The Lonely Wolf

by Monica La Porta

  When the melancholia struck, Quintilius consoled himself with the notion he had his whole pack and Camelia by his side. He could have ended up without her.

  Paolo had just brought him his first espresso of the day, when his cell phone went off. He looked at the caller ID and worried. “Ludwig?”

  If it wasn’t for some trouble, the angel would have never called back so soon after what had happened the night before. His angel had come to his party after all. Even though the notion was bitter-sweet, it still made him happy. Quintilius’s skin tingled where Ludwig had almost touched him. Longing for his capricious lover’s touch, he wished Ludwig had taken him in his arms and spirited him away. They had gone too long without savoring each other, and Quintilius’s body ached for the yearning.

  “I found one of your clan’s pins on an attempted murder scene,” Ludwig said.

  Quintilius placed the empty coffee cup onto the saucer. “Where?”

  “Claudius’s premises, of all places. Can you be in Santa Severa in, let’s say, less than an hour?”

  Although he knew Ludwig hadn’t meant anything more than what he had said, the idea of meeting him at the apartment he owned inside the medieval castle overlooking the Mediterranean Sea made his heart beat faster. “Give me forty-five minutes.”

  After telling Camelia he would be out of reach the whole morning, he left in his black Jaguar. Eager to see the angel and uncaring for the scenic drive along the marine coast, it took him half an hour of fast driving on the Aurelia speedway to reach the castle, but once there he didn’t have to wait. Ludwig had already arrived and was standing beside the castle’s portcullis.

  Leaning against a column, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and a charcoal-gray tie, Ludwig was breathtaking. Even with his stately white wings hidden, he couldn’t be confused with anything else but an angel. He wasn’t a cherub though. No blond curls and sky-blue eyes for Ludwig. No, he was the embodiment of manhood, all hard angles, stormy-gray eyes, and dark-red hair cropped close to the scalp.

  “Hi,” Quintilius said, wishing they were there for pleasure and not for work.

  But in the last decade or so, while Ludwig pretended to be an immortal, their relationship had greatly suffered because of the angel’s devotion to the cause of overthrowing Arariel.

  Then Ludwig would do something like the night before, and Quintilius’s heart would break all over again.

  Ludwig passed one hand over the reddish stubble on his unshaven jaw, his eyes stormier than usual. “I’ll be brief—”

  “At least have coffee with me.” Quintilius didn’t give the angel an option. He strolled past him and entered the castle, passing under the large arched entry. “So, what’s happened exactly?” he asked when Ludwig fell in step with him.

  “I was flying over Castel Gandolfo, when I noticed a scuffle on the grounds of Claudius’s nest. Two werewolves were trying to kill a vampire—”

  “Two werewolves?”

  “Yes, and I saved the vampire. But after, when I went looking for the two wolves, I found this—” he opened his palm, revealing a metal disk “—pin.”

  Reaching for the pin, Quintilius brushed Ludwig’s palm and heard the angel’s hissed intake of breath. “This is mine.”

  “That’s why I removed it from the scene.” Ludwig stopped at one of the openings in the medieval walls. The big, rectangular, glassless window with its iron railings framed a portion of the beach below, and salty sprays were driven into the castle by the ever-present gust from the ocean.

  “You did that for me—” Quintilius filled his eyes with the sight of his beloved.

  Ludwig faced the window, his massive figure all in dark, cutting a stark contrast with the pastel shades of the stone walls and the white and light-blue of the sand and the sea beyond. “You sound surprised.” Slowly, he turned.

  With a tilt of his head, Quintilius closed his hand over the pin, then brought it to his heart. “I know you love me.”

  Ludwig nodded, a small smile gracing his lips. “More than I can even explain. And yet, I shouldn’t have done so. I tampered with a crime scene without thinking of the consequences. My heart overruled my brain.”

  “Why are we having this conversation?” Quintilius stepped closer to the railings dividing the opening in smaller squares. He pressed his forehead against the cold and wet iron and breathed in the salty sprays.

  “Last night—” Ludwig started, then joined Quintilius at the window, mirroring his pose. “How did you know I was there? My scent is masked when I’m invisible.”

  Quintilius slightly angled his head to look at Ludwig’s chiseled profile. “You are a part of me. When we are away from each other, I miss you. Only when we are close, I feel whole again.”

  “I wanted to kiss you so much it hurt.” Looking at the sea, Ludwig smiled. “I wanted to take you here and make love to you until morning.”

  “You should have.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I know, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it or that I can’t dream.” Quintilius moved out of the window and resumed his stroll.

  For several minutes, they kept silent. Quintilius led the way toward one of the internal courtyards and to his apartment on the second floor of the biggest building in the square.

  At the narrow steps leading up to a small wooden door, Ludwig hesitated.

  Quintilius’s heart bled a little. “It’s just coffee.” He climbed the stairs and opened the apartment, then when Ludwig hunched under the small opening and crowded the entry room, he said, “This place always reminds me of you.”

  The flat in Santa Severa Castle was their love nest. Quintilius had bought the space in the mid-fifteen hundreds from an herbalist who used it to store his medicines. Built over the apothecary’s store, the one bedroom dwelling had been renovated throughout the years and was now a modern flat with an antique flair. The ancient stone walls were proudly displayed over the fawn slabs of the flooring, worn by centuries of use. Currently, the apartment sported a few pieces of white furniture and black, metal light fixtures, complementing the white boxes framing the recessed windows. Quintilius and Ludwig had met there for years, and Quintilius never went to the flat by himself. Too many memories.

  “Quin…” Ludwig slammed the door and walked to Quintilius, and, without another word, pushed him against the wall and kissed him hard and fast. Quintilius’s hands went to the angel’s shirt and started unbuttoning it.

  “No.” Ludwig raised his mouth from Quintilius’s and stepped back until he was on the other side of the room, panting and disheveled. His wings were tucked behind him, lightly glowing. A look of despair on his face, Ludwig blinked, and the radiance dimmed fast until it was gone.

  “You can’t do this to me.” And yet, every time they met it happened. One of the two would forget about the rules of their relationship, that they couldn’t have one.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happening to me lately.” Ludwig brought both hands to his face and shook his head.

  “I’m tired of this—” For so long, Quintilius had dreaded the moment he would say those words, yet they left his mouth before he could stop them. “I can’t take it any longer and I need to learn how to live without you.”

  “You don’t mean it.” Ludwig’s stormy eyes became the color of the darkest night, and one moment later he was facing Quintilius, towering over him once again, crowding his space with his scent and his warmth.

  It was an unfair move from the angel, knowing how the wolf in Quintilius would be stirred by his nearness, clouding Quintilius’s resolve.

  “I might not mean it, but it will happen nonetheless.” Quintilius pressed a palm over Ludwig’s chest. “If we can’t be together, so be it. Two thousand years of pining after you is too long, even for an immortal.”

  “I am the archangel now.”

  “I congratulated you a year ago—”

  “You know I didn’t want the position. I want anything but being the archangel. My life i
s now under scrutiny 24/7 and I won’t ever be free to do what I like or be with you.”

  “My love, you’ve had two millennia where you weren’t the archangel, yet our situation never changed. So—”

  “That’s low.”

  “Is it?” Quintilius couldn’t help but raise one hand to Ludwig’s jaw, as if he wanted to caress his face, but he let it hover without making contact. “Thank you for the pin. I’ll look into it. I would like to say none of my wolves would ever be involved in murdering vampires, but I can’t be sure.” His treacherous wolf whined, but he ignored him.

  “I know this is all my fault, but we should talk.” Ludwig stepped closer, his eyes locked on Quintilius, making it hard for him to breathe or think.

  “We’ve talked. Seeing you like this, secretly, as if we should be ashamed of our feelings, isn’t for me anymore.” As Quintilius talked, the urge to grab Ludwig and march him to the bedroom was so strong he had to step to the side and walk away. At the door, he turned for one last glance at the man he loved, and for a moment his resolve faltered, but he grimaced and before exiting said, “Stay as long as you like, but I would appreciate it if you would give me your keys back at your earliest convenience.”

  ****

  The door closed behind Quintilius, and to Ludwig it felt like a metaphor for their relationship. They quarreled and downright fought, but even when they had smashed furniture or broken walls, he had never thought they had reached the point where there was no going back.

  He slid to the floor, holding his head between his hands. His lover had just left, and it had felt like a farewell. They would meet again, but they would be the archangel and the alpha, not Quin and Ludwig anymore. It hurt. They had spent months, sometimes years, without seeing each other, but lately fate had thrown them together more than once, and he had cherished those stolen moments immensely. Even though he had known since the beginning that there was no future for them, he had courted Quintilius and had not relented until the wolf had said yes and spent their first night together under the stars.

  That first illicit tryst had become an on-and-off affair that had lasted two thousand years. And now Quintilius had made a decision, and it sounded definitive. Ludwig couldn’t reproach anything to the werewolf. He had been stringing Quintilius along since the beginning, and it had been mainly him dictating how and when they would meet next.

  His work cell phone rang, and his first reaction was to throw it against the opposite wall. But he thought better of it when he saw the call was from Peter, the renegade controller. The demon was related to Quintilius through Ophelia, and if there ever was an example that interspecies romance worked they were it. If only it was that simple for Ludwig and Quintilius.

  “Peter.”

  “Good morning, archangel. Someone called me and left a description for a minor named Lupo Solis, one of the renegade kids on my radar, and he was seen around the first lights of dawn near Claudius’s nest. I was told there was an attempted murder on the nest’s premises earlier this morning and that you were on the scene—”

  “Is your renegade a werewolf?”

  “Yes. Did you see him?”

  “I saw two werewolves. The younger of the two is big and tall, short dark hair, blue eyes—” Now that he thought about it, there was something regarding the boy that puzzled him but the notion was too elusive.

  Peter swore, then said, “That’s him. I hoped it was just a coincidence. The kid’s in enough trouble as it is, he doesn’t need attempted murder charges on top of his already long list of misdemeanors.” He swore again. “Did you notice anything else? Was he there against his will, maybe?”

  “No, I’m sorry. The kid wasn’t shackled or under drugs. But I noticed the two werewolves wore similar jackets—” Ludwig called forth the memories of the two. “Yes, they were wearing the same jacket, but inside-out.”

  “They belong to a gang then.” Peter paused for a long moment, then added, “This is terrible news.”

  “It gets worse.” Ludwig knew the demon was not only trustworthy, but also loyal to Quintilius and would share his concern to keep the alpha untouched by the shit storm brewing over his head.

  “Did the vampire die?”

  “No, he’s alive, but I found Quintilius’s clan pin on the premises.”

  Peter swore. “Does Quintilius know already?”

  “I informed him, and—” Ludwig couldn’t help but shake his head at what he was about to say, the wrongness of what he had done starting to weight down on him. “No one else knows.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t report it.”

  “Archangel—”

  “Drop the archangel already. I liked you better when you called me Ludwig.”

  “May I ask why you didn’t report it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” The demon sighed out loud. “Then why tell me at all?”

  “Because that renegade kid you’re tracking might know something about that pin.”

  “Maybe it was planted there.”

  “That’s a possibility. Find that boy and bring him to me before he talks to anyone else.”

  “I must follow protocol—”

  “I order you not to.”

  After a long silence, Peter cleared his throat, then answered, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  A few minutes after the phone call had ended, Ludwig stood and left the apartment, but not before a last look at the only place where he had known happiness on Earth.

  Chapter Four

  After rummaging inside his underwear drawer for the fourth time, Lupo had to admit defeat. He had looked everywhere in his bedroom, and the mess of clothes scattered everywhere could attest to his thoroughness.

  Somehow, somewhere, he had lost his pin.

  He remembered wearing it on the inside of his jacket the night he had ambushed the bloodsucker. Antonio ordered him to hide the Red insignia by putting the jacket inside out, and he hadn’t thought of the pin sticking out. Then he hadn’t worn the jacket for a few days and forgotten all about it.

  It might be a sign, he thought. He didn’t even know why he had kept that pin for so long, even after that harpy had explained to him what a bastard the man was. And to think that when he was a kid he would have given anything to have Quintilius as a father. The cruel irony of reality.

  Once, Quintilius, who was one of the Cradle and Bites’ patrons, had visited the orphanage. Lupo had been so in awe of the alpha, he couldn’t say a word when the man asked for his name. Before he left, Quintilius gave the kids toys, but Lupo remained in his corner and didn’t come forward. The alpha noticed him and walked closer, then dropped to his haunches and offered Lupo an action figure. Lupo shook his head, but Quintilius noticed how he was looking at the pin on his lapel and gave it to him.

  And now the pin was gone. The end of an era.

  A knock on his door startled him. “Yes?”

  “Your schedule for today has changed. You must report to Rock at once,” one of the little brothers said in a hurry, already running to deliver the next message.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Lupo snatched his boots from the floor and hastily tied the laces. When he donned his Red jacket, he automatically patted the spot where the pin used to be. Somehow, the memory of the woman’s words became more painful when combined with the realization he had lost the only memento from his youth associated with happiness. Until that moment, he had separated the alpha from his past from the man who had thrown him away like yesterday’s garbage.

  But it didn’t matter anymore. Thanks to his loyalty and commitment to the Reds, he had been patched at the beginning of the month. It had taken hard work to climb the ranks and become a recruit first, and a full-fledged Red later in such a short amount of time. But when he had chosen Rock as his big brother, and then when he had worn his Red jacket for the first time, those nights had been the happiest moments of his life. No one would ever steal that from him.

  Before entering R
ock’s office, Lupo made sure to tuck his white shirt inside the waistband of his black jeans. He wanted his big brother to be proud of him. Lupo’s tendency to daydream had gotten him in trouble with Rock. All in the past, but a few times he had been late to relieve his big brother when they both worked surveillance in the monitor room. Rock had covered for him, and Lupo had been immensely grateful.

  After rapping his knuckles on the doorpost, Lupo leaned forward and from the open door he peeked inside Rock’s office. “Did you want to see me?”

  Showing him the cell phone, his big brother nodded and made a sign for him to get inside, then pointed at one of the chairs facing his desk. “I understand you’d rather talk to Tancredi, but the alpha is busy at the moment.” Rock took the cell phone away from his mouth, let out an exasperated sigh, then said, “I’m the only big brother available now.” A few seconds passed. “I’ll pass along the message.”

  “Vampire?” Lupo asked, rocking on his chair.

  “They wanted to know if we were behind last week’s attack in Castel Gandolfo.”

  “And?” The chair landed on its rear legs with a thump, as Lupo straightened his stance.

  Rock steepled his hands over the desk. “And Tancredi is playing hard to get, while I deny any Red involvement.”

  “Is it working?” A cold shiver ran down Lupo’s back.

  “Of course it’s working. They don’t have any proof it was us.” Rock smiled. “Rome is taken by storm by a series of vampire murders, and we capitalized on that. Genius.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve already talked with Antonio. You followed protocol, so everything’s fine.”

  Memories from that night assailed Lupo, and a sense of uneasiness followed. The thought that he had lost his precious pin in the gardens started as a doubt and became a certainty in the span of a few seconds.

  “Even if they unleash the Enforcer, she won’t be able to find anything that can be used against us. Relax.”

  “Why did we attack the bloodsucker?”

  “Territory—” Rock shrugged.

  “Is that so?”