Aislinn gratefully followed Rissa out of the great room and down a different hall into another room. The room they ended up in looked like a library. There were tons of bookshelves and tables and chairs. There were a number of sitting areas with couches and armchairs arranged together in confidential little nooks. Several people were already in the room. They looked up and watched as the small group of women entered and headed for chairs. Aislinn wondered if there was a single room on this floor that wasn’t full of people.
“How many are in this pack anyway,” Aislinn asked with a bit more emphasis than she intended.
Rissa ushered Aislinn to one of the big couches and they all sat down. “I don’t know exact numbers. It started out a lot smaller. Most packs are a lot smaller. But Lord Arnauk is, well, good at leading. There aren’t many other packs this large mostly because there aren’t many alphas that can control this many people. Lord Arnauk seems to come by it naturally. Not to mention most of us just want somewhere safe to live. And he’s got one of the best set ups.” With that she introduced Aislinn to the other women who were with her. Then the questions started coming.
By the time Aislinn had finished avoiding directly answering any and all questions pertaining to what went on upstairs all afternoon she was exhausted. Rissa was scowling. “And here I thought we were friends,” she said with a pout.
“Oh don’t you dare do that,” Aislinn scolded. “We are friends. But you’re getting awfully personal.”
“Personal is all relative. Humans have way too strict a sense of what’s personal. Besides, if any woman from this pack had ever managed to get up to Lord Arnauk’s rooms the first thing she’d do when she came back down is tell everyone. Then she’d rub his scent in their faces. You’re acting like it’s something to be ashamed of, for goodness sake. You have in your lap access to the best bragging rights in the whole of the pack and you’re keeping it to yourself.”
Rissa’s exasperation was baffling to Aislinn. Just one more thing I’ll have to figure out, she thought. Then something occurred to her, wolves, rub scent in faces? “Uh, you don’t mean that literally do you?” she asked.
Rissa’s amused smile grew impossibly wide. “What literally?”
Aislinn cleared her throat. “The scent rubbing in faces part.”
The other women present smiled and chuckled a bit. But for the most part the question was taken far too seriously for Aislinn’s comfort. “Why? Where did he put his scent?” Rissa responded with a sparkle in her eyes that told Aislinn she had just said something far more interesting than she should have.
“Okay, Rissa, speaking as friends,” Aislinn said and Rissa nodded confidentially then moved in closer. “I don’t have any idea what’s normal around here. Think in human standards, which you seem to be familiar with, and then put me in your context. I don’t really understand most of this. The mating ceremony okay I kinda caught it in the middle, all the innuendo about what I should and shouldn’t have managed to do around here. Why don’t you give me a couple hints about what you really are looking for me to tell you and maybe we can get on the same page.”
Rissa took that as an invitation to get the dirt she was looking for one way or another. At least if she gave enough details that humans shouldn’t know and might shock Aislinn, then she might find something out. “Well if you missed the beginning of the mating ceremony then you missed the part where everyone would have presented themselves to Lord Arnauk. If you caught the middle then you know how that goes. The end would involve,” she grinned as though this was the important part, “well, it’s kinda like dogs. They’d shift to either their hybrid forms or their wolf forms. You ever watch the discovery channel?”
Aislinn was more than a little shocked by the frank way Rissa was putting it and from the look on Aislinn’s face Rissa figured that whatever happened upstairs probably wasn’t as good as she had originally thought if this info was new to Aislinn. Rissa figured that Lord Arnauk must have remained in his human form for whatever happened at least. “You can’t be serious. You’re just trying to mess with me now,” Aislinn said angrily.
But the raised eyebrows on everyone’s faces at her reaction had Aislinn feeling as though she had just said something relatively racist. “Nope, I’m not kidding,” Rissa said with disappointment. She wasn’t offended. She was just upset that she wasn’t going to find out anything good. “A lycan in a form other than human will behave more animal than you’re probably used to. And his,” Rissa thought for a moment before coming up with an appropriate word, “genitalia will behave more like his wolf than human. They would have shifted, if all the assassination stuff hadn’t intrupted things, he would have mounted her, swelled inside her while they had sex, they’d have gotten stuck together, he’d come inside her, bite her hard enough to scar her, and then when they were finished the rest of us would have acknowledged what had happened while they were joined together. They’d be stuck like that for most of the rest of the night. If things were planned right it would happen while she was in heat so that she’d end up pregnant as a result. Mating accomplished. Then usually the new couple disappears for a week or so to get it out of their system. The wolf does tend to get riled up when it claims a mate. And really that’s the watered down version. Lord Arnauk never got passed the human form part though. Really they didn’t come anywhere near finishing things. To some extent they never really even got started.”