Ascension (6 page)

School wasn’t nearly the hell I’d expected. Yes, I’d rather have stayed home with Jeremy, but this gave me the opportunity to further study human behavior and develop my public face. I even made a few friends—not the "come on over after school and we’ll listen to my 45s" kind of friends, but school chums, classmates I could eat lunch with or team up with for joint projects. These friends invariably came from the fringes of teenage society, the kids who were too smart, too overweight, too homely or just too odd to fit in. With these outsiders, I could feel some kinship, even if they weren’t werewolves.

Gregory died when I was fourteen. Since his injury, he’d never regained his full physical strength and had always been more prone to illness than most werewolves. One night he went to bed and didn’t wake up. Outside his family, Jeremy was the only one who seemed to grieve his passing.

The next landmark of my life came at fifteen, when I killed my first mutt. In the Pack, one’s first mutt kill is considered a rite of passage, something to be celebrated with a night of drinking and carousing. I was too young for either drinking or the Pack’s version of "carousing", which usually involved women. It didn’t matter because I told no one that I’d passed this landmark, not even Nick. I kept it to myself because I didn’t consider it an event worthy of commemoration. I wasn’t proud of what I’d done. Nor was I ashamed of it. The need to kill trespassing mutts was an unavoidable fact of my life, and I accepted it as such, with no emotion either way.

It happened in late spring. Antonio and Nick had come up for the weekend. Nick and I were now old enough to stay home alone, so Antonio and Jeremy had gone to
Syracuse
for some drinking and . . . carousing, and we didn’t expect them back before the wee hours of morning.

Nick and I spent the evening hanging out, talking—mostly him talking, mostly about girls. He’d snuck over a few copies of
Playboy
, and we went through those. I didn’t really "get" it, but I played along with his enthusiasm. When it came to sex, I was a late bloomer. I’d begun filling out and putting on some muscle heft, helped by the weight set that Jeremy had bought for my fourteenth birthday. I’d also shot up a few inches. In the past year or so, I’d begun showing the first signs that, while I might never be as tall as Jeremy or as muscular as Antonio, I wouldn’t be the runt of the litter forever.

In other areas of puberty, though, I lagged behind. My voice only cracked when I lost my temper and shouted loudly enough to strain my vocal cords, and the only excess hair I had came when I Changed. Sex and desire were things I understood only as hypothetical concepts. So, although I felt no physical reaction on seeing the
Playboy
centerfolds, I seconded Nick’s opinion that they were "hot" and tried very hard to keep my attention off the articles, and on the pictorials.

After eating everything that Jeremy left out for us, and sampling his brandy, we headed up to my room to sleep. I waited until Nick drifted off, then slipped from bed, took my flashlight and sat in the corner to read. With Jeremy gone, I was the man of the house, and I didn’t feel right falling asleep on the job. Anything could happen. And that night, something did.

When the clock downstairs struck midnight, a wolf’s howl echoed the last few gongs. I leapt up, dropping my book and flashlight, and opened my window. The howl came again, from deep in our back woods. I knew that it was a mutt, not because I didn’t recognize the voice, but because it was a howl of challenge, the call of a wolf who has ventured onto another’s territory and dares him to do anything about it.

I knew I had to act fast. Jeremy and Antonio would be home any moment now. If they heard the howl, our weekend would be ruined. Antonio would insist on handling it, Jeremy would insist on defending his own territory, and any way that it ended, no one would be happy. Better for me to take care of it first.

Two things told me I was relatively safe taking on this challenge alone. First, the wolf’s cry held a quaver that said he was getting on in years. Second, coming at
midnight
and howling in the woods rather than appearing at our front door meant he wasn’t all that sure he wanted anyone to answer his challenge. This was an old wolf making his last stand, maybe ill or otherwise close to death, hoping to die doing something he’d never dared do in life—take on a Pack wolf.

So I leapt out the window, raced into the forest and Changed. Then I tracked him and killed him. It was, as I’d suspected, not a difficult task, and not one that requires any further detail. I killed him, I buried his body, and I went back to bed.

That winter, I killed my second mutt. This time, the mutt presented himself at our door, so I couldn’t intercede before Jeremy found out. As usual, Jeremy gave him until
midnight
to leave town. The mutt only laughed and said he’d be in the back forest, ready whenever Jeremy got up the nerve to take him on. I knew he wouldn’t leave. And I knew Jeremy would give him until
midnight
. So, on pretense of working out, I went down to the basement, then climbed out a window and zipped to the forest. I Changed, lured the mutt away from the place he’d promised to meet Jeremy, and killed him. This time wasn’t nearly as easy as the last, but I managed it. I stashed his body far from the assigned meeting place, and downwind so Jeremy wouldn’t find it, then hurried back to the house. Late that night, long after Jeremy had decided the mutt had fled, I returned and buried the corpse.

Two mutts within six months was unusual. Normally, we saw an average of one per year. A third one showed up just a few months after the second. This one, fortunately, did take Jeremy’s advice and left town. But that still meant three mutts in a year. Something was wrong. Yet because Jeremy knew nothing of the first one, he thought we’d only had two mutts in just over a year, both of whom had left without a fight, so he saw no cause for alarm.

When I hit sixteen, puberty finally kicked in, bringing with it a problem far more complicated than the killing of trespassing mutts. I began to feel the first tugs of sexual desire, and while that’s probably confusing for any kid, my situation only made it ten times worse. With no females of my own species, my body fixed those desires on the nearest approximation it could find—human girls. And that might have been fine, had my wolf-brain not jumped in with demands of its own. On the matter of sex, the wolf in me was clear: I needed to find—not a casual sexual partner—but a life partner, a mate. I would accept a human mate, since it seemed I had little choice in the matter, but it had to be someone I wanted to spend my life with. Yet there were few humans I could envision spending an entire weekend with, let alone a lifetime. So here I was stuck. I looked around, and saw no potential life partner, and the wolf in me would accept nothing less.

That September was one of the worst times of my teen years.

I always arrived at school early so I could run a twenty laps around the track, wear off excess energy before beginning my day. That was be my only chance to get some physical activity in before I went home and worked out. I didn’t take gym class. We were supposed to, but Jeremy had managed to convince the school that my time was better spent where my obvious assets lay—in academics. With the help of a sympathetic teacher, who agreed that I needed to be challenged academically, I was already on the fast-track to college, skipping any "extra" classes like gym or art so I could graduate a year early.

That morning, the football field was flooded, so the team had to move their before-school practice to the track field. I ignored them, but the disinterest wasn’t mutual. After a few minutes, I noticed the football coach watching me more than he was watching his team. When I headed to the stands to grab my towel, he came over.

"What’s your name, son?" he asked.

I wiped the towel over my face. "Clayton."

"You’re a student here, aren’t you? I know I’ve seen you around."

I shrugged and kept drying off.

"You took those hurdles pretty good. You on the track team?"

I shook my head, grabbed a clean shirt from my bag, and peeled off my sweat-sodden one. The coach’s gaze slid over my upper body.

"How much are you lifting?" he asked.

Another shrug, and I yanked on my shirt.

"Not very talkative, are you, son?"

I hefted my bag. "I gotta go."

He stepped in my path. I tensed, but pushed it back. He was a teacher, and I knew I had to respect him, but it was something that I’d been having more and more difficulty faking in the last year or so.

"I want you to try out for the team," he said.

I swung my bag into my other hand. "What team?"

Someone laughed. I turned to see a half-dozen members of the football team behind me, shifting into a semicircle, as if blocking my escape route. Whether they knew what they were doing wasn’t clear—humans are notoriously ignorant of their body language—but that didn’t keep me from interpreting it as a trap. The hairs on my neck rose.

"The football team, son," the coach said. "I want you to try out for the football team."

I knew I should take the high road, like Jeremy would, quietly demur with an excuse and a thank you. But, as I said, I was finding this increasing hard to do. I thought of a polite excuse, but instead what came out was:

"Not interested."

A rumble rose from the boys behind me. Even the coach stiffened, his good humor sliding away.

"Not interested?" he said. "This is the
football
team, boy, not the goddamned chess club. If we want you on the team, you join. It’s a little something called school spirit."

I said nothing, but my sneer answered for me.

The coach’s face went bright red. "Get to the office, boy. Now."

I wound up with a week’s detention for being disrespectful to a teacher.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the coach started cornering me in the halls. If I tried out, he said, there was a good chance I could make running back, maybe even quarterback, and didn’t every sixteen-year-old boy want to be quarterback? Another student overheard, and ran off to inform the current running back and quarterback, neither of whom was too pleased with the prospect. So then I had
them
harassing me. Finally, I snapped. As hard as Jeremy might teach me to turn the other cheek, there was a limit to how long I could do it.

The next time they challenged me to a skirmish match, I accepted. Fortunately, no bones were broken. The wounds to the quarterback’s ego were another matter, though and, instead of getting him off my back, I’d only pissed him off more. I knew I couldn’t fight them—that football skirmish had been pushing it enough—so I was stuck swallowing their insults, and accepting their shoves, and getting more miserable with each passing day. Soon even my school friends were avoiding me, for fear of catching the fallout.

From there, it only got worse. On Thursday, while racing home to make sure Jeremy didn’t find out about my detention, I got a speeding ticket.

Jeremy had bought me a car for my sixteenth birthday, so I wouldn’t have to endure the school bus any longer, and this was my third ticket so far. If you worked it out, the number of times I sped versus the number of tickets I received, I was doing pretty good. But Jeremy didn’t see it that way. Nor did he understand my view of traffic laws. I understood why speed limits existed, but I saw no reason why they should apply to me. I was an excellent driver. With my enhanced senses and reflexes, I could drive eighty miles an hour and still swerve before hitting even a squirrel. I made my own money, transcribing notes for Jeremy’s growing translation business, and I paid for my tickets, so what was the big deal? Threatening to take away my car was wrong. Wrong and unfair.

That ticket only added fuel to a fire that had been blazing all month. The source of that fire? College. Having condensed my studies, I was due to graduate next June, which meant I was supposed to head off to college in a year. I had no problem with going to college. I
wanted
to go. I enjoyed learning and I knew that I needed a very good education if I hoped to find a career that I could pursue from home, like Jeremy did.

Now Jeremy had
not
gone to college. He’d wanted to, and expected to, but then his grandfather died and he’d been forced to start working to pay the bills. So naturally Jeremy wanted me to go to college and, as I said, I agreed. The problem came with the question of "where." The school had already hinted to Jeremy that I could probably get a scholarship pretty much anywhere I wanted to go. So what did he do? Started gathering information on colleges, to decide where I
should
want to go.

I knew damned well where I was going: Syracuse University. Jeremy shot down that idea as if it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. I’d already decided my major—my early studies of human society had led me to a high school anthropology course, and I’d decided that was what I wanted to pursue. As Jeremy pointed out, Syracuse did not have a topnotch anthropology program. So I had to go elsewhere. Well, I wasn’t. I just wasn’t. I was staying home, and going to Syracuse University. Move away to school? Wasn’t happening.