Renegade Read online

  I found her one sunrise when the sky was pink and the water was misty gray, swimming alone in a tidal pool on the far side of the island that we had discovered years ago and liked to think was our secret. It was not, of course. Since the Devoncroix had come, nothing was secret anymore.

  She was wearing a yellow bikini, and because she was dressed I knew she had walked here in human form, which was oddly typical of her. It was a long way from the villa, and in wolf form she could have covered the distance in minutes. It would have taken her over an hour to walk.

  She was long and lean, with slim hips and barely budding breasts, and her lazily floating form, which was clearly visible beneath the clear water, was flattered by the swimsuit. I stripped off my tee shirt and sandals and waded in to join her. Since I had developed pubic hair, I was no longer entirely comfortable being naked around her, so I wore the tennis shorts in which I had started out.

  When I was chest deep beside her, she flipped over on her back, floating effortlessly with her dark hair spread out like a halo around her. She said nothing. Her eyes said everything.

  I put my arms around her. “What’s wrong?”

  She looped her arms around my neck and sank into me, her face on my shoulder. “Everything,” she said softly, clinging to me.

  We allowed ourselves to float deeper, wound around each other in silence while the water lapped around our ears and the sun pushed a golden sliver above the horizon. Suddenly she tightened her arms around my neck and tilted her face back to look at me, and there was a kind of desperate ferocity in her eyes as she demanded, “Will you run away with me?”

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “Now, today, quickly before they find out. Before they make me—”

  “Before they make you what?” She started to kick away from me and I reached back and caught her hands, holding them around my neck. “What are they going to make you do? What are you afraid of?”

  She looked at me, her eyes wet. “The hunt is tonight,” she said.

  “I know.” I felt a rush of adrenaline, just thinking about it. “It’s your first one, right? You’re so lucky. You’ve got to remember every detail, and—”

  She broke away from me suddenly and struck off furiously. When I caught up with her she was crying.

  “What?” I demanded, grabbing her shoulders. “What’s wrong with you?”

  She struggled with me childishly for a minute, thrashing in the water, but I wouldn’t let her go, and then she cried, “I hate you! You’re just like them and I hate them! I hate them and I hate you and I hate ….” She wrenched away from me and slapped the water hard, sending sprays into the air between us. “This. Being this! Being what I am.” And, as I stared at her in astonishment, she suddenly flung herself back into my arms, holding on tight, and whispered fiercely, “Oh Emory, I’m so afraid. I can’t do this. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.”

  I held her while the gentle waves lapped against us and the water turned golden. I patted her hair and let her cry and told her everything was going to be all right. And my head was reeling. I suppose that, knowing how traumatic her first pack run among the Devoncroix had been, I should have been more empathetic. And to a certain extent I was, or I tried to be. But I also understood, and think she did too, that this was a rite of passage for her, and—perhaps more importantly—a test of power for her parents. No one would force her to go, but she was well past the age of consent, and was expected to take her place among the pack. The prince would be disappointed, and the princess would be embarrassed, if she did not.

  I said, “Lara, listen, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine. It’s just like hunting rats in Venice, nothing to be afraid of there, eh?” She looked up at me and I gave her an encouraging smile. “I’ll be close by, and keep an eye on you, I promise. You don’t have to do anything, no one is judging you, you just have to be there. Just go with them. Be who you are.”

  “I don’t want to be who I am," she said, her eyes anguished. “Why did I have to be born this way? Why can’t I just be like you?”

  And now I was truly astonished because all I had ever wanted in my whole life was to be like her.

  I said, “I’ll be close by.”

  She pressed herself close to me, her bare skin against my bare skin, her mouth open on my neck, her breath hot. “Let’s have sex together, Emory,” she whispered. Her leg snaked between mine beneath the water, coiling around my ankle. “Let’s do that, please. Then we’ll have our special secret that I can remember forever. You want to. I know you do.”

  Of course I did. I was already hard against her thigh and my heart was pounding so hard even I could hear it. The loup garoux can smell desire on a human just as they can smell everything else, and mine was coming off me in thick, choking waves. Of course I wanted to. There is only one reason a thirteen-year-old boy will ever turn down an offer of sex with a girl: because he is afraid.

  Nonetheless, when she wound her arms around my neck and opened her mouth against mine, I took her tongue inside my mouth as though it were a feast I had been waiting all my life to devour. I grasped her buttocks beneath the water and lifted her up and she twined her legs around my waist with nothing separating us but a brief expanse of space and a scrap or two of clothing, and I let myself drown in the fantasy of heat and flesh and sheer, impossible wanting.

  I had grown up in a household in which sexuality was unaccompanied by shame or angst, where it was openly discussed and expected to be enjoyed, and where there were few, if any, taboos. There are, however, protocols. Having sex outside one’s own species was a breach of a primary one.

  The loup garoux mate only in wolf form, and only as a result of the grand passion that is the fullest possible celebration of what they are. There is no such thing as adultery in their culture, nor rape, nor divorce. At the moment of mating the entire essence of one flows into the other—the emotions, thoughts, memories—and becomes so intermingled that they never are separate again. There are no secrets between a mated pair. There is no loneliness, jealousy, misunderstanding. They are, mentally and spiritually, as one. The mating bond is so strong between them that when one spouse dies, the other usually follows within a matter of minutes. Theirs is the kind of passion that I think we humans will never know, and perhaps that’s why we are so helpless beneath their allure. We ache to have what they have, to know what they know, to feel what they feel. And we, for them, are mere playthings.

  When they have sex in human form it is completely unrelated to mating, or even to affection. It’s playful, casual, unrestricted, and generally holds less social significance than the act of running together. Of course, to pretend that loup garoux have not, upon occasion, had sex with humans would be naïve in the extreme. I had discovered in the prince’s library entire volumes of erotic poetry dedicated to just that topic. There are dirty jokes and pornographic films centered around the subject. But it is not the kind of thing Prince Fasburg would accept from his daughter and his adopted son in the presence of the highest-ranking members of the pack. For they would know. If we did this thing, of course they would know. They would smell it on our skin, hear it in our whispers, see it our eyes. And we would all be shamed.

  I wrenched my mouth away from hers, staggering with the effort and almost falling in the water. “You are cruel,” I gasped. I put my hands on her knees and pushed hard to disentangle her from me. How easy it would have been instead to slip my fingers beneath the tiny yellow bikini bottom. Instead, I pushed her away so forcefully that she flailed backwards and almost went under. I caught her and hauled her upright just before she inhaled a mouthful of water. She stared at me in astonishment, water lapping at her chin.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “You want to, you know you do! Why—“

  “You’re using me, that’s why!” I shot back at her. “Because if we had sex your parents would be mad at you—at us—everyone would be mad and no one would want you on the hunt. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”r />
  Still, she didn’t seem to get it. “Is that so bad? Why is that bad? Emory …” She pushed closer to me, finding the shelf on which I stood, so that the water now came only to the top of her breasts. Small breasts, firm and athletic. I wondered what they tasted like.

  She caught my hand, and looked helplessly into my eyes, but she did not try to force herself against me, as she had done before. She looked hurt, and confused, and she said, “Don’t you love me even a little?”

  All the breath left my lungs in one long slow sigh. I stroked her wet face, tangling one finger in her hair. Every part of my adolescent body ached for her. I said, in a voice made husky with hormones, “I love you a lot. I love you more than anything. And I’m going to take care of you tonight, don’t worry. You’re going to be fine. I’ll be there, I’ll be close, nothing’s going to happen to you. Don’t be afraid. I’ll always take care of you. But you’ve got to do this, Lara. You’ve got to.”

  No doubt she had known from the beginning that she had never really had a choice. I will never forget the look of sorrow and resignation in her eyes as she said, “I’m not like the others, Emory. They know that, they can sense it. I can change my form, but I can’t change inside. I don’t have the soul of the wolf inside me. I never will.”

  I refused to believe her, which is perhaps the greatest hurt I inflicted on her that day. She tried to tell me who she was, and by refusing to listen I robbed her of what she knew to be true. In so many ways I would spend the rest of my life trying to make that up to her.

  But right then, all I knew to do was to hold her tight and repeat, “You can do this, you’re as good as any of them. I’ll be there.”

  I felt the fight seep out of her as she slowly, sadly, and with a great sense of defeat, laid her head against my shoulder. The fingers that entwined with mine felt small and fragile.

  “Do you promise?” A small reluctant hope crept into her voice. “You won’t let me out of your sight?”

  “I promise,” I told her, and felt a great sense of relief as I encircled her with my arms, patting her shoulder. “I promise.”

  I thought the prince and princess would be proud of me. I thought I had done the right thing.

  But that was before I witnessed the hunt.

  I will abbreviate my telling of this because the memories are, as with so many pivotal life events, too powerful, too complex for language. If I had the words of a hundred thousand men I couldn’t make you understand what it was like on that night, to be me, to be within the heart of it, to know what I knew and feel what I felt. So I will use instead a few simple words to tell what I observed.

  It was the night of the new moon, and they gathered under the white-columned open air pavilion that overlooked the sea. Never has there been so dark a night. The torches were not lit. Even the stars were under cover. The only things that moved were the shapes of their gossamer garments, stirred by the wind as they stood in silence, waiting for the leader of the pack to raise the call.

  No one had to tell me to stay inside. Yet the prince did happen upon me in the late afternoon, and he said to me with dark and fevered eyes, “This is not a night for humans, little man.” Yet he said it absently, almost in passing, so that it seemed more of a suggestion than a command. Of course had he given me a direct order, my dilemma would have obvious. Perhaps he knew already I would not be able to resist the temptation of this, the grandest and most basic ritual of all their kind and he did not want to put me in a position to disobey. Perhaps he really didn’t care. Already he had begun to change, in manner and in purpose, as had the princess. Charged from every direction by the electrical anticipation of their own kind, they grew wilder, more sharp-sensed, more alert and reactive with every moment that passed. The entire island seemed to be throbbing with the pent up energy of the pack. I could feel it in my throat, and the prickling hairs on my arms, and the faint aching at the back of my sinuses, as though I was breathing air that was too thin. The prince was right. This was not a night for humans.

  When I touched Lara she was trembling. “Stay at the back,” I whispered to her. “Stay where I can see you. I love to watch you run.” I knew that telling her that would make her want to show off for me, and make her remember I was there. Besides, it was true, and that of course is the essence of it all: I loved what she was more than she did. I wanted her to do this not for her sake but for mine.

  And even then, she would do anything for me.

  She flashed a look on me that was a fierce wondrous mixture of savagery and joy, gratitude and dread, and then she slipped away from me, as helpless as any of them to resist the pull of the pack.

  All of the lights in the house had been extinguished, to better prepare their eyes for the hunt. I slipped away under the cover of darkness to position myself among the rocks overlooking the pavilion. No one noticed me. They wouldn’t have cared if they had.

  I did not think there had ever been a human who witnessed a pack ritual like this, involving a mass change. I was thrilled to my core with the anticipation of it. Nothing could have kept me from this night—not the prince, not my own good sense, not the pack leader himself. I crouched atop the rock overhang and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I thought I could make out Lara near the back of the crowd with the other adolescents, looking small and frail in her thin white changing robe with her long dark hair lifting and drifting around her with the crackle of static electricity. I remember the rustle among them, the heightening of excitement as the leaders of the pack strode forth among them in gowns of royal blue and stood on a dais with their arms uplifted and their heads thrown back. I recall when their garments fell away. There was a rush and a roar inside my head, the feeling of my guts being turned inside out, a thundering wave of percussive light, and that’s all I knew until I was lying face-down in a pool of my own vomit, shaken, disoriented, terrified, and too weak to even stand.

  I could sense them all around me, flowing in and out of the shadows, I could hear the scratch of their claws on the rocks and feel the heat of their breath; it was like being trapped in the midst of a stampede. I covered my head with my arms and rolled aside, hiding as best I could inside a thorny bush. I saw the flash of eyes in the dark. I saw teeth.

  In wolf form they are enormous. No mass is loss in the change, so that if he is six feet tall and weighs 180 pounds, he will be six feet long and massive in wolf form. Their paws are the size of human hands, tipped with razor-like claws. Even in human form, they are, pound for pound, five times stronger than a man. In wolf form, their muzzles can snap small tree trunks. The earth thunders when they fly across it. The leaves on the trees rush upward in their wake, grasses bend, small creatures huddle quaking in the shadows, paralyzed with fear. Small creatures like human boys. Did they know I was there? Of course they did. But tonight I was not their prey. They did not even slow down.

  The pack dispersed around me, racing across the cliffs and into the night, and all I wanted to do was crawl back to the villa, lock all the doors and windows, and find a closet in the furthest corner of the house in which to secure myself. No, I wanted to leave this place, I wanted to run from the island as fast as I was able, to swim if I must, to safety. But then I remembered Lara, and my promise to her. Covered with scratches and smelling of vomit and shivering from head to toe, I stumbled to my feet and into the thick of it, searching for her.

  This is the power and the horror of the hunt: the screams of terror and howls of victory, blood sprayed across the rocks, entrails spilling, bones cracking. This was my dark eyed prince, with jowls dripping blood, my elegant princess, her muzzle buried in a steaming carcass. It was wild, fierce madness that was almost incomprehensible in its intensity, and yet so elemental and extreme that I instantly understood it, even as I shuddered with fear in watching it. Pacts were made, characters were tested, souls were bared and alliances destroyed through the hunt. Life and death decisions were faced. Missteps made here were never forgiven. A month from now, a year, even a decade hence, two pai
rs of eyes would meet across a conference table and recognize each other from this night, and the fate of an industry, a nation, or a people would be determined on the basis of what had occurred on this bloody battlefield. I think I understood that, even as a boy. And I think that knowledge, as much as the savagery of the hunt itself, was what terrified me most. Their alienness. Their complete and utter otherness. Their life, their culture, their world was all I knew. Yet I would never be a part of it. I would never even, with my small and primitive human brain, fully comprehend it. And I would never belong.

  The terrible irony I was too young to understand was that neither would Lara. And that we would both spend the rest of our lives desperately trying to make ourselves into something we could not be.

  I did my best to stick to familiar paths, to stay out of the fray, but I wandered in the dark and the savagery was everywhere. They hunted in packs of two or three, racing across the night and exploding out of the dark with guttural sounds of greed and triumph. Blood would spray and a ragged bleat of heart-stopping terror would sear the air and what was living would live no more. They ripped out hearts and lungs, and turned on each other with snarls and snapping teeth and rolled and tore at each other with a viciousness that sometimes brought blood, and then they would separate and form another pack, and it would all start over again. I scrambled from one such scene to the other, staying as far away as I could, desperately trying not to run because I was afraid that if I did I might become prey. I couldn’t find Lara. I was gasping, desperate, furious. Why couldn’t I find her? I had told her to stay at the back where I could watch her. Where was she? But I hadn’t known it would be like this. I hadn’t known.