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  Though I waited for days, she never returned. When I left the palais, I did so alone.

  When the force of Lara’s Change separated us, a thin layer of skin was torn from my fingers and palms where our hands were linked. Her brand was on my soul just as plainly as the mark of the cross was burned into my skin.

  In the same way a part of my essence, the very particles of my soul, had been torn away from me. Sometimes my hands still stung with the memory of what had been peeled away. And sometimes, I think, her soul still ached for the parts of her that were missing.

  And though there were days when she was so much inside of me and so far away from me, that I knew the agony a caged animal must feel just before it chews off its own leg, I never approached her again. I stayed away because I knew that the pain of being with her, and knowing again how deeply I had hurt her, would be worse than the pain of staying apart. I stayed away because I could not hurt her again, and I knew I was destined to do so. I stayed away because I knew that if I asked, she could refuse me nothing. And though it broke my heart anew every day, I was determined not to ask.

  Until the day that I did.

  ____________________________

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Present

  The silence hung over the room like a shadow for a moment. Then Rolfe reached for an apple, sliced out a wedge and bit into it, chewing thoughtfully. “Do you want to know what I think? I think you never loved her half so much as you loved what she was. Lara must have known that on some level. You went with the prince that night because you saw your chance to finally be one of them, and when you did you failed her test. But she had only herself to blame.”

  Emory said tiredly, “I suppose.”

  “Still, it was a tragic end to a doomed love story, just as the prince predicted. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Emory sipped his drink.

  Rolfe glanced at the screen of his phone, which lay on the table between them. A small red light was blinking. He picked it up, touched the screen, and made a mild sound of interest in his throat as he viewed the contents. “The president of the World Bank has been assassinated. A brutal killing, really. It seems the poor thing was eviscerated. They still haven’t found most of her internal organs.” He shrugged and put the phone away. “Ah well, it was time for a change. Of course, there’s likely to be a period of financial chaos, but that will only make it that more effective when the proper party does step in to take control.”

  Emory leaned back in his chair with his glass cupped against his chest, watching him. “We live in interesting times.”

  Rolfe spread thick soft cheese onto a slice of bread. “This Camembert is excellent. You really should try some. ”

  Emory said nothing.

  Rolfe regarded him for a moment, chewing. He said, “You know, Professor, I don’t believe you that you never had sex with that lovely creature.”

  “Believe what you wish.”

  “You have said yourself that their allure is virtually irresistible. And frankly, I have seen the famous Lara Fasburg. Is there any male alive, of any species, who isn’t just a little in love with her?”

  Emory worked hard to keep his heartbeat steady, his temperature even.

  “You can tell me, you know.” Rolfe gave a fair approximation of a lascivious grin. “I won’t judge.”

  Emory said, his gaze steady, “I wouldn’t care if you did.”

  In a moment, Rolfe shrugged. “Tell me this then. This mating bond you spoke of, can it exist between humans and the loup garoux?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

  “Come along, Professor.” He looked bored. “You are the foremost authority on these creatures in the world. If you don’t know, who would?”

  For another moment it appeared Emory would not answer. Then he said, “There may be a bond of sorts. My understanding is that it may be more intense upon the part of the human than the loup garou. It’s not a mating bond. They mate only in wolf form.”

  A faint smile. “Which would seem to be nature’s safeguard against the cross breeding of the species.”

  “Yes.”

  Rolfe lifted the wine bottle with a questioning look. Emory held out his glass. Rolfe filled it, and sat back. “And so was it worth it, then, this Brotherhood of yours?”

  Emory said, “The Brotherhood, as it once was, no longer exists. It has deteriorated into a gang of cutthroats and hooligans.”

  “A bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “They use intimidation and threats to achieve their ends. They kill at will. They have betrayed their vows.”

  Rolfe gave a small, entirely neutral smile. “What a coincidence. So have you.”

  He wiped his fingers on a napkin, and gently swirled the wine in his glass. “What became of you, then, after your lovely Lara departed?”

  A brief silence, the shadow of a memory. “I returned to Venice briefly, but there was nothing left for me there. For a time I had some notion of finding her, but eventually …” He lifted his own glass, and sipped, his lashes lowered. “I realized there was no point. The children we had been were gone. There was nothing left to save. And I had nothing to offer her but pain.” Absently, he raised his hand to the back of his neck, lightly touching the scar there, and dropped it again. “Lara found the world in which she belonged, and it was the world of humans. My world. And the only world in which I had ever wanted to live was her world. The world of the loup garoux. A fine irony, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Worthy of O.Henry.”

  “The humans couldn’t resist Lara. They invited her to their parties and behind the velvet ropes of their exclusive clubs, onboard their yachts and their private jets. Like her mother, she was active in human charities, and over the years I would see her name here and there in connection with one foundation or another. She became great friends with the British royals, and used to appear with Princess Diana on behalf of this cause or that event. She was probably one of the most photographed women in the world.”

  “And you?”

  He shrugged. “My life continued much along the course I outlined for the prince that day in his library. I took several degrees. I studied with the best scientists in the pack. I continued my research into their history. I had access to their laboratories and libraries. In return, I would occasionally be asked to do some small thing—transpose a number here or delay a test result there, deliver a package or a message. I never noticed that any of my efforts had an effect on any outcome—but then I suppose that was the point.”

  “How did they contact you?”

  “Sometimes through a secret e-mail account, sometimes by telephone on a scrambled channel.”

  “And you never questioned their orders?”

  “Of course not. I knew what our mission was and to question the methods would have been pointless.”

  “Besides,” supplied Rolfe helpfully, “they only asked for small favors.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Lara? Did you ever see her again?”

  He drank, his eyes on the opposite wall. “Not for a long time.”

  “But you kept up with her, so to speak. You knew where she was and what she was about?”

  Emory looked at him for a moment. “If I asked, would you push aside your hair, and show me the back of your neck?”

  He looked mildly surprised, and then laughed softly. “No. I would not. Not because I care one way or the other, but because it is much more enjoyable for me to watch you speculate. Now we both will want to see how this story ends, won’t we?”

  Emory frowned into his wine. “I know how it ends.”

  Rolfe reached again for the knife and sliced a bit of cheese. He popped it into his mouth, the black eyes sparking with mirth. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you can’t begin to imagine how it ends. Truly you can’t.”

  ____________________________________

  Part Two

  Gotterdammerung

  November, 1999

  From an essay
by Emory Hilliford, age 7

  Palazzo Fasburg, Italy

  Aristophanes was a Greek story teller and a loup garou who lived a long time ago. He helped civilize humans. He told a story about how humans and loup garoux used to be all one person, with four legs and four arms and two heads, all mixed up together. But they were so strong that they made the gods afraid. So the gods cut all the loup garoux and the humans in half, so they wouldn’t be strong any more. That’s how we all ended up with only one head. And ever since, the humans and the loup garoux have been looking for a way to get back together.

  I think the gods were stupid.

  Emory Hilliford

  Human

  ___________________________________

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ten thousand years ago the African plain was thick with herd beasts, lush with edible grasses and fruits, sparkling with clear pools and waterfalls. Species lupinotuum ran free in packs so large that when they moved the earth thundered and the air grew dim with their dust. They hunted, they feasted, they played, they grew. For uncounted generations this corner of the earth suckled and protected them, until, eventually, they outgrew its shelter and moved on.

  Now the herds were thinned and often confined to wildlife parks to protect them from human scavengers. The grasses were still tall and lush, but the pools were shallow and far between. The land could not support a pack anymore, even a small one. But still there was something in the soul of their species that pulled them, in its own way, toward their origins. When their feet touch the ground there, it felt like home. When they scented the air, it smelled of new earth and hot wild blood. When they gazed up into a sky littered with stars, they knew they had seen those stars before.

  It should not have been surprising then, that after a search of almost thirty years, they should find the creature here. In the place they all once had called home.

  They watched with night scopes from a distance of a mile or so away. He stalked a leopard in naked human form, his movements as economical and precise as theirs might have been in wolf form. He circled the creature silently, narrowing his approach, and when he moved in for the kill the animal must have caught his scent; it turned and sprang into the air over his head. In a flash of white limbs and blurred movement he snatched the cat from the air in mid-flight, snapped its neck with a single shake, and tore open its chest cavity in one single smooth movement, and without so much as the crack of a twig to break the silence of the night. He spread open the carcass on the ground beside a stream, and settled down to eat.

  The two who watched him from afar lowered their glasses, and moved in silently.

  It all happened quickly, smoothly and as flawlessly as it had been planned. They were the best hunters in the pack. They had their orders, and did not make mistakes. Two of them in wolf form flowed down from the hill from either flank, as silent as oil and as swift as snakebite. They lunged and pinned the creature to the ground before the hunk of bloody lung he had just torn off could pass his teeth. Almost in the same movement, with a single breath, two more hunters, these in human form, splashed across the stream. One aimed a tranquilizer gun and released a dart filled with enough paralytic to fell an elephant. The other swung a titanium-fiber reinforced tiger net in a perfect arc that sailed across the stream and wrapped itself around the prone body just as the two wolves who held him bounded back. Flawless, efficient. They had spent thirty years training for this moment and now it was done.

  The two wolves circled warily, their nostrils twitching with the scent of warm fresh meat that emanated from the cat’s body, their eyes never leaving the naked, wire-muscled, human-formed male who lay unconscious and tangled in the netting before them. His mouth and hands were bloody from his feast. The soles of his feet were black. His eyes were closed, his chest unmoving.

  The two in human form were dressed identically in form-fitting black and carried black packs across their backs. One of them slipped his backpack off his shoulders and began unpacking sterile tubing and a lightweight portable ventilator. “Get that net tight around him,” he said, “but leave me room around the face to work. We’ve got four minutes to get this trach tube in before he’s brain dead.” Then, casting a quick, distasteful glance at the creature in the net, he added, “Poor mad devil. Might be best for him if he was.”

  “We have our orders,” said the other, moving in close to grasp the cinch ends of the net. “Bring him in alive or not at all. He looks dead. Are you certain—“

  He peered through the tiger netting that wrapped the man’s face, leaning close for just an instant, and suddenly the eyes popped open. They were bright blue, alert, and unsurprised. He said politely, in English, “Gentlemen, good evening.”

  And before the hunter could gasp his surprise or recoil, before his colleague could pull the trigger on the dart gun that would deliver another 100 mg of curare into the creature’s neck, he thrust a hand through the reinforced tiger netting as though it were made of spider webs and grabbed the hunter’s throat. The two wolves roared and sprang, the dart hissed silently into its target, and the hunter fell back, blank–eyed, clutching the bloody hole in his throat.

  The creature clothed in man skin, now with enough curare in his system to kill four humans or two werewolves, collapsed again to the ground. His eyes were fixed open, but his lungs stopped expanding, his heart stopped pumping, his muscles loosened. And as his fingers uncurled, the length of the hunter’s esophagus dropped from them, spattering into a pool of cat’s blood.

  ______________________________

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lara was at a party at one of those fabulous glittering beach houses in Malibu when she met Nicholas Devoncroix for the first time since the summer on Tyche. It might seem odd that in all this time they had not crossed paths, even in passing, but anyone who had been paying attention could quickly see they didn’t exactly travel in the same circles. Human princes and kings took her on their jets and their yachts, to their ski chalets and their private islands. When Nicholas met with humans it was in soundproof board rooms under heavy security. Paparazzi camped outside her Paris townhouse and her New York apartment, and followed her from club to luncheon, from limo to red carpet. She always dressed outrageously for them, in red-leather corset and diamond-studded tongue, perhaps, or spiked boots and a feathered bikini, and they cheered their approval. When Nicholas was photographed, it was usually in dark glasses with his head turning away from the camera. Nicholas climbed Mount Everest; Lara climbed the steps of the Kodak Theater. Nicholas controlled an empire, but Lara controlled her own destiny.

  Or so she thought.

  The world of humans embraced her, and she immersed herself in it, for it was the only place she was at home. Of course she consorted with her own kind from time to time—among the fast crowd with whom she usually ran they were somewhat ubiquitous, and many of them found her as amusing as the humans did—but Nicholas Devoncroix was not one of them. That was why it was so odd to find him in Malibu, California, at the kind of party even his minions would not generally deign to attend.

  The house was one of those three-story glass and steel monstrosities that seemed to suck the starlight from the sky and the sound from the surf with its pure, unadulterated pretension. There was a swimming pool on the roof and two others, surrounded by a jungle labyrinth of paved patio, tropical plants and hot tubs, on the ground overlooking the beach. The music was so loud it pulsated, and the entire place reeked of sex and bitter sweat and drugs, as such places usually did. Lara had only agreed to come on a whim, and already she was growing bored. Crack cocaine of course had no effect on her species, and she had long since grown tired of pretending it did. Heroin and other opiates were equally useless, except as surgical anesthetics, and the way humans behaved under their influence was not in the least amusing. As for the so-called sensory enhancing pleasure drugs that so proliferated gatherings such as this, not one of them could come close to mimicking the sensory state that Lara enjoyed when perfectly sober.
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  She had been known to get roaring drunk on brandy on occasion, however, and she did enjoy the pleasant buzz from a good strong cigarette. For the most part, though, Lara had begun to conclude that Californians give universally dull parties. There was never enough to eat and the wine was always below par. She was just taking her little pearl-studded phone out of her purse to call for a car—she couldn’t even remember the names of any of the humans she had arrived with, although she was fairly certain at least one of them was quite famous in his own way—when there was a little frisson of electricity in the air, a shimmer of sharp scent like the taste of ozone after a summer storm, and Nicholas Devoncroix stood in the teakwood arch of the glass paneled doorway.

  He was an extraordinary looking creature, tall and slim with flame blue eyes and sharp, cool features. His entrance into a room would have drawn attention even had it not been for his natural electrochemical magnetism. He wore a black silk tee shirt with the long sleeves pushed up above the elbows and white jeans. His pale hair, which he kept long about his shoulders in the traditional fashion, was gently tousled by the sea breeze. And as he stood there, gazing around the room in a leisurely manner that could not be mistaken for anything other than arrogant, all eyes turned, as though under compulsion, toward him. Conversations skipped a beat. Drinks were lifted and forgotten. Laughter died. Such was the effect the most powerful of their kind had upon humans.