Page 77 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

“I am, though it’s a responsibility often shared by others in the pack. We teach the pups important lessons for them to know.”

“Pups?” I envision cute little wolves running around and nearly smile.

When the word came to me outside the schoolroom, it came from a part of me that I didn’t even know was there. I don’t understand what the word actually means.

He flashes me a brief smile. “Just our young. We have always called them pups, whether they are in their human or wolf form.”

He offers me a tantalizing peek into a world opening up to me that I’m desperate to know more about. “What things do you teach them?”

“Shifter history, for one.”

“Okay.” I’d like to lie down to listen to him speak, especially if this is going to be a long story because my head is pounding, but I’m scared to close my eyes in case I don’t wake up.

“The first shifter was a Romanian farmer,” he begins gravely.

I blink. “He was a what now?”

He smiles at me. “One night, a Romanian farmer went out to confront the wolf which had been terrorizing his goats and eating his chickens. His wife asked him to wait until the following night and take more men from the village to help him. But the farmer was stubborn, and he was proud. He had held his farm together through grit and hard work. If the other farmers in town heard he couldn’t so much as handle a single wolf on his own…” Gregor shakes his head.

Listening to him speak is like having an out-of-body experience. Like someone is recanting a dream I once had a long time ago. Which in itself is weird. No one should know my dreams but me, so why does it feel like Gregor does?

“You look like you have a question,” Gregor says.

Twisting my lips into a smile, I shrug off my unease. “What did the farmer do?”

Gregor eyes me for a beat, as if he thinks there’s more to it than that, then he continues with his tale. “The farmer's wife knew her husband was proud, especially after he refused her offer to go with him so he would not be alone. She would not sleep until he had come home safe, so she wrapped herself in her warmest furs and sat in front of the fire, determined to wait up for him no matter how long he was out. The farmer, eager to deal with this rude wolf once and for all, stuffed his feet into his boots, laced them, selected his thickest, warmest coat and, gathering up his pitchfork, trudged out to war.”

Gregor stops to eye me. “Did I tell you the farmer was a stubborn and proud man?”

I nearly smile because I can imagine him telling this same tale to the children. “You did.”

He blows out a dramatic sigh. “And so, this stupid farmer…”

I laugh.

Eyes sparkling with amusement, he continues. With every passing word, his smile dims, his voice lowers, and the tension builds. “It was almost pitch black on that frigid winter’s night. The farmer could barely see his hands in front of his face. He was careful with every step he took as he angled his head one way then the other, straining to listen as hard as he looked. He checked on the goats. Nothing. He checked on the chickens. Still nothing. And thinking this was the one night that stupid wolf had stayed away and it was nothing but the wind that had—Ah!”

He jumps, which makes me jump.

Gregor flashes me a brief smile. “The farmer did not know how silent a wolf’s steps can be, how quiet it hunts as it waits for the perfect opportunity to strike. But the farmer wasn’t a thin, weak man, and he had remembered to wrap a thick scarf around his neck, for it was mid-winter. And he was not without a weapon. The farmer fought the wolf, twisting this way, then that, like his life depended on it. Because it did. The wolf, once a scrawny thing, recently made fat by the farmer’s chickens these past few nights, was not expecting him to put up such a fight. How they fought. The wife, hearing the growling and the shouting, snatched up her coat and flung it on. She stuffed her feet into her shoes and gathered hot coals in a small shovel, and she charged out without a single thought for herself, for the farmer's wife was as brave as the farmer was pigheaded.”

I am utterly captivated, chewing my nails to the quick as I listen breathlessly.

“The wolf saw the farmer’s wife yelling as she charged them, and the wolf was surprised. More so when she flung a shovel of coal toward him. Seeing those bright red flashes of burning fire, the wolf, afraid, spun around and ran away as fast as it could. The farmer, moving faster, snatched up his pitchfork and drove the end into the wolf with a mighty thrust.” Gregor’s hand is outstretched, hand fisted as if he has that pitchfork in his grasp, andhelanded what sounds like a killing blow.

I swallow. “And did he kill the wolf?” I whisper.

Gregor nods firmly. “The farmer did. They dragged the body inside the house. The farmer was determined to make himself a coat from its furs that he would wear proudly in the town and share the story—leaving out the very small part where his wife had come to his rescue—of how he had felled the wolf single-handedly.”

I smile. Of course he’d want to leavethatpart out. “And did he?”

“He did not. The farmer was exhausted by his battle and his blood was running hot. His wife noticed the bite on his shoulder, helped bathe it and bandage it, and they went up to bed. The farmer's blood was still hot, so they did not immediately go to sleep.” He winks.

I grin.

“Two days later, the farmer got an infection and died in his bed. His wife was devastated.”

I stare at him. “What…”

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