Luke scanned the hillside where wide tire tracks disappeared into the tree line. According to the brief news clips he’d seen, this pack of feral lupanthri had to be the source of the reports of wolf-cattle incidents that had the local people up in arms. He’d been very clear with them, more than once, that they were free to live in this area for as long as they could keep their presence entirely secret, according to the primary law of lupans. He had been quite clear that any wolf sightings would be immediate grounds for withdrawal of permission, and possible eradication of the pack, as always.
The mechanic had turned out to be another dead end, and he was close enough to this pack location that he figured he’d better check in now while it would only take a few minutes. Sarah, his contact in this pack, had told him that her sister had attacked a human, and the pack had responded by executing her for her folly, but then they’d refused to take responsibility for the cub, against law and common sense. She had deftly maneuvered them into shifting their territory enough that she could watch over him while he was in wolf form, but without the pack, she could do no more and had sent a message to Luke to come help the boy several months ago. He had used the opportunity to teach Dwayne, his protégé, how to receive and respond to reports of mutinous behavior, as well as teaching him about the crystal skulls, but Dwayne was turning out to be insufficient for the job. Once again, the skills he looked for in the ranks just didn’t seem to be turning up in the population. He shrugged off the weariness that always followed this observation, and got back to the task at hand.
He had to tread carefully where mutiny was concerned, but he needed to talk to Sarah, and find the boycub if he could. His stomach felt sick as he watched for any movement in the trees. He hated to face the possibility of executing pack leaders, and was angry with them for putting him in such a position, but the existence of the entire species required absolute adherence to the laws given to them by their masters. Obey or die; sometimes eliminating those who couldn’t fall in line was the only way to save the rest of them.
He rotated his position so that his left hip was under him rather than his right. Where were they? They weren’t cave dwellers, and he was nearly on top of them. He should at least hear something, someone moving around in the woods somewhere, bringing wood in or some other endless homestead chore. He didn’t want to go into the woods without seeing at least a few of them first. He was a cunning old wolf with sharp senses, but even a cub could get lucky occasionally, and he hadn’t grown to be so old by letting his guard down. He watched a hawk hunting small game. It came soaring from behind an outcropping of rock and circled the meadow between him and the dark forest on the other side of the clearing. Minutes passed by, but Luke’s attention remained on the spaces in between the trees, looking for the slightest shift in the shadows that would betray a living creature. There was nothing, though, and eventually, he had to shift his position slightly, once again, as he continued to watch. Rome wasn’t built in a day, no one knew that better than himself, and miscreants were rarely caught in an hour. It chafed him that he must sit here and wait when the clock was ticking on the werewolf hunter and the cub that he would have to execute as well.
In addition to basic responsibilities, the pack should also be scanning the area at night to determine all life forms for many miles around them, and here was the loner, apparently living in a building by himself, and a hunter, or cryptoclast as they called themselves, right in the heart of their territory. He wasn’t sure which was worse. Every single time that boy interacted with humans was a chance for information to leak, and those leaks could snowball. If the human population became aware of the existence of lupans, it was all over when the overlords returned to check on their creations. Luke had fought too hard and too long to see all his people die.
Luke brought his focus back to the trees once again. He had to fight for his concentration every moment, these days. He was a bit out of sorts from losing the crystal skull, and bad news on top of bad news was making him very irritable. He took a moment to still his mind, breathing gently; in… out… in… out… and refocused on the spaces between the trees, watching for movement. The slightest change in the fall of the light. His nose sifted all the scents around him, but the air was very still today.
The hawk suddenly dove on a patch of grass, then rose back into the sky. A miss. Nothing was going right for anyone today, it seemed. He had to mull over the scent he’d caught while moving toward the ferals. She had brought them near enough the boy that he’d caught his scent, a sick odor of a failed transformation, the type that would kill the boy in the end. What was the loner doing in that big stone building that looked like a house? He should not exist at all unless he’d been vetted and adopted, but there he was, by himself, and he smelled morbidly ill.
The sick ones had to be shown the mercy of swift death. Letting such creatures live tempted fate, and they could be turned to dark purposes and adopted by the vampiric blood drinkers who defied the law in the dark corners of cities, far from the forests that the packs had to inhabit. The fact that the boy was alone in the woods was probably a good defense against that, but he would die a wasting death that no one should have to experience soon enough. No werewolf had ever safely survived more than half a year once the wasting began, except by consuming human blood, and that was something Luke would never allow. It turned a lupan; once a hybrid broke the instinctive taboo against consuming human flesh or blood, other laws fell, and soon their superior powers were controlled by nefarious motivations.
Where were the damned ferals? Luke shifted his weight one more time, then caught the slightest movement through the trees to the right. That was it; a woman was walking through the underbrush and into the field. She wore a plaid shirt and faded jeans, with leather work boots. She looked around, then lifted a hand to place a blue and green stem in the crook of a tree. It was clearly a stalk of purplish-blue flowers, each tipped with white. A safe signal, then. That was a form of lupan, one of many signals used to message silently, from a distance, without the need to be present. He tilted his head up and gave a quiet call into the air; not a full-blown wolf howl, he didn’t want to alert anyone beyond the clearing. She stopped, and looked straight at him, then walked back into the woods. He soon heard her coming through the brush behind him, and turned to see her walk quietly through the brush.
“Are you safe?” He whispered, and she nodded.
“They’re assembling. I’ve been trying to get them to take responsibility for this youngling for months, and they have finally decided to follow the law. I don’t know if they’ve figured out that you’re in the area, but they certainly couldn’t deny their responsibility when I had to report that a cryptoclast has joined him, and is living right under his roof. I don’t know if she plans to kill him, or what, but she’s far too close for us to ignore. They’re gathering their guns, making a plan, and they’ll leave any minute to go kill them both.”
“Faex! The hunter is in his house? The damned fools, they let this go too long. Finally they do what would have saved me the trip. They should know the law is not an arbitrary inconvenience. Follow the law or die!”
“They don’t see you often enough. You are gone from us for so long, sometimes they wonder if you are still alive, even. They think perhaps we’re alone, perhaps we need to make new laws. They don’t understand.”
She was right about that. A leader must be seen occasionally, or anarchy would encroach upon the outskirts of his rule. It frustrated him that he had to act as a dictator, but the truth was that he was one of just a few lupans old enough to remember the last time the overlords came down from the heavens, as they did once every 500 years or so. He remembered with grief the decimation that ensued as they brought their creatures back into alignment with the laws, to the degree that the species had strayed from them.
“I cannot be everywhere on this entire earth at once. I am trying to find skilled and willing assistants who can lead and regulate, but technology is wreaking havoc with attention spans, and this job takes relentless focus. My latest protégé should have had this under control. I could use you, Sarah, if you would step up—”
“Stop it. I’m not leaving Joe, and I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I don’t even like having to take the lead on this problem.”
Luke shook his head. “You have the traits of a good alpha—”
“But I’m not one! This argument is old, Remy, and I need to get back to my pack. Tell me what you need from me, then tell me what you will do. I deserve, at least, to know if there will be death.” Sarah called Luke by his true name – the one he’d been born with twenty-eight hundred years ago. Only those closest to him knew this name, and she was one of them. Sarah was his strongest ally here in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. He had known her all her life.
Luke closed his eyes and groaned silently. There was no way around it, there would have to be death, and one of those who must die would be the young man she had been watching out for, keeping safe at night during his first runs as a wolf, while he slowly wasted away. And Luke didn’t know yet whether he’d have to kill Gus, the man who acted as local alpha of her pack. Most likely he would, and perhaps a few more, depending on how tight their allegiance was to him. There was no room for mercy when the existence of the entire species was at stake, and Sarah would suffer the aftermath of shifting power. If she would step up and lead, it would be less, but it wasn’t her choice. He had always respected free will.
“Yes, there will be death, but until I am face to face with Gus, I cannot tell you who else. If I can spare Joe, I will, but until I see how he reacts to me, I will not know whether I can trust him to change in the way he must if you are all to get through this. The cub, though… you know he must die.”
She nodded, a deep sadness in her eyes. “Be careful, Remy. There is another man in that house.”
Luke focused sharply on her eyes. “Another man?”
Sarah nodded, her wavy brown hair falling around her face and her brown eyes looked back at him intensely. “My messages had to be short, but you need to know, there is a very strong young man who seems to be an assistant of some sort taking care of the boy. I’ve often felt grateful that I can see his care pass from my own watchfulness to this other man. They seem to have a system. But you will get resistance from there. And he carries a gun, whenever he leaves the house, this other man. Watch for it, and be careful.”
“Faex. Is it not enough that I must face the sick cub and execute him while dealing with this moecha vilis, but I must fend off an innocent bodyguard as well? Deos, it will be hard to judge the pack fairly with this. They have forced my hand, let this get much too far. Do you know if there has been any leakage while the cub has been running around and piddling on himself?”
Luke barely heard the groan, but it gave him the briefest warning before she delivered the last bit of bad news for him to endure. “The boy went to a hospital yesterday.”
“Matris futuor. That is too much. Did Gus do anything?”
Sarah shrank before him, but, true to her fortitude of spirit, she answered without a pause. “That’s why he’s gunning up now, I think. I also told him the boy cut me, for some reason, when I was in wolf form. But we have no one trained well enough to go into that hospital and find out if any tests were run that would reveal our nature – you’ll have to do that. I should go, Remy. That is all the information I have, it’s in your hands. I need to be beside Joe when this goes down. I swear to you, if you can spare any of us, I will always be your voice here in this corner of the world. But if you can’t spare us, send me into battle on the streets of Seattle. If my pack must go, I have no desire to remain, let me at least take as many vampires down as I can before my own blood leaves my body.”
Luke put his hand on her shoulder. “If Gus were half the wolf you are, Sarah, this would not be happening. I promise you, if I am not able to spare them, you will be the first I send into those dens of filth.”
She nodded, then swiftly left him with his bleak thoughts. Yet another task he must take on.
It seemed like no time at all had passed when he heard engines start up and rev, then a series of mammoth trucks came grinding out on a broad trail that bordered the clearing. Luke shifted into wolf form and tore off after them, cutting down slopes to shorten the distance as the trucks followed the zigzag path of the old road down the mountain.