Men of the Otherworld (14 page)

The first prickling of fear zinged through me. Then I noticed my advantage. He was unprepared. As he talked to Jeremy, his eyes darted over to me, but they held nothing but curiosity.

“Clayton,” Jeremy said. “This is Nicholas. Antonio's son.”

The boy extended a hand and a wide grin. I knew it was a grin, but the bared teeth still made my hackles rise.

“He's like you,” Antonio said quickly, stepping forward. “A werewolf. Or, he will be, when he gets older.”

The boy said something. Ignoring his words, I stared into his eyes and saw nothing but open trust. I sniffed the air and caught only the barest undercurrents of werewolf scent, heavily overlaid with the stink of a human child. Like me? This boy? Not likely. At least I had the sense to be wary of a stranger.

I sniffed and turned my face away, not quite willing to turn my back.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the boy step toward me. I turned, slowly, and met his gaze. He smiled at me with that affable smile that made me curse him doubly a fool. I bared my teeth. He seemed to think I was returning his smile and grinned broader.

“Man, I thought I was never going to get to meet you,” the boy said. “Dad's been talking about you all the time and then he said
maybe you guys were coming to the Meet last month, but then you didn't and I kept bugging Dad and…”

He kept talking. I stopped listening.

As he spoke he moved closer. His shadow fell over me, making me feel suddenly very small. I clenched my fists at my sides and pulled myself up straighter. I still only came up to his chin.

I inhaled. The werewolf scent was stronger now. So this was a werewolf child, was it? Well, if so, something had to be done and quickly. You only get one chance to establish dominance.

I lunged without warning. I hit him in the stomach, knocking him back to the ground. As I held him down, he didn't struggle, but just stared at me, eyes wide. The acrid scent of something vaguely familiar floated up. I felt a dampness seep through the knee of my pants and looked down to see a dark patch creeping outwards from the crotch of his trousers. As I wrinkled my nose and pulled back, Jeremy hauled me into the air.

The next few minutes blurred past in a series of images. Jeremy's face, shuttered and hard, not looking at me. The stink of urine. Antonio bending to help his son up. The boy jabbering something. As I was being carried into the house, I caught the boy's eyes. I saw no anger there, no lingering fear, just complete bewilderment. Any struggle for dominance had existed only in my head. Then I felt something I'd never felt before. Guilt, regret and more than an inkling of shame.

After a few hours of being left in my bedroom, Jeremy brought up my belated lunch. He explained, calmly, that as Antonio's son, Nicholas must be treated with the same respect I would accord Antonio. Although Nick wasn't a full-fledged werewolf, he would be when he grew up.

There were no others like me, no child werewolves. There never had been. There were other children of the Pack, like Nick, who would grow into werewolves, but not until they became adults. These would be my Pack brothers. No matter how I felt about them, I would have to learn to get along with them.

I offered to apologize, but Antonio and Nick had already left Stonehaven. I'd blown my first chance at fitting into the Pack. Although Jeremy never said this, I understood it.

Deep down, I sensed his other fear, too. That I'd never fit in. I was determined to prove him wrong. Of course, I'd also been determined never to raid the fridge again, never to attack strangers again, never to…

As summer passed, Jeremy began steering me into situations where I'd be with other children. After the fiasco with Nick, I was eager to please him, so I did my best to tolerate the little monsters.

Twice a week, for an entire month, he took me to a playground in Bear Valley, the nearest town. I behaved perfectly. I sat motionlessly on a swing, watched the children and gritted my teeth until the ordeal finally ended. Whenever a child ventured too close, a covert growl always sent him or her scrambling to find another piece of playground equipment.

I was so busy congratulating myself on my model behavior that I failed to realize the obvious—that these excursions were leading up to something. Had I known, I would have kicked and screamed and thrown my finest temper tantrum each time I so much as saw a swing set. Instead, I behaved so well that at the end of the summer, Jeremy pronounced me, with no small amount of trepidation, ready for the next major phase of my integration into human society, a torture worse than anything I would have thought him capable of devising. I was to go to school.

The school secretary escorted us into a small room that looked as if it had been carved inside a tree. Everything was wood, from the floor to the baseboards to the desk to the chairs. Two lights shone overhead, but even their combined power was not enough to win the battle against the all-encompassing darkness. All the lights seemed to do was illuminate the oily, lemon-stinking sheen on the wood. Jeremy sat down amid the cluster of chairs. I touched the seat beside him. It felt as greasy as it looked. I looked at him and curled my lip.

“Sit,” he said.

I sat.

A door opened on the other side of the room and in walked a sour-looking middle-aged woman who smelled like fruit left on the tree to rot. Jeremy stood, tugging me to my feet, and extended his hand. She ignored it and skewered me with a snarl masquerading as a smile.

“So this is Clayton,” the woman said. “Welcome to Harding Academy, Clayton.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” I said, remembering the response Jeremy had taught me.

“Your cousin here has already taken care of all the enrollment arrangements, and I don't believe in protracted good-byes, so let's take you straight to Miss Fishton's kindergarten class.”

“Kindergarten?” Jeremy said. “Oh, there's been a mistake. I know he looks small for his age, but he's seven—eight in January.”

“With no formal education, am I right?”

“Yes, but he's been homeschooled—”

“By whom?” She snatched a paper and pen from the desk. “You should have provided the reference when you enrolled him. The instructor's name, please.”

“I've tutored him myself.”

“Ah,” she said, lips twitching. “And your credentials,
Mister
Danvers?”

She said the formal salutation with a mocking lilt that made my muscles tense. Jeremy's hand gripped my shoulder, restraint disguised as an affectionate squeeze.

“I don't have any formal qualifications,” he said. “However, I can assure you that Clayton is well beyond kindergarten level. He's an extremely bright boy—”

“I'm sure you think he is.”

The hand on my shoulder tightened, then relaxed. “Perhaps you could test him. He knows basic addition and subtraction, and he reads at a third-grade level.”

“I believe you mentioned socialization problems?”

“Problems? No, I didn't say problems.” A slight hitch in his voice here, undetectable to anyone who didn't know him. “I said he lacked socialization experience. There was some early trauma, before he came to live with me. I have, however, been taking steps to correct this and he's been making progress.”

“I'm sure he has. However, given the combination of no formal schooling and socialization ‘issues,’ I'm standing by my decision.
He will go to kindergarten and if he proves himself ready, he will progress to the appropriate level. Clayton? Come with me.”

“May we have a moment?” Jeremy said.

“As I've said, I don't believe in protracted good-byes. Children can't have their parents hovering over them—”

“I would like a moment,” Jeremy said, meeting the headmistress's gaze. “And I will escort him to his classroom myself.”

They locked gazes. The headmistress broke first. She muttered directions to the kindergarten room, then shooed us out of her office.

“We only have a moment, Clayton,” he whispered as we walked. “Now, remember what I told you? Where will I be?”

“On the other side of the playground. In the forest.”

“Right. So when you go outside for recess, you'll be able to smell me, but don't come over or I'll have to leave. Just remember that I'm there for you. If you can't handle it, absolutely can't, you come to me. But try, Clayton. Please try. It's very important that you go to school.”

I nodded and he led me down the hall.

“Oh, this must be Clayton!”

A young woman with bright red lips and a high-pitched cheep of a voice flew at me. I ducked. Jeremy's hand tightened on my arm, pulling me up straight and propelling me into the classroom.

I squinted against the brightness, not only of the sun streaming through the windows, but of the screamingly vivid colors that assaulted me from every direction. The classroom walls were painted in bright primary colors, the tones so overwhelming they made me cringe. When Jeremy had decorated my bedroom last month, he'd asked what color I'd wanted, and I'd picked two:
black and white. That's what I liked best. I didn't mind colors, as long as they weren't too … colorful.

“I'm Miss Fishton, Clayton,” the woman chirped, then turned and fluttered her hands at the gaggle of children behind her. “Class, this is our new student. Can we say hello to Clayton?”

“Hello, Clayton,” a dozen voices chimed in monotone.

“You're just in time, Clayton,” she said. “We were just getting ready to sing ‘Old MacDonald.’ Do you know ‘Old MacDonald’?”

I looked up at Jeremy.

“I don't believe he does,” Jeremy said.

“Oh, that's okay. We'll teach you, won't we, class?”

“Yes, Miss Fishton,” the class intoned.

“And then, after we sing, we'll do some finger painting. I bet you love finger painting. Now just come on in, Clayton, and we'll join hands and sing ‘Old MacDonald.’ You can be the pig. Do you know what a pig says, Clayton?”

I looked up at Jeremy. He rubbed his hand across his chin, then bent and whispered, “I'm sorry.” A quick pat on the back, one last apologetic glance, and he hurried from the room.

By the end of that week, I hated school as I'd never hated anything in my life … except Malcolm. I knew I was here to learn, but learn what? How to sing songs about farmers? How to distinguish red squares from green circles? How to build towers of blocks? After a month, we'd only begun the alphabet, and I could already read every book in the teacher's story library. Yet nobody seemed the least bit interested in moving me to a higher grade.

So Jeremy continued my academic lessons at home and instead stressed the importance of other lessons I could learn at school, namely how to fit in. This I understood. I needed to know
how to pass for human. Unfair, to be sure, but necessary. Jeremy could do it, and he was very good at it; I resolved that I would learn to be just as accomplished an actor. So I studied my classmates. I watched them. I stalked them. I learned how to imitate them.

The watching and stalking portions of these lessons prompted many parent-teacher interviews in those first two months, but Miss Fishton could never quite pinpoint exactly what I was doing wrong, just vague concerns about me “making the other children uncomfortable,” which Jeremy dismissed as an obvious consequence of putting a seven-year-old with five-year-olds. Developmentally I was light-years ahead. Yet another reason, he argued, to bump me up a grade or two. Still they refused.

At home, Jeremy decided to distract me from my boredom at school with lessons that I deemed long overdue. Though I'd hunted with Jeremy for months, he preferred to do the killing. He insisted that this was because I needed more practice with the prekilling parts of the hunt—stalking and chasing—but I suspected it had more to do with my killing method, which basically consisted of chomping on my prey until it stopped moving.

Once I did manage to catch a rabbit while out running by myself and, after I Changed back, I proudly showed my accomplishment to Jeremy. He took one look at the unrecognizable mangle of fur and bone and declared he would handle all kills for a while.

In late October, he finally deemed me ready. To my surprise, these new lessons were conducted not in the woods, but in the kitchen. For the next two weeks, Jeremy produced dead specimens of every small wild animal found at Stonehaven—rabbits, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, even a skunk. He then dissected
them and showed me where the vital organs were located. For the skunk and raccoon, he pointed out their defense systems, how to avoid getting sprayed or clawed. For the prey animals, he showed me how to kill them quickly and what parts were edible.

At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I'd thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she'd shown. Soon, though, I'd figured out the animals’ true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food.

Once Jeremy began my killing lessons, I began to see the classroom pets in a new light. Maybe I couldn't kill them, but I could study them, just as I studied the children. I began to spend my free time sitting near the rodents and watching them, studying how they moved, their weaknesses and blind spots, and how they could be most easily killed.

My fascination with the classroom pets was a great relief to Miss Fishton, who had probably given up hope of interesting me in anything. The next time Jeremy stopped in after school to discuss my behavior, her report was near glowing.

“He just loves the animals,” she said. “He could sit and stare at them for hours.” She beamed at me. “I think we might have a little zoologist on our hands.”

Jeremy glanced down at me. I adjusted the clasp on my lunch box and pretended not to notice the look he gave me.

Miss Fishton continued. “He's absolutely enthralled by them. It's just so cute. Have you considered getting him a pet? I have a friend whose cat just had kittens.”

I stopped playing with the lunch-box clasp.

“Would you like a kitten, Clayton?” Miss Fishton asked.

“Yes.” I looked up at Jeremy. “I would like a kitten.”