“We weren’t going to let him leave the Courtyard with the package,” Vlad said quietly. “We wouldn’t have let his mate and young see the meat. Selling it to him was punishment and warning for that Cyrus. Kowalski had no authority here to arrest that Cyrus and take him, and the package, to the police station. But we let him do it.”
“Just shows you’re all learning to pull as a team.” Miss Twyla gave Simon a hard look—the same kind of look a nanny would give an erring pup. But a nanny might add a paw-whack or a nip to the look. “You talk it out with Miss Meg and set things right.”
She walked to the back of the store. A moment later they heard the door open and close.
Still feeling cornered, Simon glared at Vlad. “You didn’t help.”
“You weren’t being scolded for eating a human; you were being scolded for upsetting Meg, which I haven’t done.”
“It’s not the same for you,” Simon muttered.
Vlad stared at him. “You weren’t bothered by this when we killed those intruders and the Wolves were tearing into the flesh. You weren’t bothered by it when you bit through the hand and elbow and gave the inked meat to Boone to wrap up for that Cyrus. You were fine with all of it until you went home and saw Meg sleeping—and weren’t sure you would be welcome.” Vlad looked away. “Miss Twyla is right. You need to find out if this changes things between you and Meg.”
Seeing the truth in Vlad’s words, Simon nodded and went back to working on the display in order to avoid finding out for just a little while longer.
Meg stood at one end of the Green Complex’s kitchen garden and stared at the woven baskets filled with zucchini. “Is this normal?”
“Even for zucchini, this is a bumper crop.” Ruth wiped sweat off her forehead with one hand and pressed the other hand to her lower back as she straightened up.
“Nadine said she’ll take some to make zucchini bread for A Little Bite,” Merri Lee said. She held out two modest-size zucchini. “You should take these, Meg.”
Meg sighed but she took them. Eating foods that were in season was all well and good, but she now understood about having too much of a good thing.
“You don’t have to eat them tonight,” Merri Lee said. “They’ll keep for a day or two.”
Goody. A no-zucchini meal. Of course, she wasn’t sure what they would eat—or if she’d be eating alone.
Then she saw the Wolf moving toward her. Simon, with his dark coat shot with lighter gray hairs. It had been a while since she’d had that odd sense of not being able to see him clearly when he moved, as if she were seeing an overlapping image of something even larger poking through a Wolf suit, making the outline indistinct. Maybe a little of his true form, whatever it was, showed through when he was stressed, like when he was in human form and things shifted involuntarily because he was angry or upset.
Did anyone else experience this when they looked at the Others? Or did seeing the visions of prophecy skew the way she saw the mundane world? If you could call any of the terra indigene mundane.
Ruth and Merri Lee looked around and spotted Simon.
“We should go,” Ruth said.
“You don’t have to,” Meg said quickly.
Merri Lee picked up one of the baskets. “Yes, we do. You’re not always going to agree or get along, but you’re going to be unhappy until you talk it out.”
“I could just conk him on the head with a big zucchini.”
Laughing, Ruth picked up the other basket. “Something every woman has imagined doing to a man at one time or another.”
She watched her friends put the woven baskets into the wire baskets on the front of their bicycles. She watched them ride away. Then she looked at Simon, who had edged closer to the garden as Merri Lee and Ruth moved farther away.
“We need to talk,” she told him.
She didn’t hurry back to the Green Complex. Simon walked beside her, not stopping to sniff anything to find out who had been nearby today. That was so unusual it made her wonder if he was unhappy too.
Unlocking his front door, she let him into his apartment, then went up to her own place to put the zucchini in the fridge and pour two glasses of cold water. A minute later, he opened the kitchen door and sat down at the table.
What to say? How to start?
“They were bad humans.” Simon’s voice was rough, but his amber eyes didn’t have the flickers of red that indicated anger.
Meg took a sip of water. “It was wrong of them to steal the meat from our butcher shop, same as if they had stolen from a human shop.”
“Yes.”
Of course, it would have been smarter for those men to steal from a human shop. The police would have arrested them instead of eating them. “How many were there?”
“Four.”
She didn’t know all the Wolves personally, but between the ones who looked after the puppies and the Wolfgard Complex and the ones who, like Simon and Nathan, worked in more visible parts of the Courtyard, she had a fairly good idea of how many Wolves lived in Lakeside.
“Were they scrawny men?” she asked.
Simon narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. “Not what I would call scrawny. They weren’t fat, but they were bulkier than Kowalski or Debany and just as tall.”
“And the pack ate four of them?”
He sat back, looking a bit put out. “No. The two Elders who are in the Courtyard each ate one, and the rest of the terra indigene ate the other two.”
That explained Jester’s comment about breakfast. “Did Sam . . . ?”
Simon shook his head. “We didn’t give any of the special meat to the puppies or Skippy. They’re playing with human pups now, and we didn’t want to confuse them.”
Meg sighed out a breath. She couldn’t say why the thought of Sam and Skippy chomping on a hunk of human bothered her more than Simon tearing into a person, but it did. And it made her wonder about something.
She ran her fingers up and down her glass, wiping away the condensation and avoiding a direct look at the Wolf sitting across from her. Should she ask? Could she ask? “What does human taste like?”
Simon scratched behind one ear. “Doesn’t taste as good as deer but better than chicken.” He thought for a moment. “Lots better than chicken.”
She tried to visualize the illustrations on a prophecy card that would rank the tastiness of meat. On a scale of one to ten, deer would be a ten and chicken a one? Would cows and pigs be a seven or eight and humans be a four or five?
“Meg? What are you thinking?”
She told him.
He stared at her before saying slowly, “You don’t need a prophecy card like that.”
No, she didn’t. But . . . “How accurate would it be if the card was illustrated that way?”
“Close enough.”
“So special meat isn’t special because it tastes so much better than other meat; it’s special because you don’t get to eat it that often.”
He seemed relieved when his mobile phone started yelping. He hauled it out of one of the cargo pockets in his shorts and said, “What?” He listened a moment and looked at Meg. “Kowalski is making a pizza run. You want one?”
“Yes.” She’d even cut up and sauté one of the zucchini for the vegetable side dish.
“Thanks,” Simon said, then hung up.
Meg started to rise but realized she had one more question. “If those men had tried to steal anything but food, would you have killed them?”
“Last summer? Yes, we would have. Now?” He met her eyes. “We would have torn into them as a warning to other humans, but we probably would have howled for Montgomery and let the police pack deal with the intruders.”
After Simon drove the BOW to the Market Square to pick up their pizza, Meg got everything ready to cook one of the zucchini.