Little Red's Riding

I Want to Taste...

By the time Silas had finally slipped into bed next to her, Dahlia's skin was hot. He wasn't about to wake her though. When it was bad enough she would wake on her own and until then he would let her get as much rest as she could.

As he lay in bed he wondered if she would have gone into heat if she hadn't met him. It didn't seem likely. And what would have happened if she hadn't come into the woods that morning and sought him out? What if he'd insisted on rejecting her and had just let her go on her way to her grandmother's house, insisting his guards keep out of sight, but keep her safe, once he'd learned she was in the woods. She would have made it there and then made it home before the heat struck her, as likely as not.

And then what?

He knew the answer. She would have lain with whatever man was nearby that would have had her. They wouldn't have been in short supply. It likely would have been that damnable Woodsman, whose name Silas could no longer even bear to think. He took a deep breath. It was no use thinking about him now, or even questioning Dahlia about him when she woke. The last time he'd asked her a question she'd defied his Alpha command repeatedly and they'd gotten into a huge argument.

If he'd known she was going to go into heat would it have changed how he'd acted over the last week? He asked himself. Absolutely. He probably wouldn't even have agreed to take the risk to send her home to her parents' house. It was too risky, being away from her when she could have gone into heat at any time after meeting him. He just hadn't thought that she would because he basically thought of her as a human. And humans didn't go into heat.

Dahlia murmured in her sleep and he lightly wrapped his arm around her waist, before moving further away from her again. If he was close to her right now there was no way that he would be able to sleep, even for a moment. She always smelled amazing to him, but now that she was in heat, she was especially alluring and his body was beginning to ache for her again.

Rolling away from her he closed his eyes. He'd nearly begun to drift off to sleep when he felt his mind link open, jerking him awake again.

"Yes. Oliver." He could feel that it was his best friend, even in the silence that lingered between them. "I'm assuming that this is desperately important since you're awake at this hour and I know that you were on morning patrol too."

"Yes Alpha. I'm sorry to wake you. I know you're probably busy." The fact that Oliver's tone wasn't filled with laughter had Silas on his feet in a matter of moments.

"What is it?" Silas was moving towards the closet when the next words came, and rooted him in place to the floor.

"After you came back the other warriors continued to search for those two that first made contact with the second group who were encroaching on our territory."

"It was a single person." Silas corrected immediately.

"That's possibly more disturbing but anyways. We found them."

"And what did they say?" He asked, staring out the window at the waxing crescent moon that was halfway between dark and full."

"Nothing, Alpha. They're dead. Brutally murdered, Sir. But the most disturbing thing is their faces. They have looks of sheer terror frozen on their faces."

"In human form, Oliver?" Silas forced his legs to move and he walked to the window and stared out into the darkness.

"No. As wolves. Their mouths were open, their teeths barred. And they were frozen like that. But the rest of their bodies looked as if just about every bone in their bodies from the neck down had been broken. It was awful."

"Alright Oliver. Thank you for the update. Let's double our patrols tonight. Can the schedule handle it?"

"We can do it, Alpha. At least for a while." He felt Oliver's presence disappear from his mind and he turned back to his mate with a sigh. He was going to have to leave her again soon, but he couldn't leave her for long and certainly not while she was burning up.