Running With the Pack (19 page)

While people like Rob stayed, to poison what was left.

Rage rose in me like a cleansing wind. I lifted my wolf’s head, from the forest floor, my ears flattened to damp the noise of their boasting and laughing. I turned my mind to my purpose.

I wanted to scare them, hurt them, but not at risk to myself. I knew my quarry would not have come to the forest unarmed. There were few local households that did not possess at least one gun. Most boys owned a shotgun or a rifle of their own before they hit puberty, and a gun was a practical precaution against the feral dog packs that roamed the area. Rob was the leader of this pack of thugs. He would have brought a gun as symbol of his status. The other two would have switchblades or hunting knives. I was fast—here, in this forest, supernaturally fast—so the blades did not worry me too much. But the gun had to go. It may be that there are Shifters out there who can only be harmed by silver. I’m not one of them.

I crouched in the shadows and let eyes and nose search, until I was certain there was only one single shotgun, a melange of oil and rust, steel and gunpowder, lying carelessly among the empty beer bottles. It looked old and smelled badly kept, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work.

My mother had never found her wolf, but she had come to us a witch. I had inherited her sensitivities with the stronger gifts of the wolf. The Deadfall whispered to me, heavy with the potential for magic. The ground had been fed with lightning, semen, and blood, and those powers had knotted themselves into the deep, secret history of the ancient roots, the centuries of summer leaves that had fallen and been turned to loam. I called on my blood-bond with the land and took a little of that potency into myself, the raw power stoking the magic that ran ancient and deep in my blood.

I was shadow silent, so swift across the clearing that only Lee startled. Then I was gone, a brindled darkness beneath the heavy branches of a moon-flowered dogwood, the gun in my jaws. I dropped it where the shadows were deepest, buried it with dirt and leaves.

“What was that?” Lee said uneasily. “I saw something.”

“Squirrel, or a rabbit, maybe.” Rob said. “Nothing that matters. Everybody knew we were gonna be here. Nobody’ll mess with us.”

“We will fear no evil, ’cause we are the meanest sons-of-bitches in the valley,” Jeth laughed. Jeth was smart enough, but he was a follower, a perfect mark for Rob’s stronger personality. “Relax, Lee. Have another beer.”

“I saw something, and it wasn’t no damn squirrel,” Lee muttered. He took the beer Jeth tossed him, but his eyes moved uneasily over the shadows. Kinder people in town called Lee “slow.” The more sharp-tongued said his mama had dropped him on his head one too many times. But he wasn’t too stupid to know when he was the brunt of a joke, and he was big enough and strong enough to ensure that people didn’t make fun of him more than once. I thought there was more to him than people gave him credit for. Maybe school gave him trouble, but he trusted his own eyes.

I ghosted around behind them, considering. Maybe I couldn’t make them feel the humiliation ’Rion and I had suffered, but I could give them a taste of the terror we had felt, and the pain. My gift did not carry in my bite. Let them feel my teeth.

I lifted my muzzle and howled, putting into the sound all my rage and all my loss.

The night answered.

One of the wild dog packs,
I thought—one of the reasons I was forbidden the forest beyond my Family’s protection. But my throat was full again even as I thought it, vibrating with the strange double harmony of the wolf, that quality that makes a pack of six sound like a score, and a score like a hundred. And again, I was answered.

The boys were cursing steadily now. Rob was scrambling on hands and knees, searching for the gun among the empties and not finding it. Lee had pulled a branch from their small campfire and was thrusting at the shadows shaped by the jumping flame. Jeth gripped a six-inch hunting knife, trying to look everywhere at once. “Dammit, Rob, get the fucking gun!”

“I can’t find it!”

“Rob,” Lee hissed, “we got company.”

Eyes began to shine in the darkness between the trees.

Instinct carried me, a long leap up onto the highest point of the fallen giant oak. My fur bristled to make me look larger, my tail high and bushed as I growled.
My place. My prey.
Growls answered me, and the pack leaders slipped into the ring of firelight.

There were two of them, Dobermans, tails and ears chopped to stubs. I knew them for dangerous animals. They’d killed pets and food animals, even attacked people, and had evaded several attempts to hunt them down. Once they’d guarded a junkyard. One day the owner had locked the gate and walked away, leaving the two dogs to starve or survive on rats and rainwater. They’d escaped. Half-feral already, before long they led a pack of desperate, discarded hounds and mongrels, turning them as vicious as they were.

The three boys had frozen; if they had run, the feral pack would have given chase. Dogs gone feral are far more dangerous than wild wolves—they’ve learned that without their weapons, men are easy prey. Rob was crouched in the dirt, his right hand clenched on a beer bottle, his face pale and sweating in the wan light. Lee was crouched so close to the fire he was almost in it, and Jeth and his knife were trying to become one with the tree trunk. They weren’t going anywhere.

I jumped down, landing lightly, answering the challenge presented by the Dobermans with a display of size and dominance. They were litter mates who worked as a team, but I was a big wolf, 110 pounds, in good condition and perfect health. They were thin, ridden with parasites and poorly healed wounds.

They were also experienced fighters. They could have torn me to shreds, but they didn’t know that.

I was a born Alpha. I had come into my wolf when I was eleven, at the first breath of puberty, without rite or ritual. Maybe I had never fought in earnest, but my father and grandfather had run with wild wolves, and they had taught me how to bluff.

I skinned my lips back from my teeth, subtly longer and sharper than a natural wolf’s, stretched toes set with claws more like those of a bear than a wolf. Magic sang in my blood.
See me! I am terrible and beautiful and wise. Accept me, and my power will be added to yours, and all that runs will fall before us.

The thinner of the Dobermans whined and dropped his head and tail, and then the other. One by one the pack stepped out—bluetick and coonhounds, a shepherd mix, and four of the dingo-like mixes that wild dogs seemed to breed back to—with heads and eyes dropped in submission. A good-sized pack, hunters all—and mine.

I swelled with the knowledge. For tonight, at least, I
did
have a pack, a pack who knew what it was to hunt and to kill. The Dobermans, I knew, would not hesitate at human prey. They had been headed that way on their own.

One of the Dobermans shifted his eyes behind me, and snarled.

I turned faster than the eye could see. I felt, I
knew
, that I was all that I had promised the pack. I was beautiful and terrible, my mane a nimbus, my eyes molten, my white teeth gleaming in that wet snarl that promises mayhem. The sight of me fixed Rob to the earth like a beetle pinned to a board, his eyes wide with terror.

The pack began to move, shadows with firelight gleaming in their eyes, closing ranks around me, asking with each movement, with the lips skinned back from yellow teeth,
Is this the hunt? Is this the kill?

I stared at Rob, clutching his stupid bottle, and knew he was mine to take.

This is my place!
I thought at him.
This is my forest. This is my town! You hurt somebody under my protection, somebody good and kind and intelligent. I think you’ll go on hurting people until somebody stops you.

I can stop you. Here. Tonight.

I think I will.

I took a step, one step, and felt the pack tense around me, as if each hunter was an extension of my will. Was this what it was like, to run with the wild ones, to lead the hunt that was life and death? The three who had hurt Orion, who had driven him away, could die, right here, tonight. My tracks would be lost in the tracks of the pack, the tearing of my teeth and claws lost in so many wounds. Even my grandfather would not know, not for sure.

Rob Merrow looked into my eyes, and pissed himself.

“Oh, God,” he moaned. He’d dropped the bottle. His hands were raised in supplication. “Not me. Please. Take them, not me.”

He stank of fear. ’Rion had been afraid, too, had screamed when his arm snapped. But he hadn’t been afraid like this. Not like this.

Was this the bully on whom I had wasted so much hate? He was not worth hunting. Not worth the kill.

The thought shocked me. I hadn’t come here to kill. Had I?

A world without Rob could only be a better place. But Rob and Lee and Jeth were no threat to me, not here and now. It was one thing to kill in immediate defense of myself or of another. But murder was murder, even on four feet.

I couldn’t use this pack,
my pack
, to work a vengeance that was entirely my own. Maybe it was only a matter of time before the Dobermans, at least, went after a human being. But if I made them kill for me tonight, every person who could carry a gun would be out here, shooting anything on four legs. The wild dogs, too, were mine, like the forest, like the town, and tonight they had come to me of their own will. I owed them better.

And Rob and Lee and Jeth would become martyrs of a sort, their cruelty and their bigotry whitewashed, buried under flowers and candle wax. I owed Orion better than that. I owed myself better.

Stories and movies about werewolves always make the beast the killer. It kills without reason, without remorse, driven by blood lust.

It’s so easy to blame the wolf. But I understood then what the Family chronicles had been trying to teach me. The werewolf is dangerous because the wolf is a
weapon
—murder without apparent motive, the ultimate misdirection.

Bloodlust is
human
, not lupine. A wolf kills for food, for territory, or to protect the pack. I wasn’t hungry. The land spoke to me through my flesh and blood, indisputably, forever mine, whether I liked it or not. And murder here would destroy the dog pack, and destroy my grandfather.

The meanest son-of-a-bitch in the school had just wet his pants at the sight of me. It would have to do.

I took a step back and howled. For a moment I felt the pack trembling around me, surprised, perhaps relieved. After a moment I felt them relax. Muzzles lifted, and we sang, voices tumbling over and over the boys who crouched frozen and ignored in the dirt.

Then I turned and lead the pack into the forest, where we ran and hunted the plentiful deer beneath the gibbous moon.

On Monday it seemed at first that the night at the Deadfall had never happened. Rob, Jeth, and Lee were hanging out in the hall as usual, where I’d have to pass them to get to my locker. There was an added opportunity for humiliation because Thomas, a boy I actually
liked
, was just a little down and across the hallway, stacking books for his morning classes.

On the other hand, I’d seen Rob cowering and terrified. I snugged that image up against me like a shield and continued down the hall.

“Who let the dog out,” Rob sang, sniggering. He made woofing noises, then gave a poor imitation of a coyote howl.

Normally, I’d have hunched in on myself and scuttled down the hall to my locker. This time I just turned around and stared. I saw that neither Lee nor Jeth were wearing the sly, malicious grin that usually accompanied these little dominance displays. Jeth was looking at the floor. Lee’s lip curled in disgust, but he was looking at Rob, not me. And I understood I’d gotten my revenge.

I’d exposed their leader as a coward. And if he was a coward, what were they, who had followed him? I’d broken Rob’s hold. He wasn’t harmless—no one who will use violence and stealth to make his point is ever harmless. But, here and now, I’d stolen much of his power.

He had been raised to think that being white and male made him better than anyone who wasn’t. But even here, in this backwards Southern town, no black folks were going to step out of his path, and no girls of either color were going to want him just because their other options seemed worse.

Hell, he and his little crew had run from the young black woman who had stopped to help ’Rion and me. The thought made me grin.

Rob had noticed Lee and Jeth weren’t backing him. His grin went sickly, then turned thin and hard. He glared at me, but his posture was hunched, defensive. “Bitch,” he snarled at me, “what are you smiling at?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thomas scowling, pushing his books back onto the shelf while his long hands curled into fists. Part of me really wanted to let him come to my rescue, just so I could smile gratefully up into his beautiful brown eyes. And it would be satisfying to see sweet, bookish Thomas, who was also six-four and ran track, mop the floor with Rob.

But that way lay heartbreak, I reminded myself. Thomas was smart and sweet, which meant in a year he’d be gone, just like ’Rion. So I handled it myself.

I walked up to Rob, still grinning. I pushed into his space, the way an alpha wolf can crowd a subordinate, dominating by the simple act of not being afraid. And even though he was six inches taller than me, he cowered. “I was just thinking,” I said. “That if you are going to howl like that, you should at least do it right.” And I tilted back my head, and howled.

It wasn’t a proper wolf-howl, of course, but it was as close as a human throat can come.

And that whole noisy corridor went completely silent, as that sound rose up from me. Lee and Jeth went dead white, and for a moment I thought Rob was going to wet himself again. When I finished, I gave him a slow, satisfied smile. Then I walked away, feeling his eyes on me.

Just for a moment, I looked back, and let my eyes flash gold.

RED RIDING HOOD’S CHILD

N.K. JEMISIN

If Anrin had not needed to finish the hoeing, all might have gone differently. The blacksmith was a strong man and the walls of the smithy were thick. Not that the smith would have killed him—except perhaps accidentally, if he’d put up too much of a fight—but his future would have been set in the eyes of the villagers. Blood told, and they’d been waiting for Anrin’s to tell since his birth. This was what happened instead.

“Come here, boy,” said the smith. “I’ve something special to give you.”

Anrin stopped hoeing the tailor’s garden and obediently crossed the road to the smithy. “More work, sir?”

“No work,” said the smith, turning from the doorway to reach for something out of sight. He returned with a big wooden bowl, which he held out to Anrin. “See.”

And Anrin caught his breath, for the bowl held half a dozen straw-berries.

“Lovely, aren’t they? Got them from a nobleman traveler as payment. Came from the king’s own hothouses, he swore. Have one.”

They were the most beautiful strawberries Anrin had ever seen: plump, damp from washing, redder than blood. Entranced, he selected a berry—making sure it was small so that he would not seem greedy—and took a careful bite from its tip. To make it last he rolled it about on his tongue and savored the tart-sweet coolness.

“Lovely,” the smith said again, and Anrin looked up into his wide smile. “If you come inside, you can have more. I have sugar, and even a bit of cream.”

“No, thank you,” Anrin said. He gazed wistfully at the strawberries, but then pointed toward the half-hoed garden. “Master Tailor will be angry if I don’t finish.”

“Ah,” said the smith. “A pity. Well, you’d better get on, then.”

Anrin bobbed his head in thanks and trotted back across the road to the garden. He’d finished the hoeing before it occurred to him to wonder why the smith, who had never been kind to him before, had suddenly offered him such a delicacy.

No matter, he told himself. The strawberry had been ever so sweet.

Once upon a time in a tiny woodland village there lived an orphan boy. As his mother had been less than proper in her ways—she died unwed, known well to several men—the villagers were not kindly disposed toward the tiny burden she left behind. They were not heartless, however. They reared young Anrin with as much tenderness as a child of low breeding could expect, and they taught him the value of honest labor so that he might repay their kindness before his mother’s ways took root.

By the cusp of manhood—that age when worthier lads began to consider a trade and marriage—Anrin had become a youth of fortitude and peculiar innocence. The villagers kept him at arms’ length from their homes and their hearts, so he chose instead to dwell within an eccentric world of his own making. The horses and pigs snorted greetings when he came to feed them, and he offered solemn, courtly bows in response. When the villagers sent him unarmed into the forest to fetch wood, he went eagerly. Alone amid the dappled shadows he felt less lonely than usual, and the trees’ whispers were never cruel.

Indeed, Anrin’s fascination with the forest was a source of great anxiety to the old woodcutter’s widow who boarded him at nights. She warned him of the dangers: poison mushrooms and hidden pitfalls and choking, stinging ivies. And wolves, of course; always the wolves. “Stay on the path, and stay close to the village,” she cautioned. “The smell of men keeps predators away . . . most of the time.”

Old Baba had never lied to Anrin, so he obeyed—but in the evenings after his work was done, he sat atop the small hill near the old widow’s cottage. There he could gaze out at the dark, whispering forest until she called him down to bed.

On one of those nights, with a late winter chill making the air brittle and thin, he heard a howl.

The next day began the same as always. At dawn he rose to do chores for Baba, and then he went from house to house within the town to see what needed doing.

But as Anrin came to the smithy, he noticed an odd flutter in his belly. His first thought was that he might’ve eaten something bad, or perhaps pulled a muscle. After a moment he realized that the sensation was not illness or injury, but dread. So startled was he by this—for he had never feared the villagers; they were too predictable to be dangerous—that he was still there, his hand upraised to knock, when the door opened. The smith’s apprentice Duncas stood beyond, escorting another village man who held a new riding-harness. Both of them stopped at the sight of him, their expressions shifting to annoyance.

“Well?” Duncas asked.

“I came to see what chores the smith has,” Anrin replied.

“He’s busy.” Beyond Duncas, Anrin saw the smith talking over a table with another customer.

“I’ll come back tomorrow, then.” Nodding politely to Duncas and the goodman, Anrin turned away to leave and in that moment felt another strange sensation: relief.

But he had other houses to visit and other work to do, and by sunset he had forgotten all about the moment at the smithy.

That evening Anrin again sat on the hilltop and looked out over the dark expanse of trees. This time he heard nothing but the usual sounds of night, though he found himself listening for the mournful cadence of wolfsong. He heard none—but as the waxing moon rose he thought he saw something move in the distance. He narrowed his eyes and made out a fleet dark form running low to the ground against the tree line.

“Come down, boy,” Old Baba called up, and with a sigh Anrin gave up his darkgazing for the night.

Old Baba did not greet Anrin as she usually did when he reached the foot of the hill. Instead she gazed at him long and hard until he began to worry that he had done something to upset her.

“The gossips in the village are all a-whisper, Anrin,” she said. “They say the smith offers you gifts.”

Unnerved by her stare and the statement, Anrin said, “A strawberry, Baba. I would never have taken it if he hadn’t offered.”

“Did he ask anything in return?”

“No, Baba. He said I might have more if I came into the smithy, but I had other work. What’s wrong? Are you angry with me?”

She sighed. “Not with you, child.” After another moment’s scrutiny, she took hold of his chin. “You are not quite a boy anymore.”

The gesture surprised Anrin, for Baba had never been particularly affectionate with him, though she was never unkind either. He did not resist as she turned his face from side to side. “Such thick dark hair, such deep eyes . . . so like your mother. You’ve grown beautiful, Anrin, did you know that?”

Anrin shook his head. “The moon is beautiful, Baba. The forest is beautiful. I am neither.”

“No, you’re the same,” she said. “Just as wild, and just as strange—but innocent, at least for now.” She sighed almost to herself. “So many things out there would devour that innocence if they could.”

“Things . . . in the forest, Baba?” Anrin frowned.

She smiled a little sadly and let him go. “Yes, child. In the forest. Now get to bed.”

All through the next day, Anrin pondered the conversation with Old Baba. Should he have refused the smith’s gift? Baba had denied being angry with him, but if not him then whom? The smith, perhaps . . . but why?

He had come to no conclusion by the time he finished bringing water to fill the leatherman’s curing-cistern, and climbing trees to gather winter nuts for the trapper’s wife. At sunset he wandered back to Baba’s, intending to climb the hill again. But when the old woman’s cottage came into view, the door was open with a familiar man’s silhouette blocking the light from within. Voices drifted to him, sharp and angry on the chilly wind.

“—a fair price,” the smith was saying. All but shouting, and Anrin saw that his nearby hand gripped the doorjamb so tightly that the wood groaned. “I’m generous even to offer. It’s time the boy earned his keep!”

“Not like that,” Baba’s voice snapped from within. Anrin had never heard her so angry. “And you’ll not take him either, not while I still have lungs that can shout and hands that can wield a pitchfork. Now get out!” And her gnarled hand shoved against his chest; when he stumbled back the door slammed in his face.

The peculiar flutter in Anrin’s belly returned fourfold. He stepped off the dirt path that led to Baba’s farm and crouched in the bushes. A moment later the smith passed by, muttering imprecations and swinging his great clenched fists. When he was gone, Anrin climbed out of the bushes. He considered going to the house to talk to Baba, but already the day had been too strange; he wanted no more of it. He went to the hill, climbed up, and sat there too troubled to find any of his usual comfort in the night.

“Anrin,” Baba called after a while, and silently he went down to her.

Her lips were still tight with anger, though she said nothing of the smith’s visit and he did not ask. Instead she took him by the shoulder and steered him toward the barn as they walked. “Before you go to work in the morning, Anrin, I want to talk to you. Not now, of course; you’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, Baba,” he said uneasily. He suspected she meant to speak of the smith. He would be able to ask her all the questions in his mind at last, he realized, but he was no longer certain he wanted to know the answers.

“Sleep well tonight, Anrin—and be sure to lock the barn door behind you.”

Anrin blinked, for he had never locked the barn in all his years of sleeping there.

“Mind me, child,” she said, pushing him into the barn. “Bolt it fast, and open it for no one before dawn.”

He turned to her on the threshold, all the small disturbances of the past three days welling up inside him. He wanted to somehow vomit the strange feelings forth, expel them from his heart before they could poison him any further, but he could think of no way to do so.

She stood watching him, perhaps getting some inkling of his thoughts from his face; her own was softer than usual. She put a hand on his shoulder and he almost flinched as one more disturbance jarred him, for she had to reach up to touch him. Unnoticed, unmarked, he had grown taller than her.

“In case of wolves, child,” Baba said. “Lock the door in case of wolves.”

It was a lie, he sensed, but also a gift. Until morning, the lie would give him the comfort he needed.

He nodded and she let him go, turning to go back to her cottage. He watched until she was inside, then closed and locked the barn door.

Beyond them and unseen by either, a shadow crouched at the edge of the forest, only a few yards beyond Anrin’s hill.

Late in the night Anrin heard the barn door rattle. He woke right away, for he had slept lightly, his dreams turbulent and incomprehensible. Quickly he climbed down from the barn loft and went to the door. “Is that you, Baba?”

There was a moment’s silence from beyond. “It’s not Baba, lad,” came the smith’s voice. “Open the door.”

In Anrin’s belly the little flutter rose to a steady beat, spreading foreboding through his soul like night-breezes through trees. “You have work for me, sir? So late?”

The smith laughed. “Work? Yes, lad, work. Now let me in.”

“Old Baba told me not to.”

“As you like,” the smith said, but Anrin saw from the shadows under the door that the smith’s feet did not move away. Instead the door began to rattle again, and Anrin remembered that the smith carried his tools with him always.

In the back of Anrin’s mind, the night breezes rose to a sharp, cold gust.

There was a horse door at the back of the barn. Anrin went there and pushed aside the pickle-barrel that blocked it. If anyone had asked, he could not have told them why he fled. All he could think of was the smith’s wide smile, and the sound of groaning wood, and the fear in Old Baba’s eyes. These indistinct thoughts lent him strength as he wrestled the heavy, half-rusted latch open.

And then Anrin was free of the barn, running blindly into the bitter night. At his back he heard the smith’s curse; the squeal of wood and metal; the querulous voice of Baba from within her cottage calling, “Who’s there?” Into the forest, the night breezes whispered, and into the forest he ran.

When the boy fell, too weary and cold to run any further, the shadow closed in.

Anrin awoke in dim smoky warmth and looked about. A fire flickered at his feet; the roof of a cave loomed overhead. He turned and found that his head had been resting on the flank of a great forest wolf. Silently it watched him, with eyes like the winter sun.

Anrin caught his breath and whispered, “Beautiful.”

Something changed in the wolf’s golden eyes. After a moment, the wolf changed as well, becoming a man.

“You do not fear me,” the wolf said.

“Should I?”

“Perhaps. You were nearly meat when I found you in the forest. I might eat you yet.” The wolf rose from his sprawl and stretched from fingers to toes. Anrin stared in fascination. The wolf’s body was broad and muscled, sleek and powerful, a model of the manhood that Anrin might one day himself attain. He stared also because had never seen a grown man unclothed before, and because Old Baba was not there to tell him to look away.

The wolf noticed Anrin’s gaze and lowered his arms. “Do you still find me beautiful?”