Wolfe Remembers

Alan Wolfe watched Christian Brightwind stalk away. He forced a deep breath through lungs that no longer worked and tried to calm himself. Just looking at Brightwind’s bestial face was enough to test his temper. Actually talking to the man was an invitation to frenzy.

But Alan knew that giving in to that would only mark his own face or body with the beast and give the psychotic Gangrel reason to smile. Instead he did as his mentor, Black Johnny, taught him. He made his lungs draw in another breath, and he remembered.

If it weren’t for this exercise, this meditation, Alan might have very well forgotten much of his own life. The mortal part of it ended more than one hundred years ago, and time was unkind to memory. But Black Johnny, once terrorized by his own beast, had taught Alan to relive the past, to keep it alive, and to use it to face the beast inside.

Even without the mementos of his past, Alan went back into his memories easily. Like remembering a book often read.

Valerton was just a small logging town, not much different than any of the mining towns or cattle towns in the wild west. Most of the land was untouched and unsettled. The Indians had mostly been settled onto reservations, but there were still problems, and the occasional fight started by one side or the other.

Alan Wolfe lived with his mother, and his grandparents in the cabin in the woods outside Valerton, where the Thomas family had lived as fur trappers for three generations. Alan’s father was Ivan Wolfe, a mysterious man who floated in and out of his life, as if drawn to his beautiful mother and his five children, but pulled away by other, unknowable things.

But when Ivan Wolfe came into his family’s life, he brought money, and stories. He told of a shootout against a gang of green-skinned demons. Alan knew that when his father had been courting his mother, that he had shot another man in a duel, so he did not doubt his the tale. Ivan told his children how he and his friends had once tipped a runaway train off its tracks. And he also told his children old stories from Russia. Tales about the wolf-kings and ancient czars, legends about the adventures of Winter Wolf and Pheonix and Falcon. Alan was told that the blood of the Silver Fangs, the princes of wolves, flowed in his veins.

They were happy times, helping his grandfather to check the traps and skin the catch, playing with his brother and sisters, and waiting for the rare, but achingly familiar sound of his father’s footsteps outside the cabin.

Then Harry Thomas died, and his wife followed soon after. Ivan came and took his family away from the cabin and helped them start again in Valerton itself. His money opened the Wolfe Mercantile, and Alan helped his mother to buy furs from the trappers and sell them east.

As Alan grew, he began to grow restless, thinking about the future and how to make a life for himself. His father continued to visit, but each time he paid less attention to his oldest boy, and Alan knew that his father was hoping he would show signs that he was a true Silver Fang. But he didn’t.

Alan remembered the disappointment, but he had been raised to accept it. His father was a distant figure in his life, more of a mentor than family. So Alan pursued his own life, going out with the wagons to Stanton where the trains would take their goods east, or to Kenning, where the riverboats would take their goods.

It wasn’t the happiest time in Alan’s life, but more because of the dissatisfaction that plagues all adolescents. The young man was trying to learn who he was, Silver Fang, shop keeper’s son, merchant? His greatest joy came from his youngest sister, Anastasia, seven years younger. They were more than brother and sister, they were best friends.

The Garou came for Alan’s youngest sister while he was on the way back from Kenning, riding shotgun on the family coach. Alan listened to his mother explain that the Silver Fang blood was true in her, but he was always regretted that he didn’t get to say goodbye.

Alan smiled, remembering how two years later he was riding and was almost thrown from his horse when it spied a sleek grey wolf in the middle of the path. Alan dismounted and ran to the wolf, throwing his arms around her. There’d been no doubt in his mind that it was Anastasia.

The reunion was full of conflicting emotions. There was joy, pure simple joy, at seeing each other again, but Anastasia came with news that their father was dead. And Alan also realized that there was a wall between them now that had not existed when they had both been young and had pretended that they were both Silver Fangs, battling the might Zmei on the steppes of Russia, wondering weather more dragons lived in the icy forests of Canada, and half-seriously planning to run away and have adventures in the north.

But there was still love. Anastasia had been traveling as well, and on her Rite of passage she met a woman that she thought Alan would like to meet. She told Alan that his blood was still important and that she desperately wanted nieces and nephews.

His sister was right. No one knew his heart better than her, and she had found someone with the same heart who lived in Stanton. A banker’s daughter, young and adventurous. Alan thought she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. Alan courted young Lisa, and the Silver Fangs courted her father and his bank, insuring that no one but Alan would be accepted as a suitor.

Anastasia chose well and Alan and Lisa fell in love and were married. They were the last truly happy days in Alan’s life.

A year after their marriage, Alan and Lisa were trying to have children. He hoped to surprise Anastasia with news of a niece or nephew by her next visit. Instead, Anastasia held Alan while he told her that Lisa had been shot when the town sheriff and a gang of bank robbers broke into a shoot out in her father’s bank.

Alan had joined the posse to catch the criminals, but they had only caught a few members of the gang. Anastasia wiped the tears from his cheeks and promised him they would not get away. That night they set out together, following the gang north.

His sister’s promise was true, and while they could hide from a sheriff and a few rounded up deputies, they could not hide from a Silver Fang. Only one of the bandits survived to be hanged from a tree on the Canadian border.

That was when Alan found himself. He remembered it as the first time since Lisa died that he felt that he was doing what he was supposed to be doing.

There were other posses, and sometimes a tin star to go with them. He never gave up the Mercantile, because that was where the family was, but he never gave up riding shotgun on the wagons, and taking time to bring in a man if there was trouble. And just sometimes the Silver Fangs called, and Anastasia would ask Alan to run down a certain man, someone that the human law wouldn’t touch.

Alan had purpose, if not happiness. He had his siblings at the Mercantile, and his sister in the woods. Until the vampires came.

Wolfe blinked a few times, reminding himself to do it, as he came out of his memory. His life took more than a few moments to play out in his mind, but he had to be at the University in time to meet whatever animal Johnny sent to speak with the Primogen. He swung his leg over his motorcycle and started the engine.