The Passion (51 page)

The glory in her eyes turned to terror and he felt the terror rising inside him, too; terror and power and grand helpless savagery, and he wanted to push her away but could not. It was too late, too late. It was wrong and it was inevitable and no power in heaven or on earth could have prevented it. He heard her screams and his own as the Passion swept down and consumed them both.

ALEXANDER Summer 1900

Chapter Thirty-one

When I look back upon those dark days after the death of our firstborn my mind recoils instinctively, and there is very little of it that I can recal . Despair, loss, bleakness. The year 1899 is lost to me, except that I went into it a brave-hearted youth who thought he knew al there was to know about life, and I emerged from it ancient, and knowing nothing.

Elise's recovery, like my own, was long and slow. I think sometimes this is a danger in the mating bond, for every pain is not only shared but doubled and we can become so absorbed in it as to almost cripple each other with grief. If only the healing of our hearts could be as swift and as efficient as the healing of our bodies, but this is the price we pay for feeling deeply. We never truly recover from a loss.

Though our tenderness toward each other was only deepened by the crisis and our lovemaking remained as intense as ever, we did not have the courage to try to conceive again. The great and glorious passion that is necessary for true mating eluded us, smothered by guilt, dampened by fear.

Yes, we worried it might never come again, and perhaps that worry contributed to its loss. We had years, we knew, before the pack would lose faith in our ability to produce offspring—and thus lose faith in us—but the fear hung over our household and our mating grounds like a dusky sun that wouldn't rise.

If there was one thing that saved us from complete despair it was the pack: our responsibility for it, our duty to it, our vision for it. The daily routine of demands and decisions both great and smal drew us out of the dark imprisonment of our minds and gradual y captured our interest. In January of the century year we sailed to New York, which was pretty with snow and shop lights and smel ed of the sweat and greed of American industry, and quite fel in love with al we saw. Elise purchased her factory and immediately set about bringing in werewolf engineers to upgrade the clumsy, inefficient equipment with which the humans worked. I purchased several tracts of property around Central Park and commissioned a house on Fifth Avenue where I thought we might like to live part-time.

In the spring we boarded our private rail car and began travel ing west, meeting with members of the pack along the way, and beginning in many smal ways to form the skeleton structure of what would one day coalesce into our grand vision for the pack.

We kept moving, sometimes it seemed for the sake of movement alone, and then one day we looked at each other and we knew where we were going. I think perhaps we had always known.

I do not wish to make it seem as though, during this time of intense personal grief, I had forgotten about Tessa. On the contrary, the tragedy of her loss had become so entwined with the tragedy that took our son that I would sometimes awake cold and sweating from a nightmare in which I felt again the fragile, squirrel ike bones of my son's neck between my fingers, snapping and twisting beneath my touch, and the face upon his tiny writhing body would be Tessa's. I am not superstitious by nature, but more than once it occurred to me that the death of my son might be my punishment for what I had done to Tessa.

We boarded a ship in Seattle and sailed for Alaska in June—Elise, I, and an entourage of a dozen or so of our most trusted personal servants, trackers and guards. It had been almost two years, and I'm not sure what we expected to find. If Tessa had survived she would have done so by seeking the protection of her own people, and that was my hope

—to find her living whatever rough existence she might have been able to carve for herself on this wild frontier, and to find her not so hardened against me as to be unable to forgive, and to bring her home.

There was a part of me that grew to believe, more and more desperately as we neared the coast of Alaska, that if I could only find Tessa and bring her back, I could somehow undo the past and al the tragedy that had now become a part of history; that my days would once again be as gay and carefree as when she had plagued my life with her constant chatter and her incessant questions; that Elise would smile again as she had smiled the summer Tessa lived at the Palais; that lights would glitter in the garden again and music would be sweet again and joy would at last come home.

We had heard, of course, about the gold strikes in Alaska but were interested only in a vague way as concerned our own mining ventures. We could not have guessed that in the time since our prison ship had docked in the rough-hewn port of northwest Alaska, a sprawling tent city reeking with thousands of violent, greedy, unwashed humans would have sprung up around that port they now cal ed Nome.

When we saw it, our hearts sank, and so did our hopes of ever finding out what had become of one lone human girl two seasons past.

We sent our two best trackers in to try to pick up a scent, and—although somewhat against our better judgement—Gault, who had never forgiven himself for the role he had played in Tessa's loss and who insisted upon being al owed to participate in her rescue. Elise made him leave behind his velveteen jacket and yel ow silk cravat, and I think he rather enjoyed pinning up his hair beneath a floppy-brimmed miner's hat, but I had my doubts he would ever manage to make himself inconspicuous enough to blend into this particular human society—

especial y since he had to protect his sensitive nose from the stench with a scented handkerchief even from as far away as a mile out at sea.

He received a hero's farewel , however, and rowed ashore with the trackers at dusk. There was nothing for Elise and me to do but remain on board and await word from our scouts.

We spoke for the first time of Denis, and of our best and worst expectations of what we might find.

"Al those humans." Elise sounded worried, looking out over the rail at the twinkling lights of the tent city, listening to their boisterous music and harsh drunken voices. "How far have they spread, do you think?"

"He would have gone as far away from humans as he could," I assured her. "He would have gone savage at the first opportunity, and there are hundreds of thousands of acres of empty wilderness to the north."

She said gently, "He had every reason to wish Tessa harm, you know. He might have kil ed her the moment they were alone."

I nodded slowly. This I had also always known, and this is what I had come here to find out. "But she may have been clever enough to escape him."

"She was awful y clever," agreed Elise with a hopeful affection in her voice, and she leaned her head on my shoulder, and we waited.

Gault returned at dawn, ful of himself and his resourcefulness, bearing the information we needed and never expected. Indeed, he agreed smugly as we sat him down to a breakfast of tea and salmon steaks, one might expect that the task of finding out what had become of one human female among so many would be very nearly impossible—unless, of course, one was a particularly clever werewolf, and unless the human female in question was already legendary.

"This is the story they tel when they gather to pass their foul-smel ing bottles around the fire," he told us, wrinkling his nose a little with the memory, "and they're happy to tel it over and over again to any newcomer, though I suspect it grows somewhat with each new tel ing. There are some who claim they were here when it happened, the year the ship docked and brought coffee and beans, and let off two half-starved prisoners who were taken by mule into the wilderness."

Elise and I glanced at each other but said nothing.

We knew precisely, down to the fraction of a longitudinal minute, where the mariners had left Tessa and Denis, for it was to that spot that our trackers had gone to try to re-create subsequent events through their noses. Whatever Gault could tel us would be supplemental—or so we thought.

"Apparently the male was never seen again," Gault went on, "but the story they tel is how some of the miners captured the female and brought her back here to serve them—they boast about it, they're such filthy creatures—and how one snowy night a big red wolf…" He looked at us meaningful y for the time it took for him to neatly dispose of a forkful of salmon. "Broke into the lodge where they kept her, knocked down one of the wal s, so they say, and went on a rampage of bloody slaughter. He kil ed ten, some say twenty, men before…" Once again the dramatic pause. "Carrying off the woman in his jaws and disappearing into the mountains."

The horror I had begun to feel dissolved into relieved amusement—which was in itself fol owed in a moment by disappointment. I sat back, reaching for Elise's hand. "And how much if any of that tale do you suppose is true?"

Gault shrugged. "Al human legends have a basis in truth. I talked to a man who said he lost his arm to the wolf that night. There's no doubt it was Denis.

The animal they described, even in legend, couldn't have been anything else. It seems to me twenty humans with guns would be a great many for a werewolf of even Denis's stature to subdue, but he may have kil ed one or two. There seems to have been some kind of fire, and the female escaped in the confusion. But here is the interesting part."

He put down his fork and touched his napkin to his lips, his expression triumphant. "I talked to a trapper who works the streams and riverbeds farther to the north—another filthy, disgusting creature whose presence I could not escape soon enough—and he tel s a peculiar story about tracks in the snow and smoke from cooking fires far into the winter. As he tel s it, there are few humans ever to wander that far afield, and he was interested in these tracks in particular because they were smal and light, like a female's, and because they seemed at times to be joined by the tracks of a wolf. One might have dismissed the story as simply another embel ishment on the carried-off-in-the-jaws-of-a-wolf legend, except that he adds a most curious detail. Around the campsites and cooking fires the tracks of the woman were sometimes joined by the tracks of a bare-footed man."

I was not aware that I had been holding my breath until I heard Elise release hers. "Denis," she said softly. "She escaped the humans only to be recaptured by him."

"But for what purpose?" I wondered out loud, then shook my head impatiently. "A foolish question. I never have been able to fathom my brother's motives on any question and I shan't begin now.

The important thing is that she was alive, even after she left this place, and if she was making cooking fires she had learned to take care of herself."

Elise said cautiously, "The winters are very harsh here, Alexander. It may not be wise to raise our hopes."

"Humans have been surviving winter for a great many years now, my love," I replied, for I could see hope in her eyes, too. I turned to Gault. "What became of the woman of the tracks? Did the trapper say?"

Gault shook his head. "A blizzard came, and he lost the trail."

"Do you know where he last spotted a campsite?"

Gault smiled. "Of course. I can draw you a map."

I let him see my intense approval of him in my eyes, and then I turned to my bride. "Then that is where we start."

Our caravan set out the next morning, complete with pack animals purchased from the humans and every comfort technology could provide. Even as we strode along in human form I could not help but be impressed by the magnificence of the scenery that surrounded us, the sparkling clarity of the air, the tumbling streams and soaring, snowcapped mountains. As soon as we were away from human habitation Elise and I shed our clothing and transformed to wolf form, giving ourselves over to the sheer beauty of the place and the pleasure of the run.

There was no doubt in my mind that Denis would have done the same. What I could not understand was why, with al this splendor around him, he would have come back for Tessa.

Travel ing in luxury, with tents to sleep in at night and wine to drink with our finely cooked meals, with candlelight and fine china and eiderdown for our beds, we reached the spot of the last campfire in a matter of days. I could not begin to guess how long it must have taken Tessa, fighting the snow and the bitter cold, gathering firewood as she went and eating only what she could catch with her bare hands, to traverse the same distance.

Our trackers confirmed the scent of werewolf which, though it was two seasons old, had been so wel preserved by cold that even I could identify it as my brother's. And yes, equal y as distinctive and equal y as clear in this far place where no other human had since trod, was the scent of Tessa.

The trackers began a circular search grid while the rest of our party continued in the general north-northeasterly direction in which we had begun. Each night the trackers would join us at our new campsite to report on what they had found. And each day they led us deeper and deeper into those high treacherous mountains until I truly began to lose hope. In the heart of winter, in the midst of this brutal terrain, there was no chance at al that a human could have survived.

Yet over and over the trackers reported finding the scent of werewolf intermingled with hers.

"He kept her alive earlier," Elise pointed out, "for some reason of his own. Perhaps he is doing it stil ."