Freeing the Warrior's Deceived Mate

Amelia POV “When are you going to let me come with you?” I demanded, crossing my arms over my chest. I had this argument with my guardian, Dale, at least once a month. This time, much like all the others, I was determined to succeed. “Soon,” Dale replied, like he always did. He didn’t bother removing the toothpick from his mouth when he talked, and he smelled of cigarettes and body odor. It was thick and acrid, but I was quite used to it. “We just have to pick the right mission. You know your worth, girl. We can’t risk losing you if things go south.” I groaned, turning back to the dishes. I went to Dale’s trailer once a week to clean up. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it himself, he just wasn’t very good at it. When the smell of the dishes made me gag upon entry, I knew it was time for me to invade his space and spruce it up for him. “You say that every time I ask, and I’ve been asking for years now. I’m the one telling you where these ‘treasures’ are. You’d think I should be able to go help you retrieve them.” “Baby girl, listen,” he said, removing the toothpick from his mouth and throwing it at a trash can. He missed, and it landed among a pile of similarly thrown toothpicks on the floor. He scowled at the mess, then turned his attention back to me. “You’ve got a gift. Without it, the whole pack is doomed, plain and simple. That’s why we got the rules we got. You stay with the pack at all times. The day we take you on a mission, it will be the right mission. A safe mission.” I rolled my eyes. I was very aware of how little we had in comparison to the other packs. Other packs had huge mansions for packhouses, sprawling fields of land and woods for them to run in, to protect and guard. They had stable jobs, connections in the human world. Our pack was small and weak. We lived out of RVs, campers, trailers, and we moved out once every few months, in a large caravan, going somewhere new. In my lifetime alone, I've lived in every state. Some of them, twice now. The longest we’d ever lingered was six months. To help with expenses, other pack members took food service jobs, or handyman work. My job was to stay here and to stay safe. In every generation of wolves, a handful may receive a special gift, or talent. I was one such wolf, and my talent was sensing lost treasures. Just by looking at a map, I could sense where 'bouts treasures were. If I focused on it long enough, more details would come to me in a dream. I would take that information and pass it along to Dale, or to my Alpha, Rhyner, and they would retrieve and pawn off the treasure. Sometimes they were quite valuable and bought food and paid the electricity bill for months. Other times, not so much. “Aren’t all of these missions safe, though?” I asked. “You always wait for the treasures that have been forgotten for ages. The stuff in landfills, or buried, or dumped in lakes and rivers. What could be so dangerous about collecting them?” “Oh, you know, Amelia,” Dale said, scratching his beard. “Rogues are everywhere nowadays, and if one of them ever got you…” “If one of them did, I’m still a werewolf!” I argued, turning. “I have fangs and claws just like the rest of you!” I threw down a spatula, well aware that I was being more than a little childish. “I can fight with the best of them.” “Best of the teenagers maybe,” Dale said with a laugh. He dug around his cluttered side table for a moment, then lit a cigarette. He took a long drag and exhaled, filling the trailer with smoke. It filled my lungs and burned my eyes, and I took off the dish gloves and threw them on the counter, ready to make a hasty exit to avoid the inevitable coughing fit. He motioned for me to wait just as I was stepping down out of the trailer. “Amelia,” he said, with a sigh. “This next mission… the one with the damn cave or whatever. We’ll bring you along, okay?” I felt a surge of excitement. I could have hugged him if he weren’t poisoning the air around him as we spoke. “Thank you! You won’t regret it!” I said, sprinting out before he had a chance to change his mind. I took the long way back to my own trailer. The camp was a lively place. There was always a fire going, always food cooking, songs playing, stories being told. The older women taught the young children to string jewelry and told them stories of the old days, when werewolves were freer, and humans weren’t so prominent. Other children ran about playing a game called Red Riding Hood, where wolves stalked Little Red, and another child was designated as the Huntsman, who hunted the wolves. Our trailers were always fixed in circles. The strongest warriors parked theirs along the outside. The working wolves parked in the middle, and in the very center, were women, children, and those most important to the pack’s function. My trailer was in the very center, next to Alpha Rhyner’s. He said he wanted me as far away from the fighting, and as close as possible to him if rogues ever saw fit to attack us. I greeted the pack members on my way home. They always seemed to stop what they were doing and talk to me. Dale told me it was because they respect me as a valued member of the pack, even if my only contributions were pointing at a map. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but I did enjoy my brief talks with my packmates. I made it to the trailer thirty minutes later, even if it was only a five-minute walk to my trailer from Dale’s. I was hesitant to go inside, so I took my little water pail and watered my potted plants. They were herbs for cooking. I was a decent chef, but I was learning that fresh herbs tasted better, and fresh herbs were expensive. Seeds, on the other hand, were relatively cheap. I’d asked for a few books on gardening, and voila! Portable herb garden. When I’d thoroughly watered and praised all of my plants, I opened the door. My trailer was a dark, lonely, solitary place. Only a select few were allowed to come and go: Dale, my friend Bridgett, Alpha Rhyner and Luna Freilla. It took a lot of convincing to get Bridgett on the list, but what really earned her the place of honor was all the times she got caught sneaking in anyway. When they realized they couldn’t separate us, they decided to go ahead and allow it. I avoided turning on the lights- electricity was expensive- and instead opened all the curtains as wide as I could. Every inch of daylight was valuable, as far as I was concerned. Much of the trailer had been left the way my father had it. Not that there was much to rearrange. He had a few photos nailed to the wall of us when I was much younger. Some even included Dale and Bridgett. His CD rack, which used twine to hold the fragile CDs in place when the RV was in motion, was left in place, with all of his CDs, and even a few of my own. Stacked everywhere on shelves made of unpainted and unfinished wood, were books. I didn’t have a television, only my books. Most of my books were tales of wonderful, far-off lands, with magic and adventures, pirates, and knights. And princesses. I didn’t envy their burdens and responsibilities, but I was jealous of one thing. Every princess seemed to find her Prince Charming. “I’ll never find mine at this rate,” I muttered, picking up the book I’d finished just yesterday and putting it on an empty spot on my bookshelf. I had space for maybe three more books before I’d need a new shelf built. I could practically hear Dale’s complaints now. Wood is expensive. Ain't nobody got time to be makin' shelves here. No, I will not try to model something Birdie found on gods-damned Pintrest. A sudden knock on the door caught my attention, and it opened before I could so much as move to answer it. “Hey, Ames,” Bridgett’s nasally voice called. She stepped up the front step and entered the trailer. She had a brown paper sack in her hand, and she offered it up freely. “I had to do some shopping today, and I found some books you might like. I thought I would stop by and drop them off.” “Oh! Thank you!” I said, accepting the back and pulling the books out without waiting. The Cursed Maid, Love in the Mystic Jungle and The Queen’s Fool would fill those last slots, it would seem. “You’ve got such weird tastes, but it’s surprisingly easy to pick out what you like,” Bridgett laughed, flopping onto one of the benches. “And I appreciate you for it,” I replied, stacking the books on my foldable kitchen table. I kept it down when we weren’t traveling. “The ones Dale brings me are strangely smutty.” She wrinkled her nose, “That’s awkward.” “Awkward to receive them from Dale, sure, but I don’t mind them so much. You should try one.” “No thanks,” Bridgett said with a laugh. “Reading is your schtick. I’ve got my schtick tonight.” “A party?” I asked, perking up. She saw the light in my eyes. “Oh, no, Ames. Don’t start.” “Oh, come on,” I whined. “Take me with you. It’s so boring being at camp all the time.” “If Alpha Rhyner catches me, he’ll kill me. Absolutely not,” she said. I rolled my eyes. Alpha Rhyner wasn’t like the other alphas. He didn’t have the bloodline, like so many others. He’d built this pack and earned the title through democracy. People followed him because they respected him- and the reason they respected him was because they didn’t have to worry about him killing them over small infractions. “You know that’s not true,” I said. “Besides, we’ve done it before, and we didn’t get caught. Remember Oklahoma?” “Ugh. You always bring up Oklahoma,” Bridgett replied. “If I’d known you were in my backseat, I wouldn’t have taken you!” “And if I can sneak past Birdie Johnson, the sneakiest sneak ever to have sneaked, then I think I can get past the gammas unnoticed,” I said, poking her side. “C’mon. Please?” Bridgett looked conflicted. “I’m not going alone. Kyle will be there. You know how he worships the ground Alpha walks on. He’ll tell him for sure.” “He doesn’t need to know, you know,” I replied. “Come on, it’ll be fun!” Bridgett rocked on her feet. Finally, she threw her hands up. “You know what, Ames? You do what you do. I’m going to pretend this conversation never happened.” She walked to the door and glanced back, “We’re leaving in an hour. Kyle leaves his truck keys in a magnet box under the tailgate.” Yes! She stepped down, and I scrambled to get ready. My closet was sad, to say the least. I grabbed my least ratty T-shirt and some jeans. Modeling it, I realized I looked far too plain. Birdie always dressed up for her parties, and tonight, I would do the same. You never know when you’ll meet Prince Charming, after all. I cut the bottom half of the T-shirt away and cut it into ribbon strips, exposing just enough midriff to be enticing. For the jeans, I cut away everything under mid-thigh. It looked much better than before, and looked especially good with my old ratty converse. Instead of looking like I had a moth-eaten wardrobe, now I just looked like I had a more alternative style. Next was the hardest part- the sneaking. It was dusk, which was a great time to sneak around. There were a lot of long shadows, and people were more concerned with cleaning up supper than where I was going. Plus, Birdie’s trailer was in this direction, so even if I did get caught, it would be easy to lie my way out of it. As I wound through the shadows, I heard a voice. Deep, husky, and gravelly from smoking, I would recognize Alpha Rhyner’s voice anywhere. “You told her what?” He growled. “It’s a cave retrieval, Alpha,” Dale said with a sigh. “It ain’t no big deal. The girl needs to stretch her legs every once in a while. If we keep putting it off, she’ll start getting sus-” “Hush,” Alpha Rhyner said, suddenly. I panicked. Should I just walk in front of them normally and lie about going to Birdie’s trailer? Or should I hide? If I hid, I wouldn’t have to talk to Alpha, but if I walked, he might keep me too long, and I could miss Birdie and Kyle leaving. I hesitated too long and lost my chance to choose. “Amelia,” Alpha Rhyner said, appearing before me. Our Alpha was tall, almost six foot two, and ruggedly handsome. He had a constant look of disapproval that I had come to accept was just his face. “What are you doing outside of your trailer at this hour?” “Movie night at Birdie’s, Alpha sir!” I said, forcing enthusiasm into my voice. “Why can’t you do movie night at your trailer?” he asked. “Amelia doesn’t have a television, remember?” Dale said, though when Alpha wasn’t looking in my direction, he gave me a once over with a look of pure, unfiltered suspicion. Leave it to Dale to know I was up to something. Alpha Rhyner nodded, “Would you like us to get you one? I’m not a fan of you being so close to the edge,” he said. “It would be better for you to have movie nights in your trailer. Or even mine.” “Oh, well,” I hesitated. Dad had always said television rots the brains. Books were better. He home schooled me, made sure I could read and write and knew basic science. It was more than some kids around here got, and I was thankful for it. “I… suppose. If it would make you happy, Alpha Rhyner.” He smiled a crooked smile and ruffled the hair I’d spent all of ten minutes schooling into place. “You’re a good kid, Amelia. Have fun.” “Will do!” I said, jogging off in the direction of Birdie’s trailer. I wasn’t a kid anymore- I was almost twenty. Far past the age to start my teenage rebellion, but hey, you’ve got to start sometime. Living in a box was starting to drive me crazy. Besides, Birdie only partied with humans. How dangerous could it be?