I take his hand and let him pull me up. Then I touch the fur on his cheek. It’s bristly but soft, too. I give it a little tug, curious why anyone would have fur on their face.
“What are you doing?” Callan asks.
“Are you human?” I ask. “What creature has fur on its face?”
He lets out a booming laugh. “I do, that’s who,” he says. “Now we’d better hurry or the food will be gone when we get there.”
I want food, so I follow him out of the room, but my body is on alert and ready to bolt if I need to.
The house is big like Axel’s-more than one room-but all of this one rests on the ground instead of having stairs. The same brown bottles and silver cans I found in the bedroom are scattered everywhere, empty of their contents. The smell of their contents, heady and somehow alive, lingers faintly in the air. Through a doorway, I spot paper cups littering the counter, a slightly fishy, skunky scent wafting from them. Dirty dishes are stacked in the sink. A mattress covered with tangled bedding is shoved against the wall opposite the kitchen. Piles of dirty, sweaty clothes have been pushed aside, creating a path through which to walk.
“Did a hurricane blow through here?” I ask. “Big winds?”
Callan guffaws and pulls me into the kitchen. “Yeah, his name is Ethan.”
Two more enormous, hulking males fill the room with their presence.
“Fuck off,” says one of them to Callan, but he’s grinning. From the comment, I know he must be named Ethan. He sits at a table with more of the bottles pushed together in the center.
The third male stands back, eying me suspiciously. He’s got the countenance of Mama when she was angry and might snap and swat me for no reason I could tell. Something about his overwhelming presence reminds me of Axel, though, and makes me drop my eyes and lower my head.
“Luna,” Callan says. “Meet my brothers, Ethan and Warrick.”
I timidly raise my eyes to theirs and nod a quick acknowledgment.
“He’s the nice guy,” Ethan says, stabbing his thumb toward Callan. “I’m the sex god.”
The big, scary one named Warrick grunts.
Ethan smirks and gestures toward him. “Just do what he says.”
I bob my head, grateful he’s made it easy, so I don’t have to figure that out on my own. I’ve never met a soul but Mama before the last few days. I wish Axel could have made things that plain for me, so I knew Ama was mean and he was…
I won’t think about him.
Despite Ethan’s helpful introduction, I still don’t trust him or any of them. We all study each other like we’re waiting to see who makes the first move. If I thought Callan was big, Warrick is even bigger. They’re bigger than the few panthers I saw shift to their human forms before disappearing into the swamp, and even bigger than Axel. The top of my head only reached Axel’s armpit, but Warrick’s so tall my eyes are level with his bellybutton. Each of their bodies has been painted with color, the way I used to paint myself with mud while Mama washed the clothes when I was younger, before I took over the washing duties.
Ethan has an image of a winged woman on his chest, cradling three wolf pups. Maybe that’s his Mama. Warrick has a bleeding heart with a knife through it concealing his chest. Both men sport the same unruly dark hair as their brother, Callan, only Warrick’s hair is the shortest, curling around his ears and sticking out in every direction. The fact that he doesn’t know about combs, either, makes me like him a little better. I didn’t know until a few days ago.
“Why do you paint your bodies like that?” I say, lifting my hand to point at their bare torsos and arms.
“You’ve never seen tattoos?” Callan says, flexing his arm to make a snake writhe on his bicep.
“Not until…” I bite back the word “yesterday,” remembering Mama’s constant warning to not reveal too much. “Not much.”
Axel, my former True Mate, had tattoos on his body, too. I remember them from when I saw his whole body without clothes, before he made me feel good and then hurt me. A sharp knife of pain stabs my heart as I think of him. I shove it away. He cast me away, breaking the bond he insisted we make the day before.
“These were inked into our skin,” Callan explains. “Paint goes away. These last forever. It tickles a little to get it done, but it’s worth the pain.”
“Let’s eat,” Warrick says, his voice like thunder grumbling in the sky before a storm.
Callan takes my hand and leads me to the table.
“We caught some rabbits today,” Ethan says, standing and putting his arm around me, drawing me away from Callan.
Callan scowls at him.
“But my fine brother, here…” Ethan flaps his hand at Callan. “He took a stab at actually preparing a meal for you.”
I wriggle away from his sweaty arm. The windows are open, allowing the damp breeze into the room, but he smells like he hasn’t bathed in a while. It’s not a bad smell, exactly, but overwhelming coming from a
stranger. I don’t mind my own smells or even Mama’s, but I’m not used to the potency of his sweat scent.
The smell of cooked meat like I had with Axel’s pack wafts from a pot in the center of the stove, drawing saliva into my mouth. The men stand awkwardly around the table, staring at me.
“Have a seat,” Callan says, clapping his hands together. “Let’s eat.”
Once seated at the square, wooden table, Callan takes a big silver scoop and ladles some of the fragrant stew into my bowl. Next, he does the same for his brothers. Mama and I rarely cooked, preferring our meat raw. But this mixture of root vegetables and rabbit smells good. I pause, watching to see how they’ll eat. The wolf Adolpha told me I was to eat with metal tools, not use my hands.
Ethan, Callan, and Warrick dive into their meals with enthusiasm, picking up metal tools and scooping liquid from their bowls and slurping it down. When he reaches the bottom, Ethan picks up chunks of meat from the bowl with his fingers and pops them in his mouth, chewing noisily.
Suddenly, I’m struck with the enormity of everything that’s happened to me in the last few days. I went from a quiet, comfortable life in the swamp with Mama to… Not even knowing how to eat without being scolded. Tears ache behind my eyes when I think of Mama. What I wouldn’t give to have her back, to have our life back, to know that I’m not
doing every single thing wrong. I look at the strangers around the table, and somehow I feel lonelier than I felt in the swamp, even the last few years when I did most everything on my own. These men aren’t companions. They’re strangers, and if I know anything about strangers, it’s that they intend to hurt me.