Wolfblood

Chapter 4

After a while, conversation drops off, and I find myself completely relaxing. The sand underneath me forms a kind of odd pillow that I'm able to shape. I subconsciously start hollowing out a sort of burrow before stopping myself and just lightly dozing.

My friends don't seem to need to keep up a constant chatter; they're all doing their own thing now, either reading a book or playing on their phones.

Every now and then I will peak over at my brother, and I'm reassured when he's just happily playing in the ocean. Occasionally, he will come ashore and put something in a small pile before plunging back into the waves that are probably too cold for most people, but we used to go polar diving just for fun or for dares back home.

At some point, when I glance over, a girl about his age has joined him in his play, and someone who might be her brother watches them closely. I say brother, not stranger danger, because now the girl and Noah dart toward him every now and then and makes him hold the objects that they find.

He does it patiently and with a smile.

He catches my eye at one point and gives a small wave while juggling his objects, and I return it slowly.

I go back to dozing.

I'm woken a little while later by a droplet of water landing on my cheek, and I lazily open my eyes to find Noah standing over me with a massive grin.

"I made a friend," he smiles happily at me, and I can't help returning it. He seems almost giddy.

"I can see that," I say waving at the little girl standing with the young man a little way away. The girl shyly returns my wave with a hesitant smile. I return my eyes to the boy practically hopping in front of me.

"We were invited to dinner," he continues excitedly, and my stomach drops guiltily.

At my sigh, my brothers face falls slightly. "We didn't drive here, Cub. We have no way of getting home." Except running but that would be suspicious, even though our house is halfway between the Res and the school, that's still ten klicks.

"Oh, well not tonight," he brightens again. "we were invited for Thursday."

"I suppose we can ride our bikes," I allow, glad that I can agree to this small thing for him. "Do you guys have a pen and paper?" I ask over my shoulder to my friends.

Jo, without glancing up from her book, rummages through her bag for a surprisingly short amount of time before finding a used receipt and a pen, which I quickly scrawl the house phone number on.

I have yet to get a new cell phone, so the house phone will have to do. I should probably give it to my friends as well at some point.

I hand the receipt over to my brother. "Here, give them our number and let them know to call us at some point tomorrow."

"I will!" he says excitedly, turning on his heel and racing back towards his new friend. "Thanks, Ryan!"

I grimace a little as he accidentally kicks some sand on me, but other than that, I'm pleased with today.

Isaac looks up from his phone just long enough to laugh at me.

We do, indeed, find tunnels in the den. We have to sniff around a bit, noses practically shoved against the rocky wall and searching it inch by inch until we find it. It's only because I get a whiff of cold underground, dirt, and a hint of salt (that I can now label as the scent of the ocean), that I allow Noah to take a sledgehammer to the bricked wall.

The rock caves outward into a cool tunnel on the other side that carries with it the scent of seawater.

Now I wander the passageways as a wolf, allowing myself to chose turns at random, but I don't fear getting lost. I can follow my own scent trail home. For now, I follow the scent of the ocean.

The tunnels go for miles in every direction. Every now and then I would come across an exit no bigger than a burrow hole (I'd have to crawl on my belly to get out) that is well hidden by vegetation on the other side. It truly is amazing. Even more so when the small tunnel widens out to an actual cave and I'm left staring out at the ocean, several dozen feet above it.

It's a cave in the actual cliff-face, and I don't see a way to get to it from the outside unless you repelled from above or flew to it. It takes some searching for me to find a very thin edge that wraps along the cliff and eventually to solid ground.

Only after I find the ocean (I'm sure I'm somewhere on the reservation), do I make my way back home, following my scent trail as if it were visible.

When I make it back to the den, which I still have yet to make homier, I quickly shift and go in search of my brother to tell him of my discovery.

He would have loved to explore himself, but he would have to be bend over at the waist most of the time, or crawl.

When I reach the main floor, I pause at his voice drifting through the house conversationally, and I smile when I spot him perched on the counter with the phone to his ear as he picks at his supper.

He looks up at me as I make my way over to him, and I make a motion indicating that I want the phone. He nods to me in understanding.

"Hey, Claire, my sister is back… uh huh… okay… here you go, Ryan," he says, passing it over.

"Hello?" The voice that comes over the phone is that of a woman, rather than the child that I was expecting.

"Hi," I say politely. "This is Ryan, Noah's sister."

"Hi, Ryan, I'm Emily, Claire's aunt." I assume that Claire is the name of Noah's new friend. "You said that you will be having dinner with us tomorrow?"

"Yes Ma'am, if you'll have us," I reply.

"That's great news!" she says happily. "Will your parents be able to join us, or will it just be the two of you?"

"Just us; our dad is out of town at the moment," I lie smoothly.

"That's a shame, maybe some other day then. Would six o'clock be an alright time for you?"

"That sounds perfect!" I respond, and after she gives me the address to jot down, I pass the phone back to my brother. He immediately puts it to his ear.

"Hello..? Yes ma'am… Hey, Claire!"

I smile a bit and go to rummage through the fridge for a cold dinner.

I should probably hunt soon, I muse, looking over the low levels of meat. I don't have to hunt, we have enough money to buy it, but we've been eating fresh meat since I was a cub. It just tastes better than almost anything bought in a store.

As he chats, I take my cold dinner (hotdogs and burger patties) up to my room, relieved that he seems to be happier than he was the first two days of school. He would naturally have a harder time making friends, being a year younger than everyone else in his class.

But he seems to be doing okay now. I'm not sure if he is just excited about finding a friend, or if he likes Claire, but I'm not going to make any assumptions.

It's what our parents did with me when I was his age, with any boy I would get along with. It aggravated me so much that I eventually screamed that I liked girls at them in the middle of a shopping center.

Naturally, my entire school knew that I was gay before I went to bed that night, and I've been out ever since.


A/N: Next chapter, I promise it will pick up a bit.

klick- kilometer

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~Silver~