The Passion (43 page)

It was while he paused there, tearing off chunks of the life-giving meat, that he noticed a set of smal light footprints in the snow leading away from the cabin. He noticed them and knew that they were significant, and that they pleased him on some level.

But already he was too much inside himself to question why, and already the hunger was driving him again. He left behind reason and worry and everything else that connected him to the world of men, and he ran for the wilderness.

The temperature dropped and the snow fel , but the storm that was promised in the wind was stil a sunrise away. This was good, because it meant he could hunt and feed more easily; it was bad, because while he hunted, men with guns hunted him.

They were poor hunters and they never came near him; nonetheless, he kept a cautious distance between the sound of their voices, the smel of their filth and greed, and himself. Eventual y that meant he had to double back, closer to their camp than he liked. That was when his trail started to cross Tessa's, and dim memory stirred.

In the stand of evergreens surrounding the charred, smokey ruins of the lodge he found his cloak, and again a memory tugged. It smel ed of her. It smel ed of smoke and earth and his own pain, too, of his skin and his fur and of the leaves in which he had made his bed, but it also smel ed of her.

The edge of the hunger was gone, though the urge to hunt was not, and for a moment he stood over the cloak, irresolute, sniffing the wind. Somewhat to his surprise, curiosity won the battle. He raised his head and shook himself and leapt into his human form.

He found her not five hundred yards from the ruined lodge, nestled beneath a sapling tree where the weeds grew high and had not yet begun to bend with snow, curled into a bal on the ground. He dropped down beside her.

"What's wrong with you?" he demanded. "Why are you lying here? Your bones aren't broken and you don't have a fever. Why are you lying here on the ground?"

She didn't move and didn't speak; she just held herself in that tight little bal with her arms around her knees and her eyes open and staring at the dark, and she said nothing.

"Do you want to go back to them, is that it? Are you already missing your filthy human society? Wel , perhaps you should go back at that. You'd have a longer life than if you stay here to be eaten by bears."

But at his first words a sound, choked and desperate, came from her throat, and her eyes closed and her arms tightened around her knees and she began to rock herself, moaning so softly that even he could barely hear the sound. It was as though the cry, and the pain that caused it, were locked so deeply inside her soul that her voice could not express them.

Denis felt an anger he could not explain, and an astonishment. The concept of rape was foreign to him, though he knew it existed. He knew the men had used her and hurt her and exhausted her' with their lust, that they had beaten and subdued her, but he found none of that surprising in the least. It was the kind of behavior one expected from humans and he assumed Tessa had expected it as wel . But that she now lay, whimpering and unseeing, exposed to the elements and seemingly oblivious to the fact, that she had run this far and yet no further—this he could not explain or understand and it angered him.

This human female had survived the love of one werewolf and the manipulations of another, had endured a voyage across the North Atlantic and exile in the wilderness, had twice saved his life and shown nothing but courage before him and his kind.

Yet it had taken humans to defeat her. That astonished him.

He said roughly, "They wil find you here, don't you know that? They'll find you and drag you back and use you for their whore again, and if that's what you want you have only to stay here and do nothing."

She hunched her shoulders and pressed her face deeper into her knees. Her thin shoulder blades looked ready to pierce the worn fabric of her gown, and she trembled convulsively. She would never survive the night.

Denis set his teeth. "I can't stay here. There's no food here. They're hunting me already. They're hunting you, too."

She made no response, nor gave any sign that she heard him.

Denis stood up. He looked down at her for a while, angry and undecided, waiting for he knew not what.

She didn't move.

"I owe you nothing, Tessa LeGuerre," he said angrily.

He swept his cloak off his shoulders and dropped it over her. He strode off into the night, and waited until he was wel out of her sight to resume his natural form.

He set his face for the wilderness and did not look back again.

ALEXANDER

Chapter Twenty-five

Our mating ceremony was planned for the traditional Harvest Moon. There was some trepidation on my part as to how I would be received by the pack as Elise's potential mate because of my relationship to Denis and Tessa. But I had dealt from strength with both of them and acted with honor throughout it al , and among the pack pragmatism prevailed as always. I was strong, I was of noble status, and the queen wanted me. It was enough for most. There were whispers, of course, about my unfortunate association with the human and about my renegade brother, but there always are in these cases. As long as the whisperers made no attempt to denigrate my queen, I let them pass unnoticed.

Within a week of the judgement on Denis I took a battalion of our strongest fighters to the far northeast with news of Denis's defeat. Though it was heartbreaking for me to close up Palace Antonov, there was some comfort in the fact that the pack itself did not resist me. They al dispersed peaceful y enough, for though they carried in their hearts their dark philosophies and always would, without unity they were nothing. Some drifted back to the cities, some went wild, some returned to Europe with me. Such is the power of a single werewolf among us. Without Denis, they were nothing, and they accepted the only protection that was offered—mine.

Elise and I did not talk about Tessa. It was not that I forbade her to broach the subject with me, but she knew my heart wel enough to understand how the topic hurt me stil . In fact, during the entire summer the name of the human I had so loved was spoken only once in my presence, and that was by the most unlikely person.

Gault came to me shortly after I returned from Siberia. I was in the midst of inventorying the Lyons chateau and packing my personal belongings because, although I planned to keep the house in Paris and a smal er cottage near Bordeaux, there would be no point in maintaining the Lyons residence once I moved permanently to the Palais.

Chaos had reigned for days, with five or six housemaids in every room dusting and washing and placing things into barrels, while I tried to make lists of my books and my col ections and my favorite furnishings. More than once I had caught myself lifting my head to cal out impatiently for Tessa, for this was just the kind of task she would have set to with enthusiasm. Every time I did I felt a stab of loneliness in my bel y that al but cut off my breath. I missed her, and the knowledge shamed me.

Gault stood before my desk and without preamble said, "I wil be leaving your service at the end of the week, monsieur, if it pleases you."

For a moment I just stared at him. Then I threw down my pen and snapped, "It does not please me!

What is your complaint, Gault? Are your accommodations not luxurious enough? Do you desire more wages? Have you no taste for living at the Palais? Speak up, confound you, for I have no patience with this nonsense!"

Gault replied, stiff-faced, "I have wronged you. It's my job to serve your best interests at al times, and I've failed to do that. I can't stay with you under those circumstances."

"When have you failed me? What have you done?"

He said, "I'm the cause of your unhappiness now. I deliberately sent the human girl to find you when I heard you with the queen. I knew she would be upset. But if I had shown you her note, or read it at least, we might have been able to prevent her foolish treachery. She was not a malicious girl, I think. Just… ignorant."

I hardly knew what to say, or how to feel, nor in fact which emotion to address first. I was surprised, because I hadn't realized my unhappiness was evident. After al , what reason did I, bridegroom of the queen, soon to be the most powerful male in the pack, wedded to the most exquisite creature who had ever drawn breath and the woman I had adored for years—on what grounds could I possibly claim unhappiness? And there was guilt, because I
was
unhappy, and could not hide it. And there was a deeper surprise, mixed with gentle gratitude, to hear Gault defend Tessa, however weakly, at last. And there was pain, raw unmitigated pain, to hear her name spoken out loud, to have her face brought into my mind's eye, to feel the regret and the sorrow and the helplessness al over again which Gault's words, though kindly and sincerely meant, had raised.

I knew I could keep none of this from my eyes, and I didn't try. But after a moment I took up my pen again and turned my attention back to my lists. Or I pretended to. "Nothing you could have done would have made a difference," I said flatly. "Our course was set the moment she came into my house."

Gault said quietly, "Yet you stil grieve for her."

My pen stopped its meaningless movement and I stared unseeing at the page for a moment. "No," I said slowly. "I grieve… for innocence. My own, and hers."

In a moment Gault nodded, and I thought he genuinely understood. He turned to go, then hesitated. "Monsieur."

I looked up, pul ed from my gray thoughts.

He said, "I want it understood that—what I mean to say is that I see how it wil be under the new queen's rule, and with your opinions being much the same, I hope you won't let any careless remarks I may have made in the past stand in the way of…"

As my expression grew more and more bemused, he broke off with a brief intake of breath. "You know, don't you," he said plainly, "that the things I've said about humans in the past were meant in jest? With so much talk about the Dark Brothers and what they intended to do—I simply wouldn't want there to be any confusion about my position on the issue."

I raised an eyebrow. "You surely don't think you would stil be here if there was? The queen has a very effective intel igence force, I'm told."

He seemed relieved. "Yes, I suppose that's true."

Then he hesitated before adding, "I can deal with humans, if I have to. I don't like them much, any more than I like felines or spiders in my milk, but I can tolerate them fairly when it's cal ed for."

I had to smile. "Gault, you've sniffed the wind and set your sail to catch it. You are a sterling opportunist."

He smiled and bowed deeply to me, touched by the compliment. "Thank you, monsieur."

It was to our good fortune that most of the pack reflected Gault's attitude, and I began to suspect that even more would come around when it became to their advantage to do so. As for myself, I had only one interest in humans: to make as much money off them as possible.

It was therefore more than a happy coincidence that provided me that summer with the opportunity to nourish my relationship with Alphonse Rothschild, who had long had an interest in buying my Paris bank. The details of the transaction into which we eventual y entered are for the textbooks; suffice it to say that there was a great deal more maneuvering going on behind the scenes than human economists wil ever discover, and that I found the manipulations sufficiently distracting to help me put the memory of Tessa and the pain she had caused me out of my mind, at least for the time being. And yes, ironical y enough, what started out for me as a bitter mockery of humans and al their vanities ended up the most monumental y profitable venture in which I had ever engaged, and became a model for the way the pack would do business in the future.

Needless to say, Monsieur Rothschild did not acquire my bank.

Perhaps my recounting of events has caused marriages of state to seem passionless, regulated affairs. I assure you, nothing could be farther from the truth. As the date of our mating approached, I was as terrified as any human bridegroom—not of my ability to perform, for I was supremely confident of my own virility and Elise had more than once proved her ability to arouse, but of the truth of it, the permanence and responsibility, the overwhelming commitment.

From childhood we are taught the sanctity of the mating bond. We know that it is a marvel, a miracle, an al -consuming surrender of wil and individuality to a single, transcendental purpose: to conceive and raise young. But we are never told how, exactly, this awe-inspiring thing occurs, or how it wil affect us or how we may prepare for it. The reason, of course, is that there is no way to explain it to one who has not experienced it, and certainly there is no way to prepare for the one single moment that wil change one's life forever. This is terrifying.

But there was a broader perspective, and to ignore it would be a disservice both to Elise and to me.

This was a marriage of state; we both knew that.

Yet I had never aspired to be consort to a queen; I wanted only to love a woman. Elise, who had spent her life preparing to rule, would have abandoned it al for me. Of this I am certain. In matters of the heart, werewolves do not deceive each other. And because we had this foundation of simple unquestioned certainty, it was possible for us to extend our attention to the pack, and what our mating would mean to it.