45 – Finally

Troy slept.

Troy dreamed.

In his dream, he finally shifted into a man, and it was better than he’d ever thought it would be, all those years of dreaming it, and finally he was living it. In this dream, he even got a mate, and she was beautiful and sweet and strong and she smelled like the forest felt to him and her name was so pretty it gave him chills to say it. In this dream, they had so many pups, more pups than he could fit in one car, and they were little rascals all of them, especially the girls. They would pounce on him when he came home from work, until he shifted into a wolf and then they bit his tail and chased him around the yard. They played with their cousins and grew up clever and fierce and his life was good and long and happy and when his young started having young, life got even better.

Troy woke up, his hand curled around his female, her back pressed against his front, living the reality he’d only dreamed of before, satisfaction and happiness filling him completely. He palmed Reed’s belly softly, then sniffed her hair. Stay asleep, pet, he told her in ruhi, even if she couldn’t hear it. Pet, he liked it as an endearment, but would she? He had no idea. He would try it out in the morning. If not, there was always babe, baby, bae, sweetums, peppermint pie. He would try them all.

Should he tell her she was with young? His wolf was silent about it. Not yet, he decided. She wouldn’t want to know until she’d had some time to get used to her new life. In a few days, maybe, if she didn’t already suspect. She was smart, his Reed.

“Mowr,” a cat purred from outside the partially-open window and Troy knew it was Grizz, even though it sounded mostly-normal. It landed on the windowsill like it had jumped from the ground below, then leapt neatly onto the foot of the bed.

Troy growled at it. This was his bed. The cat didn’t even look at him. It kept going, the very tip of its tail twitching once, like it had never intended to stop on the bed, anyway. It leapt down the other side and sauntered across the room to the partially-open door, tail held straight up. It disappeared into the darkness of the cabin beyond.

“Big bad wolf,” Reed whispered in her sleep, her tone lusty, her speech perfectly clear, but her eyes closed and moving under their lids. One of her hands twitched. “All the better to eat me with.”

Troy grinned. His mate knew him well. He would eat her up just as soon as she woke.

Troy disentangled himself from his mate, feeling a stab of loss when her skin no longer touched his. He stood up, then covered her naked, sleeping form with a blanket. He crossed to the window and opened it all the way.

Troy stepped back a few steps, then let loose of all the ties and binds of being a man, everything that kept him civilized. He shifted quickly, easily, with little pain and no hesitation, like he’d been born to do this.

Troy leapt through the window as a wolf, landing neatly on the dirt outside, not contemplating why, if he’d been born for it, it had taken him so long, and once he’d managed to do it, why he’d been so convinced that he would not be able to do it again, why he’d tried so hard not to ever sleep, and why he had thought sleeping with the young would keep him a man. When he was a wolf, those kinds of things did not seem to matter.

Troy loped through the cabins, nose in the air, scenting who was home, where everyone was, and what everyone’s mood was. Spirits were high, even though Grey, Rex, and Soren were unaccounted for, back in the Pravus, probably. Everyone who was supposed to be at VF was at VF, all of them in the main house, except for Graeme, Heather, and Kendra, who were in their cabin in the woods.

Troy twitched an ear and stopped moving so he could hear better. Forty feet behind him, in the cabin he had just left, his mate turned over in her sleep. She sighed, then she spoke in her sleep again, like she was in a dream. “Sage. Sage is one. I have to tell…” His mate stopped talking and settled.

Head down, ears up, Troy headed for the forest. He would not go far, but he did have to run.

He was a wolf, after all.

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