Dire Wolf Wanted by Carol Van Natta

Author:Carol Van Natta [Van Natta, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chavanch Press
Published: 2018-10-18T05:00:00+00:00

14

Arvik watched Rayne take in his words. His inner beasts stayed stalking still and silent.

She shrugged one shoulder. “You’re an agent. Most of that is the price of admission.” Her eyes closed for a moment. Then she lifted her chin and caught his gaze. “What kind of monster?” Her fingers splayed briefly. “My inner wolf says you are a shifter, albeit one with three souls, which might make you mythical.”

His inner beasts urged him to agree.

Unexpectedly, she batted her eyes and coyly proffered the back of her hand. “But I haven’t seen everything this wide world has to offer.”

It sounded like a quote from a silent-film melodrama. Her simpering smile and high-pitched, breathy tone made him smile in spite of himself.

While she’d been out running, he’d decided to start at the beginning and work his way up to the harder parts. “Do you know anything about the legends of the human First Peoples, or any of the shifter clans up north?”

“Sorry, no. Classrooms made me bitey. You’re lucky I know they don’t call themselves Eskimos.”

His noisy beasts pushed him to blurt everything out at once, to kiss her, to whisk her away to the beach and show her. He compromised by inviting her to sit with him at the table.

“In our legends, the shamans of two starving shifter clans in the Arctic used powerful, dark arts to become one people. They became more than shifters with the strengths of man and beasts, with extra free magic. They conquered all other tribes, human and shifter, in the north. They called themselves the Ulu, the sharp knives, but came to be known as the Ahklut, after the male who named himself chief of all the Ulu bands.”

“When was this?”

“Depends on who you ask. My grandparents said twenty thousand years ago. Others put us as far older, but that might be more fable than fact.”

“We shifters love legends, don’t we? My favorite philosophy professor said it’s because we know less about our origins than any of the other magical species.” She smiled ruefully. “Sorry. So, the Ahklut clan was the terror of the north.”

“Yes, for centuries. When Ahklut himself died, successors took up the spear. By the time I was born in the early 1500s, as Europeans count it, the Ahklut were in decline, down to maybe a few thousand on three hidden islands. Children were rare, and healthy children rarer still. A famine drove food animals southward. The shifter and human tribes followed, but the Ahklut could not. According to our teaching tales, one of the costs of our merge was a fatal intolerance to warmth.”

Her finger traced the wing of the thunderbird figure he’d carved on the table. “Does your magic protect you?”

“Yes.” The lie rolled off his tongue before he caught it. “Not anymore.” He forced himself back on track. “We had no other skills beyond ravaging and pillaging. Everyone went on raids. Male, female, old, young. Only the injured or females nursing younglings stayed home. Our native gift, the

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