Ascension, page 5
He’d snuck over a few copies of Playboy, and we went through those. I didn’t really “get” it, but I played along with his enthusiasm. When it came to sex, I was a late bloomer. I’d begun filling out and putting on some 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 the Playboy 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.
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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 at midnight and 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 until midnight to 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 until midnight. 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 so Jeremy wouldn’t find it,
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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.
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I always arrived at school early so I could run a twenty laps around the track, wear off excess energy before beginning my day. That was be my only chance to get some physical activity in before I went home and worked out. I didn’t take gym class. We were supposed to, but Jeremy had managed to convince the school that my time was better spent where my obvious assets lay—in academics. With the help of a sympathetic teacher, who agreed that I needed to be challenged academically, I was already on the fast-track to college, skipping any “extra” classes like gym or art so I could graduate a year early.
That morning, the football field was flooded, so the team had to move their before-school practice to the track field. I ignored them, but the disinterest wasn’t mutual. After a few minutes, I noticed the football coach watching me more than he was watching his team. When I headed to the stands to grab my towel, he came over.
“What’s your name, son?” he asked.
I wiped the towel over my face. “Clayton.”
“You’re a student here, aren’t you? I know I’ve seen you around.”
I shrugged and kept drying off.
“You took those hurdles pretty good. You on the track team?”
I shook my head, grabbed a clean shirt from my bag, and peeled off my sweat-sodden one.
The coach’s gaze slid over my upper body.
“How much are you lifting?” he asked.
Another shrug, and I yanked on my shirt.
“Not very talkative, are you, son?”
I hefted my bag. “I gotta go.”
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He stepped in my path. I tensed, but pushed it back. He was a teacher, and I knew I had to respect him, but it was something that I’d been having more and more difficulty faking in the last year or so.
“I want you to try out for the team,” he said.
I swung my bag into my other hand. “What team?”
Someone laughed. I turned to see a half-dozen members of the football team behind me, shifting into a semicircle, as if blocking my escape route. Whether they knew what they were doing wasn’t clear—humans are notoriously ignorant of their body language—but that didn’t keep me from interpreting it as a trap. The hairs on my neck rose.
“The football team, son,” the coach said. “I want you to try out for the football team.”
I knew I should take the high road, like Jeremy would, quietly demur with an excuse and a thank you. But, as I said, I was finding this increasing hard to do. I thought of a polite excuse, but instead what came out was:
“Not interested.”
A rumble rose from the boys behind me. Even the coach stiffened, his good humor sliding away.
“Not interested?” he said. “This is the football team, boy, not the goddamned chess club. If we want you on the team, you join. It’s a little something called school spirit.”
I said nothing, but my sneer answered for me.
The coach’s face went bright red. “Get to the office, boy. Now.”
I wound up with a week’s detention for being disrespectful to a teacher.
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If that wasn’t bad enough, the coach started cornering me in the halls. If I tried out, he said, there was a good chance I could make running back, maybe even quarterback, and didn’t every sixteen-year-old boy want to be quarterback? Another student overheard, and ran off to inform the current running back and quarterback, neither of whom was too pleased with the prospect.
So then I had them harassing me. Finally, I snapped. As hard as Jeremy might teach me to turn the other cheek, there was a limit to how long I could do it.
The next time they challenged me to a skirmish match, I accepted. Fortunately, no bones were broken. The wounds to the quarterback’s ego were another matter, though and, instead of getting him off my back, I’d only pissed him off more. I knew I couldn’t fight them—that football skirmish had been pushing it enough—so I was stuck swallowing their insults, and accepting their shoves, and getting more miserable with each passing day. Soon even my school friends were avoiding me, for fear of catching the fallout.
From there, it only got worse. On Thursday, while racing home to make sure Jeremy didn’t find out about my detention, I got a speeding ticket.
Jeremy had bought me a car for my sixteenth birthday, so I wouldn’t have to endure the school bus any longer, and this was my third ticket so far. If you worked it out, the number of times I sped versus the number of tickets I received, I was doing pretty good. But Jeremy didn’t see it that way. Nor did he understand my view of traffic laws. I understood why speed limits existed, but I saw no reason why they should apply to me. I was an excellent driver. With my enhanced senses and reflexes, I could drive eighty miles an hour and still swerve before hitting even a squirrel. I made my own money, transcribing notes for Jeremy’s growing translation
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business, and I paid for my tickets, so what was the big deal? Threatening to take away my car was wrong. Wrong and unfair.
That ticket only added fuel to a fire that had been blazing all month. The source of that fire?
College. Having condensed my studies, I was due to graduate next June, which meant I was supposed to head off to college in a year. I had no problem with going to college. I wanted to go. I enjoyed learning and I knew that I needed a very good education if I hoped to find a career that I could pursue from home, like Jeremy did.
Now Jeremy had not gone to college. He’d wanted to, and expected to, but then his grandfather died and he’d been forced to start working to pay the bills. So naturally Jeremy wanted me to go to college and, as I said, I agreed. The problem came with the question of
“where.” The school had already hinted to Jeremy that I could probably get a scholarship pretty much anywhere I wanted to go. So what did he do? Started gathering information on colleges, to decide where I should want to go.
I knew damned well where I was going: Syracuse University. Jeremy shot down that idea as if it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. I’d already decided my major—my early studies of human society had led me to a high school anthropology course, and I’d decided that was what I wanted to pursue. As Jeremy pointed out, Syracuse did not have a topnotch anthropology program. So I had to go elsewhere. Well, I wasn’t. I just wasn’t. I was staying home, and going to Syracuse University. Move away to school? Wasn’t happening.
On Friday, battered down by my hellish week at school, I returned to Stonehaven, seeking solace, and found Jeremy filling out a form to request more information from the University of
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Chicago. I hit the roof. Broke a chair and a couple of plates. Said a few things I shouldn’t have.
Then I stormed out the back door to the woods, and stayed there until midnight, which I figured was long enough to make my point.
When I walked into the house, I passed the study, saw Jeremy in there, and kept going. He followed me.
“Your bag is by the front door. Check it and make sure I haven’t left anything out.”
My heart jammed into my throat. I didn’t turn. “Bag?”
“You’re spending the weekend with Dominic. I have business to do in New York.”
I turned and scowled. “What business?”
“Nothing important,” he said. “Check your bag and we’ll leave.”
He headed back into the study. I resisted the urge to follow. What business could he have in New York? He never took meetings in person, never needed to.
He was sending me away. Taking a break from me, just like he did with Malcolm. I suspected that was the reason behind his sudden vigor to find an out-of-state college for me: to rid himself of a boy who’d turned from a devoted child to a troublesome teen.
And what if he did have business in New York? What kind of business? Why wouldn’t he discuss it with me? There’d been a lot of that lately, closed door phone conversations that ended the moment I walked in. He didn’t trust me. He still thought of me as a child. Well, he treated me like a child, didn’t he? Deciding where I should go to school, threatening to take away my car, arranging my weekends for me. It was wrong. Wrong and unfair.
Without checking my bag, I grabbed it and stormed off to the truck.
Misunderstood
I couldn’t believe Nick had done this to me.
It was Saturday night. A special Saturday night planned by Nick to lift me out of my black mood, because that’s the kind of friend he was. Thoughtful, considerate, generous . . . the best friend a guy could want.
I scowled into the night, took a swig of my beer and dumped the rest over the side of the deck.
It had been a great plan, one that made me regret every thoughtless thing I’d ever done to him. We’d start with a movie. He knew I liked movies, and there was nothing better to get my mind off my horrible week than a good action-packed thriller, full of life-or-death dilemmas that would make my problems look laughable. After the show, we’d go out for pizza. Then we’d go somewhere else and have more pizza. Then we’d head back to the house, and Nick would try Changing. In the last few months Nick had begun showing the first signs of impending werewolf-hood—increased hunger, heightened senses and greater strength. We’d been trying to rush the process along with practice sessions, where we’d go into the woods and I’d coach him.
So far, it hadn’t worked—and everyone in the Pack swore it never would—but we kept trying.
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Right after dinner, we left the estate. Like me, Nick had his own car. That’s common for Pack boys—not because we need wheels to head out into the country for an urgent Change or to make a speedy getaway, but just because every teenage boy wants a car, and the Pack spoiled us, knowing our lives would be difficult enough later.
When Nick realized we were too early for the movie, he decided to stop off at a friend’s place. His friend’s parents were gone for the weekend, and he was having a party. There are few things in life I hate more than parties—if you want to scare me with visions of hell, just tell me it’s eternity squeezed into a small room full of people drinking, shouting, sweating and playing music loud enough to shatter eardrums. But Nick had planned an entire evening for me; the least I could do was give him the first half-hour of it.
So I went to the party without complaint. Then Nick found out they had a beer keg, and that a girl he’d been pursuing for the last month was there . . . without her boyfriend.
Two and a half hours later, I was standing on the back porch, alone, glowering into the dark yard, and wondering where my life had gone so horribly wrong.
When the patio door slid open behind me, I hoped it was Nick. One sniff of perfume, though, and I knew better. Without turning, I sent off another hope: that the girl behind me had come out for a cigarette or some fresh air, not because she’d seen me through the window and decided I looked lonely. In the ninety minutes I’d been out here, two other girls had come out, trying to cheer up my night, and only making it more unbearable.
I kept my gaze fixed on the yard, and slumped forward against the railing, leaving my back to her.
“Nice night,” she said.
I nodded.
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She moved up beside me. “You’re Nick’s friend, aren’t you?”
I made a noise in my throat. Had she been a wolf, she’d have interpreted it for what it was: a polite “leave me alone.”
“Hmmm?” she said, billowing perfume as she leaned around me. “I didn’t catch that.”
I shrugged and moved away.
“Hey, I asked you a question,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m with Nick.”
I headed down the steps to the yard.
“Hey!” she called after me. “I’m talking to you.”
I kept walking. She hurried after me, and caught my hand. When I shook her off, she only grinned, as if it was a challenge.
“Do you have a name, Nick’s friend?”
“Yeah. Not interested.”
She blinked, eyes snapping with outrage. “Excuse me?”
“Never mind. Just go back inside, okay?”
“Is that an order?”
“Just go—”
“Hey!” someone shouted from the porch.
I looked up to see a tall, muscular boy bearing down at us. One glance at his scowl, and I knew he was the girl’s boyfriend. My evening was complete.
I turned to walk away. The boy grabbed my shoulder and whipped me around. I shrugged him off and struggled not to return his glare of challenge.
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“What do you think you’re doing with my girl?” he demanded, bringing his face down to mine.
I held my ground and met his eyes. “Nothing.”
