The Passion (42 page)

The orange-and-blue lights of the fire planed his face grotesquely, but did not exaggerate his sunken cheeks and dark-circled eyes. He held the cloak tight around his shoulders with one hand, and the hand that thrust sticks into the fire was not quite steady. His injured leg, which was stretched out to the side of his body, was swol en to easily twice its size from calf to ankle and its color, beneath the streaks of caked blood, was dark and mottled. But the wounds made by the sharp teeth of the trap were now merely bruised indentations, and the bones were straight.

He stirred the fire until sparks flew and flames caught and surged, and then he tossed the last stick onto the fire.

He lowered himself heavily to one arm and was stil for a time, breathing slowly through flared nostrils.

Then he said very lowly, as though the effort were almost more than it was worth, "Why did you come back?"

Tessa inched slowly back to the fire, watching him cautiously. She stretched out her hands to the flames. She answered at length, "I saw the birds. I wondered… if you would be strong enough to protect yourself from the things that come at night."

And then she added slowly, softly, and almost to herself, "Because if you died, it real y would be over.

There would be nothing at al to remind me of what happened to me in France, nothing to prove it was real. There would be nothing to explain why I am here."

Denis said nothing, but she could see his eyes watching her from the shadows. The fire crackled and the flames danced, and eventual y his eyes closed, and he slept.

When the sky turned indigo with the prelude to dawn, Tessa walked out until she could see the val ey, and the faint flicker of light as some early riser stirred his fire for coffee.

She left the sack containing the protein squares for Denis and refil ed her own canteen at the stream.

She planned to be back among her own kind before nightfal , and she would not need anything else.

She started fol owing the stream again, and this time she was not distracted. The sun was bright, and though the air was cold there was no wind, and she was warm enough even without Denis's cloak.

She drank al the water from her canteen.

As dusk began to fal a smal knot of fear started to form in her bel y. What if she was going in the wrong direction after al ? What if the camp was farther away than she had thought? She had left the matches with Denis, inside the pocket of his cloak.

What if darkness came and she was alone in this wild forest with no fire?

And then she smel ed the woodsmoke and went weak with relief. She was going in the right direction. The camp was near.

She quickened her step, pushing through the undergrowth toward the clearing she could see faintly ahead. She splashed through the shal ow stream, and slipped on the bank going up the other side, landing hard on her hands and knees.

Heavy hands fel on her shoulders, hauling her to her feet. She caught a cry in her throat, but what began as relief turned to cold fear as she looked into the bearded, tobacco-stained face of the man who held her.

He grinned at her, showing yel ow, broken teeth.

"Wel , now," he said, "what have we here?"

Tessa struggled then, and tried to break away. He held her firm. She cried out, "Let me go!" and kicked at him, but he just laughed.

Another man came out of the shadows, and another.

Tessa began to scream.

Chapter Twenty-four

It was hunger, in the end, that drove Denis down the hil . Hunger, which in his former life had been a condition he was barely familiar with, now was the axis upon which his world revolved. Avoiding hunger, obeying hunger, fol owing hunger carved the paths that determined what course his life would take. He was a slave to the need to survive.

When he had first surveyed this wild paradise he had been overwhelmed by its splendor. Here was bounty enough for a hundred werewolves, a boundless pack, and he could not understand why none of his kind had settled here before. Here it would be possible to live one's entire life in wolf form and never worry about going hungry; here one could run without fences, hunt without inhibition, drink endlessly from clear running streams. Here, where humankind had barely touched, a single werewolf could be a king. An entire pack could rule the world.

That was when he had first begun to realize that his life was not over. It had, in fact, just begun, and the future was unfolding with a magnificence he had never dared to dream before.

He had feasted that first day after the sailors released him on fresh-kil ed deer; he gorged himself right down to the bone, and when his desperate body metabolized that, he kil ed again, swiftly, easily, and ate until he could hold no more. Living on instinct, half drunk with gluttony, his wolf-form mind thought no further than the next kil , the next long drink of cold rushing water, the run that would strengthen his muscles and make his spirit soar. He could have lived like that forever.

It was therefore a bitter irony that, in this place so far from human habitation, he, a master of the wilderness, should fal victim to one of humankind's simplest devices for taming nature. And that, because of it, he was once again on the brink of starvation in the midst of plenty.

The protective instinct that caused him to automatical y revert to human form once the basic healing was done had saved his life, for the energy reserves he had stored with two days' gorging had been almost depleted by the injury itself. But in human form he couldn't hunt; he couldn't even travel far enough or fast enough to help himself to the kil s made by other predators.

In human form the healing of his leg was decelerated significantly. The bones were tender and the newly rejoined ligaments as thin as membranes; almost a week had passed before he was able to support his own weight. Whatever energy he had to spare after fighting off fever and getting himself back and forth to the stream to drink was spent in foraging for firewood to keep his human form warm. And after the protein packs that Tessa had left were gone, he was reduced to scratching for grubs beneath the rapidly freezing ground or trying to snatch fish from the stream with his hands. Sometimes he was successful at this, sometimes not. As the nights got colder and he grew weaker, he was consumed with frustration, hating his human form and the restrictions that kept him bound to it; hating humans and al their murderous devices; hating, in particular, Tessa LeGuerre because he could not stop thinking about her.

Over and over he kept coming back to a single truth: he had misjudged her. He had counted upon those natural human characteristics of jealousy, greed and revenge to serve him effortlessly with the queen, but somehow Tessa had overcome her nature and instead acted in a manner that was disturbingly close to honorable. Her loyalty could not be swayed or destroyed. She had refused to do harm to one she loved. She had, perhaps, lived among werewolves for so long that she had begun to adopt some of their traits.

You know nothing about us
, she had said. It infuriated Denis to think she was right.

She had saved his life. He understood why she had done it, but that she had done it at al was a puzzle.

She had come back, she had built a fire, she had left him food. Al of his life Denis had lived according to a certain set of truths about humans. To suspect now that he had been mistaken about those truths, however slightly, was deeply disturbing.

In wolf form no such uneasiness would plague him.

In wolf form nothing required analysis, motivations did not matter, and what he did not understand he could ignore. It angered him to be plagued with uncertainties now. And he resented the fact that it was Tessa who had left him condemned to live or die in human form, and that questions about Tessa consumed far more energy than he could afford.

Stil , if he had not smel ed the roasting meat from the miners' camp, it was unlikely their paths would have ever crossed again.

For several mornings as the cold wind rose and hard dry snowflakes brought the taste of a crisp northern winter before evaporating in the air, Denis had been forced to listen helplessly to the sound of herds on the move. He wasn't afraid of the coming winter; he was a winter hunter who thrived in rough terrain. But if he lost the herds, his chances of survival in the kind of weather he knew was coming were diminished by half. And he couldn't hunt—not even wel enough to pick off the sick and the old who straggled behind—until his leg healed.

He knew if he changed one more time the hormonal surge would complete the healing of his leg. But unless he was near an immediate food source, the energy expended would leave him too depleted to hunt. And that was when the winds shifted, bringing the smel of an approaching storm—and of roasting meat. He remembered the human camp.

He drew his cloak around him and, using a sturdy branch to aid his weakened leg, started down the hil . The "day's walk" turned out to be slightly less than that, and he reached the outskirts of the human habitation shortly before sunset.

The smel of their dying campfires and of their stored-away food made his stomach cramp and his mouth wet, yet his sense of caution caused him to linger in the shadows, sweeping the clearing with slitted eyes, testing the air, listening. He had been listening to their conversations for miles, filthy, unlettered savages whose only concerns seemed to be how much gold they could carry out before the snow flew and how best to ease the swel ing between their legs. Many of them had already left ahead of the storm; perhaps a half dozen remained to winter over in the stick-and-clay lodge they had built in a shelter of evergreens. It was from there that the smel of cooked meat emanated.

Tessa was there; he had caught her scent earlier, and it was of sickness and pain. There were other smel s, too, in addition to the filth of human waste and sweat, of unwashed wool and rotting shoe leather; there was the smel of hard new whiskey and sex, and he came to understand that the men, loud and drunk, were having sex with Tessa. This interested him less than it should have, less than it might have under other circumstances. Human males, weakened with drink and distracted by sex, were unlikely to reach for guns. That was al he needed to know.

He let the cloak drop, and knowing that it might wel be for the last time, he cal ed the Passion to him.

For years afterward, stories would be told of what happened that night, and with each new tel ing the legend would grow until it bore no resemblance at al to the actual events. In fact, it happened so quickly and was over so fast it's doubtful any of the drunken men who witnessed it would, singly or together, ever be able to give an accurate account.

Denis ripped open the canvas covering that served as a door with one mighty swipe of his paw and charged inside the room. There he paused for no more than a split second to get his bearings, head lowered and teeth bared in a bone-rattling growl.

This is what he saw in that half moment before they were able to react to him: One man with a filthy, tobacco-stained beard was squatting by the fire, rubbing his crotch and grinning while he turned a fatty rump of boar over a spit. Another was asleep in his chair with a jug in his hands that contained nothing more than harsh-smel ing fumes. There was a table made of a stump of barked tree, and it was piled with tools and cast-off scraps of clothing and some metal plates crusted with food; there was a bench and another chair, and some nests of rags on the floor that smel ed as though they were used for beds. The guns were by the door, where Denis now stood.

Tessa was on the floor, half in the shadows of the fire. The front of her dress had been torn open, and her breasts were black with bruises. Her face was discolored and lumpy with blows, her lips cracked and bloody; one eye was swol en shut. Her skirt was pushed up over her naked legs and a man was between them, his flabby buttocks rising and fal ing with repeated grunts as he thrust into her, while another man, giggling in a high weird way, held her head and tried to force his penis into her mouth.

Those men were between him and the meat on the fire.

Denis leapt upon the back of the man who was between Tessa's legs, sank his teeth into his neck, and flung him against the wal . The man at Tessa's head stopped giggling and started screaming like a woman, his member withering as he backed away.

Furniture overturned. Someone was running. Denis whirled and launched himself at the man who was stumbling for the guns. He brought him down a few steps from the door. Someone was screaming curses in Russian, another in English. Someone else was just screaming. The smel of blood was strong. Tessa was on her knees now, pressed into a corner, and the smal whimpering sounds of terror she made were not directed toward him, but at the men who ran from him.

He whirled again and struck out blindly; this time he caught an arm and ripped out a section of flesh.

More blood sprayed. They started to run for the door, al of them, tripping over each other, grabbing for their guns, dropping them. Someone fired a round into the wal . The explosion shook dirt from the roof in a fine shower and overturned a lamp.

Fire and kerosene smel ed strong.

Denis grabbed the meat from the fire and sailed past them through the door, and when bul ets peppered the snow at his feet he barely noticed. He gulped down the hot meat in the shadows of the burning building and felt it flooding through muscles, fueling him for the hunt.