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To the Wolves by Jezunya






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Chapter 5 – Bloodlines

 

 

Renesmee

 

“Tell me about your family.”

 

I was watching Jacob’s face intently as he glanced down at me, whatever heavy thoughts had been clouding his expression seeming to evaporate the moment our eyes met.

 

I swallowed and willed my steps to remain even, caught off guard by his easy smile. He didn’t make any sense to me.

 

“What do you want to know?” he asked, one corner of his lips quirking up.

 

I blinked up at him, trying to think quickly. Truth be told, I hadn’t expected him to just agree and open up like this. Who goes around offering up their life story to any stranger who asks? Especially when for all intents and purposes that stranger should be a veritable thorn in your side, a disruption, a bratty, weepy, ungrateful-

 

“What are your parents like?” I blurted.

 

I was grateful, though. Undeserving, maybe, of the consideration he’d shown me so far, but definitely grateful. I just couldn’t understand why he would be so kind to me.

 

Jacob drew a long breath in, looking up at the sky as we walked, smiling as though he were running through years of happy memories in his head. “Well, my father’s name is William, but he mostly goes by Billy,” he said. “He’s a carpenter by trade, but a scholar at heart. History, mostly.” He smiled crookedly, shaking his head. “He taught me some of both, when I was younger, before I came of age and joined the Pack.”

 

“The pack?” I asked, glancing up at him questioningly.

 

He looked back down at me, blinking as though just realizing I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Oh, uh – see, when you’re young, you only change once a month, when everyone does, on the full moon.”

 

“Change,” I said slowly, making sure I understood, “into a wolf?”

 

“Right,” he nodded, without even a hint of condescension or impatience. How did he do that? “Everyone turns into wolves on the night of the full moon, but some people, when they come of age, usually around sixteen or seventeen, will start changing more often than that.”

 

I nodded, remembering the view from my window last night. “And… you’re one of those people? Do you… change every night, then?”

 

He blinked, then shook his head, chuckling. “No, see, it means I can control when I shift. I could do it right now, even.”

 

“Really?” I stared up at him, feeling strangely breathless at the idea.

 

He slanted an odd look down at me, seeming surprised by my reaction. “That… doesn’t scare you?”

 

I looked back up at him carefully. “Should it?” I asked.

 

It was like something out of a fairytale, unlike anything I’d ever seen. Men turning into wolves, and then back again, just by sheer force of will. That was almost all we knew of the Quileutes – they could turn into wolves. They hereditarily tended toward darker hair and skin. Their kingdom was thickly forested, and they were no strangers to the mountains. And they absolutely refused to mix with the outside world, to let foreigners like us, like me, learn anything substantial about them.

 

“It can be dangerous,” Jacob admitted, looking away.

 

I did remember one fact I’d read during my studies – during the many hours spent poring over the meager supply of books on the subject in my family’s vast library – something that was only mentioned in passing, jotted down in a worn travel log by one of Grandfather’s emissaries years before I was born. The man talked of the roiling political situation during his visit, mentioning that the throne had just changed hands, that a new king had just assumed rule of the kingdom. And this new king, Samuel, was anything but sympathetic to us. Not that any of his predecessors had been either, but where they had treated Grandfather’s messengers with cool indifference, King Samuel now met them with outright violence.

 

“Do you… know what you’re doing when you’re like that?” I asked, swallowing.

 

Matthias, the ambassador who had written about this King Samuel and whose record had captivated my research more than any of the others, had made one small comment that now swirled around in my head, echoing and splintering and reforming again: he’d described the wolves’ transformation.

 

Jacob looked at me sharply, and I imagined I felt his arm shake a little where my hand rested on it. I swallowed, refusing to drop his gaze.

 

Ambassador Matthias had been attacked, driven out of the Quileute kingdom with a pack of angry wolves snapping at his heels. He had recounted the experience as he lay healing, weak from fear and bloodloss, barely able to make it back to our lands safely.

 

“I would never hurt you, Renesmee,” Jacob said at last, the sincerity in his voice making the ache in my chest start anew.

 

We didn’t know what actually set off the process, what made a human body suddenly reform itself into a huge, ferocious wolf. Could a simple flash of emotion do it? A heated argument, perhaps? Was it entirely involuntary then?

 

Matthias’ words ran through my head, as though narrating the scene that had played out between Jacob and I less than a half hour ago.

 

The trembling rushes through their bodies, no doubt due to a wave of signals traveling down the spinal column, into the limbs.

 

I remembered the way he’d seemed to choke on his air, the way the whites of his eyes had shown around his irises. How his hands had quaked as they reached for me.

 

It’s as if they shake themselves out of existence, and the wolf steps in to take their place – man no more, only snarling beast.

 

In that moment, I had been truly afraid of him.

 

I couldn’t even imagine how close I must have come to meeting Jacob’s inner wolf – something that I knew would be an entirely different experience up close and personal than watching from my fourth story window while the beast slept peacefully below. Jacob might be sympathetic to me, kind and gentle and whatever else made him treat me with such consideration – but there was no telling if the wolf that appeared when he disappeared would be anywhere near so concerned for me.

 

He stopped it, though, I reminded myself. I wasn’t blind to the struggle he’d gone through as he wrenched himself to his feet and fled out into the field. I could only imagine the amount of willpower it took to hold back the snarling beast inside him, so ready to burst out of Jacob’s skin and finish off the infuriating little girl in front of it. But he had done it; he had stopped it, probably at the cost of his own peace of mind and calm, just to save me.

 

I was just ashamed now that I had sat there for several long minutes, too scared to go after him or even move.

 

Jacob seemed to have fallen into a similarly pensive mood beside me, watching me carefully as I mulled over all this. “Do you still want to hear about my family?” he asked quietly after several moments.

 

I looked back up at him, the sound of his voice doing more to calm my nerves than I would have expected – or cared to admit. “Yes, of course. If you don’t mind, I mean.”

 

He smiled again, shaking his head slightly – indulgent was the word that came to mind as I watched him – and began to speak again.

 

He told me about his sisters, Rachel and Rebecca – twins, which was apparently quite a common occurrence in their land, unlike the oddity that Uncle Emmett and Aunt Rose’s boys were in ours. He laughed when I commented on that, grinning and pointing out that two was actually a small number for a wolf’s litter.

 

I wondered at that, at just how much the wolf was a part of him, a part of his people, though I didn’t have the courage to question him about it directly. I watched him as we walked, his voice flowing continuously from story to story, memory to memory, his deep tones cocooning me in a strange feeling of warm security. But even as he drew me in with his voice, I watched and tried to detect some evidence of the predator in his gait, in the way he gestured with his hands or flashed his teeth as he turned to smile down at me.

 

He really was a walking contradiction, I thought, entranced by the movement of emotions across his expressive face. The man with a beast inside him, the warrior with a heart – or at least a soft spot for princesses in distress.

 

“So can anyone else in your family… ‘change’ like you can?” I asked, looking up at him sidelong.

 

“No,” he replied, shaking his head, then paused, frowning. “Well, my brother-in-law is a Shifter too, but he’s not exactly what I consider ‘family,’” he said, his lip curling in distaste.

 

I blinked, both intrigued and amused at his reaction. “Why is that?”

 

“Because he’s an ass-” He cut off suddenly, glancing down at me in seeming alarm, and then cleared his throat, continuing stiffly, “Let’s just say he and I don’t get along.” I laughed, and Jacob’s cheeks went a little red at what he’d started to say.

 

“What did you call him?” I asked, then laughed again when Jacob gave me another wild-eyed glance. Apparently, he didn’t think such language was suitable for princesses’ ears. “No, not that,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “The term you used. Shifter, was it?”

 

“Oh,” he said, looking instantly relieved. “Yeah, that’s what we call people who can shift at will, not just on the full moon.”

 

“Like you,” I said. He nodded. I felt my smile widen, adding, “And your brother-in-law,” and laughed once more when he wrinkled his nose again at the mention of his apparently odious in-law.

 

“So your sisters are both married?” I asked, still chuckling. “Do you have any nieces or nephews?” I smiled at the idea of a pack of small children underfoot, running around screaming for ‘Uncle Jake’ to give them piggyback rides.

 

“No. Well…” He shook his head, looking torn. “No.”

 

“No?”

 

“The women in my family kind of have a hard time bearing children,” he admitted reluctantly. “That’s why there’s only three of us, me and my two sisters.”

 

“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “I’m sorry. So, your mother-?”

 

“She died giving birth to me.”

 

I looked up at him sharply, horror-struck. It was all I could do to keep up with his long strides as I gaped at him. “Jacob, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

 

He glanced over at me suddenly, seeming surprised by my words. “What? Oh, no, don’t worry about it,” he said, rushing to reassure me – me, who had just made him bring up his dead mother!

 

“No, that was completely inappropriate of me. I’m so sorry. It was absolutely none of my business. I shouldn’t have made you-”

 

“Princess,” Jacob interrupted me, stopping in the middle of the road and turning to face me. I stuttered to a stop as well, turning toward him somewhat more hesitantly. “Do I look upset?” he asked after a moment, holding his hands out wide, as if inviting me to inspect him fully.

 

I chewed my lip, looking up at his face – his patient, indulging, kind face. “No,” I finally allowed.

 

“That’s because I’m not. Okay?”

 

I frowned, still uncomfortable. “Jacob-”

 

He shook his head and abruptly took a step forward, halving the distance between us. I tensed, feeling my eyes widen as I tipped my head back to stare up at him.

 

“Look, princess,” he said, gazing down at me with dark, unblinking eyes. I had to concentrate to keep my breathing even as I stared back at him. “The way I see it, I’m basically all you’ve got now,” he said matter-of-factly.

 

I sucked in a breath through my teeth, my eyes narrowing – where was he going with this?

 

He saw my reaction, and pursed his lips in response. “We’re all either of us has got now,” he amended, his voice quiet.

 

“But- your family-” I started, frowning up at him in confusion, but he just shook his head, dark hair flying with the motion.

 

“Believe me when I tell you, princess – I’m as much bound to you as you are to me now.”

 

We stared at each other, Jacob’s words hanging in the air between us, making no sense in any world I had ever lived in. His eyes bored into mine, pleading, all but begging me to understand what he was saying – but I couldn’t. I had no idea what he wanted from me. All I could possibly do was accept it, place my trust in him, and blindly go along with whatever it was he wasn’t saying behind his words.

 

And, I realized, that was what he was asking me to do, what he’d been asking me to do almost since the moment we laid eyes on each other. He was asking me to trust him.

 

It was more than choosing to leave with him, than putting a stop to my family’s various antics and stalling attempts. More than believing him when he said he wouldn’t hurt me. This was something deeper, something meaningful that he was asking of me. I had no idea what it was – but I did have the distinct and palpable sense that it would change the course of my life from this point on. I swallowed, feeling as though I were balanced on the edge of a precipice, about to take a step forward into the great unknown stretching out below me.

 

“Alright,” I said in a small voice.

 

Jacob gazed down at me for a moment, seeming almost stunned by my ready acceptance, and then he blinked, looking away and breaking our staring contest. “Well… Alright then.”

 

I couldn’t help the smile that started on my face when he shook his head, still looking quietly astonished at whatever I had just agreed to, and then his eyes focused on me again, or more specifically on my hands hanging at my sides. Very deliberately, he reached down and grasped my hand in his, slipping it back in where it had fallen from the crook of his elbow.

 

“Alright then, princess,” he said again, covering my hand with his larger one as he smiled down at me. He tilted his head in the direction we’d been traveling, toward the distant mountains and everything that lay beyond them. “Shall we?”

 

I pursed my lips, then nodded in return. “Just one thing, Jacob.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

I smiled, despite my continued misgivings. “You’re not allowed to call me ‘princess’ anymore.”

 

That earned me a roar of laughter from him – and then nearly an hour of teasing as I tried to convince him to call me by my given name, which he claimed was such a mouthful it was ‘like a full sentence all its own.’

 

“It’s a combination of my grandmothers’ names!” I tried once more, though my attempts to illustrate the sense of sentimentality and family history attached to my name had thus far fallen on deaf ears. Jacob just laughed again, shaking his head.

 

“Oh, Ruh-nez-may,” he said, exaggerating each syllable as he grinned down at me. “Haven’t you ever had a nickname? Something a little easier to say?”

 

I wrinkled my nose at his teasing, refusing to look up at him and let his infectious smile affect me. “Not since I was child,” I told him coldly. Actually, if I was being honest, it had made a resurgence in the last month or two, but that was only because my life-long friends and family knew it wouldn’t be long before they would never see me again, and that didn’t count.

 

“What was it?” Jacob asked eagerly, but when I didn’t answer, instead only scowling at his obvious tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm, he raised one eyebrow and then seemed to shrug off his previous interest. “You don’t have to pretend or try to make something up, you know. It’s really okay if you’ve never had a nickname, princess,” he said, assuming a kindly, almost patronizing tone. I glanced up sharply at the use of the royal title he wasn’t supposed to be calling me by any more – and found him trying to suppress a wide smile, his dark eyes twinkling merrily down at me.

 

“Nessie!” I spat, glaring up at him. “My Uncle Emmett used to call me Nessie, but like I said, it was really only when I little-”

 

“It’s cute,” Jacob interrupted my tirade, his smile somehow turning from joking to sincere in the blink of an eye.

 

I stopped, feeling my face heat a little as I looked up at him. “You… think so…?”

 

“Yeah,” he replied, meeting my gaze with that kind, warm smile of his – which, a moment later, turned teasing all over again. “Princess Ness. Even rhymes,” he mused playfully.

 

“What- No!” I sputtered. He just laughed. “No more of this ‘princess’ stuff! I mean it!”

 

“Sure, sure,” he said noncommittally, nodding but still grinning and looking overly pleased with himself. I glared up at him, knowing I hadn’t heard the last of this. I tried to stay grumpy and give him the cold shoulder after that, but Jacob’s cajoling and easy conversation quickly had me laughing again as he recounted boyhood tales of stealing chickens and getting chased out of neighboring farms by pitchforks and enormous Shifter wolves.

 

It was just an hour before sunset when the road began to swing south, the land around us beginning to change from open prairie and farmland to rolling hills as we approached the western mountains that separated our two kingdoms. It was at this point that Jacob glanced back at Noble, still trotting obediently along behind us with the mule, and asked if I wanted to stop to eat supper before we struck out off the road.

 

I blinked up at him in confusion. “What do you mean, off the road? The road goes around the mountains – straight into Quileute.”

 

Jacob frowned down at me, as if my words were nonsense. “No one uses that southern road anymore. The northern passes are safer and faster.”

 

I went from confused to incredulous. “Jake, the northern passes aren’t passes, they’re cliffs. And the only reason no one uses this road now is because no one travels between your kingdom and mine anymore.”

 

“That is not the only reason,” he countered, his voice turning grim. I pursed my lips, frowning up at him as my mind went straight to what neither of us seemed to want to say out loud.

 

The road we’d been traveling on for most of the day wound out from the Capital, where my family lived, merging and intertwining with the other major highways and trade routes that crisscrossed our kingdom. It broke off from the central quarter to head almost due west, traversing the vast plains of our kingdom as it headed for the mountain range that separated us from the Quileutes. At some point – the point at which we had just arrived – the road turned south, skirting the edge of the foothills until the mountains abruptly ended at the seashore. There, the road followed the water’s edge, curving west again and then north, straight into the heart of the wolves’ kingdom.

 

I’d never traveled to this distant corner of our kingdom before – the furthest I’d ever been from home was my mother’s family estate in the south – but I’d seen sketches of the coastal road, had traced my finger along its course on the crackling old maps in the library more times than I could count. Time after time, I had stood there, trying to imagine what it would be like to actually be there, to look with my own eyes at the indifferent earth and sea passing by on either side as I stepped forward into the unknown and my life disappeared behind me forever…

 

I swallowed, and in my mind’s eye I could see the old map, and the road etched on its surface in fading ink, and, beside the road, so close to the shore it was practically in the ocean, a small, unassuming dot labeled ‘hot springs.’ The springs were almost exactly halfway between our two kingdoms. Once upon a time, they had been a popular destination for both our peoples, though now they stood deserted, just like the road that led to them. And it was no mystery why.

 

Those springs were where all of this had started.

 

My parents had tried to keep me from the gory details of all that had gone on there, but I was determined to know the truth. It was the story of what had led to the cloud of doom that had hung over my head my entire life – in a way, it was my history, just as it was what would determine my future.

 

Some forty years ago, on a day at the very end of summer, a group of Quileute girls had traveled out to the springs. Simultaneously, the sons of several wealthy families from our kingdom had set out for there as well. They discovered the young women bathing in the springs – and, to quote some of my grandfather’s own writings, proceeded to inflict on them such unspeakable acts as had never been seen among our people since we had separated ourselves from the Volturi.

 

I stared up into Jacob’s dark eyes, and felt all the history behind my existence swirling around me like a shroud. “You don’t think it’s fitting that we pass through there?” I asked. It was quite a nice full-circle ending to the story, if you asked me.

 

He grimaced, looking away. “No, I don’t,” he said firmly, then caught my gaze again, his eyes hard. “Besides, it’s too dangerous.”

 

“More dangerous than trying to scale hundred-foot cliffs? With pack animals?”

 

That gave him pause, if only for a moment. “I’m not taking you down there,” he said, shaking his head. “Not when some Volturi bloodsucker could come sniffing around at any moment, looking for a quick meal.”

 

“You’re exaggerating-” I started, frowning up at him.

 

“I’m not.” He gazed down at me sternly, refusing to budge, and I felt my own determination falter slightly in the face of his certainty.

 

We heard stories, sometimes, of Volturi crossing our borders out here near the coast, snatching away careless farmers and villagers and disappearing with them into the night. The wild tales were easily brushed off in the comfort of the Capital, chalked up to accidents and wild animal attacks and country superstitions. But out here, standing on a road in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but open fields and limitless sky around me, as the setting sun began to paint the world a dusky orange, those stories suddenly seemed all too real.

 

It wasn’t like I didn’t believe everything that was said of the Volturi – I knew it as fact, just as everyone in our kingdom, and the Quileute kingdom too I was sure, knew it. They were blood-drinkers. Carnivores. Cannibals. But somehow it had just never occurred to me to actually be afraid of them before.

 

Now, though, looking up at Jacob, at how serious his normally affable face had become, I felt a chill run up my spine. “It can’t be that bad… can it?” I tried again, feebly.

 

He let out a long breath, looking away for a moment to think. “We might be able to make it up the coast without running into any of them,” he said at last, grudgingly. “But the odds aren’t good.”

 

“And what would that mean? If we encountered one?” I asked. “I mean, they are sentient beings – surely we could avoid a fight…”

 

“Sentience has got nothing to do with it,” Jacob said, his mouth set in a grim line. “If we run into a Volturi, it won’t hesitate to attack. It won’t care what you have to say or how you try to reason with it, and it will only see you as food.”

 

I felt a shiver working its way over me, making my skin crawl, and wrapped my arms around myself, feeling suddenly exposed. Jacob automatically took a step forward, his large hands sliding up along my arms to warm me. “You’ve fought them before, haven’t you?” I asked him, feeling instantly safer in this close proximity to him.

 

He nodded. “They can track as least as well as I can, and they’re fast and sneaky as hell. If we run into a gang of them, we’re screwed.”

 

I swallowed. “Do they often travel in gangs?”

 

“Only occasionally,” he said. “Only when they really want something. Out here, it’s mostly just hunters, rogues… But you never know.” He paused, glancing up at the sky and letting out a long breath. “It’s going to be dark soon. We need to make a decision one way or another.”

 

I nodded, feeling myself shiver a little more, and leaned closer to Jacob. “The southern road is dangerous,” I said slowly, not looking up at him, “but there’s simply no way we’d be able to get the pack animals up through the mountains to the north.” I tilted my head back, meeting his dark gaze as he looked down at me. “I don’t think there is much of a choice here. We have to go south.”

 

Jacob sighed, grimaced, and then finally nodded, though he still didn’t look happy about it. “Whatever you say, princess.”

 

Chapter End Notes:

 

Jacob came through the northern passes on his way there. Nessie is right, though, they’re really more like cliffs, and would be nigh impossible to get all of them through, unless Jake doesn’t mind carrying her, the horse, and the donkey up the mountain, one at a time. He was able to get through them on his own just fine, but being a werewolf he is spry and acrobatic like a mountain goat.

Please review! And come say hi on twitter! I love hearing what yall think! :D (at)Jezunya

 

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