Primal Promise

Three

He had awoken two days later back at the vineyard. Despite his questions, his father would not discuss the matter. He told him only that he'd been very sick. That it had been a nightmare, all of it. There was no girl. He'd dreamed her. No such thing as a Yowanea. It was a made-up word his feverish imagination had created and after a few days, he forbade him to mention it again.

Jameson still tested it, saying it aloud when he thought the adults wouldn't expect it, looking for a reaction, but they only looked mildly confused at best. Even Charles agreed that Jameson had been crazy sick, burning up with fever and having weird dreams. Talking to himself about some ghost girl. Eventually, Jameson began to believe it himself.

Or, he did when he was awake. When he was not, he suffered dreams of red-haired girls with dark hazel eyes who were always beyond his reach. Snippets like catching a bit of a familiar show as you clicked through channels. Feelings and memories that seemed too big for just a quick snapshot of a scene. Sitting alone. Curled up in the dark. Surrounded by woods that were too tame, but it was better to have a taste than to starve.

As he grew up, the dream girl did too. Never real, just a hinted ghost, a fleeting glimpse, a wave of sadness, anger, or very rarely, happiness. He always somehow felt that she was real when he was dreaming, but he'd wake and reason himself back to reality. He began to think of her as a special secret. An imaginary friend that he didn't have to share with anyone.

He reached the year of his first turning, and the dreams seemed to grow deeper. They became another world he could visit if only as a shadow. He never remembered much detail when he woke although the feelings remained. They echoed his. A feeling of being an ill-fit, not quite a square peg, but a decagon. Close, but never quite properly round. He moved on into high school and the dreams began to shift yet again.

He had always felt her emotions, caught glimpses but never enough to form a picture. Now he felt her touch. He held her in his arms, knew the softness of her body against him, molding to his in such ecstasy it hurt. Never quite claiming her, but knowing her intimately anyway. Her scent permeated him. He would wake feeling lonely and aroused and annoyed that consciousness stole him away again. Then he'd take a cold shower and try to forget.

Once he'd turned eighteen, his father began to introduce him to girls outside of the pack. Sent him to three different colleges in hopes that he would find the one who would inspire the Tikaaningan, the binding that tied mates together. It never happened for him. He didn't feel bad about it not working out, as it usually did. For them anyway. They would inevitably find their mates just fine, even if he never had.

The older he got, the thinner the pool of available women became until his father eventually stopped bringing it up, focusing instead on trying to turn Jameson into a proper replacement both in business and in leading the pack, though the latter would never come, Jameson knew. You could not ascend to pack leadership if you were un-mated. It simply wasn't done. He didn't expect he'd have to face it so soon though.

When his father passed away early last year, Jameson had been thrown unwillingly into a role he was never planning to ever be ready for. He did not do well under pressure. Over the years he had grown a temper. It wasn't explosive, but a constant simmer. He was always brutally unhappy and he didn't know why. He took to keeping to himself, a hermit who lived only by computer and phone, seeing very few people, and even those who he felt affection for were barely tolerated.

Since the summer of 1994, he'd not returned to the lake. He had gone back only because he'd had to inspect the cabin as holdings of the company. He stepped inside and felt at home. It lacked any of the grandeur of the ranch or the vineyards, but it almost had a heartbeat. A warmth that it embraced him with. Somehow, that humble cabin gave him comfort when nothing else could. The nearness to nature, the rising of Mount Thielsen at his back, it even made the dreams less troubling.