Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 148955 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 745(@200wpm)___ 596(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148955 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 745(@200wpm)___ 596(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
Music plays loudly with voices carrying. Their fire is too large. It’s reckless. I smell the whisky my uncle used to drink on some of them, too.
Memories claw their way forward in my mind.
At the busy bar, women offered me their cunts, so I kept taking them, feeling pleasure for a moment and then dissatisfaction. I asked him, if I were in my village, the village he’d taken me from, would it feel different? Better? None of the women in that bar were shifters and none of them smelled like mine. None of them smelled like this little sprite. One smelled familiar, though not like she was mine, and I had no idea why until I smelled her on my uncle one day after one of his errands.
“You smell like you fucked someone familiar. A shifter. I know no shifters but you, why is she familiar?”
“She was supposed to be mine. She was taken from me.”
“Did you go back and mount her? Why not bring her here to live with us? Take her from them and make her eat the grass. If she’s yours, she should be with you.”
“She doesn’t want me.”
“Who is she?”
He acted angry then that I kept trying to convince him to take what was his and mount her until she knew she was his. He gorged himself on that disgusting scent-masking grass then, encouraging me to eat more than my usual amount and I knew he was angry at the scent I’d picked up and I suspected he was also hiding something.
He ate it until he spewed it everywhere and got so ill I had to carry him back to his bed over my shoulder as he wept like a child.
The next day, he ordered me to shift early and put his finger in my face telling me to never discuss it or ask about that female again.
Months before my uncle died, he reminded me to eat the grass, to never let them know who I was, and to wait until I found my own mate and then keep her safe from them.
Just before he died, he told me that he knew he didn’t have long and said after he was gone I should go there to the forbidden village and rip them all apart. Every last one.
The day after he died, right before we were to shift to men again, I shifted early. I went to the house and took the truck to the bar in the village and ordered a beer. That night I took two women who approached me together to a hotel and fucked them both.
One slept while the other talked in sweet voices to me, asking to come home with me. She said she’d give me children. Take care of my house. She wasn’t mine and I felt loneliness I knew would ache without having anyone, not even my uncle who was never a good companion but who was all I had.
She wasn’t mine and I told her I didn’t want her. She screamed in my face and called me bad names, waking the other one, while I dressed to leave.
I drove back to the cabin, locked the garage, and checked the house to ensure I did what we usually did after our month as men before shifting. Although it’d only been a few days as man that year, I was done with it. I shifted and began with a long run, one that took me away for months. Far away, in case I needed to go farther to find my one. I came back and I approached the forbidden village. I smelled no one that was mine.
I got close, something calling to me, an unnamed need. The need for blood like he suggested? Curiosity about that familiar female? I might have wanted revenge. And I realized I hadn’t eaten the grass to mask my scent. And I didn’t care. In fact, I wanted them to smell me.
When I approached, their smells confused me. They made my head dizzy and I again wanted to mark the entire village with my scent. So I began to do that.
I saw several men step outside a large barn and they froze when they saw me marking. My uncle’s voice rang in my wolf’s head, his warnings about them. I growled at them, bared my teeth, showed my disdain and strangely, they all shifted and moved to poses of partial submission.
Why would they submit? More importantly, why would it be only a partial submission? Uncle told me my inferiors would submit if they recognized me as their alpha. He told me other alphas would only partly submit to show deference.
Confusion swam through me and I left before I finished marking. With no one to go back to, I didn’t go back to the house until winter when I denned underneath it. And the following winter. And the winter after that. I’ve forgotten how many.