The Willing (9 page)

I barely heard his voice through my own
thoughts. “Don’t go that way.”

“I’ll go wherever I want.”

“Suit yourself, but that’s where the
suckheads live.”

I paused and turned quickly.
“Vampires?”

“If that’s what name you want to grace
them with.”

“They’re this far north?”

“Of course. They like the
cold.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Hell if I know. But I
know you don’t want to go that way.”

“It’s not like they can kill me,” I
said with all the confidence of a newborn Lycanti.

He guffawed, a big, booming laugh that
disoriented me in all the things I knew about him.

“You don’t think so?”

“Nothing can kill me,” I
insisted.

His eyes fell into slits. “Oh there are
things that can kill you. Why do you think there are no grey-haired
Lycanti?”

“I’ve met Raníer. I know most of the
elders by sight if not by name.”

“There’s a big difference in the
Lycanti life and the Lycanthrope life.”

“Whatever,” I muttered. I kept walking.
Josh could not and would not stop me with so many people around.
Besides, he and the others would want to hunt soon. I could taste
his knife-sharp hunger on my tongue, but I wanted no human’s blood
on my hands. I had willingly eaten the flesh of those who had hurt
me, but that woman selling wool dresses had not hurt me in any way.
Let Josh and the pack hunt; I would take a walk and meet creatures
that had fascinated me since I could remember. I did not fear them.
I was curious.

My rage had become a constant
companion, and I felt safe carrying it with me as a weapon. If I
needed to Change, the hot surge of suppressed anger towards Josh
would fuel that need. I felt my hate for him was the only
protection I needed against vampires, if any.

I wove through the crowds, the smell of
civilization thick in my nose. I never realized how much I had
missed that scent—baking goods, hamburgers, even soap powder
wafting through the air—encased in the movement and noise of
people. My life seemed so complicated and simple all at once. Eat,
sleep, fuck. Not a hard cycle. Faced with the complexities of my
life now, I can see the appeal to Josh’s pack, but to me, it wasn’t
even an echo of my former life with Will. Whereas Will taught me to
use my Lycanti senses and reflexes to enhance my human experience,
the pack broke those down, using their senses only as tools to
allow the animal to fully overtake them. It bothered me, but I
feared being alone, especially with new life growing in my belly.
Joshua may have threatened me before, as well as threw me to his
food supply to do with as they pleased, but with his pack, I was
still safer than I would have been living alone. But now, I walked
alone. And it felt good. I loved the smell of humanity.

A body bumped hard into me and I
growled in reflex, watching the blonde hair disappear into the
crowd. Had I a wallet or any valuables, I knew they would now be
missing. As it were, I had neither, and so I was not entirely
worried about the bump.

Stupid, stupid Emily.

I, one who knows the importance of
smell for the hunt, should have recognized being marked. The brush
of skin on skin was all that the girl needed to leave a traceable
scent on me. But in my arrogance, I thought nothing of it. I
traveled on, looking through stands of books and clothes, trying to
keep the inexplicable anger from dominating my mood. Yes, public
was risky, but I had a purpose. I wanted to meet a vampire and see
why Luka could no longer love Shasta, why Will had recoiled at my
interested with the creatures, and why the pack would not even
discuss the matter. Even Josh, so contemptuous of the Lycanthrope,
seemed to slightly fear the Children of Dacre.

I kept my senses attuned to any shift
in smell of the mass of bodies around me, but I was only rewarded
with the overwhelming smell of too much body odor in too small of a
space. I did not realize how gloriously I had failed until later
that night. I continued to stroll through the crowd, oblivious to
anything but my memories of Will and the commercial interests
around me.

I was cold, colder than I’d ever been.
I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there, but I felt
sluggish laying there with my eyes closed. I could have been waking
from some long dream. The last thing I remembered was my anger at
Josh’s dismissive attitude for the seriousness of the Lycanti curse
and his frolicking among Hollywood’s wealthy as if he were an Anne
Rice character.

Just thinking about it made my temper
spike again.

“Her heartbeat just jumped,” a soft
female voice hissed. I felt a rush of breath at my throat, warm and
sweet. My eyes flew open, but darkness flooded them.

“Leave her be,” another woman answered.
“She’ll recover soon enough.”

“We can’t just leave her…”

“I said let’s go,” the other voice cut
her off, lowly but sharply.

My throat tried to work, but no words
came out. The other woman did not speak up for me either. I fought
to stay awake, but my eyes fluttered and there was nothing but more
darkness left for me, like always.

I awoke shortly after that with a
massive headache, dizzy, nauseated, and tired. I hadn’t felt so bad
since the final moments of my Change, and that was only because I
had practically died before Will brought me back.

The light poured in strongly through a
window. I was in a hotel room, the sheets crumpled around me as if
I had slept badly. I pushed them away, turning over into my pillow,
my mind a snarl of confusion. There was nothing but a blank in my
mind from yesterday evening to this morning, other than a few
hurried whispers last night that I very well may or may not have
dreamed. The ache pulsing behind my eyes did not exactly contribute
to a speedy recovery of memory.

Imagine my surprise then, when reality
came crashing in on me. My nose took in the sharp, acrid scent of
my own blood. Despite feeling like I had spent a night being
pummeled by the human prey again, I jumped out of bed. The bathroom
mirror showed a disaster.

“What the hell?” My voice echoed
strangely in the empty hotel room.

My face and throat had splashes of
crimson running up and down them. All I could do was clean up. I
lived. I may have been confused, but I still breathed and could get
back to the only safety I knew at that moment. Maybe Josh would
know what the hell had happened. By God, he was confident he knew
everything else.

Emily

“You sure you want to do
this?”

“He has to be stopped before he hurts
someone else.”

“Emily, what did he do to
you?”

I couldn’t answer Luka then. I don’t
know if I’ll ever be able to answer him. My only response was to
lean over and kiss him softly on the cheek. The bandages on my ribs
stretched as I did so and the pain was almost beautiful in this
state between waking and sleeping, letting me know I was still
living. Even my breaths that came in almost ragged gasps told me
that I could still fight. Maria had ripped me apart. It was time to
stop thinking so much and start doing.

The Lycanti

One look at me told Josh all he needed
to know.

“Leave,” he said to the others. He had
been standing, staring into the flames, warming his hands. “Go far
away. Emily and I need to talk.”

They left, obeying his order
immediately and without any dissention. For once, I was glad of his
authority over his pack. We heard them move stealthily out of
range. He turned his attention fully to me. “Vampires,” he said
levelly.

I nodded.

He nodded in return. “You seem to have
such a knack for survival, my dear.”

“Cut the shit, Josh,” I said suddenly.
“I hurt, I’m tired, and I want to know why I’m alive. You made it
sound like I wouldn’t survive the experience.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

That left me silent long enough for him
to fill the gap.

“Vampires feed exclusively on those
with the Lycanthrope gene,” he explained. “As you know, we let off
a particular scent.”

At first, I couldn’t believe he was
telling me this. I had been with his pack for half a year and he
had never mentioned anything about the topic. Never would I have
imagined that, to be cliché, the hunters become the
hunted.

My thoughts tumbled over Will and
Luka’s disdain for the Children of Dacre. “I don’t understand,” I
said tentatively, hoping my sudden fragility would invite him to
tell me more.

His earnest gaze caught me off guard.
He really is a gorgeous specimen of a man, no matter how much I
hate him now. “Do you know how they are created?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you know.”

I struggled to pull up the fragments of
what I had pieced together over my born-in-blood tutorial in the
underworld of America. “Death. Or something like it. To make a
Lycanti, you have to exchange the blood before the heart stops
beating. Vampires are made when the blood exchange comes too late.
The person is dead.”

“Very good. But I understand you know
this because your Change was uncontrolled. You almost died,
correct?”

The memory of it still scalded me from
time to time. “Yes.”

“No true Lycanthrope allows such things
to be out of his control. No one should go through what you did.
The Change should be joyous, the beautiful bond of loyalty between
master and servant made surreal.” He paced. If I did not know him
so intimately, I would have assumed he was nervous.

It was the most human I had ever seen
him. I spoke to him quietly. “You can say that to me? Speak to me
of beauty and surrealism after what you’ve put me
through?”

He did not deign to look at me. “You
now know the beauty of loyalty. I saw your eyes as the pack left
instantly. You love my power over them, just as you fear my power
over you.” He continued speaking to the flames. “I am the link
between the savagery of man and the strength of a Lycanthrope. I am
what Man should aspire to be.”

I grunted in disagreement. Not a
ladylike sound at all, but it was the only sound I could fathom to
his statement without sounding completely argumentative. I had to
keep up the façade to stay alive.

His blue eyes finally turned to me,
assessing me with his eyes not as prey, but as all the things I had
been to him: lover, companion, pack mate. He had wanted my loyalty
above all other things.

“You don’t agree? You don’t think all
men should have access to this? Look at John. Do you think he
represents the best of mankind?”

The shiver ran through me as I recalled
the night in the feeding pen, John digging his human hands into my
back, my neck, the corners of my mouth. I had taken particular
pleasure in helping to hunt and devour the man called John.
Apparently I had spat out some expletive about John without
realizing it. My neck still burned from the rope, and my thighs
still quivered with the remembrance of pain.

Josh’s eyebrows shot upward at my rude
tone denying his opinion on one of the male humans in our
fold.

“No? You don’t agree? You want to argue
with me? You are always unusually submissive to men. How odd. Even
when Layla reported your treatment among the cattle, she commented
on how you accepted your fate and did what you were told. You
didn’t even fight against those men who sought to hurt you even
after you Changed.”

I pushed away those memories. Too much
of them and I would have Changed, which he would have seen as an
immediate challenge. Instead I let my words come out, laced with
sarcasm. “You don’t qualify as a man, therefore I can argue with
you.”

“Oh?” Josh leaned towards her as she
fought revulsion from his closeness. “And tell me, my boarding
school educated lovely, what is a man if not the very essence of
domination and strength?”

I fought to keep my cool as he
dismissed my education. “A man is someone who accepts his
responsibilities. You don’t. You run from them.”

He smiled patiently, an overeducated
father indulging his fledgeling high school daughter. “And what
here in this godless country tells me when I become a
man?”

I tried to gather my thoughts to
answer, but he continued in that lazy, educated tone: “Even the
barbarous Lycanthrope have a Ceremony when a child may take on a
man’s responsibilities. He must Change fully at will at withhold
the Change during the full moon. Until he learns self-control, he
cannot be responsible to control others. Now you tell me where, in
an American’s life, does he demonstrate such finesse of
self?”

I found my rhetoric in the doctrine
which had been beat into me all my life. “The American culture is
too much of a melting pot. There’s too many ethnicities and beliefs
mixed up. But that’s what it means to be American, and not a
completely closed off, pigheaded clan.”

“It is American to throw away
time-honored tradition and disgrace your family’s
honor?”