Feral Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Nicole Luiken Humphrey

  Great Plains Publications

  1173 Wolseley Avenue

  Winnipeg, MB R3G 1H1

  www.greatplains.mb.ca

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.

  Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience

  Printed in Canada by Friesens

  Second printing, 2019

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Feral : a novel / Nicole Luiken.

  Names: Luiken, Nicole, 1971-author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190110597 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190110600 |

  isbn 9781773370316

  (softcover) | ISBN 9781773370323 (epub) | isbn 9781773370330 (Kindle)

  Classification: lcc ps8573.u534 f57 2019 | ddc jc813/.6—dc23

  Dedication

  In memory of Elmer Zumwalt. We were so lucky to

  have you in our lives, first as my father-in-law and later

  as grandfather to our children. You are missed.

  chapter

  1

  They’d left her behind.

  A hot ball of shame and anger lodged in Chloe’s throat as she ran along the dirt track through the forest. Bad enough Coach Wharton had bluntly told her to go home, that she couldn’t keep up, but her so-called teammates had run off without so much as a backward look.

  And maybe Coach was right. Maybe she couldn’t run as fast as the rest of the track team, but it wasn’t in her to give up.

  They were too far ahead now to realistically catch, but if she took the shortcut and really pushed it she could run the last bit of the loop with them.

  Chloe put her head down and increased her pace, until her feet flew down the trail, crunching on yellow leaves, until her lungs heaved and a bright stitch of pain pinched at her side. It felt good to push her body to its limits.

  A furtive rustling noise alerted her that she was no longer alone. Half-hidden among the evergreen trees, a wolf paced her.

  A surge of hope washed away the fatigue from her muscles. Had one of her teammates dropped back to run with her and encourage her? Judy, maybe?

  But the wolf hung back in the trees, and her heart sank back into her cross-trainers.

  Not a companion. What, then? A babysitter? Coach couldn’t possibly think she’d get lost. Unlike him, she’d grown up running these trails. Was this a test to see if she’d keep training on her own or wimp out and go home?

  Chloe pretended not to notice the wolf and kept running, concentrating on keeping her stride easy and smooth. If this was a test, she’d pass it. If this was some kind of hazing, meant to scare her, then she’d endure that too and prove that she belonged to the Pack.

  Because she did. She had all the extra werewolf strength and agility: her senses were keener than those of her townie classmates, and she’d had no difficulty qualifying for the high school track and field team. Her townie classmates simply couldn’t compete physically with Pack. In human form she could outrun everyone but Dean. But her fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth birthdays had passed, and she still had not Changed.

  All the other teens in her age group had. Even Judy, the smallest and most nervous of them all, had Changed into her wolf form three full moons ago.

  And when track and field started up again in September, Coach had wanted them to run in their wolf forms. Because while there were townie kids on the other sports teams, Coach Wharton had decreed a limited number of slots on the track and field team and filled them all with Pack. Practices were mostly just an excuse to spend time together. What they were actually learning from Conrad Wharton was how to control themselves as werewolves.

  Chloe risked another glimpse at the wolf, trying to identify who it was by its colouring. Not all white like Coach. Not red like Judy. Other than that she couldn’t tell. She got only flashes of white and grey and maybe brown between the tree trunks.

  She ought to have known it wasn’t Judy. Ever since her Change, Judy had started acting as if she were better than Chloe.

  Judy’s smugness and the veiled contempt in Coach Wharton’s eyes rubbed Chloe’s ego raw. For most of her life Chloe had been the leader of the Pack teens, and now everyone was Dominant to her. Last week, Coach Wharton had told Dean that she might never Change because she was too afraid of the pain. Her! Who’d never so much as whimpered during one of Coach’s brutal three-hour training runs.

  And now that contempt had spread to the other kids like an infection. They closed their shoulders against her when she approached, as if she were a townie.

  Tears burned in her eyes, blurring the trail. She accidentally stepped on a root and her ankle twisted beneath her. Pain shot up her leg. The bonfire raging inside demanded that she keep running through the pain, keep trying to catch them at the end of the shortcut, but her dad had lectured too many other Pack members about the stupidity of ignoring pain.

  Chloe dropped onto a fallen log at the side of the trail and sucked down some of the water in her squeeze bottle. Her ankle would be fine in a moment. Werewolves healed fast—so fast it took something major to kill them—but she’d probably lost all chance of catching up with the Pack.

  How could she have all the werewolf gifts and not have the ability to Change? It wasn’t fair, but every generation there were a few Recessives, werewolves by heritage who were unable to Change. Also known as Duds.

  Chloe’s fists clenched. She was not a Dud. Glaring, she suddenly caught the blue eyes of a wolf staring out at her from behind a screen of underbrush.

  Chloe shot to her feet, temper pumping through her. “Stop lurking. I know you’re there. I’m not blind.” Did her Packmates think they could scare her? Puh-lease. She’d grown up among werewolves.

  The wolf faded back into the brush. Chloe nodded, satisfied, and sat back down.

  But when she resumed her run, movement flashed in her peripheral vision. The idiot wolf had started tailing her again. Fine, we can play it that way. Chloe pretended not to notice, waiting until her sharp ears told her that her pursuer had ventured a little too close, then suddenly reversed direction and cut left into the trees.

  A thick stand of young pine kept the wolf from retreating. It hunched its shoulders and growled. Chloe stopped in surprise. The wolf had a creamy chest and underbelly, black back and tail, blue eyes, and a distinctive black stripe bisecting its forehead. Who was it? None of the wolves in her Pack had colouring like this one.

  The wolf couldn’t be wild. Real wolves stayed far, far away from Pack territory, and this one was just standing there, staring at her head-on, unafraid. Unless the animal was sick? Chloe sniffed the air. Instead of the Pine Hollow Pack scent, the wolf smelled of wildness, musk and a hint of iron. No odour of disease. All the Pack kids got rabies shots as a matter of course, but Chloe’s veterinarian dad had made sure she could recognize the signs of it, plus distemper and other canine ills. This wolf wasn’t sick, so it had to be a werewolf.

  Its pelt lacked the shine of a healthy wolf, and its ribs protruded. It was skinny and not full grown. Her nostrils flared. “That better not be you, Gail,”
she threatened. Judy’s little sister was thirteen, a not unheard of age for the Change, but—

  She stepped forward. The wolf snapped its teeth at her and broke left past her into the trees.

  Instinct made her give chase, but she stopped after a few steps because—hello?—four legs were always going to be faster than two.

  In frustration, she shouted after the werewolf: “I’m going to find out who you are and kick your butt!”

  Sometimes having werewolf parents sucked.

  Not because they were bad parents, but because they were supernaturally good at knowing when she was upset and ferreting out the truth. Like now.

  “Chloe, is something wrong? You’ve sighed three times in the last five minutes,” her mom said.

  Chloe stared down at her biology textbook and binder. She was in the kitchen. Her mom had been down in the basement doing laundry. A normal parent wouldn’t have noticed Chloe’s sighs, but, noooo, hers had to have super-hearing.

  “Hmmm?” Chloe pretended to be absorbed in jotting down a note.

  “Look at me.” A note of warning sounded in her mom’s voice as she asserted her Dominance.

  Another thing that sucked about having werewolf parents: Chloe couldn’t refuse the command of someone Dominant to her. She looked up.

  “Now tell me what’s wrong.” Her mother was petite with pale skin, dark auburn hair tied back in a ponytail, and grey eyes, but her strength of will made her a force to be reckoned with.

  Chloe shrugged, doing her best to downplay her answer without lying. Item three: lying to a Dominant was pointless; they could always tell. Fortunately, Chloe had a lot of practice at telling the truth while still omitting what she wanted to conceal. “Nothing new. Just the usual inability to Change.” She was not going to complain to her mother about Coach being mean to her like some whiny child.

  “Oh, honey.” Her mother’s expression softened, and she stooped to give Chloe a quick hug. “Be patient. It will come. I’ve been doing some research, and I’ve found some cases similar to yours. Come see.”

  Her mom beckoned her into the living room, where she pulled down a large 150-year-old book bound in red leather. As Pack historian, her mom kept the only copy of the Pack Lore.

  Her mom paged past what Chloe thought of as the “fairy tale” part of the book, which was full of slightly twisted Slavic folktales, involving wolves and characters like Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless. The rest of the book was full of handwritten diary entries, records of genealogy and the occasional recipe.

  “Here.” Her mother tapped a line. Chloe squinted at the black squiggle until her mom took pity on her and read it out: “1944 —Ivan Andrews Changed for the first time, age 18.”

  Okay, that was a little encouraging. Except for the death entry that came immediately after: “Died in battle.”

  “And there’s another one.” Her mom turned to a second sticky note in an older section of the book. The handwriting here was in a different hand, but easier to read.

  “1884—Andrei Peterov bathed in the light of the full moon and Changed, age 21,” Chloe read aloud.

  “What’s this?” Chloe’s dad strolled into the room. His grey sweatshirt and jeans hung on his lanky frame. He looked like the science geek that he was. Chloe might resemble him—they had the same brown eyes and wavy dark hair that became unmanageable if not cut short—but she was more social like her mother.

  “Apparently, I can’t Change because I haven’t bathed in the moonlight,” Chloe said ironically. After three years of trying, she was pretty sure she’d hit every phase of the moon.

  Her mom swatted her shoulder. “I was just showing Chloe that she’s not the first Pack member that didn’t Change until they were her age or older.”

  Her dad peered down at the diary. “Sheer superstition. Look at the next entry: ‘Mary Kosti wasted away from a witch’s curse. Died, age 72.’ At that age, werewolf good health starts to wear off. She probably had cancer. There’s always a scientific explanation.”

  Her mom rolled her eyes. “Says the man who can Change into a wolf.”

  “Adaptive colouration—” her dad started.

  Chloe had heard the arguments before. Time to change the subject. She had a question for him anyway. “Dad, are there any werewolves visiting from other Packs right now?” Maybe that might explain the identity of the wolf who’d shadowed her in the forest.

  Packs were territorial, and the handful that lived in Canada were widely scattered. Visitors weren’t unheard of, but there was always an announcement because sniffing around a strange Pack uninvited was a good way to get your neck snapped. If not for the need to keep the Packs from getting too inbred, they would probably avoid each other entirely. Even then, mingling usually took place in neutral territory.

  Chloe’s dad was originally from the Churchill, Manitoba Pack. He’d met Chloe’s mom at university. After they married, Chloe’s dad had moved to Alberta and joined her mom’s Pack. He’d been welcome because of his profession, but it was hard to switch Packs. A lot of times the couple would split apart after a few years and each return to his or her birth Pack, leaving one parent to raise the child. That was the case with both Dean and Brian’s families.

  “No one’s visiting. Why?” He pushed up his glasses.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have brought it up. The werewolf had been a juvenile. If they weren’t a visitor, then the werewolf was probably a runaway; Chloe didn’t want to get a kid in trouble. “Oh, I thought I saw a strange wolf this afternoon. I was probably just mistaken.” She tried to sound as if she’d merely glimpsed the wolf in the distance.

  Anyone else in the Pack would have dropped it then, dismissing the word of a Dud. Her dad frowned, taking the matter seriously. “I’ll phone around and find out if any alerts for ferals have been issued. I don’t think they ever found Paul Riebel.”

  A feral. Huh. Chloe hadn’t considered that possibility. She remembered hearing about Paul Riebel. The Thunder Bay, Ontario werewolf’s brand-new car had been rear-ended and he’d gone berserk, Changing and killing the other driver. He’d run off into the woods afterward and gone feral. Real wolves were shy of humans and their guns. Feral werewolves, who’d rejected their humanity and stayed wolf for too long, were dangerous.

  “It wasn’t him.” In the pictures Paul Riebel had been a big man and so had his wolf. Moreover, his wolf had a solid black pelt. The strange wolf might be a feral, but it wasn’t Paul Riebel.

  Mystery unsolved.

  The wolf prowled around the snug house that the dark-haired girl had disappeared inside hours before.

  Unnatural light spilled from the windows. He kept to the shadows. An anxious whine rose in his throat. Humans were stinky. Loud. Dangerous. He shouldn’t have followed the girl. He shouldn’t still be lingering here, but every time he started to lope away, something drew him back.

  Slowly, it occurred to him that maybe he’d found what he was looking for. He’d been travelling for so long that he’d forgotten the reason behind his journey.

  The days had blended into an endless grey Now, where he thought only about the weather, hunting prey, and shelter. Half-remembered instinct had kept him travelling south and slightly west. Skirting around towns.

  Until the girl’s scent had drifted across his path. She was what he’d been hunting for—if only he could remember why.

  chapter

  2

  Chloe’s shoulders tensed as she walked the gauntlet into school. Three Pack boys leaned against the wall near the entrance and watched her with hooded eyes as if she were prey.

  Kyle started it. “Dud,” he coughed into his fist.

  Brian echoed him. Cough: “Dud.”

  Chloe didn’t blush, but she did burn inside with humiliation.

  Dean stood closest to the door. He didn’t bother coughing. He jostled her arm as he strolled past. “Hey look, it’s Chloe the Dud.”

  Other kids milled around. Townies, not Pack. But in that moment Chloe didn’t care.
Red hazed her vision. She shrugged out of her backpack, turned and took a running leap onto Dean’s back.

  A normal boy would have been driven to his knees by the sudden attack. Dean staggered, but quickly recovered. “Get off!”

  Chloe clung like a monkey while he spun in circles, shoving at her legs. She grabbed his ear and twisted hard. “Not until you take it back. I’m. Not. A. Dud.” With each word she twisted harder.

  He grabbed at her hands, growling. A twinge of worry shot up her spine, but they were at school. He couldn’t Change to werewolf form. Her chest lightened with triumph. She should have done this months ago—

  “Chloe Graham!” Rough hands yanked her off Dean’s back and dumped her on the ground. Ow. Coach towered over her, his expression as dark as a thundercloud. A blond, muscular man in his mid-twenties, Conrad Wharton had a very fair complexion. When he got angry, as he was now, red crept up his hairline, making his blond eyebrows stand out as if highlighted. His nostrils flared. “Thirty push-ups! Now!” he bellowed. “Everyone else inside. This doesn’t concern you.”

  Her euphoria fading, Chloe started rapping off push-ups, touching her nose to the concrete.

  Coach crouched near her, his voice for her ears alone. “You forget where you are. This isn’t elementary school.”

  She should take the rebuke in silence. She knew it, but— “They started it. I just finished it.”

  He flattened his hand between her shoulder blades, holding her down so that her arms ached with the strain. “You pushed one of your Packmates to the edge of control, and for what? Calling you a name that you know is true?”

  Her throat constricted, making it hard to speak. “I’m not a Dud.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Coach straightened. He waited, muscular arms crossed, for her to finish her push-ups, even after the first bell rang.

  Her arms were trembling by the time she reached thirty, but pride wouldn’t let her collapse. She stood. “May I be excused?”

  He nodded.

  She snatched up her backpack and walked stiffly inside. She ignored the townies’ stares with ease, but the Pack kids’ glares ate at her. Bile flooded her stomach. Instead of the respect she’d wanted, cold contempt shone in their eyes.