The Last Lycan

Chapter 9 - Something Very Real

My groggy hand waved through the air, trying to find a solid surface. It connected with the smooth and cool wood of the floor, giving me little recognition of where I was. I pushed up, and the blanket slid from my head, sending waves of pounding pain through my temples when the morning light smacked me around the cheek. Whatever I was given to drink last night was almost on par with the puchka wine my fifteen year old self used to sneak. I hadn’t woken with the same lingering sense of having died on the hallucinogenic wine, but I was having difficulty recalling what exactly had happened.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed myself up from my front and found myself at the foot of the bed. Had I gone through a second shift? There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t ache, particularly my mouth. Brief flickers of soft lips upon mine spun in the back of my memory, and my face heated thinking about how far I had foolishly gone.

Kirill was of no use, groaning unintelligible grumblings, and I wasn’t entirely sure if he was awake, asleep or, like me, wracking his mind as to whether our first time was lost to poor decisions. Heather wasn’t lying beside me, and neither was her fresh scent invading the air, so I didn’t think I had done anything I would regret too harshly. Although I had two strange bruises high on my chest, deep red with a purple hue. They were not there when my memory was clear. I had never seen these kinds of lesions before, yet I had the uncomfortable and sneaking suspicion about where, or who, they were from.

My clothing was nowhere to be seen except for the underwear I discovered I had slept in. I grabbed the first thing I found from the black bag that was delivered yesterday. Another recollection I was lacking because the last time I had seen it, it was in the sitting room. The first thing pulled out was a strange pair of soft, thin, grey trousers, and I almost lost balance in my ungainly attempt to put them on, shoving both legs down the same opening.

I shook my head, hoping to clear the spinning effect, but it came with the instant regret of the movement.

‘Unless you wish to bid a good morning to the contents of last night’s dinner,’ Kirill warned, ‘do not do that again.’

My gut lurched in time with the throbs in my head. I was never drinking anything from a brown bottle again.

‘Stop thinking and go find mate, would you?’ Kirill rubbed his temples. ‘She may be in a worse way than we are.’

He was right. Was she unwell or hurt? There were no sounds of movement through the small home. What if she had hurt herself?

Yanking the bedroom door open, I found where my trousers from the previous night had gone, thrown into the kitchen, but they were the least of my concerns. Through the bead curtain to the sitting room, a bare arm hung from the mezzanine. I grasped the wrist, tingles and soothing warmth flooding my palm where we connected. Her heady scent of spiced fire flooded me, extinguishing my growing worries.

Heather’s hand wrapped around mine, gliding along the length of my arm to my jaw.

(“I like this wake-up call from you. Good to know I didn’t kill you on your first night of drinking.”) Her musical laugh filled my ears, and my pounding head lost its potency.

A pair of long, supple, perfect legs swung over the ledge and landed a body that only the moon goddess could have sculpted… a naked body.

‘Look at that.’ Kirill stared, transfixed. ‘Our first breasts.’

I had never seen a woman naked before, but the adolescent mind in my teenage years had given the mystery of what lay beneath their garments a lot of thought. My adult mind had spent too long trying to survive the elements and starvation to waste the energy thinking about such basal desires.

‘Does she think showing us… those things… will win us over?’

‘Yes,’ my wolf drooled, ‘and she’s correct.’

(“My drunk ass really gave you some hickies. They do look good on you, though.”) Heather tried to run her fingers across some area on my skin; I was not focusing on where.

I backed up as a trained reflex, and an involuntary growl rumbled my chest. It was not because I wanted to keep her at a distance. It was the opposite, and my head hurt too much to deal with certain rising urges; her touch would calm nothing down.

(“Well that tune changed fast. Drunk Konstantin was way more friendly.”) She bit the corner of her lip, flipping the heat within me to a furnace.

Swaying around me, she feigned a lunge at me, peeling back her pretty lips in a snarl. (“See, it’s not very nice, is it?”)

I didn’t know what she was saying, but I got the gist from her superior smirk. She was giving me a taste of my own medicine. I growled at her when she approached, so this was her method of teaching me a lesson.

‘It’s teaching me that I like her anger.’ Kirill continued his drooling. ‘Goddess, I wish you’d fight her. Imagine being pinned under that body.’

‘Would you crawl back to your stupor?!’

(“Is me growling at you turning you on?”) Heather made it a point to stretch herself out to lift the beaded curtain, raising her eyebrow and jutting her line of sight to my lower half. (“The best thing about sweatpants on a guy: they hide nothing.”)

Again, I hadn’t the first idea what she was saying. But when I followed her line of sight, there was a distinct outline of my c**k standing rigid. This she-wolf would be the end of me.

I was still in a daze, calming my body down, when she returned, fixing me with a questioning glance… and wearing the item of clothing I was missing, the hooded sweater. Had I presented her with my scent? Inebriated me had indeed made reckless and impulsive decisions.

‘Inebriated you did the first smart thing since you walked our rear end in this house.’ Kirill barked and circled to turn his back on me, though I noticed he kept a dark blue eye fixed on our mate.

(“I hope you don’t mind me snagging this.”) She tugged at the fabric surrounding her torso. (“You threw it at me in a fit of passion, spouting a whole lot of Russian at me… Do you want a shower too? Are you even on this planet?”) Heather waved her hand in front of my eyes, but all they saw was her naked body through her clothing. (“What’s up, never seen a pair of t**s before?”) Her eyes softened, and her pretty lips formed a small ‘o’. (“Oh… you’ve never seen anything before. This kinda explains why you blush so much.”)

She slowly slid her hand into mine and led me to the washroom. (“You’ll probably want a cold shower, and while you calm yourself down, I’ll introduce you to the medicine that is coffee. Hopefully, your hangover will have chilled out by the time the doctor gets here.”)

*

*

*

(“Arcassi (wow),”) the small, white-haired woman accompanying Aurora muttered, (“he’s certainly something, alright.”)

She wore similar types of clothing to her younger companion and the same white beaded necklace, but with more yellow and blue thrown into the strands.

(“And he’s still shirtless?”) Aurora lifted her brow at Heather. (“Not that I’m complaining, but didn’t I bring you a bunch of clothes yesterday?”)

(“Yes, but I barely had time to drag him out of the shower and funnel some food down him.”) Heather pushed a large mug into my hands, which sloshed with a steaming, black liquid. (“When you guys said you’d be by, I didn’t realise it would be at the crack of dawn.”)

I gave it a cautionary sniff, unwilling to fully trust another drink this she-wolf gave me. The last was continuing to make its repercussions known, pulsing behind my eyes and sharpening every sound like a blade through my skull. Heather rolled her eyes and tapped the base of the mug with the tip of her finger, choking me on the warm brew.

I spluttered, peeling my top lip back in a snarl at the smug she-wolf. “Do that again. I dare you!”

(“That’s a ‘f**k you’ if ever I heard one—oww, Ellu!”) Aurora rubbed her temple where the tiny old woman had thumped her.

(“Keep your mouth clean then, pup.”) The old woman placed her bag on the table and flicked the latch.

Moving out of my mate’s interfering reach, I took a sip of the black brew, intrigued by its flavours. It was unlike anything I'd tried before: bitter yet smooth, aromatic and earthy, with a buzz of energy in its wake.

(“Hey, Ellu, do you have any wolf-dose Tylenol or Midol?”) Heather peeked over into the older woman’s bag. (“Introduced him to werewolf beer last night, and I might have overdone a little.”)

(“It’s not all you overdid; those hickies aren’t subtle. Any more hiding south of the waistband?”)

(“Aurora! Don’t be crass.”) The older woman sent another whack to her younger companion, and gave Heather a curious white jar. (“Give him a couple of Midol. It’s better to come from you. Helps with the bonding.”)

Heather rattled the jar, clicking its lid and spilling two tiny ovals onto the flat of her palm. She thumbed through her book that contained words from my language with one hand, while offering out the two pellets with the other.

“Swallow for headache. Her doctor—” She shook her head. (“No, that’s not right.”) Flipping between two pages, her brows bunched together until her face brightened with her found answer. “She is a doctor.”

With reluctant acceptance, I held my palm out to receive whatever it was that might alleviate the thud behind my temples. She showed me what I was supposed to do with them, throwing a pair of capsules into her mouth and washing them down with the black brew.

(“Well, shall we get to it as to why I’m here? The young man looks healthy as a horse.”) The doctor eased her old bones down onto a chair.

(“Hung like one too.”) Aurora folded her arms and angled her head low as though I were bare to the world.

(“Go play with the chickens outside, would you? And stop ogling my mate!”) Heather shoved her through the curtain of beads, slamming a door that was out of sight.

(“That girl needs to find her some tail.”) The doctor shook her head as my mate batted the bead strings apart with aggression. (“Maybe you do as well with this crackle fizzing between you and your lovely man.”)

(“I don’t think I’ll be catching his tail anytime soon.”) The irritation in Heather’s eyes melted away into something softer and almost lonely as they trailed over me. (“But that’s my issue to deal with that needs some time. No, what I was hoping was if you had a test for pheromones or scents or something like that?”)

(“We can draw some blood, and I can run it back in my clinic—”)

(“I don’t think drawing blood will go down well with Konstantin. I mean, do you really wanna try and stick him with a needle?”)

The elderly woman’s near-black eyes narrowed in appraisal, sweeping across me from top to toe. I could tolerate Heather’s stare – and a small part of me craved it – but I grew irritated by these strangers eyeing me like an oddity. As was Kirill, following my annoyance with a bristling growl of his own.

(“Hmm, I don’t ‘spose I do. But why are you worried about his pheromones anyhow?”)

(“No one else finds anything odd except that his scent is muskier than other wolf males. Even Aurora said the same thing when I asked her yesterday, and she has one of the best noses of any wolf around. But me?”) Heather fiddled with a small silvery-coloured chain and pendant plucked from under the neckline of her sweater. (“I feel like I’m about to go into heat every time he’s near.”)

(“Are you?”)

My mate shook her head at whatever line of questioning the older woman was issuing as I finished the black brew cooling in my mug. This language that Heather spoke… I needed to learn her words because a pitiful helplessness sank deep into my soul every time I was left on the sidelines of what was troubling her.

(“No. No light cramps or sweating, and I had my last heat four weeks ago, so I shouldn’t be due for another five months.”)

(“It could’ve come around again early. New mates around us can do that.”)

(“Maybe… but with my mate, I think my actual heat would hit hard. No, this…”) Heather’s honey eyes met mine with a hunger that set my pulse to a rapid beat. (“I feel like I need to jump him every time he’s near, and it’s not just the bond; it’s something else. It’s every time I breathe in his scent.”)

(“There’s a swab test.”) The doctor pushed up onto her feet and rooted through her bag, taking items, containers and paraphernalia I wouldn’t be able to name if I were given a lifetime. (“But the reagent only reacts to high wolf pheromone levels in a reproductive cycle; we use it for detecting any hormonal abnormalities that might occur in a heat or a rut. It won’t actually tell you much, not without a blood test.”)

Heather’s mouth twitched in deep thought, puckering and pursing over the unknown dilemma she was in. (“The swab is a start. It’s more for my own sanity than anything else. Even if it’s a dud, I don’t wanna put my mate through anything invasive. He has enough trust issues as it is.”)

(“Well, okay. Rub this”) – the doctor handed my mate a white stick in clear packaging – (“around his neck, right where the scent gland of the marking site is. I’ll do the rest.”)

Peeling the strange packet back, Heather removed the white stick with a bulbous end, and appeared to ready herself for a battle. (“The phrase book doesn’t seem to have ‘stay still while I swab your neck’ as a standard saying in Russian. So, are we gonna do this the easy way? Or am I gonna have to do this the hard way and pin you on my floor?”)

(“I thought you just said you don’t want to be ‘invasive’ with him?”) The doctor tweaked two gnarled fingers in the air and laughed at her own words.

(“I don’t think it’s much of a threat with this guy. He’d probably b***h and snarl, but secretly love it. I got his card pegged.”) Heather’s lips twitched in a smirk and fell as she faced me, holding her hands up as though she were about to face a cornered animal. (“This won’t hurt, I swear.”)

Between the softness of her voice and smile, and her slow steps, any rationality to be wary was disarmed. The throb of my temples had begun its fade, and as always when this she-wolf approached me, the throb in my ears raged as my blood flow diverted anywhere bar where it should to fuel intelligent decisions, not hormone-driven poor choices.

I flinched when she raised the strange white stick to my neck, right where it ached to be touched by her and marked… right where I feared to let anyone in.

‘Do you think she’s about to do something untoward to us?’ Kirill piped up from his silent observations to jump to her defence.

The war must’ve been written across my face because the softest hand made by the goddess above cupped my jaw and drew me back into her honey and earth irises. They held me captive as she did whatever it was she needed, the tip of the downy stick wiping across the sensitive spot of my neck and trembling my spine.

‘See?’ Kirill waved his snout in the air, smug to be racking up his wins. ‘I don’t know what any of this is for, just the same as you, but I know this she-wolf wouldn’t harm us. So for once, smile and quit being a prickish loaf.’

(“Look at that, you survived a swabbing.”) Heather bopped my nose with the tip of her finger and returned the white stick to the doctor.

A bloom of heat rippled over my cheeks, and it made it worse that the two women were obviously chuckling at me for it. My fire-haired she-wolf crowded over the shoulder of the doctor as the older woman mixed various things in a concoction. She held up a small, clear capsule to the light of the window, agitating the liquid inside until it turned a faint pink colour.

(“Well I’ll be…”) She gave the see-through vial to Heather. (“It’s a weak result, but a normal wolf male shouldn’t produce enough pheromones for the colour to change outside of his rut. I’m not sure what kind of rogue you’ve found yourself here, but he’s an intriguing one.”)

Heather sighed, disappointed and dejected. (“This is why he’s like my personal drug, and he doesn’t even blink at my scent… it’s just a weak bond to him.”)

(“Don’t be too down.”) The doctor’s aged hands folded over Heather’s. (“That young man hasn’t taken his eyes off you once. He definitely feels something very real for you.”)