Page 4

CHAPTER FOUR

brUIN RAPPED ON the door of his son’s room that evening.

No answer.

He tugged out his phone to send a text, and then there Stockton was, rounding a bend and coming down the hallway. Bruin put his phone away, feeling a surge of pride and love, the way he always did seeing the boy.

He wouldn’t have traded this for the world, this relationship they had. He had read thinkpieces in various journals about how bucks couldn’t bond with their offspring the way males in predatorkin species could, and he knew that was utter bullshit.

Mammals all had the chemical building blocks for it, and birds, too. Bonding was an adaptational response. If there was a mother-child bond, there could be a father-child bond or a mating bond. It just really wasn’t as complicated as people liked to make it.

Of course, he knew that “natural” was different than “chemical.” Natural encompassed a whole host of other behaviors and social traditions and everything else.

Life was complicated.

But he had a son.

About fifteen years ago, he’d gotten a vasectomy before participating in one of these ruts, and then he didn’t tell anyone. It was a cowardly choice, he supposed. He could have abstained. He had—once—made overtures towards Stockton’s mother, but she hadn’t been interested in being what she called “tied down.” He thought this was ludicrous, considering the woman had three children and numerous familial obligations. How did she think of herself as free, exactly?

But, regardless, he could have made a number of other choices. He could have pursued another woman, one of any species at all. If he’d wanted a pair bond enough, he could have gone after it.

He hadn’t wanted it enough, he supposed.

But he also knew that if he had fathered another child and had been prevented from being able to form a relationship with the fawn in the way he’d had a relationship with Stockton, it would have broken him inside somewhere, rather badly.

So, vasectomy.

And then, he indulged in this breeding rite, anyway. And he wasn’t sure if that was entirely fair, though he did his best to avoid women who were marked as breeding. If he were to take up a woman’s time in that way, when she was actively trying to get pregnant and he couldn’t do it, it would have been wrong, he thought.

However, this did cut out the bulk of the women at these sorts of gatherings.

Women didn’t often show for the thrill of it. He wasn’t sure why that was, not exactly. He thought that women had just as many sexual fantasies as men, after all. He wasn’t sure if women were intelligent enough to understand that most fantasies were better never acted out, or if it was that women did try acting out their sexual fantasies—and often found them painful, awkward, and frightening in real life, so stopped that nonsense rather quickly.

Whatever the case, if women showed up for these sorts of rites, most of the time, they were here to get knocked up.

“Bruin!” called Stockton. He’d never called him ‘Dad’ or anything like that and Bruin had never pushed. Their situation was irregular enough without putting pressure on the boy, he thought. “There you are. Did you get my text?”

“Sure,” said Bruin, grinning at him. “I saw it. You said you checked in and gave me your room number, which is why I’m here.”

“Moon and sun, Bruin, you could have texted me back.”

“I didn’t have anything to say,” said Bruin.

Stockton let out a guffaw. “Okay, sure, whatever. I’m going to have to give you a crash course in text etiquette, I see.”

Bruin laughed. “All right, you do that.”

“Yeah, when you were young, they didn’t even have cell phones.”

“They did not,” said Bruin. He was in his late fifties. He hadn’t been young, not exactly, when he’d sired Stockton. He could have other children, maybe, from the years before. He’d made attempts to find that out and come up with very little, however. Tracking down those women from his twenties proved practically impossible. Lots of times, the interaction had been so brief and casual, he hadn’t gotten much more than the woman’s first name. And that wasn’t atypical for deerkin, not in the season.

“Anyway, I was coming to see if you wanted to get a bite to eat with me,” said Bruin. “Are you busy?”

“I’m free,” said Stockton. “Just coming back from orientation, in fact.”

“You’re doing the midnight run?”

“I mean, you are, right?”

Bruin shrugged. “I don’t know. Midnight is late, after all, and I’m very old.”

“You are very old, Bruin,” said Stockton, grinning at him. He opened the door to his room, gesturing with his head. “Come in while I get myself together?”

“Sure,” said Bruin.

The rooms here were nice, like a hotel room. You could rent rooms out here at the Center, after all, for other activities. Sometimes, they hosted speakers here, and if you came in from out of town, you could stay here. There was a bed, a TV, a closet with closed-loop hangers that couldn’t be removed from the rod.

Stockton ducked into the bathroom.

Bruin sat down on the bed, waiting for him. “Is it weird that I invited you to this thing?”

“It’s not like I didn’t know about it,” came Stockton’s voice from the bathroom. “Besides, do we worry about things like that? Aren’t we the definition of weird?”

Bruin smirked. “True.”

Stockton came out, sans tie and jacket, his shirt untucked. He was smoothing at the place where it had been tucked in. “Is it wrinkled here? I should get another shirt.” He looked Bruin over. “Hell, I should put on jeans. You’re wearing jeans.”

Bruin was wearing jeans, but he was wearing a blazer also. He thought the look was something more than casual, a little elevated.

Stockton seized things from his suitcase and went back into the bathroom. “We’re not going to check out women together or anything, right? That would be weird.”

“Hadn’t planned on it, no. If you want me around, I’m there, but if you’d rather be on your own, that’s fine, too.”

“Yeah,” said Stockton.

“You won’t need to worry, because young bucks like yourself are highly sought after. Obviously, this thing attracts lots of older stags.”

“Obviously?” Stockton reappeared, now in jeans and a button-up shirt, a non-wrinkled one. “I didn’t know that.”

“Think about it. The younger you are, the less likely you need to check into a place like this to get some tail.”

“Well, thanks for making me feel good, Bruin. Since I apparently do need it.”

“Oh, you’ll love it. Everyone should do a rut before he’s twenty-five. You’ve never felt so alive, trust me.” Bruin got up from the bed and went to his son. He patted his chest. “You’ll see.”

Stockton shrugged. “Yeah, well, if Maibell hadn’t left me, maybe I wouldn’t be here.”

“This isn’t something to be ashamed of, you know, son.”

“Oh, moon and sun, I told you not to call me that!”

“It’s a natural part of our heritage, and you should be proud to be involved in it. It’s a yearly tradition that connects us to each other, to our ancestors, and to the natural ebbs and flows of the seasons.”

“You sound like the guy at the orientation,” said Stockton. “I’m not ashamed, anyway.”

“Well, good,” said Bruin.

“I’m terrified,” said Stockton.

Bruin chuckled. “Nothing to be frightened of.”

Stockton smoothed out his shirt, shaking his head. “Well, I’m ready if you are.”

“Sure,” said Bruin. “Let’s head out to the restaurant.”

Together, they ventured into the hallway. They walked down to the elevator bank and waited for the elevator to come up.

Stockton shoved his hands into his pockets. “It’s easy for you to say.”

“What is?” said Bruin.

The elevator arrived, and the door opened. They went in and the doors shut after them.

“That there’s nothing to be frightened of,” said Stockton. “I’ve never had sex in public.”

“It’s not like that,” said Bruin.

“Isn’t it? Can’t anyone just walk up on you?”

“I suppose, but they don’t. There’s a bit of common courtesy. If you see a mounted couple, you go elsewhere.”

“Do you have one of those breeding lairs? How do you even get them? Why didn’t you tell me about that?”

“I do not,” said Bruin.

“Why not?”

Because I’m incapable of breeding anyone. But this, the vasectomy, was not something he’d ever shared with his son. “I don’t want one.”

“This is more than I wanted to know about you,” said Stockton. “I did not need to know that you had a voyeur kink, Bruin, I really didn’t—”

“I don’t,” said Bruin, laughing.

“Well, maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. You like being watched, not watching.”

The elevator arrived at the bottom floor.

“No!” said Bruin, who was still laughing.

Stockton shot him a look and then exited the elevator.

Bruin followed him.

The lobby of the Center was large and wide open. The open ceilings were high with exposed wooden beams, rough-hewn but stained with dark polish. The tall floor-to-ceiling windows streamed in light. There were deerkin walking to and fro all over, some in groups of three of four.

“Which way?” said Stockton.

Bruin fell into step with him. “Head for that door.” He pointed. “We’ll go down Main Street to look for a place that isn’t too crowded.” As they exited the center and walked down towards the street, Bruin felt the need to tell his son, “I don’t like being watched or watching.”

“Thanks for clarifying. I definitely want to think about this. I want to picture this.”

Bruin just laughed.

They reached the sidewalk and began walking in the direction of the main street of town.

“I just feel like the orientation did not explain to me, in detail, exactly how it is this works,” said Stockton. “I feel like there are a number of missing elements, and the only thing I can think to do to figure out how it works is to watch, but I feel like it’s gross to watch, and—”

“What didn’t the orientation cover?” said Bruin.

“Well, how it even starts, for one thing. I thought maybe all the bucks would line up like a race or something, and there would be a starting gun—”

“No,” said Bruin. “At midnight, there will be an announcement that the field is open, and people will start milling out of the other areas—like the bars and the courtyard, and the lobby, and they’ll head into the field. Not all at once, though. Some will go one by one, others will go in groups. And then, once you’re out there…” He thought about it. “There tends to be running.”

“Really?”

“Chasing,” said Bruin. “Even at midnight, seeing one of those little white tails of a doe in the darkness… it’s noticeable. You feel like something lights up the back of your brain. You just go.”

“And bucks really fight over them?”

“The sparring?” Bruin waved a hand. “Oh, that part is fun.”

Stockton snorted, a dismissive snort.

“No, it is. Don’t knock it until you try.”

Stockton shook his head. “Well, fine, okay, but then you catch someone, and you… what? You have to talk to her, right?”

“Typically,” said Bruin, amused.

“What do you say?”

“It doesn’t matter what you say,” said Bruin. “You both understand what’s about to happen. If she’s not interested, she makes that plain, so don’t worry about that. Otherwise, it’s nonsense chitchat and it always ends in the same place, which you are both quite aware is going to be the case, and it’s… it’s fun, Stockton. Stop worrying. It’ll come to you. You’ll see.”

“It comes to you ,” said Stockton. “To people like you. But I am very awkward and very young and very stupid—”

“You’ll be fine,” said Bruin, putting a hand on his shoulder. “By the way, what are you thinking for dinner? I hear most of the restaurants have vegetarian specials this week, so we should be able to eat most anywhere.” It was a predatorkin’s world, in the end.

Of course, no predatorkin ate preykin, not anymore. A thousand years ago, most civilized predatorkin had outlawed such things, calling it barbaric, but it was permitted in special circumstances, if the predatorkin “lost control” until only about three hundred years ago, when it officially became classified as always murder. All meat was from animals, then, never people, not anymore.

Deerkin didn’t eat meat, but sometimes they ate cheese and milk products.

No one could digest cow’s milk, of course, not even the predatorkin, and especially not the birds, but everyone loved the taste of it.

Even so, Bruin felt the need to say, “I don’t think we should go for pizza, no cheese before a night out running in the field.”

“I thought you weren’t even going to make the midnight run.”

“Right,” said Bruin. “Even still…”

“No pizza,” said Stockton, looking around as they emerged onto the main street. “Agreed. Maybe Chinese or Indian or something?”

“Indian has yogurt a lot.”

“True, but yogurt’s easier to digest?”

Bruin looked into the window of a restaurant and caught the eye of a girl sitting there. She was young—far too young for him, he thought, likely near Stockton’s age. She was pretty, though, the picture of perfection for a young doe, plump in all the right places, her ears tipped forward expressively as she took a drink of her drink and stared back at him.

He should look away.

She held his gaze, however, and her expression was partly innocence and curiosity and partly something knowing and mature, as if she had every idea in the world how he was reacting to her.

Nonsense, he thought to himself. She doesn’t know.

“What about Thai?” said Stockton, pointing across the street.

“Thai sounds acceptable,” said Bruin. He was still staring at the doe.

She winked at him.

His lips parted. Well, he’d look for her later. He wouldn’t do anything. She was too young. But… but… well, she wasn’t allowed in to this sort of thing if she wasn’t legally an adult, so…

“Bruin,” called Stockton, who was starting across the crosswalk.

He tore himself away to follow Stockton.

WHEN LYALL BOUGHT this place, he’d gotten a lecture from his brother about why it was a bad idea.

His brother had been standing on the porch out here, looking off into the tangle of trees and briars that made up Lyall’s back yard—well, front yard, really.

One of the things Lyall liked about this place was that it faced the woods, not the road. It put its back to the road, so different than most other houses, which displayed themselves to passersby and neighbors. This house was a house that only catered to its owner and the woods. Lyall liked that.

Of course, there were no other houses on this road, anyway, no one to see it besides him.

That was another thing he liked about it.

There was a stereotype about lone wolves and Lyall guessed he fit it well enough. This place was his dream house, isolated, surrounded by farmland on one side and butting up against the Cypress Center’s grounds and woods on the other side. He could walk out on his front porch naked with his coffee if he felt like it, swish his tail back and forth and stretch into the sunrise…

Did he do that?

Sometimes.

But anyway, his brother had been on the porch. Not naked. Everyone had been dressed at that point. His brother had said, “You’ll have to up and leave every weekend for the six weeks of deerkin season.”

Lyall had dismissed this. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“You’ll scent it,” said his brother. “It’s not as if it’s not going to call to some natural part of your hindbrain, some primeval time when wolves would chase fat little deerkin tail and feast for the winter.”

“Gross,” Lyall had said, because he was always disturbed when predatorkin made eating preykin sound sexual.

Anyway, he had been sure he would not scent it. The Center was not really that close. The grounds surrounding it spanned over a hundred acres. His house was all the way on the far side from where the deerkin would start out for their rite or rut or whatever they called it. They’d have to run long and hard to get here, to his place, and he was pretty sure they mostly wouldn’t, that they’d be tackled by their stags and pinned down and bred or whatever it was that they did out there to each other before any such scents could reach him.

Last year, the season had come and he’d been correct about it.

Mostly.

There had been a couple weekends, here and there, when maybe there had been a lingering scent.

Maybe it had made him twitch a little when he came out for his coffee in the mornings.

Made his tail twitch, that was, not his…

Okay, sometimes the scent did make other things twitch, but he didn’t know what that was about, not exactly. It was fucked up, that was what he thought.

On the other hand, wolfkin packed up with rabbitkin and chipmunkin and deerkin all the time. It was enough that she-wolves sometimes got up in arms about such things, angry that all their men were being taken by preykin women.

Lyall, however, had decided a long time ago that pack life wasn’t for him. No mate for him, not of any species.

He had been the odd one out growing up. He and his brother were part of a litter of three, and there was a generation above them, their older sisters—but his family was one of those crazy back-to-nature types, real religious, real on the let’s-make-lots-of-babies train. There were ten pups total, a pack of twelve. Maybe it was this kind of fanatical devotion to the family group that he rejected, not packs in general, he wasn’t sure.

Even so, whenever he thought of it, settling down with a woman, raising rugrats together, being a pack… it made him want to claw at his throat for air. He could not breathe in a life like that. He just knew it.

So, lone wolf, that was him.

Anyway, the scent—last year—it had been annoying, but it hadn’t been overwhelming. He knew this was the first weekend for the rite now.

There was always a midnight run on Fridays, but he’d be headed to bed then, so he wouldn’t even be affected by that one. It’d be tomorrow morning, probably, during his morning cups of coffee, of which he had too many, the last one usually around eleven o’clock, so stretching the meaning of morning coffee, anyway. It’d be then when he’d scent it, probably.

But he wasn’t worried.

Right, not worried. That was why he was gazing out into the woods now, on his porch, thinking about this. Because of his complete lack of worry.

He thought about asking his brother if he could come and stay with him for the weekend, but he thought his brother would spend too much time crowing about how he’d been right. Lyall couldn’t bear an entire weekend of I-told-you-so.

Besides, the first weekend wouldn’t be bad, he thought.

And it wasn’t as if he was some kind of maddened wolf, some out-of-control man of prey. It happened sometimes, he knew. Wolves, hawks, coyotes, all sorts of creatures could go into it, a kind of frenzy that seemed triggered by scent and instinct.

But the law didn’t care about instinct. If he were to go mad and kill a deerkin, he would go to jail for the rest of his life.

That will never happen, he thought, staring out at the trees.

In the distance, far off, he could hear the strains of music at the Center, the deerkin get-together before the midnight madness of their breeding ceremony.

His tail twitched.

Maybe it was best to go inside now.