CHAPTER FIVE

Ero sat and stared at the fire long after he’d moved them to a new location far from where the human hunter had tagged them, put an unconscious Wren to bed in the sleeping bag and set up camp for the night. He could still smell the slick fluids clinging to Wren’s thighs even after he’d washed his own hands clean from one of the water skins, and it took everything in him to ignore it when he had no right to feel this deep, throbbing lust that refused to quiet, making his entire body tight and hot.

It was his fault that Wren had lost control. His fault that he’d had to violate Wren that way to bring him back down; to stop him from doing something he might regret, if he’d murdered that human in a blood-frenzy. At least the human had had the sense to run fast, run far, as soon as he’d realized he’d cut himself in his fall.

Stalking a wolf never ended well for humans.

One drop of blood and they had not a frightened man or omega running for his life…

But a monster, hell-bent on tearing them limb from limb.

Ero shouldn’t have taken them near Chattanooga tonight. He’d wanted to take advantage of their little run to get the lay of the land, when he hadn’t been down this route in nearly a century. He had no idea how the humans at Chattanooga would respond to wolves, but he’d learned all too quickly when the alarm had gone up, sending them running. They wouldn’t be stopping to trade; he knew that much now.

But he also knew the scent of Wren in heat, and he wasn’t quite sure how to get that sensation out of him when it hovered around him like a cloud, pheromones inhaled on every breath.

He glanced over his shoulder, very carefully not looking at Wren fully. What he could see was enough—slender limbs, shapely and soft, flung restlessly out from the sleeping back, his skin still flushed in his sleep, pink lips parted…

And all of that lovely black hair sheeting over the blankets, trailing almost longer than Wren was tall.

Even without a pack for so long, even remembering so much of human ways, Ero knew that silken fall of dark hair wasn’t for him. Not by pack tradition—where omegas never cut their hair from birth, always wearing it bound and modestly secured in front of others, taking it down only in private with their mates. That vile lout Connaught had probably seen Wren with his hair loose again and again, claiming him against that bed of glossy black, taking that right rather than having it given to him of Wren’s own free will.

Ero hadn’t earned that right, either.

But he could at least look away, until Wren was awake to compose himself.

He distracted himself by making thick black coffee from his supplies, heating it over the camp stove and letting the pungent aroma of it mask the lingering scent of Wren’s arousal.

While he waited, he turned over alternative routes in his head, places that might still be friendly; he came up with very little, and was just concluding that they were likely on their own until Meridian when Wren stirred behind him with a soft, distressed whimper.

Ero poured a cup of coffee laced with sweetener packets and shifted to kneel next to Wren’s bedroll, still looking just past him rather than directly at him. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe. I’m here.” As Wren sat up wobbily, Ero pressed the mug into his hands. “Drink this. It’ll clear your head.”

Wren clutched the cup in shaky fingers and took a tentative sip—then grimaced and jerked away, wrinkling his nose. “What is that?”

“Coffee.”

“It’s gross.” But he took another sip, then another—almost desperately, as if hiding behind the mug, and he peered over its rim at Ero with nervous, liquid eyes. “Wh-what…what happened?”

Ero debated just how blunt he should be, then sighed, resting his hands on his thighs and stating, “One of the humans following us pick up our trail. He tripped in the forest, cut himself…” He didn’t need to smell the dismay, the shame in Wren’s scent to practically feel it radiating off him. “The scent of blood triggered you to go feral. While he ran, I…I did what I had to do to calm you down and bring you back.”

Wren made a shaky, upset sound and turned his face away, thrusting the coffee mug at Ero. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry.” The words were sick and heavy on his tongue, guilt a weighted stone in his chest. “That I had to touch you that way. It was the only way to bring you back without hurting you, and…I couldn’t bring myself to do that.”

“It’s…it’s all right.”

Yet Wren clutched his arms around himself, curling his fingers in his robe—before suddenly taking in a sharp breath of realization and grasping at his hair, gathering it frantically with his fingers and twisting it up into a knot with a deftness born of practice; the movement seemed comforting, at least, and now that his hair was bound, lashed in place with one of its own locks, Ero could look at Wren fully.

But Wren didn’t look at him, as he dropped his hands listlessly into his lap and stared down at them, before whispering, “…thank you.”

Wren’s upset was a tangible thing riding the air, making Ero want to pull him close, comfort him, soothe away the tension in his shoulders with a stroking touch. Not his place, he reminded himself, and he only said quietly, “Most people don’t thank others for uninvited sexual contact.”

“No, I…” Wren shook his head quickly. His shoulders were trembling, yet for all that he radiated fear…Ero couldn’t help but admire how he sought to compose himself, his pride so very strong no matter how childlike he could frequently be. “That was…it was so frightening, Ero. Like I’d been locked in the back of my own mind, scared, while this other thing used my body to try to change me and make me kill that human.” He swallowed, his voice raspy, his eyes blank as he stared at slim white hands that curled tighter and tighter in the blankets draped over him. “I…I don’t understand why I wanted to kill that human so, so much. It didn’t make sense. There was no real reason other than that he was human, and I wanted to taste his blood so…so, so much.”

“I know.” And Ero gave in, then—just a little, just enough to reach over and cover Wren’s hands with his own. “I’ve been trying to understand that part for centuries. It’s like it’s built into being a wolf. Whatever it was about the Disc that changed us…it put that inside us.”

“Why?” Wren asked tremulously, his hands clenching into fists under Ero’s.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But with what the Disc does to humans who come into contact with it…” He hated saying it out loud, admitting it, but it was hard to deny after centuries of seeing the same results, again and again. “It doesn’t seem to want them to survive. Discfall was almost a species-level extinction event. I think, if wolves hadn’t worked alongside humans before the rifts between us became too great…they would have all died, leaving only us and the dryads.”

Wren lifted those pale, haunted green eyes to him. “What does it do to them? It doesn’t kill them like it does to us?”

“No. You’ve never seen the howling ones before?”

“I’ve heard stories. They’re why Connaught told the omegas to always stay inside the keep.”

“He may not have been wrong about that,” Ero said grudgingly; even he couldn’t help a shudder at the thought of those shambling waists, vacant hanging jaws open on black hollow maws, their eyes just dead rotten shadowed pits, and that hideous Echo ululating from the backs of their throats as if rising from a radio transceiver. “They’re alive…in flesh, at least. Everything that made them who they are gets sucked into the Disc. They’re just soulless, hungry shells.” He squeezed Wren’s hand again. “They’re the other reason I go south with winter. The humans are more vulnerable to the Echo, during the idle months shut away and restless. More and more of them go north…and then come back howling and empty.”

Wren pressed his quivering lips into a tremulous line. “Will we see them?”

“I hope not,” Ero said, and pulled away to start on dinner.

He could feel Wren’s eyes tracking him, as if the omega needed to see him to anchor his world in place. And after several long minutes, Wren whispered, “Ero…?”

“Hm?”

“How did that human get so close to us last night? I didn’t smell him at all until he was bleeding.”

“They mask their scents.” Ero started carving apart the chunks of leftover rabbit and tossing them into a stew pot. “They use chemicals that either completely eradicate their scents, or sprays that make them smell like the forest and other animals so it’s harder for us to notice.”

“Why?”

“To make it easier to kill us,” Ero said, and ripped off another chunk of meat.

Silence fell between them, then, while Ero made dinner—and gave Wren a cloth dampened from the waterskins to clean himself before that scent drove Ero out of his mind. With an embarrassed sound, Wren burrowed underneath the blankets and disappeared into the sleeping bag, just a mix of sounds of cloth on skin and embarrassed little noises before he emerged smelling much less like the musky heat of desire.

Ero pretended not to notice when he threw the rag into the fire, letting that scent burn away completely.

And he pretended not to notice how the omega still watched his every move, tracking him across the campsite, letting Wren feel safe by keeping him in sight without embarrassing him by pointing it out. As he settled to stir the stew and let the water reconstitute the dried vegetables he’d doled in from the minimal supplies in his pack, though, Wren spoke again, voice soft and tinged with a touch of wonder.

“You really can control yourself around human blood,” he said. “You didn’t change when I did.”

“It doesn’t affect me,” Ero said. “The only one here who could make me go feral is you.”

Wren smiled sadly. “Then I guess I’ll have to be more careful.” He looked away, then, reaching over for the small pack he’d brought with him from his keep. “I…I need to brush out my hair. If that’s okay.”

It didn’t take much to catch what Wren was asking without words, and “I won’t look,” Ero said, as he shifted to turn his back to the fire—and to Wren.

With his back turned it was easier to ignore the urge to bury his fingers in that knot of hair and tear it loose until it spilled down in a luxuriant waterfall all over his hands.

“Thank you,” Wren said, followed by the sounds of rummaging in the pack, a faint clack of wood that he would guess were combs, a brush handle.

Ero tilted his head back, looking up at the stars, the constellations, to avoid the need to look at Wren. “Has anyone but your mate ever seen you with your hair down, Wren?”

“No!” Wren gasped, then amended, “Well…my birth-father.” The fall of his hair was near-silent, just a cool silk whisper…but the scent of it was unmistakable, like fresh rain. “He taught me why we grow it. How to care for it. He wanted…he wanted me to know what it felt like, when my mate saw me with my hair down and found me beautiful.”

Ero closed his eyes against the pang in his chest. Because he wanted to tell Wren he was beautiful; wanted to look at him and see him and say those words, and he shouldn’t and couldn’t want those things from an omega he’d practically kidnapped just two nights ago.

“Did your mate find you beautiful, then?” he asked, throat dry.

“Maybe,” Wren said pensively, as the comb hissed through his hair like rainfall. “I don’t know.”

“If he did, he should have told you every day.”

“I think…” Those soft strokes paused. “I think he found me pretty like a…like a thing. Not as a person. He picked me because I was the most beautiful of the unmated omegas, but not because I was beautiful. Me.” Wren made a bitter sound in the back of his throat. “Just…because he was the alpha, he had to have the best.”

“That’s no way to choose a mate.”

“How are you supposed to choose, then?”

“If you’re lucky…” Ero followed the constellations through the lights of Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, searching for the North Star. “Fate chooses for you,” he whispered, and remembered tumbling in blankets and the scent of soft fur and cinnamon, the laughter of children and the rightness that came with that one familiar touch that always felt like home. “You just know. Sometimes right away, sometimes one day you see someone you’ve always known in a different light, or their scent his just the right way…and you just know.” His throat hurt, and he rubbed his fingers against it. “That’s the person you’re meant to be with. That’s your mate.”

Wren’s low, hurt sound shouldn’t ache to hear as much as it did. “You’ve been mated before?”

“I’ve been in love before,” Ero said. “That’s what being mated should mean, in the end. Love. Being bonded as wolves just reinforces that.”

“What happened to your mate?” Wren asked tentatively.

“He died,” Ero answered, and rose to lift the stew pot from the stove.

There were no words, then, for the tense silence between them, as Ero ladled out bowls of stew and divvied them between them. Wren had managed to bind his hair up neatly, but a few strands slithered and licked against his pale throat as he poked morosely at his stew. Ero let the silence hold, because if he spoke he might wonder things he shouldn’t be wondering.

Like whether or not a wolf could have only one mate in their lives, or if it was possible to heal enough to ever feel that connection with others again.

He held his tongue and applied himself to eating, though, but kept finding his gaze drifting back to Wren. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” he said.

Wren didn’t look up, just turning his spoon over in his stew. “What?”

“How long had your pack been on that land?”

“Since before I was born. About four hundred years.”

That might explain the almost cult-like isolation, Ero thought. Insulated and separate, a world and a law in and unto themselves. “How old are you, then?”

“Twenty,” Wren said, and Ero swore, cursing both himself, Connaught Striker, and anything that would even listen.

“You aren’t even old enough to be mated,” he growled.

Wren lifted his head, eyes flashing. “I’m—”

“A child,” Ero said firmly. “It doesn’t matter that your body is mature enough for breeding. You’re a child.”

Or so he desperately told himself, while Wren glared at him with his pink lower lip thrust out sullenly. Wren was barely an infant in the span of wolven lives, for all that they reached physical maturity at the same rate as a human. Twenty was no age. Not for that alpha to have forced him into a mating.

And not for Ero to be having these wayward and wondering thoughts.

 

T

Wren glowered at Ero while the older wolf cleaned up the debris of dinner.

While Ero completely ignored it—and Wren.

And after what Ero had done to him, that hard body weighing him down, fingers thick and rough inside him, shameful and intimate…

Wren didn’t like being ignored.

Even less than he liked being called a child. He might be sheltered, but he’d been mated to the pack’s alpha since he was sixteen, with everything that entailed; if he was old enough to be the alpha’s mate, he was old enough for…for…

What?

What was he even thinking, as he watched that powerful, beautiful beast of a man stalk around the fire with his easy, prowling movements?

“You’re sulking,” Ero said mildly, as he scrubbed the stew pot out with a damp rag.

Wren sniffed, turning his nose up and looking away. “I’m not sulking. I’m offended.”

“So I’ve offended you, then?”

“I’m not a child.”

“Of course you’re not,” Ero answered with deceptive neutrality. “Children sulk, and you’re not sulking.”

“Don’t.” That stung more than it should, and Wren wrapped his arms closely around himself, sucking in a hiccupping breath that tasted a little too salty and thin for his liking. “You can dismiss me if you want, but don’t mock me.”

Ero said nothing.

Fine. Silence it was, then. Wren bowed his head—only for his breaths to catch as Ero’s fingers gently gripped his chin. He hadn’t even felt Ero coming, but suddenly he was there, hovering over Wren and looking down at him with intense, gleaming eyes that burned hot and strange, those fingers holding him captured with the lightest touch.

Wren was no stranger to rough, coarse touches; Connaught’s hands were thick and work-worn and littered with scars. Ero’s hands were no different, heavy and callused, the hands of a man who made his living in the wilderness, who fought the land every day for another day of survival even as the rocks and earth scraped his hands raw. Yet where Connaught had always handled him with a brutal touch, Ero clasped him with an unfamiliar gentleness, a touch that exhibited so much pure and utter control over himself that Wren could feel his strength as much as he could feel him restraining it. Ero wasn’t weak—Wren knew that, after watching him leave Connaught a bloodied and broken mess against the flagstones.

But he didn’t need to use his strength to capture Wren’s attention, when that one gentle touch completely arrested him, stopped his breaths, stilled his heart.

Ero looked down at him with darkened blue eyes that seemed to look right through him, searching deep, slipping down inside him and tangling invisible fingers up in the raw delicate places of Wren and pulling. He could blame the heat in his face on the warmth of the flames, but if he was honest with himself that heat was solely the sudden unfamiliar rush of being looked at by someone who seemed to see him, and not simply his place in the pack as an omega and the alpha’s property.

“You’re not made to be so timid,” Ero murmured, a thoughtful rumble darkening his voice. His grasp on Wren’s chin relaxed, and he curled rough knuckles against his jaw, stirring fine tremors of sensation as rough skin stroked smooth. “You don’t have to lower your eyes. Don’t swallow your pride around me.”

That touch quivered something low in the pit of Wren’s stomach—but he forced it down and fought the urge to lean into the friction and stroke of Ero’s fingers, instead pulling back and away. He took a shaky breath, smoothing his robes. “Then don’t manhandle me.”

“Is that what I’m doing? Manhandling you?” Ero’s hand fell to drape lazily on his thigh, and he made an amused sound. “My apologies, your majesty.”

Wren sniffed and looked away, pulling his robes tighter around himself and wrapping himself up. “You’re not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

Ero fell silent, then, and from the corner of his eye Wren watched Ero as Ero settled once more by the fireside stared into the flames, firelight crackling over his face and catching in the silver streaks at his temples, in his beard, to turn them into gold. Even if he was a wolf, Ero made Wren think more of a bear, large and thick-set and rough earthen brown and black all over, a solid slab of muscle that was impossible to move from its place but once it began charging at you, was just as impossible to stop. Flickers of gold picked out the bristles of hair on his swarthy forearm, turning them into little glowing filament arcs. Wren caught himself lingering, watching in fascination—until Ero’s gaze suddenly cut to the side, locking eyes with Wren before he could look away, catching him in a frozen moment that skipped his heart through several shallow beats.

“Don’t sulk,” Ero murmured, and Wren lifted his chin.

“Stop telling me what to do.”

“I’m not telling you what to do.” That simmering blue gaze dipped to Wren’s mouth, and he couldn’t resist licking his lips, as if that could ease their sudden pulse and throb. “I’m warning you. I’m no one’s alpha, Wren. But I’m not dead. You think it won’t catch my attention if you pout that way?”

Wren’s breaths caught as he realized what Ero meant. When the man had said he didn’t want to mate him, when he called him a child, when he’d apologized for touching him in ways that left Wren raw…he’d thought…

He’d thought Ero was so very immune to him, neutral.

Only to realize that the other wolf was restraining himself, and the thought shouldn’t make Wren burn.

“But you won’t do anything,” he challenged.

“I won’t,” Ero said, husky, intense. “But do you want to torment me, Wren?”

Torment him.

Wren’s cheeks burned, and he curled himself up into a ball. Somehow it was worse, knowing this stranger who had torn his world apart desired him, when these frustrating, strange feelings were so raw inside him. Biting his lip, he whispered, “You promised me you would tell me about the Silk Islands tonight.”

A long, meaningful silence…and then Ero settled next to him, his scent a hot thing filling the space between them, as he dragged his bag over. From inside he withdrew a massively thick leatherbound book, with many pages creased and folded, many others with loose pages stuck in between. Even if he wanted to keep glaring—not sulking—Wren couldn’t help peeking over, as Ero laid the book open on his thighs.

He opened to a map—one that looked as if it had been drawn on another map, massive land masses colored in some places in blue. “Do you recognize this, Wren?”

Wren shook his head, biting his tongue.

“This is what the world used to be.” Ero’s thick, blunt fingertip traced the outlines of large shapes against the blue, before following in the newly shaded parts of blue that obscured some of them. “Here, now…there’s water all over these places, now.”

Wren leaned in, shoulder brushing Ero’s, and peered down at the map, and the letters crossing one big continent. “What does that say?”

Ero stilled, looking at him. “You can’t read, can’t you.”

“I…no.” Wren found himself blushing again, face frustratingly hot. “I can spell out the letters. I don’t…know how they make words.”

“Then we can start here.” That odd gentleness roughened the edges of Ero’s voice again, as he traced handwritten letters following a chain of dots through the blue. “The Silk Islands.”

Wren leaned in closer, biting his lip, looking at the letters and trying to match how they made sounds. He almost didn’t realize when Ero began to lean back against him, until somehow they were propping each other up as Ero read to him, showed him words…and told him of a place where wolves had made artificial islands out of floating nets of silk, and poled low boats between them; a place where humans almost never went, while wolves cast fishing nets and made an entire world without the species that had given birth to them, floating down near the south pole. It sounded like a dream, to Wren.

And then it was a dream, drifting away into his imagination as he fell asleep, his head resting to Ero’s shoulder. And in his dreams, Wren poled a boat over an ocean colored like a sunrise.

While Ero called him beautiful, again and again and again.