The Bind

Pellets

CLAIRE POV

Today was Tuesday again, and on Tuesday the monarchy holds courts, so I was situated down stairs from the penthouse in my flowing robe. Pretending to favor my injured shoulder and periodically forgetting which one it was.

It was a blissful change from the sweltering heat and my thankless pack. Luxuriating in the air conditioned space, while Belle and Lucy took care of every need outside of actually solving the problems of the creatures.

Every day for the past week, from sunrise to midnight, I had been with the medics knee deep in body fluids and death threats. 

This was not exactly the way I had depicted spending summer this year. But then, I don't suppose any of us did. The medic's were sent straight from the goddess. I generally ran around taking orders and dodging ever more feeble attempts at my life as the pack suffered. We still didn't know what the wolves were detoxing from, and if I had been on my own the pack would have been thinned to a heartbreaking degree.

As Ben was under the impression that I had sustained an injury severe enough to knock a normal were out for at least a handful and a half of days, I had received that long of a reprieve. He had been linking me with summaries of the pertinent points of the meetings I should have attended. I formulated appropriate responses, and linked them back while holding back someone's hair as they rejected lunch, doled out tissues or cracked ice packs to bring fevers down.

The Medics had formulated contingency plans for whatever withdrawal symptoms could possibly be expected. Or unexpected. Like the grape sized, grape colored, boils that began popping up, and popping in general, on the underside of stubborn chins.

Do you know how impossible it is to get a wolf to bare their neck when they hold a negative amount of trust for you? I do. I shuddered in the memory of unnecessary emergency procedures, there are vital arteries running close to the surface in those regions. Eight wolves nearly bled out before the pack decided that two of the medics - Alberto and James - were trustworthy enough to be allowed to examine the protrusions. Under supervision from pack members that could barely keep themselves seated upright of course.

I eyed a bowl of grapes - fighting a wave of nausea - while a tubby man named Humphrey presented his dilemma. Gaunt cheeks hollowed by worry puffed in and out as he stressed about his teenage daughter.

"Jane goes flying at night and then won't come out in the day. Except to, ah, empty her stomach. She is wasting away and won't talk to me. Just waves me away." He wiped sweaty hands on greasy plants and addressed the view over my shoulder.

It struck me again how different this world was to the one I had known. Where doctors had usually been my first port of call for a conundrum such as this, here they were the second. So many oddities afflicting the smooth flow of life for these subjects had answers buried deep in tomes of mythology or animal nature. So it was commonplace to reach out to rulers before doctors. It baffled me.

In the world I knew, Humphrey's daughter sounded as if she had developed an eating disorder. The reality was that were creatures did not view food and form in the same way. Control mechanisms usually centered around escapism through their creature forms.

"When was the last time you went flying together?" I asked gently, smiling in what I hoped was a disarming fashion.

"What does that have to do with anything? Ahhh, Monarch..." Humphrey harrumphed, adding the honorific as an afterthought and filling the hollows of his face with an embarrassed blush. I didn't dignify his outburst with a response, and waited for an answer to my question. Without the smile.

"It was something Jane did with her mother. After she passed I, well, I put on a bit too much weight to fly." The red on his cheeks deepened, and large dark eyes studied the burgundy carpet. The fat little owl probably worried that his own eating habits had influenced his daughter's. With the increased speed of the were metabolism, Humphrey must be consuming an inordinate amount of food to have become too fat to fly. It wasn't a normal coping mechanism for creatures.