by Eden Myles
Generally speaking, he was very good at his job as head chef at the bistro, a position he had worked hard to achieve, but everyone messed up sometimes. He could see Nat snickering from behind her hand as she put the finishing touches on a crème brulee with a hand torch. He shrugged a What can you do? response. He was a fairly easygoing chef; he could afford to make a fool of himself once in a while without his crew making fun of him or enjoying his display of idiocy.
While the relief cook busied himself with mopping up the mess he’d made, William untied his apron and hurried to join Dylan.
“Good job, Chef Boyardee!” Dylan grinned mischievously.
William shrugged, ruffled her hair, barely able to hold back a smile despite her ribbing. “Accidents happen, even to the elite.”
“You’re such a snob, William!”
The two embraced and Dylan gave him a kiss on the cheek.
Seeing Dylan, his adopted daughter, always lifted his spirits. She didn’t often visit him, but when she did, it brightened his whole day—his whole week, in fact. Dylan was a dedicated pack member of the Three Rivers Pack in northeast Pennsylvania, and William was what the others called a lone wolf. A wolf without a dedicated pack. It was not a lifestyle that most werewolves embraced, but he hadn’t had much choice in the matter. His father’s pack didn’t want him, even being a Pedigree, and his current pack was far too strict for his own liking. They enjoyed living “off the grid,” a lifestyle that William had never been able to get behind. Despite being a born werewolf, he liked the big city, the wild energy of the people around him. He liked feeling like an intricate cog in a much greater machine; it made him feel he was valuable, needed.
“What brings you out to the city?” he said.
Some of his coworkers looked on at their open display of affection, probably wondering why the pretty, sixteen-year-old African-American girl was hanging around his neck like her life depended on it, but he didn’t care about them. He didn’t care about the scandal they might be causing. Nat knew he had a child that he had adopted, one that lived away at “school,” and it was only ever Nat’s opinion that he worried about.
“I wanted to see you,” Dylan told him, finally letting go, “take you to lunch.” Her voice was strained and not her own.
“Sounds bad,” he joked, setting her down. “What did you do? Or what did I do this time?” He smiled to show that he was kidding.
Dylan didn’t smile back. Her face was tense and serious, and for a brief moment her eyes shifted to wolf and back again. She glanced around to make certain the others in the kitchen were out of earshot. “It’s Ash, William,” she said in a soft lilt. “Our alpha is dead.”
***
Chapter Two
Dylan was small and slender and deceptively fragile-looking. As a human, she’d been born with a low birth weight to a mother who was a raging heroin addict. A born addict herself, with no choice in the matter whatsoever, Dylan had grown up hard and fast. By the time she was sixteen, she was selling everything she owned—even her body—just to get to her next hit. It was all she lived for, all she wanted, and she was willing to beg, borrow and steal for it.
Then, about ten years ago, she picked William’s pocket and he’d run her down, trapping her in a dead-end alley. She hadn’t expected that the tall, slender guy with the dark hair and stained cook’s whites would be able to do that, but he had. But when William finally cornered the small black street girl against a chain-link fence, he saw how badly off she was. She was painfully undernourished, with the bones of a small bird, and he couldn’t find it in his heart to turn her over to the police. They’d just put her in juvie, let her sweat out her addiction in some miserable flophouse, then throw her into foster care like a hundred other girls like herself. Within weeks she’d be back out on the streets, pushing and using.
Instead, he’d bought her lunch. Back then, William hadn’t been the head chef he was now. At the time, he’d been a lowly line cook working at a second-rate greasy-spoon in downtown Brooklyn, and money had been scarce. He bought her a hamburger and fries, and Dylan started talking. She was hesitant at first, then tried hooking him as her next john, but after a few moments, she gave up when she realized she wasn’t getting anywhere with him.
“I’m Dylan. You’re gay, aren’t you?” she said around a mouth of half-masticated bread and cheap beef.
“I’m William,” he told her. “William Le Feuvre.”
“Is that like French?”
“Medieval French, actually.”
“You’re descended from medieval Frenchmen?” Dylan sounded impressed.
William laughed. “Well, my ancestors eventually migrated to England to escape the witch hunts.”
The girl’s eyes grew even wider. She swallowed a chunk of burger before saying, “So were your family witches?”
“No,” he laughed. “Not witches.”
They went back to his place and he set her up on the sofa. “Is there someone I can call?” he asked. “Someone who might be worried about you?”
Dylan looked frightened. “No. There’s no one.”
“I don’t mind…”
“Nobody cares about me,” she blurted out. And then, realizing what she’d said, added, “I mean…that sounded worse than it is. You know.” She shrugged.
He nodded. He knew exactly. A broken home, an abusive or overbearing parent. He felt a sudden, deep kinship with Dylan.
“You know, I could steal you blind while you’re asleep in the other room,” Dylan warned him while he got her extra blankets.
“If you want this crap so bad, take it. None of it is worth anything.”
She looked around the peeling-painted walls of his coldwater, rent-controlled apartment. “I could take your food,” she pointed out.
“Only if you’re willing to wrestle it away from the cockroaches first,” he answered, smoothing out her bed.
She laughed, a child’s laughter. He had a feeling she didn’t have much occasion to do that on the streets. But soon enough she started to choke and spit up blood.
William made her sit down. “You’re sick, aren’t you?” he said, fetching her a relatively clean napkin to wipe her mouth.
“Probably,” she said, looking tiredly at the blood on the napkin. “Been with a lot of guys.” She shrugged in a resolute way that broke his heart. “AIDS or some shit. Who the fuck knows.” She looked up at him and said, “You gonna throw me out ‘cause I’m dirty?”
“You’re not dirty,” William insisted. He scooted down to look Dylan in the eye. A thought had occurred to him, a dangerous one. “What if I could make you better?”
She laughed at that. But when he explained what he was—what she could be—she stopped laughing. He even demonstrated for her by removing his clothes and shifting into his wolf form. He was a Pedigree, a born werewolf, and it wasn’t difficult. The transition was very smooth for someone born to the life, though it would be more difficult for Dylan. There would be some pain, though nothing like what she was experiencing now.
Dylan’s eyes widened in amazement, but he could smell no fear on her. She was so far gone, so done with the world and her life as she knew it, she didn’t even have the energy to run away from him. Instead, she got down on the floor and petted his ruff like he was a beloved family pet. “Yeah,” she told him honestly and smiled when he licked her face. “I want to be like you.”
That old greasy spoon had long since closed up, but William managed to fine one almost identical. Dylan sat across from him now, staring at her menu but saying nothing. When the server arrived to take their orders, William ordered them hamburgers and fries, but Dylan didn’t react at all.
William drank some water from his glass, cleared his throat, and said, “How did it happen? Tell me.”
Dylan stared down at the chipped Formica tabletop a long moment before answering. “Ash was attacked by a werewolf. An Orphan. We have no idea who it was. He got a call that some new guy was holed up in a flophouse in Chinatown, and Ash
—being Ash—went to see about him. The wolf just tore him apart like it was rabid…insane.” Dylan swallowed hard and blinked against the tears in her eyes.
Ash had been their alpha, and they had both owed so much to him. He’d been head of the Three Rivers Pack for more than a hundred years, but had been old beyond old—older than even Roman, William’s father, and that was saying a lot. William had briefly gone to live with Ash and his alpha mate Saada after Roman had cast him out of the Bloodmoon Pack. Ash had been the closest thing to a father that William had ever really had. Ten years ago, William had sent Dylan to live with Ash after he’d bitten her into the life. Ash had trained his daughter well how to live as both wolf and woman.
William ran a hand over his face, feeling the scruff at his chin. Sometimes things got so crazy down at the bistro, he wound up doing double and triple shifts, not sleeping for days at a time. “Didn’t he take Errick as backup?”
Dylan eyed him carefully. William and Errick had a lot of bad blood between them. They’d been close once—too close—but Errick had always been fiercely loyal to Ash and the pack. When William had made the decision to go to the city, Errick had refused to come with him. He said pack was family, and that a wolf would never betray his family. That was something humans did, and Errick was no fan of the humans. “The guy was newly turned. Ash didn’t think he had to. It was horrible, William. He never had a chance to react before it was all over.”
William felt an irrational stab of anger. He should have taken Errick with him. As Ash’s second-in-command, he’d been chosen because he was the fiercest fighter among them, an enormous Norseman with a long history of battles going all the way back to the Viking Invasion. As pack lieutenant, it was his duty to protect his alpha. But before William could voice his criticism, Dylan leaned across the table and took William’s hand. “Don’t blame Errick, William. If you saw Ash’s wounds…the terrible things that…creature…did to him, you’d be glad he wasn’t there. It wasn’t like a werewolf at all! More like a…demon. A fucking act of God.”
The server returned with their platters and the two of them picked listlessly at their food for a few minutes while William tried to wrap his head around the situation. A wolf that could tear their alpha apart? It didn’t seem possible.
“What else does the pack know about this…creature?”
Dylan slowly shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t smell like any wolf we know. We think it may be someone new—maybe someone from Roman’s new pack.”
William stiffened and suddenly the food was too much. It churned in his stomach. He set his fork down.
“You do know about Roman’s troubles last year? About how Anya was deposed?”
“Yes, I’ve heard,” William said. Even being a lone wolf, he’d heard the stories. The year before, his father had taken a new lover, some fresh young Pedigree from the city, and together the two of them had disposed of Anya, a tyrannical alpha queen, if ever there was one. Roman had spent the past year rebuilding his pack, or so the stories went. A part of William had waited, wondering if Roman would contact him, welcome him back into the fold now that Anya was out of the picture and no danger to him, but it never happened.
Why would Roman want you back after you’d shamed the whole pack? It was, of course, easy to be so pragmatic, to blame Anya. But the fact of the matter was he knew his father never wanted to see him again. Their last fight almost a hundred years ago still rang in his ears as if they’d had it only ten minutes ago.
They’d been living in England at the time, at his father’s estate, the shadow of the Great War hanging over all their heads like an angry thundercloud. Roman had suggested taking the pack and fleeing to America. He hoped to escape any involvement in the escalating conflict slowly eating a hole through Europe like some cancer, but William had been born and raised on the estate. He considered himself an Englishman. A man. As such, he felt it was both his right and duty to join the front, to fight alongside the other young men so willing to sacrifice their lives down in the trenches. Roman had forbid it. He said the conflict was a human issue, no concern of theirs. William was a wolf, not a man. He owed the humans no such loyalties.
“Yet we live as men,” he’d explained to his father that day in the drawing room. He’d only been back from boarding school ten minutes and his father was already setting down guidelines. “You make their money. You spend it. This is our life, Father, our world. Can’t you see that?”
But Roman couldn’t be reasoned with. He was too old, too mired in their legends and traditions. He looked at William from across the room in that regal way he had, like he was king of the world. “You are not a man made wolf, my son. You are a wolf in a human skin. You need the pack, and it is my job to protect it.”
“I don’t need your protection!”
“Their world is not safe! Our world…”
“I’m sick of your world! Your pack! Your rules! What about what I want?”
“What do you want?” Roman asked, but William couldn’t formulate the words, his desires…his anger. What did he truly want? He wanted to fight alongside the humans he called his friends, the young men he’d gone to university with, be a part of their world. He wanted to fall in love, have children. Those were the things he wanted. Yet they were human things…
Roman had gone to him, clutched his face. His eyes simmered golden-yellow with anger. “My son, you are a prince among your kind. A Pedigree. You are my heir and my greatest hope for the future of our people. Yet you would throw your lot in with the humans who would destroy you in a heartbeat if they knew what you were?”
“You don’t know what they are! How can you, when you live your life secreted away in this ivory tower?”
“Will—”
William had thrown his father’s touch off. “You don’t know me. You’ve never known me! You avoid me because of who I am. What I am…!”
Roman glared at him because he knew what William was saying was true. William had spent his entire adolescence alone at the estate while his father was off trading stock in London or throwing lavish parties and expanding his pack, his only companions his father’s servants. And as soon as he had come of age, his father had sent him away to school.
Picking up his travel bags, William straightened his shoulders and said, “I’m giving you what you want, Father. I’ll no longer be a part of your life or your pack. I’ll no longer be the bastard son you are so ashamed of.”
It was the last words he’d spoken to his father before he left the estate for parts unknown.
You were greedy and selfish. You always did put your own needs above those of the pack. You’ve disappointed him.
That was true enough. He became a wanderer in distant lands, a jack of all trades, a wolf without a pack. He’d chosen the human world over the world of his people. He’d chosen to be alone rather than to accede to the tyranny of Roman’s rule.
But he soon learned what a terrifying place the world was without your family. A few years living on his own sent him fleeing back to his father’s house, ashamed of the way he was missing him, his own kind. He was willing to beg if need be, the prodigal son, but Roman would not see him. One of the pack said it was because Roman, in his despair, had aligned himself with Anya, a dangerous woman with a hunger for Pedigrees. He said this was Roman’s way of protecting his only son, but William had his doubts. He knew his father had a talent for holding a grudge.
Turned away, he vowed to never speak to Roman again and attempted to scrape out a life for himself. Eventually he came to the States, turning to Ash for some illusion of comfort, of brotherhood, only to leave his pack a few years later when he realized that Ash’s pack would never really join the human world, either. If anything, they seemed to be devolving into savages even as the world changed around them.
Now Ash was dead, and his father still wanted nothing to do with him. In a way, William had disappointed both his fathers.
An even more disturbing thought occurred to him, and he pinned Dyl
an with a sharp look. “How is Saada holding up?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“Errick isn’t running roughshod over her?”
Dylan just shot the look right back at him. “You’re being very childish about Errick, you know. He’s doing his best to hold the pack together in the midst of this crisis. And no, before you ask, he didn’t send me. I came on my own. I thought you might like to know about Ash’s passing from me, rather than receive some soulless email or text or whatever it is the kids are using these days.”
William quirked a bitter smile. “But that’s not all, is it?”
“William…”
“Level with me, Dylan. Why are you here? Really?”
Sighing, Dylan sat back in her seat. “I thought…” She swallowed hard and lowered her eyes, unable to face him with this request. “I thought maybe you could retrieve an optogram from Ash, some clue as to the identity of his killer. We’ve turned over every rock, but we have no other leads.”
William bit his lip. An optogram was a supposed image remaining on the retina of the eye after death. When William was a young man in the nineteenth century, there was a popular belief that the eye could record the last image seen before death, but it was a belief quickly debunked by the turn-of-the-century scientists. There were no images projected on the dead person’s eyes—at least, not in his experience—but he could, under the right circumstances, access the last thoughts a person had before they died by staring into his or her eyes. “You know my power doesn’t work that way.”
Dylan shook her head long-sufferingly. “However you do it, will you come back and at least try? For Ash? For me? William, you’re all we have left.”
***
Chapter Three
In the early 1980’s, the Three Rivers Pack withdrew from society. By then, Ash had made a considerable fortune stock-chopping and taking advantage of the new trickle-down economy that Reaganomics had generated. Much like Roman had done during the great shipping expansion of the nineteenth century, he’d netted his pack an obscene fortune. Their coffers were fatter than most Middle Eastern countries. They were set up for ten lifetimes.
