The Passion (39 page)

PART FIVE

Alaska

1898—1899

In wildness is the survival of the soul.

—GRIGORI ANTONOV, WEREWOLF 1237

There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

—DENIS DIDEROT, A HUMAN 1782

DENIS

AND TESSA

Chapter Twenty-two

Denis's first reaction upon awakening to find himself imprisoned in the cargo hold of a ship deep in the North Atlantic was absolute astonishment. They had injected him with a tranquilizing substance soon after the verdict was pronounced; this he had known they would do. They had apparently kept him drugged until al ports of cal were wel behind them, for the safety of both the crew on board and the humans in port. They were wise to do so. He would have escaped had he been able; failing that, he would have done as much damage as possible in the attempt.

Astonishment. It was the last thing he remembered before being dragged from the judgement hal as wel . His plan should not have failed. It was bril iantly conceived, simple to execute; it should have been flawless. Yet, thanks to the wretched, treacherous human, it had failed. That was astonishing.

And then to be captured. To have his second plan fail, to be delivered into the hand of his enemies by the very human he had saved from prison… And she had done it so calmly, so easily. He should have been outraged, but al he felt was…

astonishment.

No, none of this had been in his plans, but no great endeavor was undertaken without risk. To have failed was very bad; to be captured was worse. But he had been prepared to die for his Cause from the beginning and the only chal enge remaining to him was to die wel . No one could take that from him.

And yet, somehow, his brother had done just that.

His own brother.

He was astonished.

Then he was furious. Furious in the way a caged wild animal is lost in a wave of savage, instinctual fury; fury that came from the depth of his soul and blotted out his brain, hot white fury that flashes hard and consumes everything in its path; fury unto death. It was the kind of roaring, unreasoning rage that only a creature who lives very close to his nature can ful y experience, demanding no explanation or justification other than that it
is;
it was magnificent in its power, cleansing and liberating. It pushed him to the very edge of the Change, and, if not for the lingering effects of the drug in his system, would have no doubt pushed him over.

He grabbed the iron bars of the cage which held him and twisted them until he actual y thought he could hear the metal bend. He gritted his teeth against the howl that was building inside him, he set his muscles, he tore at the bars until rivulets of sweat ran down his face and soaked his hair and blurred his vision. He flung himself away and col apsed into a corner of the cage, spent.

In the haze that fol owed he became aware of other things. The thrum of engines and shifting of metal plates which was the movement of the ship. The sway caused by cresting waves and the smel of fuel. The smel of many, many things, none of them pleasant: the werewolf crew, whose blood was made of brine and whose skin was leather-tough; how he despised them. The wooden freight boxes, the cargo of wool and porcelain and kerosene and wine, crated glass packed in newsprint, and brass clockworks. Salt and dead fish, sun-bleached timbers, wood mold. Cold sea. Stale bread and rat droppings. His own unwashed body and damp, rotting clothes. Human offal, human sweat, human blood, human sickness. The human Tessa was lying upon the floor of a cage much like his which was bolted to the wal a wolf's length away, watching him through swol en, slitted eyes that might have been those of a corpse.

It was dark and dusty in the hold, the only light being that which seeped through the cracks in the decking overhead. The ship was wel built, and such cracks were few and far between. Denis had little difficulty seeing what he would with his night vision, but knew the human could see little more than shape and movement. What must that be like, he wondered dispassionately, to not even see the rats until they were nibbling away at your toes and fingers? Had it driven her insane? He hoped not.

She didn't deserve so easy an escape.

He listened to the sea rushing by and the voices and movements of the werewolves who operated the ship. He learned nothing useful from them. Like many of his kind, Denis had an instinctive dislike of large bodies of water that was rooted in both superstition and practicality; he was innately suspicious of those who not only endured but thrived upon the sea. Constant winds confused scents and the salt water destroyed them altogether. The cacophony of currents and surges, splashes and roars, was a never-ceasing distraction, disguising heartbeats and hiding whispers. What could one believe of one's senses under such circumstances? The mighty queen could have devised no cruder punishment for him than to cast him adrift in this liquid hel for the weeks or months it would take to reach exile. He wondered if
he
might grow mad.

In a moment he remembered the human, and he turned his gaze sharply back to her. She had not moved, the slits of her swol en eyes fixed upon the place where he was.

"How long?" he demanded.

She didn't answer.

"How many days have we been under way, human girl?" he repeated curtly, but stil there was no response.

She was sick, he knew that, and very weak, but she was stil breathing. It gave him some grim pleasure to imagine the pain she must have endured once the anesthetic she had been given for her injured arm wore off, once she was tossed into this close dark place with the rats. How she must have fought it, screaming and screaming in the dark until her voice was gone, and screaming stil until she was too weak to do anything but let herself be tossed back and forth against the bars of the cage at the whim of the sea… Weeping, begging for surcease from the excruciating pain, final y fal ing into a semiconsciousness tormented by whatever black dreams humans dreamed from the depths of their despair. He could smel the fever on her stil , and he wondered if she would die. Again he hoped not.

Then she whispered, "I don't know. I don't know how long."

She closed her eyes, and did not speak again for many days.

The mariners came once a day to feed them, water them, and take away their waste pots, which was how Denis learned to measure the passage of time.

He did not try to engage them in conversation or elicit their support; to do so would have been a waste of energy. Similarly, he made no attempt to escape, for even if he were able to overpower every crewman on board and single-handedly

commandeer the entire ship, there was no place for him to go on the high seas, no port where he would be any less an exile from the pack than he would be in Alaska. This was a simple truth; to deny it or try to change it would have been another foolish waste of energy.

The life he had known and planned to live was now maddeningly, inexplicably gone. Perhaps one day he would find a way to get it back, but he would not do so aboard this ship.

It would have been impractical to carry enough food to sustain an entire crew of werewolves for weeks at a time, so the diet aboard ship was supplemented with protein packs—little squares of kelp and desiccated animal parts compressed into tasteless, compact loaves. Denis received one of these loaves a day, which was enough to sustain life but no more. Tessa was fed an even more disagreeable diet of bread soaked in whatever leftover gruel, broth or grease the gal ey had to spare. But as disgusting as her fare was, Denis found himself hungering for the bowls of slop she left untouched as the days went by.

For weeks he had forced himself to retain his human form, and the stress of the conditions under which he lived made it seem even longer. His muscles cramped; he couldn't sleep. There were times when he had to physical y restrain himself from simply letting go and sinking into the Change he needed so badly, and the effort to do so was so great it left him weak and shaking, gasping and wet.

But his captors knew very wel how to keep him subdued; they fed him just enough to keep him alive in human form. Should he revert to wolf form, caged and helpless as he was, he would starve to death in a matter of hours.

This, then, by definition, was torture: to be trapped in this dark airless space with the smel of human and filth, to be surrounded by water and deafening winds, to watch one's muscles wither from disuse in an iron cage too smal to even stretch out ful -length in sleep; to hover on the edge of starvation, forced to use energy he could not afford to maintain a shape that was not his own long past the time that nature al otted. Werewolves had gone mad from lesser trials.

But not one of those things, nor al of them in combination, were the source of his real torment. In his fevered dreams he tore flesh from bone and consumed it raw and steaming. He raced the wind and splashed through mountain streams and stood poised and stil with a thousand textured scents floating on the air to him, caressing his brain, lingering in his fur. He saw sunshine, he tasted green. And when he awoke the ache of longing was so intense that it cramped in his gut. But that was not what made him cry out, or toss and moan in his sleep from nightmares he could not escape. The real torment consumed him night and day, became an obsession from which there was no surcease, and it dwarfed al other anguish. It was the question to which he would never know the answer: Why had this happened? How had he failed?

Denis Antonov was born for greatness. This he had always known. It wasn't until his late boyhood, when he began studying the life of his il ustrious ancestor Mikal Antonov and comparing it with the shal ow, inconsequential contributions of his present-day family, that he knew in which direction his greatness would lie. But in truth it would have made little difference what the banner, what the cause. Denis was born to lead. That the Brotherhood of the Dark Moon suited his own philosophy was a happy coincidence for the built-in fol owers it supplied. A leader was nothing without a pack. But no leader, regardless of the strength of his character or the dedication of his pack, could hold his position through desire alone. He had to have cunning, imagination, foresight, wisdom, power, determination, a sense of justice, a grasp of the inevitable, a vision for the future; he had to be
right
.

Denis had never been wrong before. He had never, once he set his hand to a careful y plotted, wel -

conceived course, met with failure. The consequences of failure, as he wel knew, were severe; he did not take reckless chances, he did not burn his bridges, he did not plunge il -informed into a plan from which there was no escape.

He did not dispute his punishment now. He had failed. He had been bested by the Devoncroix queen and a human female; he had left his pack to be scattered to the wind or hunted down like herd beasts when the Devoncroix took it into her head to do so. Families would be torn apart because of him.

Children would starve through the winter because of him. Noble young werewolves with strong hearts and minds would have no more songs to sing because of him. Because of him, the future would die.

There was no punishment too severe for a failure such as that.

But never to know
why
… to be unable to look back and point with clarity to one's mistake, never to know precisely what misjudgement or false information or flaw in logic led to one's downfal …

that was torment. That was almost beyond bearing.

In his self-involved agonies he al but forgot about Tessa. She never spoke, either to him or to the mariners who attended her. Occasional y she ate some of the gruel they brought her and drank the water, and the smel of the fever left her skin, so that it appeared she would not die after al . But she rarely stirred. She was easy to forget.

And then one day when the pain of shrivel ing muscles was very bad and he was startled out of the depths of a black nightmare by the sound of his own hoarse cry and gasping breaths, she spoke.

"What's wrong with you? Are you sick?"

Denis drew himself up against a chil , wrapping his arms around his knees, pressing his shoulders into a corner of the cage nearest the wal where, it seemed, there was a little warmth. He was wearing the same clothes in which he had been condemned

—trousers only and cotton stockings, shirt and shoes having been left on the riverbank a lifetime ago. As his metabolism dropped, it became more and more difficult to maintain his normal body temperature, and frequent chil s were a symptom of the deterioration.

He said roughly into his knees, "Don't pity me, human."

She replied with a sudden ferocity that surprised him. "I have no pity for you. If I had the means I'd open your veins and lap up your blood from the floor while it drained out of you."

He was interested enough to lift his head. "I'm sorry I can't oblige you."

He could smel the leftovers in her bowl, almost three days' worth. His mouth fil ed with saliva. "I'm hungry," he said.

"I'm glad." .

"Push your bowl across to me."

"No."

"You would have me starve when you have food to spare?"

She said nothing. He took that as a sign she was weakening.

He shifted across the cage to the side nearest her.