Chapter 5 - Harvey

Annoying slurping noises filled the air, followed by the sound of Clancy sighing. “She”s beautiful, you know. Ridiculously beautiful.”

That aggravating sound came again just as fast as it had disappeared. More slurping. A cough. Elongated sucking sounds.

Ugh.

Clancy was sipping something so thick through a straw that he was making choking sounds while trying to get it through. That was probably another one of his homemade milkshakes he thought tasted great. I was willing to bet his demon convinced him of that.

The slurping sounds came back, then turned into gurgling as the liquid bubbled at the end of the straw, signaling the end of his concoction. He set the cup aside with a sigh and kicked his feet up onto the coffee table. I glared at him from the desk while I bent over more and more paperwork. The tome, as big as it was, still needed to be tended to despite the fact that we already knew pretty much everything about our symptoms.

As we had predicted the previous day, Kirk was suffering from another round of convulsions. He was our data recorder for the most part, and with him being out of commission and Clancy being more preoccupied with his drink, I had to be the one who took care of things. As always, I was the one who stepped up to the plate.

“Her hips are really nice,” Clancy continued. “She”s young, and she”s got a great body. Bit of an attitude, though.”

Even shooting him another glare didn”t make him stop. I probably should have said something. But I shouldn”t have to say anything to get him to stop talking about my new mate.

Clancy kicked back and rested his arms behind his head, reclining as much as he could with that hunch in his shoulder and upper back.

“Would you cut it out?” I snapped at him. “Leave my meat alone.”

The way he looked at me was like I was a dog with a special bone that everybody wanted. But in many ways, that’s how I felt. Why wouldn”t everyone else want what I had? If our records were correct, if the witch”s journal was to be believed, then I was on the precipice of relieving myself of a curse that I’d been suffering from for ten years—that was certainly an enviable position to be in.

They all want what you have, my demon whispered. I tried to push away the sound of his voice in my mind, which felt like a fly buzzing around my ear. Clancy wants it the most.

I breathed deeply as I stared at my best friend. “Will you call Nora and tell her to come over?”

He nodded absently while reaching for his cup again.

Only five women, including Nora, were left in the group. They were older, and some of them were already mated or past their prime for reproduction. Shifter women who were possessed tended to suffer greater consequences, leading to more intense madness. It was crucial that we protected the woman downstairs who I had claimed as my mate. We had to protect her from suffering like the others. Her possession could lead to a greater downfall for our pack. If she really was my true mate and she got lost to a demon, then I would be cursed forever. I would never be relieved of my demon, and I would be forced to take one of two ways out, both of which were not exactly appealing to me right now.

So, I would do exactly what I needed to do, even if it didn’t seem moral on the surface. I would go downstairs to the basement and face her again because I needed to—because I had to talk to her, and because she looked a little lonely behind the bars of her little cage, kind of like an idle puppy who needed to walk outside frequently. My feet carried me without me having to think about it. I stood there with my attention completely focused on her.

“Tell me your name,” I demanded.

I went quiet for a second, watching her watch me, studying the way her black hair spilled over her shoulders. She was playing with it, twirling it between her fingers, folding it into a braided pattern, and then undoing it. Those strands were so much like silk, like a black sea that I could get lost in. The scent of her drifted toward me, that azalea soaked in sweet water. I wanted to taste its saltiness on my tongue. I knew of it from the sea, from previous lovers, from making love on the sand. I wondered whether or not that was something she had done.

And then I realized that her lips were parting. “Kiara.”

I blinked for a second as I took in her name: Kiara.

She told me her name, which was surprising considering the conditions of her captivity. She looked down for a second at her cot and folded her hair together again. She popped her head up. “Can I call my dad?”

I stepped toward the bars. “Why would you want to do that? You”re old enough to be on your own, aren”t you?”

She gave me a slight nod and then moved her eyes around the room. “You know, family worries about each other. You know that, right?”

I considered her statement for a second and then glanced toward the ceiling, where Clancy was undoubtedly continuing to lounge with his feet on my coffee table without a care for whether or not they were going to scratch the wood. “Yeah, I guess I understand that in some way.

“You guess or, you know?”

When I looked at her, I was met with an intense stare. That feistiness behind her blue-green eyes made me think of furtive ocean waves, feverish cycles, and a dangerous riptide threatening to drown me. I liked how she fought me just a little bit—not too much, but just enough. I enjoyed her snappy responses. It meant that she had a strength in her that would protect her if I wasn”t around.

I smiled. “I think I know.”

She narrowed her eyes at me curiously before tossing her legs over the side of the cot and gracefully slinging her hair over her shoulder. “Well, you don’t sound very convincing.”

I gave her half a shrug. “I suppose I don”t know then, because I don”t have parents.”

The way her expression changed to one of concern almost confused me for a second. She was remarkably sympathetic for a woman who was in a cage.

She frowned apologetically. “That sounds kind of sad.”

Something happened to my heart then, a sort of twitch. A weird strum of strings inside that told me there was true compassion in the world. My demon usually made me forget that; it usually made me forget a lot of things. Typically, the way the demon made my thoughts twirl around made me forget that I existed half the time. Yet, when I stood here in front of Kiara, I felt like the demon was quiet.

Not entirely quiet, though—just enough that I could focus on something other than it for once. He was pushed so far to the background that if I wanted to, I could try and possibly succeed f at totally forgetting about his presence for the moment. I took a step toward the bars, and then another until my hands were layered with the crosshatch mesh cage door.

This movement seemed to invite her to do something similar, and she stood up, walked across the small space, and planted her feet firmly in front of me. Her bare feet were dirty, and the clothes she wore were torn from running through the woods. She was wearing a pair of loose jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt with some kind of logo on it. I had been so isolated from the rest of the world that I didn’t know whether it was a brand name or not.

I frowned at the threads she was wearing. “Did nobody bring you any change of clothes?”

She looked at me funny. “I don”t know. Does it look like I got a change of clothes?”

“It isn”t wise to be rude to your future husband.”

She laughed; the sound was so musical that it made me want to lean even closer to her. I rested my forehead against the gate and felt the coolness of the iron on my forehead. I almost tried to reach through the bars to get to her, which was funny, considering I could have just undone the latch, but there was just this strange, striking resistance between the bars, my heart, and the way things had to be done. I knew that breaking the heat between us would ruin our mating ritual.

And yet, other parts of me wanted to fling open the door, swing her around on the cot, and ravish her until she was screaming incoherently. I sensed that she even wanted something like that to happen. I felt it in the way she looked at me and how her eyes raked over my body. It was evident in how she inspected the front of my pants with a quick flick of her eyes.

Wolves could often confuse physical hunger for lust. However, she had been fed, and continued to observe me hungrily. I couldn”t stop considering the possibility. It didn”t help that Clancy narrated his inner dialogue about thoughts that were too inappropriate to share.

“You’re funny,” she claimed. “He thinks he’s funny,” she said to herself this time. She shook her head. “Can I just get my phone call, please?”

I sighed. “We”ll get you a change of clothes.”

When I tried to push away from the bars, I found that I couldn”t. She leaned toward me and pressed her hands just close enough to my hands that they could touch if she wanted them to. I stood there silently, trying to figure out if she wanted to touch me or if she was just trying to cozy up to me to figure out she was going to escape. Of course she would be thinking about that. I knew because she asked to call her father. It made me wonder how it felt to belong to a family like that, to think of them as soon as danger was present.

That was when it happened, when the movement struck me. Despite its subtlety, I noticed the side of her thumb from her left hand touched my right pinky. A spark flew through me that could have lit up the darkest night. My wolf seemed to chase his own tail, spinning around in circles and kicking up dirt as my demon attempted to get him under control. Even without much trying, I found myself able to block it out just by focusing on her eyes. Watching those swirls of cosmic oceanic bliss turned me into a metaphorical puddle.

Do I really have to do this ritual? I closed my eyes while recalling the way her words sounded. I could sit here and argue with her all day just to hear her voice. Or I could tell her the truth.

When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me as if she was lost, or maybe she just wanted to look lost so that I would sympathize with her. I wasn”t sure which it was. My demon had convinced me that everyone in my life was manipulative because I was manipulative. Why wouldn”t everyone else want to hurt me when I wanted to hurt them, too? But her—I didn”t want to hurt her. She looked too sweet and kind. She was too feisty, too playful, too genuinely curious.

“What?” she snapped, though I couldn’t see any hint of irritation in her eyes while she examined my lips. “What is it…?”

I didn’t respond. I was too busy considering whether I should put her through the mating ritual at all, whether I should introduce her to anyone else, or whether I should just open the cage door and let her run. I even took a step back to see the space, to see my hand reaching for the latch, to see it coming undone, sliding to the right. The door popped open about a half inch. The hinges creaked, and she stepped forward.

A hand landed on my shoulder. Behind me, a person who smelled of incense and dried leaves spoke in a raspy voice. “I presume this is the woman you”re going to mate with.”

I turned around to welcome Nora, one of our pack elders. The older woman was rather frail and much shorter than me. Perhaps an inch or two shorter than Kiara. She hunched over worse than Clancy. Her eyes were a steel gray with a hint of blue in them, a sort of cerulean that reminded me of starlight, and her skin resembled a weathered tan hide, almost like animal leather that had been left out in the sun to dry a little too long, wrinkled in many places and spotted in others. Her nose had a crooked hook at the tip, and her lips were so thin they were almost non-existent, yet they wore a smile—a very tired and worn smile that told me she was very glad to see me.

Around her shoulders was a periwinkle shawl on top of a Christmas sweater, which she must have picked up on the way here. Whatever clothes we could get were usually stolen from town or bartered for in some kind of underground market. We did our best with what we could. In particular, Nora was one among us who certainly did her best. She took care of a lot of people as she had been a makeshift nurse for such a long time. Yet, over time, I could tell that her demon had worn her down, physically and mentally. I didn’t want her to suffer anymore.

“Now, step aside.”

I held Nora’s hand and was careful not to step on the edge of her long, sweeping white skirt. Kiara had returned to her cot almost obediently, appearing almost too afraid to move. Her muscles were rigid and her pupils were dilated so wide that I almost couldn”t see the bluish-green of her eyes anymore. Some sweat had beaded on her right temple. Her fingers were tightly knitted together in her lap, and she sat as if expecting a teacher to chastise her.

Nora extended her right hand, the one that I wasn”t holding, and beckoned Kiara toward her. “Come closer, child. Let me get a look at you.”

Kiara’s eyes went wide, and her eyebrows shot up into her hairline. She hopped to her feet and scampered over to us like a frightened animal seeking shelter.

The moment she took Nora”s hand, the fear seemed to drain from her eyes. There was still some hesitation there, of course—perhaps some sort of self-preservation remained as a form of survival. But from the look of her skin, the healthiness of her hair, and the general glow about her, she looked like she came from a pack that took very good care of her. If I wasn”t in such dire circumstances, I might have felt bad about taking her from them.

But I didn”t. I knew she was supposed to be mine. She came to me in a vision, and then she was found wandering in the woods right next to my property. This was the type of fate I wished that I had come upon sooner. Yet, at this moment, I was relieved to see her holding hands with Nora, to see her muscles relaxing, and to see the rigidness fade out of her throat and her cheeks.

Everything seemed okay. Even I felt okay.

“I”m going to guide you through this process,” Nora explained.

Anxiety flashed in Kiara’s eyes as she furtively glanced in my direction. A split second later, she returned her gaze to Nora. She seemed even more intent on listening to what Nora had to say.

I retreated back to a small table that held a series of scrolls. The two women got lost in each other, forgetting about my presence. As I watched them, I felt a great affection grow in my chest, a warm feeling that expanded and infected every part of me. It overwhelmed my demon, and I heard him release a disgruntled cough as he retreated to some darker, less conscious part of me. My wolf barked once and then flicked his tail, curled up in my center, and snoozed happily for perhaps the first time in ten years.

And I owed it all to Kiara.