"They’ve already worked out an exchange with a Canadian pack with a surplus of she-wolves.”
The Sea King's words echoed through my mind. But then my father’s voice reminded me,“We are not like those backwards savages. City Wolf kings do not share.”
Yes, even with our prospects of finding a sustainable population of compatible she-wolves being so dim, I'd been right to nip that criminal scheme of theirs in the bud.
Hadn't I?
“Also, have you given any more thought to the special request I made last week?” Lambert's inquiry pulled me away from the question that refused to cease cycling through my mind since I walked away from that stone circle.
Jayzus, not this again. I stopped walking just before we reached my corner office door and lowered my voice to inform him. “We’re not going to cancel the Heat Laws just so you can get married, Lambert.”
“How about a special dispensation then?” A desperate note crept into my assistant's voice. “We could call it an experiment. Like when the brewers tried out that new fermentation process on the hops.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “And how’d that turn out for us?”
“Alright, the general public didn’t exactly appreciate it.”
“Rancid Ruin, I believe theDublin TimesFood Editor called it. Millions of euros wasted on R & D just to go back to our tried and faithful stout formula.”
“Alright, alright, that was probably not the best point of comparison, I'll give you that." Lambert huffed. "But Rhonda sincerely believes that our marrying will make her go into heat.”
This time, I couldn't stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Did you tell Rhonda that’s not how it works?”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?" Lambert shook his head. "None of us know how it works. Do you even?”
I answered that question with a withering look.
And Lambert winced. “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have ever said that to you, of all people. Of course, you know more about these things than Rhonda.”
A wee pang of guilt niggled in my belly. Ah, sure, I was the Dublin King, but did I truly know much more than him about how wolf babies were made? Like Lambert and his mot, Rhonda, I'd been born an only child here in Dublin before the Heat Laws went into effect, so I’d never actually seen anyone go into heat.
That was the trouble with living scattered throughout a city filled with humans, wasn't it? We Dublin wolf walkers had to keep our true natures hidden, so the only close community we enjoyed was at all-wolf workplaces like the company my several greats ago grandfather established back in the 18th century.
Beyond that, we didn't live close enough to one another to see the intimate details of each other's lives. In my experience, all heats had been office canteen stories. As in, “Did ya hear about Sean? Missed work 'cause his mot went into heat. Maybe we should sort out a card and some cakes for when he gets back from his two weeks off, eh.”
Though, as of late, no one had filed for the two weeks of heat moon leave that we gave our employees in addition to the floating three days they got off for every full moon. After years of mostly male births that I could count on one hand with fingers left over, last year, we’d had our first zero-birth twelve-month cycle across all kingdoms.
Dire times, indeed, with no relief coming from any of the countries I'd contacted.
“The thing is, if I don’t marry her, I reckon Rhonda's going to leave me," Lambert said, pulling my attention back to him. And the no he was refusing to take.
“As she should've done ages ago,” I pointed out. Maybe a bit too harshly. Truth be told, Lambert had picked the wrong bleeding morning to pursue this with me, what with me getting broken up with myself this weekend — just before receiving that hope killer of an email from Norway at the top of the day.
I hit him with a bespoke version of the break-up spiel Tess, the British she-wolf I'd been seeing up until that past Friday, gave me — minus all the stuff about me having zero emotional availability.
“Four years together and not a whiff of a heat to show for it? You’re clearly not a genetic match. Best for the both of you to cut your losses and try with somebody else.”
“Easy for her, but what am I to do, then?" Lambert whined."Join all the other lonely knobs hoping to catch the eye of the few she-wolves available to us here in Dublin? Go west and double up like the Sea and Wild Wolves? See if that increases my odds?”
"Not that any of them would have you as a second!" one of the lads in Accounts called out.
Like many of his fellow office workers, with their heads poked above their cubicle walls like meerkats, he made no attempt at all to act as if he wasn't using his superior wolf ears to eavesdrop on my and Lambert's conversation. "Can't farm, engineer, or boat, and you wouldn't last a week of West Coast winterin the elements.Who would agree to go in on a mate with some skinny malink City Wolf whose number one skill is slipping discs into the Tassimocoffee machine anyway?"
As the rest of the office laughed, the memory of Wild's sneer, talking about how soft we Dublin wolves were, floatedthrough my mind. I could barely imagine being a second to him or Sea, much less a third as was supposedly prophesized on those stone tablets the Wild Wolves carried about like the Ten Commandments.
I'd been right not to entertain the idea of a Second Reaping, and I informed Lambert, “There will be no revocation of the Heat Laws. It's a pity your relationship won't work out, but I’m not calling a meeting of the three kings so that you can hang on to it.”
“That’s because you’re a hard-hearted wolf who doesn’t understand the meaning of connection!” To my surprise, tears rose in Lambert's eyes. “What kind of king doesn’t care about his subject’s suffering?”
