Claws

Chapter Two

Once all of the girls had been accounted for, everyone got back to their procedural positions. With Jade beside me, I began to lead the pack home.

While running, Claw's average speed is sixty to seventy miles per hour, increasing to over one hundred plus miles per hour when challenged. Since we were in a group, I kept everyone running around fifty, making it easier to keep everyone together.

As we entered the rocky mountains, the trees got taller and thicker while the air got thinner. The trees' bark was a rich chestnut, covered in winterberry flowers in full bloom, as expected. A thin layer of snow clung to the branches and glistened in the pale light of the cold winter sun. The trees were a mix of Evergreens and Ponderosa pine trees, which stood proudly, their roots planted firmly in the rich soil beneath. Many were the size of tall buildings, and some were smaller.

The air was cold and crisp with the tang of pine and snow. It smelled fresh and clean, like cool winter mornings with a hint of campfire smoke from the previous night's Sunday gathering in the main square of eastern Erewhon. It was the best smell in the world.

"So, how do you feel now? Still anxious?" Jade barked at me over the wind while we rushed ahead. We had been running for a while in silence. Jade was the person to respect someone's thinking time but not one who could hold off for long. "You must be excited to see your parents and Robin after all these years. Linda must be ecstatic. She adores you."

"Yeah, Robin's mom is pretty amazing. Her cooking is the best in the pack," I laughed, letting my ears fly back in the wind. "I do miss them a lot, don't get me wrong. I'm just hoping that I come home meeting their expectations as an alpha. My parent's opinions mean a lot to me, you know?"

"Well, that's understandable. You're the eastern chief's daughter. You're under a lot of pressure, and people expect a lot of you. I can't even fathom the stress," Jade sheepishly grinned. It was slightly disturbing in her Claw form. It looked too human-like on a wolf's face. "You don't need to worry though. You're an incredible alpha, Mae. I've never seen anything like what you did in school, leadership and all. You're perfect in almost every way. It's really not fair. The only thing you should be concerned about is finding a mate with that pheromone hypersensitivity of yours. You'll either get sick or go into heat unless your pheromones are extremely compatible, right? It must be miserable."

"Shut up," I grumbled. "I'll figure that out later. I don't want to find a mate right now anyways, and I have pills to keep my heat at bay."

"So you have no prospects? No one that's been on your mind for the past four years....or eight years perhaps?" Jade smirked with a smug glint in her eye.

I gave her a strange look as we hopped over a fallen tree and climbed up a steep rocky hill to reach the top of the plateau ahead.

"What do you mean by eight years? That's so specific."

"You haven't thought about him at all? Not even when he left for the academy or when you left a day before he returned? You have to be kidding me! If he were my best friend's older brother and I had easy access like you, I would have already been planning out my kid's names by now."

"No way. Do you mean Zale? Are you kidding me?" I laughed, finding every bit of her apparent jealousy absurd. "I was twelve when I last saw him, and the fact that he's my friend's older brother is another one of the many reasons I would never get involved with him. They're like my brothers, both Robin and Zale. If I married Zale, it would feel like incest, and I'm not into that."

"But he was so the most gorgeous human being and Claw I had and have ever seen! How could you have not drooled over that boy at least once?" Jade looked at me in both jealousy and disbelief.