The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 3 - Not a Rogue

Look at me sticking to the update schedule!! Whoop whoop, hope you're all proud of me :) You might even get a mid-week one if I'm extra speedy.

They had tied my legs together. Forelegs first, and then hindlegs. It was so tight that the joints were bent at an awkward angle. And then they'd tossed me into a dog crate in the back of their van, like they did this all the time. My only consolation was that Kara was put in with me. I couldn't do anything to comfort her with my mouth forced shut and my limbs decommissioned, but I could lie alongside her and try to panic a little bit less than I wanted to.

The car journey was short, but they were driving over unpaved roads, and I had no way to stop my head crashing into the metal bars every time they went over a bump. By the time we came to a halt, I had bitten my tongue three times, and I was furious enough to growl at them as they were dragging me back out of the crate.

I was carried like a sack of potatoes. First into a truly massive building, and then down a flight of stairs into a basement that was a lot gloomier than it should have been. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to it ... and to see the bars lining every wall. What the hell was this place? It looked like a prison, but I couldn't figure out why a pack would need one of those. Let alone such a huge prison. I could count eleven cells just at a glance, and half of them were full.

"Females, is it? Put them over there. The cell with the open door," someone said. "Can't be mixing them with the animals in 3B."

They finally put me down on a very solid, very rough concrete floor. I could see the shadows of the bars around me. Kara was dumped in the same cell a moment later. She yelped because they hadn't bothered to lower her to the ground before letting go.

And once we were securely in the cell, the time came to release us. They were clever about it. The muzzle came off first. They had put me right at the edge of the cell so they could reach through the bars and cut the bindings on my legs with the door already closed. I wouldn't have tried to bite them anyway - I didn't want to make things any worse for myself than they already were.

There were four sets of bunk beds in our little cell. The toilet in the corner was rudimentary, but it did at least look clean. As I was still looking around, I felt something soft hit me in the back of the head. Clothes. That was a pretty clear message.

When I looked around at the two men - the only two of our attackers who had bothered to stick around - I saw that they had already turned their backs on us. That, at least, was polite. And more than I had been expecting from these strange and savage werewolves who had built a prison underneath their home. I put the clothes on. Thoughtfully enough, they'd included underwear.

I was shivering before I'd even finished getting dressed because the climate down here wasn't even close to t-shirt weather. Kara had been freed too. But even as I watched, she slunk over to the beds and crawled beneath them. She put her head on her forepaws and stared out at us with big, unblinking eyes.

The man who had kicked me in the muzzle was first to turn around. He looked me up and down now that I was in human form and made a face. "Can I ask you something? Why the hell is your wolf white? Never seen one like that before. It is some weird-ass mutation?"

I had no idea what to say to that. I just stared at him.

"Nah, you dumbass," the guy called Bradley said. "Arctic wolves are all white. She's crossbred - that's all. Had a parent from Greenland or somewhere like that. My cousin is the same way."

"That true?"

"Yes," I said quietly. "My mother was born at the very top end of Canada. Nunavut, I think."