Comforted by a Wolf Pack

Chapter 2

Upon arriving at the pack house Morgana went straight for the kitchen, following a myriad of delicious smells. Grateful she didn't smell any human meat in the mix. The pack was awed and bowed to her, smelling the future alpha's pups inside of her.

"So she's with pup," Travis's father said, his lip curling back from his fangs. "It's good that you can do at least one thing right, boy. If you hadn't managed it I would have had her passed around to every male, one at a time."

Travis bristled, his hands curling into fists. But there was no use challenging his father, not yet.

Morgana heard Travis' father and bit back a growl, certain that challenging the current alpha wouldn't be healthy for her or the pups. Her hand absentmindedly rubbed her abdomen. She couldn't feel the individual pups just yet, it would be months before that happened, but her belly did have a small bump in it. The size of bump women usually got at the end of their eighth week of pregnancy, when carrying a single baby. She started eating a hearty serving of lamb chops.

Travis ate in sullen silence. For the first time he had no appetite. The meat reminded him of all the girls he'd killed over the course of his short life. How many had there been? Dozens? Hundreds? The blood running from the lamb chops reminded him of the blood on his hands. He felt as if he were about to be sick, but that'd be a terrible admission of weakness in front of his father.

Morgana noticed that the meat was rarer in terms of how done it was than she would normally cook it, but didn't voice concerns about it. She was still the newcomer after all. Even if she was the future luna, even if she was pregnant with the future of the pack. She made due with what she was given, noting that Travis' father looked displeased that she didn't complain. Didn't say one word against how undone the meat she was eating was. Though she did learn from the conversation around her that she was on breakfast duty for the following morning.

"I smell your distress, son," the alpha growled at Travis. "I can sense your increased heart rate. What is troubling you?"

Travis gripped Morgana's hand under the table. They both knew that if his father discovered he no longer wanted to prey on humans, the consequences would be dire indeed.

"He's concerned about the pups and me sir, we went for a run after coupling as mates and ran pretty far." Morgana said, covering for Travis so their secret about not eating humans wouldn't be discovered. At least not before they could do anything about it. She scooted closer to Travis, attempting to comfort him without words. Not daring to use the link since, if they desired, anyone in the room could listen in.

Travis held his breath as his father gave Morgana a hard stare. "And that's all?" he asked, his low voice made even more menacing by the predatory edge in it. How Travis could have come from such a monster was beyond Morgana, and she tried to keep her loathing of the alpha from showing. He was the worst kind of monster—not just a killer, but an insult to all werewolves.

"You," she wanted to say. "You, and those like you, you are the reason. You are the reason we live in hiding, the reason the humans wiped us out during the great purges of the 16th and 17th centuries. You are the reason our ancestors had to flee across an ocean, those few who were all that was left of our kind. You are the reason we nearly went extinct. You man-eaters, you savages, you are the source of all the woe that befell our kind during those dark years."

Every werewolf knew the stories of those bygone, bloody days. Every pup knew the tales of when humans, in their ant-like multitudes, had driven werewolves to the edge of oblivion. Stories of the great dark forests of the Old World overrun with hundreds of men armed with guns loaded with silver musket balls, their shouts mingling with the baying of bloodhounds used to track werewolves back to their lairs. Of the smell and glow of the great pyres as werewolves by the hundreds were tortured and mutilated and burnt at the stake. In Germany, in France, in Britain and Spain and the Baltics, nowhere was safe. Those few who survived came to the New World on the first ships, and only by the grace of the Moon Goddess had their race survived.