Marked (The Pack)

by Cox, Suzanne

  I grabbed a nearby chair and slid it in front of Louise and sat down. “I didn’t ask him to lie for me. You’re right. I did go with Channing and her friends. I know you told me not to let her know about being a werewolf, but she knew it already and admitted she was one too. The way she talked about becoming and being free, I only wanted to try it with them and see what it was like.”

  “And?”

  I stared at the floor. “It was amazing, like flying, like being so free. I never wanted it to end. But then we came across the couple in the cemetery. I had no idea what they were going to do.” I finally met her gaze and felt a knot constrict my throat. Tears filled my eyes. “I tried to stop them, Aunt Louise. I promise I tried.”

  Louise put a hand on my leg as I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

  “When I tried to pull them off the people, one of the bigger wolves attacked me. He had knocked me down on the ground. That’s when Myles came and pulled me away. I wanted to stay, to try and help, but he wouldn’t let me.”

  “There was nothing you could have done. Once the pack is on a kill you can’t stop them. It’s what I tried to warn you about.”

  “I thought it was you, you know, killing those people. Sometimes I thought it was me. I could see images in my head of the night the woman was killed. Then I found the bloody t-shirt. That night in the cemetery, I remembered what really happened. You saved me before, when I first got here.”

  She nodded. “What you don’t understand is that the Fenryrians want, even need, to get members of our pack to join them. They’ve only thought about turning more and more people into werewolves so they can have greater power in the world. They’ve never worried about maintaining the blood lines of the original werewolves, so over time they have fewer and fewer members who have the strength and powers of the genetic werewolves.”

  “But I thought we were the genetic werewolves and they just had a virus.”

  “In the beginning we were all genetically born werewolf. But the virus developed in one of their pack. They wanted everyone to have it, so they inbred among each other until finally the entire Fenryrian pack carried the virus in their body. They passed it to their offspring as well. Over time the genetic werewolves had children with wolves who were originally human and they had less and less powers. Only those who have bloodlines of the beginning pack have the strength and the powers and the ability to reproduce children with the same powers. So naturally, they need to replenish their pack from ours whenever they can. Anytime they can get a member of our pack that has been born with special abilities to come over, it’s so much better for them.”

  “But how do the Lycernians keep their pack strong?”

  “It’s because we marry and reproduce with those of our own kind.”

  I made a face. “Isn’t that like incest?”

  Louise laughed. “I guess in some way it might be. But there are members of the Lycernian pack all over the world. It’s not just the people in our group that travel with us. There are other small packs that travel together and some genetic werewolves who live on their own in the world and don’t travel with any pack. They have homes and live regular lives. Occasionally, Lycernians marry humans that are non-werewolf and have mixed children.”

  “Like me.”

  Louise stared at me quietly and for once I could meet her eyes without feeling overpowered.

  “Yes, like you,” she agreed. “But we discourage it really. It’s harder for the children to find their place and adjust.”

  “Again, like me.”

  “Exactly like you.” Louise paused. “It will still be difficult when you go home. The Fenryrians will still try to get you to join them. The fewer people who know you’re a werewolf the easier it will be for you. We’ll introduce you to some of our pack in your home area that live there permanently, but you still need to learn skills to control yourself. They’ll help you.”

  “It was so different with Channing and the others when we had no thoughts about control. It was different than the times I’ve been with you.”

  Leaning back in her chair Louise sighed. “Of course it can be wonderful to completely let go. But to be able to have the control to reign that in when you want is even more empowering. This time, you knew you didn’t want to attack those people. Next time you might be so caught up with the pack, you can’t stop. You’ll wake up in the morning and find you’ve done something horrible, something you wish you’d never done.”

  I scratched at a spot on the shorts I’d borrowed from Myles. Louise sat quietly across from me, the only noise in the room the occasional whirring of the computer. “Has that happened to you before? Have you done something you wish you hadn’t?”

  Louise brows drew together. “Yes, I have, and I don’t want that for you.”

  Getting to my feet, I smiled softly. “Thanks for telling me this. I know you haven’t wanted to give me too much information at once.”

  “I’m not holding out on you without reason, Alexis. The more you know about our pack and the workings of it, the greater danger you may be in.”

  “Danger? Why?”

  “The Fenryrians are constantly trying to find out what our smaller packs are doing, where we are with the antiviral research, who are the strongest members of the pack, who are the best warriors, the next leaders. They can use all that information to help their cause. If they think they can get it from you, they’re going to try everyway they can. They won’t care if they hurt you in the process.”

  I turned and walked to the door, deciding that the last bit was more information than I’d wanted.

  “Do you want to use the computer to email some of your friends in Chicago?” Louise called out before I made it into the hallway.

  I paused. My friends at home, my quest to part of their crowd, all of it seemed a world away now. My life felt so different. It was hard to imagine that things would remain unchanged when I got home.

  “No. I haven’t heard from them all summer. I’ve sent several emails and called their cell phones, but they’ve never answered. I’ve decided to quit trying.” I started through the door, but stopped halfway and glanced back. “I guess they weren’t really my friends anyway.”

  “Maybe not.” Louise agreed. “You’ll make friends, real friends, soon.”

  “Werewolf friends?”

  Louise smiled. “Absolutely.”

  I waited a second longer. “Why would they say I shouldn’t have come here?”

  Louise didn’t respond immediately, only stared at me before saying softly, “I can’t answer that.” She spun the chair around to face the computer again.

  Can’t or won’t? I thought to myself as I pulled the door closed. I went to get my pajamas before going to take a bath. Maybe I would find some werewolf friends in Chicago and hopefully, I wouldn’t mistakenly make friends with someone who wanted to kill me or else turn me into a killer. I recalled how I’d been so inexplicably drawn to Channing and her friends. Did that mean somewhere deep in my werewolf psyche I wanted to be like the Fenryrians, to attack and kill whenever I felt the urge? I shivered and hurried to the bathroom where I dialed the water temperature to hot and started filling the tub.

  ***

  A clanging from beneath my pillow woke me. Keeping the pillow in place, I snaked my hand under it and turned off the alarm. Slipping on a big t-shirt over my sleeping shorts and tank top, I left the room to tip toe down the stairs. On the back deck Myles sat waiting for me. I dropped into the chair next to him.

  “Louise knows about what happened the other night at the cemetery.”

  “You told her?”

  “I couldn’t lie to her.”

  “Really, since when?”

  “Since now, okay.”

  He slapped the arms of the chair. “Great, now she’ll never believe anything I say again.”

  “That’s not true. She wasn’t mad at you. A deputy came by and told her about the dead guy in the cemetery. She had a good idea what had happened anyway. I’m s
ure she appreciates you saving my neck.”

  “Well, what’s important now is finding a way to stop or at least slow down this pack. I think Channing might be the key.”

  I leaned forward. “What can we do?”

  “Brynna will be home day after tomorrow so we’ll plan for you to get together with Channing after that.”

  “Why can’t we do it tomorrow? Can’t we do it ourselves? What do we need Brynna for?”

  “No, we can’t do it ourselves, we need her too.”

  I stifled a groan. “Fine, so what should I do? Tell Channing I want to run with her again?”

  “Right, but this time you’ll have to change in front of her where she can see you.”

  “That means I have to…” I frowned. “You know.”

  “What, take your clothes off in front of her? You’re both girls. Does it matter?”

  “It’s just standing there with no clothes then going through the change in front of someone is strange. It’s like she’ll know something about me that I might not want her to know.”

  “But it’s exactly what we’re trying to do. We want to find out something about her I’m sure she doesn’t want us to know. Besides, you can always wear old clothes that you don’t mind tearing up. I buy a bunch of cheap stuff from discount stores just for that reason.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “That’s a good idea. And while we’re changing I’ll look at her arm to try and find the symbol.”

  “Right.”

  “How do I get her to let me see it?”

  He scuffed his tennis shoes on the floor. “I don’t know. You’ll have to think that one up on your own. Maybe you could tell her you’re nervous or scared and you want her to hold your hand.”

  “Oh yeah, that’ll sound good.” I stared up at the stars for a moment. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

  “This is what you’ll be looking for.” He pulled papers out of the pocket of his worn khaki shorts and passed them to me. “Here’s the symbol for the Fenryrian pack. See this line. It has an arrow at the top pointing up the arm toward the head. If they are human and infected with the regular virus, the symbol will be these two side-by-side vertical lines with a sideways X crossing at the top of the two lines. A mutated strain of the virus will be the same symbol as someone with the plain virus, plus another vertical line with a diagonal line running at an angle, starting higher on the left passing through the line to the right.”

  Myles leaned back motioning for me to keep the papers when I tried to hand them back to him. “Keep them. You’ll need to study them to be sure you can tell the difference and be ready to describe what you saw. Don’t let Louise see it, though. She’ll only wonder what we’re doing and start asking questions.”

  “Aren’t we doing a good thing?”

  “We are, but we’re really not fully trained to do it. You’re not even trained at all. What they don’t understand is that it will be so much easier for us to get this done because you’re already in Channing’s circle.”

  “I see your point. But I have a good memory, so you can take these. I don’t think I’ll need to study them.”

  He leaned toward me in a rush and grabbed the hand that held the papers at the wrist. “Alexis, the thing we haven’t discussed and that maybe you haven’t considered, is how difficult it will be for you to focus while you yourself are becoming. You have no training and to be honest I’m not sure if you can do it at all. Since you do have the least self control of any person I know.”

  I jerked my hand away from him. “I can do it, so don’t worry.” Standing quickly, I went to the door that led to the kitchen. “I’ll find what you need to know and help you this once, but after that I’ll be going back to Chicago. I’m through worrying about what this pack or that pack is doing. And I’m done trying to stop the Fenryrians from doing what they want. I don’t know why you care anyway. Let them turn everybody into a werewolf. What difference does it make? Why can’t you guys do what you want and let them do what they want?”

  Myles walked toward the steps of the deck. “You’re not thinking straight right now. Eventually, you’ll find out that if you don’t agree with the Fenryrian pack and don’t do as they do, they will kill you.”

  “Really? So how come any of you are still around?”

  “Because we kill them first.”

  Myles walked away, leaving me standing at the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I put away the cleaning supplies and went outside the cabin to help Louise load plastic boxes into the dusty black Yukon. She handed me an empty container. “If you’ll go in the music room and box up those little instruments, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Okay.” I held the box in my hand and stood there. “I can’t believe day camp is over.”

  “Really? I thought you’d be glad your sentence of punishment was up here. You’ll be going home soon.”

  I bounced the container against my leg. “I know. The kids were kind of fun, though. I might want to do it again sometime. You know, maybe next summer.”

  Louise smiled. “I’ll remember that,” she paused, “next summer.”

  I nodded and hurried away, not sure if I wanted to kick myself for offering to spend another summer with Louise and her friends, especially after I told Myles I was done with them. Outside, I heard Louise calling. I snapped the lid on the full box. Glancing around the room to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, I flipped off the light and hurried to the car.

  Louise put the box I’d filled in the back and looked at me. “When do you turn sixteen?”

  “In a month, why?”

  “Do you know how to drive?”

  My eyes narrowed. Where was Louise going with this? “I’ve driven in our neighborhood. I do okay.”

  Louise tossed me the keys. “Let’s go. You can drive around the park here until you get used to the car, then we can go to Angeline’s for dinner.”

  “What about eating with all your friends?”

  “We’re not doing that tonight since we had to stay late and pack everything from camp. It’ll be easier to eat out.”

  I decided not to ask anymore questions in case Louise changed her mind. I bolted to the driver’s seat and had my seatbelt snapped in place before she got in.

  “Does this mean I can start driving myself instead of taking the four-wheeler?”

  “What? You don’t like the four-wheeler anymore?”

  I started the engine and we rolled down the drive. With a wave of her hand Louise indicated a side road that led deeper into the park and I turned.

  “I do still love the ATV, but it’s not so great when it’s raining or when you don’t want to mess up your hair.”

  Louise laughed. “I guess you’re right, maybe next summer when you actually have your license.”

  I kept driving and didn’t comment. I had already decided not to think about next summer.

  Thirty minutes later, I steered into the parking lot of Aucoin’s Seafood Market and Restaurant, a really mundane name for a strange lady like Angeline. We took a seat in a booth near the back of the eating area where no other customers were sitting. A young woman took our order and disappeared.

  “What will you guys do now that day camp is over? Will you stay here or go somewhere else?”

  “Oh, I guess we’ll be here in Lebeaux for a month or so longer, then we’ll leave.” Louise positioned and repositioned the napkin with her silverware wrapped inside. “It will be a group decision. We’ll meet in a few weeks and decide where we need to be. Then we’ll go.”

  I sat without speaking, staring at the bubbles forming around my straw in the glass of soda the waitress had brought. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it.

  “What?”

  I looked up. “You wouldn’t tell me where you were going even if you did know, would you?”

  The wry smile Louise gave me answered the question, but she spoke anyway. “No, I wouldn’t, and neither should Myles or Brynna, so don’t put the
m on the spot by asking.”

  “I won’t.” I took a swallow of soda and felt a shadow fall over us. Angeline stood at the end of our booth. She stared at us for several seconds before sliding into the seat beside Louise.

  “So, this one is finally learning all the secrets of her heritage.”

  “Just the ones she needs to know.”

  Angeline frowned. “That’s no good to her, is it?”

  Louise gave the woman a hard stare. “It’s the way it’s going to be.”

  The old woman met my aunt’s glare. “Maybe for today, maybe tomorrow too, but not for long. You can’t let this one go her own way, Lou.”

  Choosing to ignore the woman’s warning Louise changed the subject. “What about the boy in the cemetery? I thought you were going to be able to help prevent some of the attacks. I thought you had this town protected.”

  My glass jumped as the old woman banged her hand on the tabletop.

  “Don’t you be puttin’ that on me,” she hissed angrily through tight lips. “I have no power in that place. Why you not askin’ this one. She was there. I saw it in the blood, saw her there and the other who led her away.”

  If I could have shoved myself into the cushion of the banquet, I would have. I wanted to disappear, but obviously the woman could see me no matter where I was, so what was the use.

  “I… I tried to stop them. One of them tried to kill me.”

  The woman sneered at me. “Kill you? They won’t be killin’ you girl.” She turned on Louise. “You should never have brought this one here. I was wrong to think this was the best place for her. We had enough troubles without her. Now they only be gettin’ worse. It’s because of her.”

  Angeline’s voice had reached a shriek. She pointed a bony finger across the table at me.

  “Grandma, enough.”

  The girl from the shop in New Orleans, Raina, appeared and caught Angeline by the arm. “They need you in the back. The gumbo isn’t right.”

  She pulled the older woman from the seat and propelled her toward the back of the restaurant where the kitchen was. I sat in stunned silence while Louise stared at the table. Raina appeared again with plates of food in her hand. She placed the steaming boiled shrimp in front of us then pulled a chair from one of the tables and sat at the end of our booth.