Bleed The Wolves

Chapter 2: Dust and Sea

The interrogation room in the main office was a windowless, miserable place. It was where they always took him; brawlers could take very little distractions, the weaselly scout from the surveillance team liked to say.

Lining the walls were thick fabric wallpapers in grey, and a carpet the colour of river water flooded the floor to keep in sound. Both made the room smell dusty and his massive frame feel like a child stuffed in a dollhouse. Furthermore, the door was at his back, the chair barely fit half of him, and the table was off balance.

The scout assigned to him was late; a rarity on which Thomas capitalised to purge his mind of lemon perfumes, mating prospects and shoes a size too small. The less emotion Thomas took into these check ins, the less notes the scout made in that damned notebook of his. But the room was too small for Thomas to set his anxieties far.

While the morning's kerfuffle made the eighteen graves and eight days of hunt seem far off, the mountains lingered. He set his elbows on the table and pressed his palms to his eyes. It was hard to forget their shadow when those dreams still woke him with warning looks. Even now, they found him awake, returning in fragments like hands through bars.

My feet hit the forest floor. Bare, but I am careful. If I bleed they will find me. I sweat, but I've wrapped myself so heavily in cloaks I hope they smell none of it by the time they reach my trail. The desperation presses me on. The terror of years finally under my feet with the mountains to my back.

Damn foothills always shook loose memories best left to cobwebs and dust.

Days later, terror down my neck and exhaustion a close second, I reach the edge of the lake. The ice has laced over its rim. I wade in, the cold waking me like a knife. Then, like a snake shedding its skin, I slough off my many cloaks and let heavy furs sink to the bottom, where they will never be found. I scrub my skin until it near bleeds and get out.

Naked, the sun can't warm me. Shaking with cold or nerves, I unbuckle my pack and pull out the creased dress.

Dress? Thomas raised his head. There had been no dress.

Thomas startled as the door opened. A she-wolf shut the door behind herself.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded, shelving the dreams for good.

Brawlers had a hard time differentiating between what happened before their eyes and what happened behind them. Imagination and memory, fears and presumptions all threaded into one reality like a misprinted photograph. If Thomas couldn't touch it, he wasn't supposed to think about it.

The she-wolf wore a well-pressed dress of blue cotton and clutched a notebook and folder to her chest. She was young, perhaps how old Thomas was when he joined White Pine seven years ago.

She smiled over the top of her folder. "Anastasia. It's a pleasure to meet you, Thomas." She held his eye for the full two seconds rank allowed before pulling out the chair opposite. Not a flinch in her gaze.

Thomas crossed his arms. A peg breed. The most unflappable off the wolves; so even-keeled there wasn't a dominant wolf in their line. To send a peg in to ask questions—a female, no less?

"You are one of Beta's, aren't you?"

"I am part of the surveillance team like Mr Harrison before me," she said, but she laid out her notebook and folder so they were precisely parallel with the rim of the desk. If that wasn't Kate's training, Thomas wasn't White Pine.

Beta kept a contingency of wolves outside the city for training. She only brought them in for special cases. Thomas really didn't want to be a special case.