PitW Book 1 Chapter 2 Part 2

Next post probably during the day Wednesday.

My parents didn’t tell me everything about thralls, obviously. I think we’ve made that clear. But they (and by they I mean Mom) didn’t tell me nothing about them.

The word thrall is from either Old Norse or Old German, and it means “slave”. Humans applied it to werewolves a couple hundred years ago or so. Specifically, it applies to humans who, deliberately or not, get infected with lycanthropy, supposedly to become the servants of the one who “turned” them.

And you humans believe this because you keep getting us mixed up with vampires. Which we aren’t, because there are still no such things as vampires. But, Mom says, werewolves never really had a word for it, because we didn’t need to make a difference between born werewolves and “made” werewolves until, well, about two hundred years ago. So we just adopted your word for it.

How much of this is accurate and how much something you tell little kids because they’re too dumb to understand anything more complex, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask Jean sometime, or Debbie- yeah, Debbie’s not in this book, she comes later, so don’t bother looking for her.

... where was I?

Oh, right, vampires and stuff.

Anyway, no, werewolves do not enslave the people we turn into thralls. Thralls have their own minds and their own will. The problem with that, when a human gets bit... or, in Sarah’s case, fucked... it takes them a lot of time and practice to learn how to control their transformation. (Even I have problems doing that, and I was born this way.) And all the time, their minds and will are flooded with new sensations, new instincts and new urges, so strong that self control goes flying out the window.

That makes thralls completely unpredictable. And, since even the weakest werewolf (like me) is still really hard to kill, generally stronger and faster than any human, and has really sharp teeth and claws that will turn any enemy they don’t kill into another werewolf... that makes them goddamn DANGEROUS.

Especially to other werewolves, because wounds from the claws or teeth of other werewolves don’t get the fast-heal treatment any other kind of wound does. We can bleed out from them or get infections just like you people. Not fun.

Another bit of vampire lore Hollywood came up with is that, if you kill the one who created the thrall, that cures the thrall. So far as anyone I know ever heard, that doesn’t work with werewolves. But when Sarah saw me and Jean in the fur for the first time, I thought I was about to find out for sure first-hand...

When she looked down again after howling her heart out, Sarah saw her call had brought help... but...

... who were these things?

She didn’t recognize either of them, exactly. Something about them seemed a little familiar- and one smelled every familiar indeed. But she didn’t know any dog-people, especially not dog-people like the female wearing nothing but a feather in her hair and a shirt-shaped piece of netting that didn’t even try to cover the nipples poking out of her fur.

And anyway, they were too close. WAY too close. She wanted her personal space while she figured out... well, everything. Why did everything look wrong? Why did she feel... well, not wrong exactly, she felt perfectly right, but not the way she remembered feeling before. Something had changed, something that for some reason kept just slipping out of her reach, and right now she didn’t need distractions from apparent strangers.

She bent down to look the two interlopers in the eyes- it took a lot of bending- and growled. Her lips bent back to bare her teeth.

“Um...” The male’s voice quavered a little. Again it seemed familiar, but she couldn’t quite match it up with the three different colors of fur and the ratty clothes scattered between. “Er... n-n-nice girl?” He leaned back, almost falling on his ass, and added uncertainly, “Sit? Stay? Please?”

“Try something simple, Pete,” the female said, baring her own teeth in what looked like a playful grin to Sarah. “How about, ‘Don’t kill us?’”

Sarah didn’t appreciate these two talking down to her, especially considering they stood- well, mostly sat now- in her shadow. She growled a little louder and bared more teeth.

With a crablike backwards scramble the two backed off.

Satisfied, Sarah stood up again. Her legs seemed a bit more comfortable if she kept her knees flexed, so she squatted a little, testing her balance. It felt right, balancing on the balls of her feet, her ankle way, way up from where she thought it ought to be... and yet, well, it just felt right that way. Why had it ever felt otherwise?

She bounced on her paws again, and this set other parts of her bouncing, which called her attention to her chest. There was an awful lot of it- in fact, if the two maybe-strangers had stood close enough to her, she wouldn’t have been able to see them. They were firm- really, firm, surprisingly so. She brought her hands up to poke them, and to stroke the somewhat shaggy fur that covered them except for the part around her nipples.

The sight of her hands distracted her again. They were big too- nowhere near large enough to even start to cover her boobs (and she remembered being able to do exactly that, before, but now she couldn’t, and the memory flitted away). There were definite fingers and a thumb- pretty long fingers at that, at first glance. But the tips were a fair bit wider than the rest of them, with thick bare pads of skin just under the claws, which didn’t seem all that large or out of place anymore.

She gave one hand a sniff. Oh. Was that what she smelled like? There was still a hint of hand sanitizer, a little bit of canned chicken soup, a bit of forest loam, but mostly fur, clean fur like Fluppy Dog’s fur. Cute little Fluppy Dog, old but still glad to see anybody, so cute and friendly-

She felt something moving behind her. She twisted to look over her shoulder and there it was- something big, and yellow, and bushy, and stiff, swaying rapidly back and forth.

She had to catch it. She just had to.

Her head lunged forward to take it in her teeth.

It spun away.

She tried to follow.

It dropped down and sped around her.

She spun after it.

She didn’t notice going to all fours.

She barely felt the bouncing of her enormous tits under her, bumping her elbows and occasionally her knees.

The world vanished from Sarah’s attention, except for a tiny yellow bit of fur which she hadn’t quite yet realized was part of her own body.

Time passed, unheeded.

“So, you wanna talk about keeping a pup in line, Cramer?” Walt snarled. “You couldn’t keep a crayon in a line!”

“Crayons are about your speed,” Gus growled back. “You’re too dumb for anything more complicated.”

Sally, standing behind Walt, folded her arms. “Oh, both of you quit acting like terriers trying to mark territory,” she muttered.

Both the big male wolves snarled softly, teeth fully bared, eyes locked.

A shorter male- Jack- pushed between them and shoved them apart. “Enough,” he grunted. “Save it for later. Right now we’ve got a strange werewolf on the other side of town- a BIG one- to deal with.” Stepping through them, he began buttoning his shirt back up as he added, “And if our missing kids aren’t already involved, they will be shortly.” He glanced around and added, “Any bets?”

Nobody said a word. The two larger males stayed separated, both of them watching him instead of each other. Sally clung to her mate’s arm, her eyes also staying on Jack.

Jack sighed, then took a deep breath, and forced himself back into his human form- a fairly ordinary-looking man, fairly skinny in his middle age, no gray in his hair. He picked up a rumpled suit jacket from next to his chair and slung it on. “Con,” he said, “if we heard it here it must have been like a jet taking off where it came from-”

“Already on it, Jack.” The ex-pack alpha was halfway through dressing and forcing himself back into human form as well. “I ought to know the drill by now.” With his uniform shirt back on, he reached into the pocket and pull out the hand radio. Switching it on, he said, “Dispatch, Car 1, Dispatch, Car 1.”

“Go ahead, Car 1,” a fuzzy, distorted voice rasped from the radio mini-speaker.

“Larry, I’m on the northwest side of town,” Con said. “I just heard what sounded like some kind of big animal cry, somewhere far off. Any reports?”

“Affirmative, Con,” the voice on the other end said. “Cindy’s taken two calls already, one from Sherwood Estates, one from down by Lake Packard.”

“Roger,” Con said. “I’m on my way down there. Send a car to each report if you can. And send a couple to Shelle and Turkey Creek. The one I heard might be something different.”

While Con continued to give orders that spread his sheriff’s department thinner than an oil sheen on the river, Jack finished gathering up his belongings. “I’ll have to go back to the office,” he said. “People will be calling the newspaper hotline to report this, which means I have to be there to suppress it. Everybody else says put until Con finds out what’s going on.”

“Fuck you, Goodwin!” Gus snapped. “I’ve got to go retrieve my girl! She’s running loose-”

“You especially stay here, Gus!” Jack snapped right back. In his human form he didn’t even come up to Gus’ shoulders, but he strode over to him and stood less than an inch in front of him, head craned back to look the flattop-wearing wolf in the eyes. “Have you forgotten you’re on probation with this pack? We rejected your bid to become pack alpha, and then you ran for sheriff so you could use the job to force your way into being alpha. After that stunt, nobody trusts you farther than they can throw you.” He snorted and added, “Hell, nobody here would be in a room alone with you except Con. And that’s only because, old as he is, he knows he can still take you down.”

Gus didn’t blink. “Big talk from a weak bullshitter of a wolf, Goodwin.”

Jack didn’t blink either, and he didn’t even acknowledge Gus’s statement. “You’ve proven you’re a danger to the Secret, to the pack and every wolf in it,” he continued. “We debated this. We had the vote. You got to live- barely. And you got to live for two reasons: out of concern for your daughter, and because it’s a pain in the ass to make a deputy sheriff’s body disappear.” His eyes narrowed as he finished, “But if you want to compare notes with D. W. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa, just take one step out of line. Give me the least bit of trouble.”

With that Jack spun on his heels, walking towards his car. Gus’s jaw flapped for a moment, and then words returned. “Listen to you, you neutered pup!” he shouted. “We voted. We decided. You’re too weak even to take responsibility for your own decisions!” He spread his arms and shouted, “We’re WEREWOLVES! It’s our right to be free! Our right to do whatever we want if we’re strong enough!” He took a step forward and said in a tone only marginally softer than a shout, “And it is still my right to challenge you in combat for your position-”

Grass rustled, and Gus paused in his rant. Looking around, he noticed that about half the pack- and almost all of it between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five- had either surrounded him or was walking in his direction. Every eye he saw was hostile. A couple of weres, including Walt, had teeth slightly bared.

“-if I wanted to,” he finished, backing down quickly. “Which I don’t. Tonight,” he added hastily, as if that made it any less a retreat.

“Smart boy,” murmured a female voice. Carla Goodwin stood in front of him, smiling. She had a million smiles, and this one was about the third least friendly in her arsenal- the one that said it was a nice evening, but it would be even nicer if your entrails were stretched out like clotheslines on the trees. “For a change.” She stepped forwards, and Gus’s foot twitched as he had to force himself not to step backwards.

Carla stood as tall as she could, stretching herself up to be in Gus’s face. It was easier for her than it had been for Jack- she’d never left wolf form- but it was still quite a stretch. Even so, a trickle of sweat ran down the fur of Gus’s cheek as she murmured, for his hearing alone, “Maybe we won’t have to reopen the question of what happened to Nancy Vulthar. Or her daughter.” And then, in a hiss with notes of growl in it, “And what I know about her.” She tapped the side of her nose in a gesture which, on a human, would mean a-word-to-the-wise.

Gus took two steps back, and then, slowly, walked over to where he’d set up his camping gear.

Meanwhile, at the car, Jack shouted back to the pack at large, “Everyone stay here for now! Once I’ve got things settled at the paper, I’ll get with Con and help him investigate this. We’ll make whatever decisions we need to when the moon is gone.”

Looking over at Walt, he sighed, shook his head, and opened the car door, shouting, “Walt, keep an eye on the pack for me.”

“M-m-me?” A look of unholy glee exploded on Walt’s face. “Acting pack alpha? Me?” He laughed, a long, not terribly mature laugh. “At last! I get to run things for once! I get all the power! All the glory! All the WOMEN!” He laughed again, flexing his arms and showing off a build most bodybuilders would have died for, or even glued fur to their bare skin for.

Jack leaned out the car window for one final order. “Sally,” he shouted, “you keep an eye on Walt.”

Sally waved back cheerfully. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything too stupid!”

Walt sighed, ears drooping. “Awwwwww...”