by Karen Ranney
Assembling any kind of database about Weres was expressly forbidden by the Council by and they didn’t write down many rules. The punishment for recording information about other Weres was to be forbidden admittance to any of the hunting lands under the Council’s jurisdiction, not to mention being turned down for any entreaty before the governing body.
It wasn’t a good idea to get on the Council’s bad side. Why had Craig taken the chance? Hubris?
According to my father, Craig had been attracting favorable attention from members of the Council. The Palmers had a bloodline that would allow them to marry into one of the five families. My mother, who kept track of such things, informed me that there were currently fourteen princesses — my name for them — in the five families. My half sisters didn’t count because their mothers hadn’t come from acceptable secondary stock.
Well dressed Weres passed by, most of them were relaxed, smiling, and exuding affluence. Luna Lodge looked to be a resounding success. And as I watched him cross the lobby to me, so was Craig.
The college kid in jeans and polo shirt had morphed into a tall, broad shouldered businessman in a severe black suit tailored to an inch of its life. Craig’s swagger across the room was a magnet for every female gaze. His grin was an admission that he knew it, expected it, and appreciated it.
My loins girded themselves. Everything south of my neck quivered to attention. I’d gone for the last two years without sex and every deprived cell reminded me of that fact as I sat there.
I was the desert and he was water.
I was a kid and he was ice cream.
I was a kitten and he was catnip.
I could have gone on, but I stopped myself.
"You've got it bad, don't you?" Joey said at my side.
I glanced at him and then back at Craig.
What the hell did he see in my eyes? Or was it the fact that my tongue was hanging to my waist?
Let's be a little more subtle, shall we?
"That's okay," Joey said. "Craig looks at you the same way."
I didn't need to hear that, not right now. Not with my libido doing the Lambada on my limbic system.
"Somebody told me he was engaged," I said, plucking that information from the recesses of my mind.
"Who told you that? Sure, he's a Bram Bram, but he hasn't found anybody serious. He wants to start his own dynasty."
I tore my gaze away from Craig and focused on Joey.
“Do you mean bam bam, as in bam bam, thank you ma’am?”
“No, Bram Bram, after Brian Bramble,” he said. “He was sanctioned by the Council for indiscriminate fornication.”
I could feel my eyebrows creeping toward my hairline.
“Indiscriminate fornication?”
He nodded, carefully keeping his gaze away from me. “He did it three times a day with different women for about five years.”
“He was a Were?”
“Is a Were,” he corrected.
“What kind of punishment do you get for indiscriminate fornication?”
“You get sent to a monastery for a few years,” a deep voice said. “To contemplate the exact nature of your sins.”
I didn’t want to look up at Craig. I was being a cowardly wuss.
My blood started heating just feeling him near. I’d always been that way around him. I could sense his presence and all the little hairs buried just beneath my skin would begin to tremble. The loins that had heretofore been girded began to sweetly swell and I grew moist in places nature thought might aid in mating.
Newsflash: I was in trouble.
I kept my smile stuck on my face with some difficulty and looked up at him. Up close he was even better looking. His brown eyes were shining like polished Colorado river rocks. His teeth were positively gleaming.
I’d heard that vampires had the ability to charm a woman out of her panties. We Furries don’t have that ability. We depend on basic chemistry. You man. Me woman. Show me how well tab A fits into Slot B, please. Pant, pant, pant.
I was doing the mental panting already and I thanked God I was prescient enough to pack the Waxinine into my purse. I slapped my hand against the leather as a reminder it was there and no one, not even Craig Palmer, could make me change and go on The Hunt if I didn’t want to.
The problem was, as I sat there in the sunlight looking up at him, I wanted to. I could feel the drum beat of an ancient rhythm, the smell of pine in my nostrils, the glitter of the moon on the water, the vision of branches swaying as we passed on four feet through the forest. We were creatures of the wild, the before place, the secret caves of our ancestors. We were the keepers of the Truth, the reality of the world that most humans couldn’t — or maybe wouldn’t — accept.
I’ve always imagined my libido as this little yellow creature with bright white hair on the top of its head and down its back. It had a face like My Little Pony and a Teletubby had a baby and a long thin tail it could curl into a pinwheel. Right now the tail was twirling like the prop on a Cessna.
Whoa boy.
“A monastery?” I asked.
Oh goody, I sounded almost normal. My voice didn’t quaver or anything. I certainly didn’t fall to my knees in front of the God that was Craig Palmer. Once upon a time I’d done the knee bit even more. On one illustrative encounter, I’d even begged him not to leave me and go back to school. I’d make it worth his while, I believe I said. He’d only laughed at my eighteen year old devotion.
“How am I going to explain it to my mother that I didn’t finish college because you wouldn’t let me?”
That set me back a bit, because I didn’t want to encounter his mother under the best of circumstances and that certainly wouldn’t be classified as one. Mrs. Palmer had shrewd eyes that were narrowed at me most of the time. I was a Boyd princess and I’d used the Boyd name and my position at every opportunity. I was more than a spoiled brat. I was a spoiled, entitled, brat.
Self-awareness had come to me when I went away to finish college. The Boyd name had absolutely no pull, nor was anybody overly impressed about who my father was. They didn’t know that he was the ruling member of the Council of Weres or that I was an uncrowned princess. Instead of deference, I was forced to justify my very existence. Not as a Were, but as a student and a member of society.
I found it difficult at first, but the loneliness of my new world did what no amount of lecturing could have done. It forced me to face the fact that I wasn’t special, that I wasn’t a princess at all, uncrowned or otherwise. To the rest of the world, I was simply Torrance Boyd, no big deal.
Craig Palmer evidently hadn’t learned any humility in the intervening years.
I might just be plain old Torrance Boyd, but I was no pushover. I smiled and this time the expression was real. There wasn’t one damn thing forced about it.
“You’re looking good,” I said. “Success becomes you.”
I looked around the lodge, taking in the milling crowds. Tonight was going to be a celebration, a joining together of lots and lots of Furries as they went out and did what was natural.
For the first time in a long time, I felt a twinge of envy. The last time I’d changed was three years ago, outside of Round Rock and I’d been alone. Still, I could remember that surge of freedom, that knowledge that I was part of the nature around me. Humans forget that so often.
My human side was homogenized and pasteurized and wrapped in cling film. I was kept carefully separated from all those uncomfortable things about life. But as a Furry, I got to experience all of them, to take joy in the fact that I could feel the blood coursing through my veins, pumping and pumping and pumping with excitement and ecstasy just for being alive. Then, when it was over, if I was lucky enough to have a companion with me, I shared that feeling, that oneness with all of nature in a glorious coupling.
“Is it this crowded every full moon?”
“Yes,” Craig said. “You’ll join us of course.”
I don’t know what I would’ve said to him if J
oey hadn’t made a sound at that moment.
“Can we go somewhere private to talk? Joey has something to tell you.”
We hadn’t talked about approaching Craig with the whole turning into a dog thing, but I decided the best way was to just tell him the truth, bluntly, if necessary.
“Something odd happened,” I said, before Craig could respond. “I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how it happened. And I sure as hell don’t know what to do about it.”
“You always did like to swear,” he said, his smile disappearing.
I forgot, sometimes, that the Palmers lived in the 50s. The 1850s.
“You’re just lucky I didn’t say fuck,” I said.
His face blanked out.
“I don’t think this is the place to talk,” he said and turned on his heels.
He didn’t ask me to join him. He didn’t ask if it was even convenient for me to join him. He didn’t say anything like, “Torrance, would you care to adjourn to my conference room?”
I guess saying fuck really annoyed him.
I looked at Joey, so tempted to do my own turning and walking away, but I didn’t. I wasn’t here just because of Joey’s problem. I was also here because of Sandy and Duncan. I hadn’t mentioned my sister yet.
One of my aunt’s expressions came to mind as I followed Craig, Joey at my side. I was feeling as angry as a horny toad with a longhorn up his butt.
Chapter Seven
Was he a Wolfie?
It wasn’t a conference room I entered. Instead it was an office, as pretentious as my father’s law firm in the center of San Antonio. Everything was wood, mahogany at that, well polished and smelling of lemon. The desk looked to be an acre wide, a bunch of papers stacked neatly in several piles along the front. On the top was an old-fashioned blotter and in front of that a marble stand holding two long black fountain pens.
The better to sign your soul away.
Everything in the room was brown or hunter green. It gave me the impression of a forest at the break of dawn, a clearing where a Were might rest and regain his strength.
There were those among the Weres who harped on our evolutionary ties to the wolf. We might transform into something that looked like a wolf, but that was only superficial. Our organs remained human. Our minds were human.
Those who fixated on the connection to wolves were ridiculed by other Weres and called Wolfies.
I stopped on the threshold and looked at Craig. Was he a Wolfie? I thought I’d known him well eight years ago. Had he changed in the interim?
He stood with one hand on the tall leather chair, the other with fingertips resting on the top of his desk. A pose of dominance and will made all the more powerful by his silence.
His eyes were slightly narrowed as they regarded me, an intense stare that equaled mine.
Eight years had passed. Eight years and I felt the tick of every spent minute.
He’d changed, but so had I. He’d matured and grown more wary.
The same could be said for me, but I’d also adopted a sense of humor about myself. I no longer expected the world to bow down to me. I didn’t want anything from the world but a chance to be myself.
I straightened my shoulders and faced him.
The magnetism was still there, at least on my part. I realized, with a shock, that I wanted him. I wanted to feel an echo of what I’d felt as a young woman. I wanted to know if it had only been the bliss of first love. Or would any encounter between us be like sparklers: hot, fiery, and flashy?
I’d had lovers since Craig, but no one had ever touched me like he had, as if my limbs were extensions of his and he knew the spots to make me tremble.
My libido was turning from pale yellow to a lovely shade of rose as if it were embarrassed about the memories suffusing me at the moment.
“So, are you in danger of going to a monastery?” I asked. “I take it you’ve had a parade of lovelies in your life.”
“Jealous?” he asked.
Instead of snapping back with an answer, I actually considered the question for a moment.
“No,” I finally said. “Maybe once, but not now.”
“That’s right, you’re so much older and wiser now,” he said, smiling that crooked smile that used to charm the socks — and other garments — off me.
“You got it.”
I walked over to the door and closed it, nodding to the sweet young thing we’d passed on our way in. His redheaded assistant was gorgeous, but I didn’t expect anything else from Craig.
I pushed back the jealousy I’d claimed not to have only minutes earlier and stood with my back to the closed door.
“Does your staff change at the full moon?”
“Only about half of them. I ask that they take turns. That way the lodge is never understaffed.”
When it’s time for the Hunt, we can do one of three things about it. We can accept that it's our nature. We can change, go loping through the woodlands, and experience life as Weres for a few hours. Or we can fight our nature and contain ourselves in a dark room with VR goggles, soothing music and simply tough it out. The third way to stop changing was by medication.
The fact that a number of us use Waxinine helps the greater good of all of us. I'm sure it's only a matter of time until we’re outed officially. Until then, the more Weres who could function during a full moon, the better. We carry on the falsehood that there’s no such thing as a Were, that we’re a figment of someone’s creative imagination.
Most fantasies have a component of truth, something humans were probably going to learn one of these days.
“We have a problem,” I said, glancing at Joey.
He was looking a little pasty at the moment, and I walked over to him and urged him to sit in one of the overstuffed hunter green chairs in front of Craig’s desk.
“You gone through a lot,” I said. I looked at Craig. “Can you order him something to eat?”
Changing from human to Were expended a lot of energy. Going from dog to human must be just as difficult. The stop an hour or so ago at McDonalds hadn’t been enough nutrition.
I imagine that Craig made a fortune at the buffet table following the night of the full moon. I know I always wanted to eat anything that wasn’t nailed down when I reverted to my human form.
“Are you and Joey full brothers?”
I knew what I was asking. I wasn’t impugning his mother’s morals as much as his father’s.
I wouldn’t put it past any Were male to stray, as long as he had the financial wherewithal to support the woman. But that was a big sticking point and not in the elder Palmer’s favor. Sam Palmer was a very nice man who worked as an accountant for some of the Were families. He’d always been very kind to me, and not just because my father was scary. He was kind to everyone.
However, he wasn’t a success. Until Craig had earned a scholarship to college, there wasn’t any money for him to complete his higher education. Sam Palmer didn’t make enough to have a concubine. The family was teetering on the edge of falling into the third tier.
“Yes,” he said. “We’re full brothers. Why?”
“I was hoping it was a genetic anomaly,” I said, taking the seat next to Joey.
I had no idea how Craig was going to react when I told him why I was here.
Although I’d never heard of a Were changing to a dog, that didn’t mean anything. I could be woefully ignorant. It could have occurred before and people just hushed it up because they were embarrassed or ashamed.
It was one thing transforming to a wolf. But a dog? Granted, Joey had been a good looking Alusky, but he’d still been a dog.
Craig sat at his desk and surprised me by picking up the phone and ordering a meal for Joey.
“Are you hungry?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
I really didn’t know how to handle the situation. I paused, giving Joey the opportunity to speak. He remained silent.
Oh goody.
“We have a problem,”
I said.
I used the word we on purpose. It connotes a joint effort. Or the fact that I was only one part of a situation. I used we sometimes in difficult circumstances in my practice. We don’t know what causes dogs like Sadie to develop cancer. We don’t know if Edgar is going to make it through the night. We can continue on this course of treatment and see what happens.
Craig sat back with his hands on the arms of the leather chair, regarding me with a look that reminded me of one of my professors. I’d answered a question in a way that he thought ridiculous and rather then give me any clue about what I’d done wrong, he kept staring at me.
I remember nearly stammering a correction, at which point he smiled pityingly at me.
I was damned if I was going to react to Craig in the same way.
“Actually, it’s not my problem. It’s Joey’s problem.”
I sat back, folded my arms, and refused to continue. Let Joey tell him.
He didn’t turn his head to look at his brother. Instead, Craig kept his gaze focused on me.
My libido perked up and I beat it mentally into submission. It whimpered but it didn’t crawl away.
I didn’t avert my gaze. Nor did I look at Joey. I wasn’t going to give him an out. If he was too chicken to talk to his brother, then that was a Palmer problem, not one that involved me.
As the silence ticked by, I realized that I might be in the middle of an invisible masculine tug-of-war.
“Joey turned into a dog,” I said, irritated by both of them. “A pretty dog, a big dog. An Alusky, which is a wolf-like dog, but a dog, nevertheless. You couldn’t mistake him for anything but a dog.”
Finally, Craig looked at Joey.
“You went back to them, didn’t you? What did I tell you would happen if you did it again?”
“You’d throw me out of the family,” Joey said.
Since when had Craig become the patriarch? His father was still alive and well. I’d caught sight of him a few weeks ago in the mall. I pushed that question aside for a more important one.
“Who’s them?”
Neither man answered me which had me tilting my head back and staring up at the ceiling, sighing gustily.