Renegade

by Donna Boyd

  “You have a peculiar sense of humor.”

  She was thoughtful for a moment. “This is the flaw in the way the pack is structured. You—and your family of course, and your mighty corporation with all its various holdings and its outrageous wealth—you control an empire that is largely composed of humans, that is almost completely dependent on humans both as consumers and as your work force, and that exists, if you are completely honest, largely for the sake of humans. Yet you know nothing about humans. You hold them in contempt, and you segregate yourself from them.”

  “Untrue. I dined with a human only yesterday.”

  “And probably left him with the bill.”

  “Of course.”

  She lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation. “I despair of you.”

  He smiled, watching her from the corner of his eye. “You could teach me tolerance.”

  “I haven’t the time.”

  “Then run with me.”

  The words were unexpected, and they caused a catch in her heartbeat, a flush of pleasured excitement that started in her core and crept outward to her fingers, her toes, forming dewy drops of heat where her fur collar touched her neck. To run with a member of the opposite sex was the boldest kind of flirtation, and an invitation from someone as sexually potent as Nicholas Devoncroix was not an easy thing to refuse. She said, shifting her gaze away in confusion, “You surely don’t mean now.”

  “Why not?” He turned his face up to misty rain, scenting the air. She could feel the surge of energy from him as he did so. “It’s a fine cold night and my human form begins to chafe.”

  She couldn’t stop the quick pounding thrill of her pulse, as though her body were reacting to an invisible caress. Perhaps it was. She tightened her shoulders and thrust her hands deeper into her pockets. “For one thing,” she told him, “I am very fond of this gown.”

  “My people will take care of it.”

  She cast a quick suspicious glance around and sensed nothing, no one. “For another, I’m not quite certain how I feel about running with someone who has people follow him around for the sole purpose of taking care of his clothes.”

  “I arouse you,” he observed. Of course he could feel her heat, smell her excitement.

  She did not look at him. “Hardly a noteworthy accomplishment in my human form.”

  He swung gracefully in front of her and caught the collar of her coat lightly in his hands. In the dark she saw only his eyes, but her senses roared with his presence. “Then,” he said, “let’s dispense with it.”

  With a gentle tug, he slid the coat off her shoulders, and down her arms. Her skin prickled instinctively in the cold. She removed her hands from her pockets, and the coat puddled around her feet.

  She said, with her eyes fastened on his, “You waste your charms on me. Why?”

  “Because they are not wasted. You intrigue me.” He took off his coat and tossed it aside, and his eyes never left hers. Heat and scent, raw and sexual, billowed from him.

  She said, “I will not run with someone I don’t trust.” But she breathed deeply of him, feeling a little drunk with the sensation.

  He took her earrings, one in each hand, and slid them deftly out of her ears, dropping them into his pocket. “I don’t think I’m the one you mistrust.”

  He thrust his fingers into her hair, plucking out the pins one by one. Even in the dampness, her hair crackled to his touch, strands of it floating toward him, entangling in his fingers.

  Lara caught his wrists and pulled his hands away from her scalp, holding them hard in the space between her face and his. She said lowly, “Do you see these hands?” Her eyes glittered in the night. Cold rain glistened on her face and trickled over her bare shoulders. Her fingers were iron, and his pulses throbbed beneath them with raging life. “It was hands such as these that built this park and the skyscrapers that look down on it. Hands such as these painted the Mona Lisa and wrote Eudora’s vow. And these legs …” she stepped forward, thrusting her knee between his legs, her ankle winding around his, her thigh hard against his. “These two strong straight legs are the legs that dance Romeo and Juliet, not the legs that race mindlessly across a plain. This is what we are at our best, Nicholas Devoncroix.” She released his hands abruptly and stepped away from him. “The rest is mere savagery.”

  His blood roared in her ears. The feel of his skin and the hard sinews of his arms still burned her fingertips. His eyes were a quiet fire that consumed without burning. She watched as his fingers loosened his silk tie, and the buttons of his shirt. His voice was low and still. “Run with me tonight,” he said, “and tomorrow I will dance with you.”

  If ever there was a moment when she might have walked away, it was then. Her heart pounded. Her breath dried up. And she did not walk away.

  His clothes fell away. The night sparked with the sharp charred ozone smell of him and her skin tingled and burned in response. Anger and desire and a sweet helpless hunger for the wildness that was him, and that was her, clutched at her center and seared through her veins. He stepped into her; he took the straps of her gown between his fingers. His eyes were the only lights in the night, and they burned blue-black.

  “Who are you, Lara Fasburg?” he said softly. He snapped the straps between his fingers, and the fabric slid down her body like a lover’s hands, caressing each curve.

  She stepped out of her gown, and the diamond straps glittered like raindrops on the ground. The air grew thick with the clashing molecules of the coming storm and drawing it in was like breathing honey. He stepped back, holding her with his eyes, and when he moved, his hair whirled and lashed around him as though borne on a violent wind, and it glowed with a blue iridescence that cast shadows on his skin. She kicked off her shoes. She heard the high sweet note of music trilling in her ears, and she knew it was the sound of his blood surging through his veins, of his power transmuting liquid to fire, melting capillaries, bursting vessels, transforming that which was once corporeal into something much more than mortal. Oxygen leached from the air and into the light and power that was his Becoming. She felt the glorious ache of magnificent force building in her womb, tightening her spine, bursting through her lungs and swelling in her breasts and sparking through her fingertips.

  He turned to her, he fastened her with his lightning eyes. He lifted his arms and with a flash of white gold color and a thunderous explosion of dizzying hot scent he leapt into the Change. Never before had she known what it was like to be brought into the passion of the Change by a werewolf as powerful as Nicholas. The intensity of the pleasure was shattering. She was caught in the swirling, roaring tide of his magnificence; wonderfully, willingly, rapturously ensnared, and she surrendered with a cry of ecstasy to the supremacy of her nature.

  In this form there was no complex reasoning, no conflicting emotions, no careful thought patterns. There was only muscle and movement and instinct and the grand and glorious wonder of the senses. The taste of rain on the tongue, the roar of heartbeats in the ear, the rush of cold air through the nostrils. Claws digging into turf and stones flying underfoot. Night streaming by. Running, running, breathing, smelling, feeling. The silken luxury of her own fur, the wind cutting through it and caressing her skin with its sharp cold bite; the unparalleled luxury of another’s footfalls beside her, turning when she turned, leaning when she leaned, racing and slowing, matching breaths, matching heartbeats in a harmony of movement so perfect that it was called the dance of the gods. This was what it was like then. This was what it was like.

  They ran down dark and forgotten paths where humans seldom trod. They ran through small streams and tangled bushes. They inhaled the night, the rich smoky scent of their own kind, the hot spurting blood of small game. They raced and they leapt, they tussled and rolled in the wet grass; they used their teeth and their claws and their steel-band muscles. They let themselves sink into the glorious unfettered essence of what they were. They forgot what it was like not to be wild.

 
; He was by far the stronger and the faster, and because he was who he was, he eventually forgot to temper his pace to hers. He let his muscles fly and his adrenaline soar. He circled and charged her and she, drunk with the glory of the beast that too seldom burst free, charged him back. She caught his throat with her teeth and he, in a brilliant ballet of grace and power, spun away and sank his teeth into her shoulder.

  It would have been, with another, a harmless gesture of playful challenge, but for Lara it was the resurgence of a nightmare, a jolt of shock and pain that triggered something so deep within her she could not have fought it had she wanted to. And she did not want to.

  She gave a scream of shock and pain and twisted away, snapping viciously at his face. She caught him just below the eye and tore away a flap of skin. Blood gushed. She charged at him again, beyond reason now, beyond restraint, mad with memories, mad with rage, helpless against the beast within her that had no choice but to fight back.

  There were rules of combat and rules of the run; even had there not been common sense would dictate the inevitable consequences of attacking another werewolf near the eyes. The instinct for self defense was powerful and immediate. Nicholas flung her hard to the ground and pinned her with his weight, his eyes blazing and his face dripping blood and his teeth bared only inches from her throat.

  There is always with them a moment before the killing strike in which logic returns, often for no more than an instant, but it is an instant in which the choice must be made with the forebrain, not with instinct. This protective mechanism prevents accidents and regrets in a species so powerful it could easily destroy itself in a matter of decades were its passions not so governed.

  Nicholas recognized her, and the relatively minor nature of his injury, and his instincts were checked. Yet he may also have wondered, in that flash of cognizance, whether she had done it on purpose, and why, for when he sprang away it was with a roar of fury and a burst of light and color, and he was in his human form when he lunged at her again. Lara’s change was less graceful, and she stumbled to the ground.

  He hauled her to her feet by the arm. Her skin was still hot from the change and rain sizzled where it struck her skin. Her black hair was wet and tangled over her face and between the strands her eyes gleamed fiercely.

  “You take a chance, Lara Fasburg.” His voice, not fully returned, was low and guttural and his fingers on her upper arm were tight enough to have broken the bone of a human. Blood mixed with the rain that streamed down his face, and his nostrils flared with fury.

  In the distance there was the sound of taxi cabs and the clatter of manhole covers. Human voices muttered nonsense behind their windows and their heavily screened balconies and their neon-lit places of night business. Elevators pinged. Doors slammed. Locks clicked. The air was fouled with human sweat, human shampoos, human breath, the greasy miasma of human food and human garbage, one barely distinguishable from the other. But here in this dark cove there was only the thunder of blood and the taste of rain, the smell of lightning and harsh triumph and sex at its most primitive.

  She pulled her arm away in a gesture that was not so much contemptuous as defiant. Her small breasts rose and fell with each quick breath. She tossed her hair away from her face and her eyes held his with a low hard light. “You wanted to know who I was,” she said on a breath. “Now you do.”

  She leaned into him and licked the blood from his wound, but already it had begun to heal. He caught her head between his hands, he turned her face to his. He tasted his blood on her tongue. Waves of pleasure surged between them, and they sank together to the ground.

  By the morning the wound on his face had completely healed, with not so much as the trace of a scar to suggest the memory of the night.

  He would never bear her mark.

  _________________________

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Present

  "Our Lara,” observed Rolfe, bemused, “is quite the puzzle, isn’t she?”

  “Some might say so.” Emory pushed his hair away from his forehead with the heel of his hand. His skin felt hot even to his own touch, and he was tired and oddly weak. He wasn’t surprised, but it was inconvenient. The water pitcher had been refilled, and he poured himself a glass. The effort made his biceps ache.

  “So were they mates, then, Lara and Nicholas?”

  “No. I’ve explained to you before, it’s common for the loup garou to share sexual intimacy without feeling passion for each other. They were never mated.”

  “Because she was already mated to you.”

  “That’s absurd.” He sipped the water. “And impossible.”

  “Then explain to me how you know the details of what happened that night in Central Park which, if I have my chronology right, was some days before the two of you were reunited.”

  Emory said flatly, and without blinking, “She told me.”

  Rolfe considered that for a moment, and then leaned back in his chair, resting his cheek on his index finger. “So were you the spy Nicholas sought?”

  “No,” Emory said. “Not then. I had done nothing but give lectures three days a week to a theater filled with students in Montreal for the past year. In my spare time I worked on my book.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “It was An Analysis of Molecular Genetics. You never finished it.”

  “That’s right.” He revealed no expression.

  “You’re very bright, Professor, no one denies that. But surely you don’t expect me—or anyone, for that matter—to believe that at your age you had mastered molecular genetics which, in fact, would have been your third specialized degree.”

  He said, “That’s right. As I told you, I had access to the best scientists in the pack, and to technology that was decades away from being shared with humans.”

  “And who decided when this knowledge was to be shared?”

  “They did.”

  “They?”

  “The pack scientists.”

  “So you were a puppet of both the pack and the so-called Brotherhood.”

  “Yes.”

  “You had no sense of loyalty whatsoever to your own race.”

  Emory said, “I believed I was doing what was best for my own race.”

  Rolfe regarded him with a thoughtful, faintly self-satisfied smile his face. “I’m curious. Was it your idea to study genetics?”

  “It was the prince who suggested it. I was a good student.”

  “Of course. He made certain you would be. You were a bold and imminently successful experiment, weren’t you? He must have been proud. Did it ever occur to you to wonder why he chose such a specific path for your education? ”

  “Occasionally. It didn’t matter. I would have done whatever he asked.”

  “Except,” Rolfe pointed out softly, “when you did not.”

  Emory put down the water glass and leaned his head against his hand, his fingers spread over his jugular. Rolfe’s attention quickened.

  “Are you taking your pulse?”

  “Yes. It’s slow.”

  “Do you need a medic?”

  “No,” Emory said. “Not yet.”

  “Because we have drugs that can work uncanny miracles on human physiology,” Rolfe assured him. “You would be amazed.”

  Emory dropped his hand, and cupped it again around the water glass. “I know. Already I have told you more than I ever would have done of my own volition.”

  Rolfe smiled. “Excellent. And you will not lose consciousness? We are so close now to the end that I’m afraid I would have to do something drastic if you did. So promise me, please, a proper denouement. Tell me you will not die yet.”

  “Oh no,” Emory said softly, on a breath. “Oh hell no. I am not done yet. Not by a long shot.”

  “So tell me,” demanded Rolfe, and the glint in his eyes was almost childlike in its enthusiasm, “who was the spy? Who was it that Nicholas sought?”

  Emory drank the water, sank
back in his chair, and let his shoulders relax. “It was Alexander Devoncroix,” he said. “His father.”

  ____________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A colleague was excavating in Guatemala and he had invited me to examine some of the artifacts they had uncovered in a mass grave outside a temple site. I agreed because it was warm there, and Montreal in November was not the most hospitable place to be. I planned to spend my winter hiatus in Guatemala, and was just locking up my office for the duration when a package arrived by special messenger. Inside there was an airline ticket for New York that departed in three hours. There was no note of explanation, no business card, no receipt. Just the ticket.

  Occasionally a summons came like that—an airline or rail ticket, an address on a scrap of paper, a telephone number to call. I always felt a little like James Bond on those occasions, and I won’t deny the appeal of that kind of covert drama, even though the most dramatic part of my so-called missions was usually the summons.

  Later of course I realized that none of these missions had ever had any significance at all. They were toying with me, testing me, preparing me. And the moment toward which it had all been directed was at hand.

  A driver was waiting for me in New York. It was cold and rainy, and the sheen of headlights turned the wet asphalt into a black mirror. Exhaust fumes steamed the air in the car line. Masses of people moved past me, tugging their wheeled suitcases and muttering into their cell phones. The driver took my leather duffel and led me to a limo with tinted windows. He opened the back door for me and I got inside.

  I looked into the ice blue eyes of Alexander Devoncroix.

  Twenty years earlier he had filled me with awe; he had lost none of his power to intimidate with time. His thick silver hair was pulled back from a face that was a little more angular than it once had been, and eyes that were, it seemed to me, even sharper. He sat perfectly erect in the car, his hands lightly folded over one knee, and the stillness of his posture only increased the force of his presence. Near him, the air seemed thinner, details sharper, colors brighter, even in the dark. It was also more difficult to breathe.