Wolf Omega: Lykanos Chronicles 2

San Diego, 1919

“Yes, a girls’ trip,” Eleanor Richardson said one afternoon over cards. “We’ll leave Friday morning and return Sunday afternoon. That’s what you need to lighten your spirits.”

On account of the summer heat, I wanted nothing to do with her idea. But she wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

After driving for over two hours through the empty chaparral landscape south of Los Angeles, I privately questioned Eleanor’s decision again. But as we got closer south, the highway opened to the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean on our right, and I forgot my impatience and doubt. The vast blue field and cool breezes that met us couldn’t help but calm me.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” she yelled over the car’s motor. “Jonathan was so jealous when I told him that he wasn’t invited on our adventure, he threatened to show up unannounced tomorrow.”

Eleanor’s husband, Jonathan Richardson, was a senior executive for the west-coast division of a New England hotel company, in which I held stock. I suspected he was perfectly happy to have the weekend to himself back home. I knew the man was a philanderer, and if that wasn’t enough to dissuade me into liking him, he had already proven his character to me when we first met.

The curse of wealth and immortality is that one day, the details of capital management mean next to nothing. Maximo and my attorneys had handled our investments for ages, and by now, I knew very little about their details. For this reason, I was already fairly close with Eleanor before realizing that her initial friendliness was as much on account of Jonathan tasking her with befriending me as it was her genuine attraction. As a major shareholder in the Westchester Company, and being an allegedly impressionable young widow, Jonathan Richardson sought to influence my vote on its future moves. Using his wife to encourage me was a transparent rouse, but one I chose to play along with.

Eleanor had become my best friend while I lived in Los Angeles. The idea of befriending humans would make a lycan like Duccio impatiently sigh, but that’s what she was to me. It didn’t matter to me that she couldn’t hear my thoughts as I heard hers. I yearned for someone who couldn’t hide the thoughts I chose to listen to. Eleanor was a modern Californian woman, and I had fallen far too in love with her light to surrender her over Jonathan’s nonsense.

After I failed in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Eleanor was the sole reason I didn’t leave America. Starting over abroad was perhaps the most logical choice to make if I was to create a pack of my own. But Eleanor was the door to most of the happiness I knew in California, and for her, I waited for change to find me.

“I told the son of a bitch he’d have to find us, as he certainly won’t find us waiting around in our room!” Eleanor laughed.

“Only two hours away from him, and you’re ready to get us thrown in jail on a morals charge?”

“You’d better believe it, doll!”

In his journals, Sempronio detailed the catalog of reasons that led him to abandon Rome. He was heading to search for solitude in the wilds of Germania when he stopped to rest at the old Roman outpost of Como, finding the region uniquely devoid of lycan. The lakes country, pristine and uniquely beautiful, captured his heart, and he gave up his flight to set about constructing Castello Palatino.

Upon arriving in San Diego with Eleanor, I couldn’t help but remember the joy Sempronio had described. Much like Como of Caesar’s day, San Diego was a sleepy little military outpost. Unlike San Francisco, the great warships anchored in the harbor here had no world-class city to account for their presence. It was merely the last major town before reaching the strategic southern border with Mexico.

“Jonathan grew up here before moving to L.A.,” she yelled. “It’s a small California town if there ever was one. The first time he brought me down, it was to attend his mother’s funeral. I’d only met the woman once before at our wedding in Pasadena. Well, he was sad and devastated, as you can imagine. But I got a load of all this clean sea air and cool sunshine and was secretly thrilled to find myself on vacation.”

The sweet, salty wind that filled the cabin of her Cadillac Coup felt like a doctor’s prescription. Even in early July, the weather here was mild, benefiting from the Pacific marine layer and constant breeze. It was a welcome relief from the scorching mid-summer heat of Los Angeles. Also, the endless overcrowding of modern humans hadn’t yet overrun the streets here. And San Diegans moved at a much slower pace, which suited me just fine.

Eleanor checked us into fine lodgings in the center of it all, the U.S. Grant Hotel. The stately property was the tallest building in San Diego and by far the most luxurious. Jonathan Richardson’s pull ensured they quickly escorted us to their finest suite on the eighth floor. We towered over downtown from our balcony and enjoyed a lovely view of the Pacific in the distance.

“Did I promise you this was the place, or what?” Eleanor bragged as we settled in.

After resting only half an hour, she was raring to keep our “girls’ trip” on the go.

“Now, brace yourself: we’re leaving for the beach right now. You’re going to watch me place my bare legs in the water, and I don’t want to hear any guff or see you roll your eyes at my brazen attempts to swing with the youngsters.”

It was a bit of humor at which I couldn’t help but laugh. Though Eleanor was centuries younger than me, she presumed that she was significantly older in her early forties.

“I’ll do my best,” I promised. “What’s it called, the bordello where this awesome spectacle will take place?”

“We’re going to Mission Beach, where all the kids go to show off their gams. Did you bring your bathing suit like I told you to?”

I looked at her with a guilty expression and thinned my lips.

“Why not?” she stomped her foot like a toddler.

I shrugged my shoulders in silence for several seconds, drawing her evil eye.

“Fine,” I sighed. “I have it here.”

Eleanor dropped her jaw in melodramatic disbelief at my ploy.

“Just for that, you’re getting in the water first.”

The drive to Mission Beach took awhile, but when we finally pulled up to the boardwalk, the roar of the surf managed to dissuade my apprehension. I was a stunning place, just as she’d promised.

“I insist you take that hat off and let down your hair. As it is, you’re the only young woman who still keeps it long.”

I shook my head and sighed, accepting this fate as gracefully as I could. The day couldn’t have been more beautiful, and the soft sea air felt indecently pleasurable as it flowed through my scalp.

“Satisfied?” I asked with a long face as I unpinned my hat for her.

“Not quite, dear.”

We disrobed beside the car, a genuinely mortifying experience to broach in such a lovely but exposed place. The irony of my self-consciousness wasn’t lost on me. What would Max have said to see me squirm at exposing my legs (ten inches above the knee, no less!) while I was perfectly fine with running stark naked through the forest alongside him?

“Do a first coat of the sun cream here,” she instructed. “Trust me. This light won’t be forgiving on your pale skin.”

Eleanor assigned me to carry a picnic basket, umbrella, and towels, before leading us onto the sand, holding two soft fabric chairs and a large bag on her shoulder. She’d filled it with the remaining sun cream and a couple of short novels to read.

There were dozens of people relaxing on the beach, but she found us a reasonable amount of privacy in no time. Once we’d set up the umbrella and chairs, and we had our shoes off, she took me by hand to offer a perilously mischievous grin.

“All right then, don’t fight it anymore. Here we go.”

The hot sand between my toes felt strangely relaxing. However, the first wave of cold water that rolled past my feet was so shocking that I let out a yelp of surprise.

“Don’t worry--it’ll pass. Just walk out a ways further with me.”

“It’s freezing! You’re insane,” I laughed.

“Certifiable, but you’ve already crossed that bridge, so make your peace with it and keep walking.”

Five minutes later, the water felt inexplicably warmer. Women here wore suits cut far higher than mine, and seeing them in the surf made me feel far less self-conscious about my bare legs. The kids’ laughter in the water mixed with the pounding waves placed an indisputable smile on my face. And then something unforgettable happened: I felt joy.

The burdens I’d carried there with me—loneliness, disappointment, insecurity, time, and my responsibility to an impossible legacy—all of it vanished from my shoulders. I felt truly at peace, and the sensation was so unexpected that I couldn’t help but laugh. There were tears in my eyes, and I laughed more at how ridiculous I felt to cry over the light sensation.

Eleanor noticed my tears but understood my reaction perfectly. I didn’t know how she could be so accurately perceptive. She was a mortal and knew nothing of my genuine struggles. Regardless, Eleanor somehow sensed the weight of it all, and this perception led her to bring me to this wild, indecent, and sacred spot of hers.

“I said you’d love it,” she whispered tenderly, hooking her arm in mine as the ocean waves drove past our calves again and again.

Despite middle age, Eleanor felt free here, like a small girl. The women around us felt the same. There was a culture of inexplicable youthful freedom in this marvelous place. Women cut their hair short, exposed their legs, and laughed in the company of young men without the slightest fear.

Had this all come about because of the Nineteenth Amendment? Was that change the genesis of this unexpected and modern style of American life? I didn’t know for sure, but I knew I’d been waiting all my life for it to happen. And if San Diego was where this miracle had chosen to make itself known to me, then this was where I meant to be.

More striking than anything about the city was that I couldn’t sense a single lycan anywhere. In Washington, after the war, I’d perceived many werewolves outside the city limits, but they were fleeting and disorganized—rogues or tiny roaming packs destined for some other place. I felt many in New York, but they kept mostly to the mainland. Those who ventured to lower Manhattan kept a healthy distance away from Duccio and me.

Here I couldn’t sense a single one. The city was mine for the taking, and by the end of Sunday afternoon, as Eleanor drove us back toward Los Angeles, I’d already decided I would begin my dream life here.

My first step was to solidify my background. I contacted my estate attorney in Washington, D.C., and convinced him to journey out to the west coast. I’d never before met the man; he was one of the countless successors to the legal partnership that had managed my family’s wealth ever since Maximo moved us to America.

Highly conservative and pushing fifty-eight, Martin Jenson wasn’t terribly impressed by the liberal newness of San Diego. Nevertheless, he held the strings to most of my assets in the United States. More to the point, he was the best way to establish me as a young widow in an unknown land.

With a careful amount of psychic manipulation, Jenson found himself remembering a long and fictitious history. He had known my husband, who’d passed away only three years earlier back east. Jenson recalled how it was his smart suggestion that I move out west. It was his ambition to create a new branch of the firm in San Diego. Once completed, my manufactured devotion to his counsel prompted me to transfer much of my fortune to the Golden State.

Weeks later, after some investigation into the ideal spot, I purchased several lots of land in a new housing development called Inspiration Heights. The suburb of Mission Hills was a twenty-minute car ride north from downtown, but it was the perfect place to build a large home in a quiet, unassuming district. From the lot’s crest, I could see the downtown harbor and the ocean beyond.

I couldn’t build a castle in San Diego; this was a different age that viewed the past’s mighty structures as ridiculously unsuitable. But I made the most enormous mansion the city’s zoning law would allow. Smack in the middle of decent society, it had plenty of room to establish a new lycan family.

In his mid-sixties, Henry was only too grateful to find himself in such a quiet and relaxed neighborhood. When the house finished construction a year later, he oversaw my private library’s transfer into its vast concrete-lined cellar. There, behind a trick wall I designed to keep Prohibition’s eyes sufficiently confused, Sempronio’s texts rested comfortably alongside my favorite Burgundy vintages and Italian spirits.

I set about joining every part of San Diego society that I could. Eleanor knew several prominent women in town, and I used my pocketbook to win their favor. I integrating myself into their dens of influence until I was a leader among them. I was not just an aristocrat’s wife here; no one in California even knew my family’s heritage. Such ideas had no relevance in this world. Instead, I was Gabrielle Borchardt Roussade: philanthropist and civic voice of the city’s feminist causes.

By night, I set about my old ways of prowling in search of those in need of my help. I pruned the most dangerous clients of the famous “Stingaree” district, where politicians and police kept all the city’s vice contained within a dozen blocks down by the harbor. I roared in the face of modern detection methods, eluding all efforts to restrain my noble slaughter of evildoers.

I was alone, but I was alive for the first time since the day Maximo was taken from me.

And then, without the slightest expectation, and only four blocks from my house, I felt the first lycan of what would become my new pack come of age.