Page 65 of White Wolf
“Let’s find you some pants,” Feliks suggested.
~*~
Dressed in a cobbled-together uniform of black borrowed from the boys’ Cheka uniforms, and some of his own things, Sasha found that he was eager to go aboveground. To go anywhere, really. He wanted to explore. With his new heightened senses, every scent and sound and sight was an adventure. He felt safe, now, wrapped in the scents of Pyotr’s shirt and Feliks’s pants. They smelled familiar –his pack, a voice kept saying in the back of his mind – but it was a familiarity that he experienced in a whole new way. Before, he’d known that they were his friends, and that, whatever their moral shortcomings, they wished him well and wanted to keep him safe. But now the individual, razor-sharp scents of them traveled up his nose and burst inside his brain in warm pulses oflove, andgood, andbrothers. Packmates. He had both kinds of knowledge now, and the combination of knowing and feeling intensified his need to be with them to something as elemental as his own heartbeat.
“You really are a pup now, I guess,” Ivan said with a chuckle, reaching to straighten the hat he’d plopped on Sasha’s head.
Sasha could smell the old, stale scent of dead wolf on the fur now, and a ripple of sadness moved through him. It was brief, though, and soon replaced by exuberance. “I want to go outside.”
Kolya, Feliks, and Pyotr couldn’t seem to decide if they were amused or horrorstruck by him, all with varying degrees of expression. Pytor’s eyes were wide, and damp; he kept chewing on his lip. Kolya, meanwhile, kept a hand hovering at all times near his belt, where he kept his collection of knives. Feliks fell somewhere in the middle, staring.
Ivan was still Ivan, though, and Nikita, though he looked asleep on his feet, with deep smudges under his eyes, smiled at him with the patient fondness of a parent.
“Why do you want to go outside?” he asked.
“I want torun.”
Ivan chuckled. “I think we have to check with the old man, first.”
The growl that left his mouth startled everyone, even Sasha himself.
“Well there’s the first sensible thing you’ve said,” Kolya said.
Ivan’s brows went up. “You don’t like that idea?”
“I…” He frowned, unable to explain it. He wasn’t angry, but a part of him wanted nothing to do with Monsieur Philippe. He could remember him, the smell of him still caught in his sinuses from before, an acrid, charred-wood smell that was nothing like the warm, musky scents of his packmates. “I don’t…he’s not pack,” he tried to explain, shrugging helplessly.
That earned some cautious looks.
But Nikita nodded and said, “I bet not. But. We’ve still got to check in. He knows more about all this than we do. Come on.”
~*~
Monsieur Philippe was in the room he’d established as his office, eating his own SPAM stew with seeming enjoyment, his face radiant with a contented sort of happiness. He beamed when they entered the room.
“Sasha!” He stood up so fast the spoon clattered out of the bowl and onto the table, slopping broth. “There you are. How are you feeling? Can you speak? Can he speak?” he asked Nikita.
Nikita sounded offended. “Yes. He can speak.”
Though he didn’t want to. He wanted to growl again, put himself between Philippe and his pack and lower his head, show the old man his teeth. It was an effort to hold his ground. “Hello,” he said, stiff and formal.
If anything, Philippe smiled wider. “You can smell me now, can’t you? All mages smell like fire. You’ll grow used to it, don’t worry.”
Sasha nodded, but his anxiety continued to wind tighter.
A hand settled on his shoulder, Nikita’s, grounding him, easing some of the tension growing in his belly. “Sasha wants to go outside.”
“A wonderful idea. Let’s go see what you can do.”
~*~
Outside! The smells! The sun!
A wedge of sun, anyway, silver fading into gold along the distant tree line as dusk fell. The compound stretched out flat and treeless, same as before, muddy where the snow had melted, a few stubborn, dirty white patches hanging on before the spring thaw finally claimed them. There was no permafrost here, as at home, and the earth had a tangy, wet smell. Beyond the grounds was the same looped barbed wire fence with its hand-built posts, the same guard tower and gate.
It was beautiful. The most dazzling thing he’d ever seen. He’d always had a predator’s eyes, his father had said, and now he had a predator’s nose and ears too. Not just a predator, but a wolf.
A shiver overtook him, rippling pulses of delight that made him shake all over. If he had a tail, he thought he’d be wagging it.Run, that voice in his mind told him.Run, run. Just for the sheer joy of it.
