They did.
I devoured books throughout my childhood and even after puberty I had a thirst for knowledge during the month each year that I was a man. I’d study until night fell and then I’d shift, run, and hunt until bone-weary and then I’d fall back into bed until the next day when I could devour a new book. Textbooks. Novels. Atlases. Encyclopedias. Each year he insisted I mount multiple females so I could seek out a mate. I read a lot in between those times, in between errands he had us run. He took me to a book shop sometimes and would ask the owner for books to teach a child all they’d learn in school.
A conversation from early manhood comes over me.
“What if she’s not at that bar, uncle? What if my destined only one is in the forbidden village? Or in another city, another country across the ocean?”
I’d been reading of foreign lands. I’d run out of the books we had and on a trip out of town for supplies as well as one of his errands, I found a different bookstore and there were thousands of books that had already been read by others so were inexpensive. I had two twenty-dollar bills in my pocket and purchased as many as I could carry.
“Shifters find their mate in their territory. It’s basic, Tyson. A shifter’s born territory is meant for them. They rarely stray far from it. If we weren’t to find our mates close, we wouldn’t stay in the same zone all our lives.”
But we left our zone often for his errands and came back soon after. He didn’t like being away from our property and would grow agitated easily whenever we had one of those errands.
And in one of his dark times he muttered about taking me, as an infant, to a place far away because I couldn’t eat the herb to disguise my scent, but said as soon as he could feed it to me, we came back. He needed to come back because if shifters left their territory it was bad for their minds. He didn’t explain that.
When I asked him about finding a mate for himself, he went sullen and told me,
“Not all stories have the happy ending, Tyson. Our pack decided to control my destiny instead of letting me be in charge. I showed them.”
Instead, he directed me to keep mounting women from the other village where the witch lived, telling me it was too dangerous to go to the forbidden village where they hated us, would kill us if we let them scent us. But yet I was drawn to the village.
“Is she there? Is that why I’m drawn?”
“Maybe,” he told me and one year, we moved along the fringe of it after taking extra efforts in masking our scent so we wouldn’t be discovered.
I wanted to mark the perimeter.
“I need to mark it here.”
I’d never felt the urge to mark a territory as mine. The urge was strong.
“You can’t do that, Tyson, we’ll be discovered. This was your birthright, that’s why you feel this, but you can’t take it. Things have changed.”
“Why? If it’s mine, I should take it.”
“Trust your uncle. There are things you don’t know.”
“Then tell me. I’m not a boy anymore. I’m a man now so fucking tell me.”
He went on to remind me of all he’d sacrificed to save me and told me ‘later, when it’s safe, I’ll tell you.’
I didn’t smell my mate there, so we left.
“Ivy,” I ask, “where do you come from?”
She’s pulling cooking things out of the kitchen cupboards and surveying them with distaste before setting them in the sink. Everything is dusty from not being used or cleaned in many years. Some items in the cupboards have been there as long as we’ve had the place. The house came partly furnished and outfitted with most of that kitchen gear. She finds an unopened package of sponges and a large yellow container that I recall contains soap, so she begins washing. I decide we need a fire. Her legs are bare and she’s wearing rubber footwear that consists of a v across her foot, plugging into the rubber sole between her first two toes. She must be chilled. Her hair is still wet, too. I pull a log out of the basket and shove it into the wood stove.
“I live a few hours away. But I was born in a little town not far from here, as a matter of fact. My parents moved when I was about… three or four I think.”
I smile as I work on the fire and she furiously scrubs at the surface of the electric stove with a sudsy sponge. This makes my chest feel warm.
Her attention moves to the food we got today, and she begins stashing items in cupboards, moving the few items in those cupboards around first. She opens the refrigerator with a jar of something in her hand and gasps.