1. FAMOUS LAST WORDS

 

“Lead the packs.”

I wake with a start, squinting from the blinding sunlight breaking in through the plane’s window. Sweat beads on my forehead as I stare at the seat across from me, half-expecting Roul to be there. In his stead is Amara, fast asleep. The low hum of the plane’s engine lulled me to sleep too, shortly after takeoff. I’m surprised by the dream — the memory that I shelved along with Roul’s cremated ashes months ago. My imagination took the opportunity to revisit that moment in this sleep-deprived and anxious state, bringing back with it the sting of the bullet that nicked me after it left his body. I loosen my tie then undo the first button of my dress shirt to touch the imperceptible scar on my neck from the near miss. Amara tattooed over the healed wound when she returned from the aftermath of Quedlinburg. The design is in her signature style, an eagle, wings outstretched as if ready for flight. It reminded me instantly of the scar I once saw on Rodolfus “Roul” de Aquila’s palm. And it should. Aquila, she said, is Latin for eagle. It’s now forever etched on my skin as a reminder of the sacrifice of his life. It was Roul who had told me not long before he was killed outside his Paris mansion that getting inked is part of an age-old tradition among born werewolves. The tattoos represent milestones in our lives. This one will be my first of many. I readjust in the Learjet’s plush leather seat and take a sip from the lowball tumbler of sparkling water set into a cup holder in the wood veneer of the private jet’s interior. Creature comforts. What a weird turn of phrase since in my other form all of this would be completely redundant. The plane surges slightly, losing altitude and signaling the approach to our destination, and it hits me suddenly, the weight of everything that’s about to unfold. The fate of the pack, my pack, is on me alone. If I fail to convince the others to come together, the very existence of all our kind could be at stake.

I don’t know what to expect on American soil. My index finger traces an imaginary picture on the surface of the armrest, something that’s been on my mind since Roul died. It was a simple image he drew in his own blood on the concrete walkway just moments before he drew his last breath. Every child knows it by rote, a triangle atop a square — home. Below us New York offers a different cityscape altogether from Paris, and a distinct one even from this altitude. The skyline stretches out below the clouds: swaths of concrete, glass and steel broken up by the green spread of Central Park where the city shows signs of spring. This is where I grew up, yet somehow it’s foreign. Home, but not quite anymore. It’s strange how a few months away can cast such an odd light on a world that was once so mundane yet at the same time comforting in its familiarity. A part of me knows it isn’t the place that’s changed; it’s me. The responsibility that was passed to me in Roul’s dying breaths has painted a sober patina over my world and everything in it.

“Lead the packs.”

I doubt three words have ever put so much responsibility into the hands of someone so unprepared for the undertaking. Four months after Roul laid down his life for me there’s still this hint of self-doubt about my leadership abilities lingering like a bad itch, but I’m resolved to quash it once and for all. Too much is on the line and there’s no room for hesitation where I’m headed. At least I have backup in Amara. We’re the only passengers on the private Fenrir Pharmaceuticals jet. The lion’s share of the company, along with most of Roul’s major assets, was left to me. Had the circumstances been different, I doubt I would have been his first choice. Not that packs are ever handed down to successors. Under normal circumstances, they’re fought over by the alphas. Enough blood was shed when Roul was assassinated before my eyes, and the stakes are much higher than they’ve been before. An entire species is at risk now. There’s nothing even remotely normal about this situation.

This journey across the Atlantic is far from a homecoming. Amara and I are here on reconnaissance. From what I’ve been told, some werewolves crossed over to the New World around the same time as the Pilgrims and for similar reasons — to flee from persecution in the Old World, albeit of a different sort. Those left behind aren’t sure what happened after the emigrants landed. Packs are territorial by nature, and no one could venture to the Americas without hostility. It seems that those who did never came back. There are wild rumors of some kind of unification. Nobody gives it much credence, though Roul seemed sure they pulled it off. He’d hoped to do the same in the Old World — bring the European packs together. Now the task has turned to me, a werewolf of barely half a year but the last descendent of his bloodline. My human life is behind me now. There’s a war ahead of us and I’ve spent my time preparing for it. I couldn’t just rattle around Roul’s mansion in Paris waiting for the enemy to come to me when tough decisions had to be made. I doubt I’ll dodge a Luparii bullet again. Werewolf hunters have only one job: to take out my species.

The Luparii snipers have been tracking werewolves all across Europe since they fell out with the Hounds of God, their loose alliance ripped violently asunder in a bloody act of betrayal. As Roul predicted, the lone wolves were the first to be targeted. Unprotected and alone, Arden reported many were cured against their will, easy pickings for the Luparii. Like all good hunters, the Luparii’s patience will be their truest virtue. They can out-wait us all, culling our numbers one by one until there aren’t enough of us to make a stand. Meanwhile, the Hounds, an army of bitten humans loyal to the magistrate Breber, gave every indication that they were mobilizing for war. To them, Wolf’s Bane, the so-called ‘cure’, is a mixed blessing. Those who remained civilians may want their old lives back, and Wolf’s Bane can give them that. There are others, though, who have nothing to go back to and those who have found purpose in the military and religious training who will likely stay true to the cause of the Hounds — to keep the ‘true-born’ at bay. They consider us to be the big, bad wolf of fairytales and a danger to human society that must be controlled through their governance. Packs have always been too small to fight their rule. It’s a hopeless scenario unless we can pull together and find strength in numbers.

Had Amara’s boyfriend, Arden — my secret brother of sorts — not been cured against his will back in November when everything began, surely he would have been a contender to take control of the pack. Arden would have been a different kind of leader had he been given the chance. Henri Boguet, a modern-day mad scientist and once ruthless inquisitor of witch-trials, had different plans. Ones that involved the very human act of vengeance. I never got the full story, just the key part that Arden was the werewolf who bit Boguet. Hundreds of years later, Arden became the first unwilling ‘test subject’ in the man’s plan to rid the world of werewolves. That the cure was inadvertently discovered through study of my DNA is something I haven’t been able to live down. It’s also part of what drives me to make things right again.

Once, Arden might have been a target to our enemies, but he’s no longer a werewolf — not physiologically, anyway. By long-standing rules and traditions he should be an outcast. But they didn’t account for me, the hybrid, a miscast chess piece in their wide-reaching game. In any case, instead of embracing the challenges of the modern world, Arden would have taken the pack further into the woods, away from the constructs of human society. At some point that will help our cause, more than I can admit just now. When we return to Europe I’m going to have to rely on his outdoorsman survival skills to get us through the battlefields, but he wouldn’t be of any help here on my home turf. Life has given us an unfair burden and we’ve had to leave Arden behind, tasked with warning the other packs of the impending war in Europe and the bio-weapons fitted with Wolf’s Bane. If I have any expectation of unifying the other packs, I’ll have to earn their trust before I return. When I do, war will be waiting for me on two fronts. There hasn’t been an outright declaration by the Hounds yet, but it’s coming.

Amara stirs awake. Her dark eyes light up in the sunshine. She wears a black knit dress, simple enough except for the diamond-shaped cutouts on the back that reveal parts of her tattoo. Her black leather boots come up over her knees and her hair is pulled back in a high ponytail. When she glances briefly over at me, an old heat rises to my face against my will. Even after all these months of being cooped up together in Roul’s mansion, I’m still not immune to her predatory stares. Every time she looks at me I’m acutely aware that I’m an ‘intruder’ in this world of hers. Her life has been shaken up as much as mine but I needed someone here with me who had clout, someone who could advise me in matters I may not have a complete handle on. She hasn’t said much of anything since she and Arden came back from Quedlinburg. Everything about their lives was ransacked by circumstance. Their possessions notwithstanding — their little flat in Paris decorated like a world history museum, his butcher shop below, her tattoo artist tools — Arden’s forced humanity put an expiry date on their relationship. He now has a very human lifespan ahead of him, one that will see him grow old and die while she lives on. I’ve asked them to give up some of their remaining time together, maybe the greatest sacrifice they could bear. The time they once had used to be a beach that stretched out far into the horizon. They had enough of it to spare in handfuls. Now they’re relegated to what’s left in the hourglass, and even this speck of sand counts for something. The pack is supposed to be the basic unit of their social life. For Arden it certainly is, with Amara at the center of it. The simple truth is there’s only one thing that held Amara to the pack, and that’s Arden. His tenacious unwillingness to walk away from this life, even though they tried to turn him out, is now what keeps her from leaving. Wolf’s Bane rattled her. During the long stretch of waiting for them to return to Paris, while Arden slowly healed from his gunshot wound, I was almost sure I’d never see either of them again. When they finally returned and discovered that Roul was dead — that I was left to lead the packs — even then it crossed my mind that I might be alone in fulfilling his last dying request.

In my periphery Amara continues to eye me, uninterested in the view below.

Without looking over, I tell her, “If you’re going to say something, now’s the time.”

Her gaze doesn’t waver. “It would have been prudent to have brought a gun.”

I can’t hide my surprise so I maintain my steady stare out the window. “I thought you didn’t believe in firearms.”

“You mistake Arden’s views for my own.”

We’re silent for a moment and I consider once again what we might be heading into. “This unified pack in the New World ... it could all be a myth.”

“You said yourself there was only one way to discern the truth. I am far more concerned that whoever is in power will not allow us to live to tell of them.”

Gooseflesh rises on my arms and I’m thankful she can’t see it under my suit. “You know what Arden’s parting words to me were? Homme mort ne fait guerre.”

A dead man deals no blows.

She averts her eyes. “Of late, he has been preoccupied with thoughts of mortality — his own and that of others.”

If I didn’t know any better I’d say there was a touch of sarcasm in her voice. But I do know better, and Amara is deadly serious. When the jet banks right, she pulls down the shade on her side while swallowing down the motion sickness she’s been trying to hide from me, evident in the unusual pallor of her skin. I glance out my window again as we come in for a landing at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, a hub of small aircraft and charter business flights. I instinctively pull my phone from the inner pocket of my suit jacket. It’s 11:14 a.m. Although we had a seven-hour flight, with the time difference it’s only a couple hours later than when we left Paris. It feels like I fell into some kind of rift in the space-time continuum. Thankfully, I caught a few hours of shuteye but it won’t take long for the jet lag to set in, and I’ll need all of my wits in the next few days. I unlock my phone as we rumble along the taxiway and send a text to Madison, letting her know we’ve arrived safely.

“Sir?” The pilot’s voice reaches me from the cockpit, but I don’t acknowledge that he’s actually talking to me until he repeats himself. “Sir.”

“What is it?”

“You may want to look outside.”

As I unfasten my seatbelt, Amara pulls up her window shade. Blue and red lights flash across her pallid skin. Police cruisers surround the jet. My concern about tracking down the pack is instantly quashed. I’ve no doubt in my mind that somehow, before I’ve even set foot back on American soil, they’ve already found us. To what end I’ll only know once I meet with them. Amara unabashedly gazes at me with I-told-you-so eyes. She was right. I probably should have brought a gun.