” I ask, circling one finger around my own eye and cheekbone. “Looks like you were hit with a 12 gauge.”
“It wasn’t a 12 gauge; it was a 12 pointer. And it really—”
“Oh, by the moon, Sigegeat,” a woman groans from the table behind us.
“He asked,” Ziggy snaps. “As I was saying, that deer”—he hesitates again like a carnival barker sizing up the crowd—“really bucked up my eye.”
A combination of groans and growls circulates around the room, and I find myself laughing at Ziggy’s high hopes for such a low joke.
“See, he likes it,” Ziggy says, “and he knows Idris Alba and somebody else famous.” He raises his chin dismissively at the rest of the room before turning to me and muttering that “Wolves have no sense of humor.”
“Sigegeat,” says the Alpha.
Every eye and ear turns toward her, standing at the coffee urn. It’s bad enough that a hundred wolves watch everything she does and everything she says, but now she has Stringy Beard sniffing her personal space like a dog at a fire hydrant.
She makes a motion with her hand like a hammer striking a nail, though when she pulls back her fist with the imaginary hammer, she punches Stringy Beard in the cheek.
Then she turns to pour herself coffee with the trace of a grim smile.
Something about the hammer made Ziggy take off, and for a man with one eye and no depth perception, he is fucking fast. No matter how often I tell him to slow down, he doesn’t until my heel slides down a moss-covered rock and I twist my ankle in the stones gathered at the base of a meandering stream.
“Who was that with the Alpha?” I ask when he comes back to get me.
“I don’t know. There’s always someone with the Alpha.”
“It was a big guy with curly, dark-blond hair and a stringy beard.”
“I don’t know. What does he smell like?”
“How the hell should I know what he smells like? He’s got curly, dark-blond hair and a stringy beard and he had his nose stuck in the Alpha’s neck the entire morning.”
“S’gotta be Poul, Alpha of the 10th Echelon. Can’t you move any faster?”
“No, I can’t. And why did Poul, Alpha of the 10th Echelon, have his nose stuck in her neck the entire morning?”
“He does it all the time,” he says, motioning to me to get moving. “He’s checking to see if she’s receptive.”
“What do you mean ‘receptive’?”
“For cunnan. Fucking.”
I’d watched Poul follow her to the coffee urn, so close that he stepped on her heel. She’d done nothing, just leaned against a table and pulled up the sock bunched at her ankle. Still, her mouth was tight and her eyes hard, and she looked nothing like last night when I saw something, an openness, even a hint of recklessness.
“And does she want him?”
“‘Want’ has nothing to do with it. It’ll be many moons before she’ll be fertile again, but whenever it happens”—he waits for me to clear a toppled tree—“she will take him because strong wolves mate with strong wolves to make stronger wolves. Almost there,” he says, pointing to a gap in the trees.
“What’s the point of being Alpha if you don’t get to do what you want?”
“The point, Shifter, is that when the Alpha speaks, the Pack follow immediately,