The Passion (3 page)

The coldness of horror crept through Nicholas's veins, turning his skin to ice and freezing his breath in his lungs for one long and painful moment. A moment ago he had been wil ing to turn as wild as this kil er, to toss aside al he knew and al he valued for the satisfaction of bloodlust… and
he had been
wrong
. One rash, mistaken assumption I and he had been ready to declare war upon the human race; to cast aside centuries of breeding and civilization and careful restraint; to disgrace himself and destroy the pack; to let science, industry and art fal by the wayside—for the sake of a mistake. Because it was easier to believe centuries of prejudice than a moment's logic; because in the moment of deepest passion the savage always triumphs.

The shame of his failure reached deep into his soul.

Slowly Nicholas stood, careful this time to let none of his turmoil show in his eyes. "The human," he insisted evenly. "Why should a human be involved in such a thing? Who is he and what was he doing here?"

"Not a human, you fool," Alexander repeated harshly, and with more than a touch of impatience.

"Find the pure blood scent. Tel me what you smel ."

Nicholas looked around uncertainly, fol owing the evidence of his nose to a splatter on the wal that held the strong scent of the human. He was acclaimed the most powerful werewolf in the pack, yet he had been wrong twice tonight already. He felt like a cub taking its lessons: angry to be so humiliated, yet humbled because the humiliation was just.

He dipped his fingers in the splatter of blood and brought them slowly to his nostrils. Human, yes.

Human, yet… He stiffened, and brought his fingers closer.

He raised his eyes to Alexander. "Werewolf," he whispered.

Alexander's face was impassive.

"Is there another?" Nicholas demanded. The scent on his fingers, intermingled with human scent, was not that of the feral kil er, or of Moria or Rene or Tobias. It was not like any werewolf scent he had ever known, so faint, in fact, as to almost not be werewolf at al … but it was. And he dared not leap to any more conclusions this night.

Alexander said, "No other."

In the pulse of silence Nicholas could hear the soft thrum of blood through his elder's veins, the expansion and contraction of lungs with steady, even breaths. He could hear the quiet rustling movements of the werewolves in the other room as they went about the business of attending to the dead; he could hear the painful, sickening sound of blood drying on wounds, muscle and sinew contracting as rigor mortis set in. And he could hear, although his lips never formed the words, his own unspoken question slamming into the stil ness of the room.

Alexander's gaze was steady as he said, "It's no trick. You should have picked it up sooner. I did, the moment I walked into this building."

Nicholas demanded hoarsely, "How was it done?

How could the creature produce such blood? Which is it, human or werewolf?"

Alexander replied quietly, "Both."

They walked down Fifth Avenue accompanied by the fog and the eerie echoing click of their own footsteps, muffled by the damp. A garbage truck clattered several blocks over, breathing out the sour stench of its cargo and the tired, flannel-wrapped sweat of its operators. In the distance a siren wailed, but it was not coming their way.

Nicholas had left the building without giving orders, without looking back. His operatives were good at their jobs; they would do what had to be done, but no more until he told them otherwise.

Nicholas said nothing for many blocks. He had spoken rashly before and had been shown the fool.

He remained silent to acknowledge this fact to his elder, and he used the time to try to resolve the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of conflicting, half-formed thoughts that raced through his head.

At last he spoke. "Were they doing genetic research, then? Rene and the others—did they make this half werewolf?"

His voice was taut and the admonition of a human philosopher kept haunting the back of his mind:
When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks
into you
. He had looked into the abyss, and what looked back at him was the only thing that had ever frightened him in al his thirty-eight years on earth.

Alexander's tone was reflective. "That's a facile explanation, isn't it? And comforting, too. For what can be made by man—or werewolf—in a laboratory can also be unmade. Far easier, I think, than to al ow that the monster might be an occurrence of nature—or that he might not be a monster at al ."

Nicholas shoved his hands deeper into the silk-lined pockets of his coat. The fog tasted smokey and rich as it passed through his sinuses and down into his throat, like a barrel-aged wine, redolent of this brash human city with al its filth and foibles, majesty and charm. How odd that he should notice such a thing at a time like this. How much odder that he could stil appreciate it.

He said, deliberately and with care, "A human-werewolf hybrid cannot occur in nature. They are two separate species. They cannot interbreed."

"Nonetheless," replied Alexander, "they have done so."

Nicholas breathed again, deeply, of the cold thick air. He kept his heartbeat calm. He listened to the sound of their footsteps, to the stealthy spring of a cat onto a nearby rooftop, to the sighs and murmurs and soft urgent movements of a man turning his lover in bed some four stories above. He listened, and was silent.

And when he had been quiet a sufficiently respectful time he said, flatly and unequivocal y, "That is impossible."

He sensed the other man's smile in the dark; not so much amused as patient, perhaps a little sad. "And now you wil tel me, noble Nicholas, that you've never shared the pleasures of the flesh with a human female."

Nicholas scowled, his shoulders tensing. "I hardly see the relevance—"

"Of course you have. They are incredible little temptresses and the forbidden plaything is always the most coveted."

"What you are suggesting," said Nicholas without hesitation, "is a deviancy beyond imagination. No werewolf could mate with a human in his natural state, much less conceive a child—it is
not a
physical possibility."'

Now it was Alexander's time to be silent. Nicholas could see the hot puffs of his own breath superimposed on the fog, and he could hear the rush of it in his ears. He exerted control, and was calm.

"Why are you making these outrageous speculations?" Nicholas demanded lowly after a time. "What can possibly be the point?"

"I'm not speculating about anything," replied Alexander without a pause or even the slightest change of inflection. "I'm tel ing you (hat a natural hybrid exists. And I know who it is."

Nicholas felt the world stop. When it resumed again, nothing would ever be the way it once was, not the tick of a clock, the spin of a wheel, the orbital arc of a star. Not the life of man or werewolf or any creature that flew the skies or swam the waters or walked the soil of this planet earth.

When you look into an abyss…

They walked past shuttered buildings and silent brown-stones, past traffic lights reflected in shiny asphalt. They crossed the street and took a footpath; they moved deeper and deeper into the pit of darkness that was Central Park.

Something breathed in a pool of black shadow to the east of the path they walked, a human with glittering eyes and the smel of vomit on his skin. He had a knife tucked inside his jacket, and the quickening of his pulse suggested he was sizing them up as prey. He shrank deeper into the shadows as they passed, though, and his hand slackened on the hilt of the knife. His pores had the smel of quick cold fear. Nicholas was vaguely disappointed by his cowardice.

He caught the scent of a group of his own kind, running in joyful play through the broad meadows near the lake, and his head tilted automatical y toward them, soothed by their presence. It would have been an uncommon occurrence not to find werewolves abroad on a night such as this, enjoying the magnificent piece of wilderness they had carved out for themselves in the heart of the city, but Nicholas found their presence a reassuring surprise nonetheless, almost an omen. He longed to join them with a single-minded intensity that momentarily blotted out al else, to cast aside this cumbersome human form, to wipe his mind clear of moral choices and dark knowledge and weighty, weighty responsibility. To run through the night and drink in the fog and just
be
.

But the pleasurable, wind-borne remnants of his own kind soon faded into the background beneath the demand of closer, more disruptive sensations.

Someone slept in the bushes, his teeth rotting and his liver diseased. Someone else rifled a trash bin half a mile or so down the path. Against the nocturnal rustlings and chatters of the zoo animals came another animal sound, muffled and desperate: a female helplessly struggling against the violence being perpetrated upon her by a male of her own species. She was weakening, and Nicholas wondered if she would die this night, brutalized and broken, her body tossed into the shrubs for the beetles and spiders.

"What pathetic, useless creatures they are," he muttered into the fog. "How did we ever let it get this far?"

The smile that touched Alexander's lips was dry and tired. "A question that wil take more time than we have this night to answer."

The lights of the city grew dimmer stil , swal owed by fog and the few stubbornly clinging leaves of maples and elms. They descended deeper into the night, into a silence so thick even their footsteps were swal owed, into a darkness only werewolf eyes could navigate. The human scents that lingered here were old and faint, tinged with confusion and unease. The wooded paths they travel ed now were not carved by human feet or meant for human enjoyment, and those who wandered through seemed to sense as much, and did not linger long.

They moved through a maze of evergreens and tal shrubs, past the sound of slow-running water in a shal ow stream. Nicholas tried to map the crisis in his head. A werewolf-human hybrid had somehow come into existence, if his own father was to be believed. It not only existed, but had been discovered by a wild werewolf unknown to him, the werewolf who had attacked the scientists at Research Concepts. Had he meant to kil the hybrid or liberate it? Had Rene and Moria and Tobias died in defense of the monster or in defense of their lives? What was the hybrid doing there in the first place, and what had become of it now? It had been injured, obviously, but there was no corpse, no smel of death in its blood. Was it staggering, wounded and dangerous, through the streets of New York even now? Or had it crawled off somewhere else to die?

And why, most important of al , did Nicholas feel that his own father knew the answers to al of these questions and more? Why wouldn't he tel them?

In the shadows a deeper, blacker shape loomed up before them. It seemed to leap out of nowhere and block the path, massive and majestic, fierce and powerful. It was a wolf in low crouch, its eyes narrowed and its teeth bared, carved of age-darkened marble and posed upon a granite column eight feet high. It had been guarding this private place for over a hundred years, and Nicholas never failed to feel a thril of awe in its presence.

Alexander made his way over to the bench beneath the statue and sat down, with only a slight stiffness in the bend of his knees betraying his age. He was a hundred thirty years old, and could live in good health another twenty.

Nicholas sat beside him, feeling the cold of the stone through his coat and the stil ness of the night in his bones. A snatch of something about the dark November of the soul floated up in his mind and he tried to remember what it was. The human poets were tormenting him tonight.

"Is it a test, then?" he demanded lowly, when he could stay silent no longer. He kept his shoulders square and his gaze centered forward into the night.

"If so, I know I have already failed. I was wrong to blame the human and ignore the evidence. I've asked al the wrong questions. I've wasted time.

This—creature you cal a hybrid human is the key to it al and is even now slipping from our grasp. I should have gone after him myself. You're right, I let my passions overcome my judgement." And for the first time his voice faltered and thickened a fraction.

"They were my people. They were my friends. And they shouldn't have died."

Alexander said, "This was one of the first places I visited when I came to the United States as a young man. The statue was here even then, marking this as our place. There used to be thousands of such acres of wilderness in every major population center of the world. Sad to say, as the century has grown, our places have become fewer and farther between.

It would be easy to blame humans, but it's not their fault. It's our own."

"We weren't vigilant enough."

"Yes. We became more concerned with progress than survival." Then Alexander said, "Yes, it was a test, though not of my making. And you have disappointed me. I had thought, after al we've progressed this century, after al of my efforts and your mother's, you would have been less quick to cal the human enemy. But it's instinct, isn't it? I wonder if we shal ever real y overcome it."

Nicholas was silent. The intensity of his shame was like a cold vise pressing into his temples, for he could not ignore what his rash judgement might have cost them. He had been wrong. He should have known better and he had made a