Renegade

by Donna Boyd

  The paparazzi snapped the photograph in front of the middle arch of the Palm Court. Lara, in a strapless black Chanel sheath with a Hermes silk stole draped elegantly from her arms, smiled up into the eyes of Nicholas Devoncroix, whose hand was protectively on her shoulder and whose face was bent toward hers. The tenderness of his expression said it all.

  The captions would read: Catch of the Century! Billionaire Bombshell! And in the more respectable publications: Business mogul Nicholas Devoncroix squires media darling Lara Fasburg around New York. Can a major merger be far away?

  They made their way through the reception line and bade their best to the guest of honor. A former American president and an astronaut were there, as were several Rockefellers and Kennedys. Nicholas was no stranger to any of them and neither, somewhat to his surprise, was Lara. They said the proper things. They drank champagne and ate caviar on toast.

  Lara’s hair was long and loose about her shoulders. In a rare private moment, Nicholas smoothed it back behind her ear with one hand, and smiled when he saw she wore no earrings. “I have something that belongs to you,” he said. He took the earrings from his pocket and, measuring the proper placement with a glance, deftly pierced the flesh of her lobes with the posts and snapped the earrings into place, one at a time. Her pierced lobes had naturally healed during the previous night’s Change, and a small drop of blood glistened on his index finger when he moved his hand away. He held her eyes, his gaze explicit with memories of the night before, as he brought his finger to his tongue and licked the droplet away.

  “You are a beast,” she told him, but she could not repress the smile that deepened the corners of her lips. She touched one dangling diamond lightly. “But thank you for not losing them.”

  He took two flutes of champagne from a waiter and passed one to her. “Did you know your father was in town?”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Really? How peculiar. He detests New York.” She sipped her champagne. “Where is he staying, do you know?”

  “I believe he keeps a suite at Trump Towers.”

  “I think you may be right. I’ll make certain not to wander in that direction until he leaves.”

  “I take it you’re not close.” As he spoke the hand-held device in his jacket pocket vibrated. He took it out and glanced at it briefly. There was a single line on the screen: 142 Fifth Avenue. He felt a measure of relief steal through him as he replaced the device, and later he would understand that he was relieved only because he wanted to be. That was the address of one of their research laboratories. No doubt the human Hilliford had begged a favor from the pack leader who had, for whatever reason, always been more than tolerant of him, to gain admission to the laboratory. It was curious, but not alarming. There was no mystery here.

  Had he been less distracted by Lara’s scent, her voice, the loveliness of her skin and the chemistry of her nearness, he might have considered further, thought more carefully, asked more questions. But he did not want to concern himself with treachery and espionage on this fine night in these elegant surroundings with so many possibilities dancing in his head. And there are always what ifs.

  “Not for ages,” Lara was saying. “I told you, I don’t keep up with figures from my past.” She regarded him brightly over the rim of her glass. “This is convenient for you, however, isn’t it? Now you can interview him about whatever you were dithering on about last night. What was it again? Remind me.”

  He regarded her with cool amusement. “I’m sure I don’t remember. But I will say I’m relieved to learn your father hasn’t contacted you. I was worried he had heard of our liaison and intended to challenge me on it. I’m sure he wouldn’t approve.”

  “We have no liaison, Nicholas Devoncroix, and if we did my father’s opinion on the subject would be the least of your concerns. However …” She tilted her head speculatively as she looked at him. A small dimple appeared at one corner of her lips. “We would make an interesting couple, wouldn’t we?”

  “Indeed we would.” He glanced around the room, as was his habit, and inclined his head to someone he knew. He looked at her again. “Tell me one true thing, Lara Fasburg,” he said. “What is it that you want?”

  The question seemed to take her aback. “From you?”

  “No. In general.”

  Her eyes skipped over his face, and away. She sipped her champagne. She glanced around the room, and then at him again. “I would ask the same of you. What do you want from me?”

  He answered the question easily. “For the present, your time. Your company.”

  “Until you grow bored.”

  “I don’t plan to grow bored for some days yet. I think you may have a good deal to teach me.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  Her skin gave off the subtle scent of confusion, and genuine surprise. There was such an unexpected innocence to it that he wanted to stroke her throat, gathering that scent on his fingertips to memorize. He wanted to kiss her eyes closed, and taste her. The impulse, and the fact that he did not, in fact, act upon it, made him smile.

  He said, “Now answer me.”

  She sipped her champagne. She cast her eyes to the side, and then back to him, bravely. Her scent now was oddly shy, faintly sweet. “I want,” she told him, lifting her chin a fraction, “to be adored. It is all I’ve ever wanted.”

  He said, “Then you must be thoroughly content.”

  She focused her gaze briefly on her glass. “You would be surprised.” Then she met his eyes again, and said, “Thank you for last night.”

  He inclined his head in gentle understanding. “We were not meant to live apart from our own kind.”

  She said softly, “Yes.” And the sadness in her eyes made him want to do something to banish it, and to make certain that look never came again.

  He said, “Look, the dancing has started.” He put aside his champagne and stepped back, holding out his hand to her. “Do you waltz?”

  A slow and comfortable smile curved her lips. “Divinely,” she assured him. She placed her hand in his, and he led her away.

  ____________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Subject: David Devoncroix

  Gender: Male

  Age: 30 years

  Species: Unknown

  With every heading of every report I always stopped there, unable to read on for a moment, staring at the line. Species unknown. Species actually unknown. Not a myth, not a trick, not a trap or a lie. Species unknown.

  I inserted the needle into his vein and drew my own blood sample. I placed the drop on the slide and the slide under the microscope. I examined it for myself.

  I watched as tensile strength tests were performed using electrodes to stimulate his muscle groups. I saw his fingers close around a six millimeter titanium alloy bar and snap it in two.

  I watched as Tobias used a scalpel to open a long wound on his arm, exposing fascia and muscle and bloody bone, and I watched as the ooze of blood was replaced with clear serous fluid, as inflamed tissue grew pink, as open edges sealed themselves, as smooth pale skin erased the scar of the wound. I had never seen a loup garou spontaneously repair a wound without changing forms. The entire process took less than a minute.

  I examined his PET scan, CT scan and functional MRI. I saw the areas of the brain that exist only in lupinotuum, the increased olfactory receptors and the foreshortened auditory nerves that give them such enhanced senses of smell and hearing. I saw the brilliant, almost terrifyingly constant neural activity that lit up the lobes of his brain even in a deep coma.

  I asked the most obvious question.

  “Can he change forms?”

  “It seems unlikely. One of the base pairs in the chromosome sequence is altered. However …” Tobias walked to the large transparent screen in the center of the room and touched an icon that brought up a video replay of the subject’s electromagnetic body scan. He slowed down the replay so that I could read it. I could tell that the subject appeared to be generating a
detectable and constantly shifting electromagnetic field that was similar to the ones I had noted in scans of lupinotuum. My theory has always been that this fluctuating electromagnetic field, which plays such a crucial part in their ability to shift their forms, is also responsible for the physical reaction most humans have when first encountering them—the inexplicable attraction, the disrupted thought processes, even the uneasiness.

  I asked, “Have you tried to communicate with him?”

  I felt Alexander Devoncroix’s eyes on me. Tobias gave me a look of barely concealed disdain. “A somewhat challenging task, since he has been comatose since he arrived.”

  I touched another icon on the screen and brought up the genetic analysis. I read until my eyes blurred, touching the screen faster and faster, shifting between one program and the next, one set of data and another. Of course my brain could not absorb it all. Of course there was no real analysis taking place. I just wanted to see it.

  David Devoncroix, male, age 30: Evidence indicated that he possessed all of the strength, the super-enhanced senses and the intellectual acuity of the loup garou, but he had only one form– human. Since the one great disadvantage of the lupinotuum has always been that they require an enormous amount of energy—and therefore, resources—to maintain two forms, this was clearly an evolutionary leap forward. He demonstrated that remarkable ability to heal himself almost instantly that is characteristic of the loup garou, but could do this while maintaining his human form. Brain scans showed an unusual amount of electrical activity in the lower cerebellum, even while in an induced coma, so it’s reasonable to assume he may have access to parts of the brain that are generally dormant in both human and loup garou, but I did not have enough time to conduct the tests necessary to quantify this. Blood and tissue analysis showed an immunity to every disease for which it was tested.

  Human beings have forty-six chromosomes in a DNA strand. Wolves have seventy-eight. Lupinotuum have eighty-two. The specimen David Devoncroix had one hundred three.

  In all animal and most plant life on earth chromosomes are aligned in pairs, one from each parent. When an anomaly occurs, it is usually in the form of trisomy, or a triad of chromosomes instead of a pair. The deformity is always obvious, both mentally and physically, and often fatal. The specimen David did not display a trisomy in his chromosomal structure, but a single extra chromosome. And because the anomaly occurred in a section of the DNA where the Devoncroix Effect might have appeared, had it been present, one could not definitively say whether he had an extra chromosome, or was missing a chromosome, or what role this particular chromosome might play in his structure, if any at all. Perhaps this was the marker for his species.

  Because he was, from all the evidence of my eyes and by every scientific definition, a new species.

  “We have to wake him up.” I wasn’t even aware of having spoken out loud. My eyes were now glued to the microscope, and I clicked through to examine another tissue sample on the carousel. I could smell my own sweat, and hear the dry, erratic thumping of my heart. “We need to do cognitive function tests, neurological, stamina and coordination. It’s going to take years to analyze his DNA, years …”

  The shadow of Alexander Devoncroix fell over me. “It’s time,” he said, “to go.”

  My head was reeling as I went out into the night, and I actually staggered a little at the bottom of the stairs. I had to grip the rail for balance and let the truth wash over me. Not just the truth but the wonder of it, the marvel, the outrageous simplicity of it. I thought about centuries of history, of miracles lost, gods fallen and greatness crumbled to dust. I thought about wars and slaughters and civilizations overtaken by jungle vines. I thought about Eudora the wild and beautiful queen, and the priest who loved her. I thought about a thousand years of evolution, ten thousand. All of it leading to this moment.

  This moment.

  The rain had stopped, but was replaced by a pale cold fog that smelled of wet asphalt and exhaust fumes. Taxi cabs made splashing sounds as they edged through the traffic. Alexander Devoncroix awaited me on the sidewalk when I made my way through the gate. The car was gone.

  “I’ve sent your luggage ahead,” he said. “Your hotel isn’t far. We’ll walk.”

  I fell into step beside him. “Our mistake was in thinking that cross breeding wasn’t possible because of the lack of homologous DNA.” My voice was low and tight, the thoughts coming almost faster than I could express them. “But we didn’t account for shifting chromosomal patterns during the Change, and for homologous recombination which would have begun as a DNA repair process during meiosis and could so easily get out of control due to the accelerated healing mechanism that kicks in during and just after the Change.” I drew a breath. “We didn’t account for the Devoncroix Effect.”

  We passed beneath a streetlight. A young couple with their heads bent toward each other, talking softly, moved by. An engine ground its gears on the street. Alexander’s expression was thoughtful as he murmured, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

  I felt a chill. I shoved my hands into my pockets and kept talking. “I need time. I need blood and cell cultures. I need to look more closely at the extra chromosome. It’s possible this isn’t just an anomaly. But we need to wake him up. I need to, we need to communicate with him, to find out how his brain functions, how he learns, what—who—he is.”

  Alexander Devoncroix replied simply, “I know what he is.”

  And that was when I knew that he had not brought me here to study the miracle that was David Devoncroix. He had not brought me here to analyze data or offer an opinion. He certainly had not brought me to act as a consultant to three of the most brilliant scientists of our time. I grew quiet inside, slowly but certainly. My thoughts were still whirling, but they were silent. My focus was on him. Waiting.

  We crossed an intersection. People hurried past us. Brilliantly lit store windows cast their reflections in the puddles on the street. It was only mid November, but some of them already had Christmas decorations up. Spindly bare tree limbs in planters by the curb were wound with white lights. A restaurant door opened, emitting the fragrance of garlic and fresh bread.

  Alexander said, “Do you know how many banks we own?”

  I shook my head, my throat dry.

  “The vast majority of them around the world, I assure you, and the ones we do not own are dependent upon us for their resources. The human moguls who believe they control the planet’s mineral resources do so only at our discretion. We have worked hard over the years to build a synergistic relationship with your people, young man, because when you prosper, we prosper. In this way we have brought civilization to the edge of the greatness upon which it stands today. But this you know. You have written books.”

  He glanced at me. I said nothing.

  “We have brought your people space flight, microtechnology, satellite communications, robotic surgery and pharmaceuticals that, in a single generation, have lengthened the average human life by twenty years. You will no doubt agree that the modern world, though deeply flawed, has been better off with us than without us over the past century.”

  A woman in a smart wool cape and battered running shoes hurried past us with a shopping bag full of purchases. I said hoarsely, “Yes.”

  “We have achieved our present status as masters of commerce and invention through greed, cooperation, enlightened self-interest and an absolute conviction of our own infallibility. Yet our culture is a singularly volatile one, steeped in the birthblood of violence that we choose, each day, to resist. It is important that you understand this. We choose to keep the peace. We choose to build rather than destroy. We choose the greater good over our own instincts moment by moment, day by day. This is not our nature. It is our choice.

  “And yet throughout our history the savagery resurfaces at random moments. Pack leaders are overthrown. Philosophies are discarded. Cultures vanish. Civilizations are abandoned. The struggle to mai
ntain the balance is never an exact science. And so I ask you now, having studied us from the unique viewpoint you have as an observer of our society, and not a participant in it: how do you think the pack will react when this new creature is made known to them? A mutant human-loup garou hybrid, a monstrous accident of nature, sprung from the noblest and strongest line in the pack, blood and flesh of the pack leader … what will this mean to them, do you think? What will they do?”

  I took a nature course once that required me to spend a spring in Denali National Park, observing and recording the activities of a particular pack of wolves. The breeding female, the mate of the alpha, gave birth while I was there to five cubs. Two were deformed. One had a crippled foreleg, stunted above the wrist. The other had a bob tail. I watched her systematically kill, then eat, her malformed offspring. This is not unusual in nature, and I had expected it. What I had not expected was that within the week the pack would turn on the alpha and his mate, killing them and abandoning the remaining cubs to starve. Perhaps they sensed a weakness or disease in the pair that would contaminate the pack. Perhaps the incidents were unrelated.

  But nature is often consistent in these matters.

  I said, “The pack can’t know. No one can know.” There was a low desperation in my voice which only became sharper with the heaviness of his silence. “You convinced a molecular biologist and two geneticists that he was the result of in vitro engineering. You can convince the rest of the pack.”

  “As long as he remains an inert specimen, perhaps. But sooner or later he will be brought out of the coma, or he will overcome it spontaneously. As you have observed, his physiology is unpredictable, and remarkable. He is also quite sentient. He knows his own history, and he is capable of sharing it. We do not know what else he is capable of. But the mere fact of his existence will throw the pack into chaos.”

  The background noise receded into a distant murmur and clatter. The clack of our footsteps on wet pavement was loud in the silence. That, and the thump of my heart. Hard. Heavy. Terrified.