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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 thePlayboy 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 atmidnightand 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 untilmidnightto 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 untilmidnight. 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
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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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]