Blood Trail

aside, wer function much the same way wolves do. Each pack is made up of a family group of varying ages, with a dominant male and a dominant female in charge."

    "Dominant? How?"

    "They run the pack. The family. The farm. They do the breeding."

    "The Stuart and Nadine you mentioned the other night?"

    "That's right."

    Vicki pulled thoughtfully on her lower lip. "For something this important, you'd think that they'd have come and spoken to me."

    "The dominant pair almost never leave their territory. They're tied to the land in ways we just can't understand."

    "You mean, in ways I can't understand," she said testily, his tone having made that quite clear.

    "Yes." He sighed. "That's what I mean. But before you accuse me of, well, whatever it was you were about to accuse me of, you might consider that four hundred and fifty odd years of experience counts for something."

    He had a point. And an unfair advantage. "Sorry. Go on."

    "Donald, Rose and Peter's father, used to be the alpha male, so I imagine the hold is still strong on him. Sylvia and Jason are dead and Colin works nights, which makes it difficult to use me as an intermediary. Rose and Peter, while not adults by wer standards, were the only remaining choice."

    "And they were, after all, only the icing on a cake you were perfectly capable of baking on your own."

    Henry frowned, then smiled as he worked his way through the metaphor. "I didn't think you'd be able to turn them down," he said softly. "Not after you'd seen them."

    And what makes you think I'd be able to turn you down, she wondered, but all she said aloud was, "You were telling me about the structure of the pack."

    "Yes, well, about thirteen years ago, when Rose and Peter's mother died, their Uncle Stuart and Aunt Nadine took over. Stuart was originally from a pack in Vermont but had been beta male in this pack for some time."

    "He'd just wandered in?"

    "The young males often leave home. It gives them a better chance to breed and mixes the bloodlines. Anyway, Donald gave up without a fight. Marjory's death hit him pretty hard."

    "Fight?" Vicki asked, remembering the white gleam of Peter's teeth. "You mean that metaphorically, I hope?"

    "Not usually. Very few dominant males will just roll over and show their throat and Stuart had already made a number of previous attempts."

    Vicki made a bit of a strangled sound in her own throat and Henry reached over and patted her on the shoulder. "Don't worry about it," he advised. "Basically, the wer are just nice, normal people."

    "Who turn into wolves." This was not the way Vicki had been raised to think of normal. Still, she was sitting in a BMW with a vampire - things couldn't get much stranger than that. "Do, uh, all you supernatural creatures hang out together or what?"

    "What?" Henry repeated, confused.

    Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose. It didn't help in the dark but it was a reassuring gesture nevertheless. "Just tell me your doctor's name isn't Frankenstein."

    Henry laughed. "It isn't. And I met Perkin Heerkens, Rose and Peter's grandfather, in a perfectly normal way."

    Slowly, as the day released its hold on the world, he became aware. First his heartbeat, gaining strength from the darkness, the slow and steady rhythm reassuring him that he'd survived. Then breathing, shallow still for little oxygen reached this far below ground. Finally, he extended his senses up and out, past the small creeping things in the earth to the surface.
    Only when he was sure that no human lives were near enough to see him emerge, did he begin to dig his way out.

    His hiding place was more a collapsed foxhole than anything else, although, if discovered, Henry hoped that the Nazis would believe it a shallow grave. Which, he supposed as he pushed through the loose dirt, was exactly what it would be if the Nazis discovered it. Being unearthed in daylight would kill him more surely than enemy fire.

    "I really, really hate this," he muttered as his head broke free and he unhooked the small perforated shield that kept the earth out of his nose and mouth. He dug in only as a last resort, when dawn caught him away from any other shelter. Once or twice he'd almost left it too long and had had to claw the dirt aside with the heat of the sun dancing fire along his back. Burial reminded him too much of the terror of his first awakening, trapped in his common coffin, immortal and alone, hunger clawing at him.

    He had all but one leg clear when he caught sight