~Alpha Morozov~
"How long before we reach Ekaterinburg, Drozdov?" Konstantin asked his charioteer as he stood behind him in the small balcony, a hint of impatience in his otherwise emotionless tone, hands clasped behind his back.
Boris Drozdov gave the reigns in his hands a massive tug and the six royal horses swerved right, along the mountain's slippery path.
"I am running them as fast as they can handle, Your Majesty," said Drozdov cautiously, always cautiously around his alpha, "but I'm afraid that we cannot reach Ekaterinburg in less than a week's time."
A week more. And they'd already been travelling for two days.
"Keep me informed of our progress," Konstantin said in the same cold, emotionless voice that he always used with anyone who was not Sofia.
Drozdov nodded his head with a short bow wordlessly.
It was night time, and apart from the lanterns burning in and around the chariot, and the moon, there was no source of light for the charioteer or the horses in the clouding darkness. It was fortunate, then, that the Scouts and Hunters who ran in a circular formation surrounding the royal chariot had excellent sight, for they were functioning as Drozdov's eyes in the treacherous landscape they were passing through. They had been journeying without break with only one chariot for the alpha, and Konstantin intended to keep it that way.
He turned around and when into his room. He took off his shirt when he was in the little corridor, and flung it across the room before leaving, without a word to Sofia, without even looking for her or making sure that she was okay. And that was because he just couldn't.
Two days had passed since he had first felt that pang of unknown emotion in his chest, and since then, every time he found himself at the verge of talking to her or being near her, that same pang would find its way into his heart and squeeze it so hard that he almost could not breathe. And over the course of those two days, all he could think about was what it was that he had been experiencing.
When his shoes were off, he made his way wordlessly to the window-door, and even though it hurt him to be away from Sofia, it was less pain than what he felt when he was with her.
Konstantin just did not understand what was happening or why. This wasn't the first time that he was going to the Ball; this was his third time. And every time Sofia had been with him, just like this time. Then what was so different now, that he wasn't able to be near her? An answer sat at the back of his brain, but he was in no mood to think about it.
Jumping off the chariot's balcony with a mighty leap, he ran a few paces to keep up with it before transforming into a gigantic wolf with a bluish-grey pelt mid-run. As soon as the transformation was complete, he let out an earsplitting howl, sprinting past the adjacent running Scouts and Hunters who bowed their heads to him as he ran to the forefront, leading the way to Ekaterinburg.
And as the humongous werewolf ran, one thought kept going through his head like a loop: he had not even found his mate yet, and his mind was already a wreck. He did not want to think what would happen to him and Sofia when he actually found her, and something deep in his chest told him that this year, he just might find her.
Oh, how he wished he didn't have to.
~Natakha~
Natakha dreamt of a cool breeze ruffling through her thick charcoal fur as she ran through the forest, her nose after a peculiar, strong smell that grew closer and closer as she sprinted through the clumps of roots in the never-ending forest, dry leaves crunching under her heavy paws. Her wolf form was big, quite big as compared to an average female's. And though she was proud of her size, yet it came at a disadvantage; all that weight made it difficult for her to keep up the speed, and her breath was coming out in short bursts, air passing through her cool, wet nose.
And then- water passing through her nose?
She tumbled over, fore legs bent at the ankle and hind legs in the air before her back crashed on the muddy forest floor. She was drowning. There was water in her nose. There was water in he-
Natakha jerked up in bed, gulping in a huge breath, eyes wide in shock.
There was water everywhere; on her face, in her hair, on the covers, seeping through her clothes, and not to mention, in her nose.
She sneezed.
"Well, I see that the princess is finally awake," commented a snarky voice with a mocking laugh.
Rubbing her nose on her wet sleeve, Natakha saw Dmitri standing at the end of her bed with one hand on the bed post and the other clutching onto an empty bucket.
She felt her ears go hot with anger despite the cold water still on them.
"What the hell did you do that for?!" she shouted at him, nostrils flaring as if she could breathe fire through them.
Apparently, Dmitri found her anger-flushed face funny, for he laughed his annoying laugh.
"At least I have it in my kind-hearted self to wake you up before we left," he shrugged with a mocking smirk, "you couldn't even do that."
The smug smile on his face made Natakha want to shove his head in the very bucket in his hand. She lunged for him.
He yelped at her sudden move, but sidestepped out of her way in the nick of time, laughing when she barely caught the bed's edge to stop herself from falling over when he moved out of the way.
"Aw, missed?" he laughed at her and she glared at him, teeth grinding against each other, "better luck next time, klutz."
With that, Dmitri tossed the empty bucket on the girls' overcoats that lay on the sofa and left, still cackling. She screamed in frustration, but since Zhanna was still sleeping, she took care to do it with her jaw clamped shut.
Zhanna, on her part, slept on without bother whilst Natakha breathed heavy breaths, eyes still on the door where Dmitri had left. Oh, how she was going to make him pay for what he did. She punched the bed with both her hands in anger before climbing down the ladder.
"Zhanna, wake up," she said impatiently, standing in front of her friend's bed.
But being the heavy sleeper that she was, Zhanna did not even flutter an eyelid.
Huffing, Natakha marched to the door, knowing exactly how to wake the sleeping beauty.
She slammed the door shut hard.
"What the hell?" Zhanna's head jerked up as she turned her neck around blindly.
Natakha marched back in front of her bed. "Wake up, we need to leave."
At that, Zhanna slumped back.
"Can you, please," she said in a muffled voice, her mouth against the mattress, "never do that again? That door sets my teeth on edge."
Natakha didn't reply to that. Now that her friend was awake, she was going to go after that mindless ogre.
"I'm going to take a poop, can you get up now?" she exasperated, making her way to the door.
"Is it evening already?" Zhanna almost cried.
It made her laugh despite herself.
"Yes," she told her before leaving their carriage, "it's evening already."
*****
The evening was extremely chilly outside the carriage, what with all the heavy snowfall, and as she walked through the hustle and bustle of werewolves in a different clearing that evening, Natakha regretted not taking her overcoat. She let out a shiver.
The grassless clearing that the carriages had been halted in that evening was quite big, and the forest was a distant spectacle in her vision as she searched for one very irritating smug smile on the face of one very irritating young boy. Just thinking about him made her eyebrows draw in, her jaw tick and her hands ball into fists. When she passed through a rather rowdy group of male werewolves, her shoulder bumped into one of theirs. And even though it was nobody's fault really, she scowled at them, her steps slowed, but then the funny questioning look on their faces when they watched her go made her brisk walk away.
'Boys', she huffed to no one but herself, rolling her eyes irritably.
Four days. Four days she had tolerated that idiot of a boy as they'd travelled day and night. But this had been the limit. And he had crossed it.
'Where has that dimwit disappeared', she thought, trudging on with short, angry steps.
Natakha stopped in a comparatively quiet spot, and surveyed her surroundings, noticing that her pack members had not transformed that evening, as was customarily required of them. She frowned.
'Why has no body transformed? And why is nobody transforming either?'
Unable to find the daft she had originally come for, Natakha made her way back to her carriage. But when she reached it, Zhanna was nowhere to be seen.
"Zhanna?" she called once she was in the carriage, thinking her friend might be in the small washroom behind the sofa.
But she did not get a reply.
What was it with everyone that day? She couldn't seem to find anyone.
At first she thought that she could wait for Zhanna to come back and then they could leave for their friends' carriage. But then she decided against it. Gathering her overcoat from the rickety sofa, she clambered down the steps, adjusting the coat over her shoulders and made to make her way to the Salutaries' carriages. But she bumped her head into someone.
"Nat- hey," said Maria, "there you are."
"We've been looking everywhere for you," Zhanna looked her up and down skeptically, "you said you were going to take a poop. I thought you'd go to their carriage, assuming one of the idiots was using ours, but when I went there they said you never came."
Natakha didn't know what to tell them. If she told them that she had gone to find Dmitri, she knew she wouldn't get to hear the end of it from them.
"Yeah," said Varvara, again like she was speaking to a child, "where were you, sweetheart?"
The way all four of them were looking at her made her feel like rolling her eyes. She wasn't a kid; she could look after herself. She was a hunter after all, and a good one at that.
"I had, um," she started, pondering over a seemingly genuine excuse, "I did start to go to their, carriage, but I, I uh, forgot my coat! Yes, I forgot my coat."
She held the collars of her coat for all four of them to see, who all but seemed to believe her, except a doubtful Zhanna.
"And then," she continued, "I started feeling cold, so I, went uh, back to the carriage to uh, get it."
And then for added effect she smiled a big smile, and Zhanna immediately knew that she was lying.
But mercifully, she let it go.
Varvara clapped her hands and Natakha looked over at her, smile fading.
"Well, it's good that we found you soon, businka, because we need to move," she said, cupping Natakha's face, and though discreetly so as to not be rude, Natakha tried to move her face away.
"Move?" she asked, looking bewildered, "but without transforming?"
"Yes, Nat," said Maria, slinging her arm around her shoulder and turning her around to walk with the rest of the wolves, in a direction away from the forest. "Because we don't need to transform tonight; we've reached Petrozavodsk."
*****
Almost a mile they walked the winding path to a small city that twinkled in the distance, horses and empty carriages following behind them slowly. The orange gleam from a few hundred small, square windows was the first sign of civilization, and Natakha was glad to be near settlement now that she could see it.
No doubt that the carriages were as comfortable as they could be, but she was starting to get sick of travelling, and they still had two weeks of travelling left before they reached Ekaterinburg. And although she wanted to complain about how far they had to travel, the fact that her sister, Talya, had had to travel to Abakan the previous year, which was almost more than double the distance of the trip this year made Natakha keep her rants and complaining to herself.
When they made it to the outskirts of the Pack of Petrozavodsk, the welcoming pack's Beta, along with a few guard wolves waited to greet them.
The alpha of her pack, Alpha Alexeev, who was at the forefront of their entourage, exchanged words of greeting before the guest pack's Beta led them all in, through dusty, grassless lanes that changed to gravel and then eventually gave way to stony streets that crisscrossed their way through the city.
The city was a different sight from their own Pack of Murmansk; there was not much green in Petrozavodsk, mostly small buildings and houses of wood and stone. After a few blocks of houses was usually an impressive work of stone, sometimes a statue of a great wolf, sometimes of the pack's (presumably) alpha, and sometimes, of the Moon Goddess.
Natakha thought it was a beautiful village, but she found it a bit odd that there was not one soul to be seen on any street except for the people of her own pack.
'Probably because its so late in the night?' She thought. 'What's the time, anyway?'
People around her, along with her group of friends were led to the biggest building they had seen in Petrozavodsk so far, which was, simply, not that big at all.
"This looks like their pack house," Maria remarked, eyes scanning the new building in front of them as they passed through its gates.
"Well, I guess we're going to be staying in it tonight," said Natakha, following the Beta of Petrozavodsk inside the building through thick glass double doors.
Inside, they were assembled in a huge lobby of pale pink; walls, floor and all. At the opposite side of the lobby were two tall staircases of dark wood, which led up to a narrow balcony that ran along the entire length of wall. On it stood the imposing figure of a bearded man, his intent, blue eyes overlooking the throng of people pouring into the pack house. With his imposing posture and keen eyes, Natakha guessed him to be the alpha of the host pack. The alpha of her own pack joined him at the overlooking balcony, and as soon as everyone was in, the double doors shut behind them, and the man at the balcony spoke, proving her assumption right.
"Good evening, Alpha Alexeev," the man said to Alpha Alexeev, and they shook hands in a firm handshake, "and to the Pack of Murmansk. Welcome to Petrozavodsk. I am the alpha of this pack, Alpha Volkov."
Alpha Volkov paused, and when he was reassured by the pin drop silence in the lobby that all attention was his, he spoke again.
"Tonight, make yourselves comfortable in our humble quarters, because we will begin our journey tomorrow at last light. I'm sure you all will agree, the horses deserve at least a day's worth of rest."
With a nod of his head, he, along with Alpha Alexeev left, turning on their heel and disappearing through a doorway beyond the balcony.
A kind of ruckus began as soon as they left, and it took a while before the Beta of Petrozavodsk was able to sort them all out into groups of four, who were to share one room each in the colossal basement of the pack house. When it came to the five girls, however, they were rigorous in their request to the Beta to let the five of them share a room together, as opposed to the decided total of four people a room. And the Beta was all but happy to let more people stay in a room to save him space, for there turned out to be more people than those for whom arrangements had been made available.
Half an hour later, Natakha, Zhanna, Maria, Varvara and Ruslana were huddled in a tiny room with four bunks and one sofa in the corner of a dim yellow, windowless room.
"Well," started Maria, "bunks again."
Varvara huffed.
"I swear to god," she muttered, "my mate better be at the Ball this year, because I sure as heaven won't go through the same torture next year just because he isn't there this time."
"You know, I saw bathroom stalls at the corner of the hall," said Ruslana, "does anyone want to come along with me?"
Natakha immediately marched to one of the lower bunks, proceeding to fall flat on her stomach on it. The other girls exchanged funny looks.
"I don't really need to use the bathroom," Zhanna told them, "you guys can go, we'll stay here."
The other three nodded, but did not go before leaving one odd belonging on each of the remaining three beds. Then, giving Zhanna sympathetic looks, they slipped out of the room.
"Well," Natakha heard Zhanna say after the door shut, "I guess I'll just take the sofa tonight."
Natakha giggled.
"Bdshvshvwuihi," she said, in between laughs.
Zhanna, who was at the sofa in the corner of the room, scrunched her brows at that.
"What?" she asked a still laughing Natakha.
Natakha sat up straight and faced her friend.
"I'm saying," she said, and though she wasn't laughing anymore, yet her eyes were smiling, "that you should've followed my lead and claimed a bed before them."
Zhanna shrugged, and sat back on the sofa with a jump. And as soon as she did, a billowing brown cloud of dust engulfed her. She scrunched her nostrils shut, but she wasn't fast enough, for some of the dust had gotten into her nose, and she sneezed.
Natakha laughed. "See? Told you you should've hogged a bed first."
Zhanna's eyes were watery with dust when she spoke.
"I had my mind set on something else," she muttered, trying to look up without squinting her eyes, "something that I wanted to discuss with you without those three."
Natakha removed her shoes and crossed her legs on the bed.
"Hmm? And what's that?"
Zhanna sneezed.
"I want to know," she sneezed again, "where you were this morning when you said you were going to 'take a poop'."
Natakha groaned.