Misty II

[54] Wait-IV

"She'll come around."

For the first time, I hear his heart skipping a beat. Brother Salome barely lies. But when he worries, he chooses hope over truth.

I shake my head.

"Three days are enough to understand it," I say while gulping hard. My heart shakes as I tell him, "From the very full moon night, I have been looking for her. There is no scent like such. The kind of one. . ."

Salome looks at me. I don't. He'll see the pain easily. My heartbeats are rising with each blink.

". . . the one that makes you forget everything and you just know that it is her." He completes it for me.

Nothing like this happened when I smelled the scents of all eligible unmated females for me around the pack.

"Every part of the forests here, every mountain, every house." I speak lowly.

Salome is not ready to give up in making me feel better. "Sometimes, we are too eager to look in the eye patiently and feel it."

I shake my head again.

"I wasn't eager, brother. I was patient while sniffing in to their scents. I am being patient. But I am restless too." I tell him the truth that I find hard to share with King and Robin.

I will always be the younger pup to them. They will not keep it serious and try to cheer me up by making it funny.

Not finding my mate after the first shift is not funny.

"What if she. . ." The breathes leave my chest. ". . . what if she is from outside the border?"

He sighs. He knows.

I blink in disappointment at the Moon Goddess.

My eyes move up to look far at her shining above the mountains. Why would she do it to me?

Miggy was gone. With her, Mother's liveliness has gone too. Because of Mother, Father has stopped being enthusiastic too. Every month we have been burying the stillborn pups. Most of them being males.

It's hard to celebrate even a moment of happiness.

I was wrong at thinking that my first shift would bring a smile to father's face. He was only proud. But it felt too hard for him to celebrate it in the same way he did for King and Robin. Those were old times. The good times.

It is only Lysar, Tara and her grand pups who make Mother look forward to next day. How would I look into her blank eyes after she'd know that my mate will be a foreigner too? I will have to force her into getting caged in my world too.

I'd have to make my mate give up her world for me because of the border. I'd have to see her suffer the same ordeal that mother and Nysa went through all these years and it was still going on.

"Doesn't that make life more adventurous?" Salome says with a smile and a pat on my shoulder. "Loosen those jaws. This is nothing to be angry or disappointed about. How many new things there would be to learn from a foreigner?"

My head lowers with his each word. Did I check every house? Every part of the valley? Did I look for her in the caves? I did. I did.

"Nysa always has so many stories to tell from her pack. The way her words thicken in anger, fascinates us. Natasha loves it when Nysa puts ribbons in her braids. Aunts says that your mother taught the pack to discard sacrifices and instead hunt only on the times when the beast demands it. Your mother's dishes are being passed on to next generations of the families of this pack."