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.
Death, police, jail. Those things had happened today and would result in danger, which would result in her being connected somehow to a woods and a grave.
She should tell Simon. She would tell Simon. But not tonight. Saying anything now would stir up the Others, and she didn’t want to get everyone riled just because her tongue was prickling again.
Meg braced her hands on the kitchen counter. She didn’t want to make a cut on her tongue. Too easy to make mistakes and do permanent damage. And a cassandra sangue who couldn’t speak clearly wasn’t any use to the people who had traveled to the compounds to buy a look at their future. But sometime soon her tongue was going to bleed and she would see the prophecy waiting to be revealed.
? ? ?
The more time he spent around humans, the more confusing they became. Every other predator the terra indigene had absorbed had a social structure that made sense. But humans!
Simon pulled into the employee parking lot, got out of the BOW, and opened the wooden door that provided access between the employee and customer parking lots.
No sign of Kowalski yet.
They might not eat each other, but humans killed humans all the time. He’d seen that for himself when Lawrence MacDonald had been shot and killed at the stall market when men from the HFL movement attacked their group. While the human pack had grieved, their behavior didn’t change toward the terra indigene. In fact, the deaths of MacDonald and Crystal Crowgard made the bond between the human pack and the Others even stronger.
Were they that accepting of the terra indigene seeing humans as meat because they realized that those who lived in the Courtyard didn’t see them that way anymore? Or were they accepting because they understood that they, too, would be seen as meat by the terra indigene living beyond Lakeside and the connected places of Great Island, Talulah Falls, and the River Road Community?
Simon watched Kowalski and Pete Denby pull into the customer parking lot. He saw Montgomery leave the apartment building and walk as far as the public sidewalk. The lieutenant seemed to be listening for something, but Simon didn’t detect any unusual sounds.
Kowalski opened the back door, pulled out a party-size pizza, and said, “I wasn’t sure if Sam and Skippy were joining you tonight, so I wanted to make sure you’d have plenty. Half is pepperoni and sausage; the other half has veggies.”
Simon took the pizza box. “That’s good. I owe you money.”
“It’s our treat tonight.”
Trying to make up for something other humans did. Trying to help take care of the pack.
Kowalski closed the back door, then hesitated. “Do you have any meat at home? Something frozen?”
“Hunks of bison.”