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—desirable.

I fisted my hands and gulped, through growing dizziness. Stammered, annoyed by my own inarticulateness:

“Uh, I don’t, I don’t go bareback, that’s just dumb. I mean, you do two friends, and I do two friends, and HIV takes five years plus to even show up on the chart, so—”

Karl just looked at me, knitting those no-brows, like I was the cutest, dumbest little thing he’d ever seen. Making me . . . blush.

“But—you’re not gonna be with anybody else, Lee,” he said, finally.

Simple as that: No one. Never.

(Ever again.)

I reddened. “Say what?”

Dick going: Yes! Brain going: Nut. And everything in between slapped suddenly awake, tentatively up, from the rising hairs on the back of my neck to the crawling skin of my balls, my widening nostrils, my fluttering pulse.

An hour later, we were back at my place, with him already in me deep enough to hurt. And me, already—

—pulling him deeper.

* * *

There are a lot of bears to choose from, but the one Karl had in mind was—naturally enough—the biggest aside from long-extinct Arctodus simus, the prehistoric short-faced monster bear, which ranged from six feet at the shoulder on all fours to fourteen standing up. Under the skin, Karl believed he was a Grizzly: Ursus horribilis, “The King Of The Brutes,” able to weigh two thousand pounds, run thirty miles an hour, and survive four bullets in the heart just long enough suck the marrow from your bones.

He reeled off statistics like they were love-talk, or family anecdotes: Told me how bears eat each other, adult and child. How fights between bears lead to broken jaws, shattered teeth, lost eyes. How the female bear is called a sow, the male bear a boar. How female bears won’t have sex while raising their young, which can take two to four years.

“Thought you were a cat, y’know, first time I looked at you,” he murmured that night, into the sweaty side of my neck. “But now I think maybe . . . maybe you’re a bear, too.”

(Uh huh.)

Nini aside, you see, Karl wasn’t faculty—but he did teach: White Power cant, liberally admixed with a highly personal form of Viking Shamanism. The first he’d inhaled, almost literally, with his mother’s milk; “Ma” was Verena Speller, called Vee, currently serving twenty-five to life on a particularly grotesque beat-down that turned into a full-scale race riot—payback for Karl’s father, Grand Wizard of Klan North, who died of a heart attack after getting into a fist-fight with the Holocaust survivors’ group protesting his initial public appearance. Karl, a toddler at the time, could no longer remember seeing her outside of a contact visits room.

“She knew what she was doin’,” was his only comment, the one time I asked about it. “Ma’s a soldier. She knew the risks.”

We went to visit once a month, after Karl and I had become an item. But I usually stayed out in the car, because Ma had “issues” with “my kind”; she was old-school to the bone, and didn’t want to be anywhere near the narrow faggot ass of any white guy who wasn’t doing his level best to replace the race. Karl was safe enough, though—he’d already done his bit, and then some, sowing his seed with nine good Aryan wenches he’d met through ads in the backs of Heritage Front hand-outs. He got baby, toddler, preteenage pictures through the mail and took them in for Vee to coo over, destroying them ritually at each visit’s end to keep the guards from confiscating them.

And every time, he left saddened in a way that made me sad just to witness it: Revolted, horrified, shaken to his unshakable core by the spectacle of his mother stuck behind bars, penned and prowling restlessly as a lioness confined to a stall built for dogs.

“They’re never gonna put me in a cage,” he told me, with equal emphasis on all parts: Not them, not me, not a cage. Not ever.

Oh, no.

I kept my opinions on the subject to myself, for then. Things had already gotten complicated enough once news got around, and my friends started telling me I was screwing Hitler. I’d scoff: Rommel, maybe. After all, he’d never said anything too repulsive to bear without response about non-white people around me . . .

And was that rationalization? Bet your ass. And did I need it, just to make my own behavior endurable, and still dream myself moral?

Not—

—as much—

—as I should have.

I told myself what Karl told me—that he didn’t really give a damn about “the Cause,” about paramilitarism, neo-Nazism, racial Separatism, any kind of ism. That all he really cared about was the grail he pursued to the exclusion of virtually everything else: The maddeningly elusive goal of evolution—or de-evolution—into his own “natural” animal form.

It was the second part of Karl’s creed, the one he’d been left to come up with all on his ownsome . . . a Frankenstein faith patched together from romance and ritual, mythology and madness, snips and snails and old wives’ tales. Put simply, he aspired to remake himself into a berserkgangr, or berserker—a bestial warrior-poet, Odin’s champion, intoxicated with blood-mad ecstasy, who could wade into battle naked except for his totem animal’s flayed hide, the ritual bear-shirt.

Pretty nutty, huh? So much so that even other Aryans considered Karl cracked. To the Far Right Christian coalition he was a renegade, an unrepentant Pagan, maybe even a devil-worshiper. Straight-up paramilitarists, meanwhile, thought his time would be better spent fighting the good fight on a battlefield the rest of them could share—down here on earth, where the usual weapon of choice is rocket-launchers, not shape-shifting.