The Loup Garou Society by Julie Steimle (ereader with android txt) 📖

I was able to renew our family's business contacts.”

Rick nodded, urging him on. Nothing was shameful about any of that.

“But I…” His father shook his head. “I was vulnerable. Scared. And… the Loup Garou convinced me to do a very wrong thing.”

“You didn’t kill anybody, did you?” Rick drew in a breath, anticipating the worst.

Death surrounded werewolves. It was a fact of life. But Rick and his father had sworn to always keep their wolf affairs away from human ones. They had always made their monthly kills small animals, which they had paid for and arranged so they could remain out of the news. And they helped other wolves who were in the same situation—to keep them from becoming man-eaters. But there were always instances and encounters between hapless idiots and those loathsome SRA hunters, which ruined everything. The worst fact was, most werewolves started off as assassins. It had been the purpose of their creation.

“No.” His father was painfully laughing though.

The vehicle carrying them veered onto the road which the Loup Garou Society building was located.

“Then…” Rick urged him on with a hand roll, glancing out the window at the street signs.

Cringing, his father bit out, “When I was young and stupid, the Loup Garou convinced me to add to the gene pool of their pack—like the Canadians tried to convince you to do.”

Rick pulled back. “Oh, my, gosh. Dad!”

“It is one of the biggest regrets of my life.”

“I can’t believe you!” Rick stared, exasperated. “Especially after how you got after me during that whole kidnapping incident—and I had done nothing wrong except sneak away from the school group while ice skating.”

His father shook his head in silence, so much regret etched in every line on his face. The car temporarily stopped at a street light.

Rick stared more, realizing what this meant. “So I’ve got a…”

Cringing deeper, his father could not look Rick in the eye.

Pulling back, Rick’s eyes examined him further. There was clearly more to it than this. So he said, “What exactly happened? Did Mom know about this?”

His father nodded. “I had told her before we got married that I had, uh, been a little loose while in Paris when I was young. That, I might have an illegitimate child or two who might suddenly show up one day and…”

Rick groaned, pressing a hand to his forehead. “So you told Mom about that but not about being a werewolf?”

“The wolf would have terrified her,” his father replied gravely.

Rick shot him a dirty look, as that was exactly what had happened. He then shook his head and said, “So she was prepared for some kid or adult to come out and say you were their dad?”

He nodded. “She was forgiving. She understood that I was…uh, unstable at the time.”

Unstable. His father was always good at choosing the right words. Unstable described their life. The only thing truly stable in their lives was that they had accumulated enough money to buy forests and create wolf reserves. They had plenty of places to hunt now which were far from human civilization, and they could have hunters simply arrested for trespassing. It was a win for all—except maybe those hunters, but he didn’t care about them.

“She didn’t know it was a wolf thing, though,” Rick grumbled.

His father sighed. “That’s not the worst of it.”

“What’s worse?” Rick moaned. “I’ve got a brother or sister out there, probably. Have you been hiding him or her? Or were they abandoned?”

His words struck his father as if he had punched him. Rick watched the dignified man visibly cringe, pain his eyes. Deep regret. Even during the divorce, his father had not looked so penitent… like he wanted to go medieval and lash his own back.

“When I went along with the Loup Garou’s scheme,” his father said with a cringe, “they had conditions which I had to comply with.”

“Shock me,” Rick said, wondering what Hell his brother or sister had to deal with all those years. He had abandoned them.

“Please, son. I’m ashamed enough as it is.” His father’s amber eyes chastened him. “It only happened the one time—but I was vulnerable. And they want you to do the same.”

“What?” Rick blustered, retreating towards the side door. “You brought me here for that?”

“No,” his father gravely replied. “I don’t want you to cooperate. Let me finish explaining what happened, because you only have heard a small part of it.”

Sitting back, Rick stared hard at his father. To be honest, he never would have believed that anyone could have succeeded in manipulating the man. His father, despite his long-held secret about being a werewolf, had always been a man of integrity. He was known for it. Mobs and cartels had tried to bully him during business affairs and failed wretchedly. The SRA were constantly losing against his father’s uprightness and forthrightness. There was no crime they could peg on him. No one could make his integrity break. And yet the French had. Once.

“As I said, I was nineteen, in Paris,” his father explained. “When they approached me, they appealed to my… uh, sense of compassion for the wolves who had not attained as much financial success as I. They explained to me that their pack needed new blood desperately… and I was nineteen.”

Rick rolled his eyes. Nineteen and horny. He had heard that excuse before on the news. He never though his father would admit to it.

“The point is, I was bought into it. I was taken to a week long, loud and loose party where they loaded me up on drink and brought willing girls to me who wanted to get pregnant.” He shook his head. “I was so drunk, I could hardly tell one from another.”

“Dad!” Rick stared more. He had said girls. Plural.

“I know.” Mr. Deacon raised his hands in surrender. “I know. It was the stupidest, most thoughtless thing I had ever done. But for what it was worth, they were all wolves. None of them were unsuspecting human beings. These were Loup Garou who signed on for the pack’s program. I just provided the…” He closed his eyes, cringing.

This was too much. As a werewolf, Rick's place in the universe had always been iffy. But his family had been regular attenders of the Christian church back in Middleton Village. He was best friends with the pastor’s grandson. He had lived a moral life by the Judeo-Christian standard. And though the world trends were leaning more and more towards decadence and sexual promiscuity, Rick had never felt inclined to lean that way himself—though opportunity had definitely been there. His family had always carried themselves with dignity. His father had always been an upright citizen. But now, that view had been shattered. Rick honestly never would have thought that his father would have even considered getting involved in some kind of wolf orgy.

But he had.

“And my mother knew about this?” Rick murmured, still trying to wrap his mind around it.

His father nodded. “Though not to the extent of the Loup Garou or what they had asked of me. I told her I had gotten drunk at a party and behaved…” He could not finish.

Staring at him, shaking his head, Rick felt disgusted. He finally said, “How many girls did you get pregnant?”

His father shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Rick protested. “You has sex with them, for pity’s sake!”

“I don’t know. I was intoxicated. A lot of the time we were as wolves. Things get complicated when you are in wolf mind. And they never told me how many children I had sired.” His father stared at his knees, shoulders hunched and arms hanging.

And though his father looked wretched, Rick pursued the answer, “How many did you… you know, hook up with? Guess.”

Cringing with another shrug, his father looked like he wanted to bury his face in his hands. “Thirteen? Fourteen? I can’t recall. I told you, I was drunk, and it was all a furry blur.”

“Fourteen!?” Rick’s face went white. “Dad!”

“I know! Alright?” His father massaged his forehead. “I told you. I have regretted it ever since.”

“You should have demanded to know,” Rick snapped, thinking of all those kids born around the same time. His mind was already working on how he could find out who could be his brothers or sisters. If he could find the month and days when that party had happened, he could calculate nine months from then, sneak into Loup Garou records, or have someone like Semour Dawson hack into their files to get the information. Semour would do it. For goodness sakes, Tom Brown would do it in a heartbeat.

But then, Rick realized, he didn’t want to get Tom involved. Tom would have a heyday over the news of his father’s promiscuous indiscretion—and Tom himself was entirely indiscrete. It came with being a half-imp who loved trouble.

Nodding, Mr. Deacon said, “I tried to find out. But the Loup Garou explained that they did not want the troubles of the Deacon family affecting my offspring. They knew I was hunted. They just wanted my seed.”

The conversation itself felt nasty. It was like swimming in murky, briny water on a hot sweaty day with mosquitoes and leeches surrounding him. Nauseated, he couldn’t even look at his father. After a while, Rick said, “Ok… But did they tell you if you did have a kid from that night, or day, or whatever?”

His father nodded. “But they would not tell me how many. Rather, they requested that I donate to a fund to pay for their future—which I have been regularly paying ever since.”

That added up. Rick had seen a number of the business records. His father had made him spend a week with his accounting staff so they could teach him how they kept the books and managed their finances. Rick had seen all sorts of funds his father invested money, from animal reserves to peculiarly named clubs and associations. He even had favorite web personalities he was secretly funding under the web name A. Wolf. This, however, explained the huge donations and membership fee payment to the 

Loup Garou Society. It didn’t make sense for his father to support a foreign, independent wolf pack which had its own lucrative sources of revenue. He was funding the lives of his possibly scandalously-large number of older brothers and sisters born together in the same month, older than him by eight years.

That’s when the startling notion struck him. He was not an only child. He wasn’t even the oldest. He was the youngest of them all. One of those other wolves from another mother would be his father’s true heir. Rick wasn’t sure how he felt about that. All this time he had been training to take the reins of Deacon Enterprises, hoping his father would live a long life before that would happen. But now, someone else would have to be trained in the job. And he… he would need to find another career.

“You are my heir,” his father said, as if reading Rick’s mind. It must have been all over his face.

“How?” Rick asked, staring at his dad. “I won’t be the oldest—”

“You are the heir mentioned in my will—by name. My other… offspring in the Loup Garou are not legally mine. I have no doubts they take the names of their mothers, and are legally wards of the Loup Garou Society.” Mr. Deacon gravely shook his head. “It is an entire mess. I never should have done it. They must hate me.”

Those words struck Rick hard.

Not the detail that he was the named heir, but that his siblings—whom his father had been tricked into making and forced to leave to the will of the French pack which their mothers belonged to—quite possibly knew about him and his father, and hated them both.

But another notion arose. Maybe they had been kept ignorant and were never told by the Loup Garou who their father was. Maybe the Loup Garou did that sort of thing to passing lone