Mom was the daughter of a German Godi and his mate.  They’d come to the United States to escape Germany’s collapsed social structure after World War I.  It was 1946, and they’d come because America was the Land of Freedom and Opportunity.

What a joke.

They were shunned right from the start for their hard-to-pronounce last names and their blonde hair, blue eyes.  It was bad luck that they looked the consummate Aryan, for their sympathies lay elsewhere.  Nevertheless, the day Decker’s grandfather set foot in America was the day he stopped gaining renown.  Period.  He was Adren when he came, and still a young man.  When he died decades later, he was still Adren.

His daughter was beautiful, though.  Born in 1963, when the Godi had almost given up hope for a child – any child – his daughter had eyes as blue as the summer sky and a smile to melt a bull.  He loved her.  His daughter, Decker’s mother, deserved better than the life he could give her.  So he pulled strings and he called in old favors, and when she was sixteen, he managed to get her hitched to a respected, rising Garou.

Dad.

He was some hotshot Fenrir straight from Scandinavia.  Modi, just like Decker, though he’s likely to knock anyone who compares him to his father flat.  His father’s blood was old and his family well-known, and he himself had a list of glorious deeds longer than a desert shadow at five o’ clock.  He was the darling of his Catskills Sept, and when he took his young wife south to Alabama, he was the darling of that Sept too.

No one ever seemed to remark on his drinking problem.  On his habit of shoving his wife around the house.  Slapping her for burning his toast.  Hitting her for running his bath too cold.  Coming home blind drunk at 3am with another woman’s scent all over him, and then kicking her so hard she lost her first child for looking at another man.  A month after that she was pregnant again with Decker.  And no one ever said anything about the abuse.  After all, it was Njal Bjornson, who had gone from Cliath to Fostern in three months, Fostern to Adren in two years, and Adren to Athro in five.  He was a hero, with more kills to his name than anyone in recent history.  And his temper, everyone agreed, was a tiny flaw, really, and easily forgivable.

Decker was born into that family in the November of 1983.  He was torn from his Mom’s womb and raised high to the sky by Dad, who held a bottle of beer in his other hand.  For the next eleven years of his life he watched his father kick his mother around like a dog.  She never cried, except late at night when Dad was still out and she thought Decker was asleep.  Eventually, she stopped crying altogether when Dad started bringing home his women in broad daylight, fucking them on Mom’s bed, gifting them with the jewelry his grandfather gave Mom on her wedding day.

No one ever insisted, so Decker rarely went to school.  To this day, he barely reads at a second-grade level.  He knows nothing about the planets and the stars, or which orbited which, and he only understands the simplest of sums.  Most the time, he stayed home and watched his father mistreat his mother.  And he learned to hate.

A few weeks shy of his birthday, his father came home drunk.  That wasn’t unusual.  But he came home roaring angry, too.  Accusations of Mom’s faithlessness flew.  Decker defended her.  First with words, which made Dad laugh.  Then with his fists.  For that, his father struck him so hard that he was deaf in his left ear for a month, and then threw him into the bathroom, wedging the door shut with a chair.  Then the beating began in earnest outside.

When Decker finally broke the door down – even at that young age, he was strong – his father was gone, and with him, all support from the Sept.  As for his mother...she was never the same again.  Her eyes never quite focused, and sometimes she couldn’t even remember who he was.  They moved out of the backwaters of Alabama into the only thing they could afford.  A trailer park in the outskirts of Mobile.

When he was thirteen, he started running with a gang.  It was the Deep South, though, and racial lines were strong.  His mob stayed out of the inner cities.  The black kids there didn’t take kindly to white boys coming into their turf.  The same rule applied the other way around.

So trailer parks became their territory.  They had their run of the poorer suburbs of Mobile, terrorizing and destroying, vandalizing and stealing.  The kids of poor white trash all, they were led by a cruel, stupid brute of a boy.  Jedediah McKinley.  Big, tough, fearless.  He had the undying loyalty of sixteen boys, some younger, some older.  They were bullies and thugs, and then they were rapists, felons, killers.

Decker was the youngest.  He got picked on at first.  Then he snapped and fought back.  The other boy slunk home with his arm broken in four places and two of his front teeth knocked out.  After that, Jedediah started watching him.

When he was fourteen, he decided he’d had it with school.  He stood up in the middle of Remedial Math and walked toward the door.  The teacher tried to stop him.  Decker seized him by the hair and bent him to his knees.  Then he let go, stepped back, and kicked him in the gut hard enough to rupture something inside.  The teacher vomited blood.  Three of the girls start crying simultaneously.

When he was fifteen, he killed a man.  The kill was cold and something deep and dark inside him thrilled.  The week after that he found one of the girls who had cried that day a year ago.  He caught her in the bushes behind her house, meaning to hurt her somehow, but his father’s violence toward his mother loomed in his mind, in his veins, in his fist.  Like father like son, they always said, and he couldn’t think of a fate worse than that.  He couldn’t strike.  He let her go.

A week after that she found him under the hood of his father’s old Chevy truck.  That night he fucked her in the truck’s cab.  He’ll never know what she saw in him, why she let him.  He still doesn’t know.  But it was the first time and the only time it was ever sweet for him.  Sweet and not about power.  Not about control.

It was the only time because Jedediah had been watching Decker for a while now, and he didn’t like how strong the boy was getting.  He didn’t like how the other boys were starting to respect him.  How, after the schoolroom incident, they started circling Decker more than they circled him.  Jedediah had been watching, and he had seen Decker and his girl.  And Jedediah decided it was time to take the snot-nosed kid down a notch.

He raped and killed the girl, and then broke into Decker’s trailer and left her there.

Decker came home to find his mother serving the dead girl tea.  Talking to her as though she were alive.  Poor crazy Mom.  Then he heard Jedediah laughing his loud hoarse laugh outside, surrounded by the other boys.  Red was stealing over his vision.  He had just enough time to raise his hand and point his finger at Jedediah.  He heard himself say, You’re a dead man.  And then the red closed over.

When he came to, there was blood on his hands, blood on his body, blood splattered on the sides of the trailers.  Jedediah was dead.  Two of the other boys were dead.  His mother was dead.  He was still standing somehow, but nearly naked, his clothing in tatters on his body and in shreds on the ground.  Someone was clapping.  Slow, deliberate claps.  Njal’s boy, said the owner of the hands.  Like father, like son.

He almost frenzied again.

*