I stared at him. It sounded like the buildup to a cult initiation. If he was expecting that by my coming here I would agree to join his pack straight off, I had to put that dream out of his head before we began.
“Look, Lucas. Mr. Rain. Your Furry Highness, or whatever it is I’m supposed to call you—”
“For you, Lucas will be more than acceptable.”
For me? Why was I so special? I momentarily lost my train of thought. “Lucas, then. I appreciate that you thought I was in such need of an education you kidnapped me off the street.” At this, he smiled. “But I want you to know I only agreed to come here because you left me no other option, not because I want to join your hunting party. I’m not really a team player. And in case you missed it, I’m not the biggest fan of being what I am.”
He was quiet for a moment, folding his hands with their gloriously long fingers across his taut stomach. My indignation faded as my mind wandered with thoughts of the places and things those fingers could find and do. I blushed more.
“Before you saw me on the street tonight you felt me, is that correct?” he asked.
After a moment’s hesitation I ventured, “Yes.”
“You felt me specifically, not Dominick or Desmond. When you saw me for the first time you understood right away it was me you felt?”
I thought about it before answering, then again said, “Yes.”
“What did I taste like?”
“Cinnamon.” The answer was too quick. I hadn’t thought, I just opened my mouth and out it came. My eyes widened with the horror of what I’d said. Admitting that he’d left such a sweet taste in my mouth felt too intimate to share.
He smiled, leaning forward against his desk, resting his chin on his folded hands. “Very good.”
That was a good thing?
“How much do you know about how werewolves are made? How we are governed? Do you know anything of our history?”
“I know my mother was a werewolf. I don’t know much else. I was raised by my grandmere, my mother’s mother, and she usually changed the subject when I asked about any of it. My mother abandoned me after birth, and I guess Grandmere blamed it on the wolves.”
This was only partially true.
I was leaving out gaping holes in the story, like how my werewolf mother had been seven months pregnant with me when the human man she loved—my father—was bitten and turned by a vampire. A rogue vampire no less. In the blind bloodlust of his newborn state, my father hunted down the most vulnerable prey he knew of. He’d almost drained her before some flicker of humanity sparked in him and he gave her his blood, which she’d fed on to survive. The blood had saved her life and mine. Because she was a werewolf and already had one blood-borne infection, she was protected against being turned into a vampire.
I was not so lucky.
The blood she had taken from him infected my developing body. As I understood it, because I carried her lycanthropy, half of me was already predestined for a life among the furry. But there was also a human piece of me that was destroyed and rebuilt into something new. Had I not been part werewolf, it’s likely the vampire blood would have killed me in her womb. Instead I was spared death, but when I was born it became apparent to my mother that there was something wrong with me.
Without fully grasping what had happened to her baby, she brought me to her mother’s house and left me there with a note telling my grandmere the whole story and explaining that the pack would never allow an abomination like me to be raised as one of their own.
Grandmere had studied biology and genetics in her youth and was the one who recognized the impossible combination of commingling supernatural infections that had led to my unusual existence.
Explaining all this to Lucas was out of the question.
“Do you know how werewolves are made?” he asked.
“Get bit. Turn furry. Seems pretty basic to me.” I’d always thought the process of turning someone into a werewolf was grossly uncivilized in comparison to the perilous tightrope act of siring a vampire. Spitting your infected saliva into someone’s open wound and then waiting until a full moon lacked the mystique and the marvel of self-control vampires exhibited in suppressing their own hunger and sacrificing their own life essence to create a new being.
“Not exactly.” I could tell the brute simplicity of my answer aggravated him.
He started again, slower, as if speaking to a child. “You’re aware that lycanthropy acts like a virus. It can only be transferred via a wound that exposes the blood of the recipient to either the blood or saliva of the host.”
“Uh-huh.” Any idiot who’d seen a wolf-man movie knew that. I was blonde, not retarded.
“But what most of the world at large, at least those who believe in our kind, are unaware of is that not everyone can catch lycanthropy.”
“Excuse me?” This was news to me.
“No one understood it at first. The consensus among our kind for a long time was that those who were bit but did not turn were simply not worthy of the gift.”
“Gift? You think of lycanthropy as a gift?”
“Yes, and I hope that in time and with deeper understanding so will you. Especially given your…unique position.”
I flinched. Did he know? He couldn’t. Yet what did he mean by my unique position? I was too afraid to ask and he was already continuing.
“We once believed that those not strong enough to join the pack were unable to integrate the virus into their system. Usually, due to the wounds that led to the initial infection, those who did not turn succumbed and passed on. Over time, though, as medicine and science advanced, werewolves and other lycanthropes who worked in genetic fields began doing private research into the matter. About forty years ago they discovered it was a genetic anomaly that determined whether or not a recipient, once bitten, would inherit the gift.”
“Wait. So you’re saying genetics determines whether or not someone becomes a werewolf rather than carrion?”
He cringed. “These days werewolf attacks on humans are almost nonexistent. Almost all new wolves are either turned in accidents or as part of the cycle.”
“The what?”
Lucas let his head fall back and looked up at the ceiling, his teeth grinding together while he regrouped his patience. “You understand that I am King?”
“Yes. I understand that about a quarter of the werewolf population in this country considers you to be their unelected leader.”
“Good. Then this should be easy to follow. The genetic trait that allows our kind to carry the gift is hereditary, so over the years, before we knew the scientific reason for it, entire families contracted lycanthropy. Across the country many of the families that carried the virus generation after generation became acknowledged leaders. The knowledge they had of the ways and rules of the generations before them was invaluable. First they were alphas—pack rulers—but as more people contracted lycanthropy the need for regulation and laws grew as well. Four families in particular rose to almost mythic positions. They came to be considered royalty among the wolves because of their wisdom, fairness and long histories.”
This was a lot to take in. I had never known werewolf society to be so structured.
“Within those families and almost all families that carry the gift, it has become a rite of passage to initiate the new young into the pack. It is very rare indeed for a child to be born with active lycanthropy, even if both her parents are wolves. If you were never bitten, as you claim, then something very traumatic must have occurred during your mother’s pregnancy. Something that caused her circulatory system to share the virus with you rather than block it out as is normally the case. Because of that, you caught the virus years before you were meant to. It makes you very special.”
“You have no idea.” Sarcasm seeped from every word.
“Oh, but I do. You are special for many reasons, more than you can imagine yourself. You see, among our kind there is a tradition known as The Awakening. When a child reaches the cusp of adulthood, they are presented with a choice—continue to live a normal human life or accept the inheritance of our forefathers and join the pack.”
“I don’t understa—” Then it clicked. “You mean you wait until they’re old enough to weigh the options, and then you bite them if they say yes?”
“If they accept, then they are initiated, yes. This is how the old families have done it for centuries. It’s how we carry on our legacy. It’s also how we’ve stayed so well hidden from the public. Keeping ourselves a secret is the most important rule we live by.”
“If this is all so secret, why share it with me? I was never ‘Awakened’.” I made little air quotes around the word. “Never initiated. I’m a freak by your standards, aren’t I?”
“Far from it. A born wolf is the thing of legend among our people. You would not be shunned, but revered. That is not, however, the reason I’ve brought you here.”
“It’s not?” Why the hell was I here, then? I was gaining new respect for the werewolves, but the whole situation had me missing the political simplicity of the vampire world.
“I didn’t know until you told me you’d never been bitten that you were more special than I had first thought. I brought you here because of what happened on the street, and when you told me your name downstairs it confirmed something I suspected from the first moment we met.”
Ah, here was my chance for some enlightenment about their earlier discussion. “You and Desmond said something about my last name being interesting. How it made sense. The last time I told a werewolf my name he got really uneasy about it, but never explained why. I’m starting to think there’s more to it than just a name, unless werewolves in general hate Bullitt. But I’m betting that’s not it.”
“While there are better Steve McQueen movies, I’m partial to Papillon myself, it’s not the reason your name makes wolves uncomfortable. I mentioned that mine is not the only family with a royal legacy.”