3

clementine

MY FATHER SHOWED up at my dorm because I'd been steadfastly ignoring all his calls and texts.

It was the fall of my junior year now. I'd stayed on campus over the summer, mostly because of my roaming phase, not wanting my father to see that. I didn't want him to know.

Now, he did know, because the Council of Tithes insisted on sending out the stupid certification notices to your home address, and they had refused to send it to my dorm no matter how I'd begged and pleaded.

It was a requirement that I had to go and get a quarterly evaluation with the Council of Tithes. All women did. At my last one, they'd done the blood tests, and that was the end of it. I had my certification letter. Next full moon, I'd go to the check-in point at the wall with the other tithes and be sent out beyond the walls, and I wouldn't be let back in until the sun rose.

I let my dad in and he pulled me into a tight hug, muttering something about how he was glad I wasn't dead anyway.

I hugged him back. I felt like crying.

I'd done a lot of crying since I got the letter, even though I'd known it was happening for a while now. Last full moon, I'd been particularly antsy. I probably could have been out there, actually, then, but I hadn't had the certification yet, so I'd been safe.

My father pulled away and looked down at me. "I set something up. I have the money ready, and if I pull the trigger, there's a fake passport and you go overseas." Different countries had different rules regarding the werewolves. He wanted me to go to a country where they didn't have fences. There, they were all intermingled and tithes weren't required to be registered or anything, but… the way I understood it, it didn't matter. It happened anyway, only it happened in your house when the wolves broke into your bedroom and they destroyed all your furniture fucking you senseless. So, there was a lot of self-organization there, into the exact same behavior as here. Just that tithes went voluntarily to places where wolves gathered.

I shook my head. "No," I said. "Because if I do that, I can't come back." I'd be unable to re-enter the country. If I came back, I'd go to jail for skipping out on my duty to society or whatever.

"They have safe houses there," he said. "There are places, sanctuaries, where girls can check in and be kept during the moon, where no one touches them."

I'd heard about this, too, but I heard they were usually pretty empty, that tithes did not voluntarily go there, not when the moon got close. "Dad…" I backed away from him, hugging myself, unable to talk to him about this. It was too disgustingly embarrassing. This was not something I wanted to discuss with my father.

It was very quiet.

"You want it," he muttered.

"No!" I said, turning to him, angry.

"How could you, Clem? After what happened to your mom? After everything you've seen Angela go through? After all of that, how could you want this?'

"I don't want it!" I protested. "I don't have a choice, Dad."

"You do. I am giving you a choice." Now, he was angry, too.

"It's not a real choice. Leave everything, give up on my future, on my degree, never see you again, live out my life in a foreign country… And how much money is it that you're trying to spend on this? You can't dump all your savings into—"

"Yes, I can. That's what my savings are for . To protect you."

"Dad, it's too much. I'm sure Angela thinks it's too much."

He sighed heavily, and I knew she'd probably thrown a fit at the thought of his spending that kind of money. "Whatever she said, I know it's just her trauma speaking. And when I think of you, that traumatized, for the rest of your life, it kills me."

"People say it's not that bad," I said with a shrug.

"Of course they do. We all say that," he said, gesturing around. "You were six when it happened, sweetheart. You don't remember the world before. You don't know what it used to be like. We all pretend we don't live in a dystopian nightmare with a borderline dictatorship and that we haven't slipped into The Handmaid's Tale, but—" He broke off. "I'm only saying, when things are bad, you have two choices. You can sit around longing for something better or you can accept things the way they are and make the best of it. Of course we're making the best of it. But you know that I think that it's insane that we don't just kill all those freaking monsters."

There were countries where they did do that, of course. Places where they hunted the werewolves down and shot them all. Where they loaded them into gas chambers. Where they did flyovers and dropped bombs on them. Shit like that.

There weren't werewolves in those places anymore, because if you shifted there, you left. You had to fucking escape in an underground system of safe houses. And to say those governments hadn't turned into fascist dictatorships, well …

"Yeah, whatever," he muttered. "Maybe they're still people, sure, but that doesn't mean anything. People are responsible for all of the awful atrocities that have ever been visited on this world."

"No," I said. "Not necessarily. Sometimes, nature is. Like, whatever happened to the dinosaurs."

He gave me a look, because we'd had this argument before. "This is why I thought it was dangerous that you were such a bleeding heart for the werewolves. This is why I argued with you. Because now, here you are, faced with the reality of being victimized, and you're excusing their monstrosity because you think they have humanity. Can't you remember when they came into our house that night? Can't you remember what they were like then? Can't you remember how vicious they were? That's not something we feel sorry for, Clementine. That's something we fear."

Maybe he was right.

Maybe that was why we didn't shoot them or hunt them down or attempt to eradicate them.

Maybe we were afraid of what the wolves would do if we attacked them. There were a lot of them, after all. And they were objectively terrifying.

My lower lip trembled. "You think I'm not afraid, Daddy?"

His face crumpled.

I ran at him, ran into his arms. He caught me and we both cried, and my dad never cried, like never cried. The First Full Moon, that night, yes, when we left Mom, at her funeral, yes, and sometimes, when we talked about her, yes, but…

But then it didn't matter.

We argued for another two hours, and I wouldn't cave and we both cried more, and then I made him leave.

The full moon was in two weeks.

kestrel

TWO OF GRIFF'S thugs showed up a week before the full moon even though I'd already been sent about seven texts and five emails which had all outlined all of the rules that were allowed for participation this time around.

Some wolves were wary of using the internet, because they thought that the government was using it to track us, or that—at the very least—the cell phone companies or Google or some shit might use it against us for all kinds of nefarious purposes.

But in this part of the country, the big head guy was Griff, and Griff was very on the grid, so everything was pages and pages of bureaucratic bullshit.

I was out weeding the vegetable patch when they showed up.

Paladin came up, and he was more nervous than usual, and Paladin was always nervous. He was shaking so hard that he could barely get his words out but eventually he told me that there were guys up on the porch of the farmhouse, and I left the weeding to go and greet them.

There were rules of how you did these sorts of things, codified expectations, and I knew better than to go against any of it. It wasn't that I was really slavering to go after a bunch of tithes, anyway. Pussy was whatever-whatever. I didn't miss it.

Okay, lie, but I'd spent just as many full moons out catching rabbits as going to those fucking orgies by the walls, fighting for a chance to hopefully stick my cock in some hole or other. If it got difficult, we could always fuck each other, anyway.

Still, sometimes I did end up there. We all did.

Call it instinct or a curse or whatever you wanted.

Sometimes, I just couldn't help it.

If you didn't agree to all the rules and you didn't play the games that Griff wanted you to play, you weren't deemed safe to be allowed to be at a gathering. And since everyone else was at a gathering and there was no way to detain rebellious wolves who were going to fuck up everything, there was a zero-tolerance policy.

Agree, tow the line, or they kill you.

I smiled real wide at them. "Please come in," I said. I was really glad that we hadn't drunk the last of the beer ration we'd gotten. Lazarus had wanted to, but I'd talked him out of it. "We have some cans of lager if you're interested."

They accepted the beer, because of course they did. The thugs always took whatever they were offered, like it was their due. Of course, they'd probably been traipsing all over the place, getting beer from every single pack out here, so they were probably drunk already.

Perfect.

"We're just here to talk about some changes to the gathering rules," said one of the thugs.

Yes, I know. I know that we're supposed to hang back and give Griff and his guys the first crack at the tithes, and that we don't get a tithe until she's been thoroughly fucked by you guys first. I know this. There were seven texts, and I responded in the affirmative to every single one of them. I just smiled. "Of course. We want to assure you that we have no intention of not following the rules. We're happy to comply. We all live better out here together if we're at peace."

Not like the beginning of this bullshit, where everyone was killing each other willy-nilly and there were little factions having wars over turf and wars over women and all of that shit. Women were rare out here. It wasn't unheard of for wolves to come in and kill all the men in a pack to take their woman if they had one.

It used to happen all the time.

It was better now.

But, of course, Griff and his guys pretty much had all the women.

"Griff has a mate," said one of the guys.

A mate? I was pretty sure Griff had access to twenty or thirty women in that weird little compound of his over the other side of the hills. "Congratulations to Griff," I said, still smiling as wide as I could fucking manage.

"She showed up recently," said the other guy with a shrug. "One of the tithes from the last full moon. She came and he sniffed her and they disappeared for three days and when they came back…" He shrugged, slugging at the beer .

The other guy shrugged too, laughing helplessly.

I waited. When they came back, what?

"Well, anyway, look, that bitch is essentially ruling the place now," said the first guy. "Griff worships the ground she walks on and says that all her ideas are great and that we all have to listen to her perspective. And so, there are new rules. Griff says they want to keep it to three wolves to a tithe. He says up to five, if there's not enough to go around, but… your pack is three, right?"

"Yes," I said, furrowing my brow, extremely confused.

"If your pack claims a tithe, then she's yours for the night," he said.

I drew back, astonished. What kind of fuckery was this? That was never how it worked. Never. A pack didn't get a girl. If I got a crack at a girl, she was lying in a puddle of wolf semen, already well fucked and nearly exhausted. I didn't mind. The tithes didn't mind either, I didn't think. Sometimes, they'd moan about how they were getting subbed in some fresh cock, and they seemed to be pretty glad about that. But, to be fair, the tithes couldn't help themselves anymore than we could.

"Yeah, I don't see that it matters either," said the second of the guys, shaking his head. "The tithes, they show up and they're just sluts for it. They want as much cock as they can get any way they can get it. But Griff's new bitch—"

"Mate," supplied the other guy, rolling his eyes.

"Mate," he agreed mockingly, clinking his beer can into his companion's, "she says that the tithes want quality time with just a few wolves. She says that if there's no connection between the tithe and the wolves, that she should try a different pack next time, because that will mean it's more likely that more tithes mate."

I just blinked at them. I didn't know what to say. I'd been on the websites. There were forums for werewolves, and there was some communication between us and people in other parts of the country, other parts of the world.

So, anyway, rarely, apparently, a tithe mated to a wolf. Even more rarely, a tithe might mate to more than one wolf, to an entire pack.

The mating was different than the gatherings, apparently. For one thing, once she was mated, she stayed… whatever it was that happened to the tithes, where they could handle us fucking them in wolf form, that faded for them after about six or eight months. But a mated tithe, she wouldn't lose it at all, apparently.

As for the rest of it, the bond stuff, whatever that was, I didn't see that it was much different than any regular kind of love or whatever.

People said that it was, that it had to be some mystical, fate thing or else a woman would never want to jump the fences and come live out here with us, with the beasts. But I knew that wasn't true.

I knew women did shit like that. Certain kinds of women did, anyway. Maybe not all of them, but there was a type. Probably the same type who became pen pals with serial killers or whatever, but it was a thing. There was a kind of woman who was attracted to danger. You put that together with the kind of sex that the tithes had, which was obviously intense, which they obviously liked, and…

Of course some of the women wanted to move out here full-time.

I didn't think there was anything mystical to it at all.

Once I said all this to Lazarus, though, and he just laughed at me and said, Yeah, okay, but how come the mates can handle wolf sex for all time then?

I didn't have an answer to that.

"Is that, uh, a good thing?" I said to them. "If there are more mates out here?"

"Oh, she's on the warpath," muttered one of the guys. "Used to be all the women were community property. A woman might show up, claim to be yours, say she prefers you or something, but you have to give her to Griff whenever he wants and you have to give her to anyone ranked higher than you if he wants, and we're not ranked that badly, are we, Jones?"

"No," said the other guy, who must have been Jones. " Not that it matters now, because half our incentive to climb the ranks went away. This bitch of Griff's thinks the women should get to choose who they want to fuck."

Right, and that would be bad, losing out on getting to fuck unwilling women, obviously. "What a cunt," I said.

Jones gestured at me with his beer can. "Definitely a cunt."

"Griff's not long for being boss is what I figure," said the other guy. "Somebody'll challenge him. Maybe Red."

I tried not to flinch, thinking of that. I didn't know Red, exactly, but he'd ripped me open one night during a full moon. I probably should have died, but I shifted back before I could bleed out. Red was vicious and frightening. He liked violence a tad too much. Griff wasn't exactly a measured and reasonable leader or anything, but Red was definitely worse. Fuck.

"Anyway," said Jones, "so even if she gets a bunch of women out here, dotted all over the countryside, mated into these little packs you guys got, it ain't going to matter. Because within a few months, Griff'll be dead, and we'll be out here taking all your mates back to the compound anyway. Just think of that while you're hoarding some tithe this gathering, eh?"

I rubbed the side of my neck. "Yeah, I think I get the picture. Crystal clear."

"Thanks for the beer," said the other guy, finishing his.

Jones left his, half-empty, on the table.

They walked out without saying goodbye or anything.

I stayed at the table, still trying to process all of that. What the hell?

Lazarus came in from the living room. This farmhouse was built before we got here. There was a redistribution of land and wealth that happened right after the Change. All the wealth that had belonged to werewolves got seized when they kicked us out into exile. They used that to pay off the people who had houses out here in the middle of nowhere and then those people had to move into the cities.

It took a while to work itself out, but after enough women ( and men, to be honest) got raped to death out in the country on full moons, people left voluntarily.

Lazarus shifted in the first wave. He was older than Paladin and me. I'd only shifted about ten years ago, Paladin even less, maybe eight. We'd been young, both fifteen or so when it happened.

Lazarus was in his early thirties. He'd been eighteen on the night of the Change. He'd killed his girlfriend, who'd been pregnant, barely pregnant. He said that he'd been freaked out, because they were too young, but that even so, he wasn't sure that he wanted her to end the pregnancy, and then—

Anyway, all of that generation, the older wolves, they all seemed to have done some shit like that at the beginning. Being so brutal to people they cared about had done things to them. All of us out here, we were all fucked up, but they were very fucked up.

I thought that was why Lazarus liked it if I was in charge and made all the decisions even though he was older and wiser and probably stronger if it would come down to a fight.

"So," I said to him, "you hear all that?"

He nodded.

"What do you think? Griff can't be that whipped by this woman, can he?"

"Oh, definitely," said Lazarus, chuckling, coming over to sit opposite me at the kitchen table. He picked up Jones's beer and regarded it.

"You going to drink that after him?"

"Thinking about it," he said. "You think I shouldn't ‘cause I'll get his cooties?"

"Yeah," I snorted. "That's it exactly."

Lazarus upended the can into his mouth and drank it all down. Then he crushed it with one hand. "You think we should go this month?"

I touched my chest. "Me?"

"You see someone else here I'm asking?"

"I, uh, yeah." I shrugged, looking down at the table. "I mean, they're right. It won't last, whatever it is with Griff and this woman. The men under him will revolt and probably kill him, and then all the women will go back there to be the sex slaves to the ruling class or whatever. But we get a window of opportunity to have a woman to ourselves. So, fuck yes, we should go."

"But," said Lazarus, crumpling the beer tighter, "if she mated one of us, then we'd probably get ourselves killed trying to protect her from them."

"None of us is going to find a mate," I said.

He shrugged, setting the crushed metal down on the table. "Nah, probably not."

"And we wouldn't get ourselves killed. We'd just let her go."

"You've never had a woman at all, Kestrel," he said.

"What the fuck, yes, I have," I said. I'd been out here for ten years, that was a lot of full moons, a lot of tithes. I didn't always go, but sometimes, like I said, couldn't help myself. There were nights where I fucked four or five women, in fact.

"I mean, you've had sex with women, but that's not the same."

I rolled my eyes. Way to rub it in, Lazarus.

"What if they tried to take Paladin to be their sex slave?" he said.

I sighed. "Okay, I see your point. I would definitely get myself killed preventing that from happening. But that's not a reason to not go nab a tithe to ourselves, Lazarus. This could be the only time we ever get to do that."

Lazarus looked me over. "We, uh, the three of us, we almost never are all together."

"Well, it's happened," I muttered. I distinctly remembered it, in fact. I remembered standing up, my hand in Paladin's hair as he sucked me, and watching Lazarus's thick cock going in and out of Paladin's ass.

"Not while shifted," he said. "I don't know how well my wolf will stand down to yours in that situation."

"We'll be fair and equal about it, come on," I said. "No one's ordering anyone around. It won't be like that."

"We'll be shifted ," he said, as if this was a really good argument, as if it meant something.

"Don't go if you don't want," I decided. "I'm going."