Morningside Cuesta hehe the sun

His tail whisked at Akuti's offer. "Maybe you should," he said seriously, thinking that it might be taken better from someone other than him. Maybe it would sound less like nagging if she heard it from Akuti, and if it was phrased like a conversation rather than a command.

Grayday had never been great at conversation.

"So that's Dawn, Addie, Sunny, and Kieran squared away," he said, checking off pack-members in his mind. "Now we just gotta see how Hawthorn does at hunting. I think he's older than the rest of the kids, but I don't know how much experience he has."

They'd come upon the Mudminnow river. Grayday's nose twitched as he caught his daughter's scent, but he'd already known that she spent a lot of time out here, on her own. Although it worried him to have her wandering, he knew there was very little he could do about it. Eventually, his kids would realize they had no reason to listen to him, and he had to play his cards right and choose his battles to make sure that day came as late as it possibly could.

"That girl is gonna be the death of me," he muttered, sitting down at the edge of the water and looking out over the river. The moon was reflecting off the water in a way that made everything around it hard to see, but he looked anyway. At least it was something.