Vampires, however, who could only infect hueys with their condition to create progeny, were classified as humans, but diseased. To me, the answer was simpler. A vampire could love and be loved, and was at liberty to make decisions based on will, not instinct, if they so chose.
Unconditionally, they were human.
Maybe that’s what drove Igor to study supernatural genetics, I thought as I maneuvered the car through another gentle mountain curve. He was of an age when all maladies came with some level of social damage. What would it be like to live as a supernatural leper? Did he see himself as having some communicable disease, and see the slayers as a cure?
Retracting from completion of grand theories and biological classifications, even I admitted this was perhaps the oddest road trip I had ever taken. Under the light of the blazing sun, the others and I had agreed I’d be safe to drive on the main highway that led south out of the Black Forest region and over the Austrian border without my watchdog awake. As the sun dipped toward the horizon, however, and the purple shadows of the mountains stretched long over the highway, I turned to the urn-like container belted into the passenger seat beside me. To the untrained eye, it would look like nothing more than full-sized coffee thermos, though without any seams. How would anyone suspect it held a vampire inside?
I reached across the divide, tapped a finger on the vessel and pulled the silver back up my arm, past my shoulders, and commanded it to plate the planes of my abdomen. I didn’t want any of it in sight when I met the pack. The smoke held the container’s shape only a moment, so concentrated that it looked like I’d only changed the color of the thermos rather than the materials it was made from. A blink, however, and the cloud swirled, taking on mass where moments ago there had been only miasma.
Yan stretched out long in the seat the moment he was reconstituted. “Thank you. It was getting rather itchy in there.”
He put on his seatbelt, though I doubted a car accident would do anything to him. Unless it managed to take his head off, that was.
I turned down the retro German pop station I’d been listening to for the last two hours, more to annoy me and keep me conscious than to entertain. My annual Herbert Grönemeyer quota was full in one sitting. “We’ve got two more hours until we reach Zeihern. It’s not completely dark yet, but the direct sunlight is gone. I have to stop for gas, and I’d feel better if I wasn’t alone when I did so. You’re not going to burst into flames or anything, are you?”
“A vampire doesn’t burst into flames, we dry out, then scorch, then dissolve into dust,” Yan said flatly. “The light is defusing quickly. I will be fine with this limited exposure.”
“Groovy. So... Want to take turns changing the radio station or have awkward conversations about our lives?”
Yan shut off the radio. “Have you consummated your relationship with your wolf lover yet?”
“Awkward conversation, then.” I flicked on the right blinker as I merged toward the exit. “No offense, Yan, but that’s none of your business.”
He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “In the old days, these things were so much simpler to deduce. If we observed two creatures going into a room together for the day then coming out in certain unkempt ways, we could assume intercourse had occurred. Nowadays, though, your generation has no set rules for social engagement. You and Mr. Somfield, in fact, have been cohabitating for sometime without any intercourse occurring as best we can figure, but...”
The brakes cried to the high heavens as I slammed them down. As soon as I was assured there was no one coming up behind us and I wasn’t blocking the exit, I spun in my seat.
“Who in the hell do you think you are, asking me that kind of stuff?”
Yan shrank back in his seat, finally rediscovering his shame. “Apologies. Time and isolation have made me unpracticed in the art of social convention.”
“Ya think? My sex life is none of your business. How would you like it if I asked what you and Markus do behind closed doors?”
“Markus prefers keeping the doors open...”
My hand shot up. “Oh, my god, that mental picture is going to haunt me forever...” I tried to clear my mind. “How does that happen, anyway? And before you get into details I don’t want to know or will ever want to know, I only mean how did the two of you end up together?”
“You know how curious he is about vampires, and since I came in to the employ of the hoods a decade ago, he’s always been at me for details. I suppose in the last year or so we just sort of... clicked. It has not been without some negotiation. My position necessitates certain... acts which come into conflict with our relationship.”
“No offense—I love my cousin—but he isn’t the ‘lie to my face and I’m okay with that’ type.”
“Oh, I don’t lie to him,” Yan rushed to clarify. “I’ve grown too old to put stock in the benefits of artifice, but both of us understand that our harmony depends on a bit of unscripted discord in the distance. I have no doubt he has his secrets as well.”
Remembering that Markus hadn’t told Yan I was an asenaic, I knew that to be true.
“Not that I’m going to answer, but why would you ask me about sleeping with Tobias?”
Yan’s eyes brightened. “Ah, so you have—"
“STILL none of your business.”
He drew inward. “One of the things that brought Markus and I together is our interest in the other’s peoples. Just as Markus is curious about vampires, I have always been curious about wolfsretters. Hoods, as you say currently. I’ve endeavored to learn as much about your history as I can.”
The full implication of what Yan said took shape in my brain. “What do you know about what really happened to Gerwalta Faust?”
“The only record I’ve ever encountered about those events was one penned by her sister, Matron Helga Faust. But there are... rumors.”
My ears perked up. “Yeah?”
Yan nodded. “That the Betrayer wasn’t Gerwalta Faust at all, but her mother.”
That didn’t make any sense, even if I didn’t buy the commonly-held version of the story as true. “How so?”
“As the saying goes, ‘history is penned by the victors, the truth buried with the victims.’ Have you not ever wondered why Helga is called ‘the Restorer’?”
I chewed on my lips as I moved the car back into drive. “No, but I guess I should have. Anything you can add to that?”
His hands flattened on his legs, rubbing his knees. “One story I heard was that Gerwalta Faust’s mother, Gunda, had a last-minute change of heart about her daughter and saved the baby from harm, staging its death and secreting it out of Schloss Wolfsretter.”
Hope fluttered in the pit of my stomach, making me dizzy. “Do you think that’s true?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Kline, I do. It came from a very reliable source not given to spreading gossip.”
“Yeah, who?”
“Igor Kharmarov.”
Holy shit. Igor? Had he known the whole time that my ancestor survived? How? The answer to that question would have to wait until the next time I saw the professor again. If I ever saw Igor again.
Yan leaned forward, examining me across the divide. “Are you okay, Miss Kline? You’ve gone pale.”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t. “Call me Geri, though. And do you mind if I give you one word of advice before we get to the packlands?”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t ask any of the lupines about their sex lives.”
SEVEN
We left the car parked on the side of a dirt road and moved with lithe steps across grass crisped with frozen dew. Ahead lay six cottages clustered in the midst of a clearing, braced by several utilitarian structures. A little further up the hill stood the remnants of an ancient barn, moist and moss-covered, looking like one of the postcards the summer tourists gobbled up. The style was similar to ones still seen at intervals in the Black Forest, though fewer of the structures remained with each passing decade.
A h
alf moon peered over the mountains, lighting the settlement.
“Which house do we try?” Yan asked. “Or do you suppose the pack is out running?”
I closed my eyes and inhaled, testing the air for hints, sending my senses coursing over the landscape. Then, I felt it. That little tug, a quiver which grew into a wobble in my gut. They were there, up the hill and concealed by the forest, roughly a kilometer away. They’d been moving in the opposite direction, but the moment I reached out to them, I may have inadvertently changed that. Suddenly the pack was on the move, closing in fast. But not all of them. Several of them were closer. Much closer. I didn’t need any supernatural powers to know that part. The frosted, lit windowpanes of one of the residences gave it away to the naked eye.
“Markus ran this pack through the database. Four males, six females, four cubs ranging in age from two to thirteen. Two females are with the two younger cubs inside the biggest house.” I lifted a finger, pointed to the two-storied structure that lay furthest from where the road ended.
Yan’s jaw dropped. “Remarkable. Your senses are so well-tuned as all that?”
“Actually, I’m just using deduction.” My finger flicked up. “That’s the only house with its lights on and smoke coming out the chimney. You should know, though, that the rest of the pack is charging toward us from that ridge up there.”
“I can hear them,” Yan concurred. “I am surprised you can, though. I know hood hearing beats a human’s, but it is nothing compared to a vampire.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the first lupine broke through the tree line, only eight hundred meters to our right. She was tailed by the rest in quick succession, the pack moving in a way I’d rarely observed myself except in nature documentaries. Their circular formation complimented with yips could only be interpreted in one way: they intended to kill.
“We have a plan, right?”
The nerves in the vampire’s voice were undeniable. Wolves and vamps didn’t often cross paths due to their different habitats, but the archives of our peoples included a few times a pack took on a lone vampire and ripped it to shreds. A single vamp may be stronger, but a lupine was just as fast and, in a group, could pull down anything.
“Kinda.” I pushed Yan behind me. “Not sure this is going to work, so be ready to smoke unless you want your throat ripped out.”
“I can’t smoke when I’m scared.”
Brave of him to admit as much.
“Besides,” Yan continued, “Markus loves kissing my throat.”
I readied myself to move. “So didn’t need to know that.”
A wall of barks and growls fell over us, an onslaught that pushed every button my hood instincts had. Strike them. Slay them. Damage them. I lectured my wolfsretter brain, in German even. No! This will work.
Or so I hoped.
It was funny. All my life I had listened to the drive of my nature pushing me to act in ways prescribed by breeding and genetics, and never considered that wolves did the same thing. And since new revelations had me seeing everything from a new perspective, I figured the right thing to do might be the opposite of what instinct demanded.
“Yan, do exactly as I do when I do it.”
My eyes would be glowing silver now, but there was nothing I could do about it. The wolves ripped up ground. Twenty meters. Fifteen meters.
Behind me, Yan’s voice shook. “Geri?”
Ten meters.
Five.
“Geri!”
“Now!”
In the blink of an eye, I folded in on myself, dropping to the ground, burying my head down between my arms, assuming a fetal position on the ground. One of a vampire’s greatest strengths was the ability to move with superhuman acuity. Gravity didn’t pull on Yan any harder than it did me, but I still heard the thud he made even before I’d assumed my position.
The pack surrounded us, and for a moment, when a few pushed their snouts into my hair and clothing, one even nipping my ears, worry gripped me. Would they attack, would they bite? Would they kill? One raked a paw across my head, hopefully just to get a better view of my face. No further comment from Yan, so either he had a remarkably high pain threshold, or the wolves hadn’t touched him.
“Explain yourself.”
The man’s scorched voice, drenched with the thick accent of the Austrian mountains, told me that at least one of the wolves had shifted back into his human form. I fought down the impulse to look up and continued to kiss dirt.
“My name is Geri Kline, relinquished hood of the House of Red, disavowed daughter of Matron Brünhild Kline,” I said. Or at least, I hoped I’d said. I’d been raised to speak basic German, but fear was getting the better of me and I wasn’t sure I’d said it right.
A lupine’s hot breath huffed against my ear as I awaited response. Without my eyes, my ears became my only view of the scene. Quiet whispers wove together in a tangle, the unfamiliar threads of voices difficult to discern. The gruff man—he must be the alpha—spoke with a female. It was the woman, not the man, who addressed me next.
“Why do you travel in the company of a vampire?”
To my relief, Yan answered for himself in German perfected as though god damned Goethe himself were drafting a new work on the vampire’s tongue.
“It is my honor and privilege to accompany Miss Gerwalta Kline into your beautiful packlands. I yield to the grace of your Konigswolf, offering my respect and vow that I am here without issue, seeking no claim but a hope for friendship.”
I cried out as a firm hand twisted my hair in its grip and pulled me to my feet. I couldn’t help but whimper, even as I told myself to do so was to broadcast weakness.
But you are weak, Geri, a little voice inside me mocked. A strong hood would not have thrown herself like pearls before swine.
The naked, middle-aged woman who held me at arm’s length didn’t seem interested in roughing me up though, or of actually causing pain. In fact, she looked at me... confusedly, with deep earthen-colored eyes and skin nearly as fair as the snow that topped the nearby mountains. Her appearance struck the eye, gave me pause for a reason I couldn’t quite put words to. It wasn’t beauty, per se. No, it was some sort of power I sensed from her. She was gentle, but formidable. Dominant. Powerful.
“Your name is Gerwalta?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ma’am? “Like the Betrayer.”
The woman’s face curled. “Who?”
Not all wolves knew of the hood legacy, it seemed. In fact, not all hoods knew more than the name, like a title of a book they’d been read as children rather than a real person, an archetype of evil without the need for context.
“Gerwalta Faust,” I clarified, “the Betrayer.”
As we spoke, other wolves shifted back into their huey forms, one of whom, a young woman who couldn’t be but a year or two younger than me, leaned into the wolf who held me captive.
“It could not be coincidence,” the first said.
The other woman clicked her tongue. “Coincidence is never coincidence.” She turned back to me. “What business does a relinquished hood and a vampire have in these packlands?”
They were never going to believe me. “I came to learn your stories.”
She laughed, turning to the gravel-voiced man. “Did you hear that, Lukas? She says she wants to hear our stories. Lies! A hood wants to hear nothing from a wolf but ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, sir.’”
I tried to wet a mouth that had suddenly gone dry. “Please, I’ve driven all the way from Triberg just for this. All I want is to talk to you, ask you a few questions.”
The first woman smiled and stroked my cheek. “And we will do our best to answer.”
Lukas took half a step forward. “Ann-Marie, you cannot possibly—”
Ann-Marie snapped her fingers and gave Lukas a vicious scowl, silencing him, making him sink back. How curious a behavior for an alpha.
“The road from Schloss Wolfsretter is long,” Ann-Marie continued. “Come. I think dinner i
s just about ready. Go to the alpha’s home. We will dress and join you shortly.”
By this time, all the wolves but two had scratched back into human flesh. As though Ann-Marie were a grand marshal leading a parade, they all fell into line behind her, six naked bodies walking through the crisp Alpine landscape as though strolling across a Brazilian beach in the height of summer. The two in fur pulled up the rear.
Or rears, as the case may be.
Yan drew himself beside me, his eyes fixed on a rather svelte male who looked to be in his early thirties. “Are they always like this? So liberated? So nude?”
I nodded.
“But you don’t seem fazed by it at all.”
“It gets old after a while.”
It didn’t.
“Really?” The vampire grinned. “So when you see Mr. Somfield...”
In an instant, my face flushed. I had, of course, seen Tobias shift from fur to flesh before, but that had been in a time when we’d either been battling for our lives, or before we’d admitted our feelings. Thinking on it now, I didn’t picture myself being so blasé the next time.
Yan clapped me on the shoulder. “Save your breath, Geri. Your pulse says it all.”
Lukas opened the door to the largest home as the others filtered to the other residences. The scene we found was enough to melt the heart: playtime for a chubby-faced toddler and an older girl, perhaps a sister, who must have only recently gained an ability to take fur. She darted between her wolf and her huey forms, drawing the little boy’s squeals with each iteration. Inviting flames leapt about the fireplace, bits of bundled pine branches hung on the walls, and I’d bet twenty euros that all the wood furniture and embroidered cushions were handmade.
“At ease,” Lukas said to the two attending shewolves as they leapt to their feet, instinctively seizing the children and shepherding them behind them. “They are guests. The hood is Gerwalta Kline, the vampire is her chaperone.”
Rebellious Hood Page 6
