SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Sixty-Five
Guccia enfolded the others into our pack without the slightest hesitation.
Nearly overnight, she changed their lives, purchasing them a home on State Street. She partnered with Beaufort to expand his shipping business and tasked me with educating the others. Guccia fell naturally into the role of alpha of our combined family and governed us as her upbringing decreed.
Teaching didn’t come to me easily. I often relied on my memories of Gabrielle to bolster my patience with Jacob and Willem’s endless questions. But they sat in pure astonishment as I tutored them on the world of knowledge I possessed. And years later, when the revolution seized the continent, spurned by stories of representation for all and the old democracies of Sempronio’s age, both men took a direct role in General Washington’s push to create a new ruling body.
As they’d become my pupils, they also became subordinates of Bastiano and Callamus, who released their wolves and nurtured their strength as warriors. Willem and Jacob accepted my sexual orientation only when Guccia insisted she’d never tolerate the mindless prejudices of their human upbringing in her pack. In time, they came to love me for my tales of justice upon the evildoer, an idea that meant little to Bastiano and Callamus or their Venetian upbringing. Jacob and Willem often begged me to lead them through the city as it grew. The three of us together became vigilantes to protect the immigrants that poured into New York. And as we grew together as brothers, they were grateful to help me save men of my kind who suffered in silence at the hands of an unjust world. Through them, I felt I’d finally honored Maximilien and Gabrielle. I’d even honored Sempronio, whom I’d only met through the many memories shared with me.
Guccia changed Beaufort herself. She wanted nothing more than to enlarge our numbers, as we never shook our concern of European lycan arriving in New York. But Guccia brought Henry into eternity with us for another reason. They fell in love, and she became Mrs. Lotte Beaufort in time. I’d always dreamed of seeing her feel such joy with a man. She was truly my sister when I gave her hand in marriage, and I was only too happy to become Uncle Rudolf to their four children.
To Guccia’s dismay, none of her early children were lycan. I had always feared she would abandon them, as the lycan of the wicked old societies would, or worse. But Guccia would not be separated from her little ones, three girls and a boy. She loved those children more purely than any of us could, and each birth proved to me that Guccia had never really been part of her father’s world.
It wasn’t until all four of them were married that Guccia allowed us to stage our tragic and untimely deaths. She’d fought us for years, begging Henry and me for just a short while longer. But Guccia’s porcelain beauty never faded, and in time she accepted that we each must allow their children to live their mortal life undisturbed by our unchanged countenances.
I didn’t join the Beauforts in Philadelphia, where they established themselves with other names. Nor did the other lycan. But we remained in touch by letter. And when they finally conceived a girl, Barbara, who was lycan, I went at once to hold her in my arms and hear her mind open to us all. And in the years that passed, Guccia and her daughter returned to New York to stay with me for months at a time.
Bastiano, Callimus, Jacob, and Willem each flourished in the city. We spent as much time together as we did apart. Time was a funny experience, I would come to find. A decade would pass, and I would find I wanted space from them and lycans altogether. Then another decade would pass, and I’d find myself desperate to be around them. My favorite memories were of their bringing new lycan of age to join the pack. Tutoring the young and sharing my memories of Gabrielle’s lessons was always a joy. I ensured every student knew their lessons came from the greatest master of us all, the ancient Sempronio, who’d amassed knowledge from around the globe over his fifteen centuries of life.
I moved around New York City several times, falling in love with her more and more as the years passed. She grew to a staggering size and became the center of the modern world. And I never lost my fascination with the age of discovery she furnaced.
I had relationships with several human men, though they never lasted more than a few months. Expressing my sexuality with them felt wild and addictive at the beginning. But each only felt like a ghost impression of my love affair with Duccio. I couldn’t bring myself to pretend the disparity between lycan and humans wasn’t a bottomless chasm. At least, it was when it came to physical love.
Though I’d changed my first name many times, I never abandoned the surname of Van Duren. It was a common enough name in town. As silly as it might seem, it meant America to me. After a century of living in New York, of trying my hand at so much that was new and exciting, I discovered I couldn’t let go of an idea that caught my mind. I’d never created a house of my own.
Duccio had built our Roman villetta, while Guccia had crafted our State Street residence, just as she had in Venice. And while I’d purchased a couple of homes independently after she left for Philadelphia, I hadn’t designed them. I’d barely nodded to a decorator’s vision for each.
When the city expanded and New York’s wealthy moved north in search of land to build grander houses, I followed. On the corner of Fifth Avenue and 39th Street, I designed a home that was purely my space, distinctive of my tastes, and not imposed upon me by others. Down to her four-story floor plan, the patterns engrained in the marble tiles, and the shades of lacquered wood, I made every choice about what I built. And when I found my choices mirrored what Duccio would’ve selected for me, I didn’t let my apprehensions stop me. He would always be a part of me, so I let my mansion’s moulded panel walls be stained nearly black to remind me of his aesthetics.
After a few years, I sat back in my easy chair to read the latest novel with greater satisfaction than ever. I’d discovered something I’d never realized in all this time: I preferred solitude. I looked back at all those years and laughed at my childhood self, the boy desperate to be around anyone he could talk with openly. I now loved nothing more than the peace of a roaring fire and a quiet night with my latest shipment of novels from Europe.
But by now, you must realize why I did this. Not building a house, of course, but why I wrote about a century of my lycan life in a few paragraphs after spending hundreds of pages describing the first few years. All my New York experiences, each filled with sublime joys and harrowing pains, were not the reason I wrote this autobiography.
From the first page, I always meant this book to be about the three people who’d affected my life most significantly: my lycan parents and my lycan lover. And I’ve passed over an ocean of other tales to complete this work and hold to my vision for it.
So, allow me to tell you the only other story about New York that matters to my tale.