Chapter 13 #2
I stare at him and I stay in that suspension of aggression and fear.
I don’t notice that my wolf form is fading away. It is only when a cool breeze makes me shiver that I realize I have lost my fur.
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
“I thought we were both dead,” he says. “But we’re not, are we, kid? We’re both stronger than we thought. And now you’ve come into your own. You’re grown. You’ve taken a mate. It suits you.”
“You have been taking my pack members. I want them back.”
He laughs, reaches into the bushes, and tosses me a sweater.
It is rust-red in color, and far too long for me. When I put it on, it smells like him. Like death, and like long summer nights asleep on the back seat of his car. It’s warmer than I expected it to be, and I find I don’t hate the stench.
“Follow me,” he says, turning and walking into the woods, toward the source of the scent.
I follow him. What else am I to do? I am barefoot in a forest, I am starting to get hungry again, and I cannot guarantee being able to find my way back again.
After a little while, I start to hear sounds. People talking. Doesn’t sound like they’re particularly anguished.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Cages with my missing pack in them, maybe.
Instead, I find the runners and the stragglers from my pack of Runaways going about what I can only describe as their business. My father never allowed anybody to live with him before. When I was younger, he avoided other wolves like the plague.
There are shelters built into the forest. They’re covered in netting and leaves and branches and such, designed to avoid detection from the sky, and maybe from casual hikers lost on their way, though judging by the smell, a casual hiker is not going to survive long here.
“You turned them all into flesh eaters?”
“Every wolf is a flesh eater,” he laughs. “Some of us are precious about it, but none of us are better than our basest desires and our fundamental hungers.”
He’s been working on that line for years. It’s starting to almost sound convincing.
“I can smell the human in your belly,” he growls with amusement, leaning into me. “You don’t have to pretend to be better than you are. Not here. This is the one place you will not be judged.”
“I only did what I did because I had to.”
“Oh, really? You had to kill and eat a man?”
“I had to kill him, and the eating part. It was more like a nibble. And I was hungry, and scared, and…”
My father puts his hand on my shoulder. “You ate because it was food, and because your instincts told you to. Don’t apologize for it.”
I spent years fearing this version of myself, and now it is here and now the father I missed for all that time is approving of me, and there is something so very intoxicating and fulfilling about being here with him.
Some of the pack call out to me with glee. They seem happy to see me. I wave back. They don’t approach. They respect my father too much. I have to wonder how he got them here. Did he steal them away? Or did he lure them with the promise of the kind of freedom only a man with no morals can offer?
“How did you get them here?”
“They were ready to come from the moment I met them,” he says. “You had nothing to offer wolves like these. You were doing what you’ve always done. Pretending to be human. Pretending to get along in a human world. They wanted what I offered them.”
“An outdoor toilet?”
He snorts. “Freedom. The real life of a wolf. You turned them into low-level workers. They need more than that. They need to hunt. They need to starve from time to time. They need to feast. We’re bred to fight for survival, kid. They do all that here.”
“And none of them left so much as a note. We’ve been worried about them.”
“You’ve not been worried about anything besides catting about,” he says. “Attracting the eye of Rex Regent, so I hear.”
“How did you…” I ask, then I realize that a few of the wolves out here in the forest shanties were around when Rex first showed up. He’s taken almost a dozen wolves from my pack. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I didn’t offer them what they really needed. Maybe I was always bad at leading them.
“Come and eat,” he says. “We have venison and sweet pork.”
I know what sweet pork means. I won’t be having any more of that. Having taken so much as a bite of my would-be attacker is making me feel nauseated enough as it is. I don’t want this life. I don’t want any part of my father’s world.
“Why didn’t you come and get me after they took me from the gas station? I waited for you to come. You never did.”
He turns and looks at me. “I told you to get in the car,” he says simply, as if that single act of disobedience justified the rest of his abandonment. “You chose differently. That’s what you wanted. I gave you what you wanted.”
“I was fourteen.”
“Old enough to make a decision,” he says. “And old enough to bear its consequences.”
I don’t agree with that, but he doesn’t care. My father feels justified in what he did and all the arguing in the world isn’t going to change it. I didn’t want to see him again. He didn’t look for me, and I didn’t look for him.
I turn. “I’m going to go back to the city,” I tell him. “You can keep the rest of them. If this is what they want, this is what they can have. Good luck to all of you.”
“Not so fast,” he says, gripping me by the arm. “You’re staying here.”
“Why? You told me I made my choice, now let me make it.” I try to pull away, but his grip tightens on me.
“Uh-uh,” he says. “I don’t want a daughter of mine giving birth to a Regent pup. I’ve got a better idea. You stay here. With us. You embrace the thing you were always meant to be. All you need is enough flesh.”
“What does that mean?”
“The more you have, the more you will want to have. The more you hunger, the more you feed, the more you understand what it is to consume the weak, the stronger you become.”
He hauls me through the encampment to a big tent at the back.
Inside this tent is a commercial large dog crate designed to keep a German Shepherd or similar sized dog.
There are chew and claw marks all over it, and when he pushes me down and into it, I find that it has a stinking blanket and nothing else.
“Why?” I ask the question, already knowing the answer. He wants revenge on the version of me that didn’t become the one he thought I should be.
“When is a better question,” he says. “And the answer to that is as long as it takes.”
* * *
There is one cage in this den, and that is the one I find myself in.
“You’ll get hungry, and when you do, you’ll eat the way you used to.”
“What do you mean, used to?”
He grins, flashing white teeth that are at odds with the rust-red stains of his sins. “I fed you well as a pup,” he says. “You were such a good eater when you were small.”
Thankfully we are interrupted before he can play ‘here comes the airplane’ with the flesh of a human being. One of the lookouts comes scooting in with a great deal of exuberance.
“Regent hunters are out at the road,” the scout says. “Oh, hi, Nicky.”
I give a small wave from inside the crate. No point getting too dramatic about this. I am going to try to use my sway with them once my father goes out to do something psychotic. It won’t be long before he feels the need to hunt and kill. That is the one thing I know about him for sure.
“Run them off,” he says. “I’ll move the girl. Help me with her crate first.”
With the assistance of a guy who used to answer to me, my father loads my crate onto the back of an old pickup.
Forestry trails this deep are often not maintained and rarely drivable, but of course my father has found a way around that. Tracks have been cut into the bush from the back, and they run around the park and I guess probably eventually join up with a road somewhere nobody expects them to.
“Rex is going to find me,” I tell him as he starts strapping my crate down. “He won’t let me go.”
“What makes you so certain he cares that much about you?”
“I owe him for a new bed,” I deadpan.
My father laughs. “More than I needed to know, but I’m sure you’re right.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’re not going to be able to outrun Regent in this old bucket. He has helicopters.”
“Yes. And I am sure he deployed them when you first fled, and yet I am the one who has you, and you’ve killed someone. Forgive me if I don’t rate your overfunded pretty boy.”
He gets in the truck and starts driving. Behind us, I see the strays covering over the tracks with leaves and brush. They had this planned well enough that anybody who comes this way is going to think they’ve just found a camp of unhoused people.
But the wolves will smell better. They’ll know better. There’s no way…
My father turns the wheel hard right and into a riverbed where the river flows. This is going to be much harder to follow. But still, Rex will know if the track doesn’t continue on the other side that we had to go one way or the other.
He’s going to find me.
The rickety rocking of the crate going back and forth over the riverbed makes me feel ill.
It goes on for what feels like miles. Then we get onto another path that eventually leads inside a tunnel.
At first, I am afraid that my mad father has driven into a train tunnel.
Then I realize it’s a mine, and that is not much better.
In fact, I’m going to say it is worse. Train tunnels sometimes have a light at the end of them.
Mines don’t. The further in we go, the deeper, darker, and more dangerous it is going to get.
He stops and pulls into a parking space carved out into the wall of the mountain. Then he comes around, tapping the side of the truck as if he’s in a very good mood.
He cranks the tailgate down and opens the gate. He lets me out and allows me to scramble from the crate. By now I am in such a state I barely feel like myself. In hours, he’s turned me from one kind of animal to another kind of animal.