The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Midnight on Wharf Street
By eleven I couldn't lift my head off the pillow.
Orrin propped Wilda's spare phone against the water jug so I could see the screen.
Wilda was on the other end, on a video call, walking down Wharf Street with the phone held up in front of her.
"Can you see?" she shouted. "Honey, can you see this?"
I could see.
The old customs house stood at the end of the street with its big brass doors shut.
The steps were empty.
The street in front of them wasn't.
There were women everywhere.
Wolf-kin and cat-kin and deer-kin, a fox girl with a baby on her hip, an old hare-kin in a wheelchair with a blanket over her knees.
Their mothers were there, and their sisters, and some of their fathers.
Every one of them was holding a candle.
"How many?" I whispered.
The bear-kin woman's face came into the frame, lit gold from below.
"We stopped counting at two hundred," she said. "They keep coming."
Wilda turned the phone slowly so I could see down the whole street.
It was a river of little flames, all the way back to the harbor.
The TV vans had come too, three of them, with their masts up and their lights making the brass doors blaze.
Somebody had made signs out of pizza boxes.
MINE WON'T TOUCH ME EITHER.
FOUR HEATS IS A SENTENCE.
SIGN IT, LEANDER.
The lynx-kin girl was standing on the bottom step with a bullhorn somebody had lent her.
Her tufted ears were straight up.
Her voice cracked on the first word and then didn't crack again.
"My name doesn't matter," she said into the bullhorn. "I'm twenty-three. I've had three Heats alone. My husband's father told me to try harder to be wanted."
The whole street booed so loud Wilda's phone crackled.
Then the bear-kin woman took the bullhorn.
She held up something small and blue.
The pamphlet.
The one with the sunset.
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