Trophy Cub - 8. Feast and Famine

It was still a couple hours before dawn when Kane’s SUV pulled up to the patio on the east side of the pack house.

“Hurry up and get him inside,” Kane ordered Nick, “and make sure nobody sees you. I’m going to announce to the males that the pet is sick and is under quarantine for the next two weeks so that nobody questions the condition and the… smell that he’s currently in until he can recover.”

Nick nodded and pulled the sleeping Mike out of the backseat by his arm and threw him over his shoulder once again. Nick winced at the offensively strong odor of sex and multiple lycans emanating from the human’s rear, which in his current position was right next to Nick’s face, and he realized that the back zipper of the leather shorts was still pulled down exposing the human’s raw and bleeding hole. Nick zipped him back up and hurried into the pack house and through the halls and stairways to the sub-basement.

As he hurried along the sub-basement corridor, he nearly ran into Pip who was just coming out of Laundry Room 4C. Pip’s eyes grew wide when he saw Mike slung limply over Nick’s shoulder. Nick leaned in so that his face was an inch away from Pip’s nose.

“You saw nothing. Do you understand?”

Pip nodded with a shudder and then stared at the floor and bared his neck in submission as Nick pushed past him.

Nick continued down the hall until he reached the pet’s room. Unlocking the door, he walked directly over to the corner of the room containing the showerhead. He dropped Mike from his shoulder and propped him up so that he was sitting up against the wall under the shower. He pulled the chain and a blast of cold water revived Mike with a shock.

“Scrub yourself well, filthy animal, and remove those leather clothes. You reek of the dozens of wolves who fucked you last night,” Nick taunted as Mike thrashed underneath the spray of cold water.

Mike finally stood on shaking legs, pulling himself up along the wall.

“And you reek of the Alpha, Enforcer,” Mike said, glaring at Nick through the spray of water hitting the top of his head. “Everyone in the pack is going to smell his seed inside you and you can’t wash that away.”

“Shut your whore mouth!” Nick yelled, slapping Mike across the face with the back of his hand.

Mike caught himself against the wall and continued to stare Nick down.

“Yes, they’ll smell the Alpha inside you and know that he has marked you as his bitch. The Alpha’s reputation will be fine since he simply dominated someone weaker. But you… You willingly bent over and lifted your tail for another male. What will the pack think? What would the God of the Moon say?”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Nick screamed. As Mike watched, Nick began losing control of his wolf and started to shift, ripping the seams of his shirt as his torso expanded and his mouth elongated and dropped sharp fangs. However, with great effort, Nick pulled it back and gained control of himself once more, shifting back to his fully human appearance.

Nick turned off the shower and regained his composure as he gazed calmly at Mike who maintained his steady glare. The last of the water ran down Mike’s body and dripped onto the tile floor.

“Little human pet,” Nick said calmly, “I think your time here draws to a close. The Alpha told me before I brought you back here that he planned on telling the pack that you have fallen ill and needed to be quarantined here in your room for several days so that none of the pack would witness seeing you in your current condition or smelling the scent of the great number of non-pack males on and inside your body.

“I’ll bet that you never knew, all this time, it was I who arranged the schedule and assigned which wolves were to bring you your meals each day. With you under quarantine for weeks and no sexual visitors for the foreseeable future, it would be a pity if I became distracted and ‘forgot’ to assign anyone to bring you any food to eat, and it would be an even greater pity if the water supply was somehow accidentally cut off to this room.”

Nick turned and walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned back to Mike.

“How long can you survive with just the water currently in your toilet bowl, little pet? We shall see, won’t we?”

With that final taunt, Nick exited the room for the last time and locked the door behind him.

****

Gunnar pulled into the parking lot of the truck stop diner just off the freeway exit in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, Wisconsin. He’d followed Susie’s directions in reverse to get him from the Silver Bullet back here, but now he needed to eat and devise some kind of plan to hunt down the pack that was holding the human. His human.

He opened the glove box and pulled out his cell phone, and then rooted around in the back seat, digging under his bags of clothes until he found four hefty three-ring binders filled with legal paperwork and many pages of notes in Nils’s handwriting.

“Do you want a table, or do you want to sit at the counter, honey?” the waitress asked him as he walked in carrying his stack of binders.

“If you don’t mind, darlin’, could I get the big booth over there in the corner? I’ve got a lot of stuff here I need to spread out.”

“The big booth is supposed to be saved for parties of five or more,” the waitress said, unsure whether it was worth arguing over when there were only two other tables currently occupied in the whole place, but if her manager saw her letting somebody camp out in that booth all day with a bunch of paperwork, he’d chew her ass out again.

“Tell you what,” Gunnar said flashing her a charming smile, “I plan on eating enough food for five people so does that count?”

She laughed and replied, “Sounds fine to me, hon,” as she grabbed a menu and led him back to the corner booth.

“Coffee?” she asked as Gunnar sat down and scooted his rump around the curved bench to the middle of the table.

“Please,” Gunnar replied. “Black, no cream or sugar.”

She left the menu on the table and walked off to get his coffee as Gunnar laid each of the four binders out carefully in front of him. These binders comprised the entirety of Gunnar’s real estate assets, but he had no clue as to the contents of any of them. Nils had a fondness for acquiring property over the years, and with the money that they had, Gunnar was not going to begrudge him whenever a few hundred acres in Montana or a lake house in Maine caught his eye. They had taken many, many wonderful vacations around the States over the last hundred years and they never seemed to have to stay in hotels wherever they went. Gunnar never bothered to ask if the elegant homes or the rustic cabins that they stayed in on those trips were rented for the week, or if they owned them. It was Nils’s hobby, and he didn’t pry. Nils had kept careful records including the sale documents, deeds, and meticulous notes for each property in these four binders. Now, it appeared that Gunnar was going to need to establish a short or long-term base of operations here in Wisconsin as he planned for possible war with a pack of lycan religious fanatics, and he needed to go through all these binders to see what his nearby options were.

The waitress came back with his coffee and asked if he’d had a chance to look at the menu and decide on breakfast.

“Uh, yeah, yeah…sorry,” Gunnar said as he grabbed the menu off the table and quickly scanned it. “I’ll have a full order of the loaded biscuits and gravy, the four-cheese omelet, country fried steak and eggs with an extra country fried steak, two Belgian waffles, stuffed French toast, and a double order of the ultimate hash browns on the side.”

The waitress finished writing it all down on her pad and looked up at Gunnar in disbelief.

“You weren’t kidding when you said that you’d be eating enough for five people, were you?”

“I’m a growing boy,” Gunnar said and patted his stomach. “Oh, and you may as well just bring over a whole carafe of coffee if you could. I don’t want to keep you running back and forth all morning refilling my cup.”

She hurried back to the kitchen to put in his order and Gunnar started leafing through the binders to see if he could find a section on Wisconsin in Nils’s filing system.

After a brief analysis, Gunnar was able to determine that the four binders were used to sort the real estate by time zones. Green binder for Eastern, blue for Central, purple for Mountain, and the bulging red binder combined for Pacific and Alaska time zones. Since there were only the four, Gunnar assumed that he must not own any property in Hawaii. What a shame.

Gunnar flipped through the blue binder and found the section containing Wisconsin properties. There were four to choose from. Houses in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison, a lakeside vacation home just outside of a little town called Sturgeon Bay, and fifty acres with a four-bedroom log cabin up in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest region.

After reviewing Nils’s meticulous notes on the properties, he crossed the houses in Milwaukee and Madison off the list, as those had been contracted some time ago to a long-term rental management agency, so they most likely had occupants living there. Gunnar wondered briefly if monthly payments for various rental properties were still being deposited in his bank accounts, but then shrugged and remembered why he had a trusted accountant on his payroll who was privy to his little secret to manage that sort of thing.

That left the cabin in the national forest and the house in Sturgeon Bay as possible locations for him to hole up and devise a plan of attack on the wolf pack. It would help if he knew the pack’s location so that he could choose the property within striking distance.

A light bulb went on over Gunnar’s head, and he pulled out his cell phone. Quickly scrolling through the contacts, he dialed the number of Susie Banshee, the leader of the She-Wolves in Chicago.

“Papi Bear, there better be a damn good reason why you’re calling me this early in the morning after you damn well know I was on stage till two in the morning last night,” a sleepy and agitated Susie said after answering her phone.

“Sorry, sweetie,” Gunnar said, “I wouldn’t normally bother you at this hour, except that I’ve gotten myself into a situation, and I need to pump you and the other She-Wolves for some information.”

“A situation?” Susie replied, “This situation wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain Silver Bullet bar, would it?”

“Yes, I went to the Silver Bullet last night, and I ended up tangling with a wolf who was letting the whole bar gang-bang his human sex slave in the backroom. My protective werebear nature kicked in to intervene and when I was able to get a whiff of the human’s scent, it turned out he was bear kindred and he was suffering badly.

“I demanded the wolf relinquish his claim on the kindred human, but he wasn’t willing to give him up that easy. I would have taken the human by force, but Axel the Kodiak bouncer put me in a sleeper hold and drugged me, and then explained to me bright and early this morning how starting a one-bear war with those crazy wolf packs was not a good idea. If I’m going to rescue this kindred human from the pack, I’m going to need a plan, and the first step is to find out where the pack keeping him is located.”

Susie was silent for several seconds, taking in the information that Gunnar had just dropped on her like a heavy weight. “You werebears sure know how to stir up trouble, don’t you? If you think you’re going to get that wolf to give up his human slave, I salute you, Papi. Tell me what information you have to identify this pack.”

“All I have is a name of the wolf I tangled with,” Gunnar said. “Hopefully one of you will recognize the name from one of your old packs. The name is Alpha Kane.”

“Shit, Gunnar!” Susie exclaimed. “You didn’t just tangle with any old wolf, you had to go and start something with a fucking Alpha, didn’t you? Of course you did. The name means nothing to me but let me check with the other girls. Hold on.”

As Gunnar waited for Susie to confer with the other She-Wolves, the waitress came back carrying a huge tray loaded down with his breakfast.

“OK, honey. We’ve got two waffles, stuffed French toast, cheese omelet, double meat country fried steak and eggs, full order of loaded biscuits and gravy, a double order of the ultimate hash browns, a pitcher of syrup, extra butter, extra napkins, and a carafe of coffee. Is there anything else you need right now?”

“This should keep me busy for a while, darlin’. Thank you.”

Gunnar was just starting to smear several pats of butter on his Belgian waffles when Susie returned to the phone.

“I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news,” Susie began.

“Hit me with the good news first,” Gunnar replied.

“The good news is that Alpha Kane is the Alpha of Dixie’s old pack. We marked his pack boundaries for you in hi-lighter on your map. They’re the ones who have a compound in the middle of the Mishicot State Wildlife Area, about thirty miles southeast of Green Bay, near the Lake Michigan coast.

“Now, here’s the bad news. We all have stories of what it was like in our old packs before we were banished, but you may recall that while the rest of us were pretty chatty and willing to dish all the drama that went on, Dixie stayed pretty quiet.”

“Yeah, I do remember that Dixie didn’t have as much to say as the rest of you girls,” Gunnar replied.

“Well, that’s because her pack was the absolute fucking worst. Half of the pack prim and proper females who would claw your eyes out if you crossed them without even messing up their nails or their high-fashion coture, and the other half of the pack the most depraved and degenerate bunch of male wolves in all of lycan history. Both sides willing to fight to the death for their own interpretation of what the God and Goddess of the Moon thinks they should do.

“They allowed Dixie to choose banishment, but not after weeks of torture, the likes of which we choose not to talk about. It took Dixie a long time to come out of her shell after she wandered down here to Chicago and found her true home with the She-Wolves.”

“Did Dixie give you any kind of insight as to how somebody might breach their compound security?” Gunnar asked.

“As a matter of fact, she did,” Susie stated. “The pack house is always guarded and occupied around the clock, but there is one night a month when the entire pack gathers as a group outdoors and leaves the house empty and unprotected. I’m guessing you know what night that is.”

“The full moon,” Gunnar said.

“That’s right,” Susie confirmed. “The one night each month that you could get inside the pack house and be able to find and rescue your human, the entire pack will be filling the surrounding forest, hunting and running and howling at the moon. That’s almost one hundred wolves. You’ll have to sneak past them all to get to the house, and then sneak past them all again after you’ve freed him.”

Gunnar sighed. “At least now I know the ‘where’ even if I don’t know the ‘how’ just yet. Thank you so much Susie. I owe you a big one.”

“Yes, I’ve seen your big one,” Susie quipped. “Just let me know if you need any help, Papi Bear. We love you and don’t want to see you get into any trouble with those wolves, you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, baby. I’ll talk to you again soon. Gunnar out.”

He pressed the end call button on his phone, and then began shoving giant forkfuls of food into his mouth, pouring syrup over everything as he went.

The waitress and the cook peeked around the kitchen door and watched Gunnar eat.

“Do you really think he’s going to be able to eat all of that food?” the cook asked the waitress as they saw Gunnar shove a half of a waffle into his mouth in one bite while flipping through the pages in one of his binders that was spread out to one side of his many plates of food and then turning to study a map that was spread out on the other side.

“Half my tips say that he’s going to get finished eating that lot, and then he’s going to realize that he forgot to order any bacon. If I was you, I’d throw about a pound of it on the griddle right now and get it started,” the waitress replied, elbowing the cook in the ribs.