Wolf Teeth || Book I : Summer {M/M} ❄

Chapter #10

The appetizers did vanish much faster than they were replaced. Luckily, they had enough that Serove seemed pleased. The newlyweds returned to sit at the head table and enjoy the entertainment portion of the evening.

Enjoy was a loose word. Kalysto still looked like her scowl had been painted on. Reyz made several attempts to cajole a smile from her and never managed it.

Entertainments included a magician, a sparring match between two wolves, and—finally—a dancer. By this last, Oryen had enjoyed a beer for every three Serove had drunk, which brought Oryen up on four. Warmth bloomed pleasantly in his extremities, and Serove seemed in a far better mood.

On the floor where two werewolves had just sparred, a slight man walked, barefoot, into the centre. He wore only black trousers and bright red paint on his palms. His olive complexion and dark eyes drew sharp contrast with his shock of ash white hair. He did not say a word, or announce himself, or really do anything aside from walk to that spot, take up a pose with an arm extended gracefully to the surrounding crowd and wait there. Frozen.

Oryen found himself transfixed. There was something oddly familiar about the dancer. What's more, he could smell, even from this distance, that the dancer was human.

"Who's that?" he asked.

Serove squinted over his beer. "Oh, that's...thingy." He snapped his fingers to recall the name. "Beau! He's, uh, whatchacallit. A smuggler. Gets us nice things. Like this!" He raised his beer and clinked glasses with Oryen.

"What's a human doing in quarantine?"

"Jobs. Hazard pay is good I hear."

The amphitheater filled with music, and Beau began to dance. He drew a lyrical line with a toe through the dirt in a graceful arc, then stamped his foot to the beat of a drum. He floated across the space, the tension in his limbs making it seem as though an invisible force kept pulling him back to the place he started. As he danced, a story emerged too. Of a caged creature that yearned and fought to be free.

It was, Oryen reflected, an awkward theme for a wedding.

He thought at first that the music would lift and Beau would move more freely. Instead, the drums beat harder and the minor chords louder. Until the moment of the crescendo, Beau held his hands inward or in fists. As the music crashed over them, Beau's hands opened in a flash of red paint, which in a dervish of motion he streaked over his arms, his chest, his throat. Striped with it, the strings drew out one final, plaintive note as Beau rose up, as though a fish hook beneath his breastbone were pulling him painfully skyward. Then the music stopped and he crumpled into the silence that followed.

Oryen had not taken his eyes from the dancer. Though much of the crowd was drunk and distracted, they'd stopped to take notice. The performance seemed poignant. The noise of the amphitheatre fell away. In the space of that quiet, as Beau rose up and took a graceful bow from the stage, one pair of hands clapped.

At the head table, Kalysto was finally smiling.

Something stranger still happened. Beau, making a cursory sweep of the crowd as he exited, caught Oryen's eyes. And held his gaze. An indiscernible emotion passed over Beau's face in that barest moment. Oryen couldn't name whether it was anger, pain, shock, a combination of the three, or neither. He could identify only one thing in that look.

Recognition.

Beau left and Oryen's heart thudded somewhere in his stomach. Serove, having observed the entire thing, wore a lopsided frown and dug an elbow into Oryen's ribs. "You know 'im or somethin'?"

Oryen and the surrounding crowd seemed to shake themselves from the strangeness of the moment all at once. "No, just can't decide which side of him I like more. The front or the back."