By my second week in Millbrook, I had learned that the most dangerous phrase in Aldermere was "you wouldn't understand, it's a custom."
Paula had told me that before the arm-wrestling-for-breakfast incident. Diane had said it right before explaining that the tavern's "mourning ale" was just regular ale sold at funeral prices. And now Willa was saying it while dragging me through the forest at a jog, my wrist clamped in her fist like a handle, and I was trying very hard to keep up without face-planting into a pine tree.
"You will sit," she announced, pointing at a boulder that was, generously, knee-height, "and I will claim you."
"I feel like 'claim' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence."
"Your language. Your problem." She folded her arms. The wolfkin stood at the edge of her pack's old territory — she still came out here most nights, she told me, out of habit, to run the boundary and make sure the deer remembered their manners. She'd saved my life here a week ago, back in Chapter Whatever of my personal descent into fantasy-novel protagonist syndrome. Tonight there was no deer and no ambush. Just her, me, and the fading green light through the canopy.
"Explain the claiming," I said, sitting. "Slowly. With diagrams if possible."
She sat opposite me on a fallen log, cross-legged, ears swiveling toward me like antennae. Up close — and Willa was always up close, personal space being another concept wolfkin found decorative — the details the town called "wild" were, to my perfectly functional eyes, extremely easy to look at. The tall ears tipped with silver. The amber eyes that caught the dusk. The scar across her left cheek that she'd gotten wrestling a boar and which she described as "a funny story" and which I was increasingly sure was the reason she had never once been courted.
"Wolfkin mate-bonding," she said. "When a hunter chooses, they mark. Two marks. Scent-mark —" she tapped her nose, "— which is the mouth, here —" she tapped the side of her neck, "— and claim-bite, here." She held up her own wrist, showing me the inside of it, where a faint old scar rode the vein line. Two neat dents, like parentheses.
"Who bit you?" I asked.
"No one. Pack scar. Every pup gets it. Means the pack can find you if you're lost." She looked at me steadily. "Claim-bite is different. Claim-bite means the pack cannot take you. Means mine. Means no one else's scent on you, or there is blood."
I nodded slowly. "So to be clear. You're proposing to bite me. As a romantic gesture."
"As a *serious* gesture. Romance is human nonsense. I am being honest with you, which is more."
That was Willa in one sentence. I had started keeping a mental file. Paula performed valor. Diane performed warmth. Willa performed nothing; she just said the true thing in the plainest possible words and let it detonate.
"Walk me through the actual evening," I said. "Step by step. So I can make an informed decision like a modern man and not wake up tomorrow with a bite wound and regrets."
She tilted her head, considering. The ears did the thing where one flopped sideways when she was thinking. "You smell of pine and lamp oil and Diane's stew. I will fix that. I will wash the tavern off you —" she caught my expression, "— with my mouth, yes, do not make that face, it is practical, the tongue gets the oil out of the skin — and then I mark the wrist. The scent-mark first, the bite second. And then we see if you are claimed, or if you run."
"And if I run?"
"Then you are prey, and I chase you, and the claiming happens in the grass instead of on the nice rocks, and it is worse for your trousers." She shrugged. "Your choice. I recommend the rocks."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. "That's not actually a choice."
"Everything is a choice. Some choices are just worse."
She stood and came over, and there was a moment — just a moment — where the feral comedy of it all dropped away and she looked almost uncertain, which on Willa looked like a wolf trying to do arithmetic. "Ethan." She used my name rarely; usually I was "man," "human," or "hey." "The pack threw me out when I was nineteen. Said no one would mate a huntress who looks like a warning sign. The Temple priest said my ears offend Grace. Three years I have run these woods alone. I am not asking because I am lonely, though I am. I am asking because you looked at me in the square and you did not look away, and you did not look *kind*, you looked *hungry*, and I am tired of being looked at kindly."
And there it was. The thing about Ethan Parker, office worker, twenty-four, deadpan survivor of inverted beauty physics: Paula had needed to be fought for, and Diane had needed to be wanted without apology, and Willa needed — needed to be *chosen*, teeth and all, by someone who understood exactly what the teeth were for.
"I want the bite," I said. "I want the whole claiming. Whatever it is. I'm not running."
The clearing she chose was a hundred yards deeper in, a bowl of moss and flat stones around a spring-fed pool, the kind of place that in every fantasy novel I'd ever read was reserved for mystical visions and possibly drowning. Willa inspected it with a hunter's eye, nodded once, and pointed at the largest flat rock.
"There. Sit. Shirt off, boots off. Leave the rest for now."
I obeyed, because objecting to Willa's logistics was like objecting to weather. The stone was sun-warm under me even in the dusk. She circled once, slowly, nostrils flaring, and I realized with a slow-burning embarrassment that she was genuinely, clinically *reading* me — my day, my dinner, the last three hours of Diane's stew-pot proximity.
"You need the wash," she declared. "Sit still."
What followed was the strangest and, I am professionally obligated to report, most erotic grooming session of my life. Willa knelt behind me on the rock, and her hands — strong, callused, a hunter's hands — pushed my shoulders down, and then her mouth was at the side of my neck. Not a kiss. A *lick*. One long, deliberate stroke of her tongue from collarbone to jaw, and my entire nervous system filed a complaint and a request for more in the same instant.
"Still," she murmured against my skin.
"Still," I agreed, lying through my teeth, because I was already trembling.
She worked down my neck to my shoulder, tongue and lips and the graze of teeth, tasting away the day — and the thing was, it didn't feel like foreplay the way Paula's oath-duel had or Diane's slow simmering warmth. It felt like being *prepared*. Like meat being seasoned, except the meat was me and the seasoning was a wolfkin's mouth and I was so hard by the third pass down my throat that I was genuinely concerned about the structural integrity of my trousers.
"Your pulse," she said, and her voice had dropped half an octave into something that vibrated in my chest. "Fast. Good."
She moved around to face me, still kneeling between my knees on the rock, and her hands went to my waistband. "Off."
"Willa—"
"Off, or I tear them. And these are your only good trousers."
I got the trousers off. The evening air on bare skin in a forest clearing, with a wolfkin huntress studying me like a particularly interesting track in the mud, should have been humiliating. Instead, when her eyes dropped and her ears went fully upright and she made a low sound — not quite a growl, not quite a purr — I felt something in my chest unclench that had been clenched since I woke up in this world.
"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, *good*."
She took me in her hand first — no preamble, no ceremony, just the warm strong grip of a woman who had decided this was hers to hold — and stroked once, slowly, watching my face with those amber eyes, and the possessiveness in her gaze was so total, so *unapologetic*, that my hips bucked before I could stop them.
"Easy," she breathed, and licked a stripe up the underside, and I made a sound I had never made before in my life and hoped no deer were in earshot to judge me.
Her mouth was hot and thorough and utterly without the performative delicacy the Temple of Grace would have prescribed. She took me deep with a hunter's single-mindedness, her tongue working the ridge of my head, her throat relaxing around me in a way that suggested wolfkin anatomy had some advantages the human girls back home never mentioned. One hand stayed wrapped at my base, twisting slowly; the other found my thigh and dug in, claws pricking just enough to remind me they were there.
"Gods," I gasped. "Willa — I —"
"Not yet," she said, pulling off with a wet sound, her lips swollen, her chin glistening. "The marks first. Then the rest. Patience is also a hunt."
She shifted up, straddling my lap on the rock, and I got my hands on her for the first time that evening — on the solid curve of her hips, the strong thighs, the worn leather of her hunting vest. She let me pull the vest open. Underneath, bound tight in linen wraps, was a body the town of Millbrook had declared an offense against Grace and which I was declaring, silently, with both hands, a minor miracle. I unwrapped her slowly, and she watched me do it, her breathing going ragged, and when the wraps came free and her breasts — full, heavy, tipped with dark rose — spilled into the dusk air, she actually *flushed*, which I had not known wolfkin did.
"Don't stare," she muttered.
"Too late," I said. "Been staring since the square."
She growled — actually growled — and kissed me, hard, teeth clashing, and it was the least graceful kiss I had ever received and the one I wanted most. Her tongue was insistent, her canines scraped my lower lip, and her hips ground down against mine, the wet heat of her sliding along the length of me, and we both groaned into each other's mouths. This story is hosted at NovelPing.
"Scent-mark," she panted, tearing her mouth away. "Hold still. This is the important part."
She bent to my neck — the other side this time, the clean side — and her mouth opened over the slope of it, tongue pressing deep, and then her teeth sank in. Not a bite — a *press*, the full imprint of her jaw closing on the muscle between neck and shoulder, hard enough that I felt the individual points of her canines dimpling the skin, hard enough that it would bruise, that it would *show*. The pain was bright and brief and it detonated straight down my spine into my cock, and I groaned, loud, my hands spasming on her hips.
"There," she breathed, licking over the mark, and her voice was wrecked. "Now everyone who smells you knows. Mine."
"Say it again," I said, and she laughed, low and feral, and bit down on the mark again, harder, and I nearly came untouched, my whole body seizing.
Then she took my wrist — my right wrist — and turned it palm-up on the stone, and her expression went solemn, which was more frightening than the teeth. "Claim-bite," she said. "This one is forever. Scar forever. Are you sure?"
I looked at her — the ears, the scar, the amber eyes gone dark with want, the woman the world had thrown away for being too wild to love — and I thought about Paula's oath and Diane's kitchen and every moment since I'd arrived when someone had looked at me like I was the answer to a question they'd stopped asking.
"Bite me," I said.
She did. Her mouth closed over the inside of my wrist, right along the vein, and her canines pierced — a clean, sharp, deep puncture, two points of bright pain — and she held it, sucking once, hard, tasting my blood, and the intimacy of it was so overwhelming, so *total*, that tears pricked my eyes and I didn't bother hiding them. When she lifted her head, blood beaded on her lower lip, and she licked it off, and the two puncture marks welled red on my wrist.
"Claimed," she whispered, and pressed her forehead to mine. "You are pack now. My pack. The only pack that matters."
And then she sank down onto me in one smooth, unstoppable motion, and the chapter of my life titled "cautious office worker" officially ended.
She was tight and hot and *wet*, slick from the long claiming, and she took all of me with a shuddering gasp, her claws digging into my shoulders, her ears flat back. For a long moment she just sat there, impaled, breathing hard, her forehead still against mine, and I could feel her pulse hammering everywhere we touched.
"Move," I whispered. "Please. Willa, *move*."
She rode me like a hunt — no rhythm at first, just need, grinding down hard, rising, slamming back, her breasts bouncing free in the dusk, her head thrown back, throat bared, the scent-mark on my neck throbbing in time with every stroke. I held her hips and met her thrust for thrust, and the rock was hard under my knees and the forest was loud around us — crickets, the spring, her panting growls — and it was the most animal, most *honest* sex I had ever had. No oaths, no tenderness, just two bodies that had chosen each other with teeth.
"Harder," she snarled, and I obeyed, driving up into her, and she cried out — a sound halfway between a sob and a howl — and her inner muscles clamped down on me in waves, and she came with her claws raking my back and her teeth finding my shoulder and *biting*, not hard enough to break skin, just hard enough to hold me while she shook apart on top of me.
The sight and sound and sheer *surrender* of her tipped me over. I came with a groan I didn't recognize as mine, pulsing deep inside her, my arms locked around her waist, holding her down on me, holding her *close*, and she collapsed forward onto my chest, both of us slick with sweat, her ear pressed to my heartbeat.
We stayed like that while the light died. Her tail — she'd been wagging it the whole time, I realized, thumping against the rock — finally stilled. She lifted her head and licked the blood off my wrist, gently, tenderly, sealing the claim.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we do it outside. Properly. Under the sky. The pack way."
I looked at my bitten wrist, at the bruise blooming on my neck, at the wolfkin sprawled across my lap like I'd been conquered — which, to be fair, I had been — and I laughed.
"Tomorrow," I agreed.
Behind us, in the trees, something howled — far off, answering. Willa's ears shot upright. She grinned, feral and delighted.
"The woods approve," she said.
And for the first time since arriving in Aldermere, I believed her.
We lay there on the flat rock until the light failed, her head on my chest, my hand in her fur, and just as sleep started pulling me under, her voice came low against my collarbone:
"At dawn," she said, "I wake you. The true claiming happens under the open sky. I know the place."