Beneath the Skin

by Amy Lee Burgess

  “Of course she would be. With her reputation, she’ll need to take what she can get. I wasn’t aware I had that same sort of reputation. And each minute further into this conversation I’m finding I care less and less. I’m here because my former pack practically begged me to come. I wasn’t going to.”

  Allerton said, “I know.”

  He sighed and got to his feet. Murphy was on his like a shot and I was not far behind.

  Ushering us to the door, he paused and looked at Murphy. “I wish you would at least consider Constance, Liam. Talk to her. You might be surprised at what you discover.”

  “I doubt it,” said Murphy with another one of his damn grins. He was gone down the

  staircase and I went too, only slower so I wouldn’t look as if I chased him. Plus I had to contend with stiletto heels and a tight dress. I prayed Allerton would not call me back and he didn’t.

  All the way down the stairs, I bounced back and forth between humiliation and rage.

  Why had Allerton done something like this to me? What had I done to deserve such total mortification?

  Techno music spilled out from the ballroom into the corridor. Beyond the arched

  doorway I saw dancers on the floor. It seemed as if everyone at the Gathering was dancing. Old, young, male and female, it didn’t matter. They were all abandoned and flushed with pleasure as they moved to the beat. I wanted to dance too.

  Grey, Elena and I used to dance in our home together and we’d go out to clubs.

  The song was a familiar one--one I danced to a million times with them. If I closed my eyes I could even see their faces, sweaty and happy, as they danced with me.

  Instead of joining the gyrating bodies, I went to my table and found my coat and purse.

  The reception hall was nearly empty. A few people milled about. Six or seven couples sat on sofas as they talked or made out, but the former crush of people had migrated up to the ballroom.

  On my way to the door, a couple entwined together pushed past me. There was all the room in the world to have gone around me, but they chose to go through me. The woman had a glass of red wine and she managed to spill it down the front of my gown.

  With a dismayed gasp, I looked at her and recoiled. It was Nora from my old pack. With Jonathan. They both laughed and walked away without looking back.

  As I tried to wipe the red wine off my gown with my fingers, I cursed. My new dress was ruined, of course. Perversely, now that it was, I mourned it even as I’d damned it in the room with Allerton and Murphy. It was the most beautiful and provocative dress I’d ever owned and now it was stained and worthless. Just like me.

  “Club soda might help,” said someone behind me. I whirled to see Liam Murphy, who

  stared at me with something almost like pity. I didn’t think my humiliation could be any more soul-destroying, but I was wrong.

  “I was leaving, anyway.” I struggled to put on my coat. He helped me, although I didn’t ask him.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be finding a new bond mate?” he wondered lightly as he

  adjusted the coat around my shoulders.

  I searched for a clever comeback, but was too shaken to think quickly.

  “Who were those two? You looked like you knew them.” He spoke as if he had a right to know. Incredulous, I stared at him. First he couldn’t escape me fast enough, and now he pretended to be interested in what happened to me?

  “None of your business.”

  “It was rude.”

  It was my turn to smirk.

  “Well, you ought to know.” I waited a moment to see if he would evince any guilt. He stared at me, but when he didn’t say anything, I turned around and walked out of the chateau, feeling his gaze burning into me as I left.

  The next morning it was a huge act of faith and courage for me to board the bus and go back to that damned chateau. How much humiliation should one person subject herself to? But I did it. By sheer will alone, I got on that bus. This time an elderly grandfather sat next to me. I offered him the window seat, but he said he preferred the aisle as the old bladder wasn’t as reliable as it used to be then he cackled with laughter so I had to grin too. Suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so much like I ran the gauntlet. Maybe I would even have a good time today.

  Grandfathers and grandmothers were the salt of our subculture. They always added spice and knowledge and wisdom, plus they made you laugh at their bluntness.

  We had to sign in again in the reception hall, which was tedious, but this time we were given shiny laminated name tags that pinned and were obviously meant to be kept through the rest of the Gathering.

  There were lectures and workshops during the morning hours-- How to Succeed in

  Business Using Your Enhanced Senses, Areas to Hunt in Major Urban Locations, How to Cope With Your Wolf. I’d heard them all before so I wandered around the chateau and marveled at the architecture and furnishings.

  Lunch was a buffet in the ballroom. I sat at a table with a young mother and her bond mates. She spent most of the lunch on the phone to London, talking to the pack mate who had stayed behind to watch the children in the pack who were still too young to attend. Privately I thought the young mother ought to have stayed home with hers. She was obviously getting nothing out of the Gathering.

  Her bond mates, one male and one female--an attractive blond with bold blue eyes--spent most of their time flirting across the table with each other, wordlessly, with their eyes. And, annoyingly, their feet. I had to pull mine under my chair to keep out of their way. It was very distracting and just about ruined my pleasure in lunch. That was a shame, because so far the day had sucked and the pasta in cream sauce could have been the highlight, but instead I bolted it down as I tried to avoid amorous feet and toes.

  Naturally, no one talked to me. They all saw my pendant and after murmured hellos,

  ignored me. That was getting predictable.

  Where was the lecture on surviving without a pack or a bond mate? I would go to that one like a shot.

  After lunch there was a workshop on herbal remedies given by two old grandmothers,

  and I did attend that.

  Plants and potions fascinated me. I loved crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle and distilling them with water and other liquids then mixing them into powders and measuring it into capsules. I loved reading about them and learning about their effects and their efficacy.

  The repetition of the movement soothed me. It reminded me of days spent at my great-grandmother’s side when I was a little girl.

  The grandmothers, Hannah and Elise, praised those of us who grasped the concepts. They would test our knowledge, the grandmothers, by giving us only so many of the ingredients and asking us if we were making a remedy for stomach aches, for instance, what would we choose as the final ingredient.

  I was right every time, but then I had read a lot of books and, growing up, I’d often stood at my own great-grandmother’s knee to watch her concoct things.

  That afternoon was the most peaceful of the Great Gathering.

  We’d been told to bring our evening clothes with us and were provided with changing rooms, male and female. The room reserved for the females was sumptuously decorated with velvet-upholstered chaise lounges and French Impressionist paintings in elaborate frames.

  Antique mirrors placed in corners helped us determine whether we looked good. Porcelain bowls of potpourri were placed on marble-topped end tables. The scent of lavender and rose competed with expensive perfume.

  Around six thirty, I changed into a short black dress with crisscross rhinestone straps and a pair of really cool silver stiletto sandals. The dress was cheap compared to the red gown, but I still thought I looked good as I twirled before one of the full-length mirrors.

  Pack mates and bond mates chattered together and did each other’s hair and makeup, but I, of course, did my own. I French braided my hair and tucked it up underneath, pinned in place against the back of my neck. My peridot pendant hung around
my neck on a thicker, short silver chain, one I used for evening events.

  I tried not to notice that nobody talked to me. However, it occurred to me that I wasn’t talking to anybody either and communication is a two-way street after all.

  A woman preened in the mirror next to mine, dressed in a long, white gown with bold black geometric designs. Her dark hair fell to the small of her back and glowed with purple highlights. She wasn’t precisely beautiful, but she had an arresting, oval-shaped face, a large but distinctive nose and very red lips. Her eyes were brown and missed nothing.

  She wore a pendant with two stones--one diamond, one garnet. It was the garnet that made me talk to her. Elena’s birthstone had been a garnet. The woman’s pendant had only two stones. Maybe there was a chance of a triad? If not, friendship? At the very least I would have a conversation.

  Start with the little things, Constance, I told myself then gave her a friendly smile.

  “Your dress is beautiful.”

  The look she gave me would have frozen fire.

  She said something in a language that sounded maybe Russian or possibly Hungarian. I presumed she told me she didn’t speak English. Or maybe to fuck off.

  Someone nearby laughed, one of those cruel laughs that peeled away the armor of the soul and left you bare and bleeding.

  My chin went up. I was alone, that was my only crime, and that was no crime--that was circumstance. Any of these bitches in their fancy dresses and immaculate makeup could find themselves alone at any moment. Their futures were not fixed. They had no real control over whether they would stay bonded or in love or anything. Why didn’t they understand that?

  Maybe I reminded them of that and they resented me for it. Maybe I exuded something, a scent of despair and futility.

  If so, that, I could control.

  I found the laughing woman and gave her my frostiest smile. “Was what she said really that funny?” I wondered and she gave me a deer-in-the-headlights stare. Her two companions looked as if they wanted to run away.

  “She was rude actually,” said the companion on the right, a short brunette with

  impossibly long eyelashes who was squeezed into a tight blue dress at least two sizes too small.

  “I just told her that her dress was beautiful.” I shrugged. “Oh, well, live and learn, I guess.”

  I turned to walk away, and the brunette said, “Your dress is better. I don’t know if I like the design in hers. You’re also much prettier than she is. By a long shot.”

  I smiled and turned back. “But I’ll bet if we both walked into the room together, she’d get all the attention.”

  The brunette grinned. “Of course. Sex appeal relies very little on looks sometimes.”

  “It’s attitude,” I agreed, and she laughed. So did her companions.

  “I’m Roxanne.” The brunette introduced herself. “This is my bond mate Theresa, and our pack mate Lucy.”

  Lucy was the one who had laughed at me. Now she looked ashamed. “I don’t speak much English,” she admitted. Their accents were German.

  “I’m Constance,” I introduced myself.

  “Your bond mate will be very proud to be with you tonight when he sees you in that

  dress,” said Roxanne with an admiring look. I bit my lip.

  “I don’t have a bond mate,” I confessed and waited for them to turn cold the way

  everyone had so far.

  “Really? So you are here to find one, perhaps?” Roxanne gave me a jolly smile that

  demanded one in return. She wrapped a companionable arm around my waist and led me to one of the vacant vanity tables. “I like the way you did your eyes. Do mine that way, please?” She sat on the padded chair in front of the vanity and gazed expectantly at me. An array of designer makeup lay across the top of the vanity. Most of it still had the protective seal intact. One of the perks of attending the Great Gathering. I’d tucked a Dior lipstick and blusher into my purse earlier.

  Lucy sat at the vanity table next to Roxanne’s. Theresa brushed her long, dark hair while a curling iron heated. Both of them listened intently to my conversation with Roxanne. They seemed curious, not judgmental.

  Roxanne closed her eyes as I swept some bronze eye shadow across her lids.

  “Have you ever been bonded?” The question threw me a little, but I continued to trace the eye shadow along the bottom of her eyelid.

  “Yes,” I answered, but that was all I said.

  “Theresa and I have been bonded with Helmut for eight years now. Or is it nine,

  Theresa?”

  Theresa paused to think, the brush halfway through the thick fall of Lucy’s dark hair.

  “Nine,” she decided as she resumed brushing.

  “Helmut is a little bit of an idiot, but we love him.” Roxanne’s laughter was contagious and I joined in. I tried to picture what Helmut might look like. Tall and dark, I decided, with a perpetually perplexed expression on his face as he tried to keep up with his lightning dart of a bond mate.

  “You will sit with us at dinner, of course,” Roxanne declared when I finished doing her eyes. She studied her reflection with a smile of pleasure as she turned her head one way then another, and fluttered her lashes dramatically.

  “Do I look American now?” She patted her hair and got to her feet. To me she looked distinctly foreign. Eye shadow could not change that.

  She linked her arm with mine and led me out the door and down a short marble staircase.

  The ballroom doors were propped invitingly open and the four of us sailed through like queens.

  Somewhere between eye shadow and the first glass of champagne, we became friends,

  and for the first time since I’d come to Paris, I felt as if I belonged to the Great Pack again.

  We piled plates high with cheese and crackers and French delicacies then ate them with our fingers, laughing together.

  Theresa secured a bottle of champagne from one of the cute waiters and we clinked

  glasses as we made toasts to each other and pledged friendship. We never stopped laughing.

  Helmut turned out to be short and blond and not at all an idiot. He had a dry sense of humor that appealed to me, and I spent most of the cocktail hour trying not to choke because I laughed so hard.

  “What is so funny?” A man enquired. He put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and smiled at us.

  I looked up at him and my greeting died in my throat. “Rudi,” I said at the same time he said, “Stanzie!”

  It was my German boy from the Great Gathering when we were eighteen. Rudi Grunwald

  and I stared at each other, remembering the night we’d shifted for the first time together.

  Remembering how he’d stayed by my side when I’d yelped my way around the cane field terrified of the noise made by my own heart.

  Rudi had not expected my strange, panicked reaction, but he’d stuck by me when all the others in our rag tag rebellious group of teens had fled.

  My noise had attracted attention and the Alpha of my pack had shifted and come to our aid. We both had gotten into such trouble afterward we weren’t allowed to see each other after that, but of course we did. We were eighteen. We’d wanted to bond together, but our packs told us we were too young. Technically, it had been true, but it could have been arranged if our parents hadn’t been so stubborn. The fact we’d shifted together in defiance of our ways had not helped.

  I remember we both cried when the Great Gathering was over and we had to go our

  separate ways--me back to Massachusetts, him all the way to Germany. We’d vowed to meet again and we had, but by then I’d bonded with Grey and I knew I’d let Rudi down. I could still remember the shocked disappointment on his face when I’d introduced Grey as my bond mate.

  Rudi had come from Germany to attend a Regional in New England--something I hadn’t

  expected him to do since I hadn’t heard from him after the Great Gathering. It had turned out Rudi had written me several letters, but I’d
never received them. I’d suspected my father of intercepting them, but I’d never found out the truth.

  Tonight I felt guilty at my cavalier treatment of him. He and Grey had not gotten along.

  He’d left the Regional early and I’d never thought to see him again, yet here he was across the table from me.

  The German boy I’d once known had been replaced by a man. His once tall and gangly

  frame had filled out and I was sure under his suit coat his arms were toned and muscled, and he probably had a killer six-pack.

  His face had matured and he was positively gorgeous. He looked so genuinely happy to see me. I remembered a sulky boy and here was a confident, happy man.

  I jumped out of my chair as he came around the table and we embraced. I felt his heart beating as hard as mine as he cupped my face with his hands and stared down at me with delight.

  “I’d hoped to see you, schatzie,” he said, and there was real emotion in his voice. He really was glad to see me. There were no hard feelings, and it was good to see him. I didn’t feel the crushing loss of Grey, I simply felt glad to see an old friend.

  “Well, I’m here,” I said. The lights above us dazzled my suddenly wet eyes.

  “But where is...” He fumbled for a minute for the name but I wasn’t fooled. He knew it.

  He just didn’t want me to think he remembered it. “Grey?”

  His eyes happened on my pendant and he bit his lip.

  “Oh, mein Gott, have I said something bad?”

  My smile faltered only a little bit.

  “Grey’s dead, Rudi,” I explained. “In a car crash two years ago.”

  “Oh, Stanzie.” He groaned and there were actual tears in his eyes as he hugged me, in an attempt to give me comfort. “I’m so sorry.”

  It had been easier to explain than I thought. Maybe because I got to say it first and it wasn’t thrown at me as an accusation. I didn’t want him to stop hugging me, but he did. He had to.

  He sat next to me at the table and bent his head close to mine.

  “You know Constance?” Roxanne was both surprised and pleased. Her face was somber,