“Or I could kill him,” Rafe said when she called to give him the update. “That would solve everything.”
“Rafe, you can’t take a life. You may ‘get wolf’ one night a month, but you’re still half-human and bound by council law.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rafe muttered. “I’m just glad we’re moving in together, even if it’s under these circumstances.”
“Me too,” she lied, looking with real regret around her homey kitchen, which was pretty much the exact opposite of Rafe’s uninviting and sterile one.
After she got off the phone, she started making her own preparations for the night’s turn. Unlike Rafe, who simply met up with a bunch of his friends in the woods and stripped out of his clothes before shifting, her preparations were a bit more civilized. First, she plated up the rest of the chicken and fennel recipe and put it in the refrigerator. If she was lucky, it would be enough to tide her over for the next forty-eight hours. Next, she turned off all but a few lights and dug out a fresh pair of pajamas to wear the next day before descending the stairs into her basement. This was where her washing machine, dryer, and wolf cage lived.
The cage had come with the house. Wolves who didn’t care to roam the countryside all night locked themselves in cages, so as to keep from destroying their homes as wolves were wont to do. Luckily for her, the house’s last owner had felt as she had about turning outdoors and had installed a custom floor-to-ceiling cage.
When she moved in, she’d added the further amenity of covering the hard concrete floor with cushions made from the same soft but synthetic fabric used in chew-proof dog beds. She’d also placed her foster mother’s record player outside the cage, so she’d have some form of entertainment while she waited for the turn. She usually spent her evenings crafting or reading, but she couldn’t bring anything that she didn’t want destroyed inside the cage, so that wasn’t an option.
Listening to Myrna’s old R&B records somehow made it feel like her foster mother was still alive and in her next-door cage, speaking soothing words to the pup Chloe had once been, while they both waited for the turn.
Myrna had possessed more heart than money, so she’d only been able to afford cramped dog cages for herself and the abandoned she-wolf pup she volunteered to care for. But still, Chloe had valued the fourteen years they had together, and liked to think back to those days when she curled up in her own cage, which was luxurious by comparison.
That night, she put the soundtrack to Mahogany on before closing herself into the cage and stripping down to her panties. She put the cage’s key into the box on the far wall. Key boxes were another clever werewolf invention. They were placed just high enough so she couldn’t get to it in wolf form, but could easily access it when she was human again and let herself out of her cage. This was another step up from the one Myrna had provided. Back then, they’d had to wait for Rafe’s mother to come and let them out.
Rafe’s mother had already told her she expected Chloe to take over the royal duty of opening the cages once she and Rafe were properly mated, and Chloe would be more than happy to do so. She liked that she’d be of true service once she became part of the royal Colorado family, and she was excited about her many upcoming duties. She just hoped the Viking didn’t ruin everything for her.
With a sigh, she put the heavy cage key into the built-in box and laid down, covering herself up with the warm, indestructible fire blanket she kept in the cage for full moon nights. She then closed her eyes, listening to Diana Ross sing while she waited.
She soon dozed off and therefore didn’t realize something was wrong until the music stopped playing, and the thunk of the needle slipping off the record jolted her awake.
She sat up, her eyes going to the basement window. But no, it was dark outside. Now that the music had stopped playing, she could even hear the far-off howls of her freshly-turned pack members. So why was she still in human form?
Her body began to tingle. At first she thought maybe it was the turn, come late, and she got to her knees, preparing to go feral. But the turn didn’t happen, and the tingling continued, spreading over her still-human body until she was flush with fever, and sweating from the unrelenting prickling underneath her skin. It was as if all of her nerve endings had electricity coursing through them.
She must be sick, she thought. Usually wolf-sicknesses took the form of things like rabies, which contrary to her current situation, kept them in wolf form long after the sun had risen again. But maybe this was a wolf-sickness she had never heard of before.
She ran her hands over her face, which was flush but didn’t seem to have anything wrong with it. She touched her neck next, checking her thyroid, but it seemed to be okay, too.
She ran her hands over her arms and legs, and even cupped her breast to give herself a self-examination. She’d never heard of a she-wolf contracting breast cancer, but since wolves weren’t allowed to talk about being wolves on the internet, you never knew…
When her hand grazed her nipple, a sweet pain zapped through her, freezing her where she knelt and causing her to draw in her breath and then release it again with a short gasp. She looked down and saw that her nipples were now as hard as rocks. And as if they had minds of their own, her hands started kneading her breasts, her thumbs strumming over black-cherry-colored buds again and again, unable to stop themselves from exploring the sensations this action caused within her body.
Soon she felt a tugging sensation below, and the lips of her most intimate part clenched in and out in a wet silent beg, before it began to release something even she could now recognize as heat.
She was in heat, she realized foggily, literally dripping with the need to have a wolf mate with her. But Rafe was somewhere on the mountain, running through the night with his fellow pack members.
Chloe dimly recalled a Health class, in which they were informed that she-wolves in heat didn’t turn, even during a full moon, nature’s way of cutting down on possible birth defects. No, once you went into heat, you stayed in heat until you were mated with a pup in your belly. And after that, neither you nor your mate turned again until three months after the baby’s birth.
For the first time in her life, she touched her pussy for a reason other than cleaning it. The clenching was so insistent, the tentative rubbing against the swollen bulb between her folds proved to be too little. She was soon plunging her fingers into her tunnel, working them in and out, trying to find some relief.