TONIGHT KRIS FINDS OUT A THING OR TWO FROM JENEAN
With Loreal out of the car, he drove at break neck speed through the semi empty streets until the car skidded on ice, and Chris realized this actually was breakneck speed and no amount of werewolf mystery could keep him from dying if this car crashed. He needed to get back to Jenean, and back to sense.
He was knocking on her door. She was on the second floor and had come down the stair well to let him in. As he came through the door he kissed her and only as he parted from her, did she say, “I thought you’d get back tomorrow, Chris. You look nuts. How the fuck fast did you drive?”
“Do you want me?” he demanded, kissing her as he shut the door with his back and locked it. “Tell me you want me.”
She examined the hunger in her eyes and wondered what kind of slut she was.
These… wolf eyes. Well, all the better.
“Yes,” she said, while he stared into her, rubbing her sides, roughly, his dick visibly pushing against his trousers. .
“I do.”
He pushed her against the door, searching under her robe for panties and finding none.He undid his belt and pulled down his trousers and his briefs. Jeaned shuddered and cried out as, moaning deeply, he pressed himself inside, fucking her against the door. As he fucked her like a piston, grunting, not speaking, his head buried in her shoulder, her back pressed against the door, she gripped his back and clawed into his flesh, biting his shoulder, the two them locked together. She pulled him to the floor.
In her living room, they sat on the sofa, Kris with a beer in his hand.
“I don’t like funerals,” he said. “I don’t like traveling. I’m glad I did both. Believe it or not, I’m starting to feel like myself again.”
They were both naked on the floor, halfway bothering with a duvet. Jenean wondered if they would ever graduate to sittong in chairs in a bedroom like normal people.
Kris wanted to ask, “Are you alright?”
“Whaddo you mean?”
“It was rough,” Chris said. “Even for us. I ought to be more tender. I ought not to behave like such an animal with you.”
“You never make me do anything I don’t want to, Mr. Strauss. And the day you do, I’ll let you know.”
He took a hand through his thick hair.
“I feel like myself when I’m with you. Like my wild self, like the me I tried to tell myself not to be.”
“The pussy bruising you.”
“My Lady, I’ve walked away sore from you a few times. It’s not a sword no matter what they say. It’s meat—”
“I’ll say it is.”
“And you’ve bruised the fuck out of it several times.”
“Would you like me to kiss it?”
“I always like it when you kiss it.”
“Did you learn something worth learning?” Jenean asked. “Not about how tender your dick is. I mean about… whatever you were looking for?”
“Yeah. I learned a lot.”
“ I actually wish I could have gone with you,” she said, pushing that ash blond hair behind behind her shoulder.
“But then if I had…”
She sat down on the carpet instead of the sofa, placing her elbow on his thigh, “I wouldn’t have gotten this bit of… research.”
“Research?”
“Yes,” Jenean said. “Research. Records. My aunt came to visit. She… is not a common aunt.”
Kristian Strauss, wary of strange relatives, raised his eyebrow, but he took a deep swig of beer and only said, “I now about uncommon aunts.”
“A nosey aunt, a record keeping aunt,” Jenean said. “She knows about you.”
“You talk about me?” Kris said, pretending to be flattered and realizing he actually was
“I don’t have good enough relations with most of my family to talk about you,” Jenean said. “Don’t think that’s a reflection on the way I feel about you. But this bitch knows about you, and…. Just look…”
Kris was curious, semi worried, almost ready for anything, more concerned with the roundness of Jenean’s ass and its lovely undulations, that dimple at the small of her back as she walked down the hall and into her room. He would sleep there tonight, as he had on Christmas. If his father’s death was a horrible sort of present, then she was the best.
She returned with an old fashioned leather accordion binder, and handed it to Kris, It was embrossed with a crest, a wolf’s head, and in very small letters, as he opened it, he saw, inscribed about the crest:
La Maison des Loups:
La Famille Jaquillard.
“Shit,” Kris murmured, frowning. “You mind if I put on clothes for this?”
Kris’s eyes scanned the first long sheet of paper, embossed by the wolf’s head.
Dans la mesure où l'histoire de la famille Jaquillard touche à sa fin et dans la mesure où le cadeau que nous avions autrefois été perdu, il me revient en tant qu'historien de cette grande famille de raconter son histoire et sa lignée dans les temps anciens, mais surtout à partir avec la Dame Genève par laquelle nous sommes liés à deux reprises à l’autre ancienne maison, les Wolfemen, qui a traversé une période difficile et qui a ensuite disparu de notre histoire. Voici l'histoire de notre famille qui remonte à cette digne ancêtre, Genève, qui a acquis un grand pouvoir grâce aux Warg, l'esprit de notre maison dont le nom naturel était Stedefeld et qui s'appelle maintenant Hagano…
His French was…. Atrocious, but he could make out some words. He saw Wolfemen and Hagano and when Jenean realized what he was doing, she said, “Chris, the next page.”
“Huh?”
“I ttanslated it.”
“You speak French?”
“My name’s Jenean,” she shrugged.
The next page was far plainer, but in English and he read.
“Insofar as the history of the Jaquillard family is near its end and insofar as the Gift once given to us has been lost, it behooves me as the historian of this once great family to recount its histories and its bloodline into ancient times, but especially beginning with the Lady Geneva by whom we are twice related to the other ancient house, the Wolfemen, who came of hard times and afterward vanished from our history. In way of counting here is the history of our family back unto that worthy ancestress, Geneva, who gained great power through the Warg, the spirit of our house whose name in natural life was Stedefeld and who is now called Hagano…
The history was the size of a small book and all in small font and mostly in French, for Jenean had just begun the translation, but what she had translated and did want him to see was the list of names, and names as familiar as what he and his sister and cousins had seen at Augustus’s house.
“Mitchell Morrison, 1960, Luke Morrison, 1938, Anna Jaquillard Morrison…. Annemarie Jaquillard. His eyes went up the list of names, mostly women, Claudette, Eleanor, Marguerite, Nathalie, Bethune, Frederick, Jacque who was a Protestant, haha And then..”
Tomen, Louis, Henri, Geneva,
“That’s the Geneva your aunt speaks of, and then, Charlotte…
Claire 1345
Ignito 1362
Louis 1390
Charles 1413
Maximillian 1455
Sigismund 1478
Frederick 1501
Charlotte 1525.”
Kris looked up at Jenean.
“This is my family…” then, as his face changed, “Your family.”
“Our family,” Jenean said.
“Then you know.”
Jenean nodded.
“Then you are like me.”
“No,” Jenean said. “Yes, but no. It’s… Aunt Clotilde will explain it to you. She wants to meet you.”
“When did you know?” Kris said. “About me?”
“I suspected,” she said. “On Christmas. Your smell. Your must, your heat. The way we were. The wolf in you. I wondered, but I didn’t know until Clotilde came, when you were gone.”
“You should have gone with me after all,” Kris said.
“I don’t know that much,” Jenean said. “I never have.”
“Me neither,” Kris said.
“We can find out together,” Jenean suggested.
Kristian Strauss nodded.
“You have to all be there, then,” Loreal said.
Chris and Marabeth had insisted that they stay in the house on Dimler, and Jim had said that they should all stay at his apartment. But it was Kruinh’s house they came to, and in the living room, that morning, they were all eating the shrimp and grits Lewis had made, and Lewis was smoking a cigarette. Anne was not up. None of the Drinkers were, for this was the middle of the day and Kruinh had left the house to them.
“Whatever this woman has to say,” said Lewis, “you all must be there, together, to hear it.”
“I want to go with you,” Seth said quickly to Jim.
Jim smiled at him quietly.
“I think I would like that. For you to be there at the end of it all.”
Seth shrugged and said, “Or at the beginning.”
“It’s open,” they heard the woman call.
There was only a slight French accent in her tongue, and when they entered into the large suite, she was in the kitchen.
“Jenean, help me with drinks,” she said said, and the blond woman with the long, swinging hari went into the kitchenette and, a few minutes later, she came out followed by a small, dark haired woman whom Myron thought looked a great deal like Marabeth.
“Drinks for us all,” Clotilde said as she sat in a chair by the fire, and there was sofa before it and when Kris went to sit in the chair across from her, Clotilde shook her head and said, “No, no, that is for the Queen.”
When they all looked at her, she nodded to Marabeth, and feeling embrassed, Marabeth sat down across from Clotilde.
Marabeth had arrived with Jason, which gained a raised eyebrow from Peter, who had come without Joyce. She ignored her cousin, and the detective sat between Seth and Kris, one long leg crossed over the other while he leaned back in his chair.
“Once you would have been queen of your clan and I of mine, but things are as they were long ago, and there is only one queen, and it is you.”
“But why am I the Queen?” Marabeth said.
“Because the werewolf clans were always headed by queens, and what happened to the queen was what happened to the clan. If you would heal your clan, you must heal yourself.”
When Marabeth did not speak, Clotilde continued, “As of yet, you have done little. You did not know what to do. How could you? You had not been taught. And from what I have heard, your Aunt Pamela did what she could. She saved your family in a time when it was nearly wiped out, when mine was still thriving.”
“You are our cousins. So to to speak.”
“So to speak,” the older woman echoed.
“But you said you were a queen,” Marabeth said, ‘Or that you would have been.”
“Yes, but we thought over time it was best to become like other people,” Clotilde said. “The Gift, we thought was a curse. And so we set out to end it. It can be ended.”
“Two generations of women after the werewolf.”
“Yes,” Clotilde smiled and sipped from her drink.
“And so we did this.”
Marabeth did not ask what they had done. Had they castrated boys? Killed them? Prevented them from reproducing by other means? There was no need to ask.
“And in the end it brought ruin,” Clotilde said. “”The Gift was the link to the powers our women had, but those powers were diluted, perverted. The men,” she said, looking at Myron, and Peter, at Kris and Jim, “no longer Changed, but where the Change would happen, they succumbed to madness. Thus” she looked ot her niece, “Jenean’s father, and her grandfather and many before them. We went from a noble house to what you see. But then, so did you. However it seems the Stausses have faired better.”
Marabeth leaned forward.
“I need to know everything,” she said. “If I am the Queen, then I must know everything.”
“It’s all in the story,” Clotilde said, and Kris said, “The Riding Hood.”
“Yes,” Clotilde said to him. “The only story.”
“Tell it to me,” Marabeth said.
Peter stopped himself from groaning. There were other things on his mind, like, did this mean that all his cousins who did not Ghange were destined to be insane. That didn’t seem to be true. But, at least to this woman, Marabeth was the Queen, and Marabeth said:
“We have read the different versions of that story, but we have not heard it from anyone’s mouth. Except for Jim who heard it from Pamela. Tell us the story.”
Clotilde nodded, and as she put down her glass of wine, Marabeth noted her large knuckles. Did she have arthritis? Grandmother, what big knuckles you have.
Clotilde began.
Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the prettiest creature who was ever seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had a a hooded cloak of wolf fur made for her. It suited the girl so extremely well that everybody called her Little Hood.
One day her mother, having made some cakes, said to her, "Go, my dear, and see how your grandmother is doing, for I hear she has been very ill. Take her a cake, and this little pot of butter."
Rosamunde set out immediately to go to her grandmother, who lived in another village.
As she was going through the wood, she met with a wolf, who had a very great mind to eat her up, but he dared not, because of some woodcutters working nearby in the forest. He asked her where she was going. The poor child, who did not know that it was dangerous to stay and talk to a wolf, said to him, "I am going to see my grandmother and carry her a cake and a little pot of butter from my mother."
"Does she live far off?" said the wolf
"Oh I say," answered Rosamunde; "it is beyond that mill you see there, at the first house in the village."
"Well," said the wolf, "and I'll go and see her too. I'll go this way and go you that, and we shall see who will be there first."
The wolf ran as fast as he could, taking the shortest path, and the little girl took a roundabout way, entertaining herself by gathering nuts, running after butterflies, and gathering bouquets of little flowers. It was not long before the wolf arrived at the old woman's house. He knocked at the door: tap, tap.
"Who's there?"
"Your grandchild, Rosamunde," replied the wolf, counterfeiting her voice; "who has brought you a cake and a little pot of butter sent you by mother."
The good grandmother, who was in bed, because she was somewhat ill, cried out, "Pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up."
The wolf pulled the bobbin, and the door opened, and then he immediately fell upon the good woman, slaughtering her. He cut up her flesh and drained her blood into a vial and put them on the fender by the fire. He then shut the door and got into the grandmother's bed, expecting Rosamunde, who came some time afterwards and knocked at the door: tap, tap.
"Who's there?"
Rosamunde, hearing the big voice of the wolf, was at first afraid; but believing her grandmother had a cold and was hoarse, answered, "It is your grandchild Rosamunde, who has brought you a cake and a little pot of butter mother sends you."
The wolf cried out to her, softening his voice as much as he could, "Pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up."
Rosamunde pulled the bobbin, and the door opened.
The wolf, seeing her come in, said to her, hiding himself under the bedclothes, "Have yourself some wine and cake. It is there on the fender. then come get into bed with me."
Rosamunde saw eyes and heart and lungs ate her grandmother’s flesh and drank her blood, and then she took off her clothes and got into bed. The wolf was greatly amazed to see how Rosamunde now looked. Lying naked with him, and he said to her:
"Granddaughter, what big arms you have!"
"All the better to hug you with, my dear."
"Granddaughter, what big legs you have!"
"All the better to run with, my child."
"Granddaughter, what big ears you have!"
"All the better to hear with, my child."
"Granddaughter, what big eyes you have!"
"All the better to see with, my child."
"Granddaughter, what big teeth you have got!"
"All the better to eat you up with."
And, saying these words, Rosamunde fell upon the Wolf and ate him all up.”
“Well, that was something different,” Jim turned to Seth.
“But,” Marabeth said, “I believed that, well, actually, my brothers Kris and JamesMyron believed, that the Grandmother was Leinghelde, the first of us, the first Queen. And then the Riding Hood was Rosamunda, her granddaughter.”
Clotilde smiled with approval, and nodded.
“But… what of the wolf? the wolf who kills the Grandmother?” Peter said.
“But you know who it was,” Clotilde told him.
“Hagano. Stedenfeld.”
“Yes.”
“But the wolf killed the grandmother.”
“The Wolf did not kill the grandmother,” Clotilde said. “The Wolf… how do you say… fucked the Grandmother. Leinghelde was the child of Hagano the Shapeshifter, but she became the shapeshifter because she was also his lover.”
