“My God,” Lucas breathed. “An Old One.” He led Skandar back to the fire and they returned to their meal. “I know someone who would love to see you,” Lucas said.
Shara
“You’ll be a father today,” Shara said over her peeled orange. Thomas had just sat down across from her at the breakfast table. He hesitated, his hand outstretched to steal a slice of her fruit. He grinned and took the sliver.
“You seem very sure,” he said.
“I’ve done this before,” she reminded. Thomas was about to say something, but Holle came to stand behind Shara, putting a motherly hand on her shoulder.
“Cheryl agrees,” Holle said. “Shara is having contractions and is beginning to dilate. Not yet, but very soon. Cheryl is upstairs now, preparing her things.”
Cheryl Monroe, from Pennsylvania, was an experienced midwife and had been the owner of an occult bookshop until Ulrik asked her to join him in Mexico to help watch over Joey.
“You don’t seem at all nervous,” Thomas commented.
“That’s Cheryl for you,” Shara said. “I’ve never had anyone with me who knew what to do when I had babies before.” She paused, remembering her first birth, the three offspring that had been products of a union with a natural wolf. So much tragedy had come after their birth.
“You are in the past again, lass,” Thomas prompted.
“Yes. Remembering,” Shara said. “Your wyrd can be very cruel sometimes.”
Thomas nodded and took another piece of orange.
“You’d steal your pregnant wife’s breakfast, you Irish scoundrel?” Holle scolded.
Shara and Thomas laughed, but Shara’s laugh was cut short by another contraction. Shara bit her lower lip, her eyes fixed on Thomas as his face froze, then tightened into a look of shared pain. He asked over and over if she was okay, but she couldn’t answer more than a curt nod.
“It’s a contraction,” Holle explained. “She’ll be fine.”
“Oh,” Thomas said, and now it was he who seemed to drift into the past, to think about another woman who had carried his child and the pain she had suffered.
The contraction passed and Shara took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m okay,” she said. “That was a hard one.” She pushed the rest of her orange toward Thomas. “Since you’re stealing it, anyway, you might as well finish it.”
“You’re not okay,” he challenged.
“Not hungry now,” she said. She kept looking at the clock mounted on the wall over the refrigerator, watching the second hand sweep around the face, waiting for the next contraction. “This house reminds me of a grandmother’s house,” she said. “I can’t believe Ulrik did the decorating. He wouldn’t think to put a clock over the refrigerator. I remember his office at school. It was just stacks of paper and old magazines and books. If there was a clock in the room, I don’t think I ever saw it.”
“I think he had a couple from town living here as caretakers,” Thomas said. “The woman probably took care of those things.”
“Of course,” Shara agreed. “We always have to take care of the details.”
Holle took a seat next to Shara. “It is funny how some things never change,” she said. “In the time before Nadia’s curse, men would kill the game, but it was up to the women to skin it and cook it.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve skinned and cooked many a meal,” Thomas argued.
“I haven’t seen you doing much of it lately,” Shara said. “You know, not since all these women are around.”
“I didn’t say I was good at it.”
He said more, but Shara didn’t hear it. Another contraction came, as hard as the previous one, but lasting longer. When it was finished, she felt sweat on her brow and she was hunched over the table.
“It’s time to get you upstairs,” Holle said, standing up again and gently pulling at Shara’s shoulders. Thomas came around the table to help.
Shara stood up. “I can walk,” she said. “I’ll make it. Just stay with me.” With her between them, the trio left the kitchen for the wide staircase. “You never told me how you came to America, or learned English,” Shara said to Holle as they walked slowly. She kept a hand under her swollen abdomen, rubbing gently. She swore to herself that she had not been so big with Joey.
“I crossed the polar ice caps,” Holle said. “I tried it twice and had to turn back, but finally made it over. I did not know what I would find. I only knew the new religion in Europe did not like wolves, so I wanted to get away.”
“When was that?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t know the year.” Holle put a protective arm around Shara’s waist as they began up the stairs. “It was long before Ulrik’s maker came to the New World.”
“Did you know him? The one who gave the Gift to Ulrik?” Shara asked.
“No. I have always been able to learn languages easily. I learned from listening outside the villages of some Natives in what is now Canada that there was a wolf-god living to the south, a white man from across the ocean who could become a wolf. And that he had a son. I did not know the language you call English at that time. I learned that much later.”
They stopped as Shara bent low, then sank to her knees with another contraction. When the pain passed, Shara said, “I want to hear about that. How you learned languages your wolf tongue couldn’t speak. I don’t – ”
Another pain gripped her like a vice. Shara doubled over, panting, feeling the sweat running down her forehead. She stifled a scream of pain. Above her, Holle and Thomas looked at each other. Holle smiled, but Thomas trembled with fear and excitement.
Walter
“Hess,” Walter Hess said into the phone when he picked it up to stop the ringing. Somebody answered him in a sissy-sounding language that could only be French. The only word he understood was Fenris’s name. “He’s sleeping,” Hess said in English.
“No he’s not.” A long-fingered white hand reached over Hess’s shoulder and took the phone. Hess moved out of the way and sat in a nearby chair, watching but pretending not to. “Who is this?” Fenris asked in English, then switched to French.
Hess saw the surprise on Fenris’s face and heard it in his voice as he continued. Something had caught him off-guard, and that was usually a bad thing. Maybe Kiona Brokentooth had finally been found. Maybe just the boy she’d taken. Hess ground his teeth, waiting.
Fenris scribbled notes onto a pad, then spoke again and hung up the phone. He stared at the notes for a long moment, then said, “Stop grinding your teeth.”
“You gonna tell me who that was?”
“No.”
“Fine.”
“Have you felt anything?” Fenris asked. “Any, I don’t know, gut feeling? A need to go somewhere or do something?”
Hess thought about it, wondering what kind of game Fenris was playing. “No,” he said at last. “But if you’ll just tell me what it is you want me to do, I’ll go and do it.”
“It isn’t that. I’ve been hearing rumors,” Fenris said. He tore off the notes he’d made and walked to the nearly wall-sized window looking over the California coast and Pacific Ocean. He wore only a pair of faded jeans. For the first time, the white-haired man seemed somehow diminished to Walter Hess.
“Some say the Pack really is gathering,” Fenris said. “They claim some of us feel something calling them to a specific place. And they say the Old Ones have finally changed back into men.” He paused, then added, “So I ask you, have you felt it?”
“No,” Hess admitted. “Have you?”
“Of course not.” He put his palms against the glass as if checking the outside temperature by the feel of the window. “I’m going to France, Walter. You don’t speak French, so I’m not taking you. I want you to stay here, in my house, and monitor things for me in my absence. I’ll be checking in regularly and, of course, I’ll have others watching you.”
“Of course.” Hess was careful to keep his voice neutral. “How long will you be gone?”
“I
don’t know. A week. A year. Maybe longer.”
“You expect me to stay here a year?”
“I don’t know. If you feel the need to leave, we’ll make arrangements. There is an urgent matter in France that I must attend to. Something very unexpected. I don’t understand it yet.”
“You’ll tell me what it is?”
“When the time is right. Book my flight while I pack a few things and make arrangements.”
Hess watched Fenris move out of the house’s expansive living room toward his own bedroom, wisps of his long white hair fluttering as he walked. The thought of running Fenris’s affairs was both exciting and intimidating. Mistakes would be punished with death, but the benefits would be very nice.
From a cabinet under the bar, Hess pulled out a Los Angeles telephone book to find a flight to Paris.
Cheryl
Cheryl Monroe looked from the small, dead thing in her hands up to Holle, who stood behind Shara’s shoulders, holding her hands. The Old One’s dark eyes were as shocked as her own, Cheryl knew.
“What is it?” Shara asked. “A boy?”
Holle nodded. “A boy. But …”
“Let me see,” Shara demanded.
There was no umbilical cord. The baby was not completely formed and there was no umbilical cord. His flesh was bluish and cold. He had been growing normally, had developed arms and legs, fingers and toes, but something had happened. And yet … She looked closer at the tiny belly and verified what she believed she had seen – the stub of cord had been chewed through.
Shara screamed as she had while squeezing the lifeless thing out of her body.
“She’s pushing again,” Holle yelled to be heard over Shara’s howl.
“Crowning!” Cheryl called. She quickly put aside the tiny, lifeless body and reached for the new one coming into the world. She could immediately see that this baby was pink and living. The head pushed out of Shara and Cheryl acted quickly with suction tools, clearing the baby’s nose and mouth. “Give me another push, Shara. We’re almost there. One more push.”
Shara moaned, the sound building into another howl, then the baby sprang from the womb and into Cheryl’s waiting hands, already screaming in a voice to match its mother’s.
“By the gods,” Holle exclaimed.
Heaving and exhausted, Shara could barely hold her head off the pillows. “What?” she asked. “Twins? Two?”
“It’s a girl,” Cheryl said.
Joey
Seven Years Later
The young, light-haired wolf crept forward on his belly, his ears pricked forward, his eyes and nostrils wide, all senses focused ahead of him. Through the tall grass he could see a shape moving in the water and could hear the rhythmic slap and splash of hands and feet propelling the swimmer along. He moved close to the place where the grass gave way to the bank of the pond and stopped, his head bobbing for a moment to find the best height to watch but keep himself concealed.
Joey knew it was wrong to watch Kiona like he was. He no longer thought of her as “Aunt Kiona,” though he sometimes still called her that if it suited his purpose. He knew she was not his aunt. That was one of the many things he’d learned in the seven years they’d lived hidden in the Arkansas swamp land. Kiona was not related at all, and that relieved some of his guilt.
She swam across the pond and he held his breath, waiting, hoping, and then she did just what he’d wished. Kiona began swimming back toward his side of the water, doing a backstroke, her wet, firm, reddish-brown breasts glistening in the afternoon sunlight. For a moment he imagined her swimming back, getting out of the water, and flinging her long black hair behind her while looking right at him, inviting him to join her. He would change shape, back into his 15-year-old human male form and go to her and she would take his virginity while he crushed her to him in the pond.
An involuntary whimper escaped his mouth and he quickly slammed his jaw down on his forepaws. He could just see the Indian woman’s shape through the grass now. Her progress across the water’s surface was not broken, so he assumed she had not heard him.
Joey knew that his father did the sex act with Kiona. It wasn’t often, and they never pushed their cots together and slept as a couple in his presence, but he knew that they sometimes left him in the house, excusing themselves separately, and met again in the dark shade of the trees and Spanish moss. And more than once, when his cycle was upon him, Joey had returned to the house and looked in a window to see them curled together on one or the other’s cot. Other times they met in the swamp as wolves, their voices raised in song for a while before becoming silent and he suspected they were engaged in that mysterious act again.
What would his mother think of that? Joey didn’t think about Shara as often as he used to. Talking about her was discouraged by both his father and Kiona. He remembered Thomas, the man who had been with Shara when she arrived at Ulrik’s house in Mexico. She knew Thomas had replaced his own father in his mother’s life, but he didn’t understand why. Something had happened, but it had never been explained to him and he wondered if his father even knew. All Chris would say on the subject was, “She betrayed me first.”
Kiona had stopped swimming and was treading water just out where it was too deep to stand on the muddy bottom. Joey did not raise his head, but watched as best he could through the bottoms of the think green stalks of swamp grass. Kiona’s arms were spread like angel wings, fluttering, keeping her up, and he imagined her long, naked, dusky legs churning the water below her. The water, wrapping around her, touching her where he had never put his own hands, but where he couldn’t help but think of touching her lately.
If there were any other girls around, I wouldn’t have to think of her like this.
The old Chevrolet farm truck they’d bought in Idabel, Oklahoma, sat on flat tires, silently rusting under some trees to one side of the house. A newer yet beaten up orange Jeep Wrangler was also hidden in the trees, well maintained and always in running condition. Joey had been allowed to go into Thebes and various other small towns around Bear Brake a few times since they’d come to live in the swamp, but the trio never went into any town together, never returned to the same town more than once every three months, and Joey’s visibility to outsiders was always kept to the absolute minimum. He hadn’t known the company of a girl his age since the long ago day when he’d bitten Jenny Brown in his Bozeman, Montana, elementary school.
“I know you’re watching me,” Kiona called softly, startling Joey out of his reverie. “I know you have been there all along. And I know it isn’t the first time you’ve spied on me, Joey.”
He kept his muzzle pressed against his paws and didn’t dare to breathe.
“You are the Alpha,” she said. “I would not resist.”
Joey felt his blood heat up and speed through his veins. “…not resist…”
“You’re asking yourself now if your father would catch us, and what would he do,” Kiona said. “He has no more claim on me than I have on him. He has to accept the will of the Alpha, even though the Alpha is his son.”
She wants me.
Slowly, Joey breathed, thinking about that. Kiona was saying she would have sex with him. She was saying his father could not stop him, could not protest, had no authority over him. Still, Joey imagined Chris strolling up to the pond, maybe thinking he would skinny dip with Kiona himself, and finding them making love in the water, or on the bank, or even right where he now lay in the grass. It would hurt his father. Joey wasn’t sure what would hurt Chris the most, seeing his son having sex, or that he was having sex with his woman.
She said they don’t have any claim on each other …
Kiona laughed softly at his hesitation, then dove under the water and emerged swimming away from him again. As quietly as he could, Joey jumped up and ran away.
Shara
“Kill him,” Shara said, then hung up the phone. She pushed her glasses back up her nose and refocused on the bills and invoices on the old roll-top desk in the room
that had been Ulrik’s bedroom. She used it for an office. With the exception of the bed where her mentor had died, the room was otherwise as he’d left it.
“Not even going to tell me about it?” Thomas asked from the armchair where he was reading an American newspaper.
“Adalberto caught another one in town,” she answered, lowering the hand that held a pen and turning her head to look at Thomas. “He called himself Andrew De Winter. He wasn’t smart enough to delete text messages he’d sent to Walter Hess. You’d think they’d send someone a little brighter instead of this cannon fodder.”
“Maybe they have,” Thomas answered. “Maybe the dumb ones are a diversion to keep us distracted.”
“You know I hate it when you play devil’s advocate. We’ve screened everyone. Either they were brought here by Ulrik or someone he trusted, or the few you didn’t alienate.”
“True, lass, true,” Thomas agreed. “We just have to be watchful.”
In the seven years since the birth of their dead son and living daughter, Shara, Thomas, and Holle had worked diligently to interview and research everyone living in the house. Messengers had been sent out to try to stop the migration of lycanthropes who were being drawn to the house. The pilgrims were told they would be summoned when they were needed.
“Any reports about Fenris?” Shara asked.
“Nothing definite. There’s been some activity at his ranch in California, but since Hess bought those surrounding plots we have to fly a plane over to see anything, and we can’t get much.”
“What kind of activity?” Shara asked.
“The number of wolves running around the place is higher.”
“Not him, though?”
“No.”
“Still out of the country?”
“That’s what we believe,” Thomas confirmed.
Shara tapped her pen against the back of her hand. The best information they could gather said he’d gone to Europe unexpectedly, but no one had been able to determine why or exactly where. He had vanished as completely as Joey, Chris, and Kiona. Shara shuffled the bills that needed to be paid immediately into one stack, paperclipped them and put them in a plastic bin on top of the desk, then pulled down the top and locked it.
Nadia's Children Page 9
