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Mint smiled at me. “That’s good to hear. And it’s an easy fix for the clothes. I’ll just have something brought over. What sort of meeting?”
“Predatory. We hunt together,” I replied without thinking.
Mint glanced sideways, fingers pausing in their tapping as he appraised me, visibly reordering his thoughts and assessment. “Wear the shoes.”
“I couldn’t hunt in these. I can barely walk in these!” I lifted one ankle and looked at the shoe in the mirror. Mint could not be serious.
“But you’re not hunting bear. You’re hunting human.”
Not exactly... and it might be hunting me.
Tentacles
Sterling’s office building was like most of the others: steel, glass, concrete. A massive open lobby with black marble flooring so shiny you could probably see up my skirt. The only other person, besides the man at the desk, was a woman on one of the tasteful couches, huddled over herself.
Mint had chosen a cream-colored pencil skirt which I could not have run in if my life had depended on it (heels not withstanding) paired with a bright sea-blue top that sort of matched the shoes. In the sterile, muted colors of the lobby, I was the brightest point. Sparkly stripper heels and all.
The she-wolf instantly looked in my direction, and quickly cast her gaze back down, and hunched her head low between her shoulders. An act of timid submission to a far more powerful wolf.
Hilarious. I had barely walked over to the couch without snapping both ankles in these silly shoes.
She had on stained, worn jeans and sneakers, and a faded maroon sweatshirt under her puffy blue jacket. She was young, and her face had the gaunt expression of someone who’d been afraid long before she’d gotten to this building.
She smelled of exhaust fumes, snow, grit, bleach, and above everything else, recent hunger.
Hungry wolves could do anything. She might look meek and docile, but caution was warranted. “My name is Winter. You are?”
“Janice,” she said in a tiny voice, not daring to look at me.
I studied her again, but it was hard to catch any scent with the clutter of other smells. “Six-year-old girl. Correct?”
“Yes.” She still didn’t look at me, and her voice somehow shrank further into her.
I sat down as Sterling came around a marble pillar. He matched the severity of the lobby, an Alpha of steel and flint. Janice didn’t acknowledge his arrival except to tuck her shoulders tighter.
I asked Janice, “Are you and her father properly recorded yourselves?”
Only once Sterling had sat down and murmured a greeting to me did Janice answer my question. “Yes.”
Nothing strange so far. Many parents didn’t get around to recording their offspring until the pups were old enough for their first shift. “Is your pairing recorded?”
This time she glanced around, squinted at the glass wall to the outside, then tucked her hands between her knees. She rocked back and forth once. “No.”
My gut sank, because I already knew the answer to the next question. “Should it be? Because that’s easy to do at the same time.”
She fidgeted. “No.”
So that’s what we were talking about. A bastard pup. Sterling leaned back against the couch and his scent shifted to impatient anger.
Historically, bastard recordings were hard to push through. Huge irony that we’d killed off our female lines ignoring Gaia’s Will, but when it came to “unapproved” bastards, everyone clutched their pearls and found their conscience.
I knew the research better than any wolf left alive. I’d seen the numbers. My brother Jerron might not have a mate (aside from the fact he was a shithead) because there weren’t any compatible souls that weren’t also too closely related to him. It wasn’t like he or I were from uncommon lines.
The adjuncts working under my father had simply sent most bastard applications on to him. He’d approved a fair number of them since he hadn’t believed (so he said) in making a pup shoulder the consequences of their parents’ bad choices. Another one of his unpopular moves. Caused a lot of grumbling about bad behavior continuing since there were no consequences, but anytime that had been mentioned, he’d called out the existence of the “sanctioned” bastards created by political pairings, and all that bullshit had gotten us into this genetic corner and our species was a generation away from being functionally extinct due to lack of female families.
In SilverPaw, my father’s population politics had been unpopular with the Betas and other prominent SilverPaw. They hadn’t liked the idea of SilverPaw prestige being compromised because Gaia had no interest in mortal political priorities.
And with the knowledge of what had happened twenty years ago with Sterling? No wonder Dad had been looking for an I Win button to press with his peers.
