Ekaterina Sedia - Running with the Pack

Three—maybe four weeks after the night I helped Logan, a stranger enters the parking lot. Wearing blue jeans and a leather motorcycle jacket, he doesn’t hesitate, heading right for my bridge. His black hair hangs in layers to his shoulders, and his stride is familiar.

I’m searching my memories to place him when my pups race toward him. Good. Except they don’t bite him. They dance around, tails wagging and yipping in excitement. He crouches down and pets them! I grab my bat.

He glances up as I swing and dodges the bat with ease. Strike one. I pull back for another.

“Mongrel, stop,” he says. “It’s me.”

I freeze and study him. He’s a few years older than I am, about six feet tall and lean. Good looking enough to attract the girls. His gray eyes don’t belong in the face of a man though.

He opens his jacket, and pulls his collar down, showing me an almost healed scar on his right shoulder. “Fifteen stitches.”

I lower the bat. “Logan.”

“Yep.”

He moves closer and I back up. Logan pauses. “You weren’t afraid of five werewolves, but you’re scared of me?”

Werewolves. Saying the word out loud made it real. Before I could explain them away as really smart mixed breeds.

“Guess I’m better at trusting . . . werewolves than men,” I say.

“One man dooms the whole species?”

“What about the guy . . . wolf after you?”

“He wanted to be in charge.”

“And that’s my point. Dogs . . . or wolves’ll fight it out. One dominates and the other slinks away. The human side of him tried to cheat. Right?”

Logan says nothing.

“He used a knife and then returned with a gun. Very un-wolf like behavior.”

“Let me prove to you we’re not all bastards.”

“Why?”

“You saved my life three times.”

I tap the bat against my leg. “So buy me a couple bags of Science Diet and we’ll call it even.”

“No. I owe you much more than that.”

He’s serious and I suspect stubborn as well. “Go away, Logan. You don’t belong here,” I say.

“Neither do you.”

I huff and squash the sudden desire to take another swing at his head. He thinks my silence is an agreement ’cause he’s now standing a foot away. And my heart’s acting like it’s scared. I expect him to crinkle his nose at the smell of dog on my clothes or for him to try to hide his disgust at my unkempt appearance.

Instead he takes my hand in his and pushes my right sleeve up with his other one, exposing the jagged purple scars on my wrist and forearm. I didn’t heal as fast or as well as his did. Logan traces them with a finger.

A strange teeter-totter of emotions fills me. My first impulse is to flinch away from his touch, but his familiar scent triggers fond memories of the big wolfhound I cared for.

Logan taps his thumb on my arm. “You’ve been bitten by a werewolf deep enough for his saliva to mix with your blood.”

“So?”

He quirks a smile. “You accepted our existence with ease, yet you don’t know the legends.”

I gesture to his shoulder. “I believe what I see.”

“You’ve been infected, but one bite isn’t enough to change you into a werewolf.” All humor is gone as he stares at me with a sharp intensity. “For you to become one of us, a bite from two different werewolves within a month is required.”

He turns my arm over, revealing the light underside. His canines elongate. “I’ve never offered this to anyone, and it’s a hell of a way to repay your kindness, but it seemed . . . right. Interested?”

My mind races. He’s giving me a choice. “What about my pups?”

Another smile. “Only you would think of them first. They can stay with you.”

“Here?”

“No. My pack has a network of places. We try and keep a low profile, but we’ll support you in going after your foster father.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll be part of mine and I protect mine.”

I grin at the familiar words.

Logan adds, “It’s not an easy life, and there is no cure. No going back. We don’t belong to the human world or the wolf world.”

“So you’re a bunch of mongrels?”

“Yep.”

“Then I’ll fit right in.” I raise my arm to his mouth, and he sinks his teeth into my flesh.

My name is Olwen Ap Howell, and I am the last of a very old family.

That in itself is nothing special, I know. The American South is full of Old Families. People boast ancestors antebellum, revolutionary, colonial, lineage that traces back to English or European nobility. My family has its roots in legend, but I learned pretty quickly I had to keep quiet about it. Old families have their particular rules and expectations, here where tradition still casts long shadows. My family’s traditions are cloaked in secrets, and they throw shadows longer and stranger than most.

Secrets are tough for young kids. Mom drinks, or Dad lost his job. . . . Try “My Dad can turn into a wolf.” It gets more entertaining when you can turn into a wolf. You can’t share that, not even with your Best Friend in the Whole Wide World.

There are variations on the theme. Do not let anyone outside the Family see you Change into a wolf. Before you Change, hide your clothes, so they will still be there when you Change back.

Always remember where you hid your clothes.

Never, ever Run on an empty stomach. You may eat something you’ll regret later.

The rule I was thinking of breaking was another important one: The family does not deal with its enemies by trying to eat them.

Okay, I wasn’t really planning to eat anybody, but I knew that what I did want to do was a Bad Idea. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I didn’t see any way I could endanger my grandfather with what I was planning, and he was all the Family I had left. There was a limit to how severely I could be disciplined for my actions—after all, I was the Last Ap Howell. I belonged to the land, Blood-Oathed by my ancestors who had founded this town. I was necessary.

So was action on my part. Rob Merrow and his two friends had badly hurt someone I cared about, and they had gotten away with it. What went deeper than my sense of outraged justice, and what I would never have admitted to anyone, was that Rob had given me my first taste of true physical fear, and a vision of my future that had left me shaken and sick. I wanted to return the favor.

That night was my chance. Word had come through the high school grapevine that Rob and his crew were laying claim to the Deadfall. With the reputation they had, no one else would venture anywhere near the place. I would have them to myself, in the night and the forest. I would not be a prisoner inside my human skin, the way I had been when Rob and his crew jumped ’Rion and me.

The sun was well down when I crossed my private Rubicon, the dirt lane that separated my Family’s safely fenced private acres from the wild forest that still covered so much of our small town’s land. I hurried into the protecting shadows, heart thumping. I could already feel the wolf-fire turning my eyes to hot gold, the prick of canines growing longer and sharper in my soft human mouth. I could have held the Change back, but I was eager for my other self, my swift silence and sharp teeth. Sheltered by trees and a dense clump of dogwood I began shedding clothes, stuffing them into the pack I carried. My shoes went in on top and I just had time to hide the pack before the wolf rolled me under.

The world, all sense of time and place, was lost in the roil of the Change. There’s no real pain, but there is a moment that feels like drowning, of being lost in an element so foreign that survival seems impossible. From that chaos the Self bursts out like birth, flesh or fur, into a world rendered new. Touch told me less of fine texture, more of substructure that meant silence or sound beneath my paws. Sight told less of color and detail and more of mass and movement. Scent was multiplied and magnified into a revealed language of enormous complexity.