Blood and Chocolate

"Mom, you've been fighting again."

Vivian glared at her mother.

Esmé Gandillon lolled in an easy chair, one long slim leg thrown over the arm. She refused to stop grinning. A gash in her cheek still bled slightly.

"You look awful," Vivian said.

"Yeah, but you should see the other bitch," Esmé answered. She scratched her scalp luxuriously with both hands, tousling her thick blond hair.

Vivian sighed and came over to dab at her mother's cheek with a tissue grabbed from the box on the coffee table. She would ruin her beautiful face. "Can't you and Astrid leave each other alone?" It had been like this ever since they'd moved here from West Virginia, over a year ago now. She hardly knew her mother anymore. "Can't you?" she repeated.

"Rafe called for you," Esmé said, ignoring the question.

Vivian rolled her eyes. That was all she needed. Couldn't he take a hint?

Esmé sat up and looked directly at her daughter. "I thought that's where you were, with Rafe and the others."

"No, I wasn't." She bristled at the thought. The five young males who were her only age-mates were likely to get the rest of the pack killed if they kept on going the way they were.

"So where were you?"

Vivian turned to leave the room. Since when was her mother so worried about where she was? "Down by the river, at the rocks," she said over her shoulder.

"What were you doing there?"

"Nothing."

As she left, Vivian heard her mother growl softly in frustration.

Why did Esmé always have to bring up the Five? Couldn't she get it through her head that Vivian didn't want to be with them?

The familiar knot in her gut formed hard and tight. The fire last year had been the Five's fault - and Axel's. She slammed the door of her room. The inside face of the door was channeled with claw marks. She grew her nails and ripped another row.

Axel had to go and lose it and kill that girl.

Axel had been acting wilder and wilder last spring, and talking crazy stuff. She heard him and the Five boast about midnight visits to town where they stalked humans in the shadows and scared them silly. What they did sounded funny. Vivian made them take her, too. But rumors started going around school. People were getting nervous. When Vivian said maybe they should cool it. Axel and the Five only laughed at her.

Then Axel began to go off by himself, and something seemed wrong to her. He didn't talk as much. It drove her crazy.

I was half in love with Axel, Vivian thought as she stripped off her leggings. Rafe thought I was his girl but I would have dropped him in a second for Axel. She sniffed in disgust. Caring for Axel made me stupid.

She'd seen their behavior spinning out of control, and she hadn't done a thing. She should have told her father what they'd been up to, even if that meant she'd be in trouble herself. But you didn't squeal on your friends, did you?

Then the night of the Valentine's dance Axel went to town alone and killed a girl in back of the school.

Vivian still felt the heat of anger when she thought of what he'd done. She couldn't help thinking he killed for some petty reason, like the girl turned him down. And he could have had me, she thought bitterly.

He must have been changing back when a classmate saw him crouched over the body. Before Axel knew he was there, the boy took off and named him to the police.

The Five decided to help. They killed another girl while Axel was in jail. They didn't let Vivian know their plans; they must have thought she'd object. And I would have, she thought, but she wasn't sure.

"How could a boy be covered in fur? How could a human inflict such wounds?" the family lawyer pleaded for Axel. The new killing while Axel was locked up proved there was a wild animal on the loose. Axel had merely discovered the body, then had panicked and run. The case was dismissed.

But someone from town believed the witness's tale of a wolf that turned into a boy, and late one night the inn and outbuildings burst into flame in six different spots, and black acrid smoke hid the moon.

In the 1600s, her ancestors had fled from werewolf hysteria in France to the sparsely settled New World, and by the end of the century had settled in wild Louisiana. In nineteenth-century New Orleans the Verdun triplets broke the ban on human flesh and the pack moved in haste to West Virginia, where they were joined by the remnants of a German pack from Pennsylvania. Last year the forbidden appetite had won again, and the pack took flight from the hills that had been its home for one hundred years and arrived refugees in the Maryland suburbs - five families plus assorted others crammed into Uncle Rudy's run-down Victorian house in Riverview. With luck, no one would follow them here; they could mark new trails.

The house on Sion Road had emptied out gradually as the others found jobs and places to stay, until it held only Vivian, Esmé, and Uncle Rudy. Vivian had thought that by this time they would have made plans for the future, but now the whole pack seemed to be crazy, her mother included. With more than half of them dead, no one knew his or her place anymore. There was constant squabbling. Survival depended on their blending in while they organized and decided where they would move and settle for good, but at any moment the pack was likely to explode in a ball of flying fur. They needed a leader badly, but no one could agree who.