Haughty in his anger, Lavario sniped at Kijo, “Are you thinking of a real estate investment? What will your brothers and sisters think of something as lavish as a painted door?”
His dig at the sparse living style of the Varcolac was wasted. Seconds later she left the still-moving limo. The door remained wide open as the vehicle came to a stuttering stop. Typical of her, she tramped ahead, ceding nothing to her surroundings.
Spring was a dirty time of year. Lavario got out of the limo with slow precision, making sure he didn’t step in puddles. The ground around the pavement was muddy, even the standing water was gorged with blobs of unidentifiable yard waste. When the hem of his wool coat licked the ground, he growled at the line of dirt and the impending dry-cleaning bill.
In an instant, he stopped fussing with the garment.
Fear has a smell you can taste. Lingering long afterward, sometimes for days. Lavario tasted it now. It mired his tongue, making it feel swollen and foreign. The wolf inside wanted to open its mouth, sniff the air. Tiny hairs stood on end. There was danger. To him? After today, he couldn’t rule it out.
He stood beside Kijo. He wasn’t even paying attention to the way the rain made his curly hair frizz. Something here was very wrong. Instinct shouted it loud and clear. All the bite was gone from his voice when he asked, “What did you do?”
“Created opportunity.”
The door to the home opened. Two of his daughter’s lackeys appeared, Geri and Freki, scraggly dogs always looking for an influential hand to lick. Geri, the bolder and more talkative of the two, bowed to Lavario and made a sweeping gesture like an old-time carnival huckster inviting him to take a ride.
Lavario went inside.
Thirty or so wolves, a little over half of the Varcolac pack, were present. Although they kept their heads low and eyes averted, deferring to his authority, they managed to make it clear they found his clothing repugnant. Elegant tailored suits were Boo Hag garnish. True wolves didn’t need to cloak themselves in finery to show power. They used force. Each one sniffed at Lavario’s expensive threads, showing teeth.
Lavario did not show them his. Most of the time he thought the gesture was redundant, not to mention stupid. These pups felt his bite. They knew the address to his fangs, the zip code of his claws if they wished to journey there. “Yes,” he told them, “you are an imposing flock of sheep in wolves’ clothing.”
The jab brought their heads up. One charged forward.
“Guardian Lavario,” Kijo interrupted. She collared the affronted wolf by his scruff, flinging him backward behind her. “Follow me.”
Lavario kept his tone equally formal, only inwardly reminding himself he spoke to his daughter. “Delighted to, Guardian Kijo.”
She escorted him into a formal sitting room filled with furniture that still had its factory smell. Lavario could imagine the owners guarding it for decades, redirecting grimy hands to a timeworn sofa stashed in a comfortable room.
The care they’d taken went to waste. Their formal room was covered in blood. Splatters of it reached as high as the ceiling. Bodies piled up like leaves took center stage. A child’s leg poked out underneath the body of his mother, his sister. Tiny spaceships, aliens, and the stars of the boy’s pajama bottoms were awash in a new abyss of gory muck that was perhaps as unfathomable as space. Lavario did not know. Did not want to know.
He swallowed his rage, whispering out, “Kijo.”
Impassive, she scrutinized the carnage she’d ordered but said nothing.
He kept his voice low, hissing toward the end. “What is this?”
She addressed everyone—him and all the Varcolac forming a half circle behind them. “You have been brought here to decide. Are you Varcolac or are you a Boo Hag?”
He gave them a short barking laugh he cut off at the end, disgusted with the sound of it in the room. Judging by the clothing of the Varcolac wolves—completely intact—none of them transformed for the butchery. He was about ready to remind them merely their presence there was forbidden. The scolding words suffocated in his mouth.
A girl was brought forward kicking and screaming. Her college sweatshirt, torn and bloodied, knotted around her armpits. The way her feet paddled in the air elevated her heart rate. She pushed and pushed and pushed but went nowhere. Her pain, her fear, and most of all her rage chipped at him the way the tide chiseled away at bits and pieces of the shoreline.
The eldest daughter. Lavario recognized her from the photos in his bloodservant’s wallet.
She was slung on the floor at his feet.
“This is Amber, Guardian Lavario,” Geri introduced her. “She’s pleased to meet you.”
Panting, Amber looked at him with wild brown eyes full of fight, not an ounce of flight. Beside her was a fire poker. She clutched it, stood up, and whacked him over the head. Once, twice, three times. Many after. Although it didn’t hurt, Lavario recoiled from the furor.
Geri chuckled, continuing his mock introductions, “Lavario, Guardian of the Varcolac everyone.”
None of the other Varcolac laughed. Golden wolf eyes shone at the anticipated upcoming bloodshed. Eagerness made their predator mannerisms more pronounced. Heads low, they formed a tight perimeter around the girl, shifting their bodies in response to her slightest movement. They bobbed and weaved, blocking her exit should she decide to flee.
Amber shook. Her lips trembled. “What do you people want? What do you want?” she shouted.
“Shush,” Lavario said to her. “Be still. Be strong. Do not frenzy.”
Kijo had received the same speech 456 times. The number of times he held her to his chest. The number of times he felt her small hands tangle with his ears as her tantrums ran their course. The number of times he ran his thumb across the contours of her red, tear-blotched face. Four hundred and fifty-six times, Jun. I counted each one until you stopped your wailings, stopped your frenzies, and became my daughter. I taught you how to be Varcolac. He needed to tell this girl once. Her terror ripped through him.
“Kill her,” Kijo instructed. “Kill her and be of this pack.”
Lavario transformed.
Amber dropped the poker. There was no clank, no clatter. Hardly a sound at all when it hit the carpet. She knew. In her eyes, he saw the entire event unwind, the finality of it. Soon, her dumfounded expression would turn to terror, terror to acceptance, acceptance to nothing. Now it was inescapable. Now she would die.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: PACK FIRST, PACK ALWAYS
Normally his wolf form made him proud. Over eight feet tall, he towered. His black coat gleamed with a silver luminance to it in the moonlight. Marks from previous battles, the most prominent of which were claw marks on the left side of his muzzle, were his accessories. Each one was in a perfect spot, as well tailored to him as any of his suits. Even his harshest critics in any pack could not deny him the power of his beauty. Any wolf who looked lusted.
Amber’s eyes saw none of it. She saw a monster.
And for good reason.
As if from a great distance, Geri laughed. For once, Lavario wished for more Varcolac sensibility and discretion. Merriment was forbidden to them the same as comfort. Surely one of the younger hot-headed wolves would silence the fool.
Kijo showed Geri her teeth. Instant, blissful quiet. Lavario took back everything he said about the foolishness of the gesture. His daughter came back to him. “Kill her,” she urged him. “Choose Varcolac. Your pack is here to witness. Ready to embrace you.”
How fantastic. Lavario shut his eyes. Whatever it was his daughter had planned, he’d never expected it to be this. Perhaps he should be grateful for the opportunity she provided. He was certainly beholden to the fierce, protective love in her dark eyes. They urged him to kill, to conquer. They urged him to lead with her the Varcolac way.
But he could not be what she asked.
He returned to his human form. Naked now, he overshadowed the terrified girl. Standing despite everything that had happened to her, she looked at him with a mixture of awe
and absolute hatred. Offering her comfort was off the table. He knew how she’d interrupt such a gesture.
Instead, he turned to his daughter, bracing himself for her disappointment. She looked hopeful, something he thought she’d lost centuries ago. “I cannot.”
“You won’t.”
“Is there a difference?”
“A great deal.”
Lavario said nothing. They’d lost, as ridiculous as it was.
Open wide, her black eyes burned. In her anger, her lower lip trembled. For a moment, it looked like she was a child about to tantrum rather than the powerful guardian she’d become. Maybe it was only his way of attaching sight to memory. No matter how much she grew, there’d always be a part of him that saw her as a pup. “Do not frenzy, my daughter,” he chided her gently.
She nodded, a short, final bob of her head. Her expression was set, her gaze fixed forward. “Bring me the father.”
Lavario’s bloodservant—Eresna’s old one—was dragged inside.
Amber perked up when she saw him. “Daddy!” Her voice was so full of childish expectations—Daddy was here, Daddy would make things right, Daddy would stop the monsters. She tried to run to him, but Geri pushed her back.
Daddy was unconscious. One of the Varcolac wolves roused him.
“Mfaman,” the bloodservant mumbled. “Mfaman,” he said again, and his eyelids fluttered. “Wolfman!” he shouted at last, sitting upright with a jolt. Lavario sighed. Garvey must have extracted this one as well.
“Yes,” Kijo confirmed for him. “Wolfmen indeed. Or women. If you believe it possible.”
She walked around him in a loose circle. Here to create a spectacle one way or another, she let her brothers and sisters see how far she was willing to go, how cruel she could be, how unlike her father she was. No Boo Hag here, she was telling them, but one of you. Fully. Pack first, pack always.
Transformation came in waves. First teeth. Then claws. Horror built. It knotted in Lavario’s stomach as it twisted the bloodservant’s. Fully wolf at last, she let the bloodservant crawl around the room, herding him with her body toward his living daughter and the rest of his dead family.
The man gibbered. “Please God, forgive me. What did I do, what did I do, what did I do?” And then he begged the untransformed monsters around him. “Help us. Please. I have money.”
“Money.” Geri snorted at him, at the stupidity of it.
Angry at last, he wailed, “What game is this? What do you want?”
“No game. The needs of my kind are simple as they should be,” Kijo came out of her form to answer. Though she directed it at the bloodservant, Lavario knew the speech was for him. “Your kind is more difficult. You want your money, your frippery, your easy living. Me, I only want blood. Your blood.”
Wolf again in an instant,
Thinking it was soon to be over, Lavario closed his eyes and waited for the beat of the man’s heart to cease and for both of their torments to be over. But Kijo protracted even the man’s death. Draining him slowly to make him pay for the sins of her father.
Stalwart, Amber stood. Shakier, her legs kept her upright even when Kijo, her maw wet with her father’s blood, approached. Lavario prepared himself for her death to be equally gruesome.
Kijo did nothing but speak. She grabbed the girl by her chin and forced her to look at Lavario. “This is his doing. He brought us here. He ordered it. Your life is over. You belong to us.”
Lavario thought about the little boy’s pajamas, a fake universe limning the stars with smiles and twinkling dreams. He tried to place himself in the canvas of the fabric as one of the cheerful balls of light, but the image would not last. He was a neutron star in any version of events, a stellar remnant drifting along in the remembrances of when it first started producing iron. This is the end, he told himself then. Apparently not.
When it was over with, Kijo had another rebirth. There was no renaming herself, only slight hints that the loss of her father tore at her as it always would. She had always been so stoic but now there were cracks, deep welts within her composure. Pain and anger seeped through, cooled, resurfaced. A new world was forming on top.
I want to die on my own terms. The thought sprang into Lavario’s mind. It took him awhile to figure out it wasn’t his. It was Amber’s. Kijo dragged her along with them.
* * *
They were back in the car together. Lavario didn’t know what justification she’d used for it but she was here.
In that space, Jun and Kijo existed together. The girl who loved her daddy slipped through in tears. The wolf she became allowed them to fall without quarrel. Within that time, Lavario thought she might understand the dilemma of needing two incompatible things, both with equal vigor.
An image of her in the forest holding her teddy bear crept in on him, the way she continually snuck into his bed. Other memories followed. She was right, one could not think on one thing without thinking on the others. So he sat as his mind recycled old memories. The way she could not say his name and called him Lario, the years of cradling her on his chest while she ran her hands over his ears, the way she’d lift his lips to admire his teeth, and the way she’d grab one clawed finger in her small hands.
She took his hand and told him, “Be still. Be strong. Do not frenzy.”
“I love you,” he told her.
“Father—”
He cut her off, not wanting to hear the rest. “It is your time. Be with me until you cannot.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: RIVAL
Daughter to rival.
Kijo put distance between herself and Lavario the moment the car door clicked behind them. Most of the pack gathered in a tight, horseshoe-shaped formation of codependency. The “guardians,” Lavario mentally put their title in air quotes, were up front. Oscar, the pack’s current fourth-in-command, spoke first, “We were nearly ready to go fetch you both.”
You fetch because you are dogs, Lavario thought to himself.
Mazgan looked at Kijo, the girl, and the dead father. Obviously he thought the two of them had conspired on their way home. His plans—Lavario doubted they were careful—might come undone in the process. With a red-faced fury, he launched, “What is this? What have you two done?”
“I have done nothing, Alpha Guardian,” Kijo insisted. “Guardian Lavario went into a rage after he was denied his toy, became desperate when I did not support him. He killed my servant and his own, leaving the bodies in the woods to be found by anyone. He took this girl.”
Mazgan cheered up immensely after Kijo spoke. His back straightened. He smiled. She’d finally made the right choice. “Stand beside me.”
Lavario swiveled his head to follow his daughter’s walk to the Alpha Guardian’s side. There was a soldier’s precision to her gate—a steady one two, one two, one two. Duty over love. Pack first, pack always. Although Lavario kept his expression blank, his gaze steady and straight forward, her footsteps felt like tiny little cuts on the tips of his fingers.
Mazgan continued once she was by his side, “Now tell me why this happened.”
She went through all the formalities, titles and affirmations, before she began, “Lavario wishes to be exiled, me along with him. To live as Moondogs. False Moons,” she spat. Too serious to laugh, too contained to boo, too stoic to gasp: the Varcolac stood around like cargo-pant-clad statues while his daughter continued her tale. “He disobeyed the edicts. He put us all at risk by exposing our true form to humans, by killing in the open. He brought these violations to our very door. I obeyed his orders, but he is my superior. I was duty bound.”
The pack, even those who had witnessed what happened, nodded in sympathetic agreement. Kijo had no choice since Lavario outranked her. Momentarily annoyed by the pack’s forgetfulness, Lavario fought back to the urge to remind them all of the very long history between he and Kijo. But this was Kijo’s moment.
She continued, “But now I stand before you to repudiate his actions. This Boo Hag is not my father.”
Mazgan’s eyes brightened to a glossy gold in his excitement. “What do you say to Kijo’s accusations, Lavario?”
Lavario didn’t say anything in his defense. Kijo could have told the pack that he rode a polar bear into a bank and then took out a home loan with twenty percent interest, and their reactions would have been the same. Whatever lies, truths, or half-truths got Lavario to the other side of the Door worked for them.
“Very well. Lavario has nothing to say for himself. What say you, Kijo?”
His daughter swallowed. With some satisfaction, Lavario noted she was fighting off her emotions. “I issue a formal challenge to Guardian Lavario, second of the Varcolac.”
“Lavario?” Mazgan tossed it his way with a sneer, without much ceremony.
“I accept,” he replied.
There was a smell to the air, like a memory he found and then forgot. Maybe it was just the leaves on the ground. Some crinkled and cracked when he stepped on them, some mushed. All rotted.
Lavario turned to leave, thinking it was done.
His daughter stopped him. “Alpha Guardian, I have a suggestion regarding Lavario’s punishment for this mess.” She pointed to the living girl and the dead father, the remains of the family they slaughtered. Punishment was Mazgan’s right as the leader, and so Kijo’s arrogance made the alpha’s lips twist. He was about to refuse her, he had already turned to address the pack, but she leaned forward to whisper in his ear, her hand tugging almost ladylike at his sleeve. Despite his predicament, Lavario gloated inwardly. His daughter was going to run circles around this buffoon.
“Very well,” Mazgan said to her, “I would allow you this, considering the insults he has visited upon you.”
She gave Lavario a sly little quirk of her lip. “Give him his stupid thing. Give it to him. Let him live with it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN: HIS STUPID THINGS
Trauma brought on a persistent fever, leaving Amber too weak to feed from. Lavario ended up in the exact situation the Isangelous sought to avoid at the distribution center when they refused him Tovin. There was a humor to it he declined to appreciate.
The Worst Werewolf Page 10