Wheeling Gull Isle maybe it’s not the moon at all

She tried.

She tried, but she couldn’t compete with the limitless fire of his unflinching stare. Coelacanth wrenched her gaze away from the Earthstalker’s with a stuttering breath that might have dissolved into a sob if she held no audience and could allow herself such weakness. Before Komodo, though, she spent it on a frustrated huff. Her Neptune eyes glittered with ire seldom aroused, but it was clear she did not consider herself dethroned. Feathered tail swept high and proud, a scythe-like banner above her squarely set hips and back; finely drawn head lifted; and tufted ears strained forward upon her velveteen crown. The bridge of her fox-fine muzzle wrinkled as she gathered the frayed scraps of everything she wanted to say and flung them at him in an inelegant rush.

“Modo, you — you, no — ” The words hiccupped and jolted from her in uneven spurts. “Am not your b-breed-bitch — nor daughter — ” Oh! She hated the roughhewn sound of it. She hated that she could only whisper when the tension in her muscles made her want to shout. “No claim!” she cried at last, the silk of her winnowing whisper-whine knifed and knotted with strife. The sound might as well have been a weak cough for all the sound it possessed, but Seelie herself was as eloquent as an actress in a silent film. Her hackles were up, rippling down her spine like a cresting wave, and her tail lashed like a furious housecat’s. Just who did he think he was? Why should he think that her desire and willingness to cuddle with him equated any kind of currency?

“No claim — my love, mine!” she tacked on. The atramentous ingénue believed, perhaps erroneously, that Stockholm had been fully aware of what he had taken on when he’d agreed to keep her. Seelie’s love was too free, too boundless, to be contained. What made the Gampr different from the other males in his Groenendael’s life was choice. In another life, perhaps she could have loved Aditya or Komodo the same way she loved the Volkodav — but the giving of herself had already been done. She had chosen to tether herself to Stockholm and he had chosen to do likewise, and no matter who she cuddled with or romped with, no matter who she hunted with or led with, he alone was her mate. It was in his very large prints that she would place her very small paws — and when spring rose at last from her hibernal bed, it was his children she would bear.