The Last Tail Of The Fallen Luna

The Highest Bid

Chapter 3: The Highest Bid

Seraphina's POV

When I woke up there was the smell of damp concrete and another metal scraping underneath, perhaps blood, dried and old to the floor. I could feel the pain in my head where he hit me, and for a split second I forgot why I was lying on cold ground rather than a hospital bed.

Not too long after, it returned to me. The papers. Kael's silence. The trees. The rogues.

I opened my eyes against my will.

It was a dark room with just a few dim bulbs hanging on wires above and it took me a few moments to see the shapes around me. Cages. They all were silent and still, some holding two or three bodies at once. Wolves. Dozens of them were chained or caged, none of them moving more than they needed to.

I woke up too quickly, and my head whirled.

"Where am I?" I could only croak out my voice. No one answered. "Please. Someone. Where is this?

A woman with empty eyes and a ripped dress turned her face away from me, the nearest wolf,

I scooted up to the bars that divided us. “Talk to me, please. What's happening here?"

She said nothing.

I went back to a man a couple cages further away, then a boy who must have been about sixteen years old, then anyone with eyes I could see. Each and every one of them recoiled or simply looked through me as though I were not there. Some of the things they had been made to do, some of the things they had already had to experience in this place had taken the words out of their mouths.

I stopped trying. I just sat back against the cold bars and waited as there was nothing else to do.

The doors of the warehouse opened sometime later, and two men came in, broad-shouldered, with the ease of the men who owned everything they looked at. They began to file down the rows, and without a word of explanation they pulled cage doors open, dragged out wolves and pushed them into two lines.

When they arrived at my cage, one of them knelt and grabbed my chin and turned my face side to side, as if checking a cow.

“This one!” he replied to the other. “Get her out. — Now.”

Before I could fight back, strong arms grabbed me. "Let go of me!"

They didn't. They dragged me out of the cage and into a corridor to a smaller room where two women stood with basins of water and folded cloths. They stripped me and bathed me and put me in a plain white slip, all without speaking a word to me, as if I was furniture being cleaned rather than a person.

At the end one of them tied a wooden tag around my neck. I scanned the number on the wood.

"What is this?" I reached out to get the tag. "What is this for?"

One of the old traders stood leaning against the door, watching. He laughed, as he did, softly and with amusement.

“You should be honored.”

"Honored?" I stared at him. "For what?"

"A nine-tailed wolf…well…three tailed wolf." He looked at my 3 tails that were curling weakly against my back. “There are still just a handful of them remaining, but you're going to make us a fortune tonight.”

"Please." I didn't like my voice breaking, how fast my anger turned to begging. “Please let me go, I don't belong here. I have a home—"

“No more, you don't,” he said, and turned away.

I begged anyway. I pleaded with the people who put me in my clothes; I pleaded with the guards who escorted me out of the room; I pleaded with everyone who came close enough to hear me; and no one heard me, no one looked at me.

We were put in the back of a covered transport and the doors opened once more and I stood behind a stage in a huge underground hall that I couldn't see the end of. There was a lot of noise in the air, and occasional, low, grumbled voices from a crowd I couldn't see, but they were interrupted by an occasional crack of the auctioneer's gavel every few minutes.

Behind the curtain I could see wolves dragged on and on to a lit platform, paraded before the buyers who numbered like they were bargaining over cattle. I saw a young woman dragged off the stage sobbing, sold for a not insignificant price. I saw a man who was an older man standing there frozen and silent and men with fancy coats yelling bids over his head.

I pressed my hand to my mouth, because if I let myself make a sound I thought I might scream and never stop.

Then I heard it.

"Lot Forty-Seven."

A hand was thrust into my back, pushing me forward.

“That's you," whispered the guard behind me. "Move."

I walked out on the platform, hit by the light, had to blink it out of my eyes, and when I came into focus, there before me were rows and rows of faces that I couldn't see in, all staring at me as the traders stared at them.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” the auctioneer roared. He was like a lion roaring over me, as if I were a prize animal. “This is not just any offering, it is a nine-tailed bloodline that was once nine tails strong, but now has only three tails, but that doesn't mean it is weak, does it? Think of what this bloodline could do for your pack, your line, your future.”

There was a lot of laughter in the crowd. To my left, a man shouted out a number and right away, another man joined him.

I stood there, embarrassed, my arms around myself as if I could embrace what little dignity I had left, and men who didn't know my name discussed my value.

“Do I hear more?” said the auctioneer. lThis blood line is rare; it doesn't come twice in a generation—l

Another number. Higher. Then another.

"Going once—"

One of the voices in the rear of the room rose from among the others, and the room went silent as they listened.

"Going twice—"

I closed my eyes, I couldn't bear to see the gavel fall, couldn't bear to know which stranger now believed he owned me.

That's when the gavel failed to hit the ground.

The rear doors of the hall burst open into the hall.

The sound of screaming and the bodies rushed for the exits, overturned chairs and the lights above the stage swinging wildly on their chains. As the shapes crashed through the smoke and shattered glass, wolves in their fighting form tore into the guards around the platform, I stumbled backward.

But again, the men who dragged me here seized my arms and pulled me away from the stage and from the chaos in the crowd, but before we could move more than a few steps, we were engulfed by the fighting.

Around me snarling and yelling started to go up and up. I was pushed in one direction and then pulled in another and found myself stuck between people I couldn't see clearly enough to tell whether they were friend or foe. I felt my hand on my wrist and felt it pulled and I lost my balance completely and ended up in the center of the battle, it was impossible to determine direction.

Wolves were more numerous and stronger than the auction house guards could handle and they tore the rogues apart, one by one, until the last of them was ripped out of my presence. Roughly I was hauled up by some hands, strong, firm and before I knew what was going on, I was being carried away from the collapsed stage and out into the open air.

I lifted my gaze to the strangers around me – their faces still in shadow, their bodies still morphing from wolf to man – and I didn't know whether I'd just been rescued, or just taken by another stranger.

"Who are you? What's happening?"