The Willing (16 page)

The chiseled blue of his eyes met mine,
but this time with regret instead of anger. His voice had fallen to
a low whisper that only I could hear with my Lycanti ears. “Was any
of it true?” And even more softly: “Did you ever love
me?”

I should have recognized the difference
in Luka’s attitude after we fled Mexico and connected the dots more
effectively. My stomach flipped with the knowledge that he had been
silently hating me all that time, leaving my side while I
convalesced instead of confronting me so I could heal instead of
become emotional and Change. Now that I was whole again, he felt at
liberty to even take me out in public. He, at least, recognized the
difference in me from the girl he had known by Will’s side two
years ago. I had learned something of self-control after my time
with Josh.

Lost in my thoughts, I apparently took
too long to answer. Josh stood and threw some money on the table.
“That is what I thought,” he said with finality. “My biggest regret
is that Micah has a mother like you to use him for her own selfish
purposes.” He walked away too quickly for me to retort.

And just like that, I was alone again.
I played with my food listlessly for a bit, trying to avoid the
stares, then walked to the edge of town and Changed. I had had
enough of this human bullshit for a while.

Shasta

Rachel made it clear to me that I was
expected to help when the time came. It was my duty, and we would
all benefit from a larger food supply. If we wanted to stay in
South California, then we had to follow Lenora’s plan.

So I became the recruiter, basically. I
didn’t even have cookies to bribe people with, and I didn’t
particularly want to do it anyway. What had the Lycanthrope or
Lycanti ever done for me? I didn’t owe Emily anything.

Luka’s face kept flashing before my
eyes. Even he had abandoned me. Him of all people! The man who had
killed me didn’t even have enough sympathy to stay by my side when
I became what I am. He didn’t love me enough to love me for
whatever I was. He only wanted to love one of his precious Lycanti.
Emily loves him. I can see it all over her face any time she speaks
of him. I wonder if he loves her. I wonder if he wants to fuck her
the way that he did me so many times. I wonder if he dreams about
her.

But no, there’s this Brooke girl. She’s
the one who got him. Will got Emily, who wanted Luka, who got
Brooke, who wanted Will. What a screwed up circle. Werewolf soap
operas, can you imagine? And now my friends and I are tied to these
people with bonds of Lenora’s making. And when the Mother speaks,
the Children listen. That’s why I didn’t need cookies to recruit
people. I just had to tell them that “the Mother sends word,” and
they started making their way to Washington. Ugh, ok, whatever, now
I’m rambling. Look, the point is that I got stuck with a job that I
didn’t want to do, but I did it anyway, OK? I did it because I love
Lenora and Rachel and Delilah, and I don’t want them to ever be
hungry again.

But mark my words: Emily is going to be
the cause of a lot of pain on both sides of the battle. We’re going
to lose people, and if I lose Delilah or Rachel or Lenora, or any
other of the Children who have taken care of me since that night
three years ago, I will kill that bitch, with or without Lenora’s
permission.

But for now, I will gather together as
many of our kind as I can find and send them west to Lenora. From
there, they’ll keep those mangy werewolves chasing their tails for
months while Lenora moves all the right pieces into
place.

Emily

“Do not antagonize me,
girl.”

Ranier’s voice always had that slightly
supercilious air to it that I hated now, and seated at a walnut
office desk, he seemed imposing. When I met him two years ago, his
voice and manner had sounded distinguished. Now it always grated my
nerves. But I needed him.

“Then let me pick the men going with
me,” I insisted. “It is my son’s life that is on the
line.”

“All sons of this house are my sons,”
Ranier snapped. “And for someone who imposes on the hospitality of
house in which she has no place, you have too much to say about the
matter.”

If had sought to impress me by
summoning to his mansion in the middle of the day while servants
buzzed around performing trivial errands while we spoke, he was
sadly mistaken about me. I had a goal, and he would not throw me
away from it at this point. We sat in his office, a beaker of
brandy before him and a glass of cold water for me, haggling over
the expedition as if this were some common vacation for me and not
a life-or-death mission which could very well determine my son’s
humanity.

I calmed myself using the techniques
Lenora had taught me during that long year at her home. “Let’s be
completely honest here, Ranier.” His face twisted at my informal
use of his name. “I know why you’re willing to risk all of this for
Micah. You want to steal the drug trade back from Maria, and you
think you can use Micah as leverage.”

“Ha! You know nothing,” he barked. “Who
has filled your head with these ideas? You are an ignorant American
girl who for some reason fascinates those ignorant American men.
Somehow even my own son cannot escape you. I blame it on your
Blood.”

That took me aback. “My Blood? What do
you know of my Blood?”

He scoffed in disgust and said
something harsh in Portuguese. In English, as if explaining to an
imbecile, he said slowly, “Do you know nothing of your line? My
ignorant nephew failed to make you of our Blood or to properly kill
you, but since Will completed the Change, you have some of the
purest Blood of any Lycanti alive. You are, for all impractical
purposes, almost full Lycanthrope.”

I let that sink in for a minute,
fascinated. Even after two years, I knew almost nothing about the
Lycanthrope world. Josh’s harsh baptism in blood had only showed me
how to embrace my most base passions. Aloud, I said, “Josh taught
me nothing of your history or culture or, well,
anything.”

“Of course he did not,” Ranier said
with contempt, his next words dripping with derision. “It is your
maker’s responsibility to tell you such things. Since you felt the
need to promptly kill him after your Change, I am sure you missed
several vital pieces of your education.”

We sat in uncomfortable silence. He
wanted me to ask. He wanted to be the one to enlighten me, but
Ranier had, so far, never given me anything which did not
cost.

He spoke without prompting. “Allow me
to choose the men to accompany you without fight, and I will tell
you exactly what, in the world of the Lycanthrope, makes you
somewhat of an anomaly.”

I thought that was a strange choice of
words, but didn’t comment on it. I pondered for a moment on my
choices. I knew none of Ranier’s household, and he had already
expressly forbid Luka from accompanying me in the hotel room that
day when these negotiations began. Almost a month later, and he
still would not budge from that position. Those were the first
words out of his mouth. I had planned to rely on some sort of gut
feeling to pick the men to go with me, but how reliable could that
be?

“What if we compromise? I let Luka pick
my team.”

Ranier turned the offer over in his
mind. “I will allow him to pick three of the men,” he
countered.

The patriarch had offered me eight men.
Three trustworthy men out of eight were not good odds.

“I want at least five.”

“You will get three, or none at all.
This knowledge costs me nothing. I am merely attempting to be
courteous and following the common civilities of
negotiation.”

He was lying and I knew it. For some
reason, he wanted to tell me. He wanted me to know what made my son
so damn special to him. “Fine. Three, then.”

He nodded. “Will is Maria’s son. Maria
is de puro sangue, of the purest blood. Both of her parents were
Lycanthrope, as were theirs, and so on and so forth. The chain had
never been broken until Maria took a human paramour.” He smiled to
himself, as if lost in memories. “It proved quite a scandal when
she became pregnant. At William’s birth, Maria’s parents refused to
acknowledge him as one of the Blood. Maria was banished from the
Clan’s grounds. She had to raise her son among humans with his
human father.”

That made more sense than Will’s story
about how his mother had chosen to live among the humans but felt
chained by them, thereby seeking long weeks away from his father
and him at a time. Much more sense, actually. I didn’t speak, just
allowed Ranier to continue.

“When Maria killed her mate, she
attempted to bring William to the Clan’s grounds to live. After
all, he carried the Lycanthrope gene. It was possible he could
Change upon adolescence. Maria would not hear of it. She wanted him
to be human.” His nose wrinkled. “Such a love for humans she had
then,” he said distastefully. “Thank the gods she overcame
that.”

I bit my cheek in anger, but said
nothing. Instead I asked, “I thought if the parent is human, then
the baby doesn’t become a were—a Lycanthrope.”

“Who told you such a stupid lie? There
always exists the possibility that the gene will not manifest, but
the gene will always exist.” He leaned forward, his arms resting
loosely on the expansive desk in front of him, his voice dropping
to a low tone I had never heard from him. “Maria found a way to
keep him human, to make sure that the gene never
surfaced.”

Will had never told me that. He had
always assumed he was naturally human because of his father. Lenora
and I had spent an entire year trying to unsuccessfully ferret out
this secret of how the Lycanthrope could willingly keep their
children human if they chose. “How did she do it?”

Ranier chuckled. “That knowledge rests
with Clan elders. It is not for reckless Lycanti.”

“My son…”

“Will have a choice if you insist,
before his Change, preferably at the age of 10. It is not your
choice to make.”

Luka had said the same thing to me
concerning Micah’s future.

“So what does any of this matter?” I
demanded.

“It matters because Luka’s
son by you is
de puro
sangue
. The professor who Changed William
was his aunt on his father’s side.”

I recalled the overtly sexual way that
the professor had used Will before Changing him. “Ew.”

“Yes, the whole thing stinks of too
much American influence, but overall, we have an almost unbroken
chain of pure blood. You, by way of being Will’s Changeling, carry
on that blood, and Micah carries it through you and
Luka.”

“Luka doesn’t care about any of
that.”

“Luka is not head of this
house.”

That caught me off guard. “Wait a
minute. What could you possibly want with Micah? Luka has a son, a
legitimate one by Brooke.”

Ranier shrugged, as if
Alexander didn’t matter. “Brooke is not good blood. Her creation
stems from a renegade leading the Lycanti named Joshua, who should
know better than to Change one of the Fey. They are dangerous as
Lycanti. She has
sangue
ruim
. Bad blood. No heir of mine will ever
possess such vile substance.”

I gasped. “Josh? Josh is Brooke’s
maker?”

His smile did not reach his eyes. “You
did not know?”

“But her eyes…they’re green! And…” I
hesitated due to the illumination of my ignorance on the matters of
Blood. “Josh is Lycanti.”

“Ah, so you have noticed that there are
certain genetic markers dominant in our blood lines and that a
Lycanthrope must be the maker, have you? Very good. Your ignorance
was beginning to concern me.”

“It’s not possible, is it?” I said
through clenched teeth. “It can’t be possible. Will told
me…”

“The truth. Brooke’s eyes would have
originally been of our Blood, but repeated ingestion of her lover’s
blood or other body fluids will have subtly influenced the color.
If you look closely, you will see that Brooke’s eyes have very much
blue in them.”

“Will…She and Will…”

Ranier nodded, letting me absorb all
the knowledge laid on me. He motioned for me to stand.

“But that means that Josh…”

“Is of my own house, yes. A second
cousin from the original Russian line, actually,” he added. Before
I could even fathom a response, he simply said, “Walk with me to my
gardens.”

“I don’t understand,” I mumbled. But I
followed, as if in a trance. I didn’t particularly care about the
old man’s gardens, but all of the information swirling in that
little room was too much for me. I really did need to get out, and
he must have sensed that.

Hatred for Brooke surged afresh within
me. It now looked as if my plans might transform with this new
knowledge. How would I get word to Lenora? I now knew that Ranier
would get Micah back no matter what—and that I was completely
expendable to him. Of course, I could tell him the truth: that
Micah was also of the bastard Blood and had no claim whatsoever to
the mantle of the Brazilian clan. I also had to consider that
Ranier must genuinely dislike Brooke since he was willing to
replace her with no more than my word and having seen the chemistry
that existed between Luka and me.