“I’m the one who doesn’t want to be leader.”
“Why’s that?” I ask, surprised.
“Up until a short time ago, it was all a matter of differences. A bizarre tradition, old-school. A werewolf has never been head of a pack of wolves. They have always been excluded from taking the highest office, so to speak, because they are considered to be different. But I’ve never accepted the fact that I’m a werewolf, different from my brother and my cousins. I didn’t want to be part of a pack of wolves, let alone become their leader.”
“I thought you accepted what you are,” I finally whisper.
“I didn’t choose to be different, and there are no alternatives. You understand, right?”
“Yes, but I thought you were happy to be who you are.”
Vuk gives me a reassuring smile. “Sure, there’s some fun to it, like keeping in check bloodsuckers!”
I glance at him playfully.
“But, that said, I don’t want to become some kind of mythical leader, the head of a pack of animals different from me. When Drake conceded the role to me, I refused it. But he didn’t want to take my place so as not to go against our father’s wishes. Our father, Wilhelm Wolf. The initials Drake has tattooed on his right shoulder.”
“You’ve got the same tattoo?” I ask, inquisitive.
“Our right shoulder blade,” he nods, tapping it with a finger.
“I never noticed any tattoos when we were in the factory that night.”
“I only got it done recently. When the pack formed, when I got back.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“They died years ago,” he replies, betraying no emotion.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“The pack bears the name of our father, the
king
, on our bodies.”
“The king of wolves?”
Vuk nods and turns his eyes away. He hits the gas, the speedometer rising sharply. A gust of wind whistles through the trees, icy cold, seeming to come directly from a glacier. The sound of breaking branches echoes in the forest.
I snuggle into his chest to warm myself up.
“Wow!” I exclaim, almost to myself.
“Yeah. That was a wolf-whistle and a half!” he smiles at his word play. “And you’ll discover a whole lot of other wolfy things too,” he adds.
I turn to watch the forest race past, mulling over Vuk’s words.
“So was your father alive to see your transformation?”
“My… first transformation was five years ago, in the
battle
he died in…”
Suddenly, Scott’s words on the night of the bonfire race through my head. I see them written on an imaginary page. Just words, but somehow they are a link in the chain.
“
Tyler and the guys had already been here a year before you moved. They came from Jackson, Wyoming, to take part of a tour of the New Hampshire Mountains. Now that they’ve returned, as Tyler said, they’re celebrating being back.”
“I can’t imagine how you got through it by yourself,” I ponder. “I mean, the transformation and everything. You had nobody to help you.”
“It’s bad enough having to go through it with the help of a pack…” He lowers his eyes and keeps them fixed on the road. “My first transformation in a battle was the most terrifying experience I have ever had, followed by the terrible events in the factory, obviously. But I wasn’t alone. I remember the voices of my family, by my side, explaining to me what was happening and what I should do. Drake did everything he could, but… we were outnumbered and defeated. Thanks to him, I didn’t go crazy at the end of the battle. But I don’t wanna talk about it…”
“Will he be mad when he sees me arriving with you?”
“Probably. After the battle and its consequences… things have changed… Sometimes, he’s grumpier than a grizzly coming out of hibernation.”
I try to hide my discomfort and sit up straight.
“Maybe it would be better if…”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,” he reassures me. “You know loads of things that could be useful to us and you’re not the usual dumb human who can’t understand. You’re like a neutral territory, something like that.”
I hadn’t even noticed that he increased the speed as we shot along the New Hampshire highway. Through the windshield I see the trees go from a dull olive color to a bright shade of yellow. I’m confused. Is Vuk after secret information that would help them destroy their arch enemy? I don’t want to be some kind of Trojan horse. And I haven’t been gathering information, like some kind of double-agent working across enemy lines, but his words are enough to make me feel like a traitor.
“For example, knowing about the bloodsucker that can read minds. That is the sort of information that is useful to us,” he continues point blank, ignoring my perplexed expression. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about that sort of thing… I don’t know if I’ll ever get my head around the fact that they’re true! It’s disgusting! That’s the sort of thing that we all thought were just urban legends! Is he really in your head all the time?” he asks inquisitively.
“No!” I exclaim. “Donn is not always in my head. He’d like to be, but he can’t.”
It’s Vuk’s turn to look perplexed. “He can’t hear my thoughts if he’s not next to me,” I clarify, somewhat pleased with myself. Or maybe relieved would be the better word. “And I’m the only one he can hear, but we’re not really sure why.”
“Weird.” Vuk shakes his head, his expression a mix of disgust and wonderment.
“Yeah…” My self-satisfied tone vanishes. “I hate it when it happens. He just has to, like, tune in to my frequency, which means no privacy, no secrets. All my most shameful thoughts are there on show for him to see.”
“That does seem horrible,” he agrees.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with my mind’s workings…”
“What do you mean?! We all know there’s something wrong with the brain of that bloodsucker,” he points out defensively.
“Please, Vuk, he has a name.”
“Oh right, Donn… I’ve heard of vampires with special powers, but I thought it was just a legend, just talk.” He seems unpleasantly surprised.
“Are there things that are only legend?” I ask gloomily, not sure I want to know. “I hate it that these legends turn out to be true. Sorry, maybe you don’t wanna talk about him.”
I tense up automatically, crossing my arms in front of me, almost protectively.
“I don’t, to be honest.”
“Sorry I brought him up.”
“Don’t worry about it. In any other situation, it would be nice to finally be able to talk to someone about this stuff…”
“Has he done something else to upset you?”
“In the library,” I nod, staring out the windshield at the road cutting a path through the forest. I suddenly realize we’ve arrived to the lake; I see a mirror of blue water, speckled with azure, between the greenery of the trees. It is vast, motionless, and beautiful.
“You know me so well…”.
“We’ve been inseparable for about a year, and we’ve been through a lot together.”
“Yeah, but at times, it seems like you can read my mind, too.”
“No, I just pay attention to how you’re feeling,” he smiles.
As soon as we get off the interstate, we go over the Lake
Winnisquam bridge and follow the curves of the road that heads north-east.
The houses that line the road are becoming less frequent, and they’re much grander. When we pass the last homes, we find ourselves in a thick forest, damp and misty. The road becomes narrower, cutting through centuries-old trees. Suddenly Vuk veers off onto a dirt road, barely visible in the dense vegetation. I look back at the other lane, which seems to be less of a road, more of a mountain path.
“Don’t worry, this is the right road,” Vuk reassures me. “We’re almost there.”
“Where does the other road lead?”
“To a clearing twice the size of a football field. That’s where we go to play, when humans are watching their games on the TV.”
“What do you play?”
“We play Wolf’s Hunger,” explains Vuk, bursting with enthusiasm.
“Wolf’s Hunger?” I can’t help but ask, after seeing his obvious excitement about the game. Plus, I’m actually dying to know.
“It’s our version of one of America’s favorite pastimes. Football,” he replies solemnly.
“Wolves play football?”
“American wolves do,” he underlines with a half-smile.
“Can I come watch?” I ask enthusiastically. Vuk’s face lights up, but it darkens a second later. “If you like, sure…“To tell the truth, maybe sometime in the future. For now, I think it’s safer if you don’t come watch.” He stiffens for a second. “At the edge of the clearing, amongst the trees, maybe you’d be safe. But when we play… we really let ourselves go, our instincts take over.” He smiles, almost against his will. “And you could be in danger,” he adds, pulling me into his chest.
The forest is thickening, we can barely see a few feet ahead as the road curves around bushes and dense trees.
I can’t decide whether or not to keep questioning him, when we find ourselves in a small clearing, which could even be a garden.
Vuk’s pickup is the only vehicle in sight. I can hear the delicate lapping of the waves of the lake in the near distance, hidden by the vegetation. I spot the house, in a dell at the edge of the forest. Made entirely of dark wood, it is grandiose, magnificent… of a timeless beauty.
“Jeez, real olde-worlde charm!” I exclaim in admiration.
“So you like it,” observes Vuk.
“It’s amazing.”
“It’s the house of our founding fathers,” he explains, proudly. “It’s two centuries old. Well, actually it’s even older. It was built in the mid-18th century, in 1759, to be exact.”
“Wolfeboro…” I reason aloud.
“Exactly,” confirms Vuk. “Originally, the town was called Wolfeboro in honor of William Wolf, my great-grandfather’s grandfather, the oldest of the four young… men who founded it.”
“The same initials as your father, Wilhelm Wolf.”
Vuk nods, pleased I’m paying so much attention. “Since then, New Hampshire became wolf territory, and my family was the closest thing you could get to a royal clan,” he declares proudly, as I hear the echoes of Donn’s words ringing through my head.
“A very ancient and powerful family
” he had said in reference to the Council. “
The closest thing we have to a ruling class.”
In a flash, I see the distinct and important difference between these two legendary grand clans––vampires and wolves. In both cases the monarchy or the ruling class makes political or social decisions regarding their mythological society, assuming a dominant intellectual and moral role.
We cross the small clearing, but the crisscrossed branches of the forest cast such dark shadows on the whole lot that I still can’t visualize the setting clearly. The trees reach right up to the back wall of the house, which faces north.
He pulls up and turns off the engine. “Here we are.”
The entrance is still a little ways away, but at least I can stretch my legs walking after having been cooped up in the car for so long. I look at the long porch that circles the first floor.
“Are you sure? Maybe I shouldn’t be here…” My hands shake, just like Vuk’s did in the library, but my shaking is due to fear, not rage. He notices.
“He’ll get over it,” he laughs. “Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?” he sings.
I chuckle ironically, then gather my courage as I lean on Vuk while I avoid falling over the loose dirt and stray roots. I recall having seen this same color of dirt on his pickup the night of my party. And I also remember how he talked about his brother that night. The look in his eyes right now doesn’t bode well. I know he can sense my tension, his fingers comfortingly stroking the back of my hand as I stumble along.
I almost huddle up behind him as we wait for his brother to appear at the door, but when his tall figure does show up, it’s not what I was expecting. That face, that body. I know Drake. I would never have expected to find myself before the man, his chestnut-colored eyes flecked with green, which had hunted me before the night of the full moon with his friends Ian and Nathan. There’s no trace of them by his side.
The grim image of those terrible young men in the forest is impressed on my mind. But before me is an innocuous young man, dressed only in running shorts. Or maybe he seems harmless because Vuk has taken a protective step forward to cover me.
His brother looks taller than when I last saw him in the woods in the foothills of Green Mountain in Vermont, but Vuk is almost the same height as him. He has thick, long, bronze-colored hair with a few flaming red streaks breaking up the contracted arch of his forehead. The piercings he had on his face have disappeared, like rotten apples fallen from a tree. Maybe he removed them to remove a part of his past, a closed chapter. Perhaps the part of his life between the battle in which he lost his father and the hunt for his prey––me. Only now do I understand the significance of the tattoo on his shoulder: the W. The initial of his father and the family surname, Wolf. A family that is the closest thing wolves have to a royal family, as Vuk said.
His brother is the first to speak: “Vuk, what happened?”
I look at him, petrified, shaking to my very bones. He doesn’t exactly look like a kindly college kid, like Vuk. His scrawny face is that of an adult, already corroded by the trials and tribulations of life. He has no wrinkles, bags under his eyes or actual signs of aging, but there’s a maturity and awareness his face expresses.
“Drake, allow me to introduce Stella,” Vuk finally says, cool and collected. “Stella, this is Drake, my brother.”
Neither of us says a word, we just stare openmouthed at each other. I, because I finally understand the truth. He, because obviously was not expecting to come face to face with me at the threshold of his own home. I look him up and down, trying to size him up objectively. But I feel like a fawn knocking on the door of a grizzly bear. And the image seems to fit like a glove.
“I remember you well. You’re the vampire girl.”
“Yes,” I say, my body stiff as an ironing board. “And you’re the wolf boy.”
Drake stands still just staring at Vuk, keeping his eyes firmly away from my gaze. At first when he saw me hiding behind his brother, he seemed surprised, but that feeling soon gave way to rage.