Just an Old Legend

Fine. I've danced you all over in this, so let's get this party started. Grab your reading accessories.

In answer to my committing the cardinal sin of romance writers, I want to mention what's going on in Helen's heart. She's loved Ion very much, but there are limitations to him in her mind. I can't really say myself, but she's never tried to do what she can to improve those limitations. It's one thing to have gotten him ID and all, but it's still a big step to get him integrated into modern society. Maybe it's the effort, I dunno. It's made worse by him refusing to give her what she wants and it gets worse all the time.

Did I mention that she loves to a good argument?

Running into Pete, and finding that there is a way to fix what happened, one thing leads to another, I guess. Maybe loving a werewolf isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe loving a bazillionaire is everything it's cracked up to be.

Yeah, I know she's my character. That doesn't mean that I've figured her out myself.

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Bucharest, Romania

Sitting in her apartment, Lia finished her report on the successful hunt of the old renegade in the barn. She logged off the federation server and went back to her mental planning for how she'd begin the ground part of her hunt for the werewolf in the fictional romance.

As she sat back and nibbled on a slice of toast, she kept her eye on her inbox. It didn't take more than the amount of time that she guessed that Micha needed to read what she'd sent before she received an email from him. The message itself was just drivel about month-end figures for some business, but the wording contained key words that told her that he needed to see her. She smiled and finished her toast before heading in.

The meeting was a congratulatory one, and he asked her about making up the vacation. She told him that she'd like that, but also that the kill had just been a clean-up of an old problem in the area. She pointed out how she'd come to her decision, and that what was really on her mind was the fairly real possibility of a renegade in North America - one who might have survived there for up to seven decades.

She remarked that if there was truth to what she had put together, there could well be a woman there in danger at the least, and a whole town at worst. She left twenty minutes later with Micha's blessing for the ground search.

It was what she'd been after the whole time.

Lia's skill and her record allowed her certain privileges over the other hunters, such as hunting down the renegade who had turned Danaya without needing to seek approval beforehand. But she still couldn't mount a whole campaign on her own, so she'd used the one kill to point to the need to root out any subsequent turnings.

And she hadn't said a thing about the bloodline involved.

Micha had agreed that they needed to know if the individual in the book did indeed exist, and if so, was he sane and adjusted? If he was, then Lia had permission to make contact and inquire if he'd like help from the Kaze to fit into modern human society.

If in Lia's sole opinion, he was a possible threat to humans, then she now had authority to remove that threat discreetly.

She secretly hoped to God that it wouldn't come to that as she packed and booked the tickets for her flight.

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Northbound Highway 400 Ontario, Canada

Lia pulled off the highway into a rest stop half an hour out of the city. She left the rental van running and stepped into the back to change. Six minutes later, she was back on the road and motoring northward for a few hours and enjoying the blaze of the fall colors as she reflected.

She always went over things seventy-nines ways or so as she began a hunt, once her feet hit the ground. This time, she found her thoughts hitting walls. There was a slim chance here, and that made this too personal. She recognized that the ideal outcome was long past unlikely, but it prevented her from becoming as clinical in her approach as she would normally be.

That and the time of year prevented her from going about this the way that she'd have preferred. The best way to her mind would have been in the middle of summer. She'd have approached the island and circled it in a boat driven by someone else as she pretended to be sunbathing and looking with binoculars casually.

With that done, she'd have come back and landed after dark to begin this a lot more coldly, taking it nearer and nearer to one end or another. None of that was possible now and besides, if the one in the book was living with the woman, that would have added thousands of complications.

The line of thought raised one possibility that she wanted to consider least of all, though she'd thought of it. What if whoever this mystery werewolf had bitten the writer? She'd be facing two if this went badly. She shrugged. If there were two renegades here, she'd be forced to save herself since she was going in light for that. She'd seen something like that once before. It left less time for examination, and added to her body count.

She found a few unexpected hitches on her arrival. For one thing, finding accommodation was easy. Finding accommodation with WiFi was something else again. The best that she could do was a place where she had to actually plug into their LAN. But any road will do, she thought.

She was a little travel worn, but made the effort to seek out the wealth of tourist information available, and picked up a copy of Stan Beamish's book right there in the motel lobby. After eating a light dinner, she headed back to her room with maps of the area and spent the evening studying.

The next day, she called on Stan at his office. It didn't take all that much to charm the man, and she left with her copy autographed and everything. She didn't really give a fig about that.

He wasn't what one could call forthcoming in his answers about the co-author of the werewolf tale, but his evasiveness told her that she was very close. A trip to the local marina yielded charts of the lake and the channel. It being very near to the end of the season, she was able to rent a boat for the next day with ease and she headed to the local outfitters shop to do a bit of shopping.

As she looked for some warm gear to keep herself from freezing, she stared at the goods and added a few things to her list to grab on her way out of town later in the week. She saw a few things that she thought would light up Dacia's face. The thought came to her that if this trail went cold, her next personal project would be to use some of her vacation time dragging her best friend someplace else on the globe, it didn't matter where. They always had a great time, and she was sure that Dacia had never been out of Romania in her life.

With her purchases in the van, she headed for what passed as the shopping district in the little place.

The customs were a little odd for buying oneself a bottle of wine, but she managed to find the one outlet there and in the drug store down the block, she had to smile to herself. Right next to the stand of sunglasses was a rack full of novels, and she picked up a new copy of the one that Dacia had recommended. Hers was dog-eared by now and the insides of both covers were covered in cryptic little notes in Romanian that she'd written while in Tenerife.

She'd asked Beamish a few questions about the land registry office. Armed with his answers, she was on the road. Two hours later, Lia knew who had purchased the island. So much for the pen name, she thought as she headed back to the town for dinner.

As she sat in the restaurant eating and poring over maps, a hopeful man stopped by her table trying to pick her up and, using the maps that he saw on the table as his opening. Lia listened to his pitiful attempt as he offered to "show her around" the area, and his questions about what she was looking for.

She shrugged and answered him in Russian.

Every time that he tried to speak, she replied in a different language. It was hard for her to keep a straight face, but after Italian, Greek, Romanian, German and Swedish and Spanish, she grew tired of it.

He tried once more and she pointedly told him to fuck himself in Japanese. He still didn't get it, but he understood the tone and the look.

She checked the local weather forecast and turned in.

The next day dawned bright, clear, windy and cold. Lia was glad of her purchases then.

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It had been a week now. He sat on the ridge overlooking the crude steps to the dock. The weather had dawned bright and cold. He didn't mind it as much as he'd minded the distance which had opened up between himself and Elena when they were in the same room their last evening together. The issue of him biting her had risen once more. He knew that she had no idea what she was asking for.

She kept calling it a gift that he was withholding from her. And after making a statement to that effect, she invariably followed it up with something along the lines of this after everything that she'd done for him. He thought about that a lot, and he always came up a little short to his way of looking at it.

She'd bought the island and allowed him to live on it with her, she'd said. He smiled as he thought that it wasn't as if he wasn't here anyway, he'd been here for decades before she'd been born. The island had a different owner now, but it still wasn't him. He'd once thought of asking her what she'd do about it if she didn't "allow" him to live on it anymore.

She'd bought him some clothes. That was nice, he realized, but he hadn't ever asked her to, and really, what was the purpose of that? Aside from two trips to the town, she'd never taken him there again or anywhere else for that matter in all of this time. The whole desire to be bitten had only surfaced within the last four months.

He hadn't been off the island in over a year.

At first he thought that perhaps he'd embarrassed her somehow, but then realized that he couldn't have, really. She'd told him to let her do all of the talking, so that's what he'd done.

She sometimes made a big deal about having bought him some identification so that he could pass freely among the humans, making sure to tell him how much it had cost her to do it. He hadn't asked for this either, and anyway, he'd never gotten a chance to use it. If she needed anything in town, she went alone and never asked him to come along.

The only thing that really bothered him a little was that she'd promised to teach him the ways of the modern world, but that hadn't happened. He'd asked a few times, but she'd told him that she was busy or she'd just put it off. Whatever her original intent, he still didn't know how to live the way that she did.

He was still a prisoner on the island.

Despite the success of her book, the only benefit that he saw from it was to her, since she now often went on book-signing appearance tours for her publisher. During those trips, he was left alone. The magical bank account that she'd spoken to him about had never materialized either.

He hadn't said a thing about what his nose told him each time that she returned. She came back smelling of far more soaps and cosmetic smells than she did when she left. That didn't bother him originally the first time that he'd noticed it. He'd assumed that she would come back with the different scents from the places that she'd been.

But she'd made an error then by almost dragging him to bed on her return each time, saying that she'd missed him so and now wanted to make up for lost time, make it up to him for being without her, she'd said.

During those times, his nose told him what all of the baths, showers, soaps and cosmetics couldn't hide from the skin that he'd loved to smell -- anywhere on her. Only the passage of at least a day would hide the scent that he'd picked up under her jaw, even though she'd applied perfume there.

She'd taken another male, and he'd had to play the worst acting game in pretending that he didn't know it. She'd wanted the wolfman every time she'd returned, but he was careful not to allow himself that.

He didn't want to kill her over it.

He thought about it for hours every time after she'd gone to sleep. More than once his tears had come to him, but he'd asked himself what he'd thought that he could have expected. The last time had been two days before, and it had planted the seeds for this argument, since he'd refused when she'd wanted to go to bed.

He thought that he now knew what it was to be an unwanted pet.

He did his best not to get caught up in the way that she often tried to bait him, but that invariably drove her to get angrier with him, he realized sadly. She couldn't see that it was this that pushed him away harder than anything. He could overlook most of everything here, he thought, but her dogged determination to win any misunderstanding now that he was in her bad graces was what hurt him the most because her belittlement of him was not long in coming afterward.

He never mentioned how it felt to him that she now plainly regarded him to be stupid. He wondered about that. To him, it was stupid for her to forget that he could end her existence with one motion. But she likely supposed that he'd never be driven to do that, and in that aspect she'd be correct.

He'd done something else.

The final issue had been her telling him that the food that she provided was costly to her. He smirked now as he remembered that she'd said that while eating the potatoes and vegetables that he'd grown there. He'd stared for a second and then quietly told her that he was very sorry for everything. Helen had misinterpreted it to mean just the argument and she'd pounced on that.

He'd actually meant that he was very sorry that he'd ever let her see him in the first place.

He'd stood up and gathered a very few things while ignoring her - the few clothes that she'd bought for him the year before, the letters to and from Danaya, along with his old sawed-off shotgun and the shells. She'd protested at that, but he'd quietly said that they were his, unless she now wanted the clothes back. The gun was illegal anyway, he said. He was doing her a favor. What could the police do to him, after all? The letters were another matter, he'd said. He pointed out that she now made money from her tale of his unfortunate life, and he wanted the letters back. In that regard, he told her, she was no better than anyone else who'd taken what was his from him.

She had no argument for that, and only stood there staring.

"You want to be bitten because you think you would like to live longer," he'd said quietly, "it is not so much fun to live longer when you have to jump after mice and bite their heads off so that your stomach stops aching. Bears stink when they're living, and they're hard to kill sometimes. They are even less appealing when they are dead and you have to eat while covered in their blood."

"And what am I to do when you get the idea to hunt something easier, like people? What am I supposed to do if you go mad and stay crazy? I have done this once already, protecting people from a crazy she-wolf. I cannot do it again. And for what? You told me many things, but I am still here and nothing has changed much for me while your life has gotten better."

He'd regarded her a little bitterly, "Hornets do not ask me to stick myself into their nests. I sometimes get stung only passing by, but they hurt me less than your words. Why do you drive the people that you say you love away from you? I have seen you do many things that I might consider to be stupid, but I would never say it to someone who I love." She looked into his eyes and saw nothing there but regret.

He'd just walked out into the night while she'd stood in the doorway saying that this was his solution for everything. She was wrong, of course, though she didn't get it right away. It was only his solution this one time. He'd turned then and spoke very quietly. She had to strain to hear him, but she heard it.

"You have made almost all of the choices between us. You have told me how it will be, how it will be done, whatever the issue is. I have said nothing and done what you wanted. I will only tell you of your own stupidity once."

Helen had almost walked to him then, wanting to take what sounded like a coming challenge that she'd argue down, but he'd finished his thought then and she was left with no wind in her sails.

"You have been stupid coming to me, thinking to cover your guilt by mating with me. It is your choice, Elena. But if you have love for your new male, do not ever bring him here."

He'd turned then and walked off into the night.

It had taken a week, but then she'd walked all over the island calling to him and saying that she was sorry. He'd watched her from a distance. She wasn't as sorry as he was for all of this.

He now kept his few clothes in a metal toolbox in the barn where the mice couldn't get at them and went back to hunting for himself. She hadn't seen him since, but he'd watched her leave seven days ago looking unhappy. They hadn't spoken in almost three weeks. He planned to make that permanent, now that he'd realized his error.

He should have just never tried to get close enough to meet her that day on the beach. They'd have been fine if she'd never seen him.

He supposed that even if she didn't return, there were a few things that he ought to do to prepare for the winter that he knew was just around the corner. This had to be one of the last good days. Soon the calendar would roll over into November, and that always brought days of icy cold rain and storms. A hell of a way to presage the snows that came right afterward, he thought.

He'd need to scout out burrows again. He'd cleaned out the old cast iron stove in the back of the barn and had put up a few boards to give himself a small room. There was firewood cut and stacked inside, so after the hunters had come and gone, he could live in the barn in a bit of comfort, and if worse came to worst, he'd live as a beast once more.

As he thought about everything, his attention was drawn to a speck out on the water. It didn't take him long to decide that it was a small boat out there, heading toward the island at a time of year when there was almost no one out on the water anymore. He wondered about it, since it was too small to be the wooden launch that Elena had bought the previous year, and the aluminum boat that had come with the sale of the island was right there below him, tied to the dock.

The boat was still a long way off, but he had a sense that he might want to be more discreet in his observation of it. Making no sudden or large moves, he drew away from the ridge to stand inside a grove of saplings that afforded him much the same view as the edge, but provided a lot more cover.

Lia reached into her pocket for the compact set of binoculars that she'd bought and scanned the island. She knew that she'd probably see nothing much as she approached. The maps and satellite photos had shown the house to be set far back from the dock and likely it wouldn't be visible anyway. A quick look told her that she'd been right. She put them away and concentrated on keeping the cold wind from freezing her ears off. As she neared the dock, she throttled back and glided along the channel side of the dock to tie up.

Ion had watched her approach with rising concern. He wasn't sure how to handle this. He saw the slender woman in the bomber jacket wearing mirror aviation sunglasses and had even noted in passing that she had nice legs in those jeans.

He wondered why she'd come. There were no other islands on this side of the channel, and the others were almost a mile away on the other side of it. He thought that he could maybe just handle this dressed as he was until she set her pack down on the dock.