Homo Homini Lupus Est

by Neotoma

Summary:

Gabriel ran away from his home and his pack. He had his reasons. But a werewolf without a pack is a vulnerable thing -- Gabriel skids through his life until he ends up on Kali's doorstep. His life seems to have come together, until a face from his past comes to town, and Gabriel is hauled back to his family, and the grasp of his brother, Lucifer.

Notes:

Written for the Gabriel Big Bang 2012. Beta by Owleyes-Arisen and mistalagan

Prologue –

 

Lucifer's study was bright with the morning light, and Gabriel winced at that. It was bad enough that he'd had to travel into the city early enough to avoid much of the foot traffic, but being subjected to the brilliant whiteness that Lucifer preferred was a bit above and beyond his duty.

"Hello, little brother," Lucifer purred.

Gabriel rolled his eyes, tucked his stole around himself, and sat on the couch along the wall after Lucifer nodded him permission. He rubbed his eyes, and replied, "Lucifer..." His brother-and-head-of-house was too much a morning person for Gabriel, who preferred the cool of the evening when he had a choice of when and where he was going to be active.

"You're dressed well for a morning," Lucifer observed.

Gabriel looked down at his clothes – well made but not too fashionably cut, they were in grayed tones, appropriate to his widowed state. He'd even had his everyday stole overdyed to mute its exuberance, since Wotan's death. Either Lucifer was trying to flatter, or he still didn't pay any attention to what the betas of his household wore on a regular basis.

"I dressed for a day at home – unless you have need of me elsewhere?"

Lucifer waved off his concern, "No. No, brother, I have need of you here," he said, and launched into a series of questions about the maintenance of the house, and then the city properties and the countryside farms and generational tenancies. Gabriel fumbled a bit, as he'd only been back at administrating the family properties since he'd come south after Wotan's death, and had to clear out Dean's rather haphazard records. Castiel's spouse was good with the city properties that were shopfronts and tenements for the lower-class gammas and epsilons that made up most of the Folk, but he didn't have much of a handle on the farms and preserves of the hinterlands. There were entire towns that depended on Seraphim administration, and Dean had left them in the hands of cousins and spouses of cousins, even to the point of neglecting audits.

Gabriel had been forced to plan reviews, and draw on Rachel's expertise, even though she should have been devoting most of her time to gestating and to her husband's business. That was why she was married, after all – the alliance to the rising Folk family of her husband, the Ramsii, was an important support in the Seraphim power structure.

Lucifer nodded as Gabriel groped his way through the problems and his proposed solutions – even agreeing that Dean should be encouraged to focus on the city properties to the exclusion of all else, thereby leaving the countryside to Gabriel. Finally, Gabriel wound down, and looked at Lucifer expectantly.

"Now we come to the problem of Castiel..." his eldest brother said.

Gabriel raised his brows and made an encouraging noise.

"I want him selected for Quaestor."

Gabriel frowned. "He's childless: not eligible."

"I aim to change that."

Gabriel let his frown deepen. "How? Dean's barren, he must be." They had been married for years – Sam had grown from boy to young man on the cusp of maturity in the time that his beta brother Dean and their Castiel had been married – but had never had any children from any of Dean's heats.

"Since our brother is stubbornly attached to that Folk beta of his..." Lucifer sighed dramatically, "a subsidiary marriage is the only option that is feasible."

Gabriel looked up at that, shocked. "No family would agree to that, not of the Flock, or even a rising Folk family. It would be an insult to any beta of a good family, to be put in place below Dean – his family is only a generation out of the gutter. Any pack alpha would laugh in your face, if they didn't take it as an insult and challenge!"

"I had thought of that, Gabriel."

Gabriel paused, and then asked, "You're going ask for a delta for Castiel to marry in subsidy?"

"Don't be disgusting, little brother. We're the senior branch of the Seraphim – if one of the lesser cousins wanted to marry a woman, or you wanted to in your retirement, it would be one thing, but Castiel is my second. He must have alpha sons, and betas, and that requires a beta spouse."

Gabriel nodded in agreement "...Well, I suppose you could get a subsidiary marriage inside the family, but I can't think of any unmarried beta cousin. You couldn't even order a divorce, not with the civil situation as it is – we need all the alliances our cousins' marriages are sealing, what with the strife possibly building up again. Hell, we need the alliances to the rich Folk alphas that Rachel and the other deltas in the family are sealing."

Lucifer made a face at the mention of their half-sister; Lucifer often displayed the disdain for deltas that high-Flock alphas showed. Gabriel didn't quite share the disdain, but he had dealt with deltas and even epsilons much more in the course of his life – for one, wet nurses were often deltas from the lowest families and epsilons cast off from the best. The fact that they were single-gendered females made their milk more reliable than a double-gendered beta's.

"I had thought of one possibility..." Lucifer began.

"Who? Not Camael's oldest – the boy's not even fifteen, and his cycle hasn't started yet! He's completely unsuitable. Seriously, Lucifer, there isn't any beta in the family who is unmarried and adult that you could marry off!"

"There's you."

Gabriel stared at Lucifer. "I'm his brother!"

"Half-brother. Raguel wasn't actually your mother, no matter what you seem to think."

"What's that got to do—?"

"Half-brother through Father – so any union between the two of you would not be incestuous. Technically." Lucifer gave him an inquiring look. "Or do I have the law wrong about siblings out of different mothers?"

Gabriel shifted in his seat, leaning away from his brother-and-head-of-house. "...Not technically..."

Lucifer tilted his head and waited.

"Lucifer, be serious. Legally, all right, your idea, it's not incest. But emotionally... do you think Castiel would go through with it? Do you think I would?"

"Castiel will obey orders. He's good at that."

"I won't," Gabriel said, and tried pull his hands off the arms of his chair, but his fingers were tight and disobedient against the upholstery.

"Little brother," Lucifer said, "What makes you think you have a choice?"

 

PART ONE

Anna lived in the back of an island – not a real island, but the great rambling buildings that snaked down the streets and up three and four floors into the air. She and Nathan had a lifetime free lease on the rooms, because his father was Erelim and brother to the current pack alpha and thus had a hand in disposing of family property. Nathan was neat and organized, and his father had more than once lamented he was born a gamma instead of a beta, but it meant that Nathan and she had been married, instead of Nathan marrying some alpha wanting sons. Anna herself would have been married a gamma anyway – one disappointment married to another – or maybe to a beta who'd finally aged out of fertility and was being allowed a retirement and a wife, so she rather liked who she ended up with.

At least Nathan's family promised to adopt back into the Flock any wolf-child they managed to produce between the two of them, and to fund the education of any gamma or epsilon child if that's all they managed. It was miles better than many wolfless children received from their families.

Nathan kept books for a number of shops up and down their street, and Anna worked at a printer's. She had hopes of someday buying the shop from her employer, an older epsilon whose own children had been even more disappointing to her as adults than Anna had been to her own mother at birth.

With Nathan away on work – auditing some warehouse discrepancy downriver – she was alone this night and the gray drizzling misery outside was not helping. She had three books to proof before letting them through, and the baby was making itself know in nausea and ill-feeling.

"Baby," she said to the lump rounding her belly, "Mommy needs to eat, and needs to work. You're not helping with either."

The baby in her womb didn't respond, but there was a tapping at her back door, out in the garden.

She looked through the paned glass of the door, and her jaw dropped in shock.

"Gabriel?!" she gasped as she flung open the door.

"I cry your sufferance...?" Gabriel gasped breathlessly.

"Come in, you idiot!" Anna hissed, and pulled her older brother through the door.

He looked... well, he looked a mess. He looked haggard and bloated and there were shiny red marks on his face that looked rather like silver welts, but what they were doing on his face..?

"Where have you been? I haven't seen you in weeks!" she said as she pushed him to sit at the kitchen table. He'd been remiss in his visits, not that he'd ever been precisely good about it, but she'd usually get a note from him every week or so, even when he was living in the Great Pine Forest with that northerner Lucifer had married him to. Since being widowed and returning home, he'd even managed to see her once a month or so, usually by turning up at the printshop and dragging her off to a restaurant that was a little fancier than Anna fit into on her own and more than a little lower-class than Gabriel would fit into on his own – but one that suited them as a beta and an epsilon sibling pair separated by their genders and united by their background. How Gabriel had even found a place that catered to meetings between disjunctive family members, she had no idea. He was good with odd things like that, her singular beta brother.

Gabriel stared at her and then buried his face in his hands as he burst into snotty tears.

 

Gabriel didn't quite remember how he got out of the house, but the satchel that was outside his door smelled of Samuel – the alpha boy must have mustered some nerve to defy Lucifer even covertly. Risking patronage is exceedingly dangerous for Sam, even with being Lucifer's brother-in-law. He's only a generation from base Folk, and his honor name was from his mother's father – it could be revoked easily if he was caught violating the charity of his host family. Who knows what would happen if Lucifer was enraged enough to throw the Winchesters down – Castiel might challenge for pack-alpha, or both Dean and Sam could wind up out on the street with nothing – they're sons and grandsons of veterans, true, but themselves they have nothing but what has been settled on them, and maybe a farmhouse out in the countryside that they've never seen.

Anna, bless her, doesn't ask questions until after he stops sobbing. It's a disgusting, sloppy process, weeping – and Anna doesn't need his woes dropped in her lap. She and her husband – a gamma culled from the Erelim – make do for themselves, but neither of them needs the attention of their relatives. Gabriel just couldn't think of where else to go, though, so he came to her.

 

"You can't use your name, Gabriel," Anna said.

Gabriel felt her words hit him like an icy wind, biting down right to his heart. "It's my name..."

"It's theophoric! Anyone who hears it will know it's a Flock honor-name. You can't pass as a gamma with an honor-name!"

Gabriel sighed and looked away. She had the right of it, but giving up his name...

"I know it hurts, but you'd better go by the base version – Gabe, or Gabron."

He sighed, and nodded.

"It won't be so bad," Anna said. "It's only one less syllable, you'll get used to it in no time."

Gabriel glared at her. "You didn't. You cried for weeks when Father changed your name. Anael."

He knew he shouldn't have said that the moment he spoke. It was cruel and bitter, and Anna had done nothing but help him at risk to herself. Lucifer would make her divorce Nathan if it came to light that she'd helped him run away, and probably marry her to the most disgusting old coot of a political contact he could find as well.

She stood up and stepped away from him, turning on the taps of the sink and going through the motions of washing out their cups.

"...I'm sorry, little sister. I shouldn't have said—"

"Yes, it hurt. I was six, and I didn't understand what I'd done wrong."

"You hadn't done anything wrong, except..." Gabriel trailed off. They didn't talk about this, inside the family. It was rude – gossiping about other families' wolfless children was one thing, but their own were not to be spoken of.

"...be born without a wolf."

Gabriel looked away and shrugged. Anna was an epsilon, there was no denying it. There had been no denying it when she was two, but Father had given her the traditional six years to prove herself possessed of a wolf, and she hadn't. At least she'd been raised in the family and well-educated and eventually as well-married as she could hope for. Some families – like his former in-laws the Lilim – disposed of their disappointing children much earlier and more carelessly. There was an entirely industry of child farmers to deal with inconvenient children like the spurious and the wolf-less.

"I'll give you some of Nathan's older clothes. You'll look poor, but that's all right – you don't have any useful skills anyway—"

"Excuse me?"

"Well, you don't. You're an administrator, Gabriel, not an artisan. You can't hire out to oversee a workshop without showing your qualifications – what are you going to do, give Lucifer as a reference?"

Gabriel winced. "I see your point."

"You're going to have to, I don't know, take odd jobs and be willing to sweep floors – and sleep on them, probably –"

"I'll manage, Anna."

Anna turned to give him a long searching look. He couldn't help feeling judged and found wanting.

"I will. I have to. I can't go..." he choked. He couldn't say 'home' – home was safety and comfort, and his mind balked in terror at the idea of stepping back under the roof his family lived under, even for a moment.

Anna put her hand down over his cautiously. Gabriel was proud that he didn't flinch more than a tiny bit.

"You can go south, or west. There's plenty of countryside where the river-cities barely touch. You can go there, and be just a lone gamma."

Gabriel nodded, and swallowed against the lump in his throat.

 

Gabriel took Anna's money and her husband's cast-offs and made his way to the train station in the dark – trains left all the time, going in and out on their own schedule. He bought the cheapest fare for the next train leaving for somewhere further than a day's trip. It got him a ticket for a berth on a freighter hauling manufactured goods out to some godforsaken mining town up in the western mountains. He didn't care what or where, just that it was far far from the city and the surrounding countryside. That far away from home, there were less likely to be Flock, especially Flock who knew him on sight.

He had let Anna cut his hair, her slim elegant fingers surprisingly deft as she shortened from shoulder-length to up around his ears, like gammas tended to wear theirs – it was utterly practical and yet odd. He kept seeing the short ends at the corners of his vision and being disconcerted by his own hair.

At the end of the line, Gabriel walked out of the uncomfortable passenger car he'd been in for days and up the road into the center of town, such as it was. His body was still rattling from the poor condition of the rails – it was like being in a zipcar for hours on a gravel road, not anything like the smooth travel between cities he'd experienced before. The hinterlands had been neglected, and at the moment that suited Gabriel perfectly. First things first, he had to find a place to stay, somewhere that were he could disappear into the background, but still safe enough that he would be able to sleep at night.

Harvelle's Roadhouse, the sign declared, looked like it might be a likely opportunity.

 

"Gabron," Gabriel said. This was the first time he really had to put Anna's suggestion into use. None of the railmen had cared what his name was, just that he'd had a ticket and money to pay for it. "Call me Gabron."

The innkeeper's brows went up on her forehead, but she didn't comment about his name. Gabriel was glad, because while the lie was as thin as onion-skin, but he didn't think he'd be able to remember another name, and he knew his accent marked him as Flock or at least higher than the Folk who frequented this tavern. Using the base version of his name reserved for wolfless sons and other disinherited disappointments seemed the most useful compromise, just as Anna had suggested. His little sister was wise it seemed.

"That'll do," Ellen says. "If there's any more to your story, I don't care. You sweep the floor, serve the customers, and do as I say and we'll get along find. There's a space up under the eaves where you can bunk."

When Gabriel was married north, he had to learn to bake bread and brew beer, because no alpha there would accept a spouse who couldn't feed their family. Never mind that Wotan of the Aesir had a house with fifty rooms – a certifiable palace in the mountains – and had a staff of fifteen just for his kitchen; his spouse had to be able to make bread and beer, and serve it graciously too.

The drilling in customs and language that Lucifer had arranged had taken weeks, even with Gabriel studying all morning and evening, and baking between times. The children – Azazel Minor, Helyel Minor, Uriel and Ariel, Anna, Michael, even Samuel, had eaten his attempts with some cajoling, even when the bread was good. The northern style loaves had simply been too strange at first, and had sat poorly on their tongues. The beer, horrible stuff – thick and bitter, completely unlike wine, even unwatered wine – had been distributed to the workmen who would have it. Surprisingly, the gamma servants of the household staff liked the style.

At Ellen's Roadhouse, Gabriel didn't make the rye bread his second husband had ate at every meal, but he made plenty of beer and more than a little mead, when the honey was cheap but not adulterated good with bad. He kneaded bread in the morning, and the evening, and carried endless pitchers and plates about, swept floors, and worked until the great clock struck two. Then he swept and cleaned and climbed stairs four flights up to a bed in a tiny garret under the eaves.

No one paid him much mind, and he was completely satisfied with that.

 

Jo came home from a week in the woods – hunting and trapping fur and bush meat, it supplemented her family's income from the tavern, made for little luxuries from time to time, and a store of emergency funds in hard times – to find her mother had hired a barman and general dogs'-body.

He was older, much nearer her mother's age than her own, and quiet in a way that said it wasn't his natural temper, but a profound sadness after a terrible shock. But he was good at keeping the ale flowing to the customers, and he didn't try to press attention on Jo when she joined him working the floor or later on.

Of course, he barely spoke to her, just enough for Jo to hear how clean and rounded his voice was, a touch of the north over an accent that screamed Flock. Her mother's stern words – "We'll call him Gabe" – made sense, because he was almost certainly a disinherited gamma from some Flock family or other, and probably only recently thrown out of his family onto the mercy of the world. Jo had seen more than one gamma wander through with that shell-shocked look, and even a few epsilons, who had outlived a father who had kept them close to find their alpha cousin or even brother had no use for them now that he was pack alpha and head-of-household.

Gabe at least seemed not likely to drink himself to death, or turn to whoring from lack of other skills or options.

 

The smell was maddening, and Jo cursed whatever delta had wandered through the taproom in the beginnings of her heat. It was fucking inconsiderate and just what Jo had come to expect from a wolf-bitch – or at least a certain type of she-wolf. There was always some woman or another who figured out that alphas would be stupid for her during her heat and that she might as well get while the getting was good. Jo despised that kind of thinking, because it made it that much harder for all the other Folk with wolves to keep – the Flock would just look down on them as no-accounts if things got out of hand because a delta in heat didn't have the sense to stay home and managed herself. There was a least one ruckus a month down along the train tracks because of deltas and alphas setting to. Three months ago, it had been some poor beta boy who had had no idea – at least he'd gotten taken in as a concubine by one of the administrators from the city, or at least that's what Jo had heard.

Thank the New God and the Old, Jo thought, that zetas didn't go into heat. It made passing as an epsilon so much easier.

So she was surprised as anything to follow the scent up and up until she was at the attic stairs. There were only a few rooms up there, storage mostly, and Gabe's little room.

...Gabe's room? Which the scent trail led right to? Jo found herself standing at the thin door and breathing hard against the sweet scent of someone else's heat.

"Gabe?" She asked and rapped on the door.

There was a rustle of fabric and a muffled groan and then Gabe answered, "what?"

"Gabe, answer the door." Jo pressed her ear up against the cheap wood and was off-balance when Gabe cracked it open. She stumbled, almost knocked herself silly on the jamb, and inhaled.

Sweet, and heady... a wolf in heat.

Jo saw Gabriel's eyes wide and startled, and shoved the door back far enough to eel inside. Gabe looked a mess in the dim light of his cheap lamp – sweaty and disheveled and unbelievably attractive despite that.

"... Want to have sex?" she blurted, and then winced at herself and Gabe's outraged look.

 

Gabriel lifted his head to glare at her.

"I'm just asking," she said with a bit of smile.

"You're swaggering is what you are," Gabriel grumbled, and sat down on the bed. His entire body throbbed, and while he knew another orgasm or three would help, he'd passed the point where his own hands were going to suffice and yet he didn't think he could bear having another lay hands on him. He was afraid what his body would do, given what it had done when he'd been trapped in the silver muzzle – betrayed him again and again.

"Seriously, you look awful."

"I feel awful, but you can't help."

Jo rolled her eyes, and dropped to sit on the bed next to him. She put her hand on his arm, and looked confused when Gabriel flinched.

She tried again, and he flinched again, jerking away from her and losing control enough to flash a mount full of wolf's teeth at her. His bitch growled through his throat, warningly.

He was utterly shocked when she growled back, with a deep dog-wolf's voice.

"God's BALLS! You're a zeta," Gabriel gasped.

"And you're a beta," Jo hissed. "In heat. I thought we could help each other."

Gabriel froze, and looked up at Jo and her honest, sweet face. It was wrinkled up into a frown right at the moment, but she was looking at him, instead of through him in the way that Lucifer had always had, the way Castiel had adopted in those 10 weeks of misery.

"I don't want to get pregnant," Gabriel said, and ran his fingers through his hair.

"Agreed. It would be hard to pretend to be a gamma if you did," Jo said.

Gabriel sighed, and fidgeted. His skin was prickly tight, and his nipples were tender. Not to mention the heat tickling between his legs. He dreaded the thought of stripping and turning his back to her, even if he didn't transform – and he didn't think he could, for all that his bitch had growled. The wolf wouldn't come out from beneath his skin, not if the risk was being trapped again. He had learned his lesson about that at home.

"I won't transform."

Jo's eyebrows went up. "You won't..?"

"No."

"But..." Jo tugged on the ends of her hair.

"No. I won't."

 

Jo was... well, Jo was a zeta, and Gabriel had no idea what to do with her. He'd had sex with a zeta all of once, or more accurately, he'd had a castrated zeta whore suck him off once, when he was still an unmarried boy and Michael and Lucifer (Heylel then, before he'd earned the byname, he'd just been Heylel, after a dead uncle) thought he should get some experience before his marriage. There had been a whorehouse they'd liked, and they'd dragged him along and told him to watch closely. It had been a bewildering experience for him, and he hadn't liked it, even when they had hired him a beta to talk to him – at least that whore had some practical advice for him.

Not enough, as it turned out, because Attarib of the Lilim had been pleased enough to mount him during his heats, the alpha had also liked fucking him in the ass all the rest of the time. His husband had been of the opinion that a vagina was slimy and disgusting and only fit for breeding into – Gabriel had put up with it as long as he could, but when Attarib had all but thrust a divorce onto him after the birth of Gabriel Minor in disappointment that this child was also a beta (Attarib had been twice married before Gabriel, and had nothing but beta and delta children) Gabriel had leapt at the chance to be away from him, even if it meant giving up Gabriel Minor as soon as the boy was weaned.

Wotan had been a much better match, for that it had been more overtly about commerce. Lucifer had gotten access to the iron and gold mines that Wotan's clan controlled, and Wotan got access to southern luxuries to bribe his client-families with, as well as Gabriel for a comfort in his age. Gabriel hadn't minded being Wotan's featherbed – they'd been so delightfully spiteful together.

He missed Wotan, with his scratchy voice and his scratchy beard, and his habit of calling Gabriel pet names, like 'Gaesling' and 'Barni' and 'Loki' – gosling, child, and air-spirit – Wotan had never quite viewed Gabriel as something other than a cross between an wholly bizarre entanglement and a pleasant diversion for his age, but at least he'd been kind and considerate.

 

"Gabriel," Gabe said after a while, when Jo was absent running her fingers up and down his thighs.

"huh?" Jo said.

"Gabriel. My name, it's Gabriel, not Gabron."

"So you're actually Flock. I mean, real Flock, not just raised a servant in a Flock household."

Gabe turned his head and gave her a sad smile. "I could give you my house-name too, if you like..?"

"No! No. It wouldn't help, would it?" Jo said.

"No, I don't think so." Gabe sighed, and turned a bit more on his side, rolling to tuck his head under her chin and nuzzle her neck. "Thank you."

"Huh? I mean, thanks." Jo said, and moved his hand to pet his hair, even though her fingers were sticky.

"… Put that back...?" Gabe murmured.

"You're kidding?"

"You're gentle," Gabriel murmured. "I like that."

"You're insatiable." Jo grumbled.

"… no," Gabriel said, and shifted away from her. Jo could feel him shiver beside her.

"Gabe?"

"I'm not. I'm not." Gabe hiccupped.

"Hey," Jo said and laid her chin against his shoulder, carefully putting her body along his so that he could feel the soft mounds of her tits and the padded curve of her hip. He'd been fascinated earlier, and had said something about her being 'different' and that being 'nice' like he didn't quite have the words to describe what he was feeling – Jo had been left wondering if he'd ever had sex with a woman before, delta, epsilon, or zeta. She kind of didn't think so...

He froze for a moment, and his face twisted in confusion in the candlelight, but then he sighed, and turned his head to look her in the eyes.

"You're Jo."

"Yep, that's me."

"Just Jo – nobody else," he muttered and nosed into her hair.

"That's nice," she said.

"You're nice," he replied. "Gentle hands and patient..."

"My hands are callused," she pointed out.

"I said 'gentle', not 'soft'," Gabe said, and brought one to his mouth and began licking her fingers.

Jo giggled at that, ticklish instead of stimulated.

Gabe looked dismayed, like he expected a different reaction from her.

"Sorry," she said, not actually apologetic.

"Why didn't that work?" he asked.

"Because I'm not whoever you were thinking of?"

Gabe frowned. "I... how do I offer, then?"

"Offer what?" Jo asked, genuinely confused.

He stiffened, then dropped to the bed again and buried his face against her, hiding in the hollow between her neck and shoulder. He whined as she stroked his hair carefully.

"You were nice, and you only used your hands. I can't let you fuck me," he mumbled against her skin, his breath warm and damp against her neck and over her breasts, "but I could let you use my mouth... if you want, if you'll tell me how."

"What?"

"I'd use my tongue to—-"

"I know blowjobs, Gabe," she said. "I have had sex with other zetas and epsilons before, even a gamma once. I'm just surprised that you don't know how to give one! Weren't you married?!"

"Twice," Gabe said quietly.

"And you never licked your husband's pri—-"

"Of course I did," Gabe snapped. "But I've only ever done it to alphas and betas. You're a zeta... it's got to be different."

Jo chuckled and patted Gabe's arm. "I'm sure you'll figure it out."

He did, with some coaching. Jo laughed only a little at his bafflement when he actually looked at her genitalia, instead of just fingered it blindly. But despite her odd shape, he figured out how to spread her open. In short order was licking her softly with the determined attention that had her biting her lips and digging her hands into the bed linens. She knew she couldn't grab his hair and direct him – he'd already panicked over hands at the back of his neck. It was equally hard to stop herself from wrapping her legs around him and shoving up, but she managed not to do it, at least not more than a bit of wriggling.

He didn't mind the size of her clit or how it was almost a small penis itself – in fact, he made an appreciative noise when she managed to brush it against his cheek. He used his fingers on it, and when she whimpered, he pulled himself up to peer at her curiously. Whatever he saw there made him grin, and he ducked back between her legs with a will that undid her completely. She had to bite her own wrist to keep from howling.

"Hmm," Jo said sometime later.

"Jo..." Gabe whined, and vibrated against her. "Please...?"

Jo rubbed her eyes, and looked at him. That hadn't been a shiver, that had been wriggling.

"What do you want?"

"Your hands again?" Gabe cocked his head to the side, and then looked away. "Maybe... your mouth?"

"I can do that," Jo agreed. "You'll want to sit on the edge of the bed."

Gabe let her haul him up, and didn't shiver more than once or twice when she tried to nudge his knees apart with her hands. When the shivering started up, Jo just sat beside him, and let him clutch her hand. Waiting was no fun at all, especially with Gabe's scent everywhere in his tiny attic lair, but it was worth it when he nodded at her, and braced his knees apart himself.

He looked like he was about to swallow his tongue when she went down between his thighs, and ran her tongue as well as fingers over his skin. His prick was flaccid this deep into his heat, but he made soft happy noises when she traced a finger over it, before dipping below and behind. She'd already had her fingers in him, in the wet place that betas shared with every other child-bearer, but he whined at her again as she put her fingers in him again, just two, crooked up to press on his prick from the inside. He was so wet and musky from his heat.

Jo pushed him back a little with her other hand, making room for her to work. Gabe tasted salty, tangy, an odd undertone that she'd never known before. She suspected it was what betas tasted like. He gasped and raised his knees around her. She pressed them back down.

Gabe whimpered. Given that she was she tonguing his soft prick and down around his balls, she didn't think it was distress. But she pulled back to look at him.

"Do you want me to stop?"

It took Gabe a moment to recognize that he had to answer her. "God, no..."

"Okay," Jo chuckled. "Just asking. Let me know if you do."

Gabe garbled an incoherent answer as she bent her head down again. She slipped another finger into his wetness, and pressed up. Gabe lifted his hips this time, and bore down. Her fingers slipped in to the knuckles. He could probably take all her fingers, he was so deep in heat – all her fingers and her hand up to the wrist, he was so greedy – but she wouldn't try it until she'd taken his edge off with an orgasm or two. And asked him if he wanted that, because she knew how brave he was being.

 

"What are you doing with my daughter?" Ellen asked one day, after Jo ruffled his hair on her way out the door.

Gabriel looked up at the innkeeper with what he was sure were wide eyes. He could lie with the best of them, but he could tell that Ellen had already come to her own conclusions.

"Nothing she doesn't want me to?" he offered and gave her a weak grin.

Ellen narrowed her eyes at him.

"Truly."

"Don't get her pregnant, boy."

Gabriel managed to smother his giggle half-born. "No, no chance of that, ma'am."

Ellen gave him a long dubious look. "I'm not apt to have a son-in-law my own age, so make sure it won't be necessary."

"I will – I have," Gabriel agreed.

Ellen went back to her work, and Gabriel went back to his sweeping, and then Ellen said, "Well, at least you make her smile. That's more than most, so I'll let you stay. For now."

"Thank you, Ellen."

 

Gabriel had let things shuffle on a while, and once winter had truly settled in, let Jo drag him off on one of her hunting trips – and Ellen let him go, because the deep winter after the holiday season was a dead time for the Roadhouse. He'd be more useful hauling pelts than serving the few customers.

It worked out well, he thought. Jo taught him to shoot – he'd never held a carbine before, because it was just something that betas didn't, at least if their husbands had the wealth to keep them as they should be. He hadn't liked the loud retort, or the way it kicked and bruised his shoulder, but he liked being useful to Jo.

And they curled together in the night, in the rough shelter of tent and blankets. They were so utterly alone, that Gabriel even felt brave enough to transform when it got cold enough. He'd been afraid how he'd react as a wolf to Jo, but it had been utterly uneventful. The next night, Jo had transformed while he stayed human, and he knew that was just as much a sign of trust for her as for him – his wolf might be traumatized from the forced breeding, but her wolf had never really been with other wolves at all, and was wild and wary as a bison calf.

The night after that, the slept in the tent as wolves, curled around each other asleep in their fur. Gabriel showed Jo how to hunt for voles under the snow the next morning, scenting and pouncing. It was something he'd learned from Wotan, in the long winters in among the pines. Jo had never risked hunting in wolf shape, but they were a long way from anyone else.

It was probably inevitable that they became to close – not in love, Gabriel didn't really believe in love, but entwined and entangled in all the most useless ways. It took a persistent alpha and his next heat to break them apart.

 

The alpha was one of the rough ones, some son of lower-class Folk who thought because he had a wolf and a bone in his penis that he could bully everyone around him. Gabriel had disliked him on sight, and on smell – he might not transform outside of the few trips with Jo during the winter, but his wolf-bitch was still within him, and distrusted anything that smelled too strongly of other wolves, besides Jo's well-mannered alter-ego.

"Outside," Gabriel growled at the alpha the night he came back after being told not to. Ellen had been firm; the alpha wasn't welcome in her tavern. Gabriel's wolf wanted to go for the man's throat, a clean quick kill, but he didn't want to do it in the taproom, not in front of all Ellen's customers.

"Piss off, you dickless gamma," the man responded.

Gabriel's wolf growled, showing her teeth at the man.

The man blinked in surprise, and then smirked, a cocky alpha's grin. "Well well. That's different, then. Outside?"

Gabriel nodded.

"Gabe!" Jo hissed as he began to step backward towards the door, watching as the alpha paced him with a confidant stride and a cheerful grin. It was cold outside, still crisp and windy despite the spring thaw that was coming.

Gabriel paced down the street, and turned, not towards the railway but opposite, further away and towards the forest. He looked sidelong at the alpha who persisted in following, and asked, "We don't get many wolves, and you were told to leave... so why did you come back?"

"Oh come on," the man laughed. "I could smell a bitch in heat but no dog. Who wouldn't come back?!"

"I'm not interested in fucking you."

The alpha rolled his eyes. "You're in heat, bitch. Of course you are."

"No, I'm not. Go away and don't come back."

The alpha turned and lunged, shoving Gabriel up against the stone wall of that fronted the river bank. "You're in heat. I can smell you."

Gabriel stared at the man's throat, and found himself more angry than afraid. This wasn't like home at all – he might be outweighed, but he wasn't restrained. He could fight, or run if he had to.

"I said 'no'. I don't want to fuck you."

"You don't know what you need—"

"He said 'no'. You need to leave."

The man turned to stare at Jo, and Gabriel winced. He hadn't wanted her to follow. This was Gabriel's mess to deal with.

"He doesn't know what he's saying. Betas in heat need to be fucked. It's their nature. I'm doing him a favor."

Jo frowned harder and made one step closer. "Leave. Now."

"No. Your beta needs this. His bitch needs this—"

"His bitch is fine. You leave. Now."

 

Jo couldn't have explained it later. One minute Gabriel was being crowded up against the river embankment by some stranger, the next all three of them were in wolf shape and she and Gabriel were teaming up to savage the alpha. It was like her wolf shape ran wild, just wanted to tear into the interloper who was after her beta, her sweetheart who smelt wonderful with heat. Hers, hers, hers – no one should try to take Gabriel from her, and no one would once the alpha was dead.

Sinking her fangs into the stranger's throat while Gabriel tore at his belly just seemed right.

 

The strange alpha was dead at his feet, and all Gabriel could feel was relief, and the throb of heat. He looked at Jo, who was staring thunderstruck at the corpse. In the moonlight, the blood disappeared into the earth, but the scent of violent death was unmistakable, piss and blood and shit all mixed together. Gabriel wondered if Jo had ever participated in a killing challenge before, even just as a witness. It seemed unlikely, with her hiding her zeta status – no hunt would be safe, since most ended with everyone transforming back to human-shape to cut up the prey, and while Folk might murder each other in the dark to solve disputes, only Flock and some of the higher Elect did it public duels.

"Gabe," Jo whispered, "what do we do?"

Gabriel didn't hesitate even though he was beginning to shiver. "We can dump him in the river. Let him be someone else's problem."

"Are you crazy?" Jo asked. "Everyone saw him follow you out. Everyone saw your wolf's teeth."

"I... I had to..." Gabriel stammered, and began to shake in earnest.

 

"Are you alright? Are you alright?" Jo yelled, pressing her hands against Gabe's flesh, checking for damage with unschooled fingers.

Gabe could only shiver and nod for her. The alpha was dead, she was alive, Gabe was alive, they were alright. Even if they had a body to dispose of – they were not throwing it in the river, as if that would even be possible.

"Gabe, talk to me!"

Gabe frowned at her.

"Gabe?" she asked again.

"...I'm alright."

"Thank God," Jo sighed. She smiled at him, and wrapped her arms around his neck. It was easier to think now that she wasn't in wolf shape; there were things to do, and one of them was to get rid of this stranger's corpse.

 

He returned her hug awkwardly, his nose buried in her hair. He was shaking from nerves, he was sure. Nerves and heat, a bad mix.

Jo pulled back to give him another searching look. She looked worried, which was silly. Gabriel was alright.

"Hey," she murmured, and pulled him into her arms again. He felt awkward, sticky with the blood of the defeated alpha, and too jittery, but it was nice to put his head on her breast and just be for a moment.

 

"Take off your trousers," Gabriel said.

"Hey, no," Jo retreated.

"Please?" Gabriel asked again, and sank to the ground, crouching on all fours in a manner that was so directly blatant that Jo recoiled.

"What? No! You don't want—"

"I changed my mind," Gabriel said.

Jo found herself taking one step trembling step forward, and then another. She should know better, but Gabriel smelled so enticing, and she was still full of fire from killing the stranger with him. When she got close enough, she reached out her hand, and carefully stroked it over Gabriel's soft hair in its terrible shorn state.

The beta shivered under her touch, but when she yanked her hand back, his hand darted out and grabbed her wrist. He wove his fingers into hers, and licked her palm and down.

"Oh, God's balls, Gabe..." she muttered.

"Take off your trousers," Gabe repeated.

She didn't like how he was acting – shivering one moment, almost flirtatious the next, round and round like a whirly-gig. What was going on inside his head? But maybe going along with his demands for the moment was what he needed, so she reached down and began to unbelt her trousers.

"Gabe!" she yelped, as lunged at her, his face pressed against her belly, and then down as he pulled her unbelted and unbuttoned trousers down her thighs. His tongue was... his tongue was... Jo gasped at him.

"Is this good?" he pulled back to ask. "Am I good?"

"Gabe," she lifted a hand and risked a gentle pat on his head. "Calm down."

"Jo..." he whined.

Jo rolled her eyes and got down on the ground with him. "Breathe, Gabe. You need to breathe."

He sighed all at once and went boneless, collapsing against her, his forehead coming to lie on her shoulder as he all but folded into her lap again. She let him curl up against her, and stroked his hair until he stopped shivering so badly. Each brush of her fingers stirred the air, bringing ripples of heat-scent up off Gabriel's skin. Every breath she took made it harder to think, made that odd heavy feeling spread from her chest down into her belly, and sink lower.

"Change," she said, after a long time of just petting him, soothing him as he curled in her lap and let his fear leak away. There was a little bit of a growl in her voice as she ordered him to change, to be his she-wolf again. Feeling detached, she felt her own wolf still moved restlessly under her skin in the wake of the fight, unable to calm down with Gabriel's heat-scent in the air.

Gabe stared back at her, his amber eyes huge, but he twisted in her arms, pulling away. When he was out of hand's reach, he shifted, and Jo could look at the brindled she-wolf that was Gabe's other self.

It took only a moment for her to change.

Gabe jumped back at that, and whined. His crooked tail clamped tight down the back of his leg, and he retreated, legs bent as he scuttled away. His ears were pinned and he panted at her.

Jo tilted her head and gave a soft woof. She wasn't any bigger than he was like this, being a very small he-wolf. There was no reason for Gabe to be afraid, especially since they'd already killed the interloper.

Gabe stopped retreating at that, and his ears pricked up.

Jo wagged her tail hopefully, and bent down into a playbow.

Gabe stepped closer, his head down shyly.

Jo bounced on her front paws, and did another playbow. This time, Gabe mirrored her, a slow gentle stretch into that splayed his front paws and pulled his jaws into a silly grin.

Jo bounced up onto her feet and woofed again.

Gabe woofed back at her.

They mirrored each other for several long moments, bounce, woof, playbow, jump into the air, until Jo spun into a circle and slammed her wolf-shape against Gabe. The brindled she-wolf went down sprawling.

Jo rushed over in concern, because Gabe looked stunned and confused. She whined at him, and when he lifted the she-wolf's head, Jo licked out over his eye and ear.

Gabe's she-wolf shivered at that. At first, Jo thought she'd hurt him, but when she moved a step away, the she-wolf whined at Jo's wolf, and Jo stepped him back. The she-wolf's neck arched, and Jo poked her wolf's nose against Gabe's neck.

The she-wolf climbed to tawny feet, and stepped away to shake dust off. Jo woofed in amusement, and ducked out of range of the dust, and thus was off balance when Gabe came barreling out of the cloud of dust to slam into her bodily.

Jo chuckled and huffed as she climbed back onto her feet. Gabe peered down at her with his head cocked and his crooked, broken tail wagging close to the ground. Jo nipped at him playfully, which caused him to collapse and flail, as if she'd fought him to submission.

But is wasn't submission, it was heat, and her wolf knew what it wanted from the she-wolf rolling on the ground. Oh new god and old, Jo thought, before she stepped forward on wolf feet and things got completely out of control.

It's heat and wolf shape, that's what she told herself, even as she put her paws around Gabriel's barrel. After that, she didn't tell herself much, because she was too busy feeling.

 

Jo woke up alone. She wasn't worried, at least at first.

She went into the inn, but Gabriel wasn't in the taproom. Or the kitchen. Or the storeroom. She looked all over the public rooms, asked her mother and Bobby and the one scullion scrubbing pots – but he wasn't to be found.

Finally, she went up to the attics, to the tiny room that Gabe had for his own.

His jacket was off its peg, and his clothes press was open and empty.

There was a folded scrap of paper on his cot, with her name written across it in a beautiful round hand. When she opened it, it said, I'm sorry. I can't stay. I can't I can't be what you want. Please don't follow. Gabriel Β Mik. Seraphim

PART TWO

Kali spotted the wolf in the haze of dust alongside the road when she was coming back from town. It was early in the morning, and she'd spent the night at a difficult birth – a beautiful heifer calf, and the mother cow doing well despite the tricky birth – so she was tired and aching and had no patience at all as she bicycled down the road.

"What do you think you're doing?" she snapped as the wolf shied into the long dried-out grass. It was almost crawling along the ground, possibly even more exhausted than she was, and it looked dreadful, filthy with dust and mud.

The wolf turned to look at her with bright brown eyes, and she just tapped her foot and glared. It ducked its head, curled a crooked tail, and looked so resigned that she huffed a sigh.

"You're a disaster. Come with me," she told it, and pushed her bicycle off its kickstand and down the road. When it followed she snapped her fingers and pointed and the wolf came to heel, like a well-trained dog.

One more stray in her life, she supposed. At least this one would remember to look out after herself, unlike the abandoned horse that had wound up at her barn recently, probably the stupidest member of the entire equine tribe, given the animal's love of water and ditches.

 

The next day at breakfast, Kali was surprised to find her travel-worn wolf was a travel-worn man. Cross-gender werewolves were rare enough in the lake country, though she could name a few even in town. But to have one turn up on her doorstep was a rarity. There simply weren't many of them around – people didn't make matches in the hopes of having cross-gender children here, unlike what Kali had heard of the North, where she was sure her guest was from after one look at his too warm and too worn layers of clothes.

She had awoken to find him out on the porch in the blankets she'd laid out for the wolf last night, a threadbare man with no scruff of beard for all his road filth, and a belly that was rounding out in a manner that would have been ridiculous if the rest of him hadn't looked hollow. And if Kali didn't know how fraught pregnancy could be for betas and zetas—their double-sexed bodies might be capable of pregnancy, but they were not nearly as well suited for it as single-sexed deltas and epsilons.

"So," Kali said as she laid out morning tea and toast, "eggs?"

The man who had been a she-wolf the day before looked at her with exhausted eyes and frowned. "What?" he mumbled.

"Do you want eggs?"

He looked at the iron skillet in her hand, and then around her back porch. The kitchen backed onto it, and the windows were all open with the warmth of summer.

"Eggs...?" he repeated, as if he'd forgotten the meaning of the word.

"Scrambled, poached, fried...?" Kali suggested.

"Fried?" the man asked, or maybe offered his preference. Kali was going to take it as a request, anyway.

"Fried. Over soft..?"

"Over... hard?"

Kali nodded, retrieved two eggs from the cold box, and cracked them as she set the burner alight. It took on a few minutes before she had eggs fried hard, the yolks almost crisp, to go with hot toast and ginger tea. She flipped it all onto a plate and held it out to the man.

"Eat," she told him, as he stared at the plate in his hands with bafflement.

He looked up at her, and keeping his eyes on her, began to pick at the eggs with his filthy fingers. Kali's eyebrows rose, but she shrugged and turned to cook herself breakfast—she liked her eggs scrambled and fluffy.

He had finished everything before she'd even plated her meal, but she didn't give him anything other than another cup of tea. That thin hollowness about his eyes spoke of long days on the road and little to eat, and even with his wolf taking care of him, he'd likely vomit more if she let him gorge. Wolves might thin and fat like the deer they preyed upon, but werewolves were people first and foremost. Too much food after a long period of too little, and they'd be sick.

She'd feed him up carefully, little meals all day and all week, until she was sure that he could handle more than eggs and toast and tea—and he might not be able to handle those either at first.

He looked distinctly uncomfortable as she watched him over the remnants of their tea. He fidgeted, avoided her eyes, looked out over her land, orchard and pasture both, as if he was looking for a bolt hold.

"Gabriel," he finally mumbled.

"Gabriel?" she asked.

He nodded, "Gabriel. My name... Gabriel."

Kali had not been planning to ask, in fact. A werewolf stumbling alone on the road, in wolf-shape with every indication that he'd stayed in wolf-shape for a long time, was a werewolf with problems. She would have patched his paws, fed him trimmings and mush until he fattened, and let him go on his way if he had wanted.

But for some reason he wanted her to know his name.

"Kali."

He looked up at her, and she couldn't quite decipher that expression. Curiosity or indignation or confusion? What an odd creature he was, full of nerves and exhaustion with something fierce buried deep.

"Let me look at your hands? Your paws looked raw, last night."

He held his hands out for inspection, and Kali frowned at the dusty coating them—there were cracks in the dirt around his knuckles, and some of the dirt had smeared into the egg grease and thinned, revealing skin that was shockingly irritated looking, almost pink.

It took her wiping his hands clean with rags, and then wrapping them against old and new blisters for her to realize just how pale he was, and how naturally. He was ruddy from the sun, sun-burned and sun-blistered in places, but his normal skin tone was as pale as holly or elm wood, and his eyes, while brown, were a pale golden brown, a color rare enough that Kali had never seen it before. That spoke of far northern blood, maybe as far as the river-cities, or maybe even further, into the Great North Woods, that were all pine in a country where it was never warm and no one even knew what the sun looked like. Kali had met only a few people from the North, strangers down to earn a living buying up local goods like walnuts and pecans, bolts of cotton and bales of it.

What in the world was he doing here?

 

Gabriel's she-wolf form was actually shyer than his man shape, if that could be possible. Kali got used to the wolf crawling out from under bed-frames and low tables, and from behind the clutter of her workspaces whenever Kali had visitors; crawling out from the easy shelter of the main floor to hide ever deeper in the warren of house and barn and outbuildings.

She finally had a crate brought to the house, a fine wooden form that she shoved into a corner and lined with straw and an old blanket. It was solid, and the opening in it was small and defensible, like a den dug under a tree, and she thought it might help Gabriel feel safe. He hadn't liked the upstairs room she'd offered him, she had come to realize—too much light, too much space for the she-wolf whose fears were running his mind this late into a pregnancy that he seemed deeply ambivalent about.

But the she-wolf liked the crate, dark and defensible as it was, and Kali liked that she could hear Gabriel and he could hear her, and wouldn't be hidden and frightened with her unaware if things went wrong. She had worried about him slinking away and giving birth under someone's porch like a stray dog.

Pregnancy in a beta-hermaphrodite was such a tricky thing, and could go so disastrously wrong at the last minute.

Which was of course why she wasn't needed at all. She went to bed one night, after checking that Gabriel had everything he needed—the better couch, the soft light of lamp, a book of verse she'd borrowed for him, a clay beaker full of hibiscus tea—and in the morning she found the kitchen bare, no small sweet rolls or hard scones cooling on the sill for her—Gabriel might be shy and retiring as a ghost, but by all the waters, he could bake.

Upon investigating, she found Gabriel's clothes scattered all over her parlor, and Gabriel in the crate, exhausted, thirsty, and curled up around a cub so new that it was still damp. It took some cajoling on Kali's part to get him to let her pick up the cub and sex it—male, at least as a wolf, which meant alpha or zeta, and each possibility meant different problems for Gabriel, based on what little he'd said about his past and very much on how he reacted to her friends and neighbors – namely, he was afraid of alphas and stiffly polite to Tykhe from the road works, the only zeta under Kali's care at the moment.

"Come," Kali said, and pulled herself out of the crate with cub still in her hands. Gabriel whined in distress as she tucked his offspring in the crook of her arm and stood, but he crept out when she went to kitchen.

Two pumps to get the sink going, and then Kali leaned on the foot-pedal to keep the warm water flowing. She washed the cub with water, even as it squeaked.

"It's fine," she said to Gabriel as she heard the click of his claws on her wood floors. The wolf looked up at her from the kitchen doorway, its tail down – it was always down, Gabriel's tail was crooked from an old break, but this was down even for him—but wagging tentatively.

"Four feet, one head, one tail—you have a wolf cub," Kali counted off and finished by holding the cub out.

Gabriel walked forward, and sniffed the cub. Then his front paw lifted, to catch and pull Kali's arm down until he could put his nose on the cub and lick.

Kali braced herself when he shifted, and the cub changed in her arms, following its mother's change.

"Oh," Kali said, looking at the infant girl in her arms. She peeled off her scarf—she'd dressed with idea of making early rounds today, with the idea that Gabriel would need her soon—and wrapped the cotton length around the infant, round and round. It would do for warmth until she managed to get them all upstairs, where the diapers were.

Gabriel looked pale—well, he was always pale, milk-skinned northerner that he was—and very tired, and completely naked. He also looked deflated, like a half-filled water bag, and slightly doughy, like a good poke would deform him. Birth was hard on the body, especially for werewolves.

Kali reached down, and tried to haul Gabriel to his feet. Even with bracing him against the wall and him trying to help, it was awkward with the infant. But Kali wouldn't put the child down, and Gabriel was in no condition to hold his own baby.

"Come," Kali said once she had him on his tottering feet.

"I can't," Gabriel said as she led him to the stairs. His face looked bleak as he contemplated the rise up to the upper floor.

"You can," she said, and then conceded that he might not be able to in that form. "Change if you must."

He changed, the baby didn't, and Kali went up the stairs.

Gabriel followed, one step, two steps, crawling up the stairs in stops and starts. Kali didn't watch him. It would have been an insult to his dignity.

Instead she went into the room she'd given him, that she'd equipped with the first things an infant would need—first off, a diaper. Putting one on the infant took enough time that Gabriel crept into the room, his tongue panting out.

"On the bed, Gabriel," Kali said as he made to flop on the rag rug.

The wolf whined, but moved to the bed. Kali watched as Gabriel changed again, and more or less fell onto the bed, looking even more wretched than he had downstairs.

She pulled the linens over him, layers of warmth even though the day would probably be warm enough on its own. If he overheated, he could kick them off.

"Here," she said, and put the baby down against him. "She's yours."

Gabriel smiled at the baby, and then looked up in shock. "She?"

"She. A girl, at least when human. Her wolf is male."

"A zeta..." Gabriel whispered, and what little color he had fled. Kali hadn't known he could turn ash gray like that, and it was disconcerting enough to make her snap a little.

"Yes." Kali said, and then softened, "It will be fine, Gabriel. You're cross-gendered yourself."

"You..." Gabriel looked up at her, his eyes wide, "I can keep her?"

Kali didn't like the assumption implied in Gabriel's surprise. "Yes. What will you name her? Do your people name infants at birth?" Kali asked, realizing she didn't know.

"I... her name should start with 'Jo'. Her... father... was named 'Joanna'; if we'd been married, she'd be Joanna Minor... but we weren't. But she should have something from Jo, because Jo was kind to me..."

"All right. It's 'Jo' for now, and you'll figure out the rest later?"

Gabriel nodded, and then yawned.

Kali snorted. "I see you need your sleep. Can you nurse, or do I need to bring up goat milk?"

"I can, in wolf-shape. Probably not like this," Gabriel conceded, a shrug indicating his frame with its heavily masculine appearance, "but I can change when she needs me."

"Good, then I'll let you sleep."

"Jocheved," he said, the words coming in a rush, "I want to call her Jocheved."

"All right," Kali said. "Jocheved. That sounds good. What does it mean?"

Gabriel looked a little shamefaced, even as he curled his body tighter around the infant. "'God's glory'."

Kali said nothing—she knew nothing about northern names—and put her fingers down beside Gabriel's. Let him decide whether or not he wanted his hand held, now that the danger of childbirth and the immediate aftermath was past and she didn't need to touch him every moment to keep him alive as she had feared all these weeks – a beta-hermaphrodite carrying a child was in more risk than a woman, werewolf or not, or even a zeta-hermaphrodite with their mostly female bodies.

After a moment, he moved his fingers very gently, very slowly, until his palm was curled around hers in a tentative handclasp. Kali smiled at him, and let him hold her until he fell asleep, curled hand and body around her and his new cub.

Then Kali had work to do, so she slipped off his bed and let him sleep.

 

"She was named Jo," Gabriel said one day as he was helping Kali shell walnuts—the hard black kind that were prized for their taste and their usefulness.

"Hmm?" Kali said. She hadn't really been paying much attention, being more focused on prying the husks off the shells, and the shells off the nuts. Both would be useful—the husks yielded interesting colors if you knew how to brew the dyebath properly, and the shells were abrasive shards oddly useful for grinding and polishing. The fact the meat was tasty just meant that everything had to be saved today.

"Jocheved's...father," Gabriel said. "Her name, it was Jo. Joanna..."

Yes, she remembered that he'd named Jocheved's father before, a name that meant nothing to her. Kali thought about that for a moment, "So you turned to another herm when you were heat?" Kali wasn't familiar with northerner names, but he'd call Joanna 'her', which implied that Gabriel had been impregnated by a zeta, a hermaphrodite that was more female than he was with his beta-hermaphrodite broad shoulders and narrow hips. They'd have been better off to do it the other way round, but if Gabriel had come into heat before getting his zeta lover pregnant, well, life threw lemons at you sometimes.

Gabriel flushed. "It was stupid. I was stupid. But I liked her, and I thought I needed her... And then... I ruined everything."

"How so?"

"I ran. Jo... I ran."

"Was she the last one to bite you?" Kali asked. Gabriel had a series of overlapping bites on his left shoulder, where some few people had worried are the juncture of neck and body. It was rather inconsiderate to bite a bedmate hard enough that he had scars from the experience, in Kali's opinion, but the world took all types. Maybe Gabriel had liked it every time—there were odder tastes out there, and Kali had seen more than a few of them. Or, and Kali thought this more likely, given what she knew of northerner customs, Gabriel's bedmates had been trying to make a claim on his that no one should make on another – of ownership, not partnership.

Gabriel ran a nervous hand over his shoulder then, even though it was covered. Kali had gotten used to Gabriel's quirks of nerve.

"... yes. I ran, afterwards." Gabriel shuddered out a sigh. "I didn't want to be anyone's, and I took it out on Jo. I shouldn't have let her think different."

Kali rolled her eyes. If she let Gabriel go down this path again, where he talked himself into terror and memory, she'd want to stick his head in a bucket, and she'd doubt anyone would blame her if she did at last. He might often be sweet, but Gabriel could be exhausting as well, and she had reached the end of her tether in regards to his drama and self-blame.

 

Over the weeks, Gabriel wound up helping Kali and became a fixture in her house. She didn't mind that's he was very shy around strangers – he couldn't help it, his wolf tended to panic and even with Gabriel firmly in man shape, the wolf would urge his to run – and liked his baking. He had one skill, his gift from his marriage to Wotan and from Ellen's tutelage at the Roadhouse, but it seemed enough to earn him a place in the midwife's – well, the locals called her 'tiger', which Gabriel thought was local for 'witch' – life.

She didn't even mind Jocheved, who cried and demanded and was altogether a trial. Not to mention a zeta, and Gabriel hadn't been able to understand that Kali just hadn't cared that Jocheved was born perverse and not in a useful way. Lucifer wouldn't have let Gabriel keep her, not like Father had let Raguel keep Anna when Gabriel's littlest sister had turned out to be a disappointing epsilon. Lucifer wouldn't even have sent Jocheved out for fostering at some client's home – at best she'd have been sent to one the poorly managed baby farms to be lost in the shuffle of work and disease.

But the midwife let him keep his daughter, even though he had arrived in rags and with almost nothing to offer but a willingness to disappear when Kali wanted him to. That, and his way with baking bought his hostess' sufferance, and Gabriel found himself sinking more into her debt and less willing to refuse even her causal requests. He simply owed her too much, at least as much as any client did, and probably enough to commit him to her service, enough that he was as much as debt-peon that had ever worked for the Seraphim.

 

"That cannot possibly have been legal," Kali said, appalled, after one of her causal exchanges of stories with Gabriel – well causal on her part, as she'd told a story about some of her romantic foolishness when she was a youngster learning her trade – revealed just exactly why he'd run so far away from his Northern home.

Gabriel frowned, but didn't look up. He seemed to be finding it easier to tell his story to Jocheved, who didn't seem to care what her parent did, as long as the patting game continued.

"We're out of different lineages—my mother was Cherubim, his was Ophanim—-"

"But you were brothers!"

Gabriel paused to look up at her, his face bleak. "Yes, but only through our father. It... wasn't a barrier. At least, not one that couldn't be waived away on our pack leader's, our head-of-household you'd say, orders."

Kali wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Who would order that?"

"Lucifer. Well, Heylel, but no one calls him that anymore. He's been Lucifer since I before my first heat..."

"Lucifer?"

"My brother. Full brother—he's five years older than me, and he and Michael—he was the oldest, but he's dead now—are brothers through my mother, though I remember Raguel, my father's second spouse, because my mother died of a fever when I was still a babe."

As rare as it was to get Gabriel to talk about his past, this wellspring of family history wasn't helping Kali understand why his family had pressed him into what was frankly an incestuous coupling, one that he'd fled screaming into the night.

"Why?"

"Why did he die? I don't know... maybe having three children in seven years, being pregnant every other heat, even if he lost the one before me —" Gabriel rambled.

Kali held up her hand, not quite pressing it to his shoulder. "I know how hermaphrodites bear children, Gabriel," she reminded him.

"Sorry. I just..." he deflated a little.

"Why did your brother Lucifer order you into that... marriage."

"Castiel needed children; he was married, but his spouse was barren."

"Needed children?"

Gabriel nodded. "He needed children. Can't get elected Quaestor, or any of the higher offices if you're childless."

"I hadn't ever considered fertility to be a qualification for public office," Kali murmured. Frankly, it sounded ridiculous, but the North was supposedly full of strange customs.

"It's..." Gabriel tilted his head, thinking. That made Jocheved laugh, and Gabriel smiled in reflex at her, and resumed talking. "It's duty. You have children because the state needs citizens. You marry to have legitimate children who can be citizens, and they marry to have children who will be citizens as well. It's like a sheet, unfolding and expanding because of what you did."

Kali raised an eyebrow. "And your marriage to Castiel, that would have given him citizen children."

"Flock children."

"'Flock'," Kali said, and restrained herself from rolling her eyes.

"I know you don't believe it..."

"I find it hard to credit, yes," she said.

"But it's important to us. We are descendants of angels."

"'Given dominion over the earth by the New and Risen God.' Yes, I have heard. I don't follow those teachings."

"You don't follow the Old God either, in any of His rites."

"No, I don't. New or Old, I worship neither one."

Gabriel looked at her sideways, then ducked his nose into Jocheved's hair as the baby chewed on Gabriel's fingers.

"I don't see how you can't... God exists."

"God is a thug, and not worthy of worship," Kali stated.

Gabriel looked up at her with wide, startled eyes. "How can you says that!?"

"How can you not? What happened to you, where was the New God? Why did his rules let your brothers do that to you—take your heat and use you like a brood bitch? What God let's that happen?"

"...We don't always understand what the New God want of us..."

"Hmmmph," Kali said. "He's not a very useful god then, if he can't even communicate clearly."

"I... maybe not?" Gabriel said. He looked confused, and uncertain.

Kali picked up her cup and drank her sweet mint tea decisively. Perhaps she should have let Gabriel talk more—for certain, the flood of words was unusual and probably cathartic for him—but she didn't think she could hear anymore today without going out and killing something on his behalf, and that seemed ... unhelpful.

 

Gabriel lived in Kali's house, baked in Kali's kitchen, and fed Kali's chickens. Kali milked her own goats—Gabriel couldn't even go near that, because the milking stand made him remember things he'd rather have kept buried, a horrible pressure on the back of his neck that made his breath stutter—and Gabriel helped her make cheese.

All the while, Jocheved slept or not, slung on Gabriel's back with a wide cloth that Kali had given him and helped him tied on each morning. It was quite different from a river-city cradle, but the baby seemed fine, and Gabriel was surprised at how little she cried.

Of course, his only basis for comparison was Gabriel Minor of the Lilim, his and Attarib's son, and he had been so long ago, before Gabriel was twenty. The boy was probably approaching his first heat back home, if he hadn't bloomed already, and soon his uncles and cousins would be looking for an advantageous marriage for him.

At least Jocheved would be spared the marriage contracts, being born a nobody in the south, Gabriel thought. No alpha in the river-cities would have taken a zeta as a lover, let alone a concubine or lawful spouse. Jocheved would never have to go to some alpha's house to further her family, would never be ordered to leave home for the Great Pine Forest, would never be ordered to supply a brother with offspring, will she or nill she.

"She's fine," Kali told him one day as she added cut herbs to the curds they were pressing. "You worry too much."

Gabriel gave Kali a sour look, and stroked a hand back and around over Jocheved's pale fuzzy head. "She's very small."

"But growing. Stop worrying, and help me get the whey out. I want these wheels curing tomorrow!"

Gabriel sighed and nodded, smiling softly.

Kali was abrupt and demanding and yet willing to wait through his moments of airheadness and terror, and Gabriel thought she was better than any three of his family, especially all his brothers together.

Jocheved grew and prospered, and eventually Gabriel met the neighbor woman Maia, who was an epsilon with eight children—eight! and no miscarriages! Eight children!—and a gamma husband that worked on the rails all winter and in her fields all summer, and then other neighbors. He even worked up his nerve, and followed Kali into town for a market day, and no one accosted him as he kept to Kali's shadow.

But that might have been because Kali owned all her large farm, owned it outright and rented out what she didn't use for planting or raising her goats, and thus had many people in her debt and unable to risk criticizing her choices, even if one of them was taking in a worn-out beta under her wing.

That was one of the oddest things to get used to, the way land and houses were parceled and passed around here in the south. Kali owned this house and farm outright, in her own name, and no one thought it strange. When she died, it would go to her nearest relatives, and to southerners meant her own children, not her brothers', because a woman had the same share in her children as a man, instead of being a rented broodmare for the production of heirs.

Gabriel had not believed it, until Kali had sat him down and written out her family tree, sketching out both her matriline and patriline, and explaining what property came from where, and how a parcel of land or an antique and useful object passed mother to son, father to daughter, round and round.

Gabriel had been able to give Gabriel Minor small gifts, books for his education, an occasional toy and the like, but he hadn't had any property of his own. The Seraphim lands and house were his brother's property to control, and when Lucifer passed, they'd go to Castiel, or maybe one of the alpha boys, if Michael or Young Heylel were strong enough to challenge their uncle for clan leadership then.

When they'd divorced, Attarib had taken back everything he'd given Gabriel, and Gabriel took back everything he'd brought to the marriage, down to the copper bells of Attarib's marriage belt. When Wotan had died, Gabriel had taken his dowry back again and left after the funeral and an appropriate month of mourning—though Donner, sweet and kind as he was, had gifted Gabriel with two pieces of Pine Wood jewelry for remembrance, and all the coins that he'd earned managing Wotan's smaller, nearer estates. Woodsmen had their own customs, and paying spouses who worked on their husband's endeavors was one of them. He'd been confused by the coin at the time, but it, along with the little Anna had been able to spare him, had gotten him away later, and he'd always be grateful to his Aesiri stepson for making sure he took it.

Kali neither wanted Gabriel's property, such as it was—the leftover coin from Wotan's property and the small coins he'd earned from Ellen—nor his loyalty. She tolerated him in the house, helped him with Jocheved, and seemed to enjoy his baking, but didn't want anything else from him.

Gabriel wondered vaguely, several months after working for Kali, what exactly they were doing.

"Courting," Kali said, as if Gabriel was a fool who just hadn't noticed.

"I've seen courting. This isn't it." If they had been equals, there would have been decorous meetings chaperoned by family members until Gabriel and Kali's heads-of-house had hammered out a marriage contract. Since they were unequals, and severely so – Kali was a landowner, and Gabriel was little better than a debt-peon, and only because he begged no loan from anyone, because he had no collateral besides himself and Jocheved, so who would take that risk? – Kali would have been able to entertain herself with Gabriel's body if she'd desired during the betrothal process. Well, if she'd been an alpha, back home she would have been allowed to take advantage, and any pup between the two of them would have been acknowledged but illegitimate unless they had married. If she'd been a widowed delta or epsilon, she would have returned to her family for remarriage, and he would have been remonstrated, possible with fists, for daring to court her. There simply weren't women Kali's age who'd never been married at all, not ones who were respectable and propertied, anyway. Gabriel found it terribly confusing, how they did things here in the South.

"No?" Kali raised an eyebrow as she stirred the cauldron—they were washing a great many thing today, and leaving them outside to dry and gain that crisp sunny smell.

"No. A beta marrying, that's about property. I don't have any," Gabriel said. "I have nothing of worth."

"You have yourself," Kali pointed out.

Gabriel stepped back, as if she had struck him. Betrothal rights were one thing, outright stating that one was courting only for the other's body was something else, shockingly rude and explicit. "I am not a whore," he said, and swallowed, because he knew it was a lie. If he needed to, if the situation was dire enough, he would have spread his legs to get away—he had, and it had still been better than remaining under his brothers' roof.

"Gabriel, not like that! I didn't mean— I just meant you have skills." Kali sighed, "You could sell your baking, or singing, or just work as a laborer. There is always a job needs doing, though the pay is poor."

Gabriel unwound a little, and began to pat Jocheved as she made snuffling sounds, maybe hungry, maybe just restless. The cub was greedy that was certain.

 

It took a long time for Gabriel to get his old humor back, the better part of a year, and he found it right before his world crashed around his ears yet again. His first indication was Jocheved's whining when they were transformed and nursing – the baby noticed the change in the taste of milk from his rising heat and objected. Kali figured that out when he explained the baby's upset and turning away. He felt foolish for not realizing it himself, but to be fair, Gabriel Minor had been a greedy thing and Gabriel hadn't gone into heat again until the boy had been weaned and sent back to his father's family and Wotan had never gotten him pregnant at all. Gabriel didn't want to deal with nursing and heat at the same time; his wolf would make a hash of both, given the course of his life so far.

"You're going into heat, you need to face it," Kali said.

Gabriel winced at her bluntness. She pulled few punches, and didn't seem to care about breaking things gently, at least when they were alone. He should have been used it after over a year, but ...

"It's probably false," he said. "Jocheved is only 10 months old..."

Kali snorted. "False or real, we're going to town. You can leave Jocheved as Maia's if you want," naming the nearest neighbor to Kali's hilltop home.

Maia was willing to take Jocheved in and bed the infant down with her own children, especially since it was close to the heat of the afternoon and the community-wide nap.

Gabriel realized that Kali was going to make him walk into town with her and miss the napping, but there wasn't much he could do. Kali tolerated zipcars if someone else drove them, but she didn't like to drive herself, and Gabriel was a river-city boy. He didn't know how to drive a zip, even if one had been available to borrow. And he still tottered on bicycles – Kali said she was going to commission him a three-wheeler, like a package courier's, but they were expensive and took months to make.

"This is the potter's," Gabriel said as he followed Kali to one shop on the edge of the village center.

"She has glassware too."

Gabriel frowned. "No, she doesn't. She has *pots*. You can't make glass in a pot kiln. It doesn't get hot enough."

"What doesn't get hot enough?" the potter asked as they came through the door.

"Iole," Kali said. "We're here for glass."

"Oh... specialty glass?" the potter said with a smirk.

"Yes."

The potter's eyes flicked over to Gabriel, and then up and down, evaluating. Gabriel backed up a step, unsettled by the frank look.

"Specialty glass," Iole said, with a laugh. "Back in a moment."

"Specialty glass?" Gabriel hissed as the potter disappeared through an interior door.

"She doesn't make it herself," Kali said with a smile. "As you said, a kiln for pots isn't a kiln for glass."

"Here we are!" Iole returned with a nicely pieced wooden box. She put it on the counter and began undoing the latches. "Why don't you look and choose one you think you'd like."

It took Gabriel a minute to figure out what the items inside the box, each protectively padded with cotton wadding, were.

"Those are penises!" he yelped.

"Specialty glass," Iole said with a proud smirk. "For wolf-folk with needs."

Gabriel turned to stare at her. She tilted her head at him, and he felt himself flush red at her knowing look.

Kali, the evil woman, began to roar with laughter.

 

Gabriel went home with the 'specialty glass' in his pocket. Actually, not his pocket—it was too large for that, being all together more carry-able when wrapped in wadding and stuffed in a sack for transport.

He took it out when he got to his room—not a snug hole under the stairs, no matter how much a tight small space he could defend would have satisfied him—but an open airy room on the upper floor that opened to the porch roof with its railing and staircase. He had sun when he wanted it and privacy all the time and it was enough, even though it was often brighter than he knew quite what to do with.

It was, contemplating the shape, almost ridiculous—a disembodied penis made of solid glass and colored in hues found only in plants and gemstones, never human flesh. Gabriel thought the very ludicrousness of the coloring helped him. It looked nothing like an alpha's penis with those bright colors.

The shape was also helpful, even soothing. It's was smooth glass, no features, no veins or wrinkles or odd kinky hairs in uncomfortable places. It did have some impressive bulges off on each side, but that wasn't surprising considering how it was supposed to be used.

Gabriel tried it out during the first surge of heat that hit him sometime in the night. He knew enough about how sensitive Kali was that she'd rather he just get it over with rather than having to listen to him pant and groan when he denied himself and tried to sleep alone.

Fingers first, to make sure he was slick—sometimes he felt aroused but that didn't make it all the way to between his legs. It was a nice easy feeling, fingers sliding in to second knuckle, and then the third.

Then, the thing. He carefully guided it in, and was surprised at how alien it felt, heavy with no give, no spring, entirely unlike an alpha's penis. Gabriel was repulsed for a moment, and started to take it out. That's when he figured out that alien didn't mean unpleasant, because he twisted his wrist to get a better grip, and thus discovered that it felt better at a different angle. A lot better, with some experimentation.

 

"So..." Kali said the next morning. "All worked to your satisfaction?"

Gabriel rolled his eyes, and felt his face heat up. "Yes, thank you." He wished vaguely that his skin still had its summer tan, because then he wouldn't be so astonishingly pink, but of course his cycle had restarted in winter and he was paler, not darker.

Kali's smile was puckish. She wasn't laughing at him, quite, but her eyes danced with amusement.

"It's not that funny..." Gabriel complained.

"You have no idea what you looked like when you opened Iole's box," Kali trilled.

Gabriel frowned.

"No, that's not it!" Kali laughed.

"I suppose I looked a lot like a landed fish."

"Just a bit."

"Hmm. So glad to be amusing," he sighed. "We just don't have that sort of thing back home."

"No dildos?" Kali asked. "Then what do you do during a heat if you're unpartnered?"

"Suffer or choose someone. I chose the isolation room. It was preferable, being alone," Gabriel said.

"If that's what you want, I'll make sure you have no one to bother you at all," Kali said, and leaned over to ruffle Gabriel's hair.

 

Kali thought the courtship was probably the longest, most ridiculous relationship of her life – she'd had lovers before, but the wooing had been all about fun and sexual enjoyment, not convincing a shy werewolf that she wouldn't bite and hurt – but was oddly satisfying. Gabriel was sweet and shattered and so fierce at his core that she was amazed that he'd fallen into her lap, and some days she almost wanted to believe in the New God or the Old, just so she could give thanks. But that would have been ridiculous – Kali's life was hers to own, not some god's, and her choices for good or ill were hers, not some Fate's.

She grew together with Gabriel over the months, finding herself happier every day with her life and with the beta-hermaphrodite with the pale brown eyes and the skin like peachfuzz. Sometimes, unexpected things were the best.

His reaction to Iole's 'specialty' wares was the most hilarious thing he'd ever done in her sight, and he'd done rather a lot of foolish things, mostly overreacting to minor surprises.

The second day of his heat, though, that surprised Kali. She'd gotten up, found Gabriel hadn't – heat could be exhausting – and crept into his room to tend Jocheved her nursery cradle. The baby was trying to pull herself up using the bars, and crowed in delight when Kali approached.

"Ka! Ka! Ka!" Jocheved cried, and reached with her arms, wanting to be picked up.

Kali indulged the child, propping the infant on her hip with long practice. "Hush, Jocheved. You'll wake your mother..."

"No avoiding that," Gabriel murmured in a tired voice from his bed across the room.

Kali turned to look at him.

"You look..." she frowned, and crossed over to place the back of her hand on his forehead. Against the pale sheets, he looked awful, a bright unhealthy pink, like he'd been poisoned by breathing woodsmoke or some such.

He jerked his head back, and threw himself down against the bed, burrowing under the covers. "It's just my heat, Kali..."

"Hmm," Kali said, and ruffled the hair curling around his nape. He was sweaty, and his hair stuck every which way as she ran her fingers through it.

Gabriel shivered, and then groaned, low and throaty. Then he cut himself short, his mouth snapping shut, and turned his face away, throwing the covers up over his head.

Kali's eyebrows raised at that, and she glanced at the baby in her arms.

"I'm going to feed Jocheved, and then put her down for a nap," she said, and walked out of the room.

In the kitchen Jocheved took reheated mashed roots cooked in goat milk easy enough, and was fat and full and burping contentedly when Gabriel finally managed to come downstairs. He'd even managed to find his trousers, so he wasn't naked.

That was a small blessing. He hadn't found a shirt, or possible didn't think to look for one – heat made people stupid, more often than not, in Kali's experience – and frankly, he managed to be more distracting than he had any right to be, sitting quiet at the table and trying halfheartedly to eat an apple. Mostly he was succeeding in gnawing off the fruit's red skin, but not much else.

"I think she'll sleep," Kali said as she laid Jocheved in the downstairs crib, the one that she'd always had for visitor's infants even before Gabriel fetched up on her doorstep.

Gabriel blinked at her statement, and then scrubbed his eyes. "I... I don't even know why I came down."

"Not because you were hungry," Kali replied

Gabriel looked at the apple in his hand, and frowned. "No..."

"Go back to bed, Gabriel."

"All right." He put the apple down, and made to stand. "Join me?"

Kali raised an eyebrow at him, even as he froze, and turned any even brighter pink, flushed almost red with embarrassment. It was astonishing, how pale he was, and how much his blood showed through his skin when his emotions ran high.

"I-I'm sorry," he stammered. "I'm not usually like this..."

Kali smirked, "I would have noticed."

"I'll just... go..."

"Gabriel," she said, and stepped after him, making him turn on the staircase. "Did you mean it?"

"… yes." His mobile face twisted, as he fought with himself over something, "Yes, I mean it. It's not just my heat, I do like you, I like that your courting me, I think I would enjoy sex with you... but I shouldn't impose—"

Kali snorted indelicately, and swept up the stairs until she could tuck his hand in the crook of her arm, and pull him up after her. He stumbled for a step, but followed easily enough. "Horseshit," she said, "I'm an adult, you're an adult, at the very worse it will be mediocre sex that will convince us that it was a bad choice. I'm interested if you are."

Gabriel stared at her goggle-eyed, and nodded cautiously.

"Good, then!" Kali said, and shoved him through the doorway into his own bedroom, and eventually, onto his own bed.

It was not mediocre sex. Not at all.

 

Three days later, when his heat was petering out into the last grudging impulses, Gabriel awoke in the middle of the night to find himself entirely alone in his bed. Kali was gone.

He sat up abruptly, startled by the realization. She had been beside him most of the days, and when she left his bed, Gabriel had trailed after her, too infatuated from his heat to let her out of his sight for long.

He checked the crib, but Jocheved was asleep. His daughter was so big now, almost ready to walk, already crawling like a bear and needing to be watched every moment she wasn't actually asleep. He wondered what it would be like to actually raise her all the way, instead of relinquishing her to her father's family, the way he had been required to with Gabriel Minor. For a moment, he regretted that he'd never be able to tell Jo that she had a beautiful daughter, never be able to Ellen that she had a grandchild... but there was no way he could do it safely, no letter that would not be a disaster if it was opened in transit. Better for them all if he never tried to contact them.

"I'm sorry, Jocheved," he said, and brushed his hand over her wispy baby hair. "I don't think you'll ever meet your father..."

A thump came up from downstairs. Gabriel hesitated, then grabbed the sheet to throw over himself– there was no way he could find his pants in the near darkness – and went to investigate.

He recoiled in terror as soon as he went onto the porch, his back slamming onto the door. Please, New God and Old, let it pass over us, let it go for me, and not for my Jocheved, he prayed as the huge shape levered itself up over the porch railing.

Then he gasped, as it transformed into the small and now quite familiar figure of Kali.

"Gabriel?"

He made a strangled sound, high and thin in his throat.

Kali dropped the deer carcass she'd been dragging, and crouched down in front of him. Her eyes were warm and worried in the pale moonlight.

"Gabriel, love, what's wrong..?"

"I thought you were an epsilon," Gabriel found himself saying, in a rather stupid tone.

Kali snorted, a grin in her tone. "No."

"You weren't a wolf..."

"No."

"But how..?"

"Not everyone is a wolf. It happens," she shrugged.

Gabriel stared at her. "You were beautiful," he blurted.

She blinked at him, and then smiled. "Flatterer."

"And terrifying."

Kali rolled her eyes. "Terrible flatterer."

"I think I love you."

Kali sat down with a thump. "All right, I admit I didn't expect that," she said.

Gabriel felt himself flush, and hoped the dark night kept her from noticing. Except she put her hand on his cheek and held him for a kiss, so of course she felt how hot he'd become.

"Still in heat?" she asked as she drew away. "I thought you might be ebbing. I know how terribly hungry I get when my heats are winding down..."

Gabriel knew what she meant, that ravenous hollow feeling when a heat was almost over and no seed had set. The only times he hadn't wanted to eat half a pig was when he had been impregnated and queasy.

"No. I mean, not yet," Gabriel said, and tugged her hand, silently asking her to sit with him.

Kali laughed, and ran her fingers through her hair, in the way she'd discovered made him growl happily.

"Well, I can think of a few things to pass the time until then..." she said.

"So can I," Gabriel responded, and pulled her against him. He found her mouth in the darkness, and sighed contentedly. She felt just right in her arms, and her small hands roamed his shoulders and sides, and then down.

Gabriel yelped when she squeezed unexpectedly, and Kali chuckled.

"I thought you said you weren't ebbing..." she teased.

Gabriel stared at her, and himself, faint and pale flesh in the moonlight. Her hands stroked over his penis again, and he banged his head back against the doorframe. He wasn't hard, yet, just sensitized.

"…I don't," he stammered, "I don't normally get my erections back for a week afterwards," he muttered. The impotency of his male parts during heat has always persisted before, through his heat, and pregnancy, and even through the nursing. To have an erection now, when he was in the tail end of his heat, was so alien as to be unprecedented.

"I don't mind," Kali said, kissing his throat, his ear, and swinging herself up into his lap.

"Kal—AH!" he gasped, as she just sank down on him, on his penis, weak erection that he had. He howled under her, as she rocked on him, as his prick thickened and firmed inside her. He was built like a gamma, no bone, no knot, just flesh that wasn't particularly large or thick, but Kali chuckled and kissed him and moved.

It was fantastic.

Afterwards, he was sprawled out on the porch, flat on his back as Kali lay against him, propped on one elbow as she played with his hair with her other hand. It was rather unfair that she seemed energized and he was gasping like a fish.

"That went well," she said.

"Sure," Gabriel agreed. He would agree to anything she proposed right at the moment.

"I think we should marry."

"All right," Gabriel said absentmindedly. Then he realized what he had said, and bellowed, "WHAT?!"

Kali laughed in his ear, and licked him. "Married. You, me, very soon?"

Gabriel stared at her, as she smiled down at him in the dark, only the wetness of her eyes letting him make out her expression.

"Oh. Oh yes."

"That's settled then," Kali said happily, and put her chin down on his chest with a happy purr.

 

In the end, it was a ridiculously simple ceremony. Gabriel wore two identical bracelets on his arm, bright red in a design he actually enjoyed and picked himself from the varied options that he was offered. Kali also wore bracelets, but hers were more numerous, and maybe even made of something precious.

She was certainly more dressed up that Gabriel could even imagine. Sensible clothes had been thrown to the wind, and she was wrapped in lengths and lengths of crimson silk, in a sari bordered with little foxes.

Gabriel himself was as washed and scrubbed and as neatly put out as he could manage. Pressed trousers, long tunic, a vest and sash, he'd had a decidedly peasant air about him, but Gabriel didn't care either.

Their friends—Kali's friends, mostly, though Gabriel had managed to talk to Maia enough that he thought she's friendly, if not a true friend yet—watched them exchange bracelets so that they each had a mismatched pair.

Then Kali grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down for a long kiss, and Gabriel forgot the world. It was bliss, and he only pulled away for air.

Kali smiled her bewitching smiling, and Gabriel could only gasp and press his forehead against hers, just wanting the closeness.

"Huzzah!" cried Maia once Kali let Gabriel pull back a little more. "I never thought I'd see the day, Kali! And congratulations, Gabriel! You look splendid!"

Gabriel accepted the farmer's congratulations, and several more well-wishers' benedictions without really processing them. He felt dazed, like he was walking through a dream that would fade into watery memories soon enough.

"Come," Kali said, and took him by the hand. She led him to the village record office, and made the clerk take down a register, in which they wrote their names together—and Gabriel bit his lip and put his down full—Gabriel Beta Michael of the Seraphim—because he wanted this to be lasting and he was afraid that anything less would be challenged.

There was also a standardized contract to sign and file, which Kali had explained. Gabriel read it carefully, but it was remarkably even-handed for all that it merged their property into one shared asset pool; Gabriel had to enumerate what he'd brought to the marriage for his own piece of mind, and for his own pride. It was little enough, mostly coin, all but the two amber necklaces from the Great North Wood that he'd carried coiled up all the months of his wanderings, and the simple metal necklace of iron and pyrite he'd been given by his mother's family the Cherubim as birth.

The amber was the most valuable thing he owned—to ignore that he had the strands was to be a beggar at his own wedding, and he couldn't bear to come off as that. Even if most of Kali's friends were looking on him in amused pity, which he thought might be the case.

Kali didn't understand, but she tolerated it and let him enumerated her goods and assets as well. If she dismissed him later, he wanted it obvious that he was not an opportunist or a thief, and he wanted his small dowry recoverable. It wasn't too much to ask, he thought. Even Wotan, who'd married him strictly to further the trade relationship at the start, had been careful with his marriage portion.

They walked back to Kali's home afterwards, and Gabriel was surprised and vaguely horrified to see Maia and many of Kali's neighbors had gotten there before them and set up a party in front of Kali's house. Completely with spitted fowl roasting in the fire pit and a pot full of oil for the pillow-puffs that Gabriel had become ridiculously fond of, especially when served with honey.

"Don't worry," Kali said, when Gabriel blanched at the crowd. "If you need quiet, Jocheved is excuse enough."

Gabriel was grateful for that idea—that he could retreat to take care of his daughter and no one would think poorly of it.

The party lasted long into the dark, until well past moonrise, with singing and funny stories, and Jocheved waking and falling asleep and then waking up grumpy that she'd missed guests. Gabriel finally put her in her cradle for the night sometime before moonset, but she grumbled indignantly about not getting to play with the neighbors until she dropped off like a rock.

Gabriel was so very glad when the last of the neighbors started cleaning up under Maia's directions, and Maia herself shooed Gabriel and Kali indoors.

"They'll take care of everything," Kali said, tired but amused as Maia made a hand gesture, as if she could shove them into the house.

"... it doesn't seem fair," Gabriel said as he watched the clean up. It seemed like an endless round of dishwashing for some youngster or another, among other things.

"We're supposed to save our energy for other things," Kali laughed, and ran her hand up his neck, flicking his hair from his face with a finger.

"Oh... right..." Gabriel said. He turned towards the stairs, and nodded. "Shall we go up then?"

Kali put her hand in his, and said, "We shall."

 

PART THREE

The first time Sam saw him, he wondered who the other wolf was, off in the distance, participating in a hunt. It was idle curiosity, since the locals were short-haired, either ashy gray and burnt yellow, not a brindled timber-wolf, shaggy and dark. That he was hunting over the rolling hills with a pack of pale furred locals was strange, but Sam figured that at least some member of his company was making friends.

It wasn't until days later – weeks really – that Sam had been on business around the far hills outside of the railroad town and seen the brindled wolf again that he was hit by the strange feeling of recognition, like he knew the other.

That time, the wolf was at on a creek bank with two cubs, one a wheaten dog-cub, leggy and silly with youth, and the other an infant, soft grey and pudgy with baby-fat. The child wolf was hunting, inexpertly under his parent's eye, possibly for newts or the sharp-pinchered crustaceans that the locals called crawdads and Sam called inedible.

"Eh, that's the tiger's husband. You want to talk to him, you'll have to go through her," Lupe, his guide that day, a good foreman even though she was a delta, said. "He's shy."

"The tiger's married?" Sam asked. He'd heard of the 'tiger', the local name for a wise-woman – a witch, or maybe just a skilled midwife, he couldn't tell through their thick accents and not entirely compatible dialects.

"Years now. She found him on the road and took him home, even accepted that cub of his," Lupe said, with a headshake at what sounded like baffling generosity to Sam. "He's a northerner like you..." she gave Sam a speculative look, "maybe you can make nice."

Sam shook his head, and didn't try to explain that Sam and his men weren't northerners – any man who had a timber-wolf was a northerner to the locals, even they'd come from a river city. It took getting to the Great Pine Forest to be a northerner, as far as Sam was concerned. Of course, the locals only saw pines up in hills – most of the lowlands was parklands with pecans and oak trees.

 

Kali had noticed the tall Northerner at the festival in a half-interested way. There was an outpost of them at the junction where the tail-end of their trackwork met the rail lines controlled by her own people, but it was a good hour or more by zipcar and thus too far for causal travel by foot or bicycle and those Northerners rarely bothered to come for market days, what with a neighboring village's market being much closer to their outpost.

But the Northerner was ridiculously tall, even for a Northerner, who tended to be taller anyway. They must not have anything else to do in the winter but gorge and grow enormously, at least from her Gabriel's tales of being trapped by cold weather inside their houses. She thought he was exaggerating, at least a bit.

"Gabriel," the Northerner gasped as he came right up to their table, like he was a friend, like they knew him, "It is you..!"

Kali's rebuke for the tall man's presumption died on her lips as she saw color drain from her husband's face. She reacted, jumping off her bench seat and stepping between Gabriel and the stranger.

"Who are you?" she hissed. She suspected, and if she was right, if this was one of Gabriel's brothers, possible the brother, the rapist, she'd strike him down in an instant, even though they were in public. Even though there would be a magistrate's inquiry if she did that. No one would blame her for defending her sad wolf, not here in her own village.

"Who are you?" the stranger said, and bristled at her, hackles raising even though he didn't transform.

"Sam," Gabriel said behind her. "He's Sam..."

"Not Castiel?" Kali said suspiciously, not taking her eyes from the stranger.

"No. He's Sam."

"Samuel Alpha John Winchester, ma'am," the stranger said and stepped back a stride. Not that the short distance put him out of striking range, if he decided to be so foolish, but she wasn't completely crowded anymore.

"He's my brother-in-law," Gabriel elaborated. "Or was."

"Still am," the tall Northerner agreed.

Kali snorted at that, but stepped back herself. She sat down cautiously, but kept her eyes on her new and unwelcome relation.

"We thought you were dead, Gabriel!" the man said as he stepped forward, leaning over the table, into her and Gabriel's dinner. "You disappeared and when you didn't turn up with the Cherubim, Lucifer said you must have thrown yourself into the river in a fit of postpartum madness!"

Gabriel blanched at that, Kali noted, and ducked his head. His entire body curled in and away, like he was bracing for a blow. Kali hadn't seen such behavior from him for a long time, back before they were married, right before and after Jocheved was born.

"Step back," Kali stood up again, blocking the looming Northerner and contemplating whether she'd have to transform in the middle of the festival and force him to leave.

 

Gabriel's woman was tiny and had no qualms about putting herself between Sam and his brother-in-law. It was weird. Sam wasn't even sure if she was a delta – he hadn't seen even a hint of a wolf's teeth in her, no flash of fang to remind him she could bite him, but she bristled with ferocity all the same.

"Mommy? Daddy?"

Sam turned to stare at the youngster who had come up behind him. A girl, blond and rosy beige from summer sunlight, was staring at him, and a toddler peeked over her shoulder from being carried pick-a-back.

"Jocheved, come here," Gabriel said.

"Daddy, who is he?" the girl asked as she sat away from Sam on Gabriel's other side and handed the toddler off to Gabriel's care.

Sam just stared. She was about seven, maybe eight, wheaten blond and brown-eyed – a northern child down here in the south? If she wasn't Gabriel's by birth, Sam would eat a shoe. And since Gabriel had been that timber-wolf bitch Sam had spotted, that meant this girl had been the male pup...

"A zeta?" Sam gasped. It was appalling and Sam needed to know who to blame, who to sue for the dishonor. "You have a zeta child? Who fathered her?"

Gabriel flinched and blurted, "She's spurious."

"I'm what, Daddy?" the child asked.

"Spurious," Gabriel said to the child, but didn't take his eyes off Sam. "It means you're just mine," he lied.

"And Mommy's," the child corrected.

"Yes, and mine," Gabriel's woman said, and smiled at the child. Then she shifted to look at Sam, and her look was a challenge.

"I'm not arguing," Sam said, and held up his hands. He didn't know why, Gabriel's woman was tiny, and her wolf – if she was in fact a delta – was probably no bigger than a fox, but Sam didn't want to cross her. Especially if she was claiming to be the parent of an admittedly spurious child – to accept some bastard whose father couldn't be named meant she had to be deeply invested in her alliance with Gabriel.

"Kali..." Gabriel said.

The woman turned to look at Gabriel, and there was such fondness in her gaze that Sam immediately felt awkward. Such open affection, it should have been private, not something for a public festival.

"You, Sam Winchester," the woman – Kali, Sam repeated to himself – faced him again, her eyes dark and flashing, "are not a friend—"

"Kali!"

"Gabriel—"

"Sam's all right. He left a satchel for me, when I left home."

Kali's eyebrows rose and she turned to stare intensely at Sam.

"Yeah," Sam admitted, "I did..." Sam turned to Gabriel, "I thought, I don't know, that you'd run to the Cherubim."

"Who are they? Why were you running, Daddy?" the girl asked.

Gabriel turned to her, and pulled her close to him, and then ducked his nose against the toddler in his lap. Sam looked at her, and then at Kali across the table; if the older girl was fathered on Gabriel by some unnamable northerner, Sam would bet money, bet Jess's coming dowry even, that the toddler was Kali's and Gabriel had fathered her. The toddler plus Gabriel Minor of the Lilim made two acknowledged and legal children for Gabriel – not enough for him to be rid of his obligations to his family under the law, not with the twins being officially Dean's and his girl Jocheved being spurious, but Sam knew that many families would let Gabriel go into retirement anyway, given that he had slid into middle age now.

"The Cherubim are my mother's family, and I was running away because my family had been... very mean to me."

"...Did they not let you have dessert?"

Gabriel laughed weakly. "No, Jocheved."

Sam winced. They had all been much worse than that, and none of it was fit for a child's ears.

"Sam Winchester," Kali said abruptly, and took Sam's elbow. "We must... talk."

Gabriel looked up, startled. "Don't kill him, Kali."

She smiled at Gabriel, and then up at Sam more toothily. "I won't, my love. I'm just going to explain to him, about my regard for you and Jocheved and Sakuntala. I'll be polite."

She was, in the end, polite. Also terrifying. At the end of the night, Sam still didn't know if she was a delta or an epsilon, or New-God forbid, a particularly small and feminine zeta, but by then he didn't care. He just didn't want her to focus on him again.

 

Gabriel heard a knock at the door, and ran to open it. Anyone who'd come to the house when they were flying keep-away banners must need Kali dreadfully – and there was at least one woman under Kali's care whose pregnancy he knew was likely to go bad at any moment. He couldn't turn the visitors away without telling them where she actually was.

So when Gabriel answered the door, he was entirely unprepared for northerners – guardsmen – come to arrest him on his pack-alpha's orders. He tried to argue, but the moment they mention Heylel Seraphiel, his throat closed up and he whimpered in terror.

At least Jocheved and Sakuntala had been left behind, as they had no orders for the children, and Gabriel was able to argue that they were Kali's legal children, and no part of the Seraphim.

He wanted to curse Samuel Winchester, because the tall alpha had betrayed him, probably to further his standing in Lucifer's patronage network. But even he had to admit that the alpha had probably just fallen into Lucifer's web when Sam was thrust stumbling into the train cabin and the door locked behind him. Fuck...

 

Sam woke up groggy and disorientated, and it wasn't until he caught sight of Gabriel, huddled on the opposite bench, on the opposite end, as far as he could be and remain inside the same cabin that he remembered where he was and why.

"Gabriel?" he asked.

The beta's response was to lift his head belligerently and growl, his wolf's teeth showing in his mouth.

Sam banged his head back against his seat and sighed.

"I didn't want to, you know," Sam said after a moment.

"I don't care."

Which was fair enough, Sam conceded to himself. He'd have a hard time sympathizing if he'd been dragged home against his will – more against his will, Sam at least could have refused, instead of being arrested and dragged off. But Gabriel had to have known it would happen if he'd ever been found out – he hadn't been emancipated or married off under-the-hand, and Lucifer was jealous of his family prerogatives.

 

Kali came home to two hysterical daughters and her husband's marriage bracelets twisted on the floor. The houses stank with the scent of strangers.

Strangers. Who had come for Gabriel and taken him out of her house. Who had stolen her husband.

She hissed in fury, and gathered Jocheved and Sakuntala close, soothing her children's sobs. Whoever had done this, they would pay.

 

It took Gabriel more time than it should have to realize that Sam was under guard as well, but Gabriel put it down to being kidnapped and bound with silver. He didn't know if Sam being locked into the cabin with him was supposed to be a kindness or a torment, but as his blood rose, all he wanted was privacy.

Sam must have too, because he kept glancing at the door and then back at Gabriel when he thought Gabriel wasn't looking. Not that Gabriel could blame him—being trapped with an angry beta in heat was probably not up on any alpha's list of fantasies, not if they really thought it through.

But his blood was rising, he was twitchy and snappish and what he really wanted Kali and three days alone with her, or at least enough privacy that he could shove his hands down his pants and get some relief.

"I hate this," is what Sam said the second day of their trip. Gabriel was bleary-eyed from a restless night draped across the bench seats.

"I'm mourning your distress, I really am," Gabriel replied.

Sam shot him a sour look, which wasn't enough to make Gabriel repent. Sam certainly had more freedom than Gabriel had, since Sam had gone out the door twice already. And come back looking unhappy, but Sam had always been good at making faces.

"It's not my fault! I didn't give the order to arrest you, and I certainly didn't want to escort you home!"

"You could," Gabriel pointed out, "have not told anyone that you'd found me!"

Sam wrinkled his nose at that. He put his chin in his big hand, and sighed heavily. His eyes tracked the landscape outside the window for a moment, the scrubby trees and sere grasses.

However, he didn't deny that he had told someone, some relative or friend so that news of Gabriel's survival reached the river-cities, reached Lucifer's ears...

"I'm still a client, Gabriel. Who else do I have, besides the Seraphim? Who else does Dean have?"

Gabriel gave a snort of his own. Sam was chasing red herrings on a string if he thought Gabriel cared a flip for Dean. He might not remember much about the days in the silver muzzle, the whole ordeal being jumbled and scattered unless he dwelt on it, and he tried not to—but he knew that Dean had Castiel, and Castiel had Dean, and never the twain should part, no matter who it hurt.

"Like I care what happens to your brother!"

Sam frowned, looking startled, then ashamed. "All right, Gabriel, all right. You don't have to..."

Gabriel snorted again, and settled himself pointedly in the corner.

 

"What?!" Maia yelped as Kali shut the door on her daughters and Maia's brood of offspring. She didn't want the girls to hear all the details, as they were too young to understand and she didn't want them needlessly frightened.

"Northerners kidnapped Gabriel. I need you to watch Jocheved and Sakuntala while I go and rescue him."

"… But that makes no sense! Gabriel, kidnapped? Why?"

"Maia," Kali growled.

"Who would kidnap a baker?!"

Kali glared at her friend and neighbor. Maia had many good qualities, but she was letting herself be confused by the fact that the northerners had acted so outrageously.

"He's a baker, Kali!"

"I know that," Kali grit out. "And he's also the only beta-hermaphrodite among his siblings."

Maia blinked. "What?"

"It's important, in the north. His family may be trying to bring him home."

"With a kidnapping?!"

"Apparently."

"But—"

"I need you to take care of my children, Maia, until I come back. Can you do that?"

"Of course! But... Kali, what if you can't find Gabriel? If he's been taken north..."

"I already know he was taken to the rail-line. All I have to do is follow on a train north." Kali hissed a breath full of rage. "I will find him, Maia. No one is going to take my husband from me. No one."

 

"Is he expecting us to have sex?" Gabriel asked as their guard laughed and shut the cabin door.

Sam winced. He normally didn't care about the ridiculous gossip about alpha's irresistible prowess, and betas being completely enamored of whatever male was in reach during heat.

"I hope not..." Sam said. He, at least, had an idea of what kind of legal entanglement could become from Gabriel becoming pregnant on the way home, no matter that he was in heat. Sam already didn't like being so beholden that Lucifer could tug him home against his will, if with a less overt invocation of power than one the Flock alpha had used against Gabriel.

"Good," Gabriel snapped, and curled up tighter.

"How bad is it?" Sam asked. Not that he wanted to know, particularly, but he was fond of Gabriel, as fond as he could be of a beta 12 years his elder whom had been married out of the house for much of Sam's youth, and whose reappearance seemed likely to ruin Sam's home life.

Not to mention Dean and Castiel's. And Young Castiel and Deanael as well.

The only good Sam could maybe imagine was that Gabriel was not dead, and his legal situation could be rectified. Of the course, Lucifer would invoke his rights over Gabriel and have him arrested, damn what the locals would think. If Lucifer had simply asked for his brother to come home...

...Gabriel probably would have ignored him, Sam knew. The beta had made a happy life in the south from all indications, and Sam's ill considered sharing of his joy at the revelation that he was still alive had backfired terribly. He wondered which of them had blabbed to Lucifer—Dean or Castiel?

Dean seemed likely, because he and Gabriel had never quite gotten along. Sam knew that all betas clashed sometimes—the pressures of holding home-life together could be extremely draining, especially when one was a family member, and one had only married into the house.

 

Gabriel woke in the dark, to the clicking of the train and the sticky damp feel of his body running deep into heat. He groaned, and glance across the tiny cabin to Sam, who was sitting asleep across his own bench of seats.

Gabriel bit his lip to keep from whining and waking Sam up, but he had to deal with his heat, at least somewhat, before he started howling in distress. It was a real possibility, if he got frustrated enough.

Therefore, Gabriel shifted himself over until he was facing the seat backs, instead of Sam, and took a bracing breath. He pulled his shirt out of the way, and tried slipping his hand down his trousers. But the silver band around his wrist, uncomfortable as it was against his arm, burned when it lay against the sensitive skin of his inner thighs, and he fell off the bench at the sharp sting.

"Gabr'l?" Sam mumbled as Gabriel lay gasping one the floor of their cabin. Gabriel could have doused his genitals with hot pepper and gotten less pain out of it, and he moaned in frustration. There was no way he was getting either bracelet off, not with the guardsmen being paid so handsomely to bring him back to home and to Lucifer.

"I...it's all right, Sam," he gasped, curling around himself but keeping his braceleted wrists away awkwardly. "I just—"

Sam didn't listen, not that he ever had when he wanted to know, not even when he had been small. The tall alpha clambered to the floor in the dark, and put a huge hand on Gabriel's shoulder.

"Gabriel?" he asked, and gave a tug, as if that could make Gabriel uncurl.

"The silver, it burns," Gabriel hissed through his watering eyes.

"What were you...?" Sam asked, as he manhandled Gabriel up to sit on the floor. Gabriel could barely make out anything between the darkness and the pain, but he was sure Sam had his concerned look on, the one that made people confide in Sam even though they shouldn't.

"I was trying to masturbate, what do you think I was doing?" Gabriel hissed, "But I can't even touch myself with these damn things on!" He held up his arms and shook the wide silver bracelets that were locked on to keep him from transforming.

"...ah?" Sam said.

"Yes, very helpful," Gabriel snapped.

Sam huffed as that, a little noise of displeasure. And then his hands were on Gabriel, grabbing him under his arms and heaving him back onto the bench seat.

Sam knelt against him, pinning Gabriel in the corner between seat back and wall.

"Gabriel, do you want me to...?" Sam trailed off. He looked up at Gabriel, and in the darkness, all Gabriel could see was the curve of his head as Sam looked at him.

"What?!" Gabriel barked, guessing what Sam was offering and not happy about it. He wanted Kali, he wanted Kali so much, and he couldn't have her—because they'd stolen him away from her. His choices were Sam, whatever horror that guard captain came up with, or whining himself into madness as his heat rose and rose without relief.

"Gabriel," Sam said.

"I want Kali," he cried. "Why can't I have Kali?"

"She's not here, Gabriel," Sam said, and put a hand on his knee. The alpha was still crouched in front of him. "I'm so sorry."

"You could have," Gabriel gulped, "you could have stopped them. You could have made them leave me."

"Gabriel, that's not true."

"I know," he said, "I know. But I want it to be true."

"I'm so sorry," Sam said, and sat up, climbing onto the bench seat beside Gabriel.

Gabriel sighed, and leaned into it when Sam ran a hand over his hair. He let out a shuddering breath and allowed himself to fold against Sam's shoulder. The alpha smelled warm, and comforting, and let Gabriel weep bitter tears all over his chest, until Gabriel was worn out and quiet against him.

"Did that help..?" Sam said. He didn't sound calm or patient—instead he sounded hopeful, like maybe Gabriel was through having a fit all over him and would be able to control his volatile emotions from now on.

"Yeah," Gabriel said. He pulled his feet up onto the bench seat. "Help me take off my shoes?"

"Uhm. What?"

Gabriel wiped his nose with the back of his hand and sighed. "You're the best of my very limited options, Sam... unless you weren't actually offering to fuck me?"

"I wasn't, actually," Sam said, though he reached down to pop Gabriel's shoes off, and then slid closer, a huge bulk against Gabriel's shins.

"Oh."

Sam laughed, a short burst of rueful amusement, and he crouched down onto the floor, and pressed his head against Gabriel's side. "I was offering to help, Gabriel. But... I didn't think you'd want me inside you."

"I'm in heat, Sam." Gabriel said. "What I want is all... stupid and messy now."

Sam reached up, and slung his arm around Gabriel's waist, his hand settling to pet Gabriel's side. "I remember what happened, Gabriel. I was too young and too stupid to do anything about it, but I remember. You were screaming, for days—"

"Sam!" Gabriel snapped. "Please. Don't speak of that...please."

"I don't want to make you scream. Not like that."

Gabriel sighed, and turned his face away, until he was pressing his cheek against the back of the seat he was crosswise against. "I won't. Just... ask, and stop if I tell you to, all right?"

"All right."

"You should probably take my pants off too," Gabriel suggested around a lump in his throat.

"Yeah," Sam breathed, "okay."

Gabriel helped, shifting when Sam reached up, and trying to hold his arms away, so the heavy bracelets didn't bang into Sam as the alpha stripped him half-naked. He was shivering, partly in anticipation, partly in nerves, by the time Sam moved down into a crouch in front of him again.

He didn't know why he'd expected Sam to push his legs apart and just thrust in—his first husband had been that selfish, but he'd had better lovers since—but he gasped in shock when the young alpha leaned up and ran his tongue up from Gabriel's knee to his thigh.

"Oh..." he murmured, as Sam continued licking against his thigh and up over his hip. He patted Sam's hair tentatively, awkwardly trying not to touch him with the silver he was bound with. "Oh, Sam..."

 

Sex with Gabriel was peculiarly joyless – the beta's rising heat pushed them into an intimacy that neither of them actually wanted, and Sam found that he really didn't enjoy fucking someone who cried for someone else all through the coupling. Nor to mention he wasn't all that attracted to betas in general – for some reason, he found deltas more interesting. He was even planning on marrying Jessica delta-Josiah Moore, even though Lucifer had expressed disappointment in the betrothal – his patron thought Sam could marry a Flock beta if he just tried.

"Shhh," Sam said, and brushed his hand gently over Gabriel's sweaty head. The beta was sprawled on top of him, and snuffling against his neck. It wasn't quite sobbing, but it was a tired, sad sound, and if Sam hadn't been swollen and knotted up inside Gabriel, he might have retreated to let the beta cry in peace.

"Uh, Sam..." Gabriel mumbled.

"Shhh, Gabriel," Sam said again, trying for soothing. If Gabriel stopped sniffling, Sam wouldn't feel quite so guilty about how just plain pleasurable it was to be inside Gabriel, to feel his cock swollen and locked into Gabriel's surprisingly tight body. For someone who'd gone to the childbed at least three times, Gabriel was warm and tight and delicious.

"I wanna go home," Gabriel mumbled, and tried to sit up.

"No, no, don't do that," Sam muttered, and pulled Gabriel back down, stroking over his neck and back. If the beta tried to move off Sam right now, it would be painful for both of them, not to mention farcical and futile. It would be at least another few minutes before Sam's body stopped the little orgasmic shivers and his cock deflated enough to slip out.

Gabriel went boneless, flopping tiredly on Sam's chest. "I want Kali," he grumbled against Sam's neck.

"And I want Jess," Sam said.

"Who's Jess?"

Sam peered at Gabriel, who stared back with glaze-eyed curiosity. "Who's Jess?" the beta repeated.

"Jess is my fiancée. She's a delta from the Moores."

"Moores..." Gabriel said. "Rising Folk, clients to the Cherubim?"

"Yes."

"Tell me about her?" Gabriel asked, and sighed against Sam's throat.

Sam shivered at that, the hot damp sensation making his hips twitch and his cock swell up a bit. Gabriel made a strangled sound and clamped his hands tight on Sam's shoulders, even as his passage clenched tighter in a way that Sam enjoyed a lot.

"I'm met her at a symposium."

"Drinking parties are the best..." Gabriel muttered.

"It was for a guest lecturer at the lyceum, Gabriel, not a drunken orgy for the moneyed young clowns of the Flock. You should know better—"

"Why?" Gabriel grumbled. "Not like I ever got to go. Lucifer and Michael, yeah, but I stayed home and was a good little virgin until they married me to Attarib. "

Sam blinked at that. "You were?"

"Yes. Shitload of good that did me, but I was almost untouched at my first wedding."

"Almost untouched?" Sam asked.

"Well, Michael and Lucifer took me to a brothel beforehand, but that hardly counts. It wasn't like I was allowed to let anyone fuck me there – it was purely educational," Gabriel emphasized the word, almost snarling.

Sam craned his neck to look at Gabriel, who sounded much more aware in his anger. And he was tense, all his muscles tight under Sam's hands. The change was startling, and disturbing – "Gabriel...?"

"Sorry," the beta muttered, and just sort of melted into a sort of boneless tenseness.

Sam sighed, and slid a hand down Gabriel's back, and over the beta's thighs. Grip secure, Sam rolled them over with a yelp from Gabriel, until the beta was on his back on the blanket-covered floor and Sam was above him.

Sam would have been pleased at the change in position, at his new and pleasing leverage, if Gabriel's eyes hadn't been wide and frightened.

"Hey. It's all right," Sam said, and ran his hand over Gabriel's cheek and down his neck.

"N-no," Gabriel moaned, and he shivered under Sam. It felt good, but the look on Gabriel's face, half-sick and half-flushed, was repellent. Sam quickly shifted until he was on his side, with one of Gabriel's legs hiked over his thighs and his cock as far out of Gabriel's body as he could manage without tearing either one of them.

"Better?"

"Yeah," Gabriel said, and gave a shaky nod. "Tell me about your Jess."

Sam blinked, and stroked his hand up and down Gabriel's leg, and rolled his hips absently, which made Gabriel whine soft in his throat.

"She's lovely, sweet and supportive and really clever. Her family are clients to the Cherubim, her grandmother was one of their culls, so she's actually blood-kin to them."

"To me too, if her grandmother is an epsilon of the Cherubim," Gabriel said.

"Yeah, that's right," Sam agreed. "Huh, that'd make us... cousins-in-law as well as brothers-in-law?"

"Something like that. Though I wouldn't mention me – this – to her if I were you."

"I'm going to have to, Gabriel. We won't be able to keep it a secret. The guards will gossip and Jess will hear. Better that she hears that I bred someone else from me than from the street..."

Gabriel yawned, and asked, "Would she forgive you?"

"I'm still going to marry her. I hope she will – it's not like I planned this."

"I planned to stay away from any men for the length of my heat," Gabriel replied. "So much for that."

"I am sorry..."

"That still doesn't help, Sam," Gabriel said. Then he sighed, "I wish the repressors worked for me."

"Repressors?"

"Southerner medicine. It clamps down on heats, makes them almost nothing. Works great for most deltas, like this," he said, and snapped his fingers.

"Deltas, but not betas?"

"Made me sick when I tried to use them," Gabriel said forced lightness. Sam suspected there was more to that story, but didn't want to pry.

"I'm sorry..."

"It really isn't your fault. Hmmm, Sam, move. I need you to move."

"Hold on," Sam said, and began to thrust again, just little shallow rocks that got deeper and harder as Sam gradually pushed Gabriel onto his back again, until he was thrusting hard and the beta was mewling under him.

Afterwards, Sam was sprawled half on top of Gabriel, and trying to pull himself free so as not to crush the smaller man.

"I hate this," Gabriel muttered.

"Am I that bad?"

Gabriel glared at him, and then looked away. "No. You're enjoyable enough, for an alpha. Polite. Considerate. But I want Kali. I love Kali. I was supposed to spend this heat with her, not being dragged home and fucked while I'm at it!"

"Gabriel," Sam growled. "I'm trying to make this as nice as possible. Don't make it harder than it has to be."

Gabriel pursed his lips, and didn't talk to Sam for the rest of the day. Even though they fucked twice more, and Gabriel was whimpering at the end of it.

 

When the train pulled into the great station by the river, Gabriel was numb. It was a sight he'd never wanted to see again, the river and city and the great bridges across—silver steel gifts of their forbearers, that had survived flood and earthquake and still spanned the mother river.

Sam was very careful when he came to look out their tiny window to keep opposite him. Gabriel wanted to thank him for the kindness, but the damage was already done.

"Home again..." Sam sighed in a tone that was more rueful than anything else.

"I never wanted to be here again," Gabriel admitted.

"I am sorry, Gabriel," the alpha said.

"You keep apologizing, Sam. It doesn't help," Gabriel said, and then stared at the cabin door, as he'd heard the click of a key being inserted into the lock.

The guardsmen at the door escorted Gabriel out onto the platform.

Lucifer was waiting there, in his fine clothes and calm, quiet demeanor.

"Gabriel," Lucifer said in a tone that was full of parental disappointment, as if Gabriel were a child who failed to excel on an examination.

Gabriel drew himself up, as much as he could while flanked by goons hired from the city watch. He lifted his chin, squared his shoulders, and resolutely ignored Sam's shuffling discomfit as the plebian alpha stood beside him.

"Lucifer..." Sam said, his tone conciliatory, almost begging. "Look, he's home..."

"Yes, he is," Lucifer said calmly. "And you should never have left, Gabriel. You had no permission, no leave from me, your pack alpha. You were wayward. But you will be forgiven."

Gabriel narrowed his eyes. Lucifer seemed to be waiting for something. If it was for Gabriel to fling himself at his brother's feet and grovel for a place back in the family, Lucifer was deluding himself.

"Gabriel," Lucifer said after a long moment, "You will forgiven. You just only need ask. The family will accept you back, little brother."

"If you think I want to have anything to do with you, Lucifer," Gabriel said, "you've lost more of your mind than I thought."

Lucifer slapped him. It was an open-handed blow, hard against his cheek, and it knocked him off his feet.

"You will be forgiven, once you ask to be," Lucifer said as he loomed over Gabriel. "Until then—!"

He didn't get to answer, because Gabriel took advantage of being knocked off his feet to punch Lucifer low in the stomach, and then in the face when his brother folded over in shock.

It was a short fight, because Gabriel was alone, Lucifer was not, and even a slightly tall beta against several average sized alphas was at an extremely disadvantage.

He was barely aware of Sam hauling him to his feet at Lucifer's command, he was so dizzy from the hits he's taken, brawling in the street like the lowest class Folk.

"He will remember his place," was the last clear thing he heard, "if I have to burn it into him," before he passed out into the cool dark of unconsciousness.

 

"You are awake. Your breathing has changed," was the first thing Gabriel actually understood as he woke. He was back in the isolation room of the Seraphim House, locked in and sealed, except someone was standing beside the bed.

Gabriel turned over, confirmed who it was, and came out of the bed kicking.

Castiel went down, but hit the ground changed, and sprang back up snarling. Gabriel jumped back on the bed, and over. Being trapped in human-shape meant he could climb and jump much better than four-footed Castiel, at least if he used his brain as well as his nerves.

He even made it to the door.

Dean was there, of course.

Gabriel recoiled, and then was knocked down.

Then he had a small bout of hysterics about being pinned – it was the smell, the familiar closed air and Castiel's own thick furry scent, Gabriel was sure. It was frankly embarrassing to start shrieking like that, even if Castiel did scramble off him while Gabriel flailed and kicked his way until he was crouched against the bedstead. They'd have to peel him away, and he was resolved to bite them, at the very least.

"What the hell?" Sam yelled as he careened into the doorway. "What are you doing?"

"We just came to get him up," Dean said.

"Are you serious?" Sam was glaring at Dean with that ridiculous face he made when he disapproved. Gabriel took one look and started whooping with laughter.

"Gabriel?" Sam asked, and stepped a tentative step closer.

Gabriel shook his head, and shrieked as Castiel tried to follow Sam. He could trust the Folk alpha – Sam had asked him in the train, and took 'no' for an answer – he couldn't trust his brother.

"Cas..."

Castiel looked unhappy, but straightened and backed away. At Sam's following glare, he stepped through the doorway. Sam closed the door in Castiel and Dean's faces, and sat down with his back to it.

Gabriel watched him, and tried to breath.

"Better?" Sam asked, after many long moments.

Gabriel nodded, "Yes. I..."

Sam tilted his head. "Gabriel?"

"...I can't do this, Sam..."

Sam frowned at him – not a disapproving frown, but a concerned one.

"I... Shit."

"I know you said saying 'sorry' doesn't help..." Sam said and climbed to his feet.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes at the tall alpha as he stepped closed and held his hand out.

"...but I don't know how much help I can get away with giving you. I'll try, anyway."

Gabriel looked at Sam's hand and sighed. He grabbed it, felt Sam's huge hand wrap around his like a father's around a child's, and let the alpha help him up. He pulled the sleeves of his tunic down and scrubbed his face for the lack of something better to make himself presentable. "Yes..."

"They're going to get you out of here. Lucifer wants to talk to you again."

Gabriel straightened his back and threw his chin up. "Better to go out on my own terms."

 

"I'm leaving," Gabriel said at the breakfast, just about the first thing he did when everyone was assembled. He stared at everyone and no one, and scrupulously avoided paying any attention to the twin boys sitting off at the children's table. They were nothing to him, and he wanted it kept that way; if he had to acknowledge they existed at all, he'd probably try to gut them out of sheer horror at their existence.

Lucifer grabbed his arm and pulled him back from turning away. Gabriel stared down at the hand on his arm, and then very deliberately lifted his eyes to stare at his older brother.

And growled.

"Are you challenging me?!" Lucifer asked.

"Yes," Gabriel said, and growled again.

The pack-alpha looked appalled.

"Ah... witnessed," one of Lucifer's early-morning guests said. So much for political alliances, Gabriel thought. The man might even be an in-law and yet here he was formally witnessing a challenge to Lucifer's authority.

"Witnessed," agreed another guest, and then it was off.

Lucifer looked appalled that he'd been maneuvered into a pack-challenge by a beta, of all things.

 

The old arena looked as creepy as ever. Gabriel was mildly surprised that standing on the sands instead of in stands didn't change how unsettling the structure was. Though it did give him an unflattering perspective on many of the people spectating. Odd how he'd never noticed how unpleasant so many people were when he was young – he had been a stupid youth, he decided, and ignorant, and not seen how very ugly the Flock was then.

Gabriel wondered just how many of them had come with the hope of seeing Lucifer dead, and how many were there to see an uppity beta thrashed into obedience. He wouldn't give odds either way, himself.

"You can formally submit and admit your sins right now, little brother," Lucifer said, "and I will forgive you."

Gabriel stared back at Lucifer. "I'd rather die."

"You may have that chance," Lucifer said in his calm way.

"Yes, he may, but not alone," Rachel said from the sidelines unexpectedly.

Gabriel glanced to the side in shock, and saw Lucifer do likewise. He heard the crunch of footsteps on sand, and startled at a hand on his shoulder.

Rachel moved up to stand beside him. His half-sister's face was stern. "You're a menace, Lucifer. You're ambition is becoming madness, and you'll bring the family down when you fall. I won't have it."

"Little sister, go back to your husband. Now. I will forgive this transgression—"

"No." Rachel lifted her chin and threw her head back. She was risking all, to join in Gabriel's fight. It was her right as his sister to back him in a challenge against a dangerous and unstable pack-alpha, but her husband might divorce her if she won, might repudiate their children if she lost and throw them out into the streets as a traitor's brood...

"A beta and a delta, in rebellion. Even if you managed to defeat me, the next pack-alpha will chastise you both severely..."

"I don't care," Gabriel said.

"You can't be allowed to continue," Rachel spoke over him.

"You're too dangerous," a third voice joined in, and Gabriel turned to stare in shock as Sam climbed over the railing and dropped onto the sand himself.

"Samuel. You are my client...this is petty treason..." Lucifer hissed.

"I'm not betraying the Seraphim," Sam pointed out. "Just you. You're going to take everyone down, Seraphim and client-families alike, if you aren't stopped."

Lucifer's face curled, and Gabriel had just long enough to gulp before he was dodging the furious lunge as his older brother let loose his wolf.

Lucifer's wolf had become … wrong. Gabriel hadn't even transformed and he could smell the grotesque stench of the wolf. But it was a fight for his life, with Lucifer lunging like a rabid monster, and he, his sister, and Sam were all scrambling on uneven footing.

It burned, to transform after being shackled with silver for so long, and his wolfshape was so small compared to Lucifer's bulk, but Gabriel changed to sink teeth into his brother's shank. Rachel did too, a small golden shape beside him.

Then the fight was on, and it was a terror – Lucifer was outnumbered, and Sam's wolf was just as heavy as Lucifer's, but Lucifer's had the strength of insanity and the moon. It was blood, messy and too long.

Rachel's foreleg was dislocated Sam was torn all down his side, and Gabriel's neck and shoulder were torn from Lucifer's last ineffective strikes before it was over.

But his brother was bleeding out on the sand, blood leaking out from a hole they'd torn through his gut.

Werewolf family politics always winded up horrific in the end, Gabriel thought blearily, and threw up.

 

They'd stumbled, all rather off balance now that Lucifer was dead, back to the mansion. Gabriel had felt like he was walking through a dream, covered as he was with his brother's blood, and yet free of the silver bracelets that had shackled him for weeks. He'd tossed off his stole in the atrium, and snarled at Castiel's reproving look.

But after he'd walked away from his younger brother, he'd been lost. He couldn't bear to go to his old room, or any place he'd occupied during the last days, or before when he was muzzled.

At last, Sam had found him in the kitchen, staring into the sink in confusion and still gory from the fight. The young alpha had taken him by the hand and led him to his own room at the back of the complex. He'd stripped Gabriel out of his clothes, pulled a clean tunic of his own over Gabriel's head— which fit Gabriel badly, being entirely too long in the arms, though it came down past his knees at the hem, and thus was more than modest enough—and bundled him to lie on a couch that seemed entirely too small to belong in Sam's room at all. Then Sam stripped and crawled into his own bed.

The next morning, Gabriel woke to the creak of a door. He blinked, realized he was in Sam's room, on Sam's couch, and craned his head to see who was coming into unannounced and quiet. When he saw who it was, he snarled.

Dean stared at him.

Gabriel rolled off his back, sitting up on the couch even as he kept his fangs out.

"Huh? Whu?" Sam said, off on his bed. He was apparently not a good riser anymore.

"Sammy, morning."

"Dean." Sam sighed, and Gabriel could just imagine the put upon look he had on his face, but he wouldn't look away from Dean. He didn't think he could, not now.

"Breakfast. Cas wants to talk."

"Okay. We'll be there in a few."

Dean made a face. "With pants, Sam," he ordered, and then walked away. Gabriel watched him go.

"Gabriel," Sam said after a moment.

Gabriel snapped his head around to look at Sam. "What?"

"Are you..." Sam stopped, and gave him a funny look. "You seem off."

"I had to kill my brother, Sam."

Sam looked shamefaced at that, and rubbed the back of his own neck. "Yeah. I'm sorry, Gabriel."

"He had to die. I would never have been free while he lived." Gabriel said, and then looked down at his hands.

"I'm still sorry, Gabriel."

"Yeah, well..." Gabriel said.

"C'mon, let's get dressed, see what Cas wants now that he's pack-alpha."

Gabriel frowned. "I don't think I care what Castiel wants. I know what I want, and that's passage home."

Sam gave him a weather-eye from where he was pawing through his wardrobe. "You are ... you mean home with Kali, don't you?"

"Yes." Gabriel said. "Home."

"Cas probably thinks this is your home..." Sam said.

"He's wrong. My home is with Kali. This is ... just a place I used to live."

"Well..." Sam said, "Let's get you pants, and then you can make your case to Castiel."

Gabriel gave Sam a weary glare, and shook his head. "It won't make any difference. I'm not staying here... though I suppose I could find some pants to wear before I tell my brother that..."

 

"Lucifer had plans for you," Castiel said the after the breakfast plates were cleared away.

Gabriel had sat as far as he could from his brother and his brother's spouse, so it took him a minute to realize Castiel was talking to him. When Gabriel finally looked up, Castiel had that sour expression that stared right through one and made you feel like a stupid and insignificant bug. Lucifer had been a master of that gaze, but Castiel had his own variant.

"What?"

"They'll have to be delayed, of course..."

"What the hell are you talking about, Castiel?"

Castiel cocked his head. "Your marriage—there were several advantageous matches that Lucifer was considering, but with the pup, you should marry Sam for the time being."

"No."

"Hey, I'm supposed to marry Jess!" Sam protested.

"Marry her later. Or take her as a concubine. Her family doesn't have enough standing to object, especially given your status and Gabriel's."

"I'm not marrying him," Gabriel stated. He rolled his shoulders and bit back the wolf's growl that wanted to erupt.

"You are pregnant, aren't you?" At Gabriel's hissing indrawing of breath, Castiel barreled on, "Unless Sam refutes it, your pup is his, and thus you are technically married anyway, given that you neither have other attachments."

"I won't refute," Sam muttered.

"I have another attachment," Gabriel snapped. "I'm married in the south. With a child! You can't divorce me from my wife just because!"

"I have not seen this wife, nor this child—" Castiel said.

"I have," Sam said. "The baby is definitely Gabriel's"

"You have confirmation?" Castiel's eagle eyes flicked over Sammy's shabby clothes.

"Yes."

Gabriel bristled, "It doesn't matter, since I'm going home."

"You are home, brother."

"Home to Kali and my family."

Castiel just stared in that long way he had and told Gabriel "You have no standing to abandon us, Gabriel. You aren't old yet, and you have only provided one legitimate child to this house—"

"Three!" Gabriel snarled. If Castiel was going to hold him by his fertility, he'd make sure every child counted, even the ones he still hated for existing.

"One. My sons do not count. You aren't numbered as their mother!" Castiel growled. "If you had stayed and done your duty—"

"I wasn't staying with a rapist, you bastard—!"

"—You might have more than enough to your credit for me to consider an emancipation, but right now the situation is tricky by any reckoning and I need to bind every ally I can to me."

"I am not—!"

"Marrying Sam will give your cub legitimacy and legal standing. After it is born, a quick divorce and you will be able to marry where it will do the most good."

"No."

Castiel blinked at him.

"No?"

"I'm not playing your game, Castiel."

"I don't see how you could stop—"

"I'm hiring an advocate, and suing."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Watch me!" Gabriel snarled, and darted out of the room before Castiel could rise from behind the heirloom desk. He dashed across the atrium and out the doors, into the city. There were still people – kin and ex-in-laws – that he could shelter with, if he were lucky. He just had to reach them.

 

"Thank you," Gabriel said as he sipped the ritual cup. He'd been shown into an empty room and ignored, probably while the Lilim figured out how to best position themselves before hearing his petition for representation.

"Hmm, you're welcome," Crowley, Forcas 'Crowley' A-Phenumel Lilim in full, drawled. "It's not often I get one of my favorite former in-laws showing up on my doorstep."

"I am not your favorite former in-law."

"One of, darling, one of."

"You didn't even like Attarib."

"Pff. No one liked Attarib. Couldn't get an alpha on any of his spouses, and blamed them and not his own inadequate prick. But he was useful, I'll give him that."

"You certainly didn't like me."

"Of course I did. You had the sharpest tongue in the house. If old Uncle Attarib hadn't been such a jealous bastard, I'd have banged you a few times once you'd kindled. You were quite charming as a young thing."

Gabriel paused in sipping his cup to glare at Crowley. His former nephew-by-marriage grinned at him salaciously.

"I suppose that's something."

"It is," Crowley grinned. "But now, Gabriel, I think we need to get down to business."

"I need an advocate."

"And you thought of me. Charming. Why?"

"Castiel wants to marry me off."

"He's your head-of-house, now. If you didn't want him, you should have waited until whichever spawn is oldest had hit his majority before killing Lucifer."

"I don't want to be married off. I have a spouse back in the south, and I'm not getting divorced just for Castiel's convenience. I want to go home."

"Oh, kitten, you're in a pickle, aren't you?" Crowley laughed. "Well, Balthazar my sweet should be able to find you a room someplace in this pile for the night. We can work on your problem in the morning."

 

Kali hated the river-cities on sight, beautiful cold stone and brickwork. The buildings filled their spaces up to the very edge of the streets, hoarding space and giving back only severe lines. It was not a friendly or a welcoming place, and she wondered how Gabriel could have come from it.

She didn't even have to ask about him, as it turned out, because he'd already made himself the talk of the town. The Northerners were gossiping about him by name when she stopped off the train, and all she had to do was make politely inquiring noises to get a full if garbled account.

And the location of the house where he'd run to. Northerners, it turned out, were worse gossips than her own people, and very loose with family troubles, if it was not their own family being the scandal.

Kali didn't trust the overly familiar beta who'd let her into the house. Balthazar of the Cherubim, he'd named himself, even though this was the ancestral home of the Lilim, at least if Kali had understood the directions she'd received correctly. She wanted to be at the Lilim home anyway, since that was what all the street gossips and news-readers had said was the place Gabriel had run to for sanctuary.

"You wait here, my dear. I'll be back in a tick," the beta-hermaphrodite said. Kali was glad to see him go, because blatant, obnoxious flirtation was unattractive when the one doing it was much more taken with themselves than with you.

Kali sniffed the air in the entryway, and smelling nothing of her husband, tried the chair, padded with horsehair and full of that scent too. There was a faint trace of Gabriel on one of the small pillows spread haphazard over the surface though, which surprised and reassured her.

Her husband was here, and she would soon be able to take him home.

 

"Kali..." Gabriel whispered, and rushed to embrace her in her dusty coat and scarf.

"Ah, love," she purred, hugged him back, "I've found you."

"As charming as this reunion is, perhaps inside?" Balthazar said after a while.

Gabriel looked up from where he'd been nosing into Kali's dark hair. "Barbarian. You don't know the meaning of love."

"No, I don't. Naked self-interest and a modicum of decorum, those I do have. Get off the street before word tattles back to Castiel about your lovely friend, Gabriel."

Gabriel side-stepped into the building, and pressed his nose against Kali's cheek, loving the smell of sunbaked clay and Kali's herb store.

"What are you doing here? Where are Jocheved and Sakuntala? Are they all right?" Gabriel babbled.

Kali merely held him calm in her hands and let him burble like a creek, words and words of nerves and relief.

"I came to retrieve you, The children are all right—I left them with Maia. She and her brood will look after them, and the farm as well."

"Ah, now there's a pickle. Gabriel wouldn't get past the gates. He's disputing with his pack-alpha, and the municipal guards have been alerted."

Kali frowned as Balthazar, and then turned to raise an inquiring eyebrow at Gabriel.

"I'm not under arrest anymore, but I will be if I try to leave the city," Gabriel admitted.

"What? Why?"

Gabriel winced – explaining all the ins and outs of the city's legal system was going to be hard. She had never quite believed him about the extent of the laws, or how he was placed in them. It was not too surprising – the South had much less complicated laws, in that one rule applied to all, no matter how inconsiderate that was in the variations of fortune and station. An alpha in the south had no more right to govern his family than an epsilon did.

"I challenged Lucifer – he'd gone mad, his wolf was rotting, it was horrible. My sister Rachel joined my challenge—"

"Explain, Gabriel. You 'challenged'?"

Gabriel gulped, and looked away. Kali wouldn't like how naked and raw family politics in the river-cities could be. "I challenged. A duel to the death..."

"In wolf shape, no doubt," Kali said, her lips tight.

"It's old law, Kali, the oldest, the most respected."

"The most savage."

"That too," Gabriel nodded. "Rachel joined me, and then Sam—"

"And that was allowed?" Kali asked.

"Yes." Gabriel explained, "If a head-of-house becomes senile, or insane, it's the duty of his kin to remove him. Force him to step down – peaceably if they can, but if not, then not."

"Oh love..." Kali said, and put her hand on his cheek in consolation.

"I had to do it. Lucifer would never have let me go home to you..." Gabriel sighed. "Castiel, he's head-of-house now—"

"'Castiel'? I remember that name," Kali hissed.

Gabriel gulped. "Don't, Kali. He's head-of-house now. By northern law, I'm supposed to obey him."

"Horseshit."

Gabriel giggled at Kali's vehement oath, feeling himself more than a little hysterical. He stifled the laughter and blurted, "He wants me to marry Sam."

Kali goggled at him. Then she pressed her nose against his neck, and sniffed in concentration. Gabriel could tell the moment she realized, the moment she registered the change in his scent, because drew back with a ferocious frown.

"I'm so sorry," Gabriel said, sinking to his knees in apology. He clutched at her waist and put his head against her belly, trying for submission and contrition in every line.

Kali's strong fingers carded through his hair. "They took you away because you were alone, didn't they?"

Gabriel nodded.

"You are pregnant?"

"I didn't menstruate," Gabriel admitted. There had been no bloody discharge after he'd fallen out of heat, and he'd done that days earlier than he'd expected, so he almost certainly was – that was the assumption they were all operating under, after all. "My scent's changed."

"I see."

Gabriel closed his eyes against the pain in Kali's words, and tried to explain. "It's not his fault. The guardsmen locked us in the cabin together. I was too hot, too..."

"Gabriel, what are you talking about?"

Gabriel blinked and raised his head to look at Kali. "I don't want you to be angry at Sam?"

"Sam?"

"He didn't have much choice, you know. It's hard for alphas to control themselves—" Kali snorted at that, "around betas in heat. Especially in a room alone..."

"Alone? The entire time?"

"Yes," Gabriel nodded, and sat back on his heels. "If you want a divorce now," he choked on the word, but went on, "I won't fight, but please take me south first!"

Kali stared at him, and then sat down on the couch. She pulled him up by his hand to sit beside her. "I'm not divorcing you, idiot. I came to get you back."

"I'm pregnant. Probably."

"Probably."

"That's not going to be a problem?" he asked.

"You were pregnant when we met, Gabriel."

Gabriel looked down at their joined hands and felt himself flush.

"So... Sam?"

"Yes."

"Just Sam?"

"He kept the guardsmen out, so yes, just Sam. It was... kind of him."

Kali snorted again. Gabriel looked up at her, a question on his face.

"It was not kindness, Gabriel."

"Alphas have a hard time controlling themselves—"

"Alphas are just as human as you or I. They choose not to control themselves, and then blame their biology for their bad actions." Kali said, and reached up with her other hand to smooth a lock back from Gabriel's face.

"But..."

"Do you want to keep it?" Kali asked.

Gabriel gulped. He knew what Kali was asking. There were methods that would insure that he didn't have to give birth again if he didn't want to... but if the child came and was legally a wolf, then he'd satisfied the Law of Three and no one would be able to gainsay that – his right to govern himself would have been earned through blood and children – no matter what happened with the petition.

 

"Perhaps something more civilized than an all-out street brawl?" Crowley suggested.

"This delta can release all claims to my brother, in exchange for an absolution of her marriage and a one-time payment of 10000 shekels. She may keep her bastards."

Gabriel turned to glare at Castiel and the insult.

"I keep Gabriel, and my children, and your money, wolf. Or perhaps you would like to be mocked as a rapist who prefers his blood-kin," Kali countered.

"Lucifer was within his rights to order that breeding, and Gabriel should have obeyed without question," Castiel said. "Serving as a surrogate for one wolf-pregnancy took barely 10 weeks of time—"

"Are you seriously arguing you did no harm—?"

"Fuck you, Castiel," Gabriel hissed. "You were desperate to advance and desperate to keep Dean, but I shouldn't have had to suffer for your political advancement, not like THAT!"

"You were the one fighting it, Gabriel," Castiel said in his hoarse voice. "If you'd just submitted like a good beta—"

"Fuck you. You broke my tail so that I couldn't block you—"

"Because you had to fight. You were always so selfish, Gabriel.

There was a piercing whistle, and the Lilim advocate Crowley glared at them all. "Children, children. There are better ways to resolve this. You want to brawl it out, fine, but at least have the decency to cry a formal challenge and set it up for the arena."

Castiel turned to stare at Gabriel with that flat considering look. "Agreed. The arena."

Gabriel gasped in shock at the idea. Challenging Lucifer for his place as pack alpha was one thing, because everyone could see he was going to destroy the family. Challenging Castiel now, with no clear alpha-successor should he fall, what with the children all being minors...

"Agreed," Kali said, and Gabriel turned to stare at her. She smiled back at him, and then turned her ferocious, triumphant glare back on Castiel.

"Agreed!" Crowley shouted before they either of them could take it back. "I'll have the paperwork filed in a tick!"

 

"Kali, please don't kill my brother," Gabriel said as Kali stepped past him on her way onto the sand.

She paused to look at him. Leaning down, she stroked his cheek before she stepped away and said, "Because you have asked, my love."

Castiel stood on the sand glowering, but Gabriel couldn't find himself feeling any sympathy for his little brother. All he'd wanted was to go home, and Castiel decided to stand in his way. Asserting himself as pack-alpha and head-of-house wasn't worth losing a challenge right after he'd ascended. If he lost, the pack might have to descend on Sam as a guardian until one of the children were old enough – and that would be a disaster. The family would lose so much prestige that some cadet branch would have to seize control, and it would be a bloody mess.

Gabriel didn't regret it for a moment.

 

Kali looked at the man who had been her husband's brother once, before he forfeited it all to obey an order to abuse. He was tall and milk-pale with unsettling blue eyes. The only normal thing about him was the dark color of his hair, and that just made him all the more uncanny.

"You can step back and show throat, now," Castiel said.

"No, I don't think so."

He tilted his head. "I do not want to kill you. Gabriel would be upset."

"What do you care how Gabriel feels?"

"I do love my brother," he said.

"I've seen how you love your brother. I'd rather have hatred."

The man sighed. "Very well. I will try to be quick," he said, and lunged forward, transforming as he did.

Kali dodged backward, crouched, and transformed. Her paw struck him across the barrel, but she had kept her claws velveted. Instead of being disemboweled, he flew into the arena wall, and slid down in a heap. One that was still breathing, but very much out of the fight.

Kali transformed back into human shape.

"I win."

Sam Winchester nodded in agreement, his eyes wide with astonishment.

Gabriel, her dear sad wolf, was howling with laughter and tears.

 

Sam found Dean in the study after breakfast, looking worried and angry.

"It'll be over soon," Sam said, trying for soothing, and laid his hand on his brother's shoulder.

"Yeah, and whose fault is it that we've come to this?" Dean snapped.

Sam pulled away, and sat on one of the benches along the wall. "Lucifer's? He didn't have to order Gabriel's arrest. Or maybe mine, for thinking that the family might be happy to hear that their brother *wasn't* dead after all—"

"It'd be better if he was," Dean said. "For all of us."

Sam frowned at his brother.

"He could take the kids, Sam."

"Dean, Gabriel doesn't want your kids. He won't even look at them, and the one time Deanael came close to him, he showed his teeth," Sam pointed out. If Dean missed that Gabriel was repelled by the twins and wanted to nothing to do with them—and that was sad, because Young Castiel was a wonderful child who had every hoping of growing into an ideal alpha, and Deanael was clever and charming all out of proportion to his age—then Sam's brother was letting his fears rule him. And a wolf that was afraid was a wolf that would bite, and they didn't need more of *that* in this household, thank you anyway.

"But he could..."

"Dean, Castiel isn't going to let that happen," Sam soothed.

Dean paused in his pacing, frowning as he considered it. "... yeah, probably."

Sam rolled his eyes, but that's when the doors to the study opened, and Castiel walked stiffly in, followed by Elimelech, and then Gabriel, his lawyer, and their respective spouses. Gabriel and Kali were holding hands, and the tiny southern woman was glancing around disdainfully. Of course she was, she could probably kill any and all of them if she decided she need to. Sam was amazed that she hadn't disemboweled him the first time they had met, and Gabriel asking her not to kill him was in retrospective not nearly as lighthearted as it had seemed at the time.

"You are still my brother," Cas said as he walked around to his desk to sit, His voice even more hoarse than usual with his broken ribs. "You would be welcomed home—"

"Let's not do this, Castiel," Gabriel said, his voice flat and bleak. "You're my brother, and I love you, but I don't *like* you at all, not anymore."

Castiel stared at Gabriel with that blank look he had, and then sighed and reached for the documents that were all ready laid out. The Seraphim head-of-household started signing the documents, and slid each one across the desk surface to his brother as he finished.

"Hold a moment, love," Kali said unexpectedly, and stepped up to read the document over his shoulder. Her delicate brows pulled together as she frowned, and she looked around the room, at the lawyer Crowley and his spouse Balthazar, and then at Sam.

"Explain this to me," Kali ordered.

"You have a lawyer," Sam pointed out.

"She's already heard me, darling," Crowley drawled. "You're her second opinion."

Sam looked at her, and then at Gabriel, who nodded slightly. He stepped forward, and bent over the desk and the paper. "Okay. Well, This," Sam pulled the first page up, "is a writ of retirement and liberation—this means Gabriel had fulfilled all his duties as a beta to his birth family, and is free to act as if he was an alpha—he can get married on his own volition, have an independent household, that sort of thing. This," Sam pulled up the second document, "is a marriage contract; it acknowledges your marriage under city law. Gabriel is acting as an alpha, even though he's not one, and you're acting as a delta," Sam glossed over the fact that Kali wasn't quite a delta, because a delta was a woman who had a she-*wolf*. "This means your with Gabriel children will be legitimate and can inherit the portions allotted to them based on their gender when he dies..."

Kali was giving him a hard stare. "Elaborate, Samuel."

"Well, an alpha son gets a full share, and a beta son a half-share, as does a delta daughter. A gamma son gets a third of a share, and an epsilon daughter gets a fourth, to be used for her dowry."

"And a zeta daughter?"

"This family does not produce zetas," Castiel said. "We are Flock."

Gabriel winced, and put his hand on Kali's shoulder. "It doesn't matter, Kali. We're not staying here."

"No, we are not," she agreed, and brought her hand up to caress Gabriel's cheek. Sam looked away, feeling awkward, and flipped through the documents by way of distraction. And then he saw it...

"You can't be serious?!" he blurted, and stared over at Castiel.

"What?"

"It is an ... option," Castiel said. "If Gabriel insists on living in the south and not acting as a member of this family..."

"What? I didn't see that yet. What is it?" Gabriel asked and snatched the papers out of Sam's hands.

"It's a writ of severance," Sam said, appalled. "Castiel—"

"What is a 'writ of severance?" Kali cut him off.

Gabriel had started to read, and now he was looking up from the documents, his eyes bleak as he met his wife's steady gaze.

"It's cutting ties to the family. All ties. I'd lose my *name*."

Kali tilted her head. "You would no longer be part of the Seraphim family?" she asked, in a tone that indicated she thought that might be for the best.

"No. Yes! I mean, I would be divorced from the family," Gabriel explained, his tone flat in shock. "Not Seraphim, not Flock, not *Gabriel*."

Kali stared at him a long moment, the comprehension slowly filtering into her face. Then she enfolded him in her arms, and let him sob on her shoulder. Sam saw the glare she shot Castiel, and shivered.

Gabriel got control of himself in short order, and turned to face Castiel. Whatever he saw in his brother made him square his shoulders and put his chin up. He picked up the pen, dipped it in ink, and scrawled his name on page after page after page.

"You do not have to sign them all—" Elimelech said tentatively.

"Shut it," Gabriel ordered, and continued to sign.

Sam turned his attention on Castiel, because he couldn't bear to notice how Gabriel's hand shook. Castiel, who had never paid attention to any delta or epsilon, or any beta that wasn't Dean—Castiel, who had just stabbed his brother in the soul, just to protect Dean and his attachment to his children. Sam had always liked his brother-in-law, in a companionable scholarly way, and known that Castiel would do anything to make Dean happy, but it was quite different to know in a vague and abstract way that Castiel was ruthless, and another thing to see the way it was wrecking someone who stood right in front of him.

"There, sigh those," Gabriel said, and thrust the papers are Elimelech. Elimelech signed, and then Crowley and Balthazar. Sam was last, and he picked up the pen reluctantly.

Castiel took the documents from Sam's hand when he was finished, and sorted the documents into two piles. "For your client," he said.

Crowley turned to hand them to ... not Gabriel, not anymore. The Lilim alpha looked as grave as Sam had ever seen him, his usual air of incipient mockery thoroughly suppressed.

"It's done. You're free."

"Free..."

"Thank you, Crowley," Kali said, one hand grabbing the papers and the other around her husband's waist.

"What will you call yourself?" Castiel asked his former brother.

The beta turned and glared at him, his usually soft eyes almost reptilian, harsh and golden. "You've taken my old name away. You don't get my new one." He turned his back on Castiel, and Kali went with him.

Sam watched them go, out through the study doors.

"Well, that was lovely," Balthazar said. "So glad to see you, Castiel, don't bother coming by, I don't think I want you darkening my door for at least a six-month," the beta said, and swanned out.

"Lovely doing business with you," Crowley smirked, and followed his spouse out of the study.

Elimelech just gave Castiel an appalled, thunderstruck look, and left.

"I..I'm going," Sam stammered. "Now." He fled the study.

He caught up with them before they got beyond the courtyard.

"Kali! Gab—" he cut himself off, not sure what to call the man who had been Gabriel, "Wait! Please!"

The couple stopped, and turned to look at him, frozen politeness on their faces as he galloped down the steps and into the street.

"My name. You can still have my name," Sam said breathlessly. "I'm not Seraphim. None of this," Sam waved his hand, "binds me if I don't want it to."

Kali looked suspiciously at him, then sideways at her husband, then back at Sam. "Your name?"

"Yeah," Sam nodded.

"He means for the child," her husband said. dully.

"Uhm, yeah," Sam said. "I... you want to be a Winchester too? I'm the only alpha in the family, I can do that. If you want,,?"

The beta's eyes were suddenly dancing with amusement, in spite of the bleak day. "Oh Sam, you are.." He put his hand to Sam's cheek, and smiled fondly. "Thank you. I'll find a name for myself. But thank you. And for the child, I will ... think about it."

"Okay," Sam said, and then glanced at Kali. She didn't look like she was going to disembowel him, and when he raised his eyebrows to ask permission, her lips quirked. Sam took that for an okay. "Be well," Sam said, and leaned down to kiss his former brother-in-law's brow, then cheek, then lips, a full and formal farewell.

"Be well, Sam."

"Be well, Samuel Winchester," Kali said, and laid her arm around her husband's waist as they turned and left. Sam watched them go, heading for the train station, heading towards the south. He wished them well.

 

EPILOGUE

"Daddy!" Jocheved yelled, and threw herself into his arms at the train station. Sakuntala toddled away from Maia, blessed, kind Maia, who had brought the children to meet their train, and pressed herself against his leg, smiling up at him gummily.

"Hello, sweetheart," he said.

"I was so worried! Did Mommy find you? Are you all right?"

"Yes, I am."

"Jo," Kali said, "Your father has something to tell you."

Jocheved looked up at him with worried eyes, another question already on her lips.

"I left my family, and changed my name."

"You left..? But we're your family, me and Mommy and 'Tala." Jocheved complained.

"My old family. My brothers and sisters," He explained. "I had to go up and say I wasn't being part of their family anymore, so that I could be with you and Tala and Mommy."

"Okay..."

"And I had to change my name."

Jocheved gave him a suspicious look. "You won't be 'Daddy' anymore?"

Kali snorted, and waved him off when he glared at her.

"No, I'll still be your Daddy. But I had a name of my own, you know."

"Daddy," Jocheved said in tones of aggrieved patience, "that is your name."

"No. My name was Gabriel," he said.

"Oh. You and Mommy have names? Like real people?"

"Yes," Kali said, suppressing laughter. "We do."

"What's your name, Mommy?"

"Kali Mahayana."

"Like me! You're Mahayana, like me, Mommy!"

"Yes, dear, I know." Kali said smiling.

"And Daddy?"

"Call me..." he looked up at Kali, who nodded, "Loki."