Blood Challenge (20 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

THE
cane stayed behind.

Benedict worked this out logically. If he brought it along after that firm refusal, she’d be annoyed and more determined than ever not to use the thing, even if she needed it. More important, though, it was the wrong thing to do. Children needed to have limits set for them. Arjenie wasn’t a child. She was his to protect, but not from herself. Not from the consequences of her own decisions.

That was the problem.

He’d dreamed of Claire last night. Once that had been common, but not these days. Still, he supposed it would have been more surprising if she hadn’t shown up. In the dream, he’d been at his cabin, which had mysteriously sprouted a new room. A bedroom. Arjenie had been asleep in the new bedroom when Claire walked in.

Sometimes his subconscious was damned unsubtle. “I thought we’d look in at the center first,” he said as he and his new Chosen left his father’s house.

“What’s that?”

“Our child care and community center. We don’t get cable out here, so there’s a satellite dish and a big-screen TV at the center for those who want to watch HBO or Showtime.” He glanced at her. “But maybe you knew about that.”

Arjenie looked apologetic. “The satellite dish does show up on aerial photos. So does the playground equipment. But, um, I haven’t seen inside your center.”

“Nice to know a few things aren’t in the government’s files. We’ll go to baby room first,” he said, opening the front door and stepping out ahead of her. The human courtesy of waiting for the woman to go through a door was all flourish, no sense. If any danger waited on the other side of a door, he’d rather meet it himself, not send her into it.

“Baby room?”

She was moving easily, he noted. Just as she’d said, her ankle wasn’t bothering her. He kept his pace slow. “Where the tenders mind the clan’s babies. Any who are here, that is. Obviously a lot of them won’t be. Even when the father has or shares custody, he may not live close enough to use the center regularly.”

She nodded seriously. “The courts haven’t been exactly friendly to lupus dads. I know Mr. Turner—Isen’s son, I mean, Rule Turner—wasn’t able to have custody of his son until recently.”

Rule’s custody hearing had made headlines—especially since it coincided with a string of supernatural murders. “Some mothers won’t share custody with a lupus father, and until recently there was no chance of pursuing legal remedies. Still not much point in it, in most places. And many of the mothers who do share custody live too far away for their babies to be tended here when they’re at work.” Of course, some women—like Rule’s mother—handed their babies over to their lupus fathers as fast as they could. They didn’t want a child who was going to turn furry one day.

The gravel path didn’t seem to be giving her any trouble. “If I understand correctly,” she said, “that would be girl babies and boy babies both, right? You consider your female children part of the clan even though they can’t Change.”

They also couldn’t be included in the mantle, but he wasn’t going to explain mantles yet. “Is that in the FBI’s files?”

“Well, yes.”

“Your file’s right. Our daughters are clan. Their children aren’t, but are considered
ospi
, or friends of the clan. Several of the babies and younger children at the center are
ospi
.”

“You provide child care for them, too? Even though they aren’t clan?”

“Babies are babies.” It was beyond Benedict’s understanding that, in the human world, there were children who went unclaimed, unwanted. Logically he could see that a race as astonishingly fecund as humanity could afford to be careless with its young, but everything in him revolted at the idea.

To be fair, many humans were revolted by it, too.

She fell silent as they reached the road that circled the meeting field, a grassy swathe that anchored the little village at Clanhome’s heart. The center was about two miles away, on the southeast corner of the meeting field; Isen’s house was at the northern end, banked up against the mountains.

It was a typical fall day for their corner of the county—sunny and warm, the sky blue enough to raise an ache in the heart, spotted here and there with puffs of white. A breeze tugged at Benedict’s shirt sleeves and tangled itself up in the riot of Arjenie’s hair. She’d left it down today, and it shone in the sun like molten copper.

The wind smelled of cholla and pine, rabbit and dirt … of home.

It was good to be walking here on this hard-packed dirt road, smelling home and feeling the sun’s warmth. Good to be alive to feel these things. Even after the overmastering pain had subsided, it had taken him years to be able to feel that simple joy, untainted by guilt. How, he had wondered, could he exult in life, when Claire would never feel these things again?

He’d finally understood that his grief and guilt added nothing to the short span of Claire’s life. He’d had the question backward. The real question was: How could he not?

He was glad now that he’d lived. Life wasn’t a burden taken up because his Rho insisted he was needed, and it hadn’t been for a long time. Life was what it was. Short or long, bitter or sweet, life simply was.

As Claire had reminded him tartly last night.
Quit feeling sorry for yourself
, she’d said.
Good God. What’s so special about pain? About fear? You know fear. Even back when we were together—and you know, you really weren’t that bright about some things back then—you understood fear better than me. I went crashing around, smashing into everything so I wouldn’t have to face my fear. You told me then I had to face it, accept it.

She’d snorted. It had sounded just like her, too.
Some reason you want to make my mistakes instead of finding one of your own?

Smart Claire.

Maybe it really had been her he spoke with in the dream, not just the promptings of some buried, wiser self. Maybe not. Benedict knew there was something beyond death. He didn’t know if that something allowed a woman who’d been dead for forty-two years to drop in on him in his sleep. It seemed possible. And impossible to know for sure.

And it didn’t matter. Benedict drew a deep breath, looking around at so much that he loved … none of which was guaranteed to last until tomorrow. He’d lay down his life to make it last, if necessary, but even then he didn’t get any guarantees.

Fear could be helpful, if you learned the right things from it. Or it could make you helpless. He was tired of being helpless. “You’re quiet,” he said to the woman walking beside him. Walking, not limping.

“Every now and then,” she agreed. “It doesn’t happen often, but now and then I stop talking. I was wondering … you said you were a father.”

“Yes.” He might as well tell her. She would be learning a great many of their secrets. “What did you wonder?”

“Pretty much everything. Do you have a son or a daughter? Will we see him or her at the center, or is your child older, or not living nearby? What about the mother? Do you have custody, or … you’re laughing at me.”

Yes. Yes, he was. That felt good, too. “You’ve kept a lot of questions pent up.”

“I was waiting for you to finish that thinking you were doing. It seemed to be making you feel better. Lighter.”

He cocked his head, curious. Most people couldn’t read him at all. Especially humans, who couldn’t use scent as a guide. “It did. I have one child, a daughter. Nettie Two Horses.”

For some reason, that delighted her. “The doctor who treated me is your daughter?”

He nodded. “You may be surprised by her appearance when you meet her.”

“She doesn’t look like you?”

“Around the eyes she does. She’s got her mother’s chin and jaw, and her mouth is a feminine version of Isen’s. But that wasn’t what I meant.” He paused. “She’s fifty-two.”

She blinked. “Oh. Oh! I was right! You don’t age the way humans do.”

He stopped, staring. “You know?”

“I didn’t
know
until you said that, but I guessed. I mean, it’s logical, isn’t it? If you heal damage almost perfectly, you’d heal free radical damage, too, so you’d age more slowly. Oh! Is that why you don’t use your original surname? Because it might give away your real age?”

Urgently he said, “Does the government—”

“No, no.” She patted his arm reassuringly. “That isn’t in any of the files I have access to. And I access Restricted and Confidential information routinely, and am cleared for Secret if I jump through the right hoops, and even Top Secret with specific authorization. Generally, if I run across a pertinent reference that involves Top Secret material—some of the Secret files are heavily redacted Top Secret material—I simply annotate it to that effect, and the agent making the inquiry can either request the complete file or not. But I’ve read pretty much everything the Bureau knows about your people. That information isn’t in the files.”

He wasn’t reassured. “Who have you told?”

“No one. Like I said, I was just guessing, and I understand the need to keep some things secret. Even basically nice people might start envying lupi your longevity, and envy can be extremely toxic. Though I don’t think you’ll be able to keep it secret forever.”

“Probably not,” he said, his voice very dry. “If you can make that connection, others can, and will.” They’d known the day was coming. From the moment Rule went public, it had been inevitable. Eventually people would notice that “the werewolf prince” looked the same in his recent photos as he had five years ago. Or ten.

“So how old are you?” She flushed. “I guess that’s rude, but I’d really like to know.”

“Seventy.”

“Wow. That’s just … wow. You were really young when Nettie was born.”

“Young and foolish. No more so than most at that age, I suppose. I had a lot of help raising Nettie, both in her mother’s tribe and here. I needed it.”

“Nettie. That’s such a pretty name. Old-fashioned. It comes from the German
nette
, I think, which means clean or nice.”

His eyebrows climbed. “You know German?”

“I read it. I don’t speak it very well. I can read a lot of languages I can’t speak.”

“How many?”

“Um … twelve?” She wrinkled her nose as if dissatisfied with her own answer. “More or less, and not fluently, except for the Latin languages. Just enough to see if a text has what I’m looking for, mostly. And it has to be a language using the Roman alphabet. Well, except for Greek, which I can wade through slowly, and I’ve got a teensy bit of Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. But I don’t know hanzi or kanji at all.”

His eyebrows climbed. “You’re apologizing for only being able to read in three alphabets?”

She flushed. “I’m a little self-conscious about it. People think, wow, you know all those languages? You must be a brain and a half! But I’m not, as my grades in calculus proved. I just have a really good memory, especially for things I read. Not a photographic memory, which some experts think is strictly a savant ability, though I read this article that said … never mind. That’s not pertinent. My point is, being able to remember things can be handy, but it isn’t the same as being able to synthesize or draw accurate conclusions or come up with new ideas.”

“Is an unusually good memory a sidhe characteristic?”

“Not as far as I know. I think it’s just me.”

He smiled suddenly. “I guess you remember the first words you said to me, then.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, you’re going to tease me.”

“Nice doggie?”

“I was shook up,” she said with dignity.

“You knew I wasn’t a dog.”

“I may not be a genius, but I’m not stupid.”

And yet it was common for a lupus in wolf form to pass for one of their domesticated cousins. People saw what they expected to see. “What are the visible differences between a dog and a wolf?”

She snorted softly. “Aside from sheer size? You’re a very large wolf, Benedict. But okay, I’ll play. On the whole, wolves have longer legs, longer muzzles, and larger feet. The legs are a particular giveaway. Malamutes—who look more like wolves than most dogs—have curly tails, while wolves’ tails are straight. There’s a difference with the teeth, too, but I didn’t see yours, so that doesn’t count.”

He smiled at having his guess confirmed. “You also knew I wasn’t only a wolf.”

“You didn’t act like a wolf. You weren’t upset by my nearness—and wolves aren’t comfortable being around people, you know. Plus I was fairly close to your Clanhome, so that made it more likely you were a lupus. I’m ninety-five percent sure there aren’t any wild wolves in the area.”

“Ninety-five?”

“None have been sighted in recent years. I suspect other wolves avoid your territory. But while a lack of sightings might be highly suggestive, it isn’t proof, so I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.”

She’d figured out all that while crippled from a fall and scared half out of her mind. With armed militia in the area and an extremely large wolf watching her, she’d sorted through her prodigious memory and come up with logical possibilities. Benedict smiled. “You’re wrong about your intelligence. You don’t simply remember things. You apply what you know to your situation, even under strong stress.”

She turned pink with pleasure or embarrassment. “I think I take more comfort from facts than a lot of people do, so when I’m under stress, my mind naturally zooms in that direction.”

For whatever reason, she didn’t like thinking of herself as unusually bright, though she clearly was. Maybe she already felt a little too different from everyone else, given her heritage. He held out his hand.

She blinked, then smiled shyly and took it.

That, too, felt good. Incredibly damned good. He wanted to … but he wouldn’t. Not now. For now, it was enough to hold her hand, learn about her, walk with her. His Chosen. “Let’s go look at the babies.”

Arjenie liked the baby room, and she liked the babies. She knew how to hold them, too, how to make funny faces and tickle. One of her cousins, she said, had been a late-life baby, so she’d gotten some practice there, plus she used to babysit in high school. Benedict learned the name of that much-younger cousin, and of several others. He learned the names of her uncles and aunts, too—five uncles named Delacroix, one of them married to her mother’s sister.