Renegade

by Donna Boyd

  David Devoncroix. A creature formed from the impossible. A strand of DNA captured in the act of transforming itself, binding to a strand with a mutant gene. Recombinant chromosomes attempting to repair a perceived break in the chain, because that was what nature did: it survived, it adapted, it evolved.

  It destroyed.

  “The balance of nature is a delicate and beautiful thing,” Alexander said, “and for those who are sworn to uphold it, capricious.”

  I sucked in my breath sharply, but dared not look at him.

  “This hybrid,” he went on steadily, “represents the most dangerous threat to the natural balance in perhaps all of history. He cannot be allowed to survive. You will shortly receive an order to make certain of this.”

  We stood across from the Plaza Hotel. Its lights illuminated most of the block, its flags flapped in the breeze. Cabs lined up and departed. The white horse drawn carriages queued around the side of the building, drivers wiping down the damp seats with towels. Traffic lumbered by. My blood roared in my head.

  I turned at last to face Alexander Devoncroix. We stood on one of the most brightly lit street corners in New York, and every detail of his face was visible—the ice hard eyes, the small creases at the corners of them, the pores, the sharply shaped lips, the quiet flare of his nostrils as he drew in breath. I said, very distinctly, “How do you know what orders I may or may not receive?”

  There was a very faint smile. “Because,” he replied, “I am the one who was sent to give them to you.”

  _____________________

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It would surprise most to know that joy, for Lara Fasburg, was a rare and deeply elusive thing. There were moments when joy danced just outside her reach—a taste of wine that was exceptionally fine, a glimpse of breathtakingly clear cerulean ocean against a shimmering white beach; a dewy morning or a single pure, perfectly executed note from an opera. But years had passed since she had felt a true and thorough contentment, the steady glow of joy that spread quietly through her core and into the most unapproachable parts of her brain and out through her fingertips and her lips and her smile. Sitting beside Nicholas Devoncroix listening to the cello concert beneath the canopy of greenery and twinkling lights was such a moment. She could feel his heartbeat. She could smell his pleasure, and it was a heady thing. His warmth, though they did not touch, enveloped her. The music thrilled her. The clash of human perfumes and chafing dishes and rich buttery foods delighted her. Joy. She felt joy.

  And yet she was aware of a subtle anxiety skirting the edges of this unexpected, almost dizzying sensation of elation. It nagged and taunted her, warning her nothing this lovely could last, and of course it couldn’t because her father was in town. Her father was in town and he never came to New York. Her father was in town and Nicholas suspected him of some covert activity against the pack. Her father was in town and so was she, and so was Nicholas, and there was no such thing as coincidence and moments of joy, so rare and hard won, never lasted for her.

  The concert ended and they applauded the maestro, leaving their chairs for the long white skirted tables that promised an array of delectable dishes. Lara laid her hand firmly upon Nicholas’s arm. She felt his muscles and his electricity, and the thrill of his nearness tingled on her skin. Fine strands of her hair crackled toward him and caught on the silk sleeve of his jacket. She did not bother brushing them back.

  She said, “I want to tell you something.”

  He looked a question at her, politely.

  “I am not my father,” she said.

  He smiled. “I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have made the mistake, but thank you for clarifying the matter.”

  Her fingers tightened slightly and so did the corners of her eyes. His smile faded into simple curiosity. “I am not my father,” she repeated firmly. “It’s important that you understand that. If you have business with him, conduct it. If you would spend time with me, do so. I will not be used. I am not my father.”

  Nicholas looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “I have no business with your father tonight,” he said. “Tonight I want nothing more than to spend time with you. And you are far too clever to be used by me or anyone else, as you’ve already proven.”

  She looked up at him, searching his eyes for permission, and he stepped close. She leaned briefly into him, inhaling his truth. She let his scent wash through her and leave her weak with delight.

  She said, a little unsteadily, “Your chemistry is strong and sometimes muddles my head, but you bring me pleasure, Nicholas Devoncroix.”

  He touched her hair, and she could hear the tiny sparks of static that crackled there. “I’m glad,” he said. “For, as odd as it seems to me, you bring me pleasure too.”

  “Excellent.” She smiled, and tucked her arm through his, covering his hand with her own. “Let’s go to Paris.”

  “Marvelous idea.” He turned her toward the serving table. “Do you mind if we have dinner first?”

  She stopped and looked up at him, her eyes bright with a secret insistence. “Let’s have dinner in Paris. Can you get the Concord?”

  He looked surprised, and then intrigued, and then he laughed. “Of course I can,” he said.

  ________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Why do you look so shocked?” Alexander Devoncroix was smiling at me, coolly. “I was at your initiation ceremony. I have known of your calling for years, and in fact helped plan it. Ours is an ancient and powerful name, you see. It means, quite literally—“

  “Cross of the dark gods.” I heard my voice, as from a distance. I felt my fingers, of their own volition, slowly rise and touch the cross-shaped brand on the back of my neck. A taxi passed by with a rush of air and the sound of splashing. A crowd surged past us. In the distance a doorman’s whistle sounded muffled by the mist.

  “I told you about my brother,” he said. “I didn’t tell you how he died. The poor mad devil attacked me and would have killed me, had I not done him the mercy first. I think before he died I saw gratitude I his eyes.” He was no longer smiling. “I know it was in his thoughts, as I took them into myself at the moment of his death. I knew what he knew, I saw what he saw, I felt what he felt. I could not have walked away unchanged.”

  “You did not destroy the Brotherhood of the Dark Moon,” I said. How calm my voice sounded. How reasonable. “You united it.”

  “My brother was a powerful werewolf, and ambitious. But there was one even more ambitious than he, and his influence reached far, almost as far as mine. Defeating him would serve no purpose. Allying with him would serve us both. “

  “Prince Fasburg.” Not a question, but a statement. A simple truth.

  He inclined his head fractionally. “He, and his family before him, have ruled the Brotherhood for centuries. We have not always agreed on strategy, but we have always agreed on purpose. The dominant species must prevail.”

  And with David Devoncroix, formed of the best—and perhaps the worst—of both human and lupinotuum, the dominance of the species was no longer clear.

  Alexander went on, “We have no evidence that the hybrid responds to any known poison and as you see his healing reflexes are almost instantaneous. It seems to me that the quickest, and kindest method, would be an electric charge to the heart or the brainstem, or perhaps a simple injection of an air bubble into a vein while he is still comatose. You should of course disconnect the monitor alarms first, so as not to disturb the others. It should take less than a minute, and you will be well away before anyone realizes what has happened. You should go immediately to the Trump Towers, where the prince will see to your safety. He expects you before midnight.”

  I had a sudden flash of a wild, bloody night, of holding one of their own battered and broken against my chest, of the Devoncroix in their summer whites drinking martinis and nibbling hors d’ouvres; cigarette smoke on the Mediterranean air and the voice of the prince: If you stay, you do so knowing full well what we are
…

  I said hoarsely. “He is your own flesh and blood. You cannot mean to kill him.”

  Alexander replied simply, “I cannot kill him, nor can any other member of my race. If we did, he would live on—all that he is and knows and has been and felt—with the death memory, just as my brother lives in me. We cannot allow that to happen.” His eyes were as calm as a glacier lake as they fastened upon mine. “Now you will understand why, throughout history, there have always been human members of the Brotherhood.”

  Of course. For all of my great obsession with studying them, for all of my grand conceit in imagining I could in some measure belong with them, I had never put together those simple pieces. They could not kill another member of their own species without suffering the gravest of consequences. And humans made excellent assassins.

  Alexander Devoncroix nodded a glance across the street. “Here is your hotel. You should go to your room, and prepare yourself. You cannot return to the lab smelling of fear.”

  Again my voice spoke, although it seemed to be a thing disconnected to me, uncontrolled by me, not even recognized by me. Yet the words were delivered with great care. “The world has waited a hundred thousand generations or more for this moment,” I said softly. “The loup garou and the human united at last into a single being, an entirely new species. Neither your race nor mine has the right to destroy it. I can’t believe you would ask this of me. I can’t believe you would expect me to agree.”

  There was a quirk of his eyebrow, perhaps from amusement, perhaps from surprise. “My dear young man,” he said, “you have enjoyed every advantage our pack has to offer for most of your life—wealth, privilege, education, access to places and information few humans could even dream of. Surely you did not imagine that you would not one day be called upon to pay the price?”

  I smelled roses. I saw Lara’s face, so close to mine, her hair all tangled up with wild roses, her eyes torn with sorrow. I heard her voice, desperate and broken with sorrow: What they offer is not a gift, and the price, when it comes, will be a terrible one.

  I was on the sidewalk again, traffic blaring in my ears, lights spinning around me. I cried out, “I am a scientist! You—Prinze-Papa—all of you gave me the gift of science and this is science’s greatest miracle! I won’t destroy it! I can’t do this, you know that I can’t!”

  Alexander Devoncroix held me with his gaze. His eyes were the color of super-heated steel. He said quietly, very lowly, “You have no choice. You will do this thing or it will be done by another, and in a far less intrusive and humane manner. You refuse, and you betray not only the Brotherhood, but both our races. I took the same vow as you, young human. Hear me as I say it to you again: A Brother will do nothing to disturb the balance. What nature has created, we must preserve.”

  I heard his words. I felt his gaze boring into my brain like two steel bars. I tasted my pulse in my mouth. And slowly I began to understand what the leader of the pack had just commanded me to do, and why only I, the human in whose loyalty Prince Fasburg had such sublime confidence, could do it.

  What I did not understand was how.

  I am not sure how long I stood on the street corner after he left me. I remember thrusting my fingers through my hair, digging my nails into my skull as though with the effort I could erase the memory of the last hour from my mind, turning around in a slow circle, looking for sky. But there was no escape. And I still smelled roses.

  Somehow I made it across the street. I remember moving through the vast lobby like a ghost, out of time and out of step with the rest of the world. I saw the Oak Bar. I did not go there. I saw the front desk. I did not go there. I saw the arched glass panels of the Palm Court. I saw the sign that said “Private Party.” I walked close to the glass. And I saw her.

  I think I heard a man in formal dress say, “Excuse me, sir, but may I see your invitation?”

  I didn’t turn around. I placed my hand hesitantly, tentatively upon the glass. Despair and desperation flooded me as I opened my hand and pressed it there. I leaned forward until my forehead was also touching the glass, and I wanted, simply, to weep. I thought, Lara, help me.

  She looked up.

  ____________________________________

  Excerpt from From Dawn To Dusk: A tale of Two Species, by Emory Hilliford, PhD:

  It can be argued that it was because of his vows, not in spite of them, that the human Louis Phillipe Montclaire turned his back upon his sacred calling and took the making of history into his own hands. He succumbed in the end to his own weakness, his obsessive love for all things werewolf. Even the rage of the queen he adored, even the threat of execution, even the vow he held most sacred, could not dissuade him from following what was, in his own mind, a higher moral imperative, and saving this race of magnificent creatures from extinction. His betrayal was the beginning of the end of the Brotherhood of the Dark Moon as it once had been; his actions had proven that humans could not be trusted and the grand goals of reuniting the two species in harmony and progress were all but abandoned.

  The cure for the disease that had decimated the pack was a simple airborne virus that spread rapidly from werewolf to werewolf, was completely asymptomatic, and imparted an immunity to the killing birth defect both for the werewolf who carried it, and to all his offspring. The virus was so infectious that only a single culture of it existed, and it was entrusted to the care of a human holy man, Louis Phillipe Montclaire, for the simple reason that he had every cause to want to keep it safe. The virus that could eradicate the Scourge from the lupinotuum must first be incubated in the human body, and it was deadly to its host species.

  Louis Phillipe knew he would die at the hands of the queen’s guards, and he infected himself with the virus before he came to visit the queen. Through his blood he spread the virus to the guards, to the queen, and to everyone with whom they came in contact. Among his race, he was the first to die. But over the next half century one half of the human population of the earth would be destroyed by what he had unleashed. What werewolves called a miracle, humans named the Black Death.

  ____________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Lara’s hand was upon the arm of Nicholas Devoncroix when she felt Emory’s closeness, and heard his need inside her head. She thought, No please, not now … with a great rending despair, and she thought, My love, my love, you’ve come to me! with a surge of wondrous welcome so intense it left her dizzy. It was all at once, in the briefest of seconds, and then she turned and she saw Emory’s face against the glass, and she felt the throb of heat in her palm where once she had lost a layer of skin, and her throat went dry and she had to turn her head away because she could feel the dark fingers of destiny about her and joy never lasted for her, never.

  She looked up at Nicholas and she said urgently, “I never lied to you. Take my truth. Know it. Please.”

  He half-smiled in confusion, wanting to believe it a joke, but he must have smelled her desperation, because the smile faded. He took her shoulders and leaned in to her, inhaling the scent of her truth just as she had done with him only a moment earlier. Her diamond earring brushed his cheek. She whispered, “I could have loved you, Nicholas Devoncroix. I could have.”

  He straightened and looked into her eyes. What he saw there caused alarm and suspicion to quicken in his, and then he looked over her shoulder and saw the human standing at the glass.

  His nostrils flared, his face went tight, and so did his hand upon her wrist. But she pulled away, a look of terrible desperation upon her face, and he let her go.

  He let her go.

  __________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The door opened onto the music and the gaiety of the party, and she came out into the corridor. She was wearing a tiny black sheath that made her skin look like porcelain and her hair floated around her when she moved. Her eyes were as deep and bright as a sunlit sea, but there was anxiety in them, and breathless joy, and question, and fear. All the
things that I felt.

  She came close to me. I didn’t dare touch her. She smelled like roses to me. She drank me in with her eyes: my hair, my face, my lips, the scar beneath my eye. My throat, my torso, my legs, my worn-down boots. And she drank me in with her senses: my shock, my terror, my desperation, my joy, my simple joy at being near her again. She whispered, “What is it?”

  I wanted to touch her. The tiny scars on my palms ached for her. I swallowed hard. It took all the effort at my command to make my voice work. “I never wanted to do this. I never wanted to come here.” It was a lie. All my life I had wanted nothing more than to come here, to stand here, to be here close enough to smell her, to see the gentle rise and fall of her chest, to draw her into my embrace.

  I could see panic rising in her eyes. She searched my face desperately, trying to know my thoughts. “What? What has happened?”

  “You’re the only one who can help me,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask if there was another way. I need you to come with me. I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry.”

  Her eyes were awash with tenderness, yet laced with regret—the same dark and lonely regret that I was feeling. She said softly, “You surely have always known that all you ever had to do was stretch out your hand and I would place mine in it.” And she took my fingers in hers, and closed her own about them. I felt her power surge through me. I felt the joy of completion. I felt the calm of certainty. I felt a hundred thousand things that had been denied too long. I felt whole.

  I drew in her fragrance and lost myself in it. I pulled her close, and I covered her mouth with my own. I tasted her, I melted into her, I opened myself to her, I let her hear my thoughts. I let her feel and know and understand everything that was in me. I felt her shock and her disbelief, and when she tried to pull away I let her, but she merely sank into me again, breathing quickly, trembling a little in my arms, searching my eyes.