Chapter 16

Because some persnickety wolves complained, Tara sent us to the Bathhouse to sweat out the tiny lingering scents from the junkyard.

Ti couldn’t be happier, stretched out on the top bench of the sauna where the heat is most concentrated. He exhales slowly, an almost noiseless sigh of contentment. He stretches out his hand, feeling for me, but I’ve crept down to the floor, a dampened washcloth over my face. I don’t care what Tara says; I’m not going to last more than five minutes. Offlanders use the sauna most. All that time spent with clothes and HVAC have left them in need of frequent defrosting.

Four minutes later, I race for the door and the icy waters of Home Pond, and when I return, a new pair of shoes is lined up beside the Bathhouse door. A quick sniff identifies them as belonging Caitlin, the 8th’s Beta. Solid flank strength. A real endurance runner.

I knock gently on the door.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Ti yells. “Just come in.”

At first, all I see through the crack in the door is Ti, pressed into the corner of the upper bench, his hands folded tightly atop a towel draped across his lap. Another towel is wrapped around his neck. He stares resolutely at the bucket of steaming river rocks. Caitlin is a foot to his right, resting on her knees and elbows, her ass in the air, presenting.

“Hey, Silver.”

“Hey, Caitlin. Been here long?”

She pushes her lank dark-blond hair back from her pinched, sallow face. “Long enough to wonder if he actually knows what to do.”

Ti looks up at me with a bleak expression and frantically pats the spot next to him.

I shake my head. “No, thanks. Too hot.”

He glares at me and pounds the seat again, slowly and deliberately. With meaning. I’m not sure what’s up, but I take the seat, shielding him from Caitlin’s pockmarked ass. It’s not really pockmarked, but her body bears the remnants of not one, but three run-ins with porcupines. She wears the scars proudly, emblems of her perseverance and tolerance for pain in her quest to eat porcupine. I have always thought that even one encounter with a porcupine is an emblem of congenital idiocy and have simply settled for raccoon.

Then again, she’s a Beta and I’m not.

With an exaggerated sigh, she swings around, sitting next to me, and dries her armpits with her towel. “You’re his schildere. Explain things, will you? Because now look,” she says, pointing to the clock with her sharp chin as she towels off between her legs. “I’ve got to get to work, and I don’t have time.

“Silver,” she says, taking her leave, her hand already on the door. “Shifter.”

He creeps toward the door, his finger to his lips, his ear pressed to the cedar until he is satisfied that she is well and truly gone.

“Okay,” he hisses. “What the hell was that?”

“She was presenting, Ti. You were supposed to cover her. The Pack knows what you did for Leelee, so now Caitlin sees you as a potential bedfellow, and I bet she won’t be the last. She’s a good herder; you should be flattered.”

“I’m not flattered. I’m fucking queasy.” He rubs his chest. “And what about you? Why aren’t you my ‘bedfellow’?”

“Me? It is way too hot in here. I don’t know how you can stand it.” I move back down to the floor as close to the slightly cooler bit of air by the door as I can. “I don’t have anything to do with it.” I start to pour ladles of water over my head. “I’m not your bedfellow. I’m just your shielder.”

“You’re not just my shielder. If sex doesn’t make you a bedfellow, what does?”

“But it’s not just about sex. Shielders have sex all the time. Being bedfellows is more like a trial mating.”

“Like being engaged?”

“I don’t remember. When you’re engaged, do you have to fight others who might want to cover your engagee?”

“That’d be fiancée. And generally, no.”

“Look, it was only a matter of time before you were approached by a viable female.” I catch Ti’s hand before he pours more water on the rocks. “Don’t do that. I can’t take any more.”

“Quit it with the ‘viable female,’ will you? Supposing I don’t want to screw the herder with the strongest thighs?”

“What you want has nothing to do with anything.” I pull myself up and grab the door handle. “We are not human. It is not about we want. It’s about the strongest wolves breeding still stronger ones. You are powerful and smart and have these…these weirdly amazing senses, and if you don’t mate with your equal, we would consider it a waste of seed.”

The door closes behind me, and the cool air cushions me. I don’t really want to have this conversation. And I certainly don’t want to have it while my blood boils to vapor in my veins.

I bend forward, my forehead and hand on the chilly tile, the shower’s cold water carrying the heat from my head down the shallow canal of my spine.

Then through the blasts of cool water, I feel new heat. The heat of Ti’s body. The heat of Ti’s hand as it covers mine, his fingers sliding between mine. The heat of his chest pressed to my back. The heat of that solid length that makes my hips buck against him. “Is that what you want? For me to screw Katherine?”

“Caitlin. I told you it doesn’t matter what I want. It—”

“Bullshit,” he whispers, his rough chin chafing the skin between neck and ear. “You took on a complete stranger, a Shifter, no less, because you didn’t want to be a cog in the Pack. What was it you said? One chance at living was better than a lifetime of simply being alive? That’s what you wanted.”

When he tilts his hips, I feel him more insistent against my ass.

“So I’m asking you now, Wildfire, a simple yes-or-no question.”

He moves gently against me like he knows the torture of these tiny brushes. Like he knows how to use every part of his body—the soft scrape of the ridged scar; the jab of the tight nipple; the tingle of those few, very few, tightly curled hairs; the soft caress of his sloping navel—to sharpen my senses and make me feel him more intensely.

“Do you want me?”

The voices of generations of Pack echo around my skull, yelling incoherently about Tradition and Law and Survival and Strength and Will and Sacrifice. But there is another voice too. It is small and hesitant, but it is clear and it is mine, and that voice says:

“Yes.”

“So take what you want.” He bends his legs on either side of mine, and his erection slips between my thighs. “Just make sure it’s me, because I sure as hell want you.”

He hisses as my hips punch against him. I feel him growing harder and thicker still between my clenched thighs. My hand reaches back toward him, but he turns me around, the cold water now running down our fronts, and he lifts me up, his big body between my legs. In two steps, he props my ass on the teak table and pushes me back against the slats. “Relax,” he says, holding me down with one firm hand on my chest. He bends over me, his mouth finding the promontory of my hip bone and swirling it with his tongue before angling featherlight kisses down my pelvis.

He buries his nose between my thighs and breathes in deeply, the roughness of his trim beard pricking my thighs. The bristling of the rough fringe above his lip chafes my sex—followed by the long, firm, silky strokes of his tongue—and the rich combination of being abraded and soothed takes me higher and higher. My body shudders, and I don’t remember the last time I breathed. Ti stretches my legs wider and makes a seal with his lips, pulling insistently until my body contracts. When his tongue pushes in, I fall apart with a million little screams that only I can hear.

“Open for me,” he says, his voice raw and his hands hard on my still-rigid legs. “Let me in.”

And I do. Lying on my back, I let him in because that’s what I want.

* * *

I was right that Caitlin wasn’t going to be the only one to set her sights on Ti. Hilda flagged him as we walked toward the Great Hall. He seemed oblivious to her invitation, though. I don’t bother to point it out to him, because if he doesn’t understand what it means when a female moves her tail to the side and shoots him a come-hither look along her flank, it’s not my job to tell him.

He understands Selena’s intent perfectly well, because she wiggles her Lycra-covered ass against him as he picks up his plate and utensils. He looks to me for help, but I just shrug.

We have an old saying: a strong wolf with a weak bedfellow is as good as single. As shielders, we are free to cover whomever we want. But if I were his bedfellow, I’d be expected to fight off challengers for rights to Ti’s body. I mean, he’d be expected to fight off challengers for rights to my body too, but let’s be realistic.

And Selena? She’s a mean fighter who took out Gideon’s left eye two years back. Seeing as she has no fuzzy balls, I don’t like my chances.

Then just as he’s straddling the bench, holding his loaded plate and glass, Tecia reaches across to put her hand firmly on his crotch.

Ti starts, sending the water in his glass flying.

“That does it,” he says, dropping his plate onto the table and stomping over to John.

I watch nervously as Ti whispers close to John. John signals first to Victor, our Deemer, then calls for one of the juveniles to fetch Leonora. I get up, because whatever else happens, I am still Ti’s shielder.

John shakes his head as I walk toward them. Ti pats the air softly with one hand. Wait.

“He washed up pretty nice,” says Tecia as I take my place again.

I stick my fork halfheartedly into a plate of pickled something with feta.

“I mean that carrion stench when he first showed up”—she sticks out her tongue and makes a soft gagging noise—“it was almost human.”

My stomach has tightened and my throat has too, and the food simply will not go down.

“The steel, though… Is it noticeable when he covers?”

Maybe it’s because my heart feels big and painfully hard.

“I’m thinking maybe if I spray him with a good coat of Skunk-Off and leave him in the sun for a—”

“Will you just shut up?”

Ever the teacher, Leonora teeters up to John on high heels that make her almost as tall as our Alpha. She drops her blood stick back into her handbag, closing it with a snap as she smacks her lips.

I can’t hear what’s going on. Ti says something to the three of them. There’s some gesticulating and nodding. Ti cradles his zipper. Everyone looks at Tecia. There’s some more talking, more gesticulating, and more sage nodding. Everyone looks at me. I wave.

Leonora says something and touches the braid around her neck. John nods. But Victor strokes his beard and says something that makes Ti’s control slip a little, because his voice grows louder as he says “…not be put out to stud.”

John signals, and Tecia swings her legs free of the bench. “No,” says John, shaking his head. “Quicksilver.”

“Because viable females have started presenting themselves,” John says, “Tiberius has asked to be formally declared your bedfellow.”

“But you know what they say: ‘A strong wolf—’”

“‘With a weak bedfellow is as good as single,’” interrupts John. “Yes, we all know that bit of old wisdom. It is true that under normal circumstances, you would not be able to defend your cunnan-riht, but Tiberius is asking that you be released from any obligation to defend your rights to his services.”

At the phrase rights to his services, Ti scratches his eyebrow, a gesture that I’ve come to believe means he has found something amusing.

“Is that even legal?” I ask.

“Turns out it’s custom, not law.” Victor gives a reluctant nod. “We’ve never had a guest who was not raised Pack, but Victor agrees that while we can expect Tiberius to follow Pack laws, we cannot withhold Pack rights and expect him to follow our customs.”

John turns to the Pack. He has barely finished announcing that Ti and I will be bedfellows when Selena pushes away from the table, using her current bedfellow’s shoulder. She stalks toward me, her eyes narrowed, ready for a fight.

“Selena,” John says. “I wasn’t finished.”

Then Victor details the “special circumstances” that preclude challenges and Selena returns to the now tight-faced Maximilian.

Finally, Victor straightens his back and pulls himself up to his full height. With a stern gaze, he looks over the assembled wolves, and in the portentous voice he uses for all pronouncements in the Old Tongue, he delivers the traditional blessing:

Eadig hæmed.

Happy fucking.