Outsider
Inviting strangers into the pack house can be risky, awkward, any number of things. Resistance members tend to be more trusted, and Roan felt like Remi, Stark and Lir were good people. Well... anthros.
But that doesn't mean they don't have hang ups or quirks of any kind. Remi had a big one, specifically involving packs.
Remi lasted until the third time someone called it their house like he belonged in the sentence.
It happened in the kitchen after midnight. The news was still looping muted on the living room TV, another anthro attack, another set of comments calling every muzzle a conspirator. Roan had gone quiet in that dangerous way of his. Cass looked worn through. Kiran was trying to keep the air from turning to stone by being himself.
He bumped Remi’s hip with his own as he reached past him for a glass.
“Move, packmate. Some of us need water.”
It was nothing. A joke. The same kind of loose talk Kiran used on everybody.
Remi’s whole body went still and his giant fennec ears turned back.
Not startled. Not annoyed. Still, like an animal that had just heard a branch snap the wrong way. His ears pinned flat. The glass in his paw stopped halfway to the tap. For a second the kitchen felt too small, too full of wolves and heat and the assumption that he was already theirs.
“Don’t,” Remi said.
Kiran blinked. “Don’t what? I was kidding.”
“Don’t call me that.”
The humor drained off Kiran’s face. Behind them, Lir looked up from the table. Stark, perched on a stool with a mug, went quiet too.
Roan’s voice came from the doorway, low. “He didn’t mean it like a claim.”
“I know what he meant.” Remi’s tail was tight to his legs. “I’m staying here because Dante put me here. That is all. I am not your pack.”
Kiran held up both paws. “Okay. Okay. I hear you.”
Remi set the glass down harder than he needed to and walked out the back door into the dark.
The porch was cold. Wind moved through the trees beyond the property line. Remi sat on the top step and stared at nothing, one paw braced on his knee so it would stop shaking.
He hated that it was shaking.
The door opened a few minutes later. He did not look back. He already knew the lighter tread.
Kiran sat down beside him, close but not touching. For once the fox did not fill the silence with a joke.
“You looked like I pulled a knife,” Kiran said eventually.
Remi let out a short breath through his nose. “You used a word.”
“Pack.”
“Yes.”
Kiran waited. Remi almost respected him for that.
“I had two,” Remi said, eyes still on the trees. “The first one found me after the eagles. I was sixteen, starving, sleeping in drainage pipes. A coyote pack took me in. Fed me. Trained me. Called me theirs. I believed it because I wanted to believe something.”
His ears flicked once.
“Six months in, they used me as a decoy on a raid. Told me it was a supply run. It was a debt. When the other side came looking for payment, the coyotes were already gone. They left me tied in a warehouse with a note that said I was the compensation. I got out myself. Two of them laughed when I found them later. Said a fennec was never going to be real pack anyway.”
Kiran’s tail had gone still.
“The second one was worse,” Remi continued. His voice stayed flat, which made it worse. “Resistance cell. Six of us. I thought they were different because they talked about duty instead of family. There was a wolf. Not like Roan. Charming. Patient. He told me I did not have to be alone if I did not want to be. I let him in. That was my mistake.”
He rubbed his thumb against the old scar along his left forearm, the one most people never noticed under the fur.
“They were selling names. Ours. Other cells. I found the proof and he put a blade in me for it. Not a warning cut. He meant to finish it. I still do not know if the rest of them knew in advance or just decided I was convenient once the shouting started. I crawled into a storm drain with my own blood in my mouth and listened to them argue about whether to come after me. They decided I was not worth the effort.”
Kiran swallowed. “Remi…”
“So when you say packmate like it is easy,” Remi said, “I hear the part that comes after. The part where I am useful until I am not. The part where somebody smiles at me and then leaves me for the people who want me dead.”
The porch boards creaked. Kiran shifted closer, still not touching.
“I’m not them,” he said quietly.
“I know.” Remi’s ears stayed back. “That is what I told myself the second time too.”
Inside, someone turned the television off. The house behind them felt full of breathing and warmth and a shape of belonging Remi could not stop treating like a trap.
Kiran’s voice came smaller. “I won’t use the word again.”
Remi almost smiled. It did not reach his eyes.
“Use whatever word you want, fox. Just do not expect me to answer to it. I'm happy just serving the resistance and having Lir watch my back with his rifle. So far I don't think he intends to put a round in my back someday. But we'll see I guess...”
He stood, joints stiff, and went back inside without waiting to see if Kiran followed. In the hallway he passed Roan and did not stop. In the guest room he locked the door, sat on the edge of the bed with his knives still on, and stared at the wall until the shake in his paws finally burned itself out.
He did not sleep.
Down the hall, Kiran stood outside that locked door for a long time with his ears low, then turned away without knocking. Some things did not get fixed by crowding them.
Remi already knew how that story ended.
Later that night Remi took first watch because he did not share the link.
That was the agreement. The pack could feel one another go under. He could not. So when the house went quiet he moved room to room on a timer, the old way, eyes and ears and the little glass vial Stark had pressed into his paw after training. Smelling salts. It was crude and effective to bring someone out of a dreamwalker's trance. They hoped at least, unless this enhanced elk had even more abilities.
He checks Kiran first. The fox was a messy sprawl of red fur, one arm hanging off the bed, mouth open. Asleep, but ordinary asleep. Khepri next, curled on his side, ears twitching through a dream. Zariel on his back like a soldier even unconscious. Cass tucked against the empty space Roan had left when he took the earlier shift.
Then Remi opened the master bedroom door.
Roan was in the chair by the window, not the bed. Head tipped forward. Golden eyes half-lidded and wrong. His breathing was too even, too deep. The big black wolf looked like he had sat down to keep watch and then simply stopped being present.
Remi felt it before he had a name for it. The same oily pressure Stark had taught them to recognize, thicker now, seated in the Alpha’s mind like a hand around the back of his skull.
“Roan.”
No response.
Remi started forward.
A body hit him from behind.
Arms locked around his chest and pinned his elbows. The scent hit a half-second later. Leopard. Lir. But Lir did not fight like this. There was no precision in it, only dead weight and brute hold, breath slow against the back of Remi’s neck.
“Lir. Lir, wake up.”
The leopard did not answer. His eyes were open and empty when Remi twisted enough to see them. Sleepwalking. Worse than that. His friend was being walked.
Remi drove his heel back, missed, then dropped his weight and rammed an elbow into Lir’s ribs. The hold barely loosened. The dreamwalker was using Lir like a door bar, keeping Remi off the Alpha long enough for the rest of the house to stay under.
“Sorry,” Remi snarled, and rammed his knee up between Lir’s legs.
The leopard made a broken sound and the grip failed. Remi tore free, shoved him hard into the wall, and already had the vial out of his vest. He cracked it under Lir’s nose with no gentleness at all.
The ammonia bite filled the hall. Lir gagged, eyes rolling, then focusing in a sudden ugly snap of awareness. He sagged against the wall, one paw cupped automatically over his groin, the void mark on his neck dark with strain.
“Remi?
“You were not you.” Remi was already moving. “Roan’s under. Come on.”
They hit the master bedroom together. Remi cracked a second vial under Roan’s muzzle. The black wolf jerked like someone had yanked a hook out of his thoughts, a raw sound tearing out of him as the influence tore loose. His eyes cleared. Then the anger arrived right behind the air.
“Cass,” Roan rasped.
“We’re going,” Remi said.
They took the others one by one. Cass first, then Zariel, then Khepri, then Kiran, who came up swinging and nearly clocked Lir before he understood where he was. Each of them surfaced with the same lag, the same scrape of something that had been sitting in their heads without permission.
When it was done the hallway was full of shaking breath and half-dressed anthros. Stark came down from the roof at a run, antlers first, having felt the house lurch even from outside.
Lir leaned against the wall, still pale. “I did not walk here. I was in my room. Then I was holding him.”
Stark’s face had gone tight. “That’s new. Influence I can teach you to feel. Puppeting a waking body from the outside is another trick. This elk is not working like a normal dreamwalker. And we were wrong about his limit, he got nearly all of us. Thankfully not Remi.”
Remi stood a little apart from the cluster of them, vial still in his paw, heart going too fast. Five of them had gone down in the same house while he made his rounds. The sixth had been turned into a weapon and put behind him.
Roan looked at him over Cass’s shoulder.
“You stayed on watch.”
Remi shrugged once, sharp. “That was the job.”
He did not say the rest. That for a second in the dark, with Lir’s arms around him and Roan gone under, the old story had tried to write itself again. Pack asleep. Pack used. Pack leaving him to handle the knife.
He clipped the remaining salts back into his vest and did not sit down with them.
“I’m going back on the door,” he said. “If that thing can walk Lir, it can walk anybody.”
Nobody argued.
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