Men of the Otherworld (18 page)

I shook my head.

“Well, you're lucky, then. You know what else about Danny? He's a sneak. A sneak and a snitch. Nothing worse than that, is there?”

I had no idea what Nick was talking about, but I nodded because it seemed like what I was supposed to do.

“You like school?” Nick asked, passing me another strip of jerky.

I shook my head.

He grinned. “Good. I hate it. Especially math. Do you guys have to do multiplication yet?”

I shook my head.

“Lucky. What grade are you in anyway? Oh, wait, you're a year younger than me, so you'd be in second grade, right?”

I considered this, but felt compelled to honesty. “Kinder garten. They made me go in kindergarten.”

Nick scrunched up his face. “Why?”

“Because I didn't go to school before,” I said.

“Oh, right. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But kindergarten? With the babies? Bummer. They'll move you up soon, though. ’Cause you're smart and all. You read better than me, so they have to move you up. Maybe they'll do it after the Christmas break. That's when they change stuff at my school, after the Christmas break and after the spring break. I can't wait for Christmas break. We get almost a whole month off, because some of the kids live in other countries and stuff. How long do you guys get?”

Again, I felt compelled to set the record straight. Nick had called Daniel “a sneak and a snitch.” I wasn't exactly sure what those terms referred to in the lexicon of preadolescent boys, but I suspected some form of dishonesty was involved, and I was determined not to follow in Daniel's footsteps.

“I'm not in school now,” I said. “I got kicked out.”

Nick's eyes went wide. “Kicked out? Wow. That's so cool.” He paused, seeing my expression. “Hey, don't worry, I won't tell anyone. I'm real good at keeping secrets. What did you do?” Another pause. “You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”

I could tell by his expression that if I didn't tell him, he wouldn't hold it against me, but he would be disappointed. So far I'd seen nothing to indicate he was anything less than trustworthy. I was also, I'll admit, somewhat eager to explain what had happened, to get another child's opinion on why something as
innocent as a scientific experiment had warranted screams of horror and swift expulsion.

So I told him about dissecting the guinea pig. He listened with rapt attention. The last words had barely left my mouth before the bushes near the base of the tree erupted, and Daniel flew out from his hiding spot and raced for the house.

“He's going to tell!” Nick said, jumping up so fast he bumped his head on the low ceiling. “Come on! We have to catch him!”

As he climbed down and started to run, I hesitated, wondering what Daniel was going to tell, and to whom. Then I figured it out, leapt up, spilling soda onto my jeans, and vaulted out of the tree house. That was a mistake: jumping down instead of climbing. It was an easy leap for a werewolf, and I landed on my feet, but it shocked Nick enough to race back, thinking I'd fallen. By the time he started running again, Daniel had too much of a head start. We tore from the woods just in time to see the back door to the house closing behind him.

As we ran across the lawn, I told myself the situation wasn't as bad as it might be. When we'd left the house, Jeremy and Antonio had been teaching the older boys and Dominic had been in his office. Daniel would undoubtedly blurt his news to his father and the others first, leaving me time to find Jeremy and warn him. Then Jeremy could tell Dominic about my school mishap before Daniel did… and put a less damning slant on the story.

Nick pulled open the back door. Down the hall I saw Daniel dart into the living room, and heard his father call out a greeting.

Nick sprinted down the hall. I slowed to sniff the air, searching for Jeremy. Then I heard Dominic's voice … coming from the living room. He asked Daniel where Nick and I were.

Everyone was in the living room.

“No!” I shouted, nearly tripping as I stumbled forward.

“Clayton got kicked out of school,” Daniel announced, his
voice ringing down the hall. “He killed the class guinea pig and cut it up.”

I lunged past Nick, nearly knocking him flying as I swung around through the living room doorway.

“He's lying!” I said. “It was already dead!”

Apparently, the state of the guinea pig before the dissection was not the issue. Getting kicked out of school was. And I suspect they were a little concerned about the dissection part, too. Killing the animal they would have understood; cutting it up after it was dead just seemed… strange.

Although Jeremy hadn't asked me to lie about still being in school, he'd really hoped Dominic wouldn't learn the truth, and for good reason. At lunch, Dominic had said he'd given Jeremy a one-year probation period with me. It would be several years before I fully understood what that meant.

When Dominic learned that Jeremy had brought me home, he'd evaluated the situation, based on what Malcolm had said about me from that first encounter in Baton Rouge and what Antonio reported from his first visit, taking into account that Malcolm had exaggerated my wildness to embellish his story and Antonio had downplayed it to help Jeremy's cause. With these quasi-facts in mind, Dominic made a decision. Jeremy could keep me for one year. If at the end of that year, I was civilized enough to walk down the streets of New York without raising eyebrows, Jeremy could keep me. And if Jeremy failed? Then I had to die.

That explained why Jeremy had been so eager to get me off to school, sending me as soon as I had my Changes under control. Socially, I'd been far from ready for daily interaction with other children, but Jeremy had been desperate, seeing the end of the
year only months away and me still growling at children in the town playground.

He had been determined to give me a permanent place in the Pack by proving that I could be a normal child. What better way to do that than to have me successfully enrolled in school, like every other normal child?

So when Dominic found out otherwise, what did he do? Laughed it off.

As Dominic pointed out, my early interest in anatomy might put some question marks in the psychological fitness section of my school records, but it wasn't as if I'd been caught tearing the animal apart with my nails and gulping bloodied chunks. No one was going to read that report and think “oh my god, the kid's a werewolf!” And, really, that was all Dominic cared about.

I walked upright. I could speak enough to be understood. I rarely growled at people. I was no more likely to piss on a tree than any other seven-year-old boy. I could pass for human, and that was all that mattered.

If I couldn't pass for human, would Dominic have really ordered my death? Yes. I'm sure of it. That never bothered me, never altered my opinion of him. Nothing in my life had ever given me reason to think that I had a God-given right to live. Werewolves don't have the luxury of sentimentality. Like a wolf Alpha male, every decision a Pack Alpha makes comes down to one question: how does it affect the safety of the Pack? A feral child whose Changes are uncontrollable is a clear exposure risk for all werewolves.

Where Dominic failed, though, is where Jeremy's wider vision succeeded. When Dominic learned of my existence, he'd left me out there in the bayou where any human could have found me. He wasn't able to see the larger picture. Had I been on Pack territory, he would have handled the situation. As it was, I was on
the other side of the country, having no connection to the Pack, so he didn't see the threat. Jeremy did.

Jeremy knew that if I was found, the effects of that discovery would ripple back to the Pack. It was not, however, in Jeremy's nature to eliminate the threat by killing me. To the other Pack members, I was a mutt—vermin werewolf. To Jeremy, I was a child werewolf, as entitled to protection and to a normal life as any Pack son.

As for mutts, if the Pack's view of them seems harsh, one must remember that integral question: how does this affect the safety of the Pack? Mutts are a threat. They are always a threat. No matter what kind of lives they lead, whether they kill humans or not, their existence threatens the Pack because they are beyond the control of the Pack and they are beyond the safety net that the Pack brotherhood supplies.

Dominic's approach to handling mutts was the same as that of every Alpha who came before him. He imposed rules of engagement that every Pack wolf was supposed to obey. If a mutt steps onto your territory, kill him. If you encounter a mutt off Pack territory, kill him. And if you're feeling restless, have some excess aggression to spend, then go find a mutt and kill him.

As a plan for dealing with the mutt problem, this was about as sophisticated as Nick's method for getting rid of Daniel and, not surprisingly, Jeremy saw the flaws in it. He hadn't yet come up with a solution—or not one that anyone would listen to. In the meantime, he bowed out of Pack-organized mutt hunts and, since he rarely left Pack territory, he didn't need to worry about killing any he bumped into while traveling. This did, however, leave one problem. If a mutt came near Stonehaven, Jeremy was supposed to kill him. So far, in my year with him, this hadn't happened. Jeremy's luck, though, couldn't hold forever, and the next spring I had my first encounter with a trespassing mutt.

Winter came and went, and spring returned. It was later this year, but by early May snow was a memory and the ground had hardened enough that Jeremy no longer handed me a mop and pail each time I raced into the house without removing my shoes.

Little had changed at Stonehaven. Malcolm came back in late December, but his week-long stay was uneventful. He paid no attention to us, we paid no attention to him and, before we knew it, he was gone again, having scarcely sent a ripple through the calm of our day-to-day life.

With spring came fresh litters of baby rabbits under the oldest, biggest pine tree in the front yard. A group of rabbits had made their warren here years ago, and lived under the shadow of werewolves in relative safety. Jeremy had decreed the warren off-limits. Having it there was like having a food factory on our front lawn. Jeremy didn't use those exact words, but I got the picture. Adult rabbits bore baby rabbits—lots of them—and the warren was small, so those baby rabbits had to find a new place to live. Most moved into the woods of Stonehaven. Once there, they were fair game.

One day in May, as late afternoon stretched into evening, the baby rabbits ventured out to explore their new world, and I was using the opportunity to practice my hunting skills. I was in human form, which added challenge. The game was to see how close I could get, both upwind and downwind, before the mother rabbits noticed me and herded their babies back into the warren.

After they went into hiding, I'd back off until they returned, then start over. Being skittish animals, they often waited a half-hour or more before venturing forth again. I didn't mind the wait. It was a warm spring evening, my lessons were done, Jeremy was sketching on the front step and I had all the time in the world.

As the light faded, Jeremy crept over near my hiding spot, being careful not to disturb the rabbits, and motioned that he was going to take his sketch pad inside, then join me in my game. I grinned and nodded, and he slipped off to the house.

Almost as soon as the door closed behind Jeremy, I heard the rumble of a car slowing near the house. From where I sat, I couldn't see it. The Danverses built the existing house to suit their needs in every way. The house itself was over two hundred feet from the road, with a winding driveway and a front lawn strategically dotted with evergreens. From the road, you could barely glimpse our roof. The world couldn't see us, and we couldn't see them.

The car engine died. A door opened, then shut. From the distance of the noise, the driver had stopped at the end of the drive. I tensed and listened. Footsteps crunched along the gravel. Heavy steps. A man. A salesman? Stonehaven didn't see many door-to-door salespeople, and I'd recently overheard Jeremy joking to Antonio that the one upside of my incident with the Avon lady was that he hadn't seen an encyclopedia or vacuum salesperson in months.

Of course, Jeremy hadn't known I'd been listening or he'd never have said that, putting a positive spin on negative behavior. When I overheard things like this, though, it only confirmed my suspicion that when it came to such matters, what Jeremy told me was not always what he'd like to tell me. He might say it was okay for salespeople to come to the door, but the truth was that he didn't like trespassers any more than I did. That meant I had all the more reason to scare them away. I just had to be sneakier about doing it.

So now, with a stranger on the property and Jeremy in the house, I knew what I had to do—get rid of the interloper before Jeremy knew he was there. I pinpointed the man's location and looped around the tree.

I kept downwind. With humans, this was unnecessary, but it was second nature to me.

As I crept around behind the man, I spotted him. He was short and stocky, maybe ten years older than Jeremy, with a light brown brush cut. Before I could take another step, I caught a whiff of the man's scent.

He was a werewolf.

I stopped short and tried to get a better look, see whether he resembled any of the sketches in Jeremy's room. Maybe he was this “Peter” that Jeremy was concerned about. Yet the man had his back to me and in the waning light I could see no more than his build and hair color.

I decided to scoot back into the shadows, zip around him and get Jeremy. I'd just turned when I heard the swish of Jeremy's loafers in the grass. I looked to see him a few yards from the stoop. He stood hidden by the shadow of a pine. He was upwind of the other werewolf, which meant the newcomer should have scented him, but he didn't notice Jeremy until he was less than a few feet away.

Jeremy opened his mouth, then blinked, catching the other man's scent. He hesitated only a split-second, then said, “May I help you?”

“Sure,” the other man said, his voice grating with a strange accent. “You can get your daddy for me, boy. Tell him Carl Pritchard wants to talk to him.”