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looking for firewood and he found several fresh carcasses.” Aaron wrinkled his nose. “He skinned them, I guess, because he came back with the pelts instead of firewood. We don’t waste anything. That’s why I took the bag.” Aaron spoke earnestly, his expression matching his tone. “I should have waited and seen if anyone, or you, I mean, came back, I guess. I was scared too. We, um. We weren’t supposed to be out and I saw the leather bag. Leather is rare. No one was around. I thought— Well, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t. I just took the bag. I wanted to make Walter and Anita proud.” He laughed bitterly, the tone wrong coming from him.
    Valen wanted to wrap Aaron in his arms and keep him from ever sounding like that again. He even found himself reaching for Aaron before yanking his hand back.
    Aaron didn’t seem to have noticed. He kept talking. “Then I saw you. I knew you were a shifter. Wolves aren’t that big. You were…magical, like the moonlight was even too in awe to touch you. It just kind of glowed around you instead.” Aaron groaned and covered his face with his hands. “Gods, it’s talking like that—it’s why Walter and Anita think I’m so useless!”
    Valen was confused. “Why would they think you’re useless? Because you can put words together in a way that implies you have a talent for it? Are there no poets in your society?”
    “Poets?” Aaron cocked his head and stopped covering his face.
    “Wow.” Valen had to take a moment to organize his thoughts, because they’d kind of just been blown away. “A poet.” He was afraid to ask if Aaron really didn’t know what that was for fear of insulting the man. Valen was having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that humans might have lost so much of their history.
    Granted, shifters didn’t have much written down. They did have stories, songs and other learning they passed from one generation to the next verbally, and in other art mediums as well.
    “I don’t know what a poet is. I like the word.” Aaron smiled and Valen’s entire body went tight with need.
    Aaron didn’t seem to be aware of that. “What’s it mean?”
    Valen gave himself a mental shake. “A poet is someone who has been blessed with the talent to understand the power of words, and can convey so much more with them than the average person does. It’s a gift, being a poet, and I think you have that gift.”
    Aaron’s smile brightened then dimmed out altogether. “It’s a useless one. Does crap to help us survive.”
    “There’s more to life than just survival.” Gods, how hard was life for humans now?
    “Riiiight,” Aaron murmured. “Besides the dying and starving, the sickness, waking up at sunrise or earlier in order to attempt to find food or tend crops that keep dying, to haul water and hope something doesn’t kill you while you’re doing it. To keep a watch out for attacking villages and tribes. You know, just trying to stay alive. After that’s all done, then it’s one big celebration, right?”
    “Oddly enough, sarcasm suits you,” Valen mused. “I wouldn’t have guessed it. I’d thought you should only have smiles and soft words coming from you. I like that show of spirit, Aaron Olsen.”
    Aaron sucked in his bottom lip.
    Valen desired to feel Aaron suck his cock in just as eagerly. Something was happening between them, something more than just attraction. Or if Aaron was attracted, he wasn’t willingly so.
    “I told you my name because I thought it might make it harder for you to kill me,” Aaron said a minute later. He looked up through thick lashes at Valen.
    Even squatting as he was, Valen was still taller than Aaron.
    It was important to Valen that Aaron did not think badly of him, or at least not too badly. “I don’t kill for thrills. None of my kind do. We learned a long, long time ago not to be so foolish.”
    Aaron inhaled sharply. “Like humans.”
    Valen wanted to smack himself. “I didn’t