Free Skin of the Wolf by Sam Cabot

been looking for me, until he sensed that I was close. But he’d already Shifted.”
    “What does that imply?” Spencer asked. Bonnard didn’t answer. He started to stand, got halfway, and his legs gave out. He crumpled. Livia caught him and lowered him back into the chair.
    “I think not,” she said. “You may heal fast, but you’re not healed yet.”
    Bonnard let his eyes close. “Damn city Indian. Getting soft.”
    Spencer got to his feet, lifted a blanket from the sofa and tuckedit around Bonnard. “Please. At least give yourself an hour to recover. All right, perhaps half an hour. You can’t go out like that in any case. Give
me
a few more minutes and I’ll be strong enough to locate some clothing that will fit your admirable physique. While we wait . . .” He sat and gave a rueful smile. “I must compliment you, Michael. This news has me so nonplussed I don’t know what to ask first.”
    Bonnard opened his eyes and reached a hand from under the blanket for his brandy. “Then let me ask you one. You said, ‘micro-organism’?”
    Thomas blinked. All the possible questions, all the secrets, all the knowledge, and that was where Bonnard wanted to start?
    Spencer, though, laughed. “Spoken like a scientist. Yes, a microbe. It alters our DNA. Our cells repair themselves endlessly. That’s one of the effects.”
    “There are others?”
    “Our capabilities improve. Strength, agility. And our senses. It’s all part of the same process. There’s no breakdown, you see. Another effect,” he added, before Bonnard could respond, “is the need for human blood.”
    “But that bottle. You get it in bottles?”
    “Courtesy of Father Kelly’s branch of the family.”
    “I don’t understand.” Bonnard looked to Thomas.
    “By agreement,” Thomas said, “the Church supplies the Noantri with blood from Catholic hospitals.” He was surprised to find his tone as steady as Spencer’s had been. “So they no longer . . . feed . . . on the Unchanged.”
    “The Church? You’re telling me the Church knows? About them? Priests know?”
    “Not priests. Only a very few Cardinals in the highest ranks. Some Popes have known, others haven’t. The agreement’s a closely held secret.”
    “But you know. Wait, are you . . . what’s the word? Noantri? Are you one, too?”
    “No. I’m in a—special position.”
    “Father Kelly did our people a great service,” Spencer said. “In return the Conclave—our ruling body—has granted him access to knowledge the Noantri generally take great care to conceal.”
    “I see.” Bonnard nodded slowly, a scientist digesting new facts. Thomas remembered his own panicked reaction the day he’d first heard this same news. “And the hospitals—where do they think the blood goes?”
    Spencer said, “They only know they’re instructed to sell drawn and donated blood to certain private blood banks. Catholic hospitals are everywhere. The distribution is wide, the supply is steady, and the hospitals can count on a dependable source of income. The system has been working smoothly for six hundred years.”
    “And before that?”
    Thomas felt himself redden.
    Spencer answered calmly, “We were hunted. Hounded. Driven out.”
    Thomas saw a look of mutual understanding pass between the two men. “‘Noantri.’” Bonnard tried out the word. “And ‘Unchanged’? That’s the rest of us?”
    “Well, it’s Father Kelly,” said Spencer, “and those like him. Perhaps, I venture to say, not you.”
    Bonnard grinned. “No, I guess not. When did you . . . come to be?”
    “Me, personally? In 1548.”
    Bonnard laughed aloud. “It’s a good thing I never worried about dating older men. But I meant, the first Noantri.”
    “Ah. Our scientists say possibly twenty thousand years ago. They’re still working on that question.”
    “You have scientists?”
    “Why, did you think all Noantri were effete arts-oriented intellectuals like myself?”
    “Until tonight,