Running With the Pack (11 page)

Nor did Thomas hear it, his zeal entirely for the topic he believed at hand. “How splendid. That is, in fact, why Father’s been to France. He hunts there; the sport here has grown weak, with the eradication of wolves.”

“Come,” Radcliffe said abruptly. “There have been no wolves in England for centuries, Thomas. Watch your tongue; you’ll alarm the lady.”

“There have been a few,” Thomas corrected, but without aggression. He kept his eager eyes on Markéta, not so much as challenging Radcliffe with his gaze. “It is the story put about that there have been none, but there were, indeed, packs left roaming until only a few years ago. They are startlingly canny, wolves, and seem to go to ground for years at a time. But my family has hunted them for generations, at the throne’s behest. Here, in Scotland, in Wales, even in Ireland, and now in France because there’s nothing left to hunt in the isles.”

“I do not believe it.” Radcliffe huffed, and Thomas finally looked away from Markéta, patience in his bearing.

“Perhaps you would like to visit our manor, Master Radcliffe. There my father keeps pelts from all his hunts, and you will see the newest of them has hardly had time to let dust settle. He prefers the alpha male, but in his last English hunt that beast escaped him. It was old, though, and will have died since then, and he has its mate’s fur instead.”

“I should like to see these furs,” Markéta said distantly. “If I may be so bold as to invite myself along, Masters Radcliffe, Thomas?”

Smugness rushed through Thomas’s posture and scent, and the glance he threw at Radcliffe was triumph embodied. “I shall have my coach fetch you on Thursday next, if it suits?”

“That will do,” Markéta whispered. “That will do very well.”

She wanted so very badly to shed her human form and hunt the hunter. For almost a week she’d waited, keeping herself confined in her townhouse, because to leave was to invite temptation. Even cobbled streets and the sour wind carrying civilization’s stench through the city was close enough to wilderness when she had the temptation of a hunt at hand.

It was temptation she could not risk. The thinking part of her—the part her pack leader had tried so hard to develop—recognized that. A wolf wouldn’t go unnoticed in London’s streets, and even if by chance it should, she dared not meet the hunter who had destroyed her family in her lupine form. His gift was killing wolves. Her only chance lay with striking as a woman.

So she paced before the windows until the servants blushed with discomfort; a well-bred young woman did not stare into the world so hungrily, as if waiting to invite it in to ravish her. As if waiting, she thought, to be loosed on it, so she might savage it. It was preposterous, playing the role of a maiden fair, dressed in soft white muslin and pointed shoes. She would have herself barefoot in red and black, the colors of blood and death, but no, no, no. She had to think, keep her mind clear; the man she went to see would be her family’s murderer, and she the only one left to seek vengeance.

“Mum.” The housemaid’s voice stopped Markéta’s stalking. She swept up her cloak, adjusting it crookedly over her shoulders and throwing off the maid’s attempt to help. The girl’s words followed her, their information already imparted by her arrival in the parlour: “The carriage is here, mum . . . .”

“Hold supper,” Markéta commanded. “I don’t know when I shall return.” When, or
if,
though she would never add fear to the maid’s scent by saying such a thing. The maid agreed, and Markéta was out the door to the coach before her manservant could lend a hand.

The pair of matched bays before the carriage tossed their heads and whickered uncomfortably. Markéta quenched the urge, as she always did, to put her hand beneath their noses and drive their discomfort to madness. Animals knew; they always knew. Horses shied from her, and even the most aggressive dogs snarled and backed away. Cats stood wary, one paw lifted, then disappeared into darkness. Only humans saw nothing more than the girl she presented as; only humans were so blind.

“Miss Alvarez.” The coachman opened the door, but it was the man within who offered his hand to help her up. Radcliffe, not Thomas, and his expression lit with sly pleasure at her surprise. “I was so crass as to insist I be allowed to escort you, Miss Alvarez. My town house is so much nearer your home than Master Thomas’s. It seemed unkind to make his man come all this way, when I was obliged to pass you regardless.”

“I’m delighted. The journey will go so much more quickly with pleasant company.” Markéta drew her skirts in, childishly pleased she hadn’t frightened the horses after all. “Your horses are very fine.”

“Thank you. My family breeds them on our country estate. It is, I’m afraid, the source of our income: gross commercial ventures in horseflesh. Are you shocked, Miss Alvarez?”

“I should think a man able to persuade a thousand pounds of beast to his will would be a firm and fair hand with a household as well. What woman would find that anything but enticing? You must have a fair stretch of land, then, Master Radcliffe.” For a moment the city houses outside the window slipped away, turning in her mind’s eye to pastures and rolling green hills.

“Enough,” Radcliffe admitted. “My favorite stretches are the woods. We have several, some of them very old and peaceful.”

“And unriddled by wolves,” Markéta said softly. “How lonely for them.”

“For the woods, or the wolves?” Radcliffe wondered, and when she glanced at him, lifted his eyebrows. “You disapprove of the hunt.”

“I believe I said I had a peculiar interest in it, sir.”

“You did, but it was my thought that the words said something entirely other than the heart felt. Forgive me my presumption. I did not mean to offend.”

“No,” Markéta said, softly once again. “You have not.”

He put a hand over his heart, and took the topic to the pleasant inconsequentiality of the season’s fine weather, but her gaze strayed to him time and again and she wondered what else he had heard, that she had not said.

Alistair Thomas greeted them with her mother’s pelt in hand.

Society had rules of engagement, meaningless twitter of words like so much hurried birdsong; Markéta knew she must be participating in that, because there would be a resounding, deadly silence if she were not. She did
not
admire the pelt; that much she was certain of, because Thomas’s pleasure in displaying it faltered. Radcliffe was reserved, allowing precisely what Thomas had insisted on: that it was a new fur, recently taken, and so there had indeed been wolves on England’s shores more recently than he’d known. Markéta had no idea what she herself said, nor how she could say it with any degree of calm.

The fur’s scent was so long gone it might never have been, but even without scent, without life, it could be no one other than her mother. The darker grey streaks above once-yellow eyes had made her fierce, and stripes of white on her muzzle had given her canines extra length to threaten both prey and ill-behaved pups with. She had been mother to the pack, and to see her reduced to a flopping length of skin turned Markéta’s insides cold and hard.

“Did you join this hunt?” She barely knew her own voice, dissonance ringing through it. Worse than dissonance:
she
could hear the wolf in her voice, even if the men couldn’t. It wanted to howl, and only stringent human decorum kept her from letting it loose.

Disappointment flashed over Thomas’s face. “My father wouldn’t have it. I was a poorer shot than I might have been, and he wouldn’t risk me or the hunt on it. Three men died that day even so.”

“And how many wolves?”

“Nine.” Another man’s voice, deeper and richer than Alistair’s, broke in, and was accompanied by a clatter of footsteps on marbled stairs. Markéta startled, knowing it to be a violent reaction, but there had been nothing to her beyond her mother’s fur in Alistair’s hands. Only lately did she look upward, take in the echoing length of hall they’d been ushered into, its walls mounted with animal heads and its ceiling painted with scenes of the hunt. And this a town house, she thought; the country estates would be exhausting in their attention to murderous detail.

The man on the stairs was as unlike his son in form as could be, an oak to a sapling. He carried no extra weight, just size, and his chiding was good-natured. “Al, you can’t intend to leave our guests in the foyer all afternoon. Forgive my son, madam, master. His enthusiasm at times overwhelms his sense. I’m Alan Thomas, Lord Thomas if you must, though too much ceremony is tedious. And you must be Miss Alvarez. Master Radcliffe. My home is yours, won’t you come in?”

Radcliffe guided her forward when her own feet wouldn’t take her. Her breath was lodged in her throat, stuck there by tar and blackness as Alan Thomas’s scent rolled down the stairs with him. She had thought him a black devil, not fair and jovial, but the taste of blood and death clung to him without remorse. She managed a curtsy so stiff it hurt her knees, but Lord Thomas took no offense. Instead he looked her over, then threw a tobacco-stained smile toward his son.

“This is the young lady with the interest in the hunt? You could hardly have found better, Alistair. Look at her coloring, those eyes, she could be a wolf herself. Oh, Lord forgive me, I’m as rude as he is. I’m a man who speaks my thoughts, Miss Alvarez. Perhaps you won’t hold it against me.”

“Do you favor women who speak theirs, my lord?” Her voice was strangled in her throat, and Radcliffe, unexpectedly, put his hand at her spine, a show of—not lending strength, she thought. Of solidarity, as her mother had once stood by the pack leader.

Lord Thomas’s eyes narrowed, making him suddenly wolfish himself. Not so convivial after all, for all that his gaze was the ice blue of a cub and not gold like an adult. “Would you think it fair, Miss Alvarez, if I said I’d met few women who voiced their thoughts? Whether they have none or whether society has trained restraint into them, I cannot say, but a woman of reason and consequence is a rare thing, in my view.”

Her vision was not good: she saw few colors, and her focus was that of a hunter’s, honing in on a single individual. But it worsened now, until Thomas stood out against a blurred background, prey for the hunting. “Then I will endeavor to impress upon you that a few of us, at least, are as capable of matching wits as any man, my lord.”

“I look forward to it. So you have an interest in the hunt. Do you ride, Miss Alvarez? Can you shoot?” Lord Thomas escorted them into sitting rooms so opulent Markéta might otherwise have laughed. Crystal turned sunlight to shards of light glittering across parquet floors, and overstuffed chairs were gathered to make different sitting areas. One was by the unlit fire, but they were guided to seats overlooking the gardens. A wolf’s pelt, older than her mother’s, lay across one of the sofas, and Alistair tossed her mother’s there with as little regard.

Markéta sat there so she would at least not have to
look
at the furs. Alistair Thomas sat beside her, casting a subtle glance of victory toward Radcliffe, who gave no signs of noticing as he settled into a chair across from them. Lord Thomas dropped into another armchair, but leaned forward, gaze avid as he awaited Markéta’s answer.

“I’m afraid I’m a poor rider, my lord. Horses do not like me. And the sound of a rifle hurts my ears.”

Polite doubt crawled into his expression. “How then can you be enamored of the hunt?”

“I can track.” Again, Markéta barely knew her own voice. She had spent so long training the snarls and yips out of it, so long working away the growl so all that was left was a pleasant alto. But she bit off the words as though her teeth were long and sharp, and no man who called himself a hunter could mistake the challenge behind them. “What I track, I can kill. What else is there to the hunt, my lord Thomas?”

His lips peeled back from his teeth in what might have been a smile. “No one can always kill what they track, Miss Alvarez. Not even I, and I have many more years experience than you.”

“Almost always,” Markéta whispered, “is often enough.”

Alistair shifted uncomfortably on the seat beside her. “Surely this isn’t an appropriate discussion to hold with a young lady, Father.”

“Oh, on the contrary.” Wicked delight gleamed in Radcliffe’s eyes. “I think it most fascinating. Perhaps a wager, if Miss Alvarez is willing. You have extensive gardens here, Lord Thomas. Dare you pit your tracking skills against the lady’s?”

Curiosity burgeoned in Markéta’s breast, distracting her from the reminders of her family’s death. Lord Thomas could hardly refuse such a wager without a degree of humiliation, which Radcliffe surely knew. She knew her own reasons, certainly, for needling at Thomas, but it had not struck her that Radcliffe might have his own. Nor was there a discrete way to ask, but if they had a common goal she could at least apply more pressure to the suggestion Radcliffe had laid down.

Her smile was brief, but genuine. “A challenge,” she said lightly. “How delightful. I accept.”

Emotion flew across Thomas’s face: chagrin and pride and a willing-ness to humor the poorer folk. “I cannot refuse, if our guest is so certain of herself. You must promise to forgive me if I should come out ahead in this wager, Miss Alvarez. It’s ungentlemanly, but I hate to lose. I cannot make allowances for your sex.”

“I wouldn’t want you to, my lord. And if I should win, I trust you will be as forgiving. What shall our quarry be?”

“I’ve seeded wild boar on the estate.” Thomas watched her carefully, and Markéta made no effort to hide the lifting of her eyebrows.

“Boar is an animal harried by packs, even packs of men, my lord. Would you dare the kill, all alone?” She would not; she was not, even in the face of vengeance, that great a fool. It had been decades and more since boar had roamed Britain freely, just as it had been so long since wolves had. Pack memory told of stolen piglets, delicious to eat, but also told of the size and speed and rage of a full-grown boar. Markéta’s people were larger by some significant part than their single-aspected brethren, but boar met them weight for weight, and sometimes better than. One wolf against a boar was madness.