Kelley Armstrong - Bitten

On the less factual side, the Legacy contained countless stories of werewolves through the ages. Most of these were "my father told me this when I was a child" sort of yarns, many dating back to before the first edition of the Legacy was written. There were tales of werewolves who'd lived their lives in reverse, staying wolves most of the time and changing to humans only when the physical need demanded. There were stories of knights and soldiers and bandits and marauders who'd supposedly been werewolves. Most of these names had vanished from history, but one was still known, even by those who'd never cracked open a history book in their lives. Human history tells of the legend that Genghis Khan's family tree started with a wolf and a doe. According to the Legacy, that was more truth than allegory, the wolf being a werewolf and the doe being a symbol for a human mother. According to that line of reasoning, Genghis Khan himself would have been a werewolf, which explained his lust for blood and his near-supernatural abilities in war. It likely wasn't any truer than the countless human genealogies that include Napoleon and Cleopatra in their family tree. Still, it made a good story.

An equally good tale is one that was also found in human werewolf mythology. A newlywed nobleman's village was plagued by a werewolf. One night, while staking out the beast, the nobleman hears a noise in the bushes and sees a monstrous wolf. He jumps from his saddle and gives chase through the woods on foot. The beast flees from him. At one point, he gets close enough to swing his sword and lops off one of the wolf's front paws. The creature escapes, but when the nobleman goes back to retrieve the paw, it's turned into a woman's hand. Exhausted, he returns to his home to tell his wife what happened. He finds his wife hiding in the back rooms, binding the bloody stump where her hand used to be. Realizing the truth, he kills her. Now, the human version of the story ends there, but the Legacy goes further, giving the ending a pro-werewolf twist. In the Legacy tale, the nobleman kills his new wife by slicing open her stomach. When he does so, out tumbles a litter of wolf pups, his own children. The sight drives the nobleman mad and he kills himself with his sword. Now, as a female werewolf, I'm not particularly keen on the thought of a bellyful of puppies. I prefer to interpret the pups as an allegorical symbol of the nobleman's guilt. When he realizes he's killed his wife without giving her a chance to explain, he goes mad and kills himself. A much more fitting end.

In addition to these stories and musings, each Alpha chronicled the genealogy of the Pack during his reign. This included not only family trees, but brief descriptions of each person's history and life story. Most family trees were long and convoluted. In the current Pack, though, there were three blips, one name with no others before or after it. Clay and I were two. Logan was the third. Unlike Clay and me, Logan was a hereditary werewolf. No one knew who Logan's father was. He'd been put up for adoption as an infant. The only thing that came with him was an envelope to be opened on his sixteenth birthday. Inside the envelope was a slip of paper with two surnames and two addresses, that of the Danvers at Stonehaven and the Sorrentinos at their estate outside New York City. It was unlikely that Logan's father was Pack, since no Pack member would put a son up for adoption. Yet his father had known that the Pack wouldn't turn a sixteen-year-old werewolf away, whatever his parentage, so he'd directed his son to them, ensuring Logan would find out what he was before his first Change and, in doing so, have the chance to start his new life with training and protection. Maybe this proved that not all mutts were lousy fathers, or maybe only that anomalies were possible anywhere in life.

Most other Pack family trees had plenty of branches. Like the Danvers, the Sorrentino family could trace its roots to the beginning of the Legacy. Antonio's father, Dominic, had been Alpha until his death. He'd had three sons, Gregory, who was dead, Benedict, who'd left the Pack before I arrived, and Antonio, the youngest. Antonio's only son was Nick. In the Legacy, the annotation LKB was marked in parentheses beside Nick's initials. Nick didn't know what it meant. As far as I knew, he'd never asked. If he'd even read the Legacy, which I doubted, he'd have figured that if no one had explained the notation to him it must not be important. Nick was like that, totally accepting. The letters were important, but there was no sense telling Nick what they stood for, stirring up questions that couldn't be answered and emotions that couldn't be satisfied. LKB were Nick's mother's initials. It was the only place in the Legacy where a mother was memorialized. Jeremy had added it. Neither Jeremy nor Antonio had explained this to me. It was Peter who'd told me the story years ago.

When Antonio was sixteen, attending a posh private school outside New York City, he'd fallen in love with a local girl. He'd known better than to tell his father, but had let his best friend, fourteen-year-old Jeremy, in on the secret and the two had conspired to keep the relationship hidden from the Pack. It worked for a year. Then the girl became pregnant. On Jeremy's advice, Antonio told his father. Apparently, Jeremy had thought Dominic would see that his son was in love and break Pack law to help him. I guess everyone is young once. Young, romantic, and very naive. Even Jeremy. Things didn't exactly work as Jeremy had envisioned. Big surprise there. Dominic yanked Antonio out of school and put him under house arrest while the Pack waited for the baby to be born.

With Jeremy's help, Antonio had escaped, gone back to the girl, and declared his independence from the Pack. From there, things got really ugly. Peter glossed over the details, saying only that Antonio and his girlfriend had gone into hiding while Jeremy ran interference between father and son, desperate for a reconciliation. Somewhere in the midst of this, Nick was born.

Three months later, Antonio had his first Change. Over the next six months, he'd realized that his father was right. No matter how much he loved Nick's mother, it wouldn't work. Not only would he ruin her life, but he'd ruin his son's, sentencing him to a life as a mutt. One night he took Nick, left an envelope of money on the table, and walked out. He delivered Nick to Jeremy and told him to take the child to Dominic. Then he vanished. For three months, Antonio was gone, not even Jeremy knew where. Just as abruptly, he returned. He took Nick to raise and never mentioned the girl again. Everyone thought that was the end of it. Years later, though, Peter came to visit Antonio and tracked him to a suburb, where he'd found Antonio sitting in his car outside a playground, watching a young woman playing with a toddler. I wondered how often he'd done that, wondered if he ever did it now, checking up on Nick's mother, maybe watching her playing with her grandchildren. When I look at Antonio-boisterous, loud, self-assured Antonio-I can't imagine him holding a torch for a lost love, but in all the years I've known him, I've never heard him mention any woman in his life. Oh, there are women in his life, but they come and go, never staying long enough to make it into even the most idle conversation.

At the time, I wondered why Peter told me that story, a chapter of Pack history that would never make it into the Legacy. Later I came to realize that he'd thought letting me in on a harmless Pack secret might make me feel more part of the Pack, might help me better understand my Pack brothers. Peter did a lot of that. Not to say that the others shut me out or made me feel unwelcome. Nothing of the sort. The only person whose acceptance I'd ever doubted was Jeremy's and maybe that was more my problem than his. I'd met Logan and Nick, through Clay, before I became a werewolf. After I was bitten, they'd both been there and, when I was ready to accept their help, they'd done whatever they could to cheer me up-as much as you could cheer up someone who's just learned that life as she's known it is over. When I met Antonio at my first Pack meeting, he'd flattered and teased and engaged me in conversation as easily as if he'd known me for years. But Peter had been different. Acceptance wasn't enough. He always went that extra step. He'd been the first to tell me his background, like a newfound uncle filling me in on family history.