Renegade Read online

  And then one day Eudora Devoncroix, queen of all the pack, was returning from a journey north when her carriage broke a wheel not far from the doorstep of the church, and slipped into the ditch. The priest Louis Phillipe came to assist, as of course he would. But his human strength was not up to the task. He slipped in the mud, became trapped under the weight of the vehicle, and was gravely injured.

  The queen’s advisors suggested that the sensible thing to do, and perhaps even the kindest, would have been to end his suffering with a quick snap of his neck, and toss his body into the ditch to be disposed of by his own kind. But the leader of the pack, who no doubt was still pondering the strange customs of her fiancé toward humans, or perhaps even wanting to explore his theories for herself, gave another order. She commanded that the broken human should be taken back to the palais, where he could benefit from the healing skills of her own court.

  The human priest mended quickly under the ministrations of the lupinotuum; their advanced medicines and healing techniques speeding the recovery process beyond anything that was known to his people. And in return, Eudora’s education on the subject of humans grew by leaps and bounds, and she began to see for herself, and almost against her will, that the Fasburgs’ claims about the intelligence of humans might be valid. He showed no fear of her, nor of any of their kind. He could quote Homer in the original Latin. He could play chess. He could speak of matters of philosophy that actually made sense to her. And his questions for her were as numerous as were hers for him; they seemed to hold a mutual fascination for one another. Eudora did not object. It is always flattering to be the object of another’s adoration, and almost inevitably, affection is returned.

  To change one’s life, habits and deeply held convictions in an instant is not an easy thing, and the mere possibility that she might have been wrong about humans—that her father, her mother, their ancestors before them and indeed all the pack might have been wrong—the very notion shook the foundations of her world. Because of Louis Phillipe she began to change everything she had always believed, and to become someone she had never imagined.

  And that was why his betrayal, when she discovered it, was so bitter.

  Eudora the Queen was naturally aware of the threat posed by the Brotherhood of the Dark Moon—a band of misfits and outcasts dedicated to destroying the pack and all that it valued. They used their wealth, their wit and their influence to wage a secret war on all that was werewolf, rejecting the standards that had kept the race strong and powerful for over five centuries and disguising their true motives under the banner of balance in nature. She had heard rumors that they had even taken certain humans into their numbers, and shared with them secrets few werewolves knew and no human ever should. But she did not believe it until she saw with her own eyes, etched into the smooth flesh of the human’s neck, the sign of the Brotherhood of the Dark Moon.

  She was wounded to the core. He had used her for a fool and infiltrated the very heart of the pack, the palais itself. He had gained her confidence and caused her to question all she thought was true. She had come to think of him as friend. And now, he would cause her to order his death. And for that, above all else, she could never forgive him. She even went so far as to beg him to recant and betray his fellow brethren, so that she might have an excuse to save his life. He refused.

  Louis Phillipe, this quiet scholar, this keeper of secrets, had sworn his fealty to the Brotherhood long before he knew and loved Eudora. And so had Eric Fasburg.

  _______________________________________

  Chapter Thirteen

  If the narrative of a man’s life is dictated by his choices, I will take you now to the choice that determined the course of the rest of my life, and took away all the rest of my choices. It was the occasion of my twenty-first birthday, which is significant in human culture but not so much noted in the world of the loup garou. Still, I marked the date. I was legally an adult. I could manage my own funds, drink alcohol in adult establishments, vote and sign contracts. The fact that I had been doing all of those things, except, perhaps, voting, for some time now was beside the point. It was important to highlight the traditions of one’s own culture.

  I had been studying at Oxford University since I was sixteen and now was just completing my master’s degree in anthropology. How does a home-schooled orphan, even an exceptionally bright one, gain admittance to Oxford at the age of sixteen? He either has a very wealthy and influential sponsor, or he has a reputation for having faced down Nicholas Devoncroix during a pack hunt. Sometimes he has both.

  I devoured my studies in my time at University, as I was expected to do. I had sex with human girls, as I was expected to do. I learned to enjoy the pursuits of ordinary young humans, more or less. And every weekend I traveled home to Venice. No sooner would I drop my bag inside the doorway than I would hear Lara’s footsteps clattering in the marble hall and she would fling herself upon me and wrap her legs around my waist and cover my face with kisses and I would laugh and stagger and pretend to fall and kiss her back; I would kiss her back.

  Because away from her, I was only half alive.

  I loved Lara fiercely, possessively, and with a kind of intensity that I’m not sure it’s possible to explain. She was mine, to protect, adore, cherish and care for. She always had been and always would be. She was everything I was and everything I could never be; she was entwined around my consciousness like ivy around a rose, she consumed me. Oh, how sorry I felt for the human girls in whose wanton, sweaty embraces I tried to escape the ache that was the absence of Lara. I never remembered their names. But even days later, Lara could smell them on me. And then the ache was like a black hole.

  Because here is the most amazing, the most wondrous, and, inevitably, the most agonizing thing: as much as I adored Lara, she loved me even more.

  In my years at the university I came across the names of Devoncroix and of Fasburg; I spent hours in the stacks, reading and researching and marveling at the hands behind the hands that had guided so much of human history. On the weekends I delved into the prince’s private library, fascinated by the unexpected twists and turns in the Fasburg family history. I began to unravel the mystery of the human priest who, according to legend, had done them a service once long ago. I knew, long before I reached my majority, that the passion of my life would be research, whether it be in uncovering the secrets of the past or decoding the human genome. Having been raised in such a thick, enticing soup of arcane mystery, I cannot truthfully imagine ever having been lured by any other profession. And though it seemed to me then I was delving into the secrets of the ages, treading ground where none before me had ever gone, I should have known that I was uncovering only as much as the prince wished me to know. As much as any of them wished me to know.

  And so when I was twenty-one, and too desperately absorbed in the present to give more than the vaguest of thoughts to the future, Lara crept up silently behind me in the great, mahogany shelved, vaulted-ceilinged library of the palazzo and slipped her hands around my eyes. She leaned in close to my ear, so that her hair tickled the back of my neck, and murmured in a voice that was throaty with laughter, “Today you are a man.”

  I smiled with the pure pleasure of having her near. I had been home from school for almost a month and was growing comfortable with seeing her again every day, but still her presence never failed to surprise me, and fill me with joy.

  I was sitting at a big carved desk that was arranged in an alcove against a painted mural of nymphs at play, the papers I had just taken from the printer spread out before me. The computer stations that were located in several places around the grand room would have been an anachronism had they not been so sleek and compact as to be almost unnoticeable. It was 1991, and the loup garoux were already discarding as obsolete the technology humans would not enjoy for another twenty years.

  I caught her wrists and pulled her around and down upon my knee. “And what was I before?”

  She pretended to be very serious as
she studied me, but her eyes were laughing. “I wish I knew.”

  How beautiful she was, with those magnificent green eyes and skin like satin and her thick dark hair pulled up atop her head in a playful ponytail that fell to her shoulders. She was wearing a tiny silk shift with big flowers that tied on one shoulder and barely covered the middle of her slender, naked thighs, and I let my hand caress the curve of her hip through the fabric, loving its feel and its familiarity. Loving her warmth and her weight and her shape and her scent; loving everything about her.

  I said, “Do you know you might be related to the Devoncroix?”

  She looped her arms around my neck, brought her face very close to mine, and said, “Do you know how much I don’t care?”

  “I’m serious.” I reached behind me for one of the papers, teasing her because I knew how much it annoyed her when I became obsessed with my research. “I think your ancestor might have mated with Queen Eudora. I found some old writings of his.”

  She put the tip of her nose on the tip of my nose. “I,” she said distinctly. “Don’t. Care. Besides …” She sprang up, catching my hand, eyes sparkling. “I have a surprise for you in the garden. Come with me.”

  I let her tug me along to the courtyard outside the west entrance, with its wisteria covered arbor and weathered wicker furniture. It was a private place, used only by the family, and Lara and I used to love to play there. She made me close my eyes when we reached the door, and I let her lead me, stumbling, across the paving stones. Of course I peeked, but still I laughed out loud in delight when she positioned me before the table she had set up beneath the wisteria, and commanded me to open my eyes.

  There was an elaborate cake in the center of the table, decorated with sugar flowers and garlands, tiered with dozens of tiny lit candles—I guessed twenty-one—that had begun to melt and drip wax all over the frosting. We never celebrated birthdays in this way, and I was touched that she had gone to the trouble to research the tradition and do this for me.

  “Hurry!” she urged, clapping her hands in pleasure at my surprise. “Blow out the candles and make a wish!”

  “All of those? By myself? You’ll have to help.”

  So she leaned in close and we blew out the candles together and we laughed when wax and frosting spattered on the tablecloth. No one loved cake more than Lara, and she lost no time in cutting two slices while I poured the wine. We sat beside the fountain, where water splashed from a marble vessel with musical sounds onto a bed of polished blue glass pebbles below, and we toasted the future.

  “So,” she demanded, scooping up a large dollop of frosting with her finger and popping it into her mouth, “what did you wish for?”

  “Not a thing,” I told her. “I have everything I want right here, right now.” And to prove it, I leaned over and offered her a scoop of my frosting from my finger.

  “You’re lying,” she said matter of factly, but accepted the frosting anyway. “You wouldn’t waste a twenty-first birthday wish on nothing.”

  She was right of course. But what I had wished, I couldn’t tell her.

  “Anyway …” She slanted me a sly glance. “I know what you wished for.”

  I set my cake aside and reached for her, smiling. “Do you now?”

  She hopped up and whirled away, eyes dancing. “More cake?”

  I leaned back and picked up my wine glass, smiling after her. “Wrong.”

  She cut herself another generous slice. When she returned to me she had her cake plate in one hand and the other hand behind her back. There was a look of glorious secrecy in her eyes. “This is what you wished for,” she said, and taking her hand from behind her back, presented me with an envelope.

  She watched me open it expectantly, and I was smiling, even through my puzzlement, when I drew out the contents. “Two tickets to Paris?”

  “Two tickets to freedom,” she corrected.

  She put her cake plate on the retaining wall beside mine and sank into my lap. She must have seen something in my eyes because her arms went around me and she put her lips close to my face and there was urgency in her voice as she whispered, “I can’t do this any longer, Emory. I have to get away from them. I’ve waited so long, but you have your silly degree now and you can go anywhere you want, if you don’t like Paris, we’ll go to New York or Sydney or Hong Kong, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, you can teach at a university just as you always said you would and I’ll be your wife and give lovely parties for all the humans you want to impress and I won’t even mind if you spend your evenings in a dusty library somewhere, let’s just go, Emory, oh please, let’s just go.”

  She said it like that, all in a breath, and when she finished my head was spinning with her words. I took her face in my hands and tilted it away from mine so that I could see her eyes, and I felt dampness on my fingertips. My heart wrenched in my chest, and stuttered with longing, and at the same time broke in two.

  Only in retrospect can I see what quiet courage it took for her to wait so patiently and so hopefully for this moment. While I was happily, feverishly and selfishly immersed in my studies, greedily taking in everything the prince had to offer and thinking of very little beyond my own needs, Lara had been thinking of this day. I would be twenty-one, I would have my degree, we would leave the Palazzo together. She could have left at any time, and every day she waited must have been torment for her. But she had waited for me. She had waited for me because she was Lara and she knew only one way to love: desperately, completely and single-mindedly. She had waited for me because we had been together for so long neither of us could imagine being apart. She had waited for me because she believed in me.

  Even now, she could not see how dreadfully misplaced her faith in me was.

  “Lara,” I said hoarsely, “you know that can’t be.”

  All these years I had never surrendered to the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world. All this time of loving her, of being with her, of knowing how easily and happily she would have given herself to me, I had never had sex with her. I don’t mean to make myself sound noble, for I wasn’t. Ask any of the girls I so carelessly and callously took in her place how noble I was. I was a bit of an idealist, yes. But my ideals were not for her as much as they were for me.

  I don’t know what, if anything, I imagined would become of us as adults. I know I never imagined my life without her. But to take her away, to live with her as my lover, to humiliate the prince and princess and incur the scorn of the pack … that never had been within the realm of possibility.

  She whispered feverishly, “It can. It can be. All we have to do is make it so.”

  “You’ll be exiled,” I said, desperately trying to make her understand what was at stake. The pack would turn its back on Lara … and on me. Was it worth it?

  She kissed me again, and I knew with all my soul that it was. It was.

  “I don’t care,” she said, her voice low and tight. “It’s not my pack. I don’t belong with them. I belong with you.”

  I cupped my hands around her neck, breathing deeply of the fragrance of her skin as I tried to calm my thundering heart, my unsteady breath. I whispered, “Please don’t do this. Lara, you know this is madness.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s madness to continue this way, pretending this is normal, pretending this is right.” She gripped my hands at the back of her neck and held them hard. There was desperation in her eyes. “Let’s go tonight, Emory, let’s not wait another day, please. If we wait any longer I’m afraid …” She hesitated, and dropped her eyes.

  “What?” I demanded softly. “What are you afraid of?”

  She looked at me again. “I’m afraid I’ll lose you,” she said simply.

  Foolishly, I thought she was afraid I’d fall in love with some human girl. “You’ll never lose me,” I told her firmly. “Not to anyone.”

  “Tonight, please.” Those brilliant, pained, soul-eating eyes flicked back and forth over mine, searching, begging. All I wanted to do was t
o make the desperation in her eyes go away.

  And I remembered then the last time I had seen that look in her eyes. She had begged me to run away with her then, too. She had begged me to save her. And I had refused.

  I felt a chill.

  I said, “Prinze-Papa is taking me to dinner tonight. I can’t refuse; he’ll know why.”

  She stiffened in my arms with such a look of dread that I thought she might have misunderstood what I had said. But before I could clarify she said, “No.” Her fingers tightened upon my skin, urgently. “Don’t go with him tonight. Not tonight.”

  “Lara …” I disentangled my hand from hers to stroke her hair, and because I simply could not bear that look of pleading in her eyes I brought my forehead to touch hers and I whispered, “Meet me then, at the station, at midnight. Don’t be sad. I’ll take you to Paris. We’ll go tonight. I promise.” I would like to believe that I had every intention of keeping that promise. But I think I only wanted to take the sadness from her eyes.

  A measure of hope crept into her expression. “Come back to me, please,” she begged softly. “Don’t break my heart, Emory. I don’t think I could recover from that.”

  I enfolded her in my embrace and promised her that I wouldn’t, and she did not smell the lie because at that time I believed with all my heart that I could never hurt her, that I would not even know how.

  But some things are so inevitable it almost seems a waste of time to look back upon them, and worry the details, as though in the retelling one might find a different ending. There was only one possible ending. Lara knew that, I think, which was why she was so afraid. And so did the prince. It was no hardship for him to sacrifice the heart of his youngest daughter to the vision he had for me. Their race sees long, and it sees far. He knew what he was doing. He had known it from the moment he knelt before me and looked at me with his laughing eyes and said, So, little man, will you come and live among us, and be one of us?