Love Bites (Crescent City Werewolves: The Short Stories)

Tides of Silver and Blood (Part 1 of 6)

A/N: This was originally called From the Depths and left unfinished in 2017. I'm excited to say that it's finally a finished story! Hope you enjoy!!!

They were called sea-wolves. It was a poor play of words, an attempt to reshape the common phrase she-wolf with what they did. For they were all female, and young, too, as diving into the cold waters off Mulgrew Bay and holding one's breath for minutes at a time to harvest shellfish and seaweed wasn't the work of old bones and worn hearts.

They all hunted bare-skinned, hair braided and pinned and a knife strapped at the waist. Whenever one popped back to the surface with her catch, she shook herself like the wolf she was, yellow eyes flashing while she swam for the rocky shore where the collecting baskets waited. As a group, they would rest, stretching out in the sun-warmed sand to doze or chatter, hand pies of smoked fish passed among them.

To anyone stepping away from the urbane heart of Crescent City, these creatures might have seemed more like spirits resting on the shore before slipping back into the rough waters of the bay. Certainly not wolves. Certainly not part of a pack and its rigid decadence.

But they were, indeed—a strange offshoot of the Upper Mulgrew Pack, left to themselves and yet jealously guarded. For these sea-wolves not only found delicacies for the royal family and their court, but also that one rare ingredient so vital to the antidote for silver poisoning: ambergris. It washed up on the shores of Mulgrew Bay and nowhere else for hundreds of miles, and these aloof, wild women were its collectors...

Joan's toes flexed against the damp sand while she picked her way along the shore. She was used to the prickle of salt-heavy air and wore nothing besides the net wrapped around her. A fishing spear hung easy in her hand, pointed toward the end of the shore. The cliffs there looked like a smudge of darkness in a land dimmed by the chilly, in-between minutes of twilight. Only the white castle perched on the ancient rock remained bright and polished as a pearl, but Joan gave it nothing more than a glance of contempt. The ones who lived there could hardly be called wolves, and she had nothing to do with them or their riches.

As she walked, she kept a sharp nose out for a particular smell. She didn't expect to find any ambergris along the shore that morning; the tides were all wrong. Even so, stumbling across one of those waxy lumps would mean a lot more than catching a rockfish for breakfast. Supplies were still low from what had happened the year before.

Yet the scent that blew in on the breeze had nothing to do with that precious gift from the sea. It was strong, equally distinctive in its own way. Worrying. It was the smell of rotting flesh, with that peculiar tang that came with a body brined in saltwater. Then she caught sight of gulls flapping against each other and squabbling at something trapped in seaweed just beyond the lap of the waves. Their cries were thin and harsh in the chilled air, their beaks vicious as they jerked bits of meat free.

Joan had discovered plenty of bodies along the shore. Seals bitten in half by sharks, pieces of whales that washed up with the tides. But this was something different. This was... she sniffed again and broke into a run.

The gulls shrieked and fled in an explosion of wings, a few stray feathers drifting back to the sand as she skidded to a stop and knocked away brown-shelled crabs with the side of the spear head. The smell was overwhelming, as powerful as the freshest ambergris, but she continued to stare at the greying flesh and dull bone.

Seaweed coiled over a cracked skull, the fractures too severe to be from a scavenger's hunger, and Joan sucked in a breath while scraping kelp from the rest of the remains. Then it hissed back out of her. The flared hips of a woman, the sharp fangs of a wolf... it had to be someone from the Mulgrew Pack.