"To be sure we reserve enough for future generations, we will retain fifty sectares square for our tribe. There is a tribe to the east and another to the south, but you could make a claim on the lands to the west or north." Looking at Deliverance, she said, "Perhaps you could show the alpha his options so that he can make an informed decision."
Deliverance took Grey to the lands to the west and north.
"This is paradise for wolves."
Grey couldn't help but be elated. It was the first time he had felt optimism about the future since he was a very young wolf. He was reminded about how good it had once felt to have that blood-coursing tingle of aliveness.
He had raised a son without the benefit of a soft touch to his skin or a gentle breath near his ear. He had thought of nothing except his duty to his child and the welfare of his people. And, while he was busy being responsible, his heart had withered and dried up. Somewhere along the way he had become hard and cold and never realized it until that day.
"Yes." The demon looked around trying to view the landscape through the eyes of a wolf. "Paradise for wolves, but not for men. Your people have grown accustomed to human magic. You have vehicles on your reservation, electricity, communication equipment, some even have satellite TV."
Grey sighed and nodded. "It is true and something that I need to make my people aware of before they make a final decision."
"Good. On to Shrifthet."
They visited Shrifthet briefly so that Grey could confirm the demon's claim of plentiful females. Deliverance said that he would need to know the exact number of young wolves interested, along with their names, so that he could procure visas and living arrangements.
"How much money will be required to pay for living arrangements?"
"None. The Order will pick up the tab."
Stalkson wasn't sure he liked that idea. "We can pay our way. We have... resources."
"Whatever you say. I need to make a short stop on the way back if you don't mind. Got something to drop off with my mother's sister."
"Alright."
"What is that look for?"
"I... just never thought of demons as having mothers, much less aunts."
"Well. I do."
"Okay."
The exchange seemed to bother Deliverance. "You knew I had a daughter."
"Yes."
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"Well, if you knew I have a daughter, then why does it come as such a surprise that I also have a mother and an aunt?"
"Why are you acting pissy?"
"I'm not."
"You are. And I'm not offering either an apology or a hug."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"You know, wolf, I've noticed that you're very partial to having the last word."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"Okay."
They walked out of the passes into a forest on the edge of a large park. "Wait here."
***
CHAPTER_12
Grey stood in the shadows on the periphery of a vast area of park gardens surrounded by a forested apron of pine trees that reached for the heavens. On the far side of the park he could see the spires of modern glass buildings rising higher even than the trees. A city. A densely populated city where humans lived and worked in buildings with glass outer walls in a variety of colors. One would never guess an urban area was nearby, based on the deserted appearance of the park. The hundred foot slash pines did an amazing job of quieting the noise of the city beyond.
Though the werewolf king was of the opinion that nature didn't need improving, he had to admit that the sophisticated design of botanical placement, fountains, walkways, berms, canals, and grassy areas was pleasing to the eye and soothing to the spirit. There were also large, dense patches of flowers that were red with an intensity that didn't occur in his world.
The centerpiece was a large white marble building similar to the style of the Parthenon except that each of the supporting columns was actually a giant statue of a young woman in Greco-Roman style dress and no two were alike. It was an imposing structure that dominated the parkland in such a way as to suggest that the park was there to serve the purpose of the building.
In his world it would be assumed to be some sort of temple, but there was no guessing what it might be on Throenark - a laundromat for all he knew. He noticed that there were seven smaller buildings at the rear connected by covered walkways resembling fingers.
He wished he hadn't been ordered to wait. First, he didn't like taking orders and found that it made his teeth grate together of their own accord. Second, he especially didn't care for that order since it contradicted his desire to give the building a closer inspection. That impulse, in itself, was curious because he wouldn't have described himself as someone who was interested in art. After a few seconds of deliberation, he decided to follow his own counsel about where he would wait out the demon's family errand.
Fascinated by the sculpted relief apron that wound around the top of the sculpture just under the roof, Grey walked toward the rear. The frieze was a mural, apparently depicting either folkloric or historical events of the local culture. It was hard to interpret their meaning without knowing more. A door to one of the annex buildings opened suddenly and immediately drew his eye.
A group of young women emerged wearing red silk the same color as the patches of those remarkable scarlet blooms. They seemed to be conversing happily as they made their way toward the central building. They wore long, hooded, sleeveless shifts with side slits to the knee, cinched at the waist with thin gold belts with serpent clasps. The fabric was thin enough to conform to their figures, but loose enough for ease of movement. A sudden breeze whipped up and blew the hood back from one of them. Laughing to the others, she caught it in the breeze and pulled it back over her dark auburn brown hair, but not before he had seen her face.
He saw her.
And he wanted her.
It was as simple as that.
It was as complicated as that.
The sensation of instant attraction was foreign to Grey. He didn't know if it was the surprise or the feeling that made him uncomfortable, but he wasn't at all sure he liked the feeling.
It was outside anything he'd ever experienced or prepared for. He was sexually stimulated by the smell of bitches in heat. When the bitch was his mate, he acted on the impulse to mount, preferably in wolf form. It was urgent. It was compelling. It was an activity that was as necessary to mammals, including werewolves, as eating and breathing, but it wasn't a goal.
Stalkson Grey had always been more or less disinterested in sex, outside the occasional copulation for procreation's sake. His preoccupation was that of typical alphas. His personal, professional, and recreational goals revolved around power and were fueled by the belly fire of ambition that had been bred into him by generations of alphas. Mating was about breeding and sometimes about companionship. It wasn't about sex for pleasure's sake.
The wolf side of his personality and the human side of his personality had always worked together in perfect harmony, each complimenting the other, making the whole stronger. At least that was true in regard to his single-minded pursuit of gaining and holding the position of alpha. If the human side of his personality had other ideas about interaction with females, it had never surfaced before.
She moved with a grace that suggested healthy muscle beneath the fluid movement of the silk over her body. He studied her with the concentrated focus of a born predator until she disappeared into the rear entrance set back from the porch formed by the monolithic statuary.
Deliverance appeared next to Grey. "I told you to wait."
Grey shrugged. "What do you call this place?"
Deliverance looked around. "Which place? The city, the dimension, what?"
"Let's start with the dimension."
"Throenark."
"Throenark," he repeated. "Do you come here often?"
The demon smiled. "As a matter of fact I
do. A couple of times a week." With that, he took hold of Grey's wrist and they were back in the thick mists of the passes.
When they emerged, the king was looking at his own front door. "You want to come in?"
"No. I want to fuck." Grey turned to him with a stern expression, lines formed between his brows. When Deliverance saw his face, he couldn't help laughing. "Not you!" The demon looked him up and down. "You're pleasing enough to the eye, but too tough. I'll bet your skin feels like old leather."
"If it keeps me from being attractive to you, then it has just become my best feature, so far as I'm concerned. What is important is the plan. What happens next?"
"Running out of juice fast. Fuck first. Talk later." The demon disappeared. Stalkson sighed then went inside to light a fire and collapse in his big chair. It couldn't hurt to have a respite with his own thoughts. He made a sandwich piled high with meat seared on the outside and rare on the inside and ate in front of the fire with a cup of mulled wine.
He sat back feeling full and drowsy. Plans needed to be formed and finalized, but his thoughts turned to the vision of the Throenark woman. When he drifted to sleep in his chair, he dreamed of red silk floating around him, teasing his skin with light touches and pooling at his feet. Reaching to grab the fabric, he felt it move across his fingers and heard the sound of a woman laughing, a human woman laughing. And knocking.
As his eyelids were drifting open he realized that the knocking was coming from the front door. Deliverance stood on the mat, smiling.
"Feeling better I see."
"You wanted to talk plans?"
"Come in. I'd offer you something, but I don't have what you want."
"Truer words, wolf."
They sat by the hearth.
"Going back to what you said about my young bloods not having the courting skills they need..."
"Hmmm?'
"I was thinking about the classes you're going to teach."
Deliverance stared. "You're really serious about that?"
"Who's better qualified to teach sex ed than a sex demon?"
"You have a point."
"Well?"
"Well." Deliverance pulled his hair to the side and occupied himself braiding it. He grinned. "Like a slide show presentation. Why not? It would be a first. Incubus tells all. It could be hysterical."
"I don't want it to be hysterical. It's a serious subject. I think a serious approach makes more sense. These are young, impressionable minds and I don't want to give them a tainted view of natural processes."
The demon narrowed his eyes. "Jumping Jehosophat. You don't know any more about pleasing a woman than they do!"
Grey kept his expression blank and gave away nothing. "I'm a widower. I had a mate." Deliverance just shrugged. "So you agree?"
"I don't know why, but I like you, wolf. I like you and I'm feeling generous so, yeah, you're going to get the crème de la crème of expert advice on how to make a woman scream your name and rut on your leg."
Stalkson sighed as he tried to not imagine the feel of red silk moving against his bare leg. He crouched in front of the fire and poked at it. "That place, the one we went to last..."
"Throenark."
"Yes. I'm curious about the... building."
"Oh. It's a temple. Cult of the Vergins. They've made a religion out of healing.
"They're sort of like a cross between doctors and priestesses. They work with the red vervain that grows on Throenark and nowhere else that I know of. It heals just about anything that ails. Of course the vervain that they grow in the temple greenhouses is a little different than the wild plants."
"So the women I saw..."
"Dressed in red? Those are the thirteen Vergins. Second daughters from aristocratic families who give them into sacred service when they're children in exchange for a blessing that accompanies the family for generations. When the girls turn twenty, they're either released from duty or chosen to serve as one of the thirteen for ten years.
"My Aunt Pandora has been their protector, the acting Grand Mother for two hundred years."
"And you visit her a couple of times a week?"
Deliverance laughed out loud. "Well, I'm not exactly visiting her. As a favor to her, I stop off a couple of times a week and service the Vergins. According to their sacred law, they are never to be touched by the hand of man." When the demon grinned demonically, Stalkson Grey knew what was coming. "But I'm not a man. So it's a win-win-win-win. Everybody's satisfied: my mother, her sister, the pretty little ladies, and moi."
The last thing Grey wanted was to form an image in his mind of Deliverance pleasuring the beauty with tints of mahogany in her hair, but there it was. And it made him seethe. His fists clenched involuntarily. Irrational as it was, he wanted to launch himself at Deliverance, changing form in flight. And he might have if the demon's elemental power was anything other than fire. But the lupine side of Grey's nature had a healthy respect for fire in general and a deathly fear of fire out of control.
"You treat them like a harem?" he growled.
The demon looked surprised by Grey's deep, gravelly tone. "Is that a problem? I assure you they enjoy my attentions. As always, satisfaction guaranteed."
Grey struggled for patience, trying to remember that the demon was the instrument of salvation for the continuation of his species. He told himself that, for the same reason you can't be mad at a woodpecker for pecking, you can't be mad at an incubus for fucking anything willing. At the same time, his imagination was reveling in the imagery of tearing the smarmy look off the demon's face with very long, sharp teeth.
In a dazzling display of self-control, instead of shifting to wolf form and ripping the demon's lips away from his head, Grey said, "Are you going again soon?"
"Day after tomorrow. Why?"
"Just curious," he lied. "I guess I... liked it there."
"So what are you saying? You want to go back and hang out in the trees while I get a fill up?"
"Maybe."
Deliverance laughed. "Sure. Whatever floats it."
***
CHAPTER_13
The stark truth was that Jefferson Unit had been quiet since Monq and Baka had sealed the tunnels. Most of New York's vamp population had grown fat and complacent living in the underground. The irony was that it was one of their own who had planned and executed the operation that turned the vampire version of the easy life into their tomb.
The event had done such a bang up job of extermination that there had been little to do since. Sol shared with Storm and Glen that he worried about the knights losing their edge. They still maintained a duty roster and patrolled, but no longer expected to find anything. It was making them sloppy - a very dangerous thing for a vampire slay..., uh, curer.
"In fact we haven't scored a single cure."
Sol placed his coffee cup in the saucer then leaned back, causing the leather desk chair to squeak and groan.
"It's decision time. And this is what I'm thinking." He paused before steepling his fingers. "Very strange asking other people what they think. I've been keeping my own counsel for a very long time." Glancing between Storm and Glen, he began to lay out his thought process.
"It seems several matters are converging here and need to be sorted out. We're stabling the top Black Swan knights and giving them virtually nothing to do but walk around and pretend to be busy. Likewise, we're hosting Baka and the new stars of his task force without giving them anything to do.
"At the same time we have the arrival of Z Team looming."
"Looming?" Glen asked.
Sol glanced at Storm. "I say that because they're a spirited bunch who can be a handful."
Glen didn't look satisfied with that answer, but Sol forged ahead.
"We can't abandon this facility. For one thing, we need to protect Monq's research."
"And Elora," Storm interjected.
"Yes. And Elora. Not to mention that this is the largest training installation for recruits. It would be silly to uproot the re
search and training aspects of this complex, but I think we need to disperse the knights and medical personnel where they could better be used."
Storm nodded. "I'm betting you've already thought this through to its furthest logical ramifications. So let's hear the whole enchilada."
Glen perked up. "Mexican sounds good."
Storm smiled. Sol ignored him.
"Cleaning out the underground havens here and in Edinburgh pretty much means we can cross those two cities off the list." He turned to Glen."If you were in my place and you were going to split up and relocate our complement of hunters, what units would be under consideration?"
Glen didn't hesitate to answer. "Without having access to the numbers, it's hard to say conclusively, but, working blind, I'm going to guess you'll send them to London, Paris, San Francisco, and Rome. Maybe Brasilia and Buenos Aires."
Sol looked at Storm. "He named the six units I was looking at and he named them in order. Quite remarkable." Sol studied Glen for a minute or so with such an intense scrutiny that even Storm was impressed that his protégé didn't squirm or seem nervous. He sat quietly relaxed, blinking slowly, belying the possibility that he would shoot from his chair if he heard the engine noise of a taco truck nearby.
"I'm thinking it might make the most sense to send Baka's new team to Paris. They've been trained on the use of the cure canister tranq guns, they speak the language, and, since they're not afraid of contracting the virus or being overpowered, they may bring a superior ability to clean out the sewers. So to speak."
Storm nodded. "Sound reasoning."
"That creates a surplus of knights in Paris, so we should disperse some of them to London or Rome depending on who speaks Anglish and who speaks Italian. The extra boys here should be split between San Francisco and Brasilia."
"You should try and keep teams together."
Moonlight: The Big Bad Wolf (Black Swan 4) Page 17
