Dinner was uncomfortable.
I'm not sure how to explain it, but it was just really uncomfortable.
I think the most uncomfortable person at the table was Bell.
Maybe he was embarrassed about waking up stoked.
I asked him if he were in the middle of a fight, but he said no. Maybe a bad dream?
Mate looked away and refused to talk about it.
Well, if he had to be that way about it.
Mate had changed to the usual jeans and black long-sleeved T-shirt.
He ate very little. He had mumbled something about having just eaten in real life.
He didn't sit next to me either.
Our dining table was a round glass one, so sitting around it were Dad, Mum, me, Savy, Killion, and Mate.
I would have liked to blame Mate for the all-around general awkwardness at the dining table, except that Mate was in his usual moody self by the time dinner was served.
It was just that I would look up and catch him just staring at me. It was a little unnerving.
What? Did he not like Little Miss Bossy? Naturally, my hair would flare back.
And whenever Dad or Killion noticed Mate staring or my hair flaring in offense, they would try to make small talk to distract Mate.
Except that Dad turned out to be highly unskilled at small talk. I'm not even sure why he was trying.
And Killion, the Jedi master of small talk, met his match in Mate, who simply refused to cooperate. The stubborn mule that Mate was.
At one point, Mate stood up and said, "I'm just going to wake up."
And Dad and Killion both stood up to stop him.
"Wait!" Dad said.
Mate paused.
But Dad had nothing.
"You don't have to go," he said eventually. He looked at Killion to provide some kind of excuse.
"Yes, actually, the Alpha and the other Betas haven't had much luck getting info from the rogues we caught," Killion said. "We were going to give it one more shot before disposing of them. How about the two of us show them some Lorent magic?"
"You show them." Rebel shrugged, sounding completely uninterested.
"I'm under oath not to outside Lorent lands." Killion shrugged. "You're not."
"Why?" I asked.
"It's very mysterious what the Lorents do to our rogues, isn't it?" Killion asked.
That was true.
There were always rumors, though—wild and crazy rumors.
It had been so bad—the rumors about what happened in the Green Packland dungeons, specifically the Lorent ones—that the High Council had to demand the bodies for examination.
But the postmortem results were always bewildering.
They all had their necks broken but nothing else. It was as if they didn't even struggle. Even the chemical tests came out clean. No drugs. Most of them were, at worst, a little dehydrated, but none of them were kept long enough to be starved or malnourished.
And these were bodies that were disposed from their dungeons.
Why did you even bring rogues all the way there just to break their necks? How did you even transport a rogue to your dungeon without even a small scratch or cuff mark or anything? It was as if the rogue had peacefully followed you into the dungeon to have their neck broken.
Of course it was highly suspicious.
Although the kill-on-sight law in the Green Packlands could not be revoked for "historical reasons" (Dad had rebuked them, saying it was more for security reasons for the rest of the continent). In general, our packlands were infamously cruel and unfriendly toward rogues and vamps.
These crazy cases that came out of the Lorents' dungeons didn't help our overall image.
Oversized barbarian wolves—that's what they called us.
I had a hard time for a while in elementary school. You know, since I attended school outside at West Mountain. It didn't help that I was taller than most of the kids in school back then. I really stood out.
Once, a bunch of Lycan kids surrounded me at the cafeteria and called to each other, "Look! It's a barbarian wolf!"
"Say something, Barbarian Wolf!" one of the kids shouted. "Come! Listen, the barbarian wolf is going to say something."
I didn't like being stared at. It made me feel like an animal in the zoo. So I just walked away from the circle and didn't look back.
I avoided those kids for a while.
But over time, I forgot their faces, and then I became friends with Jake and the other guys and forgot all about it.
"We play the bad guys; they enjoy the safety net our lands provide them." Dad had fumed at the articles calling us barbarian wolves. He didn't know about what happened in school.
Dad was extra mad at the injustice of it all when the neighboring packs with more humane "catch and release" laws started to release their worst rogues here.
But Dad wasn't the only Alpha in the Green Packlands who was angry. One of the minor packs in our land got fed up and had a major "accident" where the escorting warriors of the rogues on the catch and release programme were accidentally mistaken for rogues and killed on sight when they tried releasing the rogues on our packlands.
Terrible. We were terrible. The news those days had said we were terrible. A land of vicious oversized barbarian wolves.
But today, no other colored packland could match our contribution to the continent's education and healthcare systems.
And lately our GDP per capita had also been skyrocketing... thanks to Gate City's boon.
Meanwhile, the civilian crime rate was almost zero—who would dare come to the vicious oversized barbarian wolf land to commit crimes—especially since, besides the temporary jail in Gate City, the other detainment centers were our infamous dungeons?
Of course, common civilian law enforcement did not utilize dungeon facilities except for specific exceptions.
If anyone wanted to get in, they'd have to commit some violently criminal act on our packlands—and have no pack that would take responsibility for their actions and punishment. (Or if you are human, you'd need a human government to enforce the human equivalent punishment for your offense.)
Either that or you'd have to be from a pack that was at war with ours, and we had reason to suspect you might be harboring intel that threatened the security of our pack. At this point in time, our packs had no war or grudges with any of the other packs on the continent.
Or you were a rogue or vampire—and only if we thought you had information that we needed. (Otherwise you would be killed on sight.)
Anyway, if you were a wolf or human here to conduct business, or shop at our department stores and many specialty stops, or attend concerts or exhibitions, or whatever normal person would choose to do, the Green Packlands were one of the safest places to be. Even for a free wolf, as long as you had the necessary ID on you.
We attracted a lot of businesses with our stable infrastructure and safe environment. As a result, employment was readily available too.
And suddenly, we weren't that terrible.
The economics magazine lauded our forward thinking and didn't mention our dark, barbarous laws.
Another article in Reader's Digest had one travel author reflect on the cost of safety after visiting Gate City, concluding that it might be worth it.
Dad said every economy has its ups and downs. And he expected our zero-tolerance vamp and rogue law to be lauded or condemned depending on our financial performance.
It's one of those adult things I didn't understand.
Dad tried to explain: it's like how everyone called the Yellow Packlands sneaky and underhanded for their information collection until they became the Gold Packlands, well renowned for their intelligence and business acumen.
"But that's not right!" I argued.
"In this world, very few things are black or white," Dad had said.
Which was a problem for me, since more than one person had scolded me for seeing everything in only black and white.
I see blue too. And the other colors just fine.
But they meant the gray of morality and other metaphorical stuff that I couldn't see or touch.
Stupid intangibles of life!
Back to the dinner table, because as much as I preferred to escape into lectures about our packland's barbaric judicial inner workings, there was only so long that my wolf could pretend that Mate was not staring at me.
By now, Mum had resorted to making small chitchat with anyone who would participate.
Killion was very cooperative.
They talked about the weather and the families Mum had visited at the destitute home. Killion was surprisingly connected and seemed to have already been introduced to a number of the widows there.
Mum had been training Savy to control and use her wolf powers since she had shifted. "Maybe you can come with Savy and me this Sunday."
Savy looked down at her plate. "Mum, I don't want to go."
She totally didn't want to go. I mean, she actually said it out loud in front of everyone.
Mum started talking about how necessary it was to train regularly. Once shifted, our newly shifted wolves tend to grow in their power exponentially, and Mum wanted Savy to have it under control.
Mate was still staring at me.
Dad had given up distracting him and decided to focus on eating his meal. I decided to take Dad's cue and do the same. Food wasn't going to eat itself, you know.
There was a knock on the door despite the presence of a doorbell, and Beta Lucas and Ben entered, looking grim.
The rest of us at the table looked rather relieved that dinner had to be cut short.
Dad updated Beta Lucas that Rebel and Killion were going to have a "shot at it."
"Well, might as well," Beta Lucas said. "We'll be disposing of them later anyway."
Rebel's wolf seemed to have settled now that his mind was on the rogues. "What do you want to know?"
"Whatever they know about the Rogue King and, if possible, any connection to Beta Lorent and the recent attacks on our pack," Beta Lucas said.
Rebel acknowledged with a curt nod. "Let's do it then."
The men rose to go. I followed.
"Sam!" Mum called exasperated.
Then she looked at the men, who had all turned around the moment their Luna sounded less than content. "Isn't anyone going to at least warn her?"
The men looked at Rebel.
"Princess, it'll be scary," Rebel said.
"I'm not scared of the rogues," I said.
"I wasn't referring to the rogues," Rebel said.
"You should at least change your clothes, Little Miss Bossy," Savy reminded me.
"Just a sec!" I ran into the bedroom and changed into jeans and a dark long-sleeved T-shirt. Everyone else seemed to be wearing variations of this. I just topped it with my lucky jacket, and I was good to go.
The men were waiting around the front door and lift lobby. Killion shut the front door when I got out to meet them.
We squeezed into the lift—Beta Lucas, Ben, Dad, Killion, Mate, and me. It was undeniably crowded.
Mate was closest to me and had me boxed in against the lift wall, reminding me of earlier, except he wasn't growling at me. I realized he was using his body as a shield to block out standing space for me so that I would not be touching any of the other guys in the lift. Talk about overprotective.
He moved away the moment there was more space once the lift door opened.
Dad led the way down a series of corridors. We passed the training hall. To be honest, I had almost never ventured below the training hall level.
Once, when I was young, I met a rat here.
It was so large I thought it was a cat.
"Kitty, how did you get down here?" I asked.
The kitty had no fur on its tail and smelled like a rogue cat. And then the kitty squeaked at me. Its sharp front teeth were very uncute, and its eyes flashed red. Urrghhhh!
I hadn't been down to these basement levels since.
Eventually, we reached the end of our storage rooms. Beta Lucas used a key card and PIN number to unlock a metal door at one end.
I had a bad feeling.
I paused at the door.
Everything was telling me to stop here.
Rebel, who was walking just next to me, noticed my pause.
He passed me with a smirk. "Welcome to the dark side of the moon, Princess."