3.1 | Animal Instinct ✓

17 | spike

It was a good thing that Dimitri was far away enough and spoke quietly enough for no one else but me to hear. Too drained to argue, I simply placed my palms flat on the wall and pushed myself up on it. But it was higher than I expected and I fumbled midway through, only to have Dimitri unexpectedly grip me firmly by the elbow and haul me up.

"Thanks," I murmured, once I'd settled down beside him and heard him make a dismissive noise in return. By then, most of the members in the pack had already shifted and as sad as the overall atmosphere was, I couldn't help but feel fascinated by the way everyone looked.

All wolves, a perfect synchrony of black and brown and grey and white in the dark. I'd never seen all of Titan gathered like this and I couldn't help but think of the perfect irony of it – that it'd taken losing someone to bring everyone else together, but this was the kind of silver lining I knew Spike would like.

"Just out of curiosity – " Dimitri's voice was strangely quiet when he finally spoke, barely audible in the soft silence. And when I glanced over at him, I realised that he was staring fixedly at the pack. " – is everyone here a part of Titan?"

"Yes," I replied, making sure that my voice was just as quiet as his because it seemed unlike Dimitri to be so discreet about something. It was like that time when Jed and I figured out his alias – the more he kept his real name hidden, the more lethal the situation really was. This felt the same. "Phobos and Deimos heard about it and they offered Jed their condolences, along with Mimas because that's where Jed found Spike's body. But this is a closed service."

Dimitri kept silent for a prolonged moment. Then, after a cautious glance around to make sure none of the wolves were looking our way, he tapped the space separating us and held out his fingers briefly to me, keeping his actions as surreptitious as possible. "Phone."

I bit my lip and slowly slid my phone out of my pocket, setting it down on the space on the wall between us. He swiftly grabbed it, shifting his jacket over the device to hide the bright light. When he set it back on the wall, the screen was dimmed to the lowest, and I would've missed the message keyed across the screen entirely had it not been for the glow of the street lamp near us.

Abnormality in stance detected.

My eyebrows shot up at the unusual message that I couldn't even begin to decipher. But when I cast a sideway glance at Dimitri, who refused to look at me; all the response I got from him was a deliberate jerk of his head in the direction of the pack. Hesitantly, I followed the direction of his gaze, my eyes navigating through the varying hues of fur; some glossy, others darker under the moonlight, tails down and heads bent in what seemed like mourning, and –

I stilled, a sudden shiver of realisation glossing its way down my spine.

Was it truly mourning? Or was it –

I almost jumped in surprise when I felt something nudge me, and when I glanced back down, I realised that Dimitri had typed another message when I was focused on observing the wolves. Bracing my hands on the wall, I lowered my head and tried to read the message without being entirely obvious about it. There were only three words on it and I felt my breath catch at the first:

1) Alpha

Without reading the rest of the message, I took my attention off the phone to look at Jed. This was an area I wasn't quite acquainted with; the books on mythology and folklore I read hadn't particularly highlighted this aspect of werewolf behaviour, and I had a feeling that I'd find better information if I'd actually studied a book on wolves.