Just a Wolf

Dominic

I am driving the car with Alpha Ross, Beta Nolan, and Evan. Ross is in the front with me again, turning around to speak with Nolan, discussing the rogues. They ask Evan a few questions about what Corinne told us, but nobody talks to me while I drive.

Good. I’m just a wolf. What do I know?

I remember everything Corinne said, and how much compassion my mate was obviously feeling for her since the moment they met. When Amelia first said, at the cafe in Arcata, that she wanted to try to help the rogue, I thought perhaps it was my fate to be mated to a crazy person, but now I realize that I am fated to love a brilliant, empathetic, insightful person, who will never lead me wrong. I will follow her lead in everything we do. I trust her completely.

I am able to find the turnoff to the River Moon lodge, and pull up to the front, the other three cars rolling in behind me.

We are greeted again by Alpha Kanen, shocking as ever with his blond hair and Nordic appearance, looking exactly like Thor’s twin. Janine is standing with him on the porch, watching as we start pulling the gear out of the cars and bringing it inside. She gives me a little smile and a nod. She might be a Luna now, but I’m glad that she still remembers that we’ve always been friends.

We stack everything up in the living room. Kanen and Janine have a couple of packs here too, so they obviously have gotten their own gear together.

When we’re all inside, Kanen says, “Okay, here’s the plan. We all shift here, run out to the cave, then shift back to human. Everyone going inside will get dressed there. You will stay human in the cave unless there is reason to use your wolf form, but with the gear that has been assembled that probably won’t be necessary.”

We all look around at each other, nodding, ready to get going. Ross adds, “Kanen and I, and a couple of others, will be guarding the entrance. I’m not sure yet who it will be, but I see a couple of likely candidates.” A few people look at each other in confusion, not having seen how little the entrance is. Ross clarifies with a grin, “The entrance is small. Anyone unable to fit inside will be a guard.”

I hear a couple of “Ahhhs”.

Janine says to the handful of women who are with us, “Ladies, if you’ll grab your packs and follow me?” She leads them upstairs to shift in private.

Most of the rest of us strip naked, stuff our clothing into the spare bags, then shift. Kanen and Ross wait until we are all ready, help us get into the carrying packs, fasten the straps around us securely, then shift themselves. They just carry light packs in their teeth with their clothing.

We follow the Alphas straight to the cave. I could have found it myself since I’ve been there, but of course I wouldn’t dream of trying to get out ahead of the leaders.

Soon we have all shifted back into humans, the ladies off behind some trees to get dressed, and are assembled at the tiny entrance in the rocks. Theo and Evan and I are all wearing the wetsuits that we had used for surfing. We had wondered if it would be necessary, but part of what Corinne told us is that the cave ends about half a mile away from the entrance in a deep pool. We intend to dive in, see if there is any other outlet. The rogues apparently hadn’t gone further than the pool, but we want to know the full extent of the cave.

Ross says, “Dominic, I want you to go in first.”

Oh, okay. I nod, shrug my pack off my shoulders and drop it on the ground next to the entrance, then start wiggling my way backwards into the hole. It’s easier not buck naked this time, the wetsuit preventing me from getting scraped on the rocks. And it’s better knowing what to expect, realizing that there isn’t a huge drop at the bottom.

Ross says, “Everyone watch how Dominic does it,” and all eyes turn to me.

Great. An audience.

I quickly put my head down, jiggle my ass into the hole, cling onto the edge for a moment with my elbows, lift my arms over my head and slide the rest of the way in.

I hear Ross say, “Here comes your pack,” and somebody stuffs it down into the hole for me. First I grab the headlamp, turn it on, and fasten it to my head so I can see, then I loop the straps back over my shoulders. I start helping everyone else follow me down into the cave.

As people get inside, I hear a lot of “Brrs,” and everyone immediately unzips their packs to get out their jackets. I looked it up online - caves like this tend to have temperatures hovering in the 50’s. Chilly, especially without nice thick wolf fur.

We had packs for twelve people, but it turns out only ten can fit down here, although it isn’t for lack of trying. Two of the bigger guys managed to get their legs in, but there was no way their huge shoulders would fit through, so they had to give up in disappointment and stay outside. Well, good, there’ll be plenty of guards out there.

Janine is down here with us, which surprises me just a bit. I wonder how Kanen was able to let her out of his sight. But then I remember that Amelia and I are getting better at sensing each other’s feelings, and she told me that apparently once couples are fully mated, especially Alphas and Lunas, they can mind-link even in human form. So Kanen will be able to keep track of her even though he can’t get into the cave with us.

Once everyone is down here, wearing their packs, headlamps on, we turn to examine our surroundings, in the room closest to the entrance. With the lights, I can see so much more than I could while I was here the first time. There’s honestly a lot of crap down here, more than I realized. I know that the rogue gang had about fifteen people in it, and you can really tell that they’ve lived here. Sleeping bags, blankets, clothes, some boxes of crackers and stuff, everything jumbled messily, laying all over. They did not clean up after themselves at all. I guess they must not bring their gear with them when they move from place to place. Do they have duplicates of everything in all their different caves? Actually, that would make sense, if they are moving between them as wolves. Getting our gear here was a lot of trouble. Imagine how convenient it would be to arrive and have everything waiting.

Janine says, “Tell me everything you notice, I’ll be telling Kanen.”

I’m glad to hear the other folks speaking up, describing the same stuff that I have been observing, so I just continue looking around in silence.

I move along the edges of the room, looking at the items left in heaps. I nudge my toe against a pillow, move some clothing aside, and find a backpack underneath. I pick it up, unzip it and look inside. Oh.

“Um,” I raise my voice a bit to tell Janine, “someone left their cell phone here.”

There’s a brief pause, and she says, “Kanen says to send it up.”

I walk over to the entrance, and reach up with the phone, and someone’s hand reaches down to take it.

Good, maybe they’ll be able to hack into it.

We finish the first area, deciding there isn’t anything else important in here, just basically a bunch of junk. “Okay,” Janine says, “let’s move on.” I wait for her to lead us, and realize that she is looking at me, waiting for me.

How did I become expedition leader?

Well, okay then. I move into the front of the group, and start slowly walking out of the first area. As we move into the corridor, the smooth walls of the lava tube start to narrow a little as we progress. The floor is descending steadily as we go, and I wonder how deep underground we are getting. There are twists and turns, and although Corinne’s map wasn’t absolutely accurate, it is close enough. She clearly was telling us everything she knows, and trying her hardest to get it right.

I know to expect a sharp bend before we get to the pool, and that there will be a fairly large chamber before the ceiling of the cave descends to meet the floor behind the pool. Then we don’t know what happens after that.

When we arrive at the pool, everyone comes to stand around it. We shine our lights into the cloudy water, but can’t see anything down there but the first couple of feet of rock.

“Well,” Janine says, looking at me, “ready?”

I nod. Theo and Evan and I take off our packs. We’re leaving everything except our shoes, which we put into the smaller waterproof packs to carry with us. You really couldn’t walk around in here barefoot, the floor has very sharp ridges, carved by the lava as it passed through here eons ago. Our headlamps are waterproof, so we leave them on.

“I’ll go first, just take a quick look around,” Theo says. “I’ll come back up and let you know if I find any way out.”

He takes a giant breath and dives under the surface. Humans can hold their breath for maybe a minute, but as werewolves we are stronger than regular humans, and we have about double that time before we really have to breathe. So Theo has a good two minutes to explore. We watch, able to see the light from his headlamp shining up from under the water. We can tell that he is circling the edges of the pool, trying to find any opening. The light blinks out for just a second, alarmingly, then we see it heading back towards us.

His head pops up over the surface, and he gasps in a breath, then shakes his head to get the water out of his eyes. When he can speak, he says, “There’s an opening, I didn’t go into it very far, but it’s definitely big enough to go through. I have no idea what’s on the other side.”

We look to Luna Janine, the highest ranking person here, to get our instructions. “Hold on,” she says, then is silent for a minute while she apparently communicates with Alpha Kanen.

“Okay,” she tells us, “he wants you to try if you can, to see whether you can get through the hole. But if it doesn’t immediately let out into something else, come back well before you run out of air. If we have to come back later with air tanks we will. He doesn’t want you to try anything risky.”

Evan and I grin at each other. We’re game. Besides, Evan being some kind of secret surfing god, chances are he’s a diving god as well and can hold his breath indefinitely. We’ll see.

We slip into the water next to Theo. “Follow right behind me,” he tells us. We all take huge breaths and dive under. He goes straight to the entrance, saving the time that he took to find it. Ten seconds. He slips in, and Evan follows after him, then me, so we are all in a tunnel about three feet across. We can see pretty clearly with our underwater headlamps. Twenty seconds. I see Evan’s feet kicking in front of me, moving forward, so I follow along, knowing that he is following Theo, and that as long as they’re going forward the tunnel is still open. Thirty seconds.

I’m starting to feel a little hint of strain, holding my breath, but I know that we’ve got a good minute left before it becomes a problem. Another thirty seconds to look before we have to turn around.

I wait for Evan to spin and gesture at me to reverse course, but he doesn’t. He is still following Theo. Forty seconds.

Are they just going to continue? I’m not exactly worried yet, but we really are running out of time. Fifty seconds.

Evan’s feet kick in front of my face, and I think that he is about to turn around, because we have to reverse right now if we are going to make it back in time, but suddenly his feet are moving upwards.

Oh! I follow him up as fast as I can, and my face breaks the surface into a new cave, just after sixty seconds.

We gulp in air, panting as we look around us. The headlamps lasted just fine. We’re cold and wet, but exhilarated, knowing that we have discovered a brand new cave. I mean, it’s part of the other one, but I don’t see or smell anything in here. The rogues weren’t here. I wonder if anyone has ever been here before? We might be the first explorers, and honestly it feels absolutely amazing to think we have discovered something previously unknown.

We pull ourselves up out of the water and sit on the rocks on the side, catching our breath as we look around in the light of our headlamps. Clearly still a lava tube, the ridged floor, the weirdly mechanized markings on the smooth walls, shaped roughly like a tunnel extending away from us.

“Well?” Evan asks Theo. “What now? Go back, or move on?”

Theo thinks a moment. “Move on, but for just a little while, just enough to see if this seems to extend very far. Janine will be wanting our report.”

We quickly put our shoes back on, and shivering a little we move further into the cave. A few dozen yards in, the tunnel takes another sharp turn to the left, and Theo says, “Okay, that’s enough, we need to let them know what’s going on. Clearly this continues indefinitely, but the rogues haven’t been in here, so I don’t know what the leaders are going to want to do with it.”

So, back to the pool, back off with the shoes, another deep breath, and back through the tunnel. At least this time we know that it will only take one minute, so it feels a little easier and shorter. Knowledge always makes things easier than facing the unknown.

By the time I break the surface in the cave where the others are waiting, enjoying the snacks we had packed for them yesterday, Janine is already asking Theo, “Well?”

Panting, he clambers out of the water, Evan following him. Evan turns around to give me a hand out. Phew.

“The tunnel leads to another extensive lava tube. We followed it a few dozen yards, then came back when it took a turn and we couldn’t see beyond that. I have no idea how much further back it goes.”

Everyone looks around at each other.

I add while I’m getting my shoes back on, “The rogues weren’t ever in there, as far as we could tell. No belongings, no scent, at least that we could detect with human noses.” I hear my voice shaking from the cold. The wetsuit kept most of me dry, but not my head and hands and feet. And I’m a skinny dude. I get cold. I wish I was in bed with Amelia right now.

Janine is silent for a minute, then says, “Okay, Kanen says to come on back.”

I think the people who waited here are disappointed to not be able to carry on, but us wet dudes are perfectly happy to be getting back to the surface.

I don’t know what the leaders will want to do with this information, but I do know one thing. We have confirmed that everything Corinne told us about the cave was completely accurate. Amelia will be so pleased.