A Hope for Rauri

***So here's where I trot out the sidekick.

For a male detective, if he has a male sidekick, it's often to inject a little humor.

If the sidekick is female, she's often portrayed as being hopelessly in love with him.

Shauna is Wesley's sometime sidekick, though he tends not to be shy at all about telling anyone that she's the mastermind, which is sometimes not far off the mark, not that he's a dumbell, by any means.

She does love him, however, and this is their back-story. 0_o

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Louisiana, 1858

Shauna Kavanaugh awoke suddenly in the middle of a thunderstorm.

When she'd been little, her Irish father had died at sea, and her mother had taken her to live with some of her relatives. That part of the family was incredibly well-off and at first, little Shauna had to adjust to now being a child of privilege on a large plantation in Louisiana. She didn't know anyone from the area and she didn't have many friends, other than a few of the laborers' children.

She'd lost her father early, but he'd given her gifts to last a lifetime. She learned of one as her mother sat brushing her hair one day. According to his family's tales and legends, Shauna had one female relative far back who was reputed to have been a fairy maiden who'd given her heart to a human man. No one believed it, of course, her mother had been quick to point out to her.

But early on while still a little girl, Shauna found that she could understand the speech of most anyone who came from either Ireland or Scotland. It never happened often, but sometimes a traveler from those lands had difficulty making themselves understood in Louisiana, and more than once, Shauna's mother had taken her off on a carriage ride to see whether her girl could help and usually, she could quite easily.

Considering that she'd been born over there, come here as a tyke and had never known anyone but her father who'd had his own accent in his speech, such a thing was considered remarkable -- especially since to many people those two groups of accents weren't all that much alike.

Another thing that she had as an innate ability was the questionable gift to be able to see things and people which other folks could not. It might take years before something became clear to her or it might only take an instant.

But she did see clearly all the same.

If she had known a few children from the other plantations, then she might have heard the talk about her family and how they seemed to prosper in these worsening times when talk of war between the states was in the air and on everyone's tongue.

There were no slave families on her family's plantation.

But there were imposters; people who appeared to be slaves working there. They wouldn't speak to anyone, not to visitors and not even to human slaves from other plantations on the rare occasions when they'd met. The work of running the place went on around the clock some days.

And still the work got done.

While they were slaves of a sort, they weren't from Africa and hadn't been procured at any slave auction. They only labored for a few years to return whence they came and were replaced by others.

Generations before, a pact had been made which provided the workers -- who were most assuredly not human, no matter how indistinguishable they might be from the living slaves, and a large measure of the wealth.

There was a gateway; and one of the female Kavanaughs was the gatekeeper; a human attendant who allowed the passage of various infernal folk on their way to the mortal and corporeal world and back. There were other parts to the agreement, but this was the main thing.

But Shauna didn't know about any of that.

As she grew a little older, maybe six or seven, there came the night when there was a storm and she couldn't sleep for the racket of the driving rain and the thunder. She got out of her bed and went to the window to look out and watch. Shauna loved storms.

But what she saw there from her window was her Aunt Ophelia, a comely-looking woman walking out to the older and smaller of the three barns carrying a lantern which she was trying to shield so that it didn't give out enough light to be seen much as she walked.

Shauna had always been a curious little girl and she'd never been one to pass up a chance for a little adventure -- anything to break up the long and monotonous passage of the slow days for a spoiled girl. Her bedroom was on the ground floor next to her mother's, and there was an outside door just around the corner from the door to her room, so she wrapped her dark cloak around herself and she stepped out, thinking to ask her aunt when she got there.

But she never did ask her aunt. The events in the barn had precluded it.

Shauna saw that her aunt wasn't there alone, so she hid herself in a vacant stall and peeked.

She saw her aunt speaking in hushed tones to a ... a ...

She didn't know what, but if he was a man, then he was the strangest one that she'd ever seen. He had the appearance of something somewhere in between a man and a huge dog or wolf.

And there was that tail.

She couldn't see exactly what was going on, but at one point not long after, she watched as her aunt bunched up and lifted the hem of her dress so that the other person could see what lay beneath.

That other person smiled then and he fell to his knees, and for a time, Shauna only saw that her aunt was backed against the wall, still holding up her dress and though her eyes were closed, she was smiling, so whatever was done, it must have been the reason for that smile.

A smile on that face was a rare thing, Shauna knew. Mostly, her aunt Ophelia was a dour and grim thing to her, as beautiful as she was.

A little later, Shauna watched as the pair lay down one on top of the other. She still didn't know what it all meant, but from the sounds that Ophelia made, it must have been nice, she guessed.

The little vignette ended when the stranger turned his head to look straight at Shauna. Her aunt looked to be too happy to have other thoughts about anything, but the way that the stranger looked frightened Shauna.

He was making curious motions with his body, though he was looking right at her and his mouth was moving.

What frightened young Shauna Kavanaugh was the way that she could hear his voice in her head. She sure heard no sounds other than the ones which came from Aunt Ophelia and a little thunder now and then.

As clear as a bell -- as plain as day, she heard a rasping voice in her mind.

"Leave, young one. This is not for you -- yet. Your time comes, but not this night."

She didn't know how she'd done it, but Shauna Kavanaugh ran out of the stall, made a left turn and shot out of the doorway, somehow doing it all and even closing the door without making a sound before she ran straight to the large plantation house and back to her room.

The cloak was off and hanging in an instant and Shauna was trembling in her bed after that for a long time. The trouble was that after getting over her fright, she found that she was a little excited over it all, so she still chalked it up as being a good bit of adventure.

She just didn't know what had been meant.

The next day, no one said a thing about the muddy tracks from the door into the little girl's room. The silent servants just cleaned it all away. Her bedsheets with the mud from her bare feet were washed, and life went on. The only difference that she saw came at dinner when Ophelia looked at Shauna and smiled a little coyly.

It wasn't until Shauna was much older when she'd realized that her aunt knew even then that Shauna would come back to the barn some night.

She remembered looking at her mother then and seeing nothing like that sort of look on her face, so she guessed that her aunt was keeping the little secret for the moment at least.

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Evangeline Kavanaugh walked through the rain of a different foul and stormy night some weeks later with Ophelia, both of them as close together as they could get, partly for the slight shelter that it afforded them both, but mostly to hide the glow of the lamp from the view of the house as they made their careful way to the old barn together.

This had begun out of their closeness as sisters in a way. Evengelina had always wondered a little why Ophelia had never gotten married -- never even entertained any suitors who might have come. Most often it had fallen to their servants or Evangeline herself to send them away. True, she herself was a widow now with a small daughter, but still, at least she'd had a man and begun her family before fate had taken her husband from her.

It had taken a night much like this to learn just why her sister seemed content to live on the plantation as a spinster. Several close lightning strikes and the rippling crackles which presaged the long roars of the thunder had caused Evangeline to sit up in her bed and give up her hopes of a restful night's sleep, at least for the moment.

That was when she'd seen the glow passing by her window in the night.

She'd sat up and gone to look out of the window, and after a moment, that was when she'd seen her sister walking quickly out to the barn in the driving rain.

Thinking that something might have been wrong, she'd pulled her cloak around her and gone out herself, thinking that if Ophelia needed any help with whatever the concern might have been, well, she'd be there.

But when she got to the door, she'd found it locked from the inside and from the sounds which began to come to her ears, she ran to one of the rear doors. Finding it open, she slipped inside and after a moment of blinking and wiping the rain and her wet hair out of her eyes, what she saw almost brought her to her knees in shock.

That didn't happen, but she did need something and found herself hanging on the crossbeams of one of the stalls with both hands.

The oldest of their barns, this one no longer sheltered any livestock and was used most often to store hay for the horses and feed for the other animals as well as some of the machinery, such as their cotton gin. But it still had stalls and Evangelia was glad of it then.

She saw her sister with most of her clothing off already, standing in the midst of four large creatures, who looked to be helping her out of what she wore as carefully as something like that could do it. As she stared transfixed at the sight, Evengelina saw clearly that Ophelia was in no fear of them. She only stood caressing what she could on them and kissing the nearest of them passionately.

They were all tall and every one was a male besides -- that much was abundantly clear to her.

She'd read of things such as this, but she'd never taken it as more than the fanciful writings of someone with a wild imagination. But right there, out in the open space in the middle of the barn, well, there was all the proof that anyone would ever need as to the existence of such creatures.

Her sister was standing very nearly naked in the middle of four werewolves.

None of them looked to be slavering beasts -- well, not particularly so, it seemed, and between them all and Ophelia, Evangeline suddenly knew what this was about.

She was a grown woman and she knew of the carnal things that men and women did. She'd done them herself, obviously. She'd gone to watch a few times on the rare occasions when their overseer had declared that it was too hot to work and the silent workers had just lain in the shade of the trees to slowly fuck the day and the evening away.

Once or twice, she'd even seen it when a new young doe as the overseer called them had made her transition into adulthood with the help of perhaps a pair of females helping as they could while one or two males rutted with the young one.

But now she was seeing what they really were under the guises that they all wore when they worked for her family.

That night, Ophelia had eased herself down to kneel naked in the hay and even Evangeline had been surprised as all of them rutted into her one after another. There were times when her sister had been mounted from behind while she sucked a different male at the same time.

And there were two times that she'd had three at once and appeared to be in heaven. Very busy, to be sure, but definitely in bliss.

Something else came to Evangeline's mind then and she stared for a time until she saw that she was correct. As large and powerful-looking as the males all were, and as forceful as they appeared to be with her sister at times, there was never any sort of the cruel violence to it that she'd have thought would happen. If it could be said of them all, they appeared to be trying to be careful and even gentle with Ophelia at times.

It was clear that they were very appreciative.

She watched and as the shock of it all faded, Evangeline had begun to become aroused herself, and after a time, she drew up the hem of her gown and began to tease herself as she watched, wanting to try to remember this scene. She was an adult woman who was a widow, after all, so her bed was quite often a very lonely place late at night.

There had been the odd man come to call from the town. Most often, they were someone that she'd seen at church on Sundays, and while she could see nothing wrong with most of them, there was also nothing there for her somehow. She knew that as a widow and a mother, her options were limited.

But how to know if the man was only there to try to marry himself into her family's fortune?

She'd just given up. So watching something as primal and wanton as this was something which she hoped to use to warm her lonely bed at night by herself.

But there are by-products and signs to feminine arousal, even like what Evangeline had been doing as she'd begun to carefully frig herself.

Her breathing changed, though she'd tried hard to keep it even and still and there was always the gentle scent of human female arousal.

In a barn with at least four male werewolves in it and with their noses along with their sharp ears, well ... she knew that she was playing a rather risky game there alone on the shadows.

She'd had no idea that night, but there was a fifth male and a female. They were the alphas of the group, not that Evangeline knew anything about that sort of thing then, and they were watching as well from the other side of the barn.

And their noses weren't as near to the wildly aroused and happy human woman in the middle of the males of their pack. And of course, they weren't close enough to have the sounds that Ophelia made get in the way of detecting the slight huffs and gasps of a second woman in the barn. The she-wolf turned her head and after a moment of careful sniffing, she looked at the other females and gestured silently with her chin.

Evangeline's terror began as she was discovered by the females. She stood on watery legs and struggled as she was held up on her feet by two of them. The alpha female began to remove her gown and Evangeline fought it - or tried to. The gown was the victim then and it was torn off her in seconds.

Evangeline never forgot that night and what she'd done in the hay right beside her sister.

She'd been pawed and felt and forced to perform all manner of carnal acts on the males AND the females for their pleasure of her. As well, she'd been dragged and moved around so that she'd had to do the very same things -- some of them, anyway - to Ophelia, who told her not to fear and also how much she enjoyed this with her. It took her a while, but she'd also seen eventually that no one really harmed her, other than some slight scratches and nips and overall ...

It had been wonderful.

Much later that fateful night, the two sisters walked slowly on aching hips back to the house. There was semen in their hair and even a little still on both of their faces, though they'd tried to wipe it off for each other. Their thighs felt a little sticky here and there and they also felt wonderfully slippery as their vaginas and anuses seeped with the fluid.

But they were happy.

To Evangeline at the time, it was both surprising and astounding, the way that those males had of attaining their climaxes in her and filling her with so much more seed than she'd ever gotten out of her husband or any man before in her life to that point. It was deliciously hot to her when it came and best of all, there was always more to be had from the same male in perhaps as little as a minute if he stayed in her.

She remarked on it in a whisper to Ophelia who'd nodded and said that yes, as what those males were, they usually gave several gushes each time, so she had to be sure to remain still for it or continue bucking against them, but a little softer, and it often helped if she could catch the male's eye and give him a hopeful look then because she'd learned that they liked to see it and would then strive to give her more.

In time, both Ophelia and Evangeline were held as a slightly sacred pair to the pack who sometimes came to the barn and left little signs for their human goddesses of love which only they'd been taught to read so that they might know that their lovers were there and waited for them.

About a year after it had begun, they were bitten very carefully by the alpha pair and turned. The two days that it took to get past the sickness and the learning of how to control themselves were hidden by the ruse of the sisters leaving for a visit to see a sick friend. In reality, the sisters were back in their barn the same night fucking with every werewolf who came to them before being bitten.

They just didn't know about Shauna until a time later when she was discovered as she lay in the hayloft peeping at them.

She was found that night by one of the females and Evangeline wondered why Shauna was not afraid of the werewolves in the least.

Another of the females came forward and told of finding Shauna there in the loft some days previous, playing with some of their whelps there in the hay, as naked as they were. When asked, Shauna had said that it was only fair to her mind. She'd always wanted friends more than anything, and so, having found them, she made friends and had wanted to show them that she was no different to them -- even though she was, of course.

Shauna told her mother and her aunt that she'd never told a soul of what she'd seen there, because of her friends and their parents and she knew enough not to tell anyone. From then on, Evangeline brought her daughter along on the nights when they went and Shauna either played with the other children or she lay in the hay and slept with them under the watchful gaze of at least one of the females.

Child's play is child's play of course, and it happened one day that Shauna was bitten by a whelp and she turned as well. The event was a joyous one for them all, not least of them Shauna herself.

It all ended when the people of the town came one night and burned down the barn. Shauna was panicking, lost and choking in the smoke for a short time until the female alpha came to her out of nowhere and told her to climb up onto her back, "You must be away from this or it is your death, my little friend. Everyone else is out and safe but you, so come."

Shauna saw the slightly red glare in the eyes of the female as she looked back when Shauna climbed up to get settled, "If even one of you is harmed in the least, we will leave none alive in that town of fools. The priest will be mine before the dawn regardless, for we have found out that he guides them and was here with his holy book when it began. I will show him the worth of such nonsense this night."

And so in the aftermath of the burning of their barn, the pack moved on and Shauna lost her friends as they moved away.

Not long afterward, Ophelia announced that the new house was almost completed and would soon be ready to move into.