"Just don't breathe on me again." The quip earned me an accelerated trip the rest of the way down, and the bag filled with stars for a moment as the other werewolves snickered. The defiance earned me more pleasure than pain on the balance.
Eagle growled dangerous and low.
"Eagle, you heard Pa. Don't hurt him," Tallow said. A series of growls happened between her and Eagle, ending with him stepping off me and I assumed the weight of Tallow taking his place. She sounded much larger than him.
"You should keep that tongue to yourself, cat. It will be less trouble for you in the long run."
A thought occurred to me, one of many swirling around the black hole in my head. This one made me laugh. "Trouble? I'm not in any more trouble than I was before. You, on the other paw, just stole away a magus's last chance for redemption. I hope you've got both fire and life insurance," I said in a whisper.
She cuffed me. "Quiet." The other wolf dogs snorted.
A few more minutes of silence passed, and the truck rolled to a stop. I heard the doors pop open and the suspension give a sigh of relief. Tallow whispered in a neutral tone, "Bite me and I will return the favor." Then she scooped me up with a slight grunt. Nice to know that I was large enough to require some effort, at least.
"Is he behaving?" asked the gruff voice of Pa.
"He needed some learning, Pa," Eagle said with a snicker.
"Cats usually do. Let's see him." I was handed off. Pa held me under my armpits, heavy mitts pressing on very sore ribs. I grimaced but didn't protest, figuring telling him I hurt would cause the sadistic bastard to press on them harder. So far I had learned that male werewolves were sadistic bastards and the females less so. Despite the small sample size the conclusions seemed sound.
He found a developing bruise on the side of my head, which forced a hiss of pain.
"Nothing's broken, just bruised," Tallow piped up.
"Good." He handled me with the ease of a vet handling a house cat. He was nearly daring me to bite him, and I very sorely wanted to. But there would be no point. Not like I could run away. For now I had to wait. Hopefully O'Meara could track these fools.
Inspection done, he encircled my torso with his arm, which felt nearly as thick as O'Meara's waist. He started walking, and I could hear the snap of twigs and the crunch of gravel as the rest of the pack followed him. "Merlot, get the cage ready," Pa ordered. I heard someone scamper ahead. Was Merlot the omega? Or was it Noise? How closely did werewolves emulate their animal cousins, I wondered as I tried not to move.
I heard the scrape of metal on metal somewhere in front of us, sending a chill up my spine. I didn't have to imagine the origin of the sound for long. Soon I was pitched forward, landing on a surface far harder than the ground I was expecting.
I heard the cage door shut, and the floor creaked as something came closer. "Don't move, cat. I might slip," one of the wolves growled. A hand roughly seized my legs. There was a harsh tug on my fur, and my legs could suddenly move again, the compression of the duct tape gone. "Stop moving, not done," hissed the werewolf. Three more cuts and my legs separated from each other. It was an effort not to sigh in utter relief. Then the bag was ripped off, and my vision went from black to pure white. There was a blur of movement, and the sound of the door opening and then closing. I blinked several times as blurred lines resolved into iron bars, beyond which the alpha and his pack stared down at me. I slowly got to my feet, wincing a little as pins and needles flooded into my extremities. I glared back at them. All twelve of their yellow eyes were on me as if they were waiting for a show.
"What you want? Some kind of congratulations?" I huffed and pretended to study the duct tape on my foreleg, idly calculating how much fur I was about to lose.
"He's not breathing fire," the smallest said disappointedly. He was definitely the wolf that had cut me free. He was tiny compared to the others. About five feet tall with jet black fur, he barely stood much taller than the alpha's waist. His muzzle was blunted compared to the others, who all sported the long muzzles of wolves, except for the alpha, who looked more like a bulldog than anything else.
Eagle, I imagined, was the one standing next to the alpha. He had a prominent underbite, but looked more like a deformity than fearsome like his Pa. Almost as big as the alpha and standing on the other side was a female who I guessed was the alpha's mate. Jet-black fur with a patch of russet red on her cheekbones. Her stance was almost apelike, with her arms nearly as long as her legs. Her muzzle was long and narrow, like a shaggy Doberman. Behind her was probably Tallow, as she looked unrelated to the rest of the pack, with a more wolfish cast to her face and light grey fur with a mottling of darker spots. Her belly was swollen below two titanic human breasts. Judging from her size, I'd guess werewolves must have full litters—yikes!
Of the entire pack, only Noise's eyes squinted in suspicion. Seeing her next to the alpha’s mate, I could see the family resemblance: the fur was the same quality of her mother's and the slight build reminded me even more of a Doberman’s. A different father, maybe?
I didn't bother responding to the small werewolf; instead I let my eyes settle on the big one, Pa. His eyes were cool, and bespoke far more intelligence than the cartoon bulldog he resembled through an artist’s eye. "He'd be stupid to breathe fire in a cage that's mostly wood," he said after a long silence.
"Almost as stupid as stealing a familiar from a lady who can." The words slipped out before I could stop them.
The alpha smiled, which was a horrible thing both in terms of the number of teeth and the terrible state they were in. Any dentist would have screamed for mercy. "We have something far better than mere fire. We have a god! And you’re gunna meet her soon, cat."
His utter conviction gave me a cold and prickly feeling that ran down my spine and pooled into my stomach. I didn't see a hint of doubt in any of their eyes. Great, I thought to myself, kidnapped by a bunch of fuzzy fanatics.
An unspoken decision swept the group as I failed to do anything interesting. Big Alpha pointed at their most slender member. “Noise, you watch him.”
Noise’s eyes flashed, and she rounded on the big creature. “What? No! I’m still tracking that nymph! Get Merlot to do it.”
Pa’s eyes narrowed. “You got your ears jammed with wax, girl? I ain’t gonna repeat myself.”
“Besides,” the older female cut in, “your brother isn’t in our guest’s weight class.” She placed a steadying hand on Noise’s shoulder.
The lead weight in the middle my brain squeezed an embryonic joke about my weight before it reached my lips. Probably wise, that lead weight. Merlot, the little wolf, now bared his teeth at his mum’s condescension while Noise’s tail drooped. Huffing like a put-upon teenager, she said, “Fine, but I’m getting my phone first.”
Pa’s counter-objections to that were cut off with a soft nudge from the grizzled female. Merlot stewed with skill and practice as he and the rest of his family wandered towards the edges of the clearing and Noise rooted around in the cab of the truck. Only once she had exited it with a small rectangular object clutched in her paw and a solar charger clamped in her armpit did Pa take his eyes off me and head into the forest.
Tallow, the one who might pop if you poked her, had slinked off in a different direction, somewhere I couldn’t see beyond the viewpoint of my cage.
I watched Noise as I licked at the tape.
Yeerrach!
Duct tape adhesive was not a flavoring I'd be using as a spice any time soon. She didn't look at me. She sat cross-legged, her back to me, the solar panel next to her and the fading light of the sun shining off its surface. She hunched over the tiny screen as if her and it were the only things within the world. Despite her towering form and rippling muscles of her back, she looked vulnerable and small.
"Hey," I said.
She hunched over her screen a bit tighter. I cocked my head and attempted to figure out this strange reaction. Was she afraid of me? The cat in the cage. The way she held her shoulders, the duck of her head, I had seen that before. But where?
"Hey, fuzzy girl," I tried again. "You know I'm not joking about my magus. She’s gonna be real pissed about all this."
Noise put down her phone and hugged herself with both arms, giving a slight rock. "Shut up, Thomas—please shut up,” she whispered.
Something in the way she said my name, the intimate way it rolled off her tongue, not as if it were new but one of long practice, stilled me. The words of rationality faded as a sense of panic began to burble in my stomach and crawl its way up my throat. I flehmmed, pressed my muzzle to bars and drank in the scents on the breeze. I sorted out all the pollen and decaying scents of the forest living and dying around us and grabbed hold of her canine musk. I flehmmed again, singling her out, and she winced as her scent unwound in my mind. The scent of barbecuing meat in the back yard, Angelica sweeping into my arms and nailing me to the wall with a savage kiss, the glee of her laughter as we tussled with each other, trying to distract the other in a game of Smash Brothers. It was the scent that entered my lungs as I drifted off to sleep happy.
My legs gave out, all four of them, and I thumped to the bottom of the cage. My brain feebly tried to work through the logistics and ignore the fact that she could let me out. Two weeks on, two weeks gone, corresponding to the lunar cycle, I’d bet. But why was she so . . . wolf now? The full moon was only three days long. Why two weeks?
“Angelica, why?” I asked.
Her giant head flung back, pointing her long muzzle at the sky. I expected her to howl, but instead she choked and drew in a ragged breath before plunging her face into her massive paws. After a moment, her voice drifted back to me, muffled. “My name is Noise, Thomas. This is what I really am. You never noticed that I come back to your place with a short tail.” She straightened but didn’t turn around. “No matter how I joked about you making me howl or you’d comment on how cold my nose was when I poked you with it. You couldn’t see the monster in your bed.” She spoke so softly and into the wind. Had my ears still been naked and round I doubted I could have caught a single word. The sniffle was far louder.
“N—” I tried to use her real name but it caught in my craw like a piece of dry straw. “Angelica, I see you now okay. We can talk about this.”
She whirled up onto all fours and snarled, displaying savagely sharp teeth, her golden eyes clouded with anger. “Stop calling me that here! She was my escape from this! You wanted to know where I went? I come here with my family, my pack. Now you know! Happy? Because now it’s over.”
“It’s only over because I’m in a cage you put me in.”
She stared at me, puzzled for moment, and then a look of disgust passed over her features. “Ewww! You’re a cat!”
I thrust out my chest. “I fail to see the problem with that. They tell me I’m a very handsome cat. O’Meara practically had to get the crowbar to pry off Jowls.”
She snorted. It might have been the birth of a laugh, but she swallowed it down and glared at me. I caught a sparkle of something deep in her eyes. “Shut up, Thomas, and wait. You’ll at least get to leave this town.”
“I ain’t leaving, Angelica. I’ve gone through way too much trouble in order to stick around.”
One of her ears drooped in an adorable manner as puzzlement stole over her face. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Because you live in this town and I love you.”
Her jaw opened and then shut. Before we had always danced around the L word, but it would slip out of us both on occasion. She spun away from me and sat down hard on the ground, clutching her head as if trying to squeeze something out of it.
“Come on, Angelica—let me out of here,” I pleaded.
“I can’t do that. Please don’t ask me to do that, Thomas.” She looked down and stared shamefacedly into the dirt.
I looked at the cage, an old circus cart. The sort they used to transport the lions in between tents back in the day. Just enough room to pace in, a very solid wooden frame and ceiling with an iron grate at one end and bars along one side for the adoring public. I noted that there was no padlock on the grate, just a heavy latch. “I’m pretty sure you can, Angelica. It’s not locked, just latched. It is simple. Hell, I could do it from outside these luxurious accommodations, and I’m sorely lacking in the dexterous digits department. You could say it was an accident.”
Angelica made a guttural sound of canine despair and clutched her ears, as if that would make this go away. “Don’t do this to me. I’m sorry. But I can’t let you out.” She looked up, the fur around the wild golden orbs now damp with tears, her back hunched as if in pain. “Please be good. The princess won’t hurt you. You’ll understand when you meet her. Please just be a little bit patient, for me, please.” And deep behind the black of those eyes I caught that sparkle of something, a reflection of something deep in her head. Yet, her eyes fell back to the ground before I could see it clearly.
“All things considered, I’m pretty damn done with being good, Angelica. Clearly we have some, uh, revelations we need to sort out, and meeting the family is going poorly. I’m not kidding about the vengeful fire magus who’s now without her Jiminy Cricket. Your family’s not fireproof.” I stared at her, looking for some trace of the Angelica I knew in the whimpering monster before me.