Veiled Moon Shadow

Sleeping Beauty

So, we took this opportunity of Emma having been lulled to sleep in the comforting nearness of her potential mates to break free for a run. Even Simon was going to be joining us, and it was going to be more fun than usual since it was snowing. We live in a coastal forest area in California, where snow is generally considered to be rare. Though, with climate change, snow here was not as rare as it used to be, and while fun for shifters it made life for true bears and wolves more difficult with a shortage of food and resources. So, when it does snow here it turns a lot of the shifters in the area into kids who want nothing more than to get out and run and play in the snow. Snow has been falling for the better part of the day and everyone has been itching to get out and run, but with Emma home, everyone has been prohibited from letting out their were side, whether it was the wolves, or the bears if they were on our lands.

Simon hadn’t known Emma was home when he came for a visit to our home, but just like the triplets, he was drawn here like a bee to honey and looked delighted and troubled the moment he saw her. Emma was only fifteen years old but already had an hourglass figure that made other females jealous and made the four potential mates struggle with the knowledge that at only fifteen Emma was still a child regardless of how she looked. While I knew that my friends would never knowingly harm Emma, and they each made a conscious effort to treat her like the fifteen-year-old she is, I also knew that as shifters we sometimes have difficulty fighting the mate bond, even with mates that we despise as humans. However, seeing how they were drawn to one another, our father ordered me and my siblings to stay with them and make sure things did not become too inappropriate. So, all we allowed her to do was to sit between them, which was enough to make her fall asleep, so Simon carried her to bed as my other sister Claire escorted them, according to our father’s instructions.

Claire was supposed to stay with Emma while our parents went to a dinner party at the palace as my brothers, myself, and our friends went out for a run. About an hour later we began to get warnings that a trespasser had been detected near the borders but remained uncaptured. The guards didn't seem too concerned with this news, rather wanted to make sure that the pack members were on alert and knew to report sightings of any unknown people. Some might think that it was sexist for the only girl to be forced to stay at home, but if my brothers or I had stayed home our friends would have stayed in the house with Emma too and that was not acceptable to our father. He didn’t trust unmated or young males around his daughters, especially those who believed one of them was their mate. Claire being a wolf herself was not fond of staying home to babysit Emma when Emma was safely asleep in her room like Sleeping Beauty put to sleep by a spell. After all, in her opinion our father was the pack alpha and close friends with the king of the western region of wolves, what danger could Emma face in her room when her door was locked from the inside?