I tottered backward, confused. “I don't under—?”
It gave a bestial snap of its long teeth and uttered an impatient growl. Incentive enough for me to run again, which I did immediately. I yelped when I felt the thing—Augustus—poke its muzzle between my legs. A yelp that swiftly transmuted from horror to abject surprise as he wedged his large head forcibly between my thighs and gave an almighty flick of his head so that I was thrown up like a ragdoll into the air. My chords froze mid-scream and then the air rushed out of my chest in a jolting whoosh as I landed on his broad withers, my fingers fisting swiftly into his mane. He began to increase his pace then. When he was sure I was as good as locked in place, thighs clenched at his wide ribs, he began to sprint in earnest. He streaked through the trees at a speed that left me dizzy. So I shut my eyes tightly and relied on my remaining senses to supplement my vision.
I felt the werewolf’s muscles bunch and stretch under me, the pads of his feet almost soundless over the fallen leaves and bracken. The salt of my tears, I tasted on my lips. Sampled the cedar and pine on the wind cutting over my face. I could smell his fur, the musky warmth of it. Also, I could smell the farm up ahead—the distant herbaceous stench of newly plowed earth and ripe hay bales.
It was all I could do to keep myself from digging my heels deeper into his flanks to urge him faster. But he was no horse, and I wasn’t brave enough to antagonize him, still unsure whether or not I was being rescued or lulled into a false hope. With every southward mile he gained, however, my courage swelled.
Unexpectedly, he halted and turned around to lift his nose in the air. He waited a few precious seconds that attenuated my nerves to breaking, his ears pricking and head cocking in all directions. What were we waiting for? My legs jiggled nervously as dread returned. I imagined the rest of the pack, those other two large runners specifically, hot on Augustus’ stumpy tail. In an instant he was off again, finally, zigzagging through the trees like a black bullet and I like a wide-eyed monkey clinging to his back. A few more miles later, he stopped again, but this time he shrugged me right off his back, catching me roughly with a long-fingered paw right before I nearly split my skull on the ground. I pushed myself up to standing—although he was on all fours he still towered over me—and looked askance at him. With an incisive glare, he nudged me to continue on and then he glanced over his shoulder. For a hair-raising instant, he was motionless before he fixed his pointed stare back to me again. “Go!” he seemed to say. Then he bolted off.
I backed away and watched as his hulking shape disappeared into the underbrush back where we’d just come from as if he meant to retrace his tracks and mislead the other runners somehow. Or at least I hoped that to be the intention. His deep howl echoed through the woods a short while later, further west, even as I was sprinting over roots and ducking under insidious branches. Again there came the answering calls of his brethren. Far too close for comfort. But Augustus had given me another fighting chance and I was not going to waste it. Not even for the burning in my lungs would I slow down.
Except, suddenly, the choice was taken from me. There was a werewolf blocking my way. And this was not Augustus! The glacial eyes appeared out of nowhere, glowing blue with fevered animus. Even in the pitch black, I recognized those white-tipped grizzled ears—like demon’s horns! Without a moment’s thought, my adrenaline shot my arm into action. The stone I’d been carrying till now flew from my fingers, as though from a sling, and nailed Nicole directly between her creepy eyes before she even knew what hit her. I felt only a brief moment’s satisfaction before she charged at me, teeth bared and snarling viciously. Furiously. It seemed I’d only pissed her off.
Running was vain, I did not want that bitch at my back again. With no more stones to protect me, I threw my arms up to brace for attack. It was queer the way my brain was able to spike into hyperdrive; queer the way that even the blurring speed of a raging werebitch could be slowed mid-lunge. It was almost as though I was watching my last moments in extraneous slow motion. Just an observer of my own violent end.
But she never reached me. Before my death cry left my lips, she was intercepted. Another set of jaws flashed suddenly out of the dense night. They clamped themselves murderously around her jugular. Time swiftly fell back into blurring motion as I watched, paralyzed.
The black beast shook her throat with brutal force, snarling malevolently as she tore at its stygian pelt. Two werewolves were now seemingly locked in mortal combat. Up till then, I’d stood palsied, but I did finally scream when a pair of large hands closed over my shoulders without warning. In that fleeting moment, two things happened: I turned to discover Dean, of all people, standing beside me. Simultaneously, the fighting ceased. The larger werewolf’s head had snapped around to me the instant I’d screamed, and by doing that it’d allowed Nicole the upper paw. Those claws descended with stunning vengeance, and before her opponent could rally himself, she seized its neck like a striking viper, eliciting a furious roar from the bigger wolf. The newcomer swiftly set its own fangs at her shoulder, ripping with almighty fury.
I was quickly shoved aside as Dean loped towards the pair. He wasn’t the only one. Augustus had arrived as well, his weight barreling straight into the antagonists like a mad boar, tusks gleaming. For a split second there was confusion and the combatants disengaged, but Nicole—having noticed her pack-mate’s arrival—quickly rallied and lunged again. Augustus, however, leapt at her back and pinned her down with his greater bulk. Dean, meanwhile, had taken the other wolf in a savage head-lock. The wolf seemed torn between wanting to attack Nicole and wanting to heed the commands of the large man battling to restrain it. Awe-struck, I watched Dean and my monstrous savior finally back away. The brute’s sable mane was almost erect at its neck, it was that charged with violence.
“Hold her down, Gus!” Dean commanded through clenched teeth, glaring at the wolf thrashing beneath Augustus.
The Athabaskan male spared a terse grunt as he held a very irate Nicole to the ground, her body bucking and her cries enraged.
At last, Dean released his hold on the massive werewolf. I almost expected the thing to tackle Nicole again, but, though its body appeared tensed to pounce, it remained eerily still as it impaled her with bloodshot eyes.
“Don’t do it, Tristan,” Dean warned, grabbing me by the wrist to pull me away.
Tristan?! I gasped.
The sound I’d made was evidently enough to snap Tristan from his bloodlust. He blinked those topaz-green eyes at me, that lethal yellow dimming somewhat from his glare, as I was dragged away in Dean’s wake. We stared at one another like strangers, me gaping over my shoulder at him. We were strangers. I was truly seeing him for the very first time. The real Tristan. Yet I was now just as much a stranger to myself as he was—I shouldn’t have been able to see anything at all in that moonless, midnight backwoods. Not without the aid of whatever rabid thing was mutating my blood.
With a clearing shake of his large black head, Tristan made to follow us, his ears flattening over his skull as he turned to glare one last time over his own shoulder at Augustus and Nicole. After that, I was then the recipient of that uncanny stare. Unblinking. Fierce. Yet tender. I turned away, preferring instead to stare at Dean’s granite back. It was a safer point on which to focus. Suddenly, it dawned on me that we were crossing a road. The road. I’d made it. I’d survived!
I could hardly believe it at all. In fact, my movements were catatonic as I continued on. Still alive, though, existentially speaking. Like a fragile bird, Dean lifted me up into the back seat of his Land Rover, neither of us saying a word. Neither of us commented on the frustrated howling of the two runners prowling at the edge of the road. Tristan was, for the moment, standing beside the SUV, guarding me, sharp ears pricked forward as he glared into the shadows. His sinews were taut and his neck bristled with unconcealed warning.
Every time I looked at him, I felt another fissure split my chest. I hid my eyes behind my sandpaper lids and dropped my head back
against the leather headrest, desperate for the oblivion of sleep. Desperate for a time that didn’t include werewolf bites or Lupum Caedes.
I must have dozed off a few minutes at least, the echo of wolf grunts and menacing growls notwithstanding, because suddenly I felt myself being pulled against warm solid skin, my cheek guided instantly to a broad chest sticky with blood. Strong fingers kneaded at my scalp and neck as the Landy roared to life and lurched onto the road.
Still, I kept my eyes shuttered. I wasn’t ready to see what I knew was in Tristan's eyes—that same feral chartreuse I’d seen when he’d faced the grizzly. God knew the clues had all been there! If only I’d put all the pieces together: the werewolf jokes; the “bear-whispering” and that growl he’d loosed at the brownie; the way he’d healed so quickly; the weird rumors; the penises in the forest; those unnatural footprints outside my door. Wasn’t hindsight a bitch.
With a gentle touch of two fingers beneath my chin, he lifted my face to his. I could feel him watching doggedly. Probing. Silently urging me to look at him. Then I felt my tattered sleeve being tugged away from my injured shoulder. Investigative fingers brushed across my scars, the fury radiating off him. There was a savage rumbling in his chest as, presumably, he studied the damage. At last, I opened my eyes to meet his.
The dam ruptured. Agonizing sobs overwhelmed me. He tightened his arms around me and nuzzled my neck. Physiologically and mentally, I’d been stretched beyond all limits and, finally, finally, I’d cracked wide open. It wasn’t even Tristan’s rage that had set me off, nor the guilt he wore like a cilice. It certainly wasn’t the painfully tender kisses he pressed to my brow. No, it was the brief flash of disgust I’d caught in his glare. I was a mutt after all. And rabid now too.
32
The Half-Caste Heir
The distant hollow pounding, I quickly realized as I pried one groggy lid from the other, was not, in fact, the interminable throb of an impending migraine but the bite of iron splitting logs just outside my window. At intervals, it stopped and then started again and I found myself picturing the prosaic scene, of whoever was so diligently chopping wood, as I stared at the ceiling of my unfamiliar room. The pause between each downward ax stroke seemed somehow infused with a strangely lamentable hush. The gloomy thwacks fell in rhythm with my own misery.
My phone had been returned to me yesterday morning when we’d finally arrived at Dean’s homestead. Tristan had discovered it in the basement right after he’d found my dried bloodstains at the front door, the same fateful night he’d promised to tell me everything. Nicole’s scent, I’d been told, had cohered like a cloying stench to every wall, leaving Tristan in no doubt as to who’d attacked me. But there’d been no stench of death. That, more than anything, had kept him searching. And hoping.
Lydia, as it turned out, had been replying to all of my text messages so that my absence had gone largely unnoticed. Although I could tell that my mom wasn’t quite fooled because she was threatening to fly up and drag me home if I didn’t soon answer her calls. I never went a single day without hearing her voice, and it had been over a week since I’d spoken to her! Whenever she’d tried to call me (while I was fighting for my life), Lydia had promptly replied by text, blaming the godawful reception.
“Chill, Mom, I’m fine.” I shook my head as I reread the text. Lydia didn’t sound anything like me, even via the relative safety of a text. I supposed that flying beavers all day was hard enough work without trying to impersonate someone she’d only met a handful of times. Lydia hadn’t even acknowledged my mom’s cute Chris Hemsworth banter—no wonder Mom was suspicious that I’d “hied off to Nome and had my brain scrambled by aliens”. The story that my friends and family had been fed, so I’d been informed, was that I’d gotten the flu and was staying with Dean’s family while I recovered. Alison and Mel had tried to come to see me but been turned away because I was too “contagious”.
Yesterday I’d stared at my phone a whole hour before I’d finally dredged up the courage to call my mom, and then I’d lied through my throbbing teeth about how “fine” I was doing. I’d even managed not to bawl like a kitten. But when she’d insisted on flying up, I’d shut her down like a cold bitch and said I wasn’t a baby anymore, that I could take care of myself. This Evan, this saturnine imposter, was unrecognizable to me, and to my poor mother most of all. It was heartbreaking lying to her, and I’d undertaken damage control with a clinical detachment that scared me. At least Mom had had some of her worry assuaged by hearing my voice, though that was cold comfort to me.
When the woodcutter commenced his melancholic hacking again, after another of those long pauses, it snapped me from my gloomy woolgathering. Further distraction came shortly afterward in the form of a knock at the door.
Lydia emerged with a supper tray, her large whiskey eyes creased with a smile as she shut the door behind her. “Oh good, you’re awake.”
With a voice that felt like coarse grit, I asked how long I’d been asleep this time. It seemed to me that since being bitten I was more often comatose than awake, unsure of what was real and what I’d imagined.
“You’ve been asleep most of the day, understandably,” she answered, depositing my dinner on the walnut dresser. “Should I get Tristan to—”
“No.” I’d spoken almost inaudibly, but the word rang out like the lash of a whip. I’d refused to see him all of yesterday too after I’d cloistered myself up here. I didn’t want to see anyone, but I especially didn’t want to see him. My reasons were many, but the foremost among them was the thought that I couldn’t stand to see that look on his face again. I couldn’t stand to feel that niggling sting of blame for a man I loved and revered above any other. “I don’t want to see anyone.” The wood-chopping halted, and we both sat in silence a moment, Lydia inclining her head knowingly.
When the ax fell with splintering force again, she came to sit beside me on the bed, deftly checking the skin beneath my bandage with a keen eye. “Well, it’s healing nicely,” she said without flinching, clearly not as disgusted by mongrels as some folks were. Or perhaps she hid her aversion better than most. “Gus did a good job stitching you up.”
“Are you one of those flying doctors?”
She chuckled. “Not yet. Dean and I do the best we can, but the pack definitely needs a physician.”
Small talk had never been something I was good at, and right now I was feeling anything but chatty. “What’s gonna happen to me? Will I die?”
She dropped her hands into her lap. “I don’t know, each case is different, I’m told. The bite is something we’re raised to fear and avoid at all costs. It’s supposed to be punishable by death, so you can imagine how many cases I’ve come across in my lifetime.”
“What’s the average lifetime of a mutt? I mean one that survives the first change.”
“Same as the rest of us.” She gave a hesitant smile. “Most wolves, if they don’t fight amongst themselves, can live at least thrice as long as humans.”
“How old are you?” I asked, intrigued despite my dolor.
“Old enough.” She gave a little wink. “My brother and I are the oldest in Dean’s pack actually.”
I looked her up and down. She and James couldn’t be more than thirty, I decided. But did that mean I had to multiply that number by three to determine their real age?
“How old is Tristan?”
“You should ask him that.”
“Am I the first mutt you’ve ever known?”
A shadow fell over her face. “No.”
“When was the last time a—?”
“Dean’s mother.” Lydia’s words fell like an ax across my question. She shook her head, ostensibly regretting her long tongue. “But that’s a complicated story.”
“Dean’s mother was human?! Who…who bit her?”
Lydia glanced surreptitiously at the door and gnawed her lips uncertainly. Then, as if coming to a decision, she said, “Dean did.”
“Holy shit!”
�
��Yup.” She fixed me with a level stare. “Dean went through his change at an uncommon age. He’s…sort of unique. Usually, males start shifting at about age twelve, right around puberty, but he was only nine when he shifted the first time. Just nine years old when he realized what he was.”
“So his mother didn’t know what he was? What Max Thorn really was?”
“No. Max was already married to Tristan’s mother, Elaine, when Linda fell pregnant with Dean. It’s almost unheard of—half-caste kids hardly ever make it through the first trimester. But somehow Linda carried full term and bore Max a healthy son. A boy that, to some, was considered no better than a mutt.”
“Omigod!”
“Yeah, being a half-caste is only slightly better than being a mongrel. Max had cut himself off from them for years, with regular reports from Max’s uncle, Frank, hoping that Dean would never shift. Half-castes, if they survive, rarely do. Max hoped Dean would just end up being like his mother. He didn’t though. And everyone, including Max, was unprepared for what happened afterward.” Lydia stared broodily at the floor as though she’d witnessed a lot of it herself. Maybe she had. “Linda thought her son was dying when he shifted the first time. They were camping, just the two of them, and ‘uncle Frank’, up at Whale Pass. When she realized what Dean was, she knew she couldn’t take him to the hospital or go to the authorities, not without risking her son being studied in a lab like a freak. Not that Frank Thorn would have allowed a doctor anywhere near the boy. Max was forced to take her son from her and installed him in the pack to be raised by his wife alongside his younger son. As you can imagine, Dean was never really accepted, not by anyone except his brother. He neither belonged with humans, nor with wolves. The Yukon pack, as with most of the oldest packs, consists of a bunch of parochial purists, so he never stood a chance. They decided unanimously that the right of primogeniture belonged to Tristan even though Dean was technically Max’s firstborn.” She shifted her gaze to me. “You have to understand, he had no one. Not even his mother. Tristan was just a young kid then, what could he do for his brother?”
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