In the Pale Moonlight Sunny Moraine Published 2010 ISBN 978-1-59578-727-9 Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509 Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © 2010, Sunny Moraine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. Manufactured in the United States of America Liquid Silver Books http://LSbooks.com Email:
[email protected] Editor Jean Cooper Cover Artist Christine M Griffin This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Blurb Moonlight can show a great deal more than sun… For years, Rhys has lived alone on his isolated patch of land, far from his brothers and sisters, shunning all human company. For years, it has been enough for him to hunt alone, without a pack or mate, and for years he had been sure that it would always be that way. But certainties can play tricks on a certain mind. One night, Rhys finds a young man, James, huddled in a ruined hut on his land. And when—against his better judgment—he agrees to offer James shelter in his own house, everything begins to change. Haunted by a past he can't escape, Rhys finds himself far too tempted by the presence of young human flesh. James becomes far too curious about his mysterious host. And one fateful night could seal the future for both of them, the moonlight revealing too much to be denied.
Chapter One Rhys found the boy at night, huddled against the stone wall of the hut, half-naked and so skinny that his ribs jutted out against his skin, looking for all the world as though they might punch through. It was the boy’s skinniness that saved him, at least at first. Rhys pulled up short in the doorway of the hut, staring around at the broken table, the torn straw mattress, the general disarray of a place that had not been exactly neat to begin with. But it had been a while since he had made the rounds of this side of his territory, and the hut, once serving as a rough hunting lodge, had fallen into the disrepair that came with disuse. Much of the thatching in the roof was gone. The packed dirt floor was stirred and damp in places. And there was the boy. Rhys’s eyes gleamed green in the darkness, and the boy cowered away from him, moving back though he must know on some level that there was nowhere to run. At the moment the moonlight struck his young body, Rhys saw the delicate quality of it. Not exactly feminine but still gracefully formed, as were the bones under the white parchment of his skin. His appetite disappeared completely. “What are you doing here?” he asked instead, his voice low and gruff. He was in the midst of the change, caught between forms, but he was still human enough to speak. He wondered if the boy could see him. “I needed shelter. A place to sleep.” The boy was trying to push himself up against the wall. Trying to be brave. In spite of himself, Rhys smiled. “I didn’t mean … Is this your land?” “It’s my family’s, yes.” It seemed easiest to say that much. It was the land of the Free People, the land of the shepherds among the sheep, the blessed children of the Blessed Mother, but Rhys was certain that the boy would not know that. He wouldn’t know how well the People hid themselves after long years of learning, and he wasn’t sure how to explain it all at the moment, or if it was even worth explaining. The boy might still be dead in the span of a breath. One didn’t always kill for food alone, and though there would be no sport in such weak prey, Rhys was weighing his options. “We punish trespassers.” “I’m no thief,” the boy insisted. “I’m no poacher, either. I take no other man’s game.” He was trying to force steadiness into his voice. Even … authority. No other man. Rhys was still smiling. If the moonlight had fallen on his face, it would have looked like a dog’s snarl. “I’ve only your word for it. Though, if I’m honest, you could hardly poach an ailing hare from the looks of you.” “I’m stronger than I look,” said the boy, in something like an attempt at a growl. “I’m eighteen this past month, and the sole heir to my father’s holdings. I can ride, and I can shoot. So who are you to speak to me that way?” “I’m the master of this land, boy,” Rhys replied, and it truly was a growl, deep and rich and threatening. It felt good in his throat. If he found no more game tonight, this might be game aplenty. “And everything on it. If I’m feeling kind, all I’ll do is chase you off for using the hut without leave. If I’m not … maybe you’ll suffer for my displeasure.” “I’m—” The boy began again, more strident, edging into belligerence, but he
stopped then and seemed to be mulling something over. He crossed his bare arms over his pale chest and chewed at his full bottom lip. “I apologize,” he said finally, slowly, as though the words took some effort. A proud lad, Rhys was sure of it, and it made his claim of inheritance all the more believable. “I know I’m in the wrong. If you’ll be lenient, I’ll go and trouble you no further.” Rhys was silent for a moment or two, and the boy watched him with uneasy eyes. Even half-shifted, Rhys was preternaturally aware of his surroundings and his place in them, the ground under his bare feet, the wind at his back, the fall of light around him. He knew he was in the shadow. He also knew that at least the outline of his shape was visible in the doorway, hulked and massive and blocking it entirely. If he completed the change now, the boy would see. Or he could simply kill him and solve all problems at once. But it was something about the boy’s delicate frailty, about the way the moonlight made his skin gleam, the way it caught the proud angles of his upturned face, the way it turned his blond hair silver. Rhys felt something in him stirring, hunger that had nothing at all to do with his belly and a reluctance to shed blood that caught his attention simply by virtue of how unusual it was. Perhaps it was plain, ordinary physical desire. Perhaps it was something more like curiosity. Perhaps it was something in between. Perhaps it was something else entirely. “If you come back to my house,” Rhys said, finally and slowly, “I’ll feed you and clothe you and give you a bed, and send you on your way in the morning, if you’re so inclined.” The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Why? A moment ago you were threatening me.” “I’m feeling generous.” Rhys grinned. “And my generosity does not bear testing.” He stood aside from the doorway. As he stepped deeper into the shadows, he let the change slip out of the stasis he had locked it into and complete itself. He bit back a groan as his muscles ached and his bones creaked, his teeth pulling back into his gums. His clothes were ripped and torn. Thankfully, this time, he hadn’t bothered to remove them before the shift had swelled his muscles and wrenched his bones. But the boy might see. Let him see. The boy stepped out of the hut and into the chill of the night air, wrapping his arms around himself and immediately beginning to shiver. Rhys watched him dispassionately. There was a faint red line showing on the horizon, the dawn bleeding into the night. A night of hunting, and Rhys was still hungry. There was food in the house, but food longdead and cured didn’t fill the belly like food fresh-caught and still bleeding. So he would have to make do. “What’s your name, boy?” “James,” said the boy. “James Canning.” “I’m Rhys. Come with me, then, James Canning.” Rhys stepped away, and he could feel the boy’s eyes moving over him, his torn clothing and altered size. He could practically smell his confusion and the continuing thread of unease. He wondered if the boy might turn and run, tearing and stumbling off over the pastures, but there was the promise of shelter and a meal. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy followed him. “How far is your house?” Rhys pointed. “Less than half a mile over that hill. It’s small, but I’ve room enough for company.”
“I hope you won’t take this as discourtesy,” said the boy, his voice low in the dimness and faintly breathless as they began to climb the hill. “But I wonder a little at your generosity. If you’re planning to rob me … you can see for yourself, I have nothing to steal.” Rhys threw back his head and laughed. The sound of it rolled away over the hills that stood colorless in the pre-dawn light, though in the day they were a rich and lovely green. From close by, his laughter was rich and pleasant. Echoing from a distance, it sounded like the baying of dogs. “I wouldn’t rob you, boy.” There was a touch of fine scorn in his voice. “You have nothing I need.” This was a half-truth, at any rate. The house was low, stone, and it was not large, but it loomed all the same with the dawn a bloody red behind it. James paused before it, and Rhys paused with him. He could feel the boy’s puzzlement, now directed at something besides his torn garments. “What is it?” he growled. James turned to him, and even in the dimness he was almost sure that he could see the boy blushing a fine pink, almost to match the tops of the sky. “You said … forgive me. You said your family owned the land, so I suppose I expected something…” “Bigger? Grander?” Rhys shrugged his broad shoulders. He had lived out on the land for too long to care what anyone thought about him and his. When you were raised as one of the People, you were taught young that anyone who wasn’t of the People was of little significance. “This is my house, boy, and mine alone. My family lives in grander quarters, if you wish so badly for luxury. Though…” He looked James over, slowly, and licked his lips, no longer caring how it looked. “For my part, I wonder what they would think of you, looking like that.” “I was robbed once already,” James said stiffly. He crossed his arms over his bare chest again, this time out of a badly hidden embarrassment. “They took my shirt, my money, all my food. That’s why I was in the hut.” “Then the job’s been done for me, in any case.” Rhys stepped forward and pushed the heavy wooden door open with a slow creak. “Inside, boy, unless you’d prefer to sleep in the grass after all.” “I told you my name,” James said irritably, but he stepped inside with all the forced bravado of his eighteen years. “You might use it.” Rhys’s only answer was another rich laugh. Inside, the house still held the night’s darkness, but even in this form, Rhys’s eyes were keen, and he lit lamps with no difficulty. James stood in the center of the front room, casting his gaze around. Rhys watched him take in the fireplace, the nearby chairs, the table and two benches, the small stringed instrument in the corner, and the hanging bundles of herbs and strips of dried meat. The animal pelts on the floor, and on the wall over the fireplace, the head of a great buck. Rhys had brought that buck down, down with his teeth and his claws. He followed James’s wide-eyed gaze, and he remembered the hot, sweet taste of its blood as it burst into his mouth, the gush when he had torn open its throat. “What a beast,” said James, taking a step forward. “Your kill?” “Mine.” Almost against his will, Rhys felt a surge of warmth at the obvious and unguarded admiration. He turned, looking for the kettle. “Come. We’ll eat.”
There was some stew from the day before, kept warm by the banked-down coals of the fire, and fresh bread and cheese. James ate ravenously, so fast in fact that Rhys began to wonder just how this boy, the heir of a free landholder, had become so hungry. “You’ve an appetite,” he observed gruffly. James nodded, still chewing. “I told you,” he said when he had swallowed enough to speak again, “I was robbed. It was over a day ago.” “Why didn’t you return to your father’s house? Are you far from home?” James paused and looked distinctly uncomfortable, turning his face into the shadows. The light was still dim and wavering, but outside, through the windows, the sky was brightening and everything was coming into better view. “I didn’t want to go home,” he said simply, and took another bite of cheese. There’s something in this, Rhys thought. “And why would that be?” “I just don’t.” James looked up at him, and the look on his face was equal parts annoyed and pleading. “Can’t we talk about something else?” He looked Rhys over and seemed to seize on something, and his chin took on a faintly challenging tilt. “How did your clothes come to be so torn?” Rhys frowned and raked a hand through his shaggy hair. There was no reason to keep it to himself; the worst that could happen would be that he would have to kill the boy, which was an option that he hadn’t even entirely ruled out. Or James would simply take fright and run, and if he took it into his head to tell people about the wild man who lived out among the hills, who would believe his story? But he didn’t want James to run. He speared a piece of meat with his knife. “That’s my business.” “So we both have things we don’t wish to discuss. Fair is fair.” Rhys only grunted, and silence fell over the rough wooden table until James pushed his chair back, getting to his feet. “I’d like to wash now,” he said. He was still shirtless, still dirty, but for Rhys that was familiar enough that he had largely forgotten it until it was spoken of. He looked James over, faintly speculative. “There’s a well and a washtub out in the side yard,” he said. “Be free with it.” James nodded, a little stiffly, and Rhys watched his retreating back, the skinny lines of him, the thin wire of his muscles and the smooth movement of the bones beneath. Again he felt hungry, in spite of the meat in his belly, and again the hunger felt more general, more vague, and a little bit confused. He got up and went to the little window that looked out into the side yard. He stood in the shadows to watch James strip down to nothing, naively sure of his own privacy, standing and filling the bucket from the washtub and emptying it over his skinny body, which shivered and glistened in the morning sunlight. He opened his mouth, gulped down the water and shook himself like a dog, droplets flying from the ends of his blond hair and shining until they fell into the dirt and scrubby grass and were gone. “Boy,” Rhys murmured, but James wasn’t just a boy. He was close to manhood, by law already there, and Rhys, at twenty-six, was not so much older than he. Boy. Well, perhaps. Rhys licked his lips and tasted the grease of the meat, and a faint, sweet edge of blood. He should turn away and try to forget it, and send James on his way as soon as he was able to go. There were things that one simply did not do. When James came back inside, still damp with his skin faintly, slickly shining and
his pants pressed in against his skin, Rhys had clothes waiting for him. They were clean, though a bit big. A pallet had been set on the floor near the fire. James looked at it and back at Rhys again, and there was an unspoken question in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, taking the clothing. “You’re kind.” His gaze drifted once down Rhys’s powerful body, his own torn clothing, spotted here and there with blood. “I’m glad,” he started, shifting where he stood and clearly hesitant. “I’m glad that … whatever happened to you, you’re all right.” Rhys only grunted again. To that, he wasn’t sure what to say. There were things here that didn’t fit, that he was unsure how to make fit, and weariness was making an already difficult job more difficult. He brushed it all out of his mind and nodded to the pallet. “Get some sleep,” he said gruffly. “You must be tired, and I am for sure, so that’s what I’ll be doing.” He started toward the back room and paused, looking back over his shoulder. Frowning, trying to think. Nothing about this really felt like something he could explain. “I’ll wake you for the midday meal,” he said, and vanished into the darkness of the room.
Chapter Two In his dreams, time and distance melted away together. He was young again, happy again, running in the night with his brothers and sisters. The air was cool as it rushed in and out of his lungs, and he heard it whistling over his ears. He heard the pounding rhythm of his feet on the ground, and he lifted his head and sang his joy into the night. The joy of the People was a simple joy, the exhilaration that came with the chase and the moonlight and the rush of blood through the veins, the scent of that same hot blood on the wind, calling. Enticing. Only it was not the same blood. All life was life, issuing from the Mother, but the blood of the People was something more, and the blood of the People had to flow. It had to be tended, like a garden, managed like a carefully turned stream that irrigated and enriched fields, and brought forth crops that were healthy and strong. The blood of the People had to flow, from elder to pup. In his dreams, Rhys was young, but even in his dreams he sensed his youth running away from him and into the night, and he felt the threatening burden of the grown ones like a storm cloud hugging the horizon and waiting for its time. Into the night he chased his youth, and he fled from the gathering storm, and the storm was himself. He scented the blood, followed its call, but before long he was lost in a wood darker than any he had ever seen before, and of his brothers and sisters there was no sign. He whirled in the night, ruffled and confused by the rising wind, no more scent of blood on it. Only the storm and the rain, from which he hadn’t been able to escape after all, and there was no shelter to hide him from it. The worst part of being lost was always being alone. **** When Rhys opened his eyes, it was because the sun was slanting in through his window and hitting his closed lids straight-on, turning everything into a opaque haze of ruddy red. He opened them and was blinded, groaned, and turned away, his old wooden bed frame creaking as he moved. It must be close to midday, perhaps just after. He stretched, his bare skin rubbing pleasantly against the rough fabric of his bedclothes, and sat up. He was naked; his clothes would need extensive mending before they could be worn again, if ever, and so he had simply stripped them off and cast them aside. It was no matter; he had others, and even his own nudity was a thing of little consequence, one of the luxuries of a solitary life, where even among the People there was frequently a kind of strict propriety kept when one had not shifted, as though they felt that a line between human and beast had to be maintained. So Rhys often went naked, out here where there was no one to see him, but when his gaze fell on the doorway his eyes widened and he sat up, pulling the blanket into his lap and growling with surprise. James was standing there, clothed in Rhys’s pants and shirt, baggy and loose on him. He was staring, staring and not bothering to make a secret of it, and there was something in the stare that Rhys allowed himself to wonder at before he turned away, holding the blanket against himself and scowling. He would wonder at it, fine, without thinking hard about the wondering.
“Didn’t your landholder father ever teach you to knock, boy?” “There were a lot of things he didn’t teach me,” James said. He said it under his breath, very quietly, so quietly that Rhys might not have picked it up at all, but for the fact that his ears were keen far beyond what James might have had reason to suspect. “You should have learned manners, in any case,” Rhys said, and let the blanket fall aside, his sudden carelessness like a wall tossed up in the center of the room, aggressive as much as it was a defense. He reached down by the side of the bed, groping for a pair of trousers. “What hour is it?” James cleared his throat and looked a little away, toward the slanting sun coming in through the window. It was bright enough in the floating dust and the dimness that it might have almost been a solid thing. Away from it and inside, the rest of the room was so dark by comparison. “I make it out to be noon,” he said, and cast a brief glance in Rhys’s direction. “You have no clocks here.” “I need no clocks.” Rhys tightened a belt around his waist and stood, still naked from the waist up, tanned skin showing very dark in the dim light. “Shall I take it that you’re hungry again, then?” James shrugged. He still wasn’t quite looking at Rhys. “I could eat.” Rhys sighed. “Very well. I have dried meat and bread. It’ll have to be good enough for you, landowner’s son.” He pushed past James, who stepped aside for him, but skin brushed skin as one body passed the other, just the sides of arms, but it tickled, light and strange. When Rhys glanced down there was gooseflesh rising on his forearm. He looked back at James, but James had turned away completely, and his face was no longer visible. But the set of his shoulders… There was at once the voice of Rhys’s mother, loud and clear enough that for a moment he thought her shade might be standing there in the room with him, but it was only a memory called unconsciously forth. Nothing more than an echo of a past long gone. Son, you’ve a hard road ahead of you, even should the Blessed Mother smile on you. You’re not yet fully your own master … you must learn to be, or face much pain. When things cross your path, you must know when to fight, when to kill, when to turn away from the killing. Your own blood might work deception on you. Be wary of it. Somehow she had known. She had always known far too much, and when she had said those words to him, there had been plenty of her own pain in her eyes. Perhaps it was better for everyone that he had left. If this was any indication. Rhys shook his head firmly and went to prepare the meal.
Chapter Three Again they ate in silence, and again there was a kind of watchfulness between them, more pronounced now, though neither of them spoke about it. Each gauging the other, feeling the other out like fingertips reaching through the air. Rhys thought of two creatures circling each other, trying to decide if they would have to fight or if the other truly meant them no harm. A lunge and a swift bite would have ended it. Yet Rhys did not. Finally, he pushed away from the table and stood. He was still naked to the waist, and James’s eyes followed him as he rose. “I have to weed the garden,” he said simply, and went out into the afternoon sun. The warmth of it on his face and on the back of his neck eased him immediately, and he took a breath. There had been a certain amount of tittering when he had first showed interest in the cultivation of plants, in the growth and care of the herbs needed for the healing arts. Such things were the province of old women and those too weak to run and hunt. It had seemed strange to see a young, strong specimen of the People take any care for the subject at all. But there was something about it, about the cool quiet of a garden, in shade or in sunshine, the feeling of the soil and the smell of growing things. Working the earth was something like running through the forest, like the moments of rushing peace that came before the kill itself, when the exaltation was in life. It wasn’t simply a preparation for the climax of the hunt. It was a thing in itself. So Rhys had learned what he could from the tenders of the gardens, and when he left he had taken what he knew with him. Now there was no one to laugh or look askance. He supposed that too was a kind of luxury. Even one that came with such a cost. He was crouching with his hands deep in the rich, dark soil before he realized that he had been followed, and turned sharply. Just a boy who caught him unawares. The ones who had chuckled to see him crouched over a planting bed would only chuckle harder were they here to see this now. He felt a flush of shame, though he beat it back, refusing to show it. Nothing should have been able to surprise him, gardener or no. Were his senses dulling? Was something confusing them? “What do you want?” “Just to see the garden,” said James, his hands in the pockets of his loose-fitting pants, and there didn’t seem to be any mockery in his voice or face, only mild curiosity. He looked over the small patches of greenery, brow slightly furrowed. “No vegetables?” Rhys sighed and shook his head. He had wanted very much to be left alone. “No. Just herbs. For medicine.” “I wouldn’t have taken you for an herbalist.” Again, Rhys remembered the laughing, and though he was sure that the words had not been meant to sting, somehow they found a raw point all the same, and stung indeed. “My problems are my problems,” Rhys said in a low growl. “And my injuries my injuries. I must need to be able to treat myself without aid from others.” It wasn’t just for his peace of mind that he kept the garden, but for the health of his body, for wounds that he had to tend alone. No healer in the town, no doctor, no Wise Woman to poke and prod
at the strangeness of his body, the little signs that showed through even under a skin that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be human. No one to examine him too closely, only to pull back in horror, summon help, bind him and burn him before the upturned faces of all the people. He had seen it happen, many years before, when things had been simpler but no less dangerous, when once, just once, the wall between the people and the People had been breached. He had been young, barely speaking, but he still remembered it in the nightmare-flash way that the oldest memories are retained. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes at night, he would see the glow, smell the sickly-sweet odor of burning fat and hair, hear the anguished cries, and feel the squeezing hand of his mother around his little cub-fingers as they ran. And later, when they finally stopped, when they had not even lit a fire for fear of discovery, her tight whisper: Never let them catch you, Rhys. Never let them catch you, not even for a second. “You’re a strange man, Rhys,” James said quietly, and dropped into a crouch at his side, reaching out to lay a finger against the damp earth. Rhys expected to feel an urge to pull away from the sudden proximity, but it never came. “You never gave me a surname, I realized.” “No.” Rhys turned away, running his hands over a row of sprouting chamomile. Maybe there was no harm in talking a little, and in any case the words were out before he could stop them. “I—I don’t have one.” “No surname?” James’s eyes widened very slightly. “But … what about your family? Your family’s lands? If you have holdings like this you must have a name, and one of some repute.” “I meant what I said, boy. I have no family name.” Rhys gritted his teeth. He should have known that allowing even a little room for questions would result in ones too awkward to ignore, but this was one he had not foreseen, a discrepancy he had forgotten. Speaking without clear thought was already bad enough, already something to chide himself for, but when he spoke next he could scarcely believe what he was saying. The sun was hot on his back, on the nape of his neck, and later perhaps he would blame its baleful influence. He always did his best thinking under the moon. “We are the People.” James fell silent for a few moments, and Rhys could feel his confusion. For his own part, he felt mild panic—it had been a mistake to take this pup in, to feed him and clothe him, to speak to him, to do any more than slaughter him on the spot. And now he was telling him things, opening the door on a world that felt distant from even him, after all this time, a door that had been and remained almost completely closed to him. It was dangerous. It hurt. But it was too late to take the words back, to reach out and snatch them out of James’s very mind. There was just killing left to him, and now, under the sun, he discovered that no part of him wanted to kill. He was just a foolish gardener, in his dotage before his time, or so they would have said. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps, after so much time living apart, he had forgotten the most important lessons. He stayed as silent as James, until finally it was James who broke the shared quiet. “I’m sorry I asked.” “It’s nothing.” Rhys dusted his hands off on his knees. He felt numb and he was
moving like it, like he was no longer fully guiding his own body. Was that really such a stretch, when his mouth was so clearly not properly under his control? “If you want to help me, you can weed the pennywort.” Selected because it was the patch furthest away from him. The meaning of that could be left to itself and not considered too closely. Rhys only wanted to be alone; that could be all. Alone, and yet not completely so. James nodded silently, moved over to the patch of herbs and lowered his hands into the soil. Rhys spoke no more to him, and James did not attempt to get a single word out of him. They worked together in silence until there was nothing left to do and the sun began to sink behind the hills. When Rhys lifted his head to the violent reds and golds of the sunset, he felt something in him beginning to ease. It was the work, the silence, the fact that nothing further had happened; it was also the simple fact of the failing light, and the familiar call of something outside himself, drawing him away from his own brooding. Far across the sky, already white and pale was the rising moon.
Chapter Four Much later, Rhys would marvel at the fluidity of time. Living alone, marking his own time with the rising and setting of the moon, the coming of dawn, and the hunts, time had already taken on its own strange and malleable shape. He had learned to accept time’s looseness. But the next night came and went hardly before Rhys knew it had gone. While he felt thrumming in his blood, he didn’t venture out. What kept him there, he wasn’t sure of, with that same lack of assurance that he seemed now to feel for everything else. Perhaps it was a sense of risk, and one he could have easily resolved, true. Sitting there in the dimness of the fire, watching the boy … again, he couldn’t bring himself to make the kill. It wasn’t even a question of control. The desire wasn’t there. Not the desire that should have been. “You haven’t yet turned me out,” said James softly. He was seated on one of the benches, drawn close to the hearth, leaning forward over his knees. He had been watching the fire for over an hour, and Rhys, glad of the quiet, hadn’t seen fit to disturb whatever thoughts he had lost himself in. Thoughts from another world, from another people. He was unsure what he would have said to them in any case. Now Rhys shrugged, though James didn’t turn to see the movement. “I get little company.” “I would have thought you would prefer it that way.” The corner of Rhys’s mouth curved upward. He was amused, though the amusement was thin. Perhaps tonight he was in a better humor than before. James wasn’t wrong, not speaking as a rule … but just now he wouldn’t have claimed that the company was unwanted. “Thoughtful, are you?” Finally James turned, shot Rhys a thin smile of his own. For a brief moment James seemed older. “I think when there’s little speech to fill the silence.” Rhys leaned back on his own bench, his broad back against the wall. “And I do like silence.” He cocked his head slightly, his arms crossed over his chest. A particular question seemed to want asking. “Do you want to be turned out?” James was quiet again, clearly mulling the question over, with his face turned a little ways back to the fire. Such was the length of the silence that Rhys almost expected to hear an answer in the affirmative. But at last James said, “No. I don’t.” He took a slow breath, then said, “There is something about this place … I almost feel that I can breathe easier here than I could in my own house.” Rhys snorted. “I haven’t exactly made you welcome.” His own candor surprised him, but there seemed to be no reason to take it back. It was true. James only laughed softly. “No. But as I said, I’m still here. There’s a roof over my head, and my belly is full. What more does a man need?” “What more indeed,” Rhys murmured. He looked at James through hooded eyes, the boy now fully turned back to face the fire, his hair shot through red-gold by the glow and seeming to possess its own weird light. Rhys thought of angels, of the beautiful winged creatures he had seen once in the windows of a distant abbey—and instantly felt a measure of scorn for such flights of fancy. There were no such things. They were the
fantasies of frightened creatures huddled in the dark, listening to the great beasts that roamed outside, hunting them. They were what small things made and clung to when the night pressed in on them, and their own prey nature felt far too close. Once we hunted them for sport, Eldest Brother had said while giving a lesson to a circle of cubs, Rhys among them. Once they were our sheep, our cattle. Then they took up fire and iron, and they built their cities, and they grew proud. But in their hearts they still remember, and when they lose their fire and iron and when we draw close enough, they are frightened sheep once again. Rhys closed his eyes. That had not been all, and it was impossible to forget what else there had been that lesson. He looked at James in the firelight, remembering the words of his mother. There are a few who remember. The truth is always more than the stories we tell ourselves about the past, and Blessed Mother sees it all. There are a few of them who remember what we are, what we were, and them you must never touch. Not out of fear, child. Out of respect. What of those who didn’t know them at all? Rhys watched the slope of James’s back, the graceful line, and for an instant that thrumming in his blood was difficult to bear. The need to speak. The need to run. The need to hunt, to leap, to taste … what? Some human concept of redemption, of purity? Some human concept of sin? There were no such things as angels. Even Blessed Mother felt, at times, like a comforting lie. So what did one do when one’s own blood raced so? James turned again, abruptly, and the moment was over. Rhys met his eyes, almost invisible in the shadow of James’s brow, but he felt the gaze. Felt it shift to his side. “What is that?” Rhys realized after a moment or two that James was referring to the long lute that leaned against the wall. He looked down at it, as if seeing it for the first time. Indeed, it had been a long time since he had truly looked at it. “It’s a quitra,” he said. He cleared his throat. “A family heirloom.” A gift from an uncle, now long dead and half-forgotten, and the feeling of his fingers dancing across the strings only a distant memory, as purposefully distant as all memories of home. “So you play?” “I did once.” Rhys had not taken his eyes off the thing. Now that he had seen it, really seen it, it felt like a task to look away again. The firelight shone off its polished wood body, full and golden like the old autumn moon. The moon he used to most love to run beneath, before he stopped trying to mark his time, before all moons bled into one pale and lonely blur. “It has been … a while since I laid hand to it.” “Would you again?” James was smiling, hesitant, but also faintly teasing, as though he knew that he was prodding and was doing it of a purpose. Once again he was trying to reach into his host, trying to draw something out. Not quite friendly, but neither hostile at all. “Please. If you don’t mind. I love music, and I’ve never seen its like before … I’d hear if its sound matches its look.” Rhys thought of refusing. It was an impertinent request, though it was phrased courteously enough, and James clearly knew it. Perhaps he was even expecting to be refused. Rhys’s fingers felt large and clumsy, too much so for the lute’s delicate strings, and he had been understating the length of time since he had touched it. He had not even cared for it as he should have. It might be warped. He opened his mouth, ready to deny the request—and found himself nodding instead.
And not entirely surprised to be doing so. “It’s been a great while,” he repeated, reaching over and sliding his fingers down the smooth wood of the neck. Why had he agreed? To quiet the boy? That could have been easily done in other ways. No, there was more to it than that. It was the memory of the strings plucked and shivering into the air, the mournful, ancient sound of it. If that memory held true … James was right. Its sound did match its look very well. “I’m no patron, looking to bestow my favor,” James said softly, a smile at the edges of his voice, still very lightly teasing. “I’ll not judge you, I promise.” “I’m not—” Rhys started to say, frustration tensing his voice, and then one of his fingers touched the strings as he lifted the quitra onto his lap, and one high, sweet note rose into the air, pure and somehow mellow. Almost melancholy. They both fell silent, listening as it sank away into its own stillness, and before either of them had a chance to say more, as if of their own accord, Rhys’s fingers settled over the strings and he began to play. He had not forgotten how. The music came back to him slowly at first, but he could feel it rising and flowing back, stirring and freshening itself. It came from the muscles rather than the brain, far too basic and sensual to be based in thought, emerging from a far older memory than even the one of the sound. Learning to play, he had struck these notes again and again until he could play them blindfolded, play them in the dark, play them even if his own power of hearing should vanish. He started with those first simple notes, the cub’s song he had first learned, the words long-forgotten but the melody speaking to him of happier times, playing with his brothers and sisters, the warm and fragrant fur of his mother. He did not close his eyes to play, but his gaze was distant, seeing everything that the music called up and nothing in front of him, James leaned forward with his face rapt, the fire dying down to a low red glow. Rhys’s fingers moved faster, gradually turning from the simpler melody into something more complex, older, sadder. A love song, he thought he recalled. A love song or a song about a lost homeland, the singer pining for something that could not be regained. So focused was Rhys on the notes and the strings that the words escaped him, the memory of what they might have been far more indistinct and hazy than the song itself. Gradually he began to be aware that someone was singing, and it was him; of course it was him. When he lifted his eyes to meet James’s gaze, he saw something that stilled his fingers at once. “What are you looking at?” James swallowed. “I was … nothing, it was just … beautiful. I’ve never heard that song before.” Rhys grunted, his hands slipping away from the strings. “The tuning is off.” And what had the song been about? Even now he could not recall the words that he himself had been singing barely moments before. James shrugged. “It sounded fine to me.” “As you said, you’re no patron.” Rhys laid the lute aside, propping it back up in its corner with a care that he half hoped wasn’t obvious. “Music like that makes one weary. No more for tonight.” James opened his mouth, seemed about to debate the point, but appeared to think better of it and turned back to the fire again, which was now little more than sullen coals.
“I could build it back up again,” he offered. Rhys waved a dismissive hand, shaking his head. He rose, stretching, already looking toward the bedroom door and thinking of dreams. “Don’t bother. Sleep now. In the morning we’ll see what we can see.” In the morning, surely everything would seem clearer. In the morning, the past wouldn’t be pressing so near. He would be able to look at James and come to a decision about what to do that wouldn’t be hampered by heart or blood, the very blood that his mother had warned might trick him. In the morning, the dying firelight wouldn’t be casting that bloody glow across James’s face and hair, setting his skin afire, daring a touch or a bite or any number of other things. And by now, Rhys knew how much foolishness all that must be.
Chapter Five The morning brought with it no clarity to speak of, but it did bring a kind of peace, dawning bright and cool. Rhys emerged from the house to find James returning with a small basket full of blackberries and another hesitant smile. Another peace offering of a kind. Rhys accepted it with a nod, and they ate together in silence as the sun lifted itself above the hills, drying the dew on the grass and herbs of the garden, warming the spaces under the eaves of the house. The question of whether James would stay or go continued to linger, and neither of them touched it, whether out of laziness or discomfort or outright fear, or some combination of all of them and more. Rhys worked in the garden, stripping to the waist as the sun rose high, and the sweat began to trickle down between his shoulder blades. He felt eyes on him, knew that James was watching, and didn’t look up. Again, memories were tugging at him. Another hot, high noon far too much like this one, but then he had been up to his elbows in blood and offal instead of wrist-deep in the soil, a fresh kill strung up from a tree near the smokehouse, the morning’s hunt still thrilling in his blood. He had the deer’s heart in his hands, heavy and ripe, and he had been wondering if he should devour it then and there, at its freshest, or cook it, lightly season it—and risk the jeers of his siblings. Cooked meat, though admittedly tasty, was such a human proclivity. Then all thoughts of blood and meat had gone … or, not gone. Turned from dead to living, from killing to something different. He felt eyes on him, a hot gaze, and there he was, tall and dark and powerful, not Rhys’s kin, at least not by blood. One of the adopted of the pack, and not well known. The man leaned against a tree a few feet away, powerful arms folded. Watching him. Rhys had looked back, naked to the waist, streaked with gore. What had begun to thrum in his blood, then, was not the hunt. It was something else, something darker and far more dangerous. Though neither of them had closed the distance between them, not that day or any other, the man had vanished from the pack amid a flurry of rumors, and Rhys had known then that his time with the pack might not last much longer. He had known that he might have to choose. Your own blood might work deception on you. Be wary of it. His mother hadn’t known how true her words were. “Can I do anything?” Rhys looked up sharply. All at once he was aware that he was sweating harder than before, dirt packed under his fingernails, weeds torn in front of him as though he had attacked them. James was looking at him with an unreadable expression, his knees drawn up against his chest. For a moment, Rhys didn’t reply—he wasn’t certain how to reply,. Finally, he shook himself, a strange movement that felt even stranger in human skin, and turned his gaze away, off toward the well that stood a little distance apart from the house, in the side yard. Where James had stood bare and glistening only a day before. “If you want to make yourself useful,” he muttered, “you can fetch a bucket of water. I’m parched.” James nodded and got to his feet, turning without another word. Rhys watched him
go, palming sweat away from his brow, smudging his face with dirt. Something had to give. The situation, the way James was looking at him, the little curious digs he was making, and growing bolder and bolder with them. A day before, a little more than a day, and killing him would have been a relatively simple thing. Now… James brought the water and Rhys gave him a gruff nod by way of thanks, tipping the bucket to his mouth and gulping it down with undisguised, animal greed. He lifted his dripping chin, teeth slightly bared, and James was watching him again. Something about that gaze on him was abruptly unbearable. “Take your eyes away,” Rhys growled. “They itch like fleas.” James snorted something that sounded at once close to a laugh and very far from it, then walked away with his shoulders hunched in a sullen shrug, back into the shade under the eaves. He remained there for the rest of the afternoon. Rhys didn’t see him and tried not to wonder how he was passing the time. It didn’t matter. Another day, maybe two if his tolerance stretched that far, and whatever bizarre curiosity had gripped him extended no further, and he’d see the boy move on. But not killed. That was no longer something he thought he could consider. There had been too much time passed together, too many words, too much looking, and perhaps more than anything else, that light, shivering note from the night before, rising into the air between them. He grimaced, dipping a broad hand into the bucket and wiping his wet palm down his face. You didn’t break bread with your meat while it was yet living. It made everything terribly awkward. Something had to give. His skin was beginning to chafe, tighten, fit poorly. He wanted to change it, and it was becoming more than want. There was no real reason why the People had to shift, aside from what was in their nature, a profound feeling of constriction when one form was held too long. That night, perhaps he could, though with James still there it was a risk. But not a great one. He could already feel the moon below the horizon, tugging at him, tugging his skin like a love tugging at his garments, wanting to have them off and have him fully known. He could do it. He could leave James indoors with a built fire and an excuse or two to quiet him, and go. He could run and hunt and breathe, and feel alive. Not a great risk, no. The pup was as alone as he was, after all.
Chapter Six “I just don’t understand where you can be going so late at night.” James stood by the door, his arms folded, glaring at Rhys in the dim red firelight. Rhys faced him, his own arms crossed, almost shaking with frustration. He should have known that whatever ease he felt was only temporary. He knew James a little, or he was beginning to, and even after so short a time he could feel the mulish stubbornness that ran all through the boy, and had likely played a part in delivering him here. He hated that stubbornness. He had been a fool himself to think that the boy could be brushed off with vague excuses. How to explain this? Moreover, why should he have to? What gave this young pup the right to question him when he had provided food, clothing, and shelter rather than doing what every instinct had been crying for him to do and feeding on rightful prey? Almost every instinct. “I walk my lands at night, at times,” Rhys growled. “I fail to see how that’s any of your concern, boy.” “It isn’t.” James frowned and turned away. It would have been the perfect moment to push past him and out the door, but Rhys didn’t. He didn’t do anything of the kind. Later, when he was calmer, he would wonder why every intelligent decision escaped his choosing, as though he were a beast possessed by something. Or perhaps he would not wonder at deep instincts that could drive one to a kind of madness. “You just … it’s just that you haven’t told me anything. You keep hinting at shapes and shadows … and then when I think you might be about to pull back the curtain…” James threw up his hands with a clearly exasperated sigh. Spoiled, Rhys thought. Born to privilege and probably never questioned, he in his turn thought he had every right to know all. “Never mind it, it’s foolish.” It was foolish. Rhys glowered at him. “You said that we both have things that we don’t wish to discuss.” “And we don’t.” James waved a hand at him, still not turning. Rhys was fine with that. It was easier, just now, not to have to look at his face. “Go. I’ll bank down the coals and sleep, and tomorrow I’ll take my leave of you, since you seem to want that badly.” Rhys grunted, but he didn’t immediately open the door. He stood and looked at James for a long moment. Since he’d taken the boy in barely days before, they’d said so little of consequence to each other, and though his mention of the People had been a bad mistake, he was beginning to suspect that it had not been such a mistake as he had feared. James had seemed as though he might be unaware of its meaning. And James had said almost nothing to him. Really, he supposed, they were still practically strangers to one another. Yet it didn’t feel like that. There was still that strange urge to speak, to reach out. To make contact, after years of no contact at all. Rhys shook his head and pulled open the door, stepping out into the cool, clean night and shutting it behind him. Immediately what he left behind inside the house began to feel distant and unimportant. The scents in his nose and the air on his skin were an overwhelming reality. He headed over the grass, leaving the house behind and heading
for the shelter of the trees. The dew was like a bath for his bare feet. It had been too long. He quietly exulted in it. Already he was breathing easier, quicker, a thrum starting under his skin and lighting up every nerve like a spider-web touched by dew and the glow of the moon. He was becoming more fully himself. What he wore in the day, and in the company of others … it was just a mask. Now he would be allowed to take the mask off as he’d been taught, as it had been drilled into him. One could make the change in the day, if one was sure not to be observed, but it was never as satisfying. It never felt quite as right. Rhys pulled his shirt off over his head—hastily donned, entirely for James’s benefit—and hung it on a nearby branch, stretching as he did so, tensing and uncoiling the muscles of his back. Half a second later, he stripped off his pants, put them with the shirt, and stood there naked with the trees all around him, with the dappled moonlight on his skin like spots of milk. He stood there and breathed, and slowly, slowly, he began to change. The change was like taking off an old and dirty set of clothes—or sloughing off an old skin, which, in a way, it was. He felt his muscles stretch and swell, a pleasant cracking sensation as his bones realigned into the shape they had ached for hours to take. There was tingling and slight pain in his toes and fingertips and gums as his nails lengthened into claws and his teeth into rows of sharp canines, gleaming and ready to tear and to rend. The tickle of hair growing and growing, and then the warm, comforting feeling of a coat of thickening fur, and as the last of the shift passed through him and the ability to stand began to slip away. He lifted his head and howled. It was a joyful sound, wild and completely free, and once there would have been answering howls echoing through the trees and across the hills, and he would have dropped to all fours and gone to run the night with his brothers and sisters, happy and alive. Now he dropped to all fours, but there were no answering howls. There was the silence of the night in the trees, broken only by the noises of the lower things that lived in the dark. Like always, there was a pang of regret, of longing, but when he shook himself and began to run through the trees, it faded. Then there was just the panting of his breath and the pounding of his paws under him, a drum-beat echo to his heart. There was always this, and to him it was life, with the rest only taking up the place of the spaces in between. The running, the wind through his fur and the beat of his paws, and, distant and musky, the scent of meat and blood on the air. The deer, moving cautiously through the night. He couldn’t tell for sure how many, only that they were there. They knew he was there. By now, they all knew, and the knowledge would not save them all. It didn’t take long to pick up a trail, and when he had it in his nose, sharp and strong, he swerved to the side and down another roughly beaten track. He lifted his snout and scented the air, a picture as vivid as those formed with the eyes. The deer was ahead of him. The lighter musk of a doe carried to him on the breeze, edged with the scent of her unease, and he picked up speed as he rushed toward her. He was upwind and when she smelled him and took off through the trees in a crashing of twigs and leaf litter, he wasn’t surprised at all. If he had wanted to mask his approach, it would have been the easiest thing in the world, but he had chosen not to do so. He had wanted her to know he was coming. He had wanted the chase. And he chased her, his breaths twisting into snarls as instinct far older than his own years pounded through his blood. The hunt did not take long. It was, perhaps, easier than he would have preferred,
though he was not in a mood to be especially particular. There was a louder crashing ahead of him, a mistake in direction on her part, and all at once, she was there, delicate and lovely in the moonlight, stumbling and almost falling, and that moment of hesitation was all he needed. He leaped and sank his claws into her haunches, his teeth digging into the flesh of her back and closing over the ridge of her spine, the taste of blood a heady rush on his tongue. She bucked and cried out, trying to shake him off, but it was already over, and when she managed to wriggle away from him and try to run again on her tottering legs, it only gave him the opening he needed to lunge for her throat. Her blood gushed into his mouth, sweet, so sweet, as his teeth pierced her jugular and he jerked his head sideways, tearing at her. She sank down to her knees with a quiet, bubbling groan, and then fell to her side, twitched once, and stilled. It wasn’t just about the chase. It was about what came after, and it was every bit as important, every bit as sacred, and not to be rushed. He stayed with her a while, feeding, relishing, feeling how good it was to be alive, how good it was to slip back into the proper order of things, predator and prey locked into a ritual dance as old as the very roots of the world. After a while, he moved a little ways away and groomed the blood from his paws. He dozed, close enough to guard the kill and light enough in the doze that he would easily awake to fight or run if he had to. A snapping twig was all it took, though how much time had passed was a thing of which he was never sure. His eyes opened wide, and his head lifted sharply as he scented the breeze, searching for the presence he felt with senses older and deeper than even his ears and nose. There was a faint hint of something, light and not unfamiliar, but nothing he could pin down into a recognizable creature. But by now he was sure he wasn’t alone, that this was no lower animal to be safely ignored. He rose and turned in a slow circle, back hunched, fur bristling, and a growl rumbling in his throat. Whatever—whoever— was there, he was going to make things difficult for them if they had a mind to do the same for him. “Rhys,” said a voice, and Rhys’s growl died away immediately, replaced by a cold stone lodged in his throat. He knew that voice, and what had been joyful was rapidly becoming something out of a nightmare. No. Not this. Why couldn’t the foolish pup have just stayed where he was put? It was as much exasperation as it was fear, fear at what this might mean, at what might be coming next. Later, he would wonder if perhaps he had wanted it to happen that way. If, without being aware of it, he had arranged events to unfold in a manner that would force both of their hands. “Don’t … don’t hurt me.” James stepped into the circle of moonlight, his hands raised as if to ward off a blow. For a moment the two simply stared at each other, wide human eyes, wide beast eyes, Rhys too aghast to even be wary, James appearing the same. Rhys expected to feel the instinctive urge to spring, to tear, to kill simply in order to defend himself from the possibility of attack. He had killed before when he had been seen at an inopportune moment by someone in a position to make something out of the sighting. Though to kill at all in that circumstance was better avoided entirely. But he felt no such urge, no need of defense. There was only a strange sense of relief at not being forced to tell it himself, to have the truth shown rather than to have to reveal it of his own will, and now no more need for subterfuge or lies.
He growled faintly once more, then began to shift again, feeling himself shrink and straighten and become naked and hairless, his form slipping back into its confines, muscles and bones in a cage of flesh. James’s eyes widened still further as it happened, his lips slightly parted, and he moved not an inch in any direction, as if he were frozen by a spell. When it was over, Rhys crouched there in the moonlight, filled with the familiar and aching sense of having been stuffed back into a box from which he longed to escape. But if there was going to be speech between them—and whatever happened after this, he felt that it was necessary that there be—the ache would have to be borne for now. He met James’s shocked gaze evenly, and lifted a hand to comb his wild, wind-mussed hair back from his face. “How much did you see?” James swallowed with a loud clicking sound. He seemed to be trying to gather himself, and it was a moment before he spoke again, low and hesitant. “Everything. I followed you from the house. I knew to keep myself downwind.” “You should not have done that.” “I know. I beg your pardon.” James swallowed again, finally moving, though it was only a slight fidgeting of his hands and feet, as though he were considering the possibility that he might have to turn and run. “Are you going to kill me?” “No,” Rhys said after a long moment’s thought. The answer came suddenly, and he was only sure of it as he said it, but the sureness was strong. The worry and exasperation was fading, replaced by something else. Perhaps it was the way James was looking at him, nervous and confused but without any real terror or disgust. Perhaps it was the simple relief that came with the truth being known. Perhaps it was the fact of the knowing itself, after so long with no one knowing him at all. “No, I don’t believe I am.” “Why not?” Rhys grinned, then, a flash of bright teeth. There was little real humor in the smile, and more a flush of a grim kind of confidence. If there was to be knowing now, it would not be all on James’s end. “I will tell you that, and let you live surely, if you will tell me why you fled your father’s house.” James shifted unhappily, looking off into the forest, his face fallen into shadow and his shoulders hunched. For the space of a few breaths, Rhys was sure that he would refuse. Then he looked at Rhys again, and his features were set and stern. All at once, he looked older than his eighteen years, and there was a weariness in his face that Rhys thought looked familiar. “My father wished me to marry. It was the terms of my inheritance.” He paused, and what he said next was laden with unspoken meaning, nothing certain, but Rhys felt sure all the same, and it pulled at his gut. “I want no woman in my bed.” “Well,” said Rhys in a slow, surprised breath. Yet, perhaps not so surprised. Perhaps he had even known, with the way James had looked at him, with the way he had stayed close even when there seemed to be no good reason for him to do so. Rhys stayed where he was for a few moments more, mulling it all over, and James waited, still and calm, though the calm had a resigned quality to it. As though, if Rhys decided to kill him now, there would not even be very much of a fight. “We have more in common than you think, boy,” Rhys said at last. The words hung in the air, and he could almost feel James taking them, turning them over in his mind. Perhaps for the first time since he had found James in the abandoned hut, Rhys let
himself truly look at the fair hair, the smooth, proud face, the strong yet delicate lines of limb and muscle under the loose clothing. His own clothing, lying against that flesh. A kind of closeness there. What was next made itself clear, and it felt right. There was no more need to question it. Rhys began to change again. “When I’m finished”—he snarled, arching his back with the pleasure of it, fingers extending into claws and digging into the soft earth as he dropped back to all fours—“get on my back. Hold tight.” James watched it with the same wide-eyed fascination that had filled his face before. Rhys watched him watch, twisting under his gaze and taking pleasure in that as well, a kind of pleasure for which he wasn’t sure he had a name. It was a new thing. It had never been like this before. The only people who had seen him make the shift had been his own kin, or they had been about to die. Until now. It finished, and again he could breathe easier. He shook himself, snapped his jaws with satisfaction, and pricked his ears forward into the night. He padded closer to James, a light breeze ruffling his fur, and turned and dropped to his knees. It was necessary, because there were beasts and then there were the People. Even on all fours, the People stood with their backs nearly to the chest of a fully-grown man. James hesitated, but at last he stepped forward and carefully, gingerly, as if he still feared some injury if he didn’t do it exactly right, he climbed onto Rhys’s broad back and clenched his fingers in the thick fur. When Rhys straightened, pulled himself up to his full height, James gasped as he was lifted away from the ground. Rhys knew. It was one thing to see; it was another to feel it. Rhys began to run. Rhys was a swift runner, always had been, and James gasped again to find himself so suddenly jolted to such speeds. His hands tightened in Rhys’s fur, clinging with just an edge of panic in his hold, but Rhys barely noticed. He was tearing towards the tree line, breaking through it and onto the grassy hill and climbing up into the night, toward the rich, dark expanse of the sky, drunk on the joy of running and the freedom of form. There were no brothers and sisters beside him, but even to run alone this way was always a pleasure beyond almost anything else. He was not even truly alone, now. There was also the light, warm weight of James on his back, the gasping of breath in his ear. Perhaps that was a pleasure, too. He burst out onto the top of the hill and came to an abrupt stop, paws skidding in the dew-dampened grass, lightly panting, tongue extended and lolling. The hill wasn’t particularly steep, but its incline was long, stretched out. His own house was now far below them, a soft glow in one of the windows and a thin thread of smoke rising from the chimney. “So fast…” James breathed into his ear, and he sounded as breathless as if he had been the one running, and far beyond panic. Into exhilaration. Rhys would have laughed, but wolves don’t laugh, and neither do the People in their true forms, so he lifted his head to the black canvas of the sky and the pale moon, and let loose a long and joyful howl. He didn’t care that it was not answered and never would be. Slowly, gingerly, James slipped off his back. Rhys turned and looked off down the other side of the hill, out at the land spread below them. Here there was more darkness,
no cheerful lighted window and a deeper night. Far away, they saw the lights of a large house, almost a castle, faint and dreamlike like distant fireflies. “Is that … yours?” James whispered, and he looked up at Rhys again with sudden unease in his face, as if he wasn’t sure that the question should have been asked. There had been so many questions that had been like weak blows, not painful but irritating and uncomfortable. Rhys only nodded, took a breath and half-shifted, becoming human enough to speak, though still only roughly. His arms, legs and naked back were still covered with thick hair. His teeth were sharp, his ears long and pricked. “It was mine,” Rhys said, his voice a low growl, dark with bestial anger and regret. “But I left them. I left my father’s house and came here, and here I’ve remained for years.” James reached out, and Rhys felt a hand settle on one hairy shoulder. Though it sent a shudder though him, to be touched in this form after so long, he didn’t shrug it off. He closed his eyes against it. “Why did you leave?” “There aren’t many of us left. We don’t breed easily, when we try to breed true, People to People in a pure bloodline. So it’s demanded that we’ll each do what we can … to see our people survive.” Rhys shook himself at the thoughts, the memories, but when James tried to withdraw his hand, Rhys reached up with a heavy paw and closed it over his fingers, holding James’s hand in place. He felt a shiver run through the boy, and the shiver seemed to pass into him and shake him again, gently. Pleasantly. “You say you don’t want a woman in your bed.” “Yes…” “And I told you that we have more in common than you think.” “Oh.” The comprehension was so complete and so sudden that it was almost audible. Though it was dark, and everything was deathly pale in what light there was, Rhys could feel James blushing, the rising heat of his skin. The hand on Rhys’s shoulder moved over to his back, exploring the hard muscle, knotted with the half-shift, a body caught between worlds. Rhys let him explore. “I—I see.” Rhys turned a little more and caught James’s gaze, held it for a few moments, and completed the shift, almost without thinking. It required strangely little thought. With James’s hand on him, it felt more natural than it ever had before. James was still touching him as his body twisted and cracked and shrank down to the form of a man. When Rhys shuddered at the change James seemed to shudder as well, drawing in a light breath. Finally Rhys was standing naked under the moon with James’s hand stroking over his back. “So you came here,” James said softly, and Rhys could feel the gaze on him, something in it that had not been there when he had been in his true form. “You came here to live apart.” “I came here to live apart until the day of my death,” Rhys whispered, and he shuddered again, and this time it had nothing to do with any present shift. It was the echo of a shift he had made years before. “I have no family. I have no pack. I run alone.” A hard choice. Perhaps a selfish choice. To live apart from the People. To cast off the kinship of his brothers and sisters. By then his mother had been years dead, and perhaps if she had been alive, if he had been able to see her face then, it would have been a choice that he would have made differently. She had not been alive to push him in a different direction. He had chosen what he
had chosen, and now there was no going back. James was silent for a time, his hand the only thing that moved as it traced the muscles of Rhys’s naked back, and Rhys let himself be touched. Part of him wondered if it was something that he should still try to resist, if it would be dangerous to allow himself to enjoy it the way he wanted to. The pleasure of contact, of fingers, even as his gut wrenched with old sorrow. And no fear in the touch. Not the panicked beating hand of a victim. The soft caress of a… Could that be, as well? Was that why he hadn’t killed the boy all the many times he could have done so? “Would you run alone?” James asked finally, his voice barely above a whisper, barely above the soft hissing of the breeze. “If the choice was fully yours?” Rhys turned to him, at last shrugging James’s hand away, though it wasn’t that he didn’t want it to be there anymore. He wanted to face James squarely, and he wanted no distraction of mind or body. This was an answer that deserved his full attention, for it was the heart of why he had left, the heart of his choice, of what the People had not been able to bear. The heart of why he was alone. “I would have a mate,” he said. “I would run with him.” James let out another quiet breath and reached up again. The movement was quick, smooth, and thoughtless. Rhys’s own hand slipped through the darkness and caught James around the wrist, arrested the movement, all instinct. But James’s eyes were still hard and deep on his, demanding something, and after a second or two Rhys released him. James’s cool fingers drifted down Rhys’s stubbled cheek. Smooth fingers, unused to labor, accustomed to much leisure and privilege. At any other time, Rhys would have scoffed at it, become contemptuous, called him “little princeling” or another such insult meant to cut and bring low what he saw as too highly placed. At any other time. This was not like any other time. Rhys’s eyes fluttered closed and again he curled his fingers around James’s wrist, but he was gentle and the intent of the gesture was changed. Not to stop James from touching him but to keep that touch there. To keep him there. “I’m eighteen this past month,” James murmured. He was very close now, the heat of him strong on Rhys’s naked flesh, like a hand in itself that sought to pull the two of them still closer together. “I am a man. I was the sole heir to my father’s holdings. But I left it all behind, for I’m a man, and I’ll have no choice made for me.” He paused for a moment or two, and there was no sound but the night wind and a bird calling in a copse far below them. In the distance, the lights of the Free People burned on and on. “I make my own choices.” It was said on a breath, so quiet. Rhys was about to ask him what choice he was going to make, when James made it with his hands, with his lips, and stole Rhys’s question clean away, along with every other thought in his mind. And then there was only the kiss and a warm, sweet blankness, the taste of blood still on his tongue, now coupled with another, entirely new taste. Rhys could not have put it into words if he tried, but he knew what it was and where it was coming from, though the place from whence it came had slept for a long time, and hunger surged within him. A deeper hunger, the same hunger he had felt at first sight of the boy, but deeper still and far stronger. The kind of hunger he had never felt for meat. He slipped a hand behind James’s neck, angled his head and deepened the kiss,
slipping his tongue past James’s teeth, seeking more of that taste. James sighed, a low sound that bled into a moan, and then Rhys was growling and pressing them hard together, hips to chest, his other hand sliding under James’s loose shirt and against the small of his back. Hungry. Finally ready to feed. The image came to him, hazy and feverish, of the death embrace of a deer as he tore into the sweet flesh, and somehow he knew that this flesh was sweeter, and that sweetness would last for a much longer time. He would be able to relish it. After so long, it could be that he deserved to eat his fill. Perhaps that moonlit discovery in the ruined hut had been good hunting after all.
Chapter Seven Once again, dawn was close to breaking when they returned to the house. They were panting, disheveled, breathless from running, from kissing, from wanting something that neither of them quite had a name for. They stumbled together into the house, through the front room and into the bedroom, shaking with want. In the dim dawn light, Rhys sank onto the thin mattress and watched as James stepped closer and pulled the shirt off over his head, his skinny body half-hidden in shadows as though it were intentionally teasing, his face so young and beautiful. “I’ve never…” James breathed, and even in the dimness Rhys could see him blushing again. “There was one, with one of the maids behind the cow shed. I just touched her. I was curious and she guided my hands. But I didn’t like it, I … that was how I started to know—” Rhys reached up and pressed his callused fingertips over James’s moving lips, and stilled them. It was hard to make his body patient, but he knew he had to. There was nothing about this that should be rushed. “You’ll like this.” His fingers moved down over the smooth skin of jaw, throat and chest, pausing for a brief moment over James’s heart, feeling its wild beat. That was deeply familiar, and it made his blood race even faster. Captured prey, frantic—but not afraid. That made all the difference. Rhys laid his hand over James’s hip and drew him closer, his other hand pushing down the waistband of James’s pants, slow and gentle, until they were as naked as each other. James stood before him with a slight shudder running up and down his limbs, his head tipped back and his eyes half-closed, and there was a kind of vulnerability in the stance that made Rhys’s mouth go dry. Are you going to kill me? Maybe. We’ll see. He took James by the wrists and pulled him down onto the bed. It started slow. It didn’t end that way. At first it was like a dream, strange and fractured. Rhys’s perception was littered with shards of things: the arch of James’s back as pleasure seized him and he pressed himself up against Rhys’s hands, the heavy panting of their breaths, a low chorus of moans that complemented each other and reminded Rhys of long howls rising harmoniously into the good night. The soft fall of blond hair in the red dawn-light, the way it lay against flushed skin. Hard hands on that skin, so soft and so perfect. The feeling of sliding between James’s spread legs, the hot twitch of his cock in Rhys’s palm, against his cheek, James gasping, Oh, oh, please, as Rhys parted his lips and took him in. At first it was like a dream, but then there was the taste, the mixing sweet and salt and then the flare of the deeper hunger, gnawing at him as he took James deeper and deeper and began to move, bobbing his head and lapping with his tongue as though he were parched and James’s skin itself was water. There was a growl hanging in the air and James’s eyes went abruptly wide and shocked as Rhys moved his hand and pressed a slick finger into him, a moment of resistance and then a slow easing. Then it wasn’t like a dream anymore at all. Then it was like the first kill after a long time without tasting fresh
blood, the same rush of need, the sparks flying through the veins, and Rhys was gripping James by the hips and flipping him bodily over onto his belly, leaning over him and dragging his teeth in an open-mouthed kiss down along the fine lines of his shoulders. He was drowning in sensation, in hunger, in pleasure. He didn’t even notice that he was changing. James lifted his head and cried out, his voice soaked with a dark alchemy of pain and pleasure as Rhys’s fingernails extended into claws and dug into his flesh, close to drawing blood. Rhys couldn’t see his face but for a craning half-turn, and then he saw a grimacing mouth, tears standing out in bright eyes, every muscle tensed. But there was still no fear to be seen anywhere on that strained face. James wasn’t trying to get away from him. He was pressing back, grinding his ass against the cradle of Rhys’s hips, one hand groping back for his shoulder and holding on, and his own nails dug and scratched. “Do it,” he hissed. “Do it, I want to feel it…” Rhys did it. More spit into his hand, his mouth watering as though he were about to sink his teeth into a hot meal, slicking himself up and pushing forward and into James’s tight, shivering body. It was hard and too fast, not wet enough even with the spit, and James cried out again, his body contorting and twisting. But at length it eased, his body loosened again, and his voice wound down into a rough moan, breathless and stuttering as Rhys began to move. All of it was unconscious, instinctive, done with the thought of the body rather than the thought of the higher brain: the final spring, the snap of teeth over an exposed neck. A predator taking his due, taking what he had chased down and caught fairly. Good hunting. A snarl pushed its way up through Rhys’s throat, stiff hair rising along his back and the nape of his neck, excitement mingling with dark aggression. He could smell blood, thick and sweet in his flared nostrils. When he pressed his mouth to James’s back, the taste there was sweet as well, and salty with sweat; Rhys lapped at it, and as he did so, he wondered in a distant kind of way if it was possible to taste another’s very pain. James was whimpering, almost keening and sounding lost and mindless, one hand fumbling between his own legs as he struggled to stay upright. But Rhys was holding onto him, holding him, holding them both together as he rushed them up quite a different hill than the one which he had rushed them before. James clung to him and the wind was deliciously cool against their warm skin. This was a hill made of flesh and blood, lightning in the brain, teeth and hands and mouths, the violent flicker of tongues and the taste of sweat. And when Rhys finally crested it, dragging James with him, there was a moment of incredible clarity. Every muscle in his body tensed and shook, as though he had been frozen at the apex of a pounce and was now hovering in midair, as though the sky spread out before him as more than a home for his howling, and he might spring into it and fly with the birds themselves. James held tight to his back and gasped into his ears. Then in the world outside the fantasy, in the world he was locked into, the sun was rising, and as it slanted through the window he saw the dust motes dancing in its beam, the sweat glistening on James’s heaving back, faint smears of the blood that he had drawn after all from the delicate young skin under his hands. Then he was falling again, unfrozen and plunging downward towards his prize, his pleasure, seizing it with his claws and his teeth and letting it thrash and buck until it was finally still, and he lay weakened and gasping with James underneath him. “I can’t … I can’t breathe.” The words came in a low croak, and Rhys started,
remembering himself and where he was, and that James was there with him, every bit as real as anything had ever been. Rhys rolled to the side with a muffled apology. It had been a dream at first, and now it was like waking up from that dream, stunned and drunk on sensation. His gaze caught his own hand in the dim morning sunlight, and he saw that it was halfway to being a paw: the thick, fur-like hair, the lengthened nails. He frowned faintly, lifted his gaze and saw the blood on James’s back, the marks he had left in his frenzy. Only light scratches, nothing deep, but his middle clenched with fear—and with regret. He hadn’t wanted it to hurt, though he had known that some hurt was unavoidable. He had told James that he would like it. Had his own actions now made a liar out of him? Would the boy be angry? “James,” he murmured. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—” “Don’t.” James turned to face him, his hair damp and matted with sweat, his cheeks flushed and his eyes wide and a little glazed. But he was smiling, tired and clearly in at least some little pain, but smiling. “It’s—I wanted it. I told you.” He reached up a trembling hand and pressed it to the center of Rhys’s broad chest, fingers splayed over the coarse hair. “No one has ever done that to me before.” “I’ve only done it once.” Once, many years ago, and barely remembered at all. A moment of madness, and it had decided a great deal, as this might. Rhys shifted closer, still half-changed, his lips against James’s temple. Like so many of what had happened, he didn’t have to think about it. It wasn’t a conscious decision. There were things moving in him like his muscles and bones when the change took them, things that were strange, and frightening because of their strangeness. Not even that one time with the fumbling, strange boy from the distant village could possibly match it. But Rhys found that, having come this far, he didn’t want it to stop. He wanted to see where the change might take him. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” “You think I’m weak.” It was said low and wearily, and it wasn’t spoken as an accusation. James was merely stated a fact. “Just a child. I saw it in your eyes when you found me. And you call me boy.” Rhys shook his head, frowning, trying to pull all the disparate threads of thought and feeling into a coherent pattern in his mind. He was changing back, slow and gradual, skin smoothing and claws pulling back in into his fingertips, becoming blunt nails once more. He was cramming himself back into his box, but it was a box he now felt that he ought to be closed safely inside, and perhaps it was because James was right. He saw James as weak. Fragile. Small. Human. “I didn’t—” he started, but James silenced him with a brief kiss, lips so soft and so warm that for an instant, every objection was driven from Rhys’s mind. “I don’t want to discuss it now.” James’s eyes were closing, his tired muscles going slack. “Later. Maybe later.” And Rhys could have pushed the issue, demanded that they discuss it now, while the question was fresh in both of their minds. But he pulled back from it and let it slip through his fingers, fingers that were already relaxing with sleep. The last thing he saw before he let his weary eyes close was the pale morning light shining through the window and through James’s pale blond hair, turning it a delicate silver.
Chapter Eight “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” said James. They were sitting in the herb garden, their hands dark with the good soil. They had woken together, washed together in the little side yard with the water shining on their skin, eaten, and begun to work together, all in near silence. There had been very little to say, and what there might have been, Rhys was unsure of. James moved carefully, almost gingerly, and it was clear that he was in some discomfort. When Rhys tried to examine him, James brushed him away, only relenting long enough to allow Rhys to rub the scratches on his back with a rosemary salve. And some of it was guilt over the wounds, and some of it was simply that Rhys wanted any excuse to touch James again, and to touch him with desire felt, at least for the moment, like a step too far, though a step already taken. It was clear enough, at least to Rhys, that this wasn’t going to work very well. Whatever “this” turned out to be, and as yet, there was no indication in that direction, or even that it would be anything at all. But James was sitting before him and facing him squarely, and saying that there was nowhere else for him to go. It was a difficult statement to argue with, especially with the taste of James’s skin still lingering on his tongue. “You could go home,” said Rhys, though he knew how foolish it was the instant it was said. If going home was an option, James would never have come here to begin with, and he certainly would not have stayed after that first strange night, though Rhys had never demanded that he leave. James shook his head. “I can’t ever go back there.” He smiled, thin and wry. “It isn’t who I am any longer. He would keep me in a cage, even if the bars were invisible. I would always be a boy there, under my father’s roof. Even after his death and my inheritance, his spirit would be there. Hovering over me. Watching everything I do, judging it. It would be like choking.” His eyes met Rhys’s more squarely, and Rhys felt something pass between them. “I think you know exactly what I mean.” “So, then?” “I don’t want to be a boy anymore,” James said quietly. “I thought that maybe, if I left, I could discover how to be a man.” He looked down at his wrists, at the light bruises there, and again Rhys marveled that there could even be such delicate, perfect skin. Perfect even with the marks. “But now I think that maybe that isn’t what I want to be, either.” Rhys’s brow furrowed as he crushed a leaf of mint between his big fingers, releasing its sharp smell into the air. He was feeling the approach of something, like the scent of an animal carried to him on the wind. Shortly he would decide if it was a thing to be chased—or if it might be so great and so terrible that it would be better to leave it alone. “I hear stories about your people,” James said, looking off over the hill, the sky thickly gray and hanging low over them. “I hear that you can cause others to change. That you can take a man and … turn him, by means of magic, by a spell.” He turned back to Rhys. “Is that true?” So, then. It was what he had thought, and there was no point in lying. Not about any
of it, about the parts that the boy had heard, and the parts that he had not heard at all, because there were some things that were not even whispered into the night, not even in rumors. Evil things had power when they were spoken of. After a long moment, Rhys nodded, and the movement took more effort than he would have expected. “It’s not a spell,” he said slowly. “And it isn’t done very often. It’s dangerous. If it goes wrong—and it is very, very easy for it to go wrong—it can kill.” He swallowed and took a breath, the smell of the mint filling up to his flared nostrils. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he held to the idea that the clean scent might serve as a kind of protection. “And it can only be done with a human who’s willing.” “I’m willing,” said James with sudden passion, his cheeks flushed and his eyes clear and bright. Rhys looked at him and knew with a sinking feeling in his gut that there would now be no gainsaying this. The boy was committed, as boys become, and would not now be shaken from his commitment. “There’s nothing for me back there. There’s no one I care for. No one I love. My own family will not take me as I am. I want to be free like you are. I want to run.” He stopped, breathing fast as though he had indeed been running, and Rhys stared at him, trying to imagine it, because in spite of the danger and the horror at the very idea of what it would take … the idea was captivating. Far too good to be believed. What he thought he would never have. A brother, again, after so long. And more than a brother. Perhaps it was a mark of how far he had fallen, to be seriously considering this spoiled pup for the Change, where only the most deserving, honorable, and brave were traditionally allowed, and even then only at time of greatest need. But perhaps he no longer cared for the rules. Perhaps those rules no longer applied. “I might kill you,” he whispered, reaching out and laying a hand on James’s knee, eyes searching his face. “You must understand that.” “It’s my choice,” said James, and though his features were set into that familiar and childish stubbornness, there was an older aspect to it now. Not just stubbornness. Determination. Rhys knew that he had seen it before, once when looking into the polished silver that served as a mirror in the house of his People. “And mine.” Rhys sighed heavily. And so what if the little human died? What would really be lost? He would only be back to where he had been a few nights before. He had spent years alone. He could do it for years more. He had been ready to do it all his life, on that day when he had left the house of his fathers. But he knew that things were no longer that simple. They had been complicated from the moment that he had found James in the hut, and driven by years of loneliness and frustrated desire, made the choice that he had. The choice to turn away from the killing, as his mother had said that sometimes he must. Now he might be turning back to the killing again, at the moment when he least wanted to do anything of the kind. He felt a stone sinking into his middle. “We’ll do it tonight,” he said, looking up into the flat gray sky. “After the moon’s rise.”
Chapter Nine The sky had blown clear by the time the moon rose, half-full, milky and cold. A wind was rising, still gentle but with the promise of a sharper bite under its breath. James stepped out into the light, out of the shadows that lay against the house. He was naked, as naked as Rhys had left him in the bed an hour before, tangled in the damp sheets with his lips swollen with kisses and one or two fresh scratches on his back, almost as though they both had felt some need to take advantage of weakness while it was still present. But now James was standing tall and proud, and as Rhys stepped forward to meet him, he felt a strange flush of pride. James might be young and his strength might be no match even for a cub of the People, but he had been told that his death might be waiting for him in this spill of moonlight, and yet he came with no evidence of fear. He held himself like a man. And in that, there was trust. In his hand, Rhys held a silver dagger, wickedly curved. He had never used it to kill or skin or gut prey. It was not to be profaned in such a way. When he had left the People he had taken few things with him, but this had been one thing he had not been willing to part with. Sacred, blessed, placed into his hands by his mother. “We are the Free People,” Rhys intoned. “We run on the land. We hunt on the land. We are the land, and at the moment of our birth we come from it, and at the moment of our death we return to it. Our Mother dances in the sky, and her light blesses us with life. We are the Free People, and from time to time we claim our own.” They were old words, and he had been taught them many years before, like all cubs, without any thought that they might someday be used. They were part of the lore, part of the knowledge that was passed down without discrimination, for the lore of the People was one of the things that kept the People strong, and all care had to be taken that none of it might be lost. But none of his teachers could ever have foreseen that it might be used this way, on this night. Rhys knew what they would think of it. It didn’t matter. “We claim our own with the light of our Mother, and the shedding of our blood.” He lifted his hand until the moonlight fell on it, and when he slashed his palm with the dagger, his blood looked black. Blood shed for James, in the hope that they might be together. He dipped the blade into the blood, reached out and painted it in lines across James’s brow and cheeks and lips. James took a slow breath, but he was still, firm, and again Rhys was strangely proud of him. Proud and sad and fearful, reluctant, for what was coming next was something he had seen only once. And it had not ended well. A circle of the People in a pool of moonlight, all of them naked, all of them poised on the edge of the change—Rhys had been able to smell it in the air, the tension. In the center of the circle had stood a woman, also naked, clearly human, by the look and by the scent of her. She had stood erect and proud, unafraid, and she had been unafraid when Rhys’s younger brother had stepped forward and pulled her into his arms. Watching from the corner of the great house, lost in the shadows, Rhys had caught his breath, filled with the sensation of seeing something dangerous and forbidden. And that had been before he
had seen the flash of the knife in his brother’s hand. She had gone to him, folded herself into his arms, strong and brave. And later, gathered around her pyre as the moon looked down, they had honored her as one of their own. But Rhys recalled thinking that it must have made very little difference to her, or to his brother who sat apart from the fire, grieving. Either way, people or People, she had been just as dead in the end. “We claim our own with the last breath of a dying man,” Rhys whispered, and with the last word his blood ran cold. He pulled James close and as he began to shift he sank his teeth into James’s throat, and tore. What came next was a ghastly sound, a low cry of pain that bubbled and gurgled as James’s blood began to choke him. He sagged in Rhys’s arms and Rhys held him, still changing, caught between forms, growing and twisting into a hulking, animal shape. And still he held on as James let out a wet whimper and groped at him with weakening fingers, perhaps trying to push away, perhaps trying to pull closer. Only a weak human after all, a flat voice spoke in his head, but Rhys shoved it away, swallowing the taste of blood in his mouth and whispering the only words he knew to say. And let them work, let them only work this one time, and he would never again ask for favor. “Mother, we implore you, look down kindly on that which we claim and carry him from the edge of death. Let your light bless him with life. Be his blood. Be his heart. Be his last breath and let it be his first.” James was going slowly limp, his head lolling back and the ruins of his throat standing out dark and glistening with blood and torn flesh. Rhys could no longer even hear the bubbling breaths forcing their way into him. There was nothing. There was the silence that death brought with it when it came to carry a creature away. Slowly he dropped into a crouch, unable to stand on two legs any longer, and unwilling to let James go. “Please, Mother.” If it ended here, this way, he would only be where he had been two nights ago, but that was a lie. He saw a life stretching out before him, barren and empty and forever on the lone, and for an instant he allowed himself to wonder if it had ever been worth it. The leave-taking. The rejection of his only family, in the name of being true to what he felt was his nature. And now, the slaughter of someone who had reached into his heart and touched him in a way he had never expected or wanted—or known that he had wanted. The blood on his teeth and on his hands, and for nothing. For no gain at all. But there had been this. The last day. That touch. A warm body in his bed and eyes that looked on him truly and were not scornful or horrified. Acceptance of a kind that not even the People had been able to give him, and if he had not left them in the first place, he might never have found what he had. Whatever other doubts he had, that couldn’t be denied. Could it be taken from him? Please. There was silence. The smell of death thick in the air. Rhys finally let James slip from his arms, arms that were becoming forelegs, and watched as he settled into the dirt of the yard, his blood still running into it and matting the soil, all the color leached out of it and the contrast thrown into sharp black and white in the moonlight. There was silence so loud that it was like a solid force weighing down the world. At last Rhys broke it and
tilted his wolf’s head back, and this time his howl was anything but joyful. It was long, anguished, the kind of sound that another beast might hesitate to utter for fear of attracting predators curious to see if its source might be something weak, something injured, something on which they could feed. Rhys howled, and it was all mourning and pain, and he knew. There was no going back to two days before. There was no going back at all. There were some wounds that couldn’t ever be healed, and they came to those who were foolish enough to let down their guard and allow themselves to be truly touched. Rhys howled because it was all he could do. And the howl was answered. It was just a cough, weak and still wet and barely there. But there, there, and James was moving, shifting his limbs, and his limbs were shifting too, changing, his whole body changing, arching, and wrenching at itself, and James opened his mouth and stretched it into a silent scream. And then not silent, for the terrible wound in his throat was closing, the flesh knitting itself back together, covering itself with a coat of thick, silky fur, and the scream became a howl, and then a whine, and then a joyful bark as he turned and scrambled to his paws. He tottered as he first tried them out, stumbling like a young pup, and then he gamboled, leaped, turned, and met Rhys’s eyes with his own, darkly shining. Rhys stood, staring, barely daring to breathe, to believe that it could be real. That he could be so blessed. For a blessing was what it was, a smile from a force that, while he hadn’t walked away from Her all those years ago … he had suspected that She might have walked away from him. And She had not. She was here, even here, and She had heard the prayer of a prodigal son and breathed Her life into the dying. Neither of them made a sound. Neither of them needed to. There were a few more moments of it, the joy in a simple look, and finally they turned again, shoulder to shoulder, and the moon shone down pale and kind on them as they sprang into a run. And they ran together. **** “Stop you there, Patrick.” The hunter laid a hand on his son’s shoulder, and the two of them froze in a patch of deeper shadow, thrown by a tree countless years old. The woods stretched out before them, cool and green and exciting, and the boy was aching to move forward, to finally bring down his first kill. A pheasant, a rabbit, perhaps even a deer. Something to make his playmates envy him, and even more, to respect him, as one who was traveling further up the road that led to manhood. But his father was holding him back, and while he resented it, he obeyed. His father was the reason he was here in the first place, a hunter as great as the boy hoped one day to be, and he knew the ways and secrets of the forest. He was to be heeded. “What is it?” he started to ask, but his father shushed him with a single movement of a gloved hand. “There ahead.” The hunter pointed. “You see, there. Through that fork in the big oak there.” “I don’t see—” the boy started, and then, all at once, the world snapped into a sharper focus. Two wolves, one smaller and lithe and silvery, one larger and darker, though in fact they were both large, and very large for wolves at that. They stood close together, bent over the carcass of a deer. Feeding. “Can we shoot them, father?” The boy gripped his bow, freshly strung with new-
fletched arrows just waiting for the string, waiting to fly swift and true to their mark, scenting and seeking the blood they were to spill. But the hunter shook his head. “Them, we’ll leave be. It’s best.” “I don’t understand.” The boy frowned, glancing up at his father. “You have pelts at home, one almost that color. It would be a good match, and they’re not yet wary of us. If we shoot before the wind changes—” “I have no pelts like those,” said the hunter, and there was a flash of something strange and old in his eyes, old knowledge that the forest taught. The boy had seen that look before. “And I never will. Those, we don’t kill. We let them be, and they let us be. You’d do well to remember that, Patrick.” He slung his quiver higher over his shoulder and turned away. “Come. We’ll hunt elsewhere.” “I still don’t understand,” said the boy, but he turned and followed his father, his gangly limbs showing every inch of his fourteen years. “They were here a long time before us,” said the hunter, and there was something almost like quiet affection in his voice. “And they’ll be here a long time after. At times we’ve fought them, but it’s better to live and let live. There’s enough land for all of us to eat and be well. Now.” He bent and touched the ground ahead of them. “I think I spy a trail here. Let’s follow it and see what we see.” The hunter set off through the trees and didn’t look back. The boy sighed once more and made to follow, but before he did, he turned and looked back through the oak’s fork. But the wolves were gone, and that night, as he drowsed with his belly warm with the rabbit stew his mother had made from the day’s catchings, he was no longer sure he had seen them at all. The End About the Author: Sunny Moraine is the writer part of a whole person, though the whole recognizes that certain identities can never be entirely untangled, and tries to make her writing reflect this reality. Sunny's work has been featured in many different venues, including the anthologies Like a Long Road Home and Queerpunk, both from Circlet Press. She has also been featured in Fishnet Magazine and The Absent Willow Review. She hears voices, and occasionally she owns that they are ridiculous. She lives outside Washington DC with her husband and two cats, and can be found, among other places, at sunnymoraine.com.
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