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“I feel very rough.” Sterling’s palms were chapped and blistered. Ice and snow and rock were murder, even on conditioned paws. “And I don’t mean the beard.”
“You are kind of good looking with the beard.” Given that body hair was the mark of human breeding, werewolf males usually stayed clean-shaven. Many didn’t need to shave every day. Facial hair had never done anything for me, but Sterling’s silvery scruff made him seem more… something. Dangerous? Fringe-dwelling? Unusual?
Sleep clawed at my eyelids, but there was too much to do. “Tell me about your scar. Which I guess is also related to how your parents know the FrostFangare.”
He just weighed the road north while he gathered his thoughts and sorted out where to start the story. “When my parents married, they looked for somewhere I could be around other wolves too. Not easy when you’re the son of a lone wolf with a human consort. But they found something in upstate New York. A large bundle of land near a pack called the IceEar.”
“Official pack?” I’d never heard the name, but I didn’t keep a complete pack roster in my head.
“Yes. The deal was my father would help clean up the local area. Corrupt police department, lots of drugs moving through town, poachers, sketchy tourist outfitters. He’d buy a huge track of land—all he could—and let the local wolves run all over it. In return, I’d be a fosterling.”
Fosterlings were very rare, but this seemed like a fair and logical exchange to make. “I’m guessing this wasn’t a very prestigious pack.”
“Very poor, very rural, very rough. I never got along with the other pups that well. I arrived the son of a rich billionaire but my face was marked up from hunting rats.”
That prodded my brain into awareness. “You hunted rats?”
“It was food.” He gestured to his face, and one of his fingers found one of the faint scars over his upper lip.
Obviously, they were food. But rats? Big, mean, thick-skinned, smart, and could weigh upwards of a pound. Their teeth did a lot of damage to a snout. They also tasted awful. Not even experienced hunters liked dealing with rats. That’s what had scarred him up. I hadn’t made the connection. They were the wounds of a ratter.
Sterling would have been about six or seven. We typically gained our ability to go to wolf form somewhere between five and eight, and the forms still had puppy fur, milk teeth, and baby claws. Our parents would just be bringing us prey. Dead, stunned, then mostly alive, but small prey. Voles, moles, mice, birds, baby rabbits. Not rats. Rats were mean, cunning, tough to kill. They were not suitable to train a pup.
He glanced sideways at me. “Your mate was a ratter. Problem?”
“Nothing except a pup having to rat.” A pup without proper teeth having to hunt rats meant nothing good about a situation. I’d already figured out that Sterling’s (and Cerys’) life before Garrett hadn’t been pretty. But hearing that Sterling had hunted rats with his milk teeth put it all somewhere around the lower circles of Hell.
I’d missed a few meals and evaded bill collectors and been shivering cold, but I’d never had to hunt a rat for a meal. I’d never had to hunt rat except to prove I could hunt rat. And I’d especially never been a puppy hunting a rat. I didn’t know that level of desperation or hunger.
Sterling went on with the story. “Naturally, the older I got, the more the situation strained. Especially among my peers.”
My brain returned to the original conversation. “Of course.”
“That didn’t really bother me. I wasn’t in Clare all the time, and most of the time I was there, which was summer, the Summer Wolves came—”
“Summer Wolves?” I had to interrupt again.
“That’s what I called them because they came in summer. European wolves, mostly, bachelors who are on their world tour.”
“Oh, we called those traveling wolves.” A tradition out of European and north Asian packs. Bachelor males sent out to make their way across the world with just their wits and recommendations from one waystation pack to the next. Usually lasted about two years. Gave the birthpack a way to see what sort of wolf they were without their pack to prop them up.
“My mother put up with them for my sake, and they were usually brotherly towards me, and were a distraction from the local boys. Some were assholes who just were their to ply their accents on the locals,” Sterling said wryly.
A lot of things about Sterling started to fall into place. I resettled myself and ignored the dull aching in my hamstrings. Maybe our crummy motel would have a hot tub.
“The ringleader of the local boys was a wolf named Landyn. When I’d come in beaten up, I’d just tell my parents training. Landyn hated I refused to cry foul to my parents and he couldn’t chase me off. I grit it out because the deal had an expiration date, and I was going to wring everything I could out of it.”
“And you turned sixteen, and the deal expired,” I concluded.
“Yes. That summer we went to Clare. I was out in wolf form just goofing off, not too far outside my father’s courtesy territory in the neutral ground west of IceEar. I cross paths with one of the younger pups from Landyn’s group, who asks if I want to help them hunt a doe. The crew is just across the way. He didn’t smell of deception, but I had a bad feeling about it. I went anyway.
“He takes me a distance into the woods and there’s the group. A mix of very young adults like myself and some older pups. Landyn’s there. They’re in human form contemplating a map and discussing this doe they’d been tracking. I go to human form. Promptly tackled and pinned.”
He didn’t say anything for the next two miles.
“Landyn wanted to see if I was a hybrid,” Sterling said, a little more quietly than before. “So he cuts me with a knife, but I’m fighting and he loses his nerve a bit, and the cut gets messy. He gets a vial out of a bag, opens it, and pours a grainy powder into the gash. Pure silver nitrate salts.”
I couldn’t even swallow. Something like sand coated my throat.
