Page 44 of A Wolf in the Garden

My wolves snarl at me, but I am the one in control here.

Ten

VAN

Every night this week has been a blur of sex and sleep in an endless cycle as Ellie and I make up for lost time. Tonight is no different, her body rolling towards mine as she wakes, and it’s so easy to slide my dick home when she hooks her leg over my hip, her cunt still dripping from our last round. The moon is only two days away from being full, filling the room with silver light while it fills me with an absolutely feral need for her. I can manage it during the day, can stop myself from jumping her bones at every opportunity, but the nights are something else entirely. The entire room smells of sex, of her cunt and of my cum, and I fucking love it.

This is the happiest my wolves and I have been in nine years.

“Knot me again,” she whispers as I roll us both so that she’s underneath me, her fingers digging into my ass as I fuck her slowly. She feels amazing around my cock, and if I could, I’d stay like this forever, never leaving this bed, never leaving her body. I push myself to my knees, watching where we are joined, watching the way her body swallows me right up until my knot is pressed firm against her entrance. “Knot me, Evander.”

“You have to come first.” It’s not a set rule, and she’s already been knotted once tonight, but I love the feel of her climaxing around my knot, and I know there’s less risk of discomfort to her that way.

She moans as I drag my dick backwards until there’s only the tip left inside, my hands keeping her legs in a tight grip as she squirms with need. I love satisfying her, love pleasuring her, love making her orgasm endlessly, but there’s also fun in seeing her this way, so desperate for release and comfortable enough to demand it of me.

“Van!Fuck me.”

I thrust into her hard and she groans, tipping her head back as one of her hands reaches for her clit, rubbing herself. “Yes, baby,” I tell her. “Make yourself come for me.” I love giving her pleasure, but there’s something about seeing her do it herself that drives me wild, and as she comes — her mouth open wide and her eyes locked on mine — I lose it with a snarl, fucking her in long heavy strokes. She groans as I knot her with a final thrust, and we come simultaneously as I fill her once more, my knot locking us in place as she rides her second orgasm.

In the quiet that follows I lower myself over her, rolling us onto our sides, our bodies still intimately tied. We fall asleep together, her face pressed to my chest, my arms around her, blissful in our own bubble of peace.

* * *

Ihang back outside the lecture theatre doors, waiting for all the students to file in first before I follow them. I had to shift a meeting and take a helicopter direct from the vineyard to downtown Auckland in order to get here, but it’s worth it for the chance to see Ellie in her element, even if it meant using up one of the few flights Lost Moon is allocated each month within the local council’s bylaws.“Honestly, you don’t want to sit through an hour of me talking about how to balance client requests with design theory,”Ellie had told me last night when I’d mentioned that yes, I was definitely attending, but she’d radiated quiet happiness as she’d given me the location, and I know that me being here is more important to her than she let on.

The room is small for a lecture theatre, the tiered seating at a strangely steep angle, and I find a place at the back, well aware of the stares from students as I pass them on my way up the aisle. I’m the only wolf in attendance, but there’s a werecat across the room that wrinkles her nose when she looks my way, and a young mothman, his bright blue antennae flattening against his skull as I slip into the row behind his. “I mean no trouble,” I murmur, sitting one seat over from directly behind him, lest his antennae perk up and get in my way.

“You’re not in our class.” The hissed reply is quiet enough that his human peers can’t hear him, his head partially turned in my direction, so that I can just see the edge of one large red eye. His row is one of the few that have been altered in the theatre for winged creatures, and the seat he sits on is backless.An uncomfortable stool. Surely the university could afford something better than that for these kids.

“My mate is your guest speaker for today.” It gives me a small thrill to use the wordmate, the word carrying a lot more meaning among non-humans, despite the fact that I haven’t used the word in Ellie’s presence yet.

His black wings flutter in surprise, shining iridescent green and blue as they catch the light, a shower of glittery dust floating to the floor. “Oh.”

“Here she is now.” She’s beautiful, looking sophisticated in a simple white blouse and black trousers that hug the curve of her hips, thepounamuI gave her around her neck, and her ears still hidden behind her long hair.She’s still afraid to be seen as non-human.It doesn’t bother me, per se, but I do hope that in time she can come to terms with the fae part of her identity, and allow herself to stop hiding her true nature. The events of this past week haven’t helped, unfortunately. Although she now knows what she is, she’s terrified of them, and with good reason. It’s rattled me too; part of me had been afraid to let her come into the city alone today, and I’d been at war with myself over it, trying to decipher whether I was being logical or whether it was my alpha instincts to protect clouding my judgement. In the end I’d texted Nerilina to check that the magic protecting Ellie was in place, and had received a curt reply:

Yes, Evander. She will be fine. Calm your wolves down.

Ellie clears her throat, smiles at the class, and then her voice rings out clear through the room. “Kia ora koutou katoa. Ko Ngapuhi raua ko Ngati Hine nga iwi. Ko Ngatokimatawhaorua te waka…”

I watch Ellie recite herpepeha— her introduction inte reo Maori, where she recites her genealogy and her connection to her ancestral lands — with a confidence she didn’t possess nine years ago, the language flowing melodically from her tongue. She says she’s still a beginner, but this traditional introduction sounds amazing to me. I don’t understand anything beyond the odd keyword; she’s told me the names of her tribes, her canoe, her mountain and river andmaraebefore, and I hear them as she speaks, but just like hearing anything once or twice in a foreign language, I can recognise those words but I’d be lost if I tried to repeat them back to anyone.

I know that for Ellie, getting to the stage where she can confidently recite this basic level of Maori language hasn’t been a smooth journey.

“Between the little bits that Koro and Mum knew, growing up, and language papers I’ve taken, I’ve got the pronunciation sorted,”she’d told me over breakfast yesterday.“But you lose the language if you don’t use it, so I keep taking these one-off courses, keep re-learning and re-forgettingte reo, and it’s so bloody frustrating. I wish I’d been brought up with the language, but you already know how my family lost it years ago, when Koro was beaten by his teachers for speaking it at school, and both his parents decided he’d be better off if they only spoke English at home. His story isn’t unique either; almost a whole generation of Maori had their own language wiped out because of those policies, and it makes me so angry every time I think about it. That’s why it’s so important that I do learn it, and why I feel so guilty every time I stop practising for a while, because I know it’s vital to keep the language going. We need more people speaking it, not less.”

It’s a sickening thought, to know what her grandfather went through, the impact of those old colonial policies wide-reaching in their harm. I see it in the way Ellie tears up when discussing these things, when she says that sometimes she doesn’t feel ‘Maori enough,’ citing her mixed heritage and her basic knowledge of the language, despite the many cultural practices shehasbeen brought up with, and despite the general understanding in this country, and specifically within her own Maori culture, that anyone with Maori ancestryisMaori.

It will be our children one day, feeling the same way.The thought is oddly jarring; it’s too soon to think about kids, and yet it’s not, not for me. I don’t want them yet — I want years with her all to myself, but Idowant them, and I do want them withher.No one else will do.

There’s a certain kind of anxiety that comes with thinking about future offspring, at least for me; if we have a child afflicted with the same alpha makeup as myself and my father, I will be devastated. I still have to explain that all to Ellie, explain what really went on between my father and I, explain to her the risks that being with me might entail.And any child with Ellie will have fae blood, too, and be at risk fromthem.

I don’t want to think about it, and push those thoughts aside. Ellie has switched to English now, a slide on the screen behind her outlining the topics she’ll cover during her talk. I may not be interested in every aspect of the content — although on the whole, itisvery interesting — but I’m fascinated by the way she commands the room.

She’s magnificent in front of the crowd. Engaging and energetic, she has the small group hanging on every word, sharing anecdotes from her time as a student, answering questions with blunt honesty, and I’m so fucking proud of her. Every now and then she looks my way, a smile in her eyes, and it’s bittersweet, knowing I missed out on so much ofthis, of her life. It’s pointless to think this way, I know that. We’ve discussed it, and as warm and forgiving and loving as Ellie is, she’s also pragmatic.“If I’d been with you these past nine years, I would have been so happy. I also wouldn’t beme, the person I am now. Same with you. And I like to think you love me now, not just the Ellie of the past. Because I really like who I have become. I worked hard to get here. When it comes to us, I want to look forward. If you’re serious about this being a forever thing, then let’s stop picking at our old wounds. I think we’ve both done that enough in the last nine years.”

I hang back after her talk ends, watching her slowly get through the line of students waiting to speak with her one-on-one and the lecturers and university staff that have come to say hello. When a call comes through on my phone I step outside, and then remain there in the hallway, replying to a bunch of emails as I wait, pausing to listen when I hear the words‘non-humans’ spoken.

“It’s been a learning curve,” a voice says, and from what I can gather it’s one of Ellie’s former lecturers. “Particularly with the gargoyles and vampires. We had one halfway through his degree when the Unravelling occurred, and… I feel terrible, but we couldn’t accommodate him at the time. There were no clients willing to have someone onsite working during the night, university-wide there was nothing set up to support these students that suddenly turned to stone during the day.”

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