Beneath the Skin (2 page)

I saw their hostile faces as I had been interrogated by the Councils at my tribunal, after they’d had time to think about it and talk about it among themselves without me. I smelled them too and I knew. They smelled of the same despair and grief I gave off. But they also smelled of anger--against me.

One thing about being Pack, we could smell emotions. We could try to mask our feelings from each other, but our scents usually gave us away.

Others, people who weren’t Pack, couldn’t do this. It was one of the things, besides shape-shifting, that made us different.

All my life it had been drilled into me that the Others would not understand our kind. We would be persecuted and bullied, isolated and studied. Perhaps even exterminated. I was kept away, home schooled when I was little. The only people I knew until I was eight or nine years old were the members of my birth pack.

One day my mother brought me to a grocery store. All the Others scared me, I remember that. A world that had consisted of twenty-four people who were Pack had suddenly changed and twisted. My insular little existence had been shattered, and the idea of the Others scared me.

They outnumbered us. They always had, they always would. Somehow we had to coexist. We could know about them, but they could never know about us.

My father made me watch werewolf movies so I would understand that I needed to keep silent about what I really was. I didn’t like the way those movies made me feel. Hunted, persecuted. I wasn’t a bit like any of the monsters in any of the movies or books, but he told me the Others would not see the difference.

We had no special protection in wolf form. We didn’t bite people, or change them into wolves like us. We didn’t even call it
werewolf
. We called it being Pack. You had to be born Pack, or you would never be Pack.

The legends of being bitten by a werewolf then turning into one were just that--legends.

The grandmothers and grandfathers said the legends protected us. Spread false information about something real and you could hide behind the legends. Twist it just enough so no one would believe you, even if you told them the truth. Not that we would. Who would believe, and what profit would come of it if they did?

Some of the Pack, especially the older ones, thought my generation was soft and the ones after us only getting softer. We were losing touch with our beast natures and becoming weak. We used our ability to shape shift as if it were a hobby, as if we were in a secret club. Our nature no longer defined us and gave us strength and purpose of will. Or so the grandfathers and grandmothers said.

I supposed modern life had made things easier. I’m not sure about softer. In the modern world it was harder to disguise the fact we aged much slower than Others. We lived in isolated areas. Switched jobs often, changed social security numbers and passports. Of course most of the grandfathers and grandmothers disdained such things. They usually lived under the radar. They preferred not to have
Other
identities. They might live in cities but they didn’t vote or own businesses. They did nothing but exist on the fringe. If they traveled, they paid cash and used transportation that didn’t require ID. Or, if they still were up for it, they traveled in shifted form.

They had jobs, but menial labor, under the table. Or they stole, begged or borrowed.

Most Pack members were particularly adept at pick-pocketing and sleight of hand. Lots of the grandfathers and grandmothers gambled for a living. They ran shell games or dice or any game of chance.

The younger generation liked material comforts. We didn’t want to live in squalor, or squat illegally on somebody else’s property, or rely on someone “legit” in our pack to provide us with housing. Lots of the old grandfathers and grandmothers lived in homes owned by their children and grandchildren.

Since we weren’t the Alpha couple in our pack, Grey and I hadn’t been allowed to have children. In the old days, if you got pregnant and you weren’t Alpha that meant going to an old grandmother for a potion to miscarry. Nowadays we had modern birth control, thankfully. Not that the old grandmothers endorsed such things. They had herbal concoctions but their efficacy was not as reliable as the Pill.

The old ways were good enough for us, they lectured. They should be good enough for you. But why not use something better if it was available?

That’s how I thought anyway.

Registration for the Great Gathering began at seven o’clock. One of the Paris packs owned a large chateau about an hour outside the city. Chartered buses had been set up to ferry those of us not privileged enough to rate lodging there back and forth to the city.

At 5:45 PM I boarded one of these buses, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone I knew. I wasn’t ready yet. My heart pounded like hell against my ribcage, and one moment I burned up, then a minute later I froze. Tears choked me so I could barely breathe.

I was bundled up against the Paris cold in my best wool coat, a pair of leather gloves and a purple scarf wound around and around my neck. Nobody could see my jewelry then work out for themselves that I was unbonded.

I supposed they could see me sitting by myself and figure it out, but sometimes packs sent representatives if they couldn’t afford for all to attend.

The bus seated fifty people. I was the fourth one on and took a window seat in the

middle. I craned my neck as I looked out and tried to give the impression I waited for someone, maybe my bond mate or a pack mate, to join me.

But I bet my smell was all wrong. I bet I exuded a mixture of trepidation, shame and desire.

Nobody sat by me for the longest time. It wasn’t until the bus driver shouted out the door in French that there was room for one more that I finally got a seat mate.

A teenage girl with mousy brown hair and a petulant expression slumped into the seat next to me. She spent the entire drive examining her black nail polish and popping her gum and studiously ignoring me. She didn’t want to be beside me anymore than I wanted to be beside her.

If I smelled, she didn’t react to it.

She was so young this had to be her first Great Gathering. Teenagers fifteen to nineteen were allowed to attend. Instead of mixing with the adults, they stayed together in a conference room of their own with one or two grandmothers or grandfathers as chaperones. Field trips and events were organized. Sometimes they found future bond mates, but most of the time they either brooded sullenly or played games. Nowadays it was Wii or Nintendo. Back in the days of the grandfathers and grandmothers it had been board games.

When I had been sixteen, I’d attended a Regional Gathering in upper state New York.

“You can make a living off chess,” I remembered the old grandfather growling at us, his teen charges. “When I was Alpha, I supported my whole pack by playing chess against Others in the park. You can’t do that with these damn electronic games. Only thing they’re good for is making you go blind and ruining your hearing. Damn shame, if you ask me.”

We hadn’t told the grandfather that plenty of our generation made lots of money gaming online and at clubs and arcades. He wouldn’t have understood and, even if he had, he would have condemned it as against the old ways.

An Other lifespan is about seventy-five years give or take. Those of us who are Pack live about one hundred and fifty. We age normally until we hit our twenties, where we seem to stall for years and years. The last fifty years or so we look old, but never older than a normal sixty or sixty-five year old. We die of normal diseases and, if we’re autopsied by Others, which is rare considering packs take care of their own dead, we don’t appear any different inside. I suppose if the right blood analysis was performed they might detect some anomalies, but the right tests are never performed, because there is no need for them. It would have to be an accidental discovery.

Our blood would need to be mixed with the proper distilled herbs, and why would anyone do that?

Even without living under the radar, we lived under the radar.

passed in a blur. I’d only been to one Great Gathering in my life when I was eighteen. This would be the first time I would mingle with the group at large. I’d never attended a Gathering alone. For the past two years, I’d existed in a twilight excess of Others, deliberately exiled from my own kind. I didn’t know if I even remembered how to talk to someone Pack. I felt rusty and conspicuous as if everyone would know my past, even though they couldn’t possibly. Odds were I wouldn’t see even one person I knew. New England packs were notoriously clannish and parsimonious. Not many of them would spend the money to travel to Paris, especially since there were so many Regionals in the area. Keyed up and nervous, I was as cold on the outside as I was on the inside. My legs had goose bumps, because I wasn’t wearing stockings with the dress and my coat didn’t come down as long as the gown.

The girl beside me was dressed in designer jeans and Ugg boots, a fashionable parka--

fuchsia and turquoise. Loud as hell, and it hurt my eyes even under the muted reading lights.

The entire ride she texted, probably to someone in the bus immediately before or behind us.

As I looked at her, I couldn’t remember ever being so young.

When I was twenty and he was twenty-two, Grey and I had bonded. Elena had joined

with us at a Regional Gathering two years after that. We’d both loved Elena. She’d completed us almost from the first night we met her.

Packs were made up of duos and triads. There were no adult singles. If someone from a duo died, the one left behind either bonded with another duo in the pack, found someone from a different pack, or the ties were severed. The only exception was with elders of at least a hundred years old. They had an honorary position in the pack at best by that point and were allowed to affiliate, but they usually only socialized. They were supported by the pack so they always had a place to live and food to eat. It was like Pack social security. You contributed all your life and paid your dues to your pack. When you were too old to participate and contribute, your pack took care of you based on what you did for them. It was a good system for the most part.

The older you got, the harder it was to shape shift. I think it’s because shape-shifting is tied to sex. That got harder as people aged too. People could still do it, but most of the time the desire was not there anymore.

The grandfathers and grandmothers loved to lecture us, but I thought they were the ones who had lost touch with what it meant to be Pack. When was the last time they’d ever shifted?

You heard stories of virile grandfathers and seductive grandmothers who managed to attract and seduce someone younger in the pack, but for some of them it had been decades since they’d shifted, even if they had bond mates.

The wheels of the bus crunched loudly down a gravel driveway leading to an imposing white chateau topped with a slate blue roof. Lost in my private reveries, I had been taken by surprise when we left the smooth road for the gravel drive. I had to scramble to minimize the sudden assault of sound. Pack had a dimmer switch sort of control over our senses that we dialed up or down as we concentrated. Some of us were set higher or lower, it just depended. I was one of the ones who was higher, even in human form.

I’d learned to dial way down out of self-preservation. It had been a hard-won lesson. The first time I’d shifted I’d spent the entire time trying to escape this awful, huge booming sound.

Like a bass drum only more organic. It wasn’t until I’d shifted back that I’d realized it was my own damn heart that had driven me crazy.

I had been eighteen, and for those of us who were close to twenty, the age of Pack

majority, it really chafed that we weren’t yet allowed to participate fully in the Great Gathering.

We’d disdained the younger teens and the grandmother left to chaperone us and instead spent our time drinking and smoking pot behind the plantation home in Louisiana where the Gathering had taken place. Heavy petting had been pretty much demanded if you’d wanted to be even marginally cool.

It had only been a short skip from that to actual sex.

Something happened when two people who were Pack had sex. There was an exchange

of essence, something indefinable that created the energy you needed to shift. You didn’t have to do it every time you had sex, and you didn’t have to shift right after it. Usually there was a twenty-four to forty-eight hour window and you could shift at any point during that time. You got better and had greater control over this the more you shifted.

Once I talked to a grandmother in my pack about sex and shifting. I thought it was

magical, this exchange of essence. She laughed at me, yes, it was, but it was more than the exchange of essence, it was the exchange of fluid too.

“Saliva, sweat and semen, child, sharing that is just as essential as this magical essence you can’t see.”

We never used condoms with each other, and I guess that’s part of the reason. We needed to exchange fluids.

One of the boys in our teen group at that Great Gathering when I was eighteen proposed a dare--that we stage our own Great Hunt, to hell with the adults. We could screw, shift, then hunt in the sugar cane fields behind the plantation.

My partner was a young German boy two days older than me. He spoke very little

English, but man, could he kiss. I still dreamed sometimes about his kisses. Slow and urgent, fueled by teen passion, sexy because we could barely communicate with words. Instead of using our mouths to talk, we used them to kiss. That’s how we talked, that German boy and I.

We broke the rules when we shifted, of course. When you first shifted, you were

supposed to be initiated by an experienced member of your Pack. You usually got to choose who, but they were free to decline the invitation. People rarely did, because it was considered an honor to be chosen as someone’s mentor. Once you got the hang of it, you were encouraged to find a bond mate. If you didn’t find one within a few years, one was generally found for you.