Slowly the darkness drew back again.
He tried to hold on to it, but it went anyway.
He lay completely still, his eyes shut, and drew in long, soft, silent breaths, trying to analyse his surroundings. For they had changed. Even without seeing them, he knew that much. Doubtless more threats were to materialise, and he must be prepared to meet them with all the strength and cunning he could muster.
The smells told him one thing that comforted him. The female was still near to him. They slept as close to each other as they could for the bars, trying to keep some tenuous sense of familiarity in a world where everything was wrong. Now they were their own little pack; she was his Dorcha and he was her Alpha, responsible for her protection.
He heard voices. His top lip trembled, lifting off his teeth. His face was hidden in the curve of his foreleg, so the strange no-tails would not see the threat.
He kept his breathing slow and even. They would think he was still asleep.
He listened to the voices. The sounds resonated in his brain, hitting a wall. They meant nothing. He would not let them mean anything. They were not-pack.
Footsteps approached the cages. One of the voices went on speaking, its tone hardly changing. The other rose, the note of it carrying a clear message that he interpreted whether he would or no: the speaker was shocked and distressed.
An all-but soundless growl vibrated through his body. Prey sounded like that. The no-tail was afraid. He was wise to be afraid. Soon, if opportunity offered, he would be dead.
He heard another sound then, one that he had come to recognise all too well. It brought him wide awake in an instant, dropping all pretence; he was up on three legs, hurling himself against the bars of the cage, howling defiance.
The shot dropped him as it had done every time before. He fell, but the darkness did not come back. He could hear his Dorcha, awake now herself, throwing herself against the bars and screaming as he was dragged out by the no-tails, powerless to do anything but lie there as helpless as a newborn puppy as he was turned over for examination.
Maybe they understood the posture of submission. At any rate they did not hurt him when he was in it. Even his eyes were unable to shift, so that he stared upwards unblinking, trying to take in what information he could about the no-tails that surrounded him.
Most of them he had seen before. They came and went, using the device to keep him harmless when they cleaned the cages. Sometimes they stroked or prodded him, and the sound of their laughter filled him with impotent rage, so that when movement and control eventually returned to him he bit the bars till blood mingled with the saliva there.
One, however … instinct warred with the memories he denied, so that briefly he wanted to moan with fear and hatred. He knew, but did not know what he knew. He wanted to kill. Someday the no-tail would be careless, and on that day he would pay.
The other – that was the one who was afraid. It showed in his pallor, in the stiffness of his movements. He would not put up much of a fight.
They were reaching for his injured paw. In his brain a howl of denial ricocheted around the cocoon of silence in which he was held. Fearful was touching it. They were going to hurt it still more, they were going to lame him completely! It still served him sometimes, just a little, if he was careful. Now they were going to do something terrible to it and stop him using it at all.
But Fearful's paws were gentle. He turned the injured foreleg carefully to and fro, making the paw bend just a little and only in certain directions, as if he knew how it hurt when it was moved; as if he cared.
As though no-tails cared about anything!
He was speaking to The Other One. His voice said that he was no longer afraid, or at least not as afraid as he had been before. It had acquired an authority that The Other One seemed to recognise. A moment later he turned aside and from a nearby surface lifted a small cylinder that he brought close to his victim's face. The soft hiss as his dew-claw pressed the top surface sent a quiver of fear through the immobilised wolf, but next second a soft mist landed on his open eyes, quieting the stinging that had begun as the inability to blink left his corneas drying.
Fearful turned away. His voice suggested that he was giving orders. The other no-tails scattered obediently. Only The Other One remained, staring down at him thoughtfully.
Shreds of recognition identified the next thing to be taken from the table. He could not move, though he tried. He knew the darkness was coming back as soon as the thing was pressed to his neck.
Dorcha's howls were the last thing he heard.
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