Every time he stalked the perimeter of the farm, giggling mixed with hyperventilated shrieks followed his footsteps. The first few times he charged in among the corn stalks, sending the husks rustling and little miscreants barreling out of the fields, he'd been surprised to find nothing taken but maybe some of his dignity. Wolf knew the vandals were mocking him, waiting for him to tire or turn his back so they could fill their pockets with the goods Scarlet lovingly grew and he attempted to help with. The trespassers would be little more than dim figures with clouds of dust for feet by the time Wolf would walk back onto the beaten track that connected the farm to town. He could catch them, silent, swift—easily. Their scents practically called to him.
"You know, they aren't here for our poor vegetables," Scarlet said. Wolf felt something thunk against the side of his head. A perfectly ripe tomato, probably bruised now from the abuse, rolled in the dirt. Even now he salivated, starving. Hungry. He was always hungry, always would be. Scarlet made it better, bearable. When he was around her, she was the only thing he craved. Silently saving those rotten thieves, he thought.
"They're getting something from us," Wolf grumbled. It was almost easy to talk with his new mouth, new fangs, new murderous appearance.
"Yeah, Wolf, they are." Scarlet's voice was tired, like she'd needed to explain this to him a dozen times already, though the surgeries hadn't really addled his brains. Just his instincts. "You."
"Me?" he snarled.
"Exactly," she said, reaching forward to pat his cheek. Like she wasn't close to accidentally slicing a finger with his canines. Wolf leaned toward her touch, condescending as it was, and watched her. "You give them a good scare. Growing up here can be fairly boring. I would know. It took a strange, alien underground fighter to add a little spice to my life," Scarlet said, squeezing a bicep before she tucked a basket into his hands. More tomatoes.
"They come here because they think I'm going to eat them," Wolf said, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, no. You haven't eaten any children while I haven't been around, have you?" Scarlet asked. Mostly in jest, but the first few weeks they'd spent together on the farm had been tenser than either had ever expected. The assault on his senses, which had been difficult enough to contain on Luna, only grew worse on Earth. Here, where there was no recycled air, no chocking dust to keep things dull. It was impossible to predict what could come creeping onto the farm. Though Scarlet claimed the crops hadn't thrived so much in years, with Wolf around to scare away any bird or rodent stupid enough to try to intrude where they weren't wanted.
"No." Wolf realized that she was still staring at him, like he would actually consider eating a child. "They would not taste very good," he offered up when she continued to eye him.
"That's perfect," Scarlet nodded. She turned away from him to hoist up her own basket, loaded with vegetables for their lunch. Wolf's second lunch, actually. "That's just the kind of thing that you need to tell them, if you want your little friends to come around."
Scarlet ignored his grumbling protests, though held the back door open for him, as they retreated indoors. Out of the burning sun, the home seemed much dimmer. It was almost identical to how it had been kept when Scarlet had been living there with her grandmother. Wolf hadn't had much of anything to bring with him when he'd moved in and felt himself to be enough of an imposition, at times, to care about home decorating. At least it wasn't all coated in regolith dust.
"They can't just hide out in the field all day," Wolf insisted.
"Then put them to work," Scarlet shrugged. "Tomatoes?" she asked, hardly waiting for his nod while she fixed a sandwich. "I know you don't like it out here. Alone."
He still didn't like venturing into town, even if he kept his mouth mostly shut. His bone structure alone was enough to let people know that he was still off. With Lunars only tentatively accepted by the most open-minded people of Earth, keeping a low profile would be best. It would have been easy, if those children hadn't realized they had a real wolf, from space, in town.
"I'm not alone. I have you," Wolf settled his hands on her hips. She was all of the pack he needed. His alpha female. But she needed to leave to deliver the vegetables, if the farm was going to survive, and she had friends outside of him. It wasn't her fault that his social circle began and ended with her—at least, in France. Everyone else was a little more difficult to get ahold of.
Scarlet leaned back against him and Wolf rumbled happily, not just because she was nearly finished putting his second lunch together. "Call it a hobby, then. I know if you really wanted them gone, you would have caught them already instead of chasing them off the way that you do. You like it when they come to bother you."
"Just as much as they enjoy me growling at them?" Wolf asked. He reached over her, grasping the plates and taking them to the small table in the kitchen. If he helped, they would be able to eat that much faster.
Scarlet waited until they were seated to speak again. He was always much more reasonable when he was mostly preoccupied with his food, though his eyes continuously swerved back toward her. Crinkled at the edges with a happiness that seemed permanently stamped on his gaze.
"You'll figure something out. If you can't think your way through this, you wouldn't be Wolf," Scarlet said.
The giggling was back. This time it sounded as if there was more of it. Possibly because he was feeling paranoid, as Scarlet had gone into town for a few hours, but more probably because in the past few days more children had been recruited into spying on the wolf.
"Is he really coming? I can't see anything," one of the little voices hissed, trembling with anticipation.
A few others hushed them. "That's the point," an older voice insisted. Wolf stalked closer to the small voices and the sharp scent of fear. Even if it was entertainment to them, at least one of them was afraid.
"You can't see, but he can see you. He can smell you. He has these big, sharp teeth and big giant eyes and big—"
"Big ears to hear you with, too." He hadn't even tried to be very frightening but supposed that creeping up behind a group of children who were waiting to be pounced on by a monster hadn't been a good method to go through with.
Shrieks echoed in front of him—which did startle those sharp ears—and most of the children darted out of their hiding places. The youngest, the one he'd heard worrying moments earlier, gazed up at him with large, round eyes.
"Please, don't eat me!" she trembled. The others smelled farther away now. Whoever had brought her there with them hadn't bothered to drag her out from the field when the monster, waited upon, finally arrived.
"I don't eat people," Wolf said. The small girl eyed him dubiously. He crouched down a little, to seem less imposing than his tall frame afforded, but she shrank back. "We grow so much to eat, here, that it would be silly to eat anything else, anyway," he pointed out to her. "Do you like tomatoes?"
There was a barely perceptible shrug.
"They're amazing," he sighed, nearly forgetting her there as he thought that, possibly, he could sneak in another snack while Scarlet was gone. "Everything Scarlet plants is amazing, actually."
Still eyeing him suspiciously, the girl gave him a nod now.
"If you're hungry, you could . . . I could find you something to eat." She looked too small to get home on her own, and he hadn't scared her away from his field, and now he'd need to wait for Scarlet to return to deal with her.
He tried to smile at the girl without showing much of his teeth.
"Your mouth is funny," she said, slowly.
"I know," Wolf told her. "It wasn't always like this. Some mean people made me look scary. But I don't want to be scary."
"They said you were going to eat us," she said. "I—I didn't want to come here. Honest."
"Have they been here, before? To see me?" Wolf asked. The girl nodded again. "I like to chase them out of the field, so I can keep all of the food for myself. But you were brave enough to stay, with me, so you could even have a tomato," he offered to her. "Maybe next time, you could help me scare them."
When Scarlet walked up to the farmhouse a few hours later, toting an awkwardly sheepish boy with her who'd 'forgotten' to drag his sister out of the corn with him, Wolf had nearly finished off all of the food he could find in the home. Building miniature people out of vegetables and messily devouring them had kept the girl well-entertained, until she fell asleep curled up on the porch.
The boy cautiously went over to wake his sister. She waved sleepily to the wolf who'd fed and watched over her. He smiled at the girl and saved a special baring of his fangs for the boy.
It would be a little fun, keeping the children around.