7

paladin

THE NEXT DAY , I tried to talk about her with both of them.

I went to Lazarus first, because I thought Lazarus might agree with me about it. Lazarus would sometimes say stuff to Kestrel and me both sometimes about how we never had any experience being in relationships with women, which was true. Lazarus had been in love, even if that love had ended in gore and horror, and even if he hated himself for having done that. So, he knew what it was like.

"I think we should try to get in touch with her," I said to him. "She said her name's Clementine, and I already did a search on social media and found her." I showed him the phone that we all shared out here, on my social media account. There was her picture. It hadn't been hard. Clementine wasn't really a real common name. She lived in the city, and I knew what she looked like, so I scrolled through the search results until I found her.

"It's against the rules," said Lazarus.

I knew that, but it wouldn't matter if she didn't report us, I thought. And she had felt it, too, and I knew she had. It had been different than any of the other times. "You know that she's something special," I said to him.

"I don't know anything like that," said Lazarus. "She was pussy and ass, and that was it." But the fact that he felt the need to say that meant that he was trying to convince himself otherwise. He did know it.

"She talked to us," I countered. "She told us her name. When have any of the tithes ever been like that?"

Lazarus just glared at me from where he was lounging on his bed. We were having this conversation in his bedroom, and it was evening, and usually if I came in here it was because I wanted sex or because I thought he wanted sex, so the fact that he grabbed me by my one of my belt loops and pulled me in closer wasn't that out of the ordinary. He kissed my crotch.

I pushed his face off. "Lazarus, I'm trying to talk ."

He laughed up at me. "What do we even need a woman for? We have you."

I put two feet of distance between us and just eyed him, unable to even speak at that.

He flopped down on the bed. His voice was gruff. "Sorry. That was fucked up." It really was, especially considering he knew the way certain groups of wolves had used me, the things they'd called me, the way they'd made me dress sometimes… "I forget sometimes is all. Forgive me?"

"Just a request," I said. "A friend request. If she ignores it, that tells us something, but she said to find her next month."

"Paladin, it's against the rules," said Lazarus.

I sighed heavily.

"Did I fuck it up?" said Lazarus. "You too weirded out for anything now? Because I'm hard as a rock. Sixty-nine with me at least, huh?"

I didn't go to Kestrel until the next morning. He was out with the chickens, looking for eggs, even though I said I would do that. I kept forgetting to do my chores, and Kestrel never said anything about it. He just did all of it. I'd apologize; he'd say it was no big deal; I'd say I'd do better; I never did.

"Sorry," I said. "I know I said I was going to deal with the eggs."

He grunted, holding up the basket he had. It was basically full. "I'm done now."

"Maybe if we made, like, a list somewhere?" I said .

"You want me to make you a chore chart like a toddler?" he said. "You want star stickers, Paladin?"

I flinched. They were jerks to me sometimes, both of them. I'd been in a lot of situations, though, and all of them had been hands-down worse than this one. We were all fucked up, so nothing was easy, but they weren't trying to control me or use me. I was allowed to say no. And Kestrel was good at working the farm.

"Sorry," said Kestrel, rolling his eyes. "Let's call it even. You forgot the eggs. I called you names. We're both asshats, yeah?"

"Yeah," I said.

We started off together towards the house. Outside, the air was cold, the dew chilly against the grass, the sky only barely starting to lighten. It was nice out here, I had to admit, nice in the morning, especially.

"I get the feeling something else brought you out here," said Kestrel.

"I found her," I said. "The tithe. Clementine. On social media."

Kestrel nearly dropped the eggs.

I had to reach out and steady the basket.

He yanked them back and stalked toward the house, fuming. "What the fuck is wrong with you, Paladin?"

I went after him. "I know it's against the rules, but she wouldn't report us. I know it. Besides, the punishment is usually just banishment from the gatherings for a few months, and we take months and months off all the time."

There were two kinds of punishment that could be handed down out here. Punishment from the government, which tended to be sort of stupid and not that big of a deal. Or punishment from whatever chief werewolf ran the area, which tended towards the permanent, violent, and painful. Maiming, body parts being cut off, death. That kind of stuff.

Obviously, Griff, the boss wolf out here, would not give a fuck if we chatted online with a tithe, even before he'd gotten a mate and become super mate-positive. It wasn't his rules it was against .

It was the government's rules.

I remembered right after the Change when lots of debates were happening about what to do about wolves. There were a bunch of people who wanted us all rounded up and shot in the head. I was still only human back then, of course. I didn't know I was going to shift in a few years. But the mass executions didn't happen, so I guessed I should be grateful for that.

For the most part, the government seemed to shy away from doing anything decisive about us. It was a compromise, trying to appease the family members of the werewolves and the people who had family members dead at the werewolves's hands. (Claws?) Of course, this had started to be all the same people as the issue went on, and I think everyone got confused. Sure, your niece had been killed by werewolves on the night of the Change—wait, no, they called it something else. The First Full Moon or something. I couldn't remember. Anyway, your niece was dead, but also your cousin had shifted into a wolf and was hunkered down in your aunt's basement freaking out that he was going to be killed.

"What do you think would happen if she accepted your friend request?" said Kestrel.

I lifted my shoulders. "Nothing."

"Okay, then, why bother?"

I sighed. "All right, fine. I guess I feel like maybe it would be a good thing if we could get to know her a little, and then, if she comes back next month—"

"Get to know her before we gang-rape her again, you mean?" He snorted dismissively and started sorting through the eggs, moving the smaller ones to one side.

"You know it's more complicated than that," I said.

"No, I don't," he said.

So, then I started to help him put the smaller eggs in the container we used for the smaller eggs. We had electricity and we had plumbing and all of that out here. It was provided through some weird arrangement with the government and the utility companies. Certain utility companies were totally local, and they'd been entirely subsumed into the exiled wilderness out here. If all of those companies had gone belly up right away, it would have had a bad effect on the economy, so they were subsidized.

Mostly, if things broke out here, though, we were on our own. We had to find someone who knew how to fix a leaking pipe or go around faulty electric wiring. A lot of times, we could. Or we watched YouTube videos and figured it out ourselves.

"You know they like it," I said.

He picked up one of the eggs that I was putting with the small eggs and moved it into the container with the big eggs. We had old egg cartons from grocery stores—not the styrofoam kinds which tended to fall apart, but the plastic ones. "They do. But that doesn't mean they really want it."

"But what if she does really want it?"

"I don't think you should get attached, Paladin," he said. "She's not, you know, like a stray cat or something. We can't keep her."

I lifted my chin. "You want to keep her, too."

He wouldn't meet my gaze. "She probably wouldn't even want it to be us again when she comes back. She'd probably want to try out some other wolves, get a different experience. And whatever happens, it's six or eight full moons for her, and then she'll stop being a tithe and we'll never see her again, so it's stupid to care about her."

"You want to keep her."

"And even if it happened, like, even if we mated to her and she mated to us and stuff… even if I thought that was really real, which it isn't. It's just women who are wired strangely deciding to live with wolves forever for whatever reason. Even if that happened, someone will topple Griff down there and take over, and it might be Red, and if that happens, they will take her away from us and do God-knows-what to her at that compound."

I drew back. "You really think that."

"If Griff's gone this soft, it's a matter of time."

"We could hide her," I said .

"Not forever," he said. "Keeping that girl is a great way to get us killed and her turned into their plaything. It's better—for all of us—if we just ignore whatever we felt."

"So, you felt something."

"For fuck's sake, Paladin."

"I did, too," I said.

Even so, I waited weeks to send the friend request, because I could understand what it was that Kestrel was saying. I knew what the world was like out here, and it wasn't a good place to bring someone. She was safer in the cities. She should stay there.

I couldn't even say why I sent the request at all. It was selfish, really. Kestrel was right. If I cared about her, I should let her go.

It was only that I couldn't stop thinking about her.

We didn't fuck each other a lot on the farm. We kept it under wraps, mostly just seeing to ourselves. When it did happen, it was me with one of them. They could both be really affectionate in the wake of it, sometimes. Sometimes, either one of them would want to spoon me all night or would lie next to me, sighing, running his fingers up and down my body.

But usually, it was kind of transactional, and they were both more comfortable if I initiated, and I tended to watch them, get a sense of them, and to, well, smell them, and I'd know if they needed me to initiate.

But since the girl, since the full moon, we'd had four three-ways, which we had done only once before this. And they were involved. The other three-way had been all about me doing all the catching, but these went on and on. It might start with me sucking both their dicks, but it might end up with me putting my cock in Lazarus's ass while he swore and moaned my name. That's good, just like that. Give it to me, he would say.

We had not talked about the implications of this, because none of us were what you might call good at talking.

And one morning, after I woke up pressed in between both of their chests, I decided that I didn't care anymore, and I went out, found my phone, and sent the friend request.

She accepted it.

Like, immediately.

I sent it, two second later, accepted.

Then.

Nothing.

Three hours later, I sent her a message. I'm the reddish wolf.

She sent a smiley-face. Oh. Hello, Mr. Russet. The sweet one.

That was what she thought of me? I grinned really wide. I know it's against the rules to contact you like this. If you don't like it, I'll stop.

Yeah, I believe you would. Don't stop, though. I've been thinking about you.

Me, too.

But then I did stop, because I didn't know what else to say.

The rest of the day passed and into the evening, and then we were having dinner, and I could scent how horny Kestrel and Lazarus were, and I was worked up, too, for that matter.

We all ended up in Lazarus's room and we each came more than once before our cocks decided to lie down and rest.

The next morning, I got up early and gathered the eggs. Then I left the farm.

I went all the way down to the farm below ours. I was always wary of going there. It wasn't like our farm. It was more like the other places I'd been in since shifting, where things were bad for certain people. They had outdoor houses at this farm and there were guys who had to sleep out there, naked, sometimes chained up.

It was a punishment if they weren't keeping up with pulling their weight on the farm, but it was also this sex thing, and I knew that. There tended to be a hierarchy thing to sex with men. You clawed your way up to the top and then you got to choose who you wanted to have sex with. If you weren't strong enough—and I never was—you ended up being taken by everyone else whenever they wanted.

I let them all out, because it was easy. The key was dangling from a hook outside the stalls where they were padlocked in. That was so anyone else in the house could come out, let them out, and fuck them if they were in the mood.

The fucked up thing about coming here was this this kind of submission roleplay, being treated like an animal and a sex object, it made me hard. I was low-key aroused every time I came into this place, and I was never really sure what to do with that.

"You think you can remember the way to that part of the wall that collapsed?" I said to one of the guys after I had them free. His name was Travis.

"What'll you give me for that information?" he said.

"I just let you free," I said.

He considered. "Yeah, okay, sure. I'll draw you a map, all right?"

"Thank you," I said.

clementine

HE WANTED ME to come visit him.

Not during a full moon, not when we were all crazed and out of our minds, but now, to see what it was like between us in general.

He said there was a place where the wall had collapsed, and he had gone out there with his cell phone, gotten the GPS coordinates, and sent them to me. He knew he was taking a risk with that, because I could tell someone in authority about the wall breach, which needed to be repaired or whatever.

But it didn't really matter. The werewolves could figure out ways to get over the walls, obviously, but mostly they didn't. Mostly, they stayed in there, maybe because they were frightened of what would happen if they were let loose on the population during shifts or maybe because they were all ashamed of whatever they had become. Maybe because they were too invested in whatever society they'd created over the walls to want to leave it and come back to the cities where they had to strangle themselves with ties and talk on the phone with angry clients or customers all day.

Anyway, I wasn't going to tell anyone.

I was thinking that I was going to go, actually.

I was curious about the wolves, especially Paladin. I had his social media profile, which obviously hadn't really been updated since he shifted. It was full of stuff from years ago, when he would have been a teenager, various old bands and movies. I delved in to find pictures of him with his friends, and he looked so very young then, hair in his eyes, smiling a guileless smile that made him look like a little boy. But he must be twenty-five or so now, older than me.

Even so, the conversation I had with him online didn't feel like I was talking to someone much more mature than me. Maybe less mature in certain ways.

I thought about telling someone that I'd set up a time to meet him, but then I wasn't sure who I would tell, because I thought everyone would react with alarm. My father would lose it. Ninnia might be okay with it, but she also lived far away, and she might worry and contact the police or something. I wouldn't put it past her. Maybe my roommate, but we weren't really close. She kept looking at me across the dorm room as if she was waiting for me to change into a mean Gremlin after midnight or something.

So, I didn't tell anyone.

I drove out there in the afternoon, at the time we'd set up to meet, and I found the place where the wall had collapsed easily enough. Most of the wall simply surrounded the city, and there was sprawl right up to the places the walls had been set up, but there were places like this, which were relatively remote, where there wasn't much of anything but road and trees and grass and that kind of thing. I pulled off and found a safe place to park my car, but I didn't see how I was going to get across the wall, because half of the wall was still standing.

Only the upper part of the wall had collapsed. It must have been hit by something, I guessed, because the broken stone had fallen outward. I would have to climb up over the jagged pieces of the wall to get inside and then, what? Jump down?

I went over to survey it, looking up and down and thinking about how I was even possibly going to climb over it. I had not worn the right shoes, I didn't think.

Paladin appeared, waving at me from atop the rubble. He was grinning. "Hey, you came!"

For some reason, it was actually easy to scramble up to where he was standing. I was grinning, too. I didn't think I'd ever been so happy to see someone in my entire life. It felt strangely right, like the way you might feel if you'd come home for the holidays after a long break away.

Yeah, like coming home? Crawling up this wall to cross into werewolf wilderness exile? I didn't know how to make sense of that.

He was gorgeous.

He was tall and broad-shouldered with large and powerful hands. He had sun-bronzed skin and his hair had auburn streaks in it, which matched the color of his wolf pelt. I wanted to throw myself into his arms, because it did feel like I'd just come home after a long time away.

But I didn't do that.

I thrust out my hand like a dork, grinning too wide.

He shook my hand enthusiastically. "Hey," he said. "Hey, wow, hey ."

This was when a number of things occurred to me that should have occurred to me before. This guy had last seen me totally naked. I'd been wearing zero clothing, and I'd been out of my head with desire to service him and those other wolves sexually. I didn't even know anything about those wolves or him, not really. Did they have some connection to each other (I thought they did, I realized, but I didn't know why) or had it just been convenient to pounce on me together? "Well," I said, "this is what I look like with clothes."

He laughed, like doubled-over laughed, as if this was a really funny joke. He chortled out several gasps of laughter before he stopped. "You're funny. "

I shrugged.

"This is what I look like when I'm not a wolf," he said.

I couldn't help but giggle at that.

He shrugged back at me. "I should have thought about how awkward this would be."

"Me too," I said.

"I just… you're all I think about, all the time, and I got kind of focused on this, and now, I realize I didn't think it through…"

"No, me too," I said. "I mean, I think about you all the time. But not just you. Who are those other wolves?"

"Oh, they're my pack."

"So, that's a real thing, packs?"

"It is," he said.

"Like you are wolves," I said.

He lifted a shoulder. "I don't know. If you look at all-male social groups, especially when the men are isolated from the rest of society for various reasons, I think humans tend to behave a lot like this typically, anyway. We're more human than wolf. Or wolves and humans are actually pretty similar?"

"All-male social groups," I echoed, trying to think of what he was even talking about.

"Yeah, like, I don't know, prison."

Not that prisons were the same anymore, because a lot of male offenders would shift after being in jail, it turned out, even if they hadn't before. So, werewolf exile had replaced jail in a lot of ways. Which maybe didn't entirely jive with his argument, because it could account for why there were so many similarities in behavior out here, maybe.

"Or maybe pirate ships or explorers or Vikings." A pause. "Sorry, here I am, not knowing how to do small talk. What do you want to do? You can come with me and I'll take you to the farm where I live if you want, or we could cross the wall and I'll beg you to take me for some fast food."

"Oh," I said, gesturing behind me. "Is that what you want? Because if so, let's go. Drive-thru on me. Now."

He swallowed, gazing at me with a funny look on his face. Then he looked away, shaking his head. "No, no, no, I can't. If you got caught with me, you'd be in so much trouble."

"I won't get caught," I said.

He shifted on his feet. "Shouldn't have offered. Everything about this is so selfish on my part. I should never have contacted you at all."

I didn't know what to say to that.

It was quiet for a while, then, maybe for too long. I tried to think of what to say, like maybe I should convince him to let me buy him some fries, but he started talking again.

"You come with me to the farm or you go back on your own, I think," he said. "I should try to convince you not to come, to forget about us. It's dangerous out here, and you shouldn't let yourself get all tangled up in it. You should stay out there, in the city, in safety."

"Should," I said. "But I already decided to show up, so I guess I'm not really doing the safe thing."

He eyed me. "Kestrel says that girls who come out here and live with the wolves are just like the kinds of women who would become penpals with serial killers."

"Kestrel?"

"He's kind of like the leader in a way—"

"The black and silver wolf."

"Oh, you could tell he was the leader." He furrowed his brow, eyeing me. "How could you tell?"

"I don't know," I said. I wanted to say I could sense it, but then I realized it was really just evidence that I'd analyzed. "He got his cock sucked first, before either of you, like it was his due. He pulled you off me before you got your knot in, but he put his in."

"Right, that's a thing none of us have talked about, the fact he did that."

"I know it can happen," I said. I'd heard that it was frowned upon amongst the wolves because of how long it meant that a tithe was unfuckable by anyone else. That if a wolf did it during a gathering, there would be consequences from the other wolves. But it happened regularly enough anyway that it was a known thing.

"You're not pregnant, right?"

"I mean, I'm on birth control," I said. But I knew sometimes that being a tithe messed with the hormones in the pill. I wasn't actually on the pill. I had the patch. Same difference, though, apparently.

"But you don't know. You haven't, like, gotten your period."

"Why are we talking about this?"

He shook his head, looking away.

"Look, I'm not some danger junkie, no matter what it is Kestrel thinks of me," I muttered. "I'm a level-headed person who doesn't want any of this, actually. I never asked to be a tithe or to be obsessed with the three of you at all waking moments. I sure as hell didn't ask for the dreams I keep having."

"Dreams?" He blinked at me, smiling a little. "You dream about us?"

"I don't believe the mating stuff is even real," I said. "I think women just have this weird Stockholm-syndrome thing brought on by how great the orgasms are. Maybe if they have nothing really going on for them in their regular lives, it seems like they want to escape or something."

"Yeah, you sound like Kestrel," he said.

"Well, I guess he and I agree, then," I said. "I'm not your mate. You're not mine."

"Because you think there aren't mates at all."

"Yeah," I said.

"So, how do you explain that when the tithes come out here and stay with the wolves, they stay tithes? They don't lose their full-moon urges and they retain their healing abilities and all of that?"

I drew back.

"I mean, that's what Lazarus always says when Kestrel gets on a kick about it, anyway." Paladin shrugged.

"Lazarus is the gray wolf," I said. The guilty one.

"Yeah," he said.

"Well… it's got to just be because of pheromones or so mething," I said. "The change becomes permanent if you're surrounded by wolves all the time. Maybe. Are we sure that if I come out here with you, I'll always be able to heal from your claws?"

He heard the way I'd phrased it. "I mean, not sure, I guess. You don't even want that."

"I don't," I said. "I do have a life out there. I have a future. I'm in college."

He nodded. "Yeah."

I felt like shit all of the sudden. He'd shifted when he was fifteen or something. He hadn't even been able to graduate high school. He didn't have the option, really, though I knew some wolves took online classes or correspondence school. It was dumb, though. What were you really going to do with a degree out here except say that you had one? "Hey, I didn't mean to be like that about it. It must suck to be thrown out here."

"Come see the farm," he said. "It's not so bad, not all of it."

I hesitated.

He reached down and took my hand. "Sometimes, you wake up in the morning and open the window, and you can hear the sounds of the morning birds calling to each other and the sky is too pretty, you know, so pretty it makes your chest feel tight. And those times, I wouldn't go back to the city for anything."

I'd been feeling that thing, the feeling of my chest getting tight. It was that sharp feeling that pulled me away from my troubles and worries and anchored me right there in the moment, just staring at a tree or something.

"Take me to see the farm," I said.

He grinned.

I grinned back, squeezing his hand.