Wolf Prints

Taming the Alpha

"It's like," I paused to think, "an English muffin."

"Then why not just call it that?"

"Because we don't."

"That's stupid."

"You're stupid."

She pushed away from the deck and her chocolate colored eyes darkened, staring at me contemplatively. Thoughtfully. In one swift motion she was standing directly in front of me, peering upward, her body so completely frozen in time I had to concentrate to hear her breathing over the sounds of the night. The wind blew, and dark strands of hair swayed with the breeze, but it was the only thing that moved. She didn't even blink.

"What the bloody hell are you staring at?" I demanded when I had finally had enough. Her stare was utterly unsettling, because though she was looking at me through the face of a child, the look in her eyes was far from childish.

It was predatory.

Her already prominent frown deepened, but she was otherwise unaffected by me. Like always. The child was not nearly as afraid of me as she should be. That much was clear. I wasn't sure how to remedy her oversight yet, but it was very much crystal clear.

"Nothing." She squared her shoulders, finally, mercifully, returning her voice back to normal and accent-free. "Just wondering if your face has any emotion other than anger."

My fingers around the hilt of the blade tightened, but I spoke as calmly as I could through gritted teeth. "If you keep frowning your face is going to freeze like that." I warned.

She shrugged daintily, lifting the doll a fraction of an inch, hugging it tighter to her chest. "Doesn't look too bad on you."

That pesky muscle in my cheek twitched again. I was going to kill something. I knew it. I wasn't sure exactly what yet, but I was definitely going to kill something.

I needed to change the subject. Now.

"What's with the doll, anyway?" I didn't know her well yet, but I was confident in assuming that she was about as emotionally detached from the world as I was. She'd made that quite obvious, though it was entirely unintentional. The girl lived in the human world, yet she acted less like one than I had ever seen before. Maybe her earlier impersonation wasn't so far off, after all. We had more in common than she knew, and I would bet my own set of fangs she was the type of person who would want to carry around a doll about as much as I would.

And I really liked my fangs.

"I'm not sure." She admitted, peering down toward the doll she held in her hands, a tiny eyebrow lifted in concentration. She shook her head, brown hair falling in graceful waves. "I think I'm supposed to like it." But she didn't sound overly certain. No, she sounded downright skeptical.

"Does it do anything?" I asked, honestly curious.

She shrugged, lifting it above her head and holding it at arm's reach to keep it in full view. For almost a full minute she studied the doll, turning it this way and that, committing even the smallest detail to memory, it seemed. In a perplexed way, she seemed utterly conflicted with the object she held so tenderly in her hands. Finally she hugged it to her chest and gave me a look that could have meant anything from complete exasperation to bored confusion. "If I drop it in water, it floats." She offered, almost hopefully.

Which wasn't really much of a talent, if you asked me. A stick does the exact same thing.

"Get rid of it." I told her, fed up with the whole mess. Fed up with her. The sooner I got this over with, the sooner I could leave. "We have things to do."