Ravening Hood

by Kendrai Meeks

  “Amy, I don’t know where you hide all these smarts at all, but they’re amazing.”

  “Mostly I keep them in my bra. If guys are going to stare at the girls anyway, they might as well get an education in the process.”

  “I think several of your recent boyfriends should be given honorary doctorates, then.” Master’s degrees at least. “But even if it’s true, that he has the genetic inclination for being a pack leader, that doesn’t make him an alpha.”

  Amy now turned all her attention on me, forgetting about tea guy. “What would?”

  “You mean, how does a wolf become an alpha?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s simple,” I said. “The previous alpha dies, and he rises to take his place- whether that’s through the agreement of the pack, or through a formal challenge for leadership. Or he starts his own pack, but that’s something that hardly ever happens. It takes a wolf of extreme strength, both physical and mental, do something like that—not to mention the fact that he risks lunacity in the process.”

  Amy’s head tilted to the side. “Lunacity?”

  Even if the last few weeks had seen Amy take a crash course in all thing supernatural, there were still some gaps in her knowledge.

  “Lunacity,” I repeated. “Or what we usually call moon madness. Wolves are so orientated towards pack that their psychology hinges on it during full moons. They can only go a few lunar cycles away or they become their wolf forever. It drives them crazy, makes them very dangerous. It’s an obligation of the hoods to eliminate a wolf who gets to that point. I’ve seen three in my life.” My chest tightened at the recollection, of being at my mother’s side as she dispatched a creature trapped in fur but with remnants of a human soul I could still sense. “I hope I never have to see it again.”

  “But what does that have to do with becoming a new alpha?”

  “A wolf who decides to try and be his own alpha has to have three things: an ability to make it through three lunar cycles away from his pack without going insane, the release of his previous alpha, and a beta wolf who’s willing to risk the break as well. That’s the part that stops most defections. One can rebel, but getting a beta to buy in at the risk of going insane and permanently wolf is almost impossible. It’s generally only done in times of war and famine, to give the pack the best hope of surviving by immigrating into new regions.”

  “I see.” Amy laced her fingers together. “Maybe you can live in Suey Ain’t Marie and he can commute to the pack? Is that a thing?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Damn it. Well, then, I might have to resume my get-Geri-hooked-up campaign.”

  “I could jump into this water right now, Amy.”

  “Go ahead. I double dog dare you. More than that, I double wolf dare you.”

  NINETEEN

  Tobias stood at the door, staring at his upturned palm.

  Stalling.

  I put down the book I’d been reading, a droll history of the Ottoman system of government. “You seem to be treading water there, chief. You sure you’re comfortable with this?”

  A wispy grimace proceeded his words. “What choice do I have? Unless you want to tie a saddle to me and ride me through the streets.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Damn, I didn’t pack my saddle, and I never learned to ride bareback...”

  “Based on your tepid love life, seems you haven’t learned to ride barefront either.”

  Switching the subject ASAP was the only way to keep from blanching. “Scared you can’t trust the Pera Pack?”

  He barely bobbed his head. “Ayşe’s sticking to orders; she still hasn’t uttered a single word to me when I’ve approached her in the Bazaar. Luckily, she still listens. I told her I needed shelter for the full moon, and that I’d wait down the street for an answer. A half hour later, another wolf came to tell me I could pass the night with them, as a lupine courtesy.”

  “The last thing the alpha of a pack trying to avoid attention wants is some foreign wolf to run about on full moon causing trouble with hueys,” I concurred. “If I had my hood, I’d build a silver cage for you in your bedroom upstairs.”

  “So your suggestion for an alternative to passing the moon with a local pack would be to imprison me. You still want to claim you’re not into BDSM?”

  “Try chaining me up sometime and see.”

  His eyes jolted away as a spark of crimson warmed his neck. Was Tobias’s jabs about rough play a cover for his own proclivities? How interesting.

  “I still can’t believe Caleb convinced Inga to go with Igor to Spain for the weekend.” The werewolf shoved his overseer-approved phone into his back pocket. “I guess you were right about his charm, huh? Even convinced the daughter of Dracula herself to give into him. How did he manage to do that?”

  “By promising we wouldn’t step a foot out of the house after dark until they got back. I think he even pinky-promised.”

  “So you, Amy, and Caleb are planning a quiet night at home?”

  “Oh, hell no. Amy would open a pop-up Kamasutra studio. Caleb and I are going out to dinner, then he said something about going to see Hagia Sophia.”

  “He lied to Inga?”

  “He prefers to think of it as a technicality. We aren’t stepping a foot out. We’re using both feet.”

  Tobias laughed. “Remind me never to get into a negotiation with a slayer. Slippery eel, that boyfriend of yours. Hagia Sophia... That’s that big church-turned-mosque thing, right? Is it even open at night?”

  “I think we’re just going to walk by it. He said there’s a beauty to it you can only see at night.”

  He grinned and tapped me on the shoulder. “So he thinks taking you to a huge church is going to finally get you in bed? Told you telling him you were ‘waiting for marriage’ would make him think you’re a religious nut.”

  “My sex life is not a venue for your comedic efforts.”

  “No, it’s the venue for your own.”

  THE SEPIA ORB CRAWLED its way out from behind the city skyline, pulling me in a way I hadn’t felt in months: anticipation, dread, longing, desire. A familiar swirl of extremes that, in my huey existence, left me anxious. Or, maybe it was the fact that I’d planned to talk to my boyfriend about how I didn’t see our relationship as having legs – despite the fact that it brought us all the way to Istanbul to track down an infamous vampire and, eventually, kill him.

  “The moon sure is pretty tonight.”

  Caleb turned a smile to me that made the cosmos in the sky above dim in comparison. “It’s not the only thing.”

  “Caleb...”

  Any effort to peel away was met with an equal effort on his part to pull me closer, ultimately pulling my arms behind my back and holding them there.

  “You need to just accept the fact that you’re beautiful, Geri. Every time I bring it up, it’s ‘oh, Caleb, stop.’ It’s like you don’t want me to compliment you.”

  “Oh, god no. Compliment away. It’s just...”

  Not yet. Not out of nowhere.

  “Predictable.”

  He brushed a kiss over my lips, and I tried not to notice how good it felt, how my bottom lip tingled when he pulled away, how my body instinctively leaned into his, chasing that kiss.

  “It’s possible,” he admitted as he pulled away and we resumed our leisurely stroll along the avenue. “You’re the first woman I’ve been with long enough for my witty repartee to become seasoned. I’ll try harder in the future.”

  Worms crawled through my belly. Change the subject. Beside us, an ancient wall stood, each of its stone meticulously shaped and placed, like a puzzle. “I thought you were taking me to see Hagia Sophia. Isn’t this the old hippodrome?”

  Just at that moment, a doorway emerged in the wall, an old (though probably hundreds of years newer than the stonework surrounding it), heavy metal thing that looked like it had been recommissioned from a submarine.

  Caleb flicked the padlock that held it close. “That’s n
ew.”

  “That’s new?” I repeated. “You’ve been wherever this leads before?”

  “Not in about a decade or so, but yeah.”

  “What is it?”

  The slayer shifted his body, blocking the view of his hands from a group of nearby Asian tourists. If they saw the glow that radiated from his palm, turning the obstacle into a molten sludge, they probably just thought it was a cellphone screen lighting up. Liquid metal dripped to the ground as hinges groaned, pulled on in the first time in who knew how long.

  “I am, but it’s closed. This is a slayers-and-guest-only entrance.”

  Doubts refused to be dismissed. “You sure you know where this goes?”

  “Unless a two-thousand-year-old passageway has been rerouted in the last decade. Don’t be nervous. It’s full moon, the weakest time of the month for vampires, and I was running through these tunnels before I could read.”

  I feigned surprise. “I didn’t know you could read.”

  “There’s a lot of things I can do that you still haven’t found out about.”

  Caleb’s solarium became a lantern, giving definition to a passage sloping downward. I was getting jealous of how many diverse applications there were for the slayer talents.

  “First werewolves living in an old Byzantine crypt, and now slayer passages underneath one of the most historical parts of the city?” I stepped over an old drainage pipe laid over our path. “It’s like this city is built over a foundation of supernatural haunts.”

  “This city is built over a foundation of everything,” Caleb said. “This part was a passage of the Roman hippodrome. The Byzantines ignored it, but then the Ottomans built stuff on top of that. Istanbul is like cultural moussaka. Slayers have been in this city since it first took shape, but Hagia Sophia and these passages are some of the only remnants of that history.”

  I pulled my hand back out of his. “Slayers had something to do with building Hagia Sophia?”

  “Not building it, just how it was built. Whoa, just a second.”

  I tried to blink definition into being as Caleb’s solarium faltered, plunging us into darkness. The slayer slowed our pace, and a moment later, I realized why. Since we’d entered the tunnel, there’d been the sound of dripping, of water pooling at the bottom of walls. As I stepped forward into a cool stream deep enough to cover my ankle, I hoped to high heaven the source was underground and not runoff from the streets or worse, bubbling up from the sewer.

  “It would be really great if you could turn the lights back on. I’d like to see what I’m stepping in so I know if I’m going to need a tetanus shot.”

  His sloshing feet and pull at least gave me a direction to follow.

  “Should be just a few more steps. And yeah, we’re through.”

  My feet cleared the stream just as the cavern around us illuminated anew.

  Caleb bounced the relit solarium on his hand. “One defect with these little things: they can’t be conjured when I’m standing in water.”

  A memory resurfaced, of Igor saying much the same thing when we’d first arrived at the rental house. “That was only like, three inches of water. That tiny bit is enough to flatline you? Maybe those solaria aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

  “Oh, they’re cracked. Just wait until you see why.” He took my hand back and hurried me along the path as it twisted and pivoted underneath the streets above. “It will be easier to show you when we’re inside. Come on, it’s not too much farther.”

  I could search through a thousand libraries, each with ten thousand books, for a hundred thousand years, and never find words sufficient enough to describe it.

  Caleb let go of my hand, allowing me to drift on the breezes of beauty and history, interwoven with stone and light. Hagia Sophia struck me dumb and left me incredulous. It rose above, around, tunneled underneath. It captured the limits of my imagination then mocked it. It was like man tried to cage heaven. Mineral veins and dozens of stone panels laid over wall and beneath my feet, drawing my attention to a ceiling circumscribed in Arabic letters around a mighty dome above us, punctuated with uncovered mosaics in the apses.

  “I have never felt more huey... More mortal, than I do at this moment.”

  Caleb nodded. “My mom used to say that peasants and sultans were equals when they come entered here, that it was the only building on the face of the earth so vast in scope it rendered the arrogance of small differences mute. It’s... I mean, look at it! It’s maybe mankind’s greatest achievement, am I right? But it’s more than just a church, or even a mosque. Remember what I said about slayers influencing how it was built?”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  Shyness grabbed a man who’d rarely known its company. “Geri, for all we know, I’m the last slayer.”

  I notched my head. “What does that have to do with Hagia Sophia?”

  “Because this building, Geri... This big, boisterous, beautiful building is part of my legacy. Inga and Igor have, um... you know, donations from me. If I die, they may be able to rescue my kind back from extinction. But being a slayer isn’t just genetics, it’s training and culture. Igor says he talked to you about hoods training slayers if it ever came to that, but someone needs to carry on our legacy too.”

  “Caleb, I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Here, let me show you.”

  He extended his right hand, and conjured a solarium. The lemon-sized balls of light were powerful little things, powerful enough to kill a vampire, to turn him to ash. But as it rose at a measured pace upward, controlled, I assumed, by Caleb’s will, the most magnificent thing began to happen. Not only did its light cast a warm glow over the interior of the structure, but the beams began to fracture, to turn in on themselves and bounce off mosaic-covered walls. Reds, greens, golds, yellows: a spectrum of brilliance turned in to the center, collecting below.

  I had to hold up a hand to protect my eyes, stung from the magnificent display. “What is this?”

  “This is why this building was made the way it was,” Caleb said. “Before the Ottomans converted it to a mosque, every inch of that dome and most of the walls were covered in glass mosaics, all designed specifically for this. This building is both a place of worship, and one of defense. In the Byzantine times, slayers protected this city from vampires. Vlad changed that. Vlad made this his sanctuary. Someday, Geri, a slayer might be able to stand here as I do now, and if the Ravens are here, it will be enough to destroy them all. I hope.”

  Already boggled by the structure for its own sake, I could hardly grasp the revelation. “This is why we’re here, isn’t it?

  He didn’t deny it. “If we spook one Raven, all we’ll do is send him flying. We have to get them all here – or somewhere like it. And when Vlad and the other stand here, they’ll die. Inga knows this, Igor knows it, and now you know it.”

  “But what do you expect me to do with this? Why did you tell me?”

  He dropped his hand, and despite the act, the solarium continued to shine above. “Because one day, it may be one of our children who has to undertake this.”

  “One of our... Caleb, I—”

  The heat of his kiss made the ball of solar rays above seem cold by comparison. I’d tasted desire, and longing, and lust, and love. Caleb’s mouth on mine spoke of it all and more. It spoke negotiations, offerings, outcomes. It promised family, a place, meaning. It proffered all this to me with a bonus of pleasure.

  This many would do his damnedest to make me happy. He’d make me his.

  “Caleb, stop.”

  In the most technical sense, he did. His lips lingered just beyond mine as our breath mingled. When had come to breathing so hard? When had I come to be completely wrapped in his embrace. With open eyes, I could see just how brilliantly his light shown, as though the fire of desire uncurling within him, within us, fueled the solarium in the dome above.

  “If this is because I told you I wanted to wait until marriage—”

  “It�
�s not.” He licked lips which then curled into a smile. “I mean, that’s a bonus, but that’s not why I’m asking. I don’t want to go through any more of this life without you. I could wield the sun, but you are my light.” He reached up, laced his fingers through my hair.

  A touch, a kiss, a brush of his lips on my neck. His sunlight shone above, and the moonlight fell on the building from outside. Both born of the same fire, separated by the lattice of history and purpose. It stirred my veins, lit my desire. I wanted him. God help me, no matter how selfish it was, I wanted him. Let his light outshine mine; I’d be warm in his.

  His lips went to my ear. “I love you, Geri. Please say yes.”

  “Caleb, I...” My heart fell back into shadow, and my body shook. “...can’t.”

  The brilliance turned blistering. His solarium doubled, tripled in size.

  “What?”

  I pulled back from him as flares licked up his arms, singing the sleeves of his shirt.

  “I want to. God, Caleb, you have no idea how much I want to believe that you and me could work, that we could make a future together. But we have completely different expectations about what we want, about where we see ourselves.”

  “How can you know that?” With both hands on either side of my face, he pressed a hard kiss to my lips. “All I want is you. We’ll find a way to make it work.”

  I shook my head, even as he held it. “But I know what I want, and as much as I like you, Caleb, and no matter how much I tell myself to just let a good thing happen for once, I don’t love you. I won’t do that to you. I won’t make promises that someday it could change, when I know it won’t.”

  In a snap, hope turned bitter.

  “How can you know?” Caleb dropped his hands and backed away. The brilliant sphere above began to descend, moving in parallel with him. “You don’t even know who or what you are. You’re too wrapped up in who you used to be to think about who you could become.”