Page 25 of Pack Kasen, Part 1 (Caught #1)

24

KAT

“ H ere.”

I hadn’t been expecting any visitors as I lay on the floor in the middle of my cage and tried not to think about how each minute I passed here my wolf was dying.

Gregor had wandered right in, whistling, and I could barely lift my head off the ground.

This cage isn’t just killing my wolf. It’s making me weak and lethargic.

Pushing myself into an upright position, I eye the small glass container Gregor slides under the bars of my cage. “What is it?”

“Aloe vera gel. I like to make ointments from plants, and this will be cooling and healing on your throat.”

“You don’t happen to have the key to unlock this cage instead?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“Unfortunately not,” he says, actually sounding like he means it. “Only Aren keeps the key. After what happened here, he only trusts himself with it.”

“But—”

“And should he or the enforcers find anyone attempting to force the door open, it would be an instant death sentence. No exceptions.”

“Because of the feral who killed his mom?”

He blinks at me, surprised. “He told you?”

“Finan did.”

He nods, his confusion melting away. “Yes, it’s good that you know. What did you think?”

I eye him curiously for a beat. Why would it be good that I know?

Shaking off my interest in his comment, I tell myself it doesn’t matter. “That it was a sad story, but it doesn’t make me like the Wolf King any more for it.” It would if I was clearly aggressive and out of control, but I’m not. Even a seven-year-old boy didn’t look at me and see the boogie monster.

I flick my gaze to the jar. “Aloe vera, you said?”

He nods.

Curious, I pick it up and twist the lid off to smell it.

It smells as good as I thought it would. Fresh, calming, and lovely. But then again, I’ve spent so many years in a cement city that the smell of nature will almost always be like heaven to me. “Why do you make ointments? Isn’t it a waste of time?”

A scratch heals in seconds. By the time I dug out a plaster from a first aid kit, the cut would have healed. Maybe if I’d cut an artery or something, I’d understand the need for bandages and ointments, but if these people are like me, or I’m like them, then what’s the point? Let nature do its thing.

“As pack healer, I do what I can to ease my pack’s pain. It’s never a waste of time if I can take away even a second of it,” he says gravely.

Gregor seems reasonable, intelligent, kind and caring.

And then there’s the Wolf King who absolutely refuses to see what’s in front of him. Is he stupid or is his ego so large that he cannot accept the possibility of ever being wrong?

Gregor cocks his head as he studies me. “You look confused.”

“Just wondering about the Wolf King.”

He takes a seat feet from me. He’s an older man, with a light dusting of gray in his hair, maybe around late fifties or older. But he’s spry, crossing his legs with more flexibility than a man his age would. “Ah. You’ll have seen all of his bad side since he brought you here. We’ve known him since he was a pup, so it’s easier for us to excuse his failings because we have seen the good he’s capable of.”

“And is he capable of doing good?”

People are complex. I get that life sometimes is more shades of gray than black and white. If foster care taught me anything, it was that few people are wholly good or wholly bad, despite how they might appear on the surface. Even me. I’m as capable of helping an old lady across the road as I am at ripping someone's throat out.

But I look at the Wolf King and I can’t envision him doing any good for anyone. Ever.

I consider myself a good person.

But am I a good person for tearing into the bodega robbers who killed my foster dad, Robert, without hesitation and then going back to his house, having a shower and crawling into bed to fall asleep without a second of doubt that I’d done the right thing?

Isn’t killing always wrong?

“Aren wouldn’t have been our leader from such a young age if he wasn’t capable of good. More Alphas lose their position because of challenges from within their pack than from outside of it.” He nods at the jar in my hand. “If you make use of that, I’ll tell you about the first shifter.”

I swallow a smile. “I’ve heard that tone before.”

A long time ago, at a period of my life when I was most unsettled, being shuffled from foster-to-foster home, the social workers tried to always keep me within the same district so I wouldn’t have to keep changing schools with each move. Sometimes that was unavoidable, and that was especially hard. Changing schools and homes was something I never got used to.

“Where?”

“School. You’re the teacher, aren’t you?”

“I am, though it’s a responsibility often shared by others in the pack. We teach the pups important lessons for them to know.”

“Pups?” I envision cute little wolves running around and nearly smile.

When the word came to me outside the schoolroom, it came from a part of me that I didn’t even know was there. I don’t understand what the word actually means.

He flashes me a brief smile. “Just our young. We have always called them pups, whether they are in their human or wolf form.”

He offers me a tantalizing peek into a world opening up to me that I’m desperate to know more about. “What things do you teach them?”

“Shifter history, for one.”

“Okay.” I’d like to lie down to listen to him speak, especially if this is going to be a long story because my head is pounding, but I’m scared to close my eyes in case I don’t wake up.

“The first shifter was a Romanian farmer,” he begins gravely.

I blink. “He was a what now?”

He smiles at me. “One night, a Romanian farmer went out to confront the wolf which had been terrorizing his goats and eating his chickens. His wife asked him to wait until the following night and take more men from the village to help him. But the farmer was stubborn, and he was proud. He had held his farm together through grit and hard work. If the other farmers in town heard he couldn’t so much as handle a single wolf on his own…” Gregor shakes his head.

Listening to him speak is like having an out-of-body experience. Like someone is recanting a dream I once had a long time ago. Which in itself is weird. No one should know my dreams but me, so why does it feel like Gregor does?

“You look like you have a question,” Gregor says.

Twisting my lips into a smile, I shrug off my unease. “What did the farmer do?”

Gregor eyes me for a beat, as if he thinks there’s more to it than that, then he continues with his tale. “The farmer's wife knew her husband was proud, especially after he refused her offer to go with him so he would not be alone. She would not sleep until he had come home safe, so she wrapped herself in her warmest furs and sat in front of the fire, determined to wait up for him no matter how long he was out. The farmer, eager to deal with this rude wolf once and for all, stuffed his feet into his boots, laced them, selected his thickest, warmest coat and, gathering up his pitchfork, trudged out to war.”

Gregor stops to eye me. “Did I tell you the farmer was a stubborn and proud man?”

I nearly smile because I can imagine him telling this same tale to the children. “You did.”

He blows out a dramatic sigh. “And so, this stupid farmer…”

I laugh.

Eyes sparkling with amusement, he continues. With every passing word, his smile dims, his voice lowers, and the tension builds. “It was almost pitch black on that frigid winter’s night. The farmer could barely see his hands in front of his face. He was careful with every step he took as he angled his head one way then the other, straining to listen as hard as he looked. He checked on the goats. Nothing. He checked on the chickens. Still nothing. And thinking this was the one night that stupid wolf had stayed away and it was nothing but the wind that had— Ah !”

He jumps, which makes me jump.

Gregor flashes me a brief smile. “The farmer did not know how silent a wolf’s steps can be, how quiet it hunts as it waits for the perfect opportunity to strike. But the farmer wasn’t a thin, weak man, and he had remembered to wrap a thick scarf around his neck, for it was mid-winter. And he was not without a weapon. The farmer fought the wolf, twisting this way, then that, like his life depended on it. Because it did. The wolf, once a scrawny thing, recently made fat by the farmer’s chickens these past few nights, was not expecting him to put up such a fight. How they fought. The wife, hearing the growling and the shouting, snatched up her coat and flung it on. She stuffed her feet into her shoes and gathered hot coals in a small shovel, and she charged out without a single thought for herself, for the farmer's wife was as brave as the farmer was pigheaded.”

I am utterly captivated, chewing my nails to the quick as I listen breathlessly.

“The wolf saw the farmer’s wife yelling as she charged them, and the wolf was surprised. More so when she flung a shovel of coal toward him. Seeing those bright red flashes of burning fire, the wolf, afraid, spun around and ran away as fast as it could. The farmer, moving faster, snatched up his pitchfork and drove the end into the wolf with a mighty thrust.” Gregor’s hand is outstretched, hand fisted as if he has that pitchfork in his grasp, and he landed what sounds like a killing blow.

I swallow. “And did he kill the wolf?” I whisper.

Gregor nods firmly. “The farmer did. They dragged the body inside the house. The farmer was determined to make himself a coat from its furs that he would wear proudly in the town and share the story— leaving out the very small part where his wife had come to his rescue —of how he had felled the wolf single-handedly.”

I smile. Of course he’d want to leave that part out. “And did he?”

“He did not. The farmer was exhausted by his battle and his blood was running hot. His wife noticed the bite on his shoulder, helped bathe it and bandage it, and they went up to bed. The farmer's blood was still hot, so they did not immediately go to sleep.” He winks.

I grin.

“Two days later, the farmer got an infection and died in his bed. His wife was devastated.”

I stare at him. “ What …”

His smile is faint. “You seem surprised.”

This isn’t the way I thought the story was supposed to end. The farmer was supposed to be the first shifter. “But you said…”

“Nine months later , his wife gave birth to a son,” he continues, his expression thoughtful. “And it is this son who was the first shifter.”

“Ah.”

“When her son first became a wolf, she was initially afraid. But this was the son who she had nursed and loved with every fiber of her being. He was a part of her and her dead husband. She could not harm or throw this half-wolf child away. Not even when, as a teenager, he attacked and bit a man who had threatened to take their farm from them. He said nothing to his mother about what he had done. Days after the man disappeared, a rabid looking wolf started attacking people. The villagers eventually banded together to hunt and kill the wolf. Only then did the son admit to his mother what he had done and that the man had run away before he could kill him.”

I understand at once. “The son bit a man and the man became a feral?”

Gregor nods. “The wife was an older woman now and her son, a husky nineteen-year-old. Fearing someone would connect her son to the events, they packed up their belongings, sold everything they could not take with them, and they left their small village for England, boarding the first boat from Southampton to the Americas, in search of a fresh start along with thousands of others.”

My history lessons at school merge with this new shifter history that had initially sounded familiar. “Did she have other children?”

He nods. “She remarried and settled in a small southern town, hoping that whatever had made her son what he was would not occur again.”

“But it must have, right? Otherwise, there would be no shifters.”

His smile is approving. “That’s right. She had three more children with an older widowed man from town.”

“And were they shifters?”

“No.”

I blink at him. “But her son…”

He shrugs. “No one understands why only her son became a shifter, but her other children did not. Perhaps the gene passed from her former husband to the child they created together.”

“What happened to the son?” I ask, curious.

His eyes sparkle. “The son was a large, mysterious and handsome man who drew eyes from all the young women. What do you think happened to him?”

I smile at him. “I think the ladies loved him.”

“They did, and he loved them back. He had come from a small village where everyone knew each other, but in America, he was popular and he loved their attention. We believe some of his offspring became shifters while others remained human. He was careful not to bite any more humans when he was in his wolf form, so we believe his genes spread.” His expression turns thoughtful. “But who is to say that the wolf in their Romanian village was the only one? Perhaps others traveled to the Americas as well. We just know him as the first.”

“Did he ever get married?”

Gregor nods. “He did. He fell in love with a woman and they had five children. With her, he trusted his secret, and it was a good thing he did. Three of their children became shifters, and we know them as the first shifter pack in America.”

History never fascinated me as much as it does now. “Are they still alive?”

“The Wolf Lord of New Orleans is a descendant,” he explains.

“And other ferals?”

His eyes lift to take in the cage that has been slowly killing my wolf. “A long time ago, someone learned that we do not like silver. And so…”

“You use it to cage a feral?” I ask, a bite in my voice.

He studies me. “Prolonged contact with pure silver isn’t just agonizing to our wolves. It stops us from shifting and will eventually kill our wolves. And us. Because we are two halves of the same whole, you can’t cut one half out and expect the other to survive.”

Now I know what the metal is in the cage I’m sitting in, I have external validation about exactly what it’s been doing to me, and I hate the Wolf King even more.

“He didn’t wear a glove when he was holding the end of my chain, and neither did Marisa,” I say. “Does that mean they couldn’t have shifted either?”

Gregor nods.

“And if I had broken free when he led me out of this cage?”

His eyebrow lift suggests an impossibility. “He’d have stopped you even if he died in the attempt.”

“So selfless.” My tone is bitter.

Gregor studies me for a beat. “All he’s known is responsibility ever since a feral killed his parents. He makes mistakes, as do we all, but he tries.”

“I’d be more forgiving if I wasn’t sitting in a cage that wasn’t slowly killing me and my wolf.”

Gregor doesn’t deny it. “I could speak to him.”

“But would he listen?”

His silence draws a bitter smile to my lips. “Thanks for the aloe vera,” I say, returning the bottle to him through a gap between the bars. “Maybe save the rest of this for someone who needs it more than I do.”

Because I’m dying in this cage. I don’t know why the Wolf King let me out at all only to stick me back in here. Maybe I was dying too fast for his liking and he wanted to slow the process down so he could continue his interrogation.

The door swings open and one of the men who was playing cards in the house sticks his head in. He looks at Gregor. “Aren’s called a pack meeting. Everyone is to attend.”

“Did he say what it’s about?” Gregor pushes himself to his feet.

The guard’s eyes flit to me. “You’ll find out at the meeting.”

So it’s about me then.

Gregor must think so too because when he turns to me, his expression is concerned. “I’ll talk to him,” he says firmly, and he walks out, the guard closing the door after him.

Silence wraps around me, constricting and cold.

There are no chuffs of amusement from my wolf. No growls or that annoying whine she makes when I do something she doesn’t like, like choosing sushi over steak.

Nothing but an oppressive silence in my head and it’s agony not knowing if she is even still there.