Darren reasoned it must have been the animalistic nature that made sensible men lust after women like her. Many loups-garous craved the strong, independent type of woman, just like Tessa and Katey. Flimsy and shallow females didn’t last long within their society. Darren, however, never understood such desires. He never allowed himself to.
When she finally looked up from a spreadsheet gripped between her hands and saw Darren, her lips parted in surprise. Darren swallowed hard and gave her a friendly nod. Katey, oblivious to their greeting, began to roam about the shelves and racks of souvenirs.
Tessa seemed to snap out of her daze and gave Darren the same smile he remembered from years ago. “I haven’t seen you in a while, stranger,” she said in her husky but feminine voice.
“I’m sorry I haven’t visited sooner,” he replied, walking heavily toward the counter. “How are things?”
Tessa sighed and held up the spreadsheet in her hand. “The same, but we have fundraiser events planned in the next few months. That should help.”
Always optimistic, Darren thought. It was the only way she could have endured the loss and stress.
Tessa glanced toward Katey and the otherwise empty welcome center. “I heard there were hunters in the next county over,” she stated in a careful whisper.
Darren nodded. “There are, but I needed to take care of this business before we left the area for a while.”
“I thought everyone left already. That’s what Jacob said, anyway.”
Darren spread his fingers across the polished wood of the countertop. “Most of the families have been evacuated, but a few have stayed behind. Katey, Logan, and Ben will be leaving tonight.”
Tessa’s eyes went wide. “Katey? Is she…” She motioned to the teenager examining a miniature stone statue of a wolf mother and her pups.
He nodded again. “That’s her. She changed on her own for the first time last night.” Darren pulled out his billfold from his back pocket. “I was hoping we could get in a private tour to see Chris.”
Tessa looked down at the one-hundred-dollar bill Darren offered her with a trembling hand. “I couldn’t accept that,” she said, shock stealing much of her voice. “You already donate so much to the preserve.”
Darren laid it on the counter between them. “We’re visitors, just like everyone else.”
“Why do you want to see Chris?” she asked, looking up at him with sudden seriousness. He couldn’t blame her for being cautious.
“I need to finish up a part of Katey’s training, and lately, words haven’t been enough to make her listen.” Darren cleared his throat. “I want to show her instead.”
“Show me what?” Katey questioned as she approached them at the cashier counter with a porcelain figurine of a silver wolf with yellow topaz eyes between her hands.
Tessa was silent, watching Katey with an uncanny interest as if she were a strange species all her own. It was a similar look many strangers had given her that knew enough about loups-garous to know females didn’t exist in their race.
“Katey, this is Tessa. She’s an old friend of mine. Tessa, this is Katey, the newest member of my pack.”
Tessa offered out her hand, but Katey was hesitant. The woman’s odd reaction to her must have given her pause.
“Tessa is the wife to another loup-garou I know,” Darren added, hoping that would break the ice.
Katey shook Tessa’s hand and gave her a weak smile. He would berate Katey about her rudeness later.
“So, can we see Chris today or is he otherwise occupied?” Darren asked, wishing nothing more than to get this unpleasant lesson over with.
Tessa nodded. “Yes, he’s here. We have one small group going through the enclosures right now, but Chris is in a different area of the preserve.” She slipped Darren’s payment into her cash drawer and grabbed a set of keys hanging on the wall. Katey set down the figurine on the counter and fell in beside Darren.
She escorted them out a side door and down a pathway that led toward several different enclosures. Some were for foxes, one for a couple of coyotes, but the majority were for wolves. Signs fastened to their fences read their names and their stories, as well as a few facts about their species. Darren saw Katey reading each one they passed, drinking in the information.
They arrived at the enclosure farthest from the welcome center, and Tessa stopped to open the padlock. Anxiety billowed from her as she struggled to keep her fingers steady with the key. Perhaps it was this building nervousness that Katey had sensed in the welcome center.
Darren could take no more of it and gently took the keys from her hands. “Allow me,” he said before easily sliding the key into the lock and twisting it until the bar popped out of place.
They opened the first of two gates. Darren was in the process of opening the second lock when he had to call Katey away from the plaque on the enclosure fence.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t go in with you,” Tessa apologized as she held the gate door open for her visitors.
Darren laid his hand on her broad shoulder. “I understand. I’ll lock up when we’re done.”
Tessa let him take the keys from her and shut the gate for them before retreating back up the path. Darren caught a glimpse of her wiping her sweater sleeve against her cheek just before she turned the corner and disappeared behind a cluster of thick bushes.
“Is this Chris guy a volunteer here or something?” Katey asked as she looked about the enclosure.
“I wish he were,” Darren replied solemnly. He walked a fair distance into the enclosure, searching for any sign of their host. Katey lingered behind, but he could sense her unease.
“Then what are we doing in here?”
Darren found a shady spot by a boulder and sat down on the ground. “There’s something you need to learn about changing voluntarily,” he began as he gestured for her to sit with him. “It’s good that you know how and you can do it so easily, but you have to be careful of how often you change and for how long each time.”
Katey crossed her legs and sat beside her alpha, her eyes still flitting around the enclosure. If she were in her wolf form, her ears would have been pricking toward every little sound. After a few moments of quiet observation, her watchfulness paid off, and a wolf came cautiously loping from the underbrush some distance away.
His pelt was black, tinged with streaks of silver and brown across his back and dense mane. His golden eyes watched them from a distance, and then as if he suspected they might have food for him, the wolf trotted closer and approached Katey first.
Darren watched her grin at the sight of him, but as he came closer and she reached out to weave her hands in his fur, her smile turned sour and brows furrowed in confusion. The wolf knew no difference and sniffed at her face and clothes for the treat he must have been expecting.
“He’s loup-garou,” she said in disbelief, “but I’m not getting that tingly sensation in my head like I do with everyone else.”
“That’s right,” Darren replied as he scratched at the wolf’s shoulders, digging his fingers in deep so the animal would feel his touch.
“When you guys turned into wolves for the first time around me, I wasn’t a loup-garou, so I didn’t feel anything. I felt something up in Alaska when they turned. So, what’s different about this one?”
The wolf turned to Darren and continued his search for a snack, his wet nose skimming around pant pockets and licking fingers.
“This is Chris,” Darren sighed. “I’ve known him for about fifty years. I even worked with him at a university once. He was an educator, like me. He’s Tessa’s husband and the father of two young boys. They’ve been married for about ten years now.”
Katey pointed back at the plaque on the fence. “But the sign said his name was Kenoa.”
“The other wolves here have names like that too. How would it look if visitors came and saw a Shinook, Katara, and Black Paw, but came to this enclosure and read a very human name on the sign?”
&
nbsp; Katey bit her lips together and brushed her hand over Chris’ chest with such sympathy that Darren had almost forgotten why they were there. For a moment, this seemed as if he were a visitor to an ill friend at the hospital.
When Chris was convinced the two bipeds did not have a treat for him, he padded away a few paces and began sniffing the air, completely uninterested in his guests.
“About two years ago, Tessa had a miscarriage, and Chris took it hard,” Darren continued. “He blamed himself for the complications that came with her pregnancy. I tried to talk him through it. We all did. In the end, he couldn’t live with himself anymore and didn’t want to bear the pain of the loss.
“When a loup-garou changes too often for too long, the wolf DNA begins to become more active in our bodies. If it happens on accident, the loup-garou may experience difficulty changing back to his human form. After a while, he won’t be able to change back at all and what little control he had over his wolf side disintegrates. Chris changed one night and refused to change back again.
“After a few days of watching him, we saw that he wouldn’t respond to our voices. He began to act just like any other wolf. It was a matter of time before we lost him. There’s nothing left of the man now. Just the wolf. Now Tessa must raise her two sons on her own without a father. When they become of age, their loup-garou gene will activate, and Jacob or some other alpha will have to train them. The job Chris would have had taken upon himself has to pass to another because of his choices.”
Katey shook her head. “There has to be some way to help him.”
“But, Katey, don’t you see he didn’t want to be helped?” Darren said with a note of urgency. “It was a form of suicide. If a loup-garou is not careful, it could be unintentional, but not for Chris.”
They watched the wolf wander away, head low and tail sweeping at the fallen leaves on the ground behind him. “You have to realize,” Darren went on, “that everything must be done in moderation.”
“Then why change into a wolf at all if there’s the risk?” Katey demanded. “Why not just wait for that time of the month and only change then?”
“It’s not that simple either. We need that release every once and a while. The way it had been explained to me once was that the wolf inside needs a morale boost to stay active and alive.” Darren looked to Katey with all seriousness in his eyes, as if this bit of information was even more important than what he had just told her. “If we don’t change enough, the wolf becomes weak and will no longer support our physical bodies. Our joined DNA would disintegrate. For those of us who have been alive for so long, it’s vitally important that we make sure the loup-garou gene does not go dormant. If it does, we will stop changing altogether and become human.”
Katey’s jaw dropped. “So, that’s the cure to being loup-garou?”
Darren shook his head. “It’s not a cure. It’s a death sentence. We’re allowed to stay alive for ages, as long as we remain loup-garou. If that gene becomes dormant, if the wolf inside loses vitality and grows weary, then we will too. Without the wolf part of our genetic code, we die. They don’t have an exact name for it, but we call it the Disease. I’ve known many loups-garous who have fallen prey to this Disease. The first signs are when the loup-garou begins to have trouble changing into his wolf form. Then, they stop changing altogether. Sometimes it takes years after that, sometimes days, but the end result is a painful death by accelerated aging.”
“So, if you don’t change enough, your wolf dies and takes you with it. If you change too much, the wolf takes over, and you die while it lives.” Katey looked away. “What about Logan? He doesn’t change at will.”
Darren had wondered about that for a long time, and he still didn’t have an answer. He could see the fear in her eyes, but there was little he could say to make her any less scared. “Logan is a special case. His loup-garou gene isn’t dominant at all. There’s no way it could fully take over or die. It’s like a recessive gene. We still don’t fully understand his biology.”
Katey didn’t seem convinced as her stare glazed over and her chest rose and fell a little more quickly in her moment of panic. Darren placed his hand on her shoulder. “Logan is going to be just fine, Katey.”
She swallowed and shook her head. “No, I’m not so much worried about him. It’s just… When I changed last night, I wanted my wolf to fully take over. I even begged her to because I wanted to change so bad, but she wouldn’t let me fade like that. She wanted us to be conscious together.” Katey lifted her chin. “Maybe she did it because she knew if I just let her take over, that I’d disappear forever too.”
“It wouldn’t happen after one time,” Darren assured her. “It’d have to be several times consistently.”
“But what if my wolf was looking out for me like that, you know?”
The way she spoke so passionately about her wolf, the way she was convinced it was truly a merging of two souls within one body, it was almost enough to change Darren’s mind again. He had never experienced that kind of bond with his wolf to think it was looking out for him. He’d never known anything from his wolf except the urge to hunt, feed, and run free. Perhaps this child, this savior of the loups-garous, could teach him something for a change.
“I bet she was looking out for you,” he replied.
“What’s going to happen to Chris?” Katey asked.
Darren let his hand drop as he looked back at the wolf digging into the dirt over by the protruding roots of a tree with his massive, powerful paws. “A pack in Wyoming had been willing to take him under their protection. They have a reserve up there for loups-garous like Chris, but Tessa wanted to keep him close by for a little while. She still hasn’t been able to let go of the fact her husband isn’t there anymore.”
A moment of thoughtful silence had passed before Katey pried a little further. “Was there something going on between you and Tessa?” she asked. “I saw the way you were looking at her in the gift shop.”
Darren guffawed. “No, there’s nothing between the two of us. We grew close out of necessity, and I was a friend of Chris’. That’s all it ever was.”
Katey slid a sly glance his way. “I could tell your hearts were beating pretty fast.”
He proudly huffed air from his nostrils. “We just hadn’t seen each other in a while.”
Katey elbowed him. “I promise I won’t tell the others,” she spurred.
Darren gave her a look. “I’ve never had feelings for anyone but my wife and I never will.”
As if she had unknowingly slipped her hand into a vat of vipers, she withdrew in submission. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the tight stress knots beneath his skin. “It’s all right, Katey. It’s been quite a long time since they… since they passed on and I’ve done my share of grieving.”
Darren could feel her eyes fix upon him, burrowing into him as if to wrench out the truth. He would not meet her stare for anything, lest she see that he wasn’t telling the whole truth.
“I know Dustin told you about how my wife and daughter died. I don’t have to tell you a second time.” He wasn’t sure why he worded it that way as if to justify his silence.
“I don’t want to hear the story again,” she said, her voice as light as a caressing feather. “I want to know their names.”
Her request was so peculiar that Darren couldn’t abstain from looking at her any longer. There was no mocking in her expression, no sign she wanted to use their names against him later. There was no reason to suspect Katey had any malicious intent with the names at all.
“My wife’s name was Eleanor. I called her Ellie whenever I was cross with her. Our daughter’s name was Lucy, short for Lucianna.”
He was sure the only other person in the world who knew that was Dustin, but only because he had personally met Darren’s family before they died.
Katey’s hand found its way to his and gripped it tightly as a new smile, full of warmth and appreciation
, shined his way.
When her skin touched his, the world around him faded and his eyes were clouded by a sudden vision. They came in flashes, as fresh and real as if they were happening in that moment.
Their cottage in the heart of the French countryside, burning. The cinders and flames blazed in the darkness. Darren rushed to the door, shouting out his wife’s name. Then she lay in his arms, her delicate flesh bloodied and charred. Her clothes were saturated with smoke and dark hair singed by the heat. She whispered a word. Centuries ago, he hadn’t been able to hear that word or understand her in the midst of the roaring flames. Now her voice was clear as a bell.
“Dustin,” she croaked.
Darren blinked, and the image of his wife dying in his arms was gone. In its place was the image of three men traveling through the woods. They held guns and talked of searching for someone. He saw their faces, as vivid and sharp as if they had been inches from his nose. He had never seen them before, but somehow, they still seemed familiar.
When they spoke Dustin’s name, Darren blinked and shook the visions away.
When he opened his eyes once more, Katey was in front of him again, a look of befuddlement on her face.
Darren’s head throbbed violently, his temples pounding with pain. Inside, he felt the stirring of his wolf. Gnashing teeth and growls filled his mind and the control he had once been able to call on for centuries, was gone. Seeing his wife in his arms, hearing her voice again after so many years, had triggered something within him that he detested.
A violent rage swept through his soul. Darren snatched his hand from Katey’s and bolted a few yards away, his teeth bared and eyes golden. Katey’s eyes went gold in defense, but she didn’t move.
“What did you do?” Darren growled, crouched down like an animal ready to strike or run.
Katey wagged her head and held her hands up in surrender. “I didn’t do anything, Darren.”
He wanted to roar, wanted to shout and demand an explanation for the strange visions. She had to have done something. Darren had been fine before she touched him.
Beast Within (Loup-Garou Series Book 3) Page 13
