I caught the faint musk of wolf like a half-remembered perfume, he was pressed so close. Something stirred inside me; a white shape rose in the dark of my mind. My wolf stood up inside me and shook her mostly white fur like any canine rising from a long nap.
He went very still beside me, and his voice was even deeper, so full of the growl that he’d been doing that it sounded like it would hurt for a human throat to talk like that. “What is that?”
“You have a nose,” I said, in a voice that was only a little shaky. “Use it.”
He drew in a deep rush of air, then let it trickle out slowly, the way some people let wine sit on their tongue. Swallowing the wine slowly, so they catch every nuance of it. My wolf sniffed the air back, as if she were catching his scent, too.
“Wolf; you can’t be wolf,” he growled.
“Why not?” I asked, and it was almost a whisper because his face was close enough that much more than a whisper would be shouting.
“She wouldn’t want your body if you were a werewolf,” he growled next to my face.
“Why not?” I asked, again.
“She can’t control wolves.” I felt him tense. I don’t think he was supposed to share that.
“Only cats,” I said.
“Yes.” The growl was beginning to fade a little, and it was more of a bass whisper, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. The Harlequin had bugged all our businesses in St. Louis once, so we were probably being listened to, if not watched, right this minute.
I did my best not to move my lips, and the whisper this time was more just breathing out. I didn’t want them to hear us. “The mother couldn’t control you?” My wolf began to trot up that long, dark path inside me. It was my visual for an impossibility. It was impossible that there were animals inside me that wanted to come out through my skin, but they were still in there, so I “saw” them as walking down a path, when there was no path, no space between me and them. In a very real way, they were me. Intellectually I knew that; to stay sane I visualized a path.
He sniffed harder, as if he would breathe me into him. He settled more of his body against the back of mine. My hands were in the way, so he couldn’t spoon me completely, and he kept his face next to mine, so that the height difference put only his upper body against my hands. He had a long torso. I fought to keep my hands still where they lay pressed between the two of us. Cuddling was better than being threatened; I just had to not rush, and not do anything to make him remember he was here to scare me.
“No,” he whispered, and used his arm to pull me in tighter to his body.
I breathed, “She forced you into wolf form.”
“She couldn’t; my master forced me.”
I pressed my face into the smooth chill of the mask, letting it hide as much of my face as possible in case the camera could see my face. The scent of his wolf was stronger this way; it made my wolf trot faster up that invisible path. The light was better so that I could see her dark saddle in all that white fur, as she trotted through the light and shadow of the tall trees that lined the path. The trees, like the rest of the landscape, were no place I’d ever been.
I breathed in the scent of him, and down the long metaphysical cord, I smelled another wolf, several other wolves. I smelled my pack and they always smelled good to me, of pine trees and thick forest leaves.
He sniffed harder, hugged me tighter. “You smell of more than just your wolf. You smell like pack. How can that be?”
“I’m the lupa of my pack, the bitch queen.”
He snarled behind his mask, drawing back enough that he could see my face. “Liar!”
“If you’re powerful enough to shift just your claws, you’re powerful enough to smell a lie. I am the lupa of our pack; I swear it.”
“But you’re human,” he growled, and it was almost a yell.
My wolf broke into an easy lope, almost a run, as if to prove the truth of what I’d said. But there were shadows in the dark around her, not us, as if I had called the ghosts of our pack. Their scents came with me, not the sight, but then for a wolf, smell is more real than sight. It’s one of the reasons that wolves aren’t bothered by hauntings, unless there’s a scent to go with it. You can wail and moan all damn day, but if you don’t smell like something, a wolf won’t care.
I felt the loneliness in the man beside me. Not a loneliness of sex, or even love, but of not having another furry body to press side to side, tail to nose, as they slept. I’d been told that the ardeur was about lust, but my version was more about your heart’s desire. What is it that you want, you really want? That part of me that carried the ardeur could see all the way through you to the truth. The man holding me didn’t want sex, or even human love; he wanted a pack. He wanted to run in the moonlight with others of his kind, and hunt in a pack. No cat, not even a human one, would ever understand his loneliness.