Running With the Pack (10 page)

BLENDED

C.E. MURPHY

The pack had been born savages and had, almost to a man, died that way.

Almost: almost. She had been a whelp the day the hunters came, dozens of them on their thundering black horses with the pack fleeing before them. Her mother had thrown her beneath a long-dead tree, and she’d watched dark legs flash by, dangerous broad hooves kicking up the snow.

She had seen the blood, from her hiding place. Had seen it when the hunters rode back, triumphant despite their own losses. Stripped skins still steamed in the cold, making their horses toss their heads at the scent of death. She hadn’t known, then, that it was her family, her cousins and her friends, who lay strewn across saddles and stuffed into saddlebags. Not until she was much older did she come to understand what had happened. That her family had run until they could run no more, and then had turned to fight. Beasts, turning tooth and claw against the men who hunted them. Horses died; men died.

But mostly, wolves died.

Fear had held the whimpers in her throat, even when the smell of men and killing was gone. Only when the forest went black with night did she creep forward on her belly and put her nose out into the cold.

A man’s big hand caught her by the scruff and hauled her into the air. She had never seen a man so close: he was huge and completely without fur except long gray crackling stuff on his head, and unlike the men on horses he wore no coverings to keep himself warm. Her tail clamped over her belly, wet with terror.

He curled his lip back, showing long teeth, though the wrinkle of his forehead was like her alpha’s: hiding amusement behind more obvious exasperation.
Cubs
, that expression said, and was always followed by a pack-wide chuckle that was as much attitude of pose as vocalization. The tip of her tail relaxed from its clench to offer a tentative wag.

“Well,” he said, and it was the first time she ever heard a wolf speak so, aloud and with words used by men. His voice was light, a thinness to it that said its howl would pierce the moon. “One left, of a pack. But a young one, so perhaps there’s some hope you might listen.” He dropped her with the carelessness of any parent weary of carrying a wriggling cub. She scrambled back to the snow’s crusty surface and he crouched, brushing cold from her ears and nose. “Come, pup. We must teach you to survive.”

Then he turned, and before his hand touched the snow it was a paw, and his gray grizzling hair thick fur, and his tail made a beacon for her to follow as they ran from where their pack had died.

“No
ward
?” The question cut through polite murmuring, briefly silencing it. Markéta knew already not to turn; not to admit she’d heard. It wasn’t that anyone imagined the sharp words hadn’t reached her. It was merely that humans, inexplicable humans, pretended rudeness and gossip didn’t exist, as if by so pretending they could excuse their own bad behavior. Few of them would survive a week, within a pack. They would be cuffed, stared down, and ultimately rejected, if they played at the back-biting which was a figurative, if not literal, part of human society.

The pack had been born savage, Markéta thought dryly, but humans had taught her the real meaning of the word.

“But she is too young to be a widow . . . !” The woman—an older one, with breasts of a size to feed a litter of puppies for all that she had only two—modulated her voice this time, but it made no difference. She might have whispered, and even through the ballroom’s endless echoing chatter, Markéta would have heard her. It was not a gift, the retention of hearing and scent in her human-changed form; humans stank, and covered it with perfumes that worsened the original stench. Worse, they insisted on gathering in huge packs, where their sweat and nattering voices blurred into a nauseating background.

Still, she would have humans change, not herself. She had gone far enough already in becoming as they were, a truth she was reminded of every time another woman learned her story and spread it as a bit of titillating gossip. She was
quite young
, she heard it emphasized, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. Old enough, certainly, to be married—but if not married, much too young to be on her own. But her guardian, if he’d ever existed, had died, leaving her to make her way as an eligible female amongst society’s snapping wolves.

Markéta snorted loudly enough to cause comment, and thrust off societal grace to elbow her way out to the manor gardens. They were too tame, too controlled, but they were also as close to wilderness as she would find so long as she maintained the fiction of polite birth. She was aware—as a human woman would not be—that two men followed her, both trying harder to avoid one another than find her. One was older, in his forties at least, and the other hardly more than a whelp of her own tender years.

Which were far more tender than the gossiping women within could ever imagine. Wolves lived only a short span. It was an ancient beast indeed who saw fifteen summers. Markéta was three, breeding age to be sure, but there were almost no others of her kind left with whom to mate. The hunters had seen to that. The hunters, and her people’s determination to live the free life of wild things, no matter what the cost. The memory of scent rose up, bitter, black. The hunt’s leader had smelled that way, like hot tar sitting at the back of her throat. She would never escape its flavor.

“Miss Alvarez.” Her name sat awkwardly on a British tongue, but she’d had no sense of how human names were put together, when she’d chosen it. She’d merely liked its sound,
Markéta Alvarez
, and had only later realized that they were not two names that the English race expected to lie cheek and jowl. She might have been Margaret Allard and satisfied them, but by then it was too late.

Its advantage was that, like everything else about her, it offered no answers, but miles of gossip-satisfying questions. She was surely not dark enough for the Mediterranean descent her last name implied, nor square-faced enough to be from north of the Danube, as her first name suggested. Her eyes were distressingly yellow—a hallmark even the change couldn’t disguise—and her hair, shaggy and thick, was too many colors to be called one.
Light
, they tended to decide; she was light-haired, but sharp-featured as a Spaniard, and no one could name a family of merit whose bloodlines ran to such extraordinary lengths.

But meritous she must be, else men of various wealth and standing would hardly bother following her into the gardens. Markéta nodded to her suitor without turning his way: his scent was of more use in identifying him than sight. “Master Radcliffe. Surely you endanger my reputation by encountering me unescorted.”

“Surely I’m too old and dull for anyone to think your reputation in any but the safest of hands, with me.” There was not a single note of deprecation in the older man’s voice; he sounded as utterly sincere as any man could. But his posture, half-glimpsed, shouted amusement, announcing he didn’t for a moment believe himself. “If I were some handsome young rake, perhaps . . . ”

“And now I must protest your attractiveness, sir, a boldness which is no fit thing for a lady to do.”

“I should hardly ask you to belie yourself, Miss Alvarez. I have, in my time, made use of a mirror.”

Now she turned to him, smiling, though his attitude would still tell her more than his face ever could. “And what does the mirror show you, Master Radcliffe? A well-dressed gentleman still possessed of a leonine head of hair, whose face bears the wisdom of a man in his prime?”

“My mirror,” he said with a bow, “is not so kind.”

If only his eyes were yellow, and not dark, he would be a man worth mating. Her pack leader had made that clear, as he’d taught her how to cast off the wolf and pretend at being human. There were some few of their people wise enough to put aside the beast in a world growing increasingly cruel to wolves. Some few who had become as Markéta now was, wearing sheep’s clothing in a rather literal sense. Not that her ball gown was wool: it was summer and warm, but she had more often made a dress of what she would have once considered a meal than she liked to think.

It struck her for the first time, as she gazed at Master Radcliffe, that her years were limited. Even with whole seasons spent as human, she might not extend her lifetime beyond two or three times its natural length. She would be dead by thirty, and long since too old to breed by then; that was a duty that should be given over to her daughters as she aged.

Daughters she might never have, if she couldn’t find a mate of her own breed. The pack leader hadn’t told her what to do, should that come to pass. Die alone, without a pack and family of her own, or risk all on a human? Wolves, like humans, largely mated for life. It would be impossible to take a human mate without telling him the truth, even if she were willing to remain human and bear one cub at a time through a pregnancy that lasted most of a year, instead of a blissfully short two months.

The forest and its hunter threat sounded suddenly far more appealing than it had since the day her pack had died. A short and savage life, to be sure, but a simple one too, without the complications of society or the difficulties of cross-breeding. Some of those thoughts were perhaps reflected in her gaze, because Radcliffe stepped forward, a question in his pose.

For the first time in her own memory, Markéta stepped back, avoiding the confrontation of entanglement.

Radcliffe hesitated, surprise and disappointment marking his stance. Before she could speak, another man’s voice said, “Master Radcliffe. Miss Alvarez.”

Her name had a crack in it, wide as a board; her second suitor was barely a man at all. She had been introduced to him earlier in the season, at another ball so crowded his scent was indistinguishable from the masses even when they had danced. Twice, if she recalled; he was handsome enough, and struck her as a man who would spend his life doing her bidding without ever wondering why. Thomas, his name was; the young Master Alistair Thomas. His father and his fortune were of note, and those combined with his affable nature made him the apple of many a young lady’s eye. It would not endear Markéta to her competition that he had come to the gardens seeking her.

She regretted her retreat from Radcliffe already, and all the more as he took a discreet step back, appointing himself the position of elder and guardian with that single move.

“Miss Alvarez,” Thomas said again, then stopped, evidently flustered by her silence. Markéta curtsied toward him, letting the action take her a half-step nearer Radcliffe. The older man’s posture improved very slightly—there was no room for improvement beyond that; he stood straight and tall as a youth already—and Thomas managed to falter again, even without moving or speaking.

“Master Thomas,” Markéta said. “Do you find the gardens to your liking?”

“Gardens?” He blinked, as though unaware of his surroundings until she mentioned them, then rallied with a smile that understandably set hearts a-flutter. “Truly, Miss Alvarez, their beauty diminishes into nothing when such a flower as yourself stands among them. I should hate to take you from your company,” he added, all polite form that had nothing of truth in it. His expression took Radcliffe in, weighed him, and dismissed him as too old and probably too poor. “But perhaps when you return to the ball you would care to dance.”

He irritated her, for some reason. For dismissing Radcliffe, for intruding on the moment she and the older gentleman had shared. It would never do to scold him for his behavior, but there were other ways to make displeasure known. Markéta turned her gaze full on Radcliffe and spoke as clearly as she ever had. “I should like that very much.”

Thomas was affable, perhaps, but not a fool. He stiffened and took one sharp step in retreat. “Then I shall see you inside.”

Markéta nodded, a cool smile already in place as a breeze carried the scent of his tension to her. Black, tarry, thick: a familiar smell strong enough to taste, lingering at the back of her throat. Her remoteness scampered before shock and an upswell of anger. She ought not have mocked Thomas for the break in his voice, for it was hers now, shrill and unattractive: “Do you smoke, Master Thomas?”

Surprise splashed across his face. “I can’t say that I do. What—” Clarity rolled after surprise, and he bent his head to sniff at the shoulder of his coat. “My father’s tobacco. He’s only just back from France, so perhaps I’d have not smelt so strongly of it when first we met. My apologies, Miss Alvarez, if it offends you.”

“It’s . . . ” Markéta closed her eyes, willing away the memory scent brought, though in truth it was her nostrils that needed closing; vision would never offer her as much information as odors could. A moment passed before she looked on the young man again, ready to trust her voice. “It’s an unusually pungent breed of tobacco, I should say. I imagine I’ve encountered it before. Your father hunts, perhaps?”

Delight lit Thomas’s smile. “He does. Are you a hunt enthusiast, Miss Alvarez?”

“I have an unusual interest in hunting.” So softly spoken, eyes downcast, anything to keep the words from the wild honesty they were. It had been so long,
so long
since she had taken to four legs and chased rabbit and deer; since she had used her senses and her body the way they were meant to be used. And there was more besides, threat in the softly spoken admission; threat which dull human ears couldn’t be permitted to hear.