I chuckled. “As tempting as that is, it wouldn’t please Alpha for me to be teaching that kind of lesson to his newest warriors. They’re just young; they’ll learn.”
Emory wrapped a lean, muscular arm around my shoulders, squeezing lightly. “You’re too kind, Kaliya. If it were me, I’d unleash the beast and give them all an epic beat-down. You’d only have to do it once.”
“As a male, I’m sure that would work well for you. As a female, I shouldn’t be able to. It’s bad enough that I’ve defeated nearly every male our age and up; flexing on younger wolves is just cruel.”
Emory was thoughtful as we followed the wooded path back toward the village. “A younger wolf may be your only chance, Kali,” he reminded me softly. He didn’t finish the phrase, but we were both thinking it as we continued in silence.
A younger wolf may be my only chance to avoid expulsion from the pack. At nineteen, I only had a few more months to find a mate. Wolves had to contribute to the replenishment of society, and our prime pup-bearing years were the younger ones. We didn’t live long happy lives, thanks to the beasts that stalked us at night. Something else we had to thank the Ancients for. Whether we called them night stalkers, wraiths, or just ‘creatures’, they were adept at keeping us constantly on the edge of extinction.
It was an unfair rule, but a rule nonetheless: if a wolf wasn’t mated by their twentieth birthday, they had no place in the pack. It mostly ensured we didn’t waste time finding a mate, and I only knew of one time they actually enforced it.
From the way things were going, I might be the second.
Of course, Emory had the same issue. We were born mere minutes apart, and neither of us had mates. Not that Emory was unattractive, or weak. He was tall, lean yet muscular, and objectively handsome with his sharply angled jaw, warm eyes, and lips made for kissing. He was also incredibly intelligent, if a little awkward at times. His brilliant mind was one of his finer attributes, and that was saying something. If people could choose their own mates, Emory would have been happily settled years ago.
But humans didn’t choose mates; their wolves did.
Emory’s issue was that his wolf struggled to find a female submissive enough for him to mate, while mine was the opposite: I had yet to find a male who could force my wolf to submit.
Mates were chosen when a male issued a mate challenge to a female and submitted her. The stronger the pairing, the stronger and more dominate the pups would be. Therefor every male tried to mate the most dominant female he could handle.
Fortunately, there was one small nod to the female in this archaic process. The male could force the Mate Challenge, but he couldn’t force the mating. The female had to accept him and seal the pairing. In theory, it could be years before he earned her respect enough to mate, and he just had to wait for it.
For me, the issue was bigger. I’d already been mate challenged by most of the eligible males in the pack, and my wolf defeated them all. Since I reached mating age, the only eligible male who had yet to challenge me was the pack’s despicable Beta, and I destroyed him thoroughly a few weeks before I turned fifteen. He’d spent the last five years ignoring me completely, clearly bitter about the ass-kicking he’d received as a pup. Since he was younger than me, he still had over a year to find a mate.
Whereas I was swiftly running out of time.
My thoughts turned to the upcoming Clan Gathering at the Blackwood Fortress. All five packs in our territory would come together, as they did every five years. It was a festival of sorts, but it served multiple purposes: One was to have a variety of games and tests of battle prowess. Another was to exchange information with all the other packs, find out what the wraiths in their territories had been up to, and discuss any recent issues the rest of the clan should know.
But the purpose that mattered the most to me was the chance to find a mate outside my pack. The Clan Gathering encouraged the intermingling of pack members to make stronger wolves. There was an entire arena dedicated to official challenges, and they started on the Summer Solstice, longest day of the year. Many held out hope of finding their mate at the event, if for no other reason than the chance to leave their own pack and live somewhere new.
I suspected Emory was hoping he’d find a submissive female at the Clan Gathering who was closer to his own age. Fifteen was technically mating age, and many females were more submissive when they were young. Less dominant males tended to prey on them to secure a place in the pack, which was partially why Emory was still unmated.
But they were little more than pups at that age. I couldn’t imagine finding a fifteen-year-old attractive enough to mate, no matter how dominant his wolf could be. Emory felt the same way.
I was just hoping that there was one wolf among the thousands across our territory that was dominant enough to mate me.
Surely, there had to be one.
Chapter 2
Kaliya
We were both lost in our own thoughts when we reached the village, and I swept away my melancholy to force a smile for Emory before we parted. “I’ll see you later?”
He nodded, brown waves of hair flopping in his eyes before he pushed them back. “Later,” he agreed, grinning.
With a wink, I grasped the rope ladder and began the climb to my house as Emory continued to his, one tree over.
Every pack had their own method for defense against the night stalkers. Years ago, ours took to the trees and built a massive network of rope ladders, wooden swing bridges, and tree-hugging houses. They were comfortable enough, if a little crude and simply-designed. The logistics made it impossible to use more modern materials for building, but the trade-off was a double layer of protection—the wraiths weren’t sophisticated enough to organize an attempt to chop down or climb the trees en masse. Plus, they were terrified of fire, so they couldn’t use it against us, either. Occasionally one or two figured out how to climb and killed a few pack members before the guards dispatched them, but overall we enjoyed a much better survival rate than when we lived on the ground—or so I’d been told. I’d lived my entire life among the trees.
As long as we pulled up the ladders at night and didn’t climb down until dawn, we were protected.
Mostly.
I reached the top and ducked into my home, a simple two-story wooden house with a single room downstairs and two upstairs. Bypassing the cozy living area, I snatched an apple from the kitchen counter and climbed the wooden stairs that spiraled around the tree. Like most homes in our village, the house was built around a central, massive tree, whose branches intersected the building at some points and served as a floor support at others. Chomping my hothouse fruit, I ducked into my room to strip off the sweaty training clothes. After a quick wash from the pitcher and bowl on my dresser, I changed into a clean set of leather pants and a fresh cotton tunic. My wild blonde hair remained in my signature collection of braids; I didn’t have time to wash it right now. Given the difficulty of hauling water to the treetops, we had facilities on the ground where we could warm water for a bath. But privacy was often an issue, and they were only open during the daytime when there was work to be done. I didn’t have time for luxurious baths every day, hence the basin.
Fortunately, our ground facilities were mostly safe from the night stalkers. The guards did a sweep each morning to make sure there were no wraiths hiding from the sun in our buildings, and they were more interested in killing us than destroying the pane glass of our greenhouses. As we pressed our attacks outward, it became increasingly rare to find them in the morning. Very few made their way to our territory anymore.