Cal
The first few days in Finland had been bearable. They’d gone to see the Metsala farm on the first full day and they’d both liked it. It was modest and would need a lot of work still, especially if they were going to be there in the winter, but it felt homey. It felt like a safe place.
Kit had connected with Anton and the two young wolves, and the boys—sans Jude who still had his cast on and couldn’t shift quite yet—had even shifted together on the second day to go for a run in the woods. The joy Kit had felt had been almost infectious, and Cal had felt happy for Kit and for Kit’s tiny fennec side.
That morning, he’d stayed back in the Metsala farm and tolerated the small tasks Noah and Dallas were there to do that day. He’d met the wolves briefly, and knew that his unease came from the fact that they were both men in their prime, and would be that as wolves, too. He knew it was his cat that disliked them, buried deep inside him as it may be. Once it would get to know them, it would be fine, but at first the cat only knew them as predators and canines.
When Kit didn’t come home before Noah and Dallas were done for the day, Cal walked with them through the woods to the Jarvela farm. The walk was ten minutes if that, and it felt like a buffer between the two places.
“I think someone’s on the porch,” Noah had said when they came to the yard. “We’ll go wash up.”
“Thanks,” Cal muttered. He could hear splashing from the lake shore and made the educated guess that his son was there, stuck on playing with the other teenagers.
He could’ve gone there, but he might as well be polite and go see the adults first.
He noticed a backpack by the house wall, but didn’t think much of it. When he rounded the corner, he saw Mikael and Maxim sitting at the picnic table with a man.
Two things happened at once. He recognized the face, even with… with what was now missing from it. The wind changed and Derek’s scent hit him full force. His cat awakened and tore through him in a way that he’d never felt before.
All control he’d had, every single piece of it was annihilated in the face of what his cat felt, seeing its mate, the mate it had ravaged and the proof of that attack, right there in front of them.
Cal had time to feel the shift come over him, registering the way his cat body now felt almost foreign.
Then his human consciousness was snuffed out like a candle.
The cat ran. It needed to get away. Away from the shame of seeing what it had done. SeeingMate, with only one eye. It could feel flashes of sense memory; the way it had swiped at the intruder with all its might. It could hear the echo of its mate’s startled, wounded cry that would never leave its brain.
It didn’t deserve a mate. It didn’t deserveanything!
The cat continued to run.
