Walking Wolf

by Nancy A. Collins

  I was so bedazzled by this vision of loveliness that I did not realize I was being watched until my attacker was almost on me. Just before he struck, I got a strong whiff of the scent that had seemed familiar, yet I could not place. I spun around, just in time for something to land against the side of my head. All sound and vision fled—but not before I realized what it was I had caught the odor of.

  It was the scent of my own kind.

  A cold rag on my brow brought me back to my senses. As I started awake, the first thing my aching eyes happened on was one of Reverend Near’s angels smiling down at me. Then my vision cleared, and I realized I was looking at the young girl with the long blonde hair I had seen tending the cook fire. I also realized was trussed hand and foot on the floor of one of the covered wagons, and that I was in my human form, and stark naked, to boot. I blushed. The girl giggled and drew her hand back from my brow.

  “The intruder is awake, mon seigneur,” she called out, in heavily accented English.

  “Excellent, Lisette,” replied a male voice. “Leave us. I wish to question him alone.”

  As the girl vacated the wagon, the man who had spoken climbed in past her. He was dressed rather extravagantly for being in the middle of wide-open nowhere, sporting a single-breasted frock coat, dress trousers, and an Inverness cape. With his long hair curled and brushed upward and parted in the middle, and his bushy mustache, he looked more like a dude on his way to the opera than a settler headed West.

  The dude pulled a thinly rolled cigar the color of mud from inside his breast pocket and eyed me intently. “What pack do you run with, cub?” Like the girl, he spoke with a accent, although his English was better.

  “Pack?”

  The dude bit off the end of his cigar as fast and as clean as a guillotine, displaying strong white teeth. “Don’t play stupid, cub. It won’t work with me. Who is your Master of Hounds?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Mister—” My head rocked back from the force of the blow to my jaw. As he moved to strike me again, I bared my teeth at the dude and growled.

  “My, aren’t we the brave and loyal dog,” he commented dryly, staying his hand. “Well, don’t show your fangs at me, little wolf—unless you mean business.” With that, he thrust his face into mine. Before my eyes, the dude’s features flexed and twisted upon themselves, as if something inside his head were trying to break free. His whiskers and muttonchops spread across his cheeks as his nose grew longer and broader, transforming into a snout.

  I cried out then, not in alarm as one might suppose, but in surprise and delight. For I was finally face to face with that which I’d been seeking. “You’re like me!”

  The dude dropped his wolf-face, resuming his human guise as easily as a man adjusts his johnson on a hot day. “Of course I am, you wretched lout! What did you expect?”

  “I—I wouldn’t know, Mister. I was raised by humans from an early age.”

  The dude fell silent, narrowing his eyes and fixing me with a strange look. He leaned forward, sniffing the air like a bloodhound trying to pick up a scent. “You smell vaguely familiar. Perhaps your sire was known to me. Do you know his name?”

  “No, sir. I was just a baby when my folks got killed.”

  The dude’s eyes narrowed even further. “Killed? By humans?”

  “Yes sir. By a bounty hunter called Witchfinder Jones.”

  At the mention of Jones’s name, the dude’s manner became noticeably anxious. “Would this Witchfinder be a large man? Very hairy?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s him!”

  “I knew him in the Old Country, under another name. But it seems his occupation is still the same.” The dude rubbed his chin and stared off into space for a moment, then turned his gaze back on me. “You remind me of someone I once knew. His name was Howler. He came to this country over two decades ago to start a new life for himself. He dreamt of founding his own pack, free of the squabbles and power plays that plague the Old Country. No one has heard from him since. Perhaps he was your sire.”

  “What about my Mama? Did you know her, too?”

  “She was a human female, what else is there to know?” he shrugged dismissively. “If you are, indeed, what you say you are—a loner—I need not fear you. Come, let me show you my hospitality.” The dude produced a knife from his breast pocket and freed me from my bonds.

  “I am called Grondeur, my young friend. And you are called—?”

  I hesitated, uncertain as to which of my names was more suitable for the occasion. Since Grondeur, although vargr, was European, I decided to go with my White name. “Billy. Billy Skillet.”

  “How American! I shall have one of my wives find you some decent clothes. It wouldn’t do to have you parading naked in front of the ladies.”

  Five minutes later, I was dressed in a pair of linen trousers, a white dress shirt with too much starch in it, a loose-fitting sack coat and a pair of short Wellington boots. I hadn’t been so finely tricked-out since my days as a drummer for Professor Praetorius. It had been so long since I had worn clothes that I had to fight the urge to revert to my true skin and tear the garments to shreds.

  “You look quite respectable, for an American,” Grondeur said, with a slight smile. “Come, allow me to introduce you to my entourage.”

  As I stepped from the back of the covered wagon, I noticed that afternoon had given way to early evening. The wagon train’s company was seated around the central campfire, their faces turned towards us in silent anticipation. A big, meaty man, bald of hair and whiskers, got to his feet and approached Grondeur, his eyes averted and head down. Although he no longer wore a leather apron, I recognized him as the wheelwright. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly high-pitched for a man so large.

  “Mon seigneur, the wagon has been repaired as you commanded. We will be ready to move come the dawn.”

  “Excellent,” Grondeur smiled, displaying his magnificent teeth to full effect. “Billy, this is Henri, my major domo and master eunuch.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Beg pardon?”

  “Come now, when one has a harem, one must have eunuchs.”

  I looked from Henri to the other two heavyset, bald men. There was no anger or resentment in their great, cow-like eyes. Instead, they seemed to regard Grondeur with true reverence.

  “And these are my wives,” Grondeur said, gesturing to the women clustered around the campfire. There were eleven of them. “Are they not beautiful?”

  Indeed, all of the assembled women were strikingly attractive. And, save for the blonde who had ministered to my wounds, every one of them looked to have a bun in the oven. They sat there, hands laced atop their swollen bellies, as imperturbable, impassive and immutable as a pantheon of ancient fertility goddesses.

  “Evening, ladies.”

  “You needn’t waste words on them, lad,” Grondeur advised. “I’ve had them all muted—except for little Lisette, the one who spoke to you earlier.”

  “Muted?”

  “Yes—I had their tongues surgically removed. I find it keeps the bickering in the seraglio to a minimum. Besides, none of them spoke English, save for Lisette. Her mother was British, her father Belgian. I allowed her to keep her tongue in order to have a human liaison capable of communicating with the peasants of this rough country.”

  “They’re called settlers here, not peasants,” I pointed out.

  Grondeur shrugged. “I can call a horse an equine and it still runs on four legs and produces manure.”

  “But why do you have so many wives?” I asked.

  The werewolf fished another cigar from his tobacco case and bit the end off, spitting it into the fire. “You see, vargr males outnumber females five to one. Unless a male joins a pack with a sexually active female, there’s little chance of him breeding true. And, once in the pack, you have to wait until the Bitch Queen is in season, and then you must fight all the other males for the privilege to rut. Because of this, necessity decrees that we find othe
r means of breeding.

  “Some of us take human females as life mates, others cast their seed upon the wind, as it where, through anonymous acts of rape. There are even those who breed with true wolves. In any case, most vargr born are of mixed parentage. Those sired by rape are probably the most plentiful. Most of them are raised by humans, ignorant of their true birthright. Many of these mixed-bloods are incapable of shapeshifting, even though they possess the instincts and hunger of a vargr. We call them the esau, and most of them are as mad as march hares. They can be very dangerous indeed, and not just to humans.”

  Grondeur reached inside his coat and produced a golden locket, flipping it open to reveal a cameo portrait of a man who shared my eyes and jaw-line. “When I spoke of your possible sire—and, the more I look at you, the more I believe that Howler was, indeed, your sire—I did not tell you the whole truth. Howler was my half-brother. We shared paternity, not maternity, you see. I was sired within the pack, he outside it. He often spoke to me of his dreams of coming to this country and starting afresh. He wanted to be the Alpha Prime, the Master of Hounds of his own pack.” With a twist of his wrist, he snapped the locket shut. “He always had such small dreams. As for myself—I am unwilling to settle for such a modest future.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Why do you think I would travel to this godforsaken country? For freedom? Liberty? No, I have come to build an empire! My empire!” Grondeur gestured grandly at the land beyond the campfire’s glow. “Howler was right—Europe is old and overcrowded, Asia even more so. If an ambitious vargr is to find his destiny, it will be here, in this great emptiness! There is nothing here to keep me from populating this vast expanse with my seed! Your father was satisfied to start with a single female—and look where it got him: an orphaned son ignorant of his birthright! But I have eleven wives, and soon I will have eleven sons—possibly even a daughter! And, in time, I shall breed with my daughters and granddaughters, and my sons will breed with their sisters, nieces and daughters, and within two centuries all vargr that roam this land shall be of my pedigree. What do you say to that, nephew?” Grondeur did not wait for me to respond before barreling on. “You know the ways of this land, do you not? You are familiar with the human savages, mais non?”

  “I was raised by the Comanche, if that answers your question.”

  He clapped his hands, grinning broadly. “Excellente! Most excellent, indeed! I am in need of an experienced guide. While Henri and his compeers are loyal servants, they are far from expert when it comes to scouting. We have already lost one of the eunuchs to bad water. You will stay on and serve as our guide to the territory of Utah.” It sounded more like a command than a request.

  “Utah?” I frowned. “Why the hell do you want to go there?”

  “Because of the humans who call themselves Mormons. They practice polygamy as a rule, so a man with eleven wives would not call undue attention to himself in such a community.”

  “I reckon not,” I conceded.

  “You will be our scout.” It seemed Grondeur didn’t ask people what they were going to do, he told them.

  Since I didn’t see any reason not to go along with his plan—after all, I’d spent years searching for other werewolves—I decided I might as well go along for the ride. Besides, the whole time Grondeur was going on about breeding a new race and sowing America’s wilderness with his seed, Lisette had been giving me the eye.

  I bedded down under one of the wagons, curling up on an old horse blanket Henri had given me. I was tired and had a full belly and, truth to tell, it had been a busy day. I fell asleep almost immediately.

  I woke a couple hours later to the hissing of tongueless women.

  While being muted might have reduced their bickering, as far as Grondeur was concerned, it was evident his wives had devised a means of getting around their speech impediment. They sat around the dying campfire, hissing and gesticulating wildly. There was something ominous about the sight of so many heavily pregnant women discoursing amongst themselves in a private language.

  One of the eunuchs sat just outside their circle, a rifle cradled in his arms, but whether he was protecting the women from potential harm or guarding against escape I could not tell. Finally the women tired of their wordless conversation and returned to the wagons, followed by the gun-toting castrato. I shrugged and went back to sleep, but my dreams were not easy.

  As I rode before the wagon train over the next few days, scouting the territory that lay ahead, I reflected on my circumstances. After years of searching for those of my own kind, I had finally stumbled across not only a fellow werewolf, but a blood relation at that. Instead of being happy, my discovery had left a hollowness inside me. Most of this I attributed to Grondeur. Despite our shared ancestry, I felt no kinship toward him. I could not shake the feeling I was being smiled at by an enemy unwilling to show his true face. Yet, I was so ignorant of vargr custom and lore, I did not want to abandon a chance to learn more about myself simply because I disliked the elder vargr. Still, I was glad my duties required me to spend so much time away from his company.

  Whenever I returned to the wagon train, Grondeur would debrief me and then, if I was lucky, talk about the Old Country. This soon became something of a ritual between us, complete with coffee served us by one of his tongueless wives. Grondeur would often treat himself to some cognac from a case he’d brought with him from Europe, along with his usual cigar. Realizing how little I knew of vargr etiquette and custom, he did his best to continue my ignorance, dispensing tiny dollops of information here and there to ensure my continued willingness to serve as his scout.

  Most of his stories began with him recounting something that had happened to him during his tenure as the Master of Hounds, the title given the Bitch Queen’s consort. To hear him tell the tale, he had been a powerful and much-admired figure in vargr society. Then his beloved was slain, the victim of internecine warfare with a rival pack envious of her influence in the court of Napoleon III. Upon her death, the pack was forced to disband. Rather than swear fealty to those responsible for his lover’s murder, Grondeur decided to leave the Old World in favor of the New.

  Grondeur was imperious and haughty, as cocksure as a Comanche brave who has never tasted defeat. And I was soon made aware of how jealous he was of his traveling harem. While I was in camp, the eunuchs never let their eyes wander from me for a moment. On more than one occasion, I toyed with the idea of riding off and leaving the werewolf lord to whatever fate might await him, but the hope of learning more about myself—and the promise of a smile or kind word from the lovely Lisette—always reigned my horse back to camp.

  I can still see Lisette’s beautiful face, smiling back at me, even after all these years. She was so lovely—her skin smooth as a rose petal, her lips full and ripe as a peach. She smelled of cinnamon and cloves and woman. Her hair fell from her shoulders like a golden curtain, swaying in the breeze like a thing alive. She was beauty made flesh.

  I knew it was foolish of me to fall in love with one of Grondeur’s wives. The older vargr made no effort to hide the fact that they were his property. Still, I was young and full of the juices all men that age seem to overflow with. I found Lisette extremely attractive, and it was plain to see that she favored me as well. As I slept alone under the open skies, I found myself pondering whether Grondeur would miss one measly wife. After all, we were kin. What harm could it do?

  One night, after everyone had retired, I was awakened by the sound of someone approaching my bedroll. I sat up, shifting into my true skin without conscious thought. To my surprise, I saw it was Lisette, dressed in a long white undergarment.

  “What are you doing out here?” I whispered, sliding back into my human guise.

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “There are better times and places to do that,” I said as I glanced about warily, wondering where Grondeur’s pet castrati might be hiding.

  “You needn’t worry about the eunuchs,” she assured me.
“I put something in their coffee. They’ll sleep for hours.”

  “What about Grondeur?”

  She giggled and rolled her eyes. “I can handle him.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t share your confidence. Please go back to your wagon, Lisette.”

  She smiled at me then, her child-bride innocence dissolving. “Why? Are you afraid of me, Billy?”

  “I’m more afraid of what might happen if you stay.”

  She drew nearer, her hips swaying seductively with each step. She slowly opened the front of her undergarment, exposing the milky flesh underneath. I knew I should jump up and drag her back to her wagon, kicking and screaming if need be, but my body refused to listen to reason. “I like you, Billy,” she whispered as she knelt beside me. Her lips were so close to my face they grazed my ear. “You’re young and handsome. You’re not old like him. You like me, too. I can see it in the way you look at me.”

  “S-sure I like you, Lisette. B-but—”

  “You’re scared of him.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “You needn’t be frightened of him, Billy. If he was as powerful as he makes himself out to be he would still be in Europe. He was the Master of Hounds, that much is true. But he was deposed by a younger rival, who took the Bitch Queen as his own. That’s why he came to this country—so he wouldn’t have to live with the shame of being a loser.” While I was digesting what she’d told me, Lisette took my hand and placed it atop one of her firm young breasts. My brain began to sputter like bacon in the pan, short-circuiting any attempts at rational thought. “I want you, Billy. I want you for my mate. Take me, Billy—take me now.”

  I’ve always been an agreeable sort, so it didn’t take much more in the way of pleading to get me going. Within seconds we were rolling on the ground, all fear and common sense lost in a wash of hormones. I pushed Lisette’s cotton shift up over her hips, exposing the moist thatch between her legs, all the while fumbling with my buttons. When I finally managed to free my johnson I discovered, to my dismay and embarrassment, the traitorous piece of meat was as limp as fresh wash.