Darkness Bound (25 page)

She could only think it must have been arctic, since he didn’t seem to feel the cold at all here.

“I got disoriented and dark came in. I went what I thought was the way back but I must have been going the opposite direction. Then I couldn’t push my horse any
more. The lantern blew out but I managed to relight it. Then the thing slipped through my fingers and went out again. I couldn’t find it.”

Leigh had both hands over her mouth. She felt as if she was waiting for a terrible story to end badly. But he was here so he hadn’t died.

“The next thing I knew I was flat on my back just seeing shadows and feeling like I’d been hit over the head. Only I hadn’t. There was a dog standing over me. Biggest damn dog you ever saw. At first I thought he was a wolf and he’d have been big for that. But the shape was wrong. He was a dog.”

“Was it Blue?”

His features twisted. “No, it wasn’t Blue. And it was too late by then.”

Making words was getting tougher. “Why do you say it was too late? Too late, how?”

“I was torn open by its teeth and claws. Changed forever. The dog stayed with me, half-dragged me all the way back to the ranch. Then, standing in the bitterness of that storm, he showed me what I had become. He
demonstrated
my future.”

Niles confused her.

“I tried to explain to Abbey but it was too much for her. I had to leave. I joined up with a band coming West for the Gold Rush.”

Leigh’s mind was blank for seconds. She blinked and started calculating. “But that was way back in—”

“Yeah.”

“But—”

“I was a man and a hound, a werehound. The animal in the snow did that to me—but he also saved my life.”

Leigh stood up. “Why are you saying all this?”

The corners of his mouth turned down sharply. “Because it’s true.”

“I don’t understand you.”

He turned up his palms on the table. “I’m a werehound, part of a team of werehounds.”

Leigh backed up a step. “I don’t believe you.” She thought about it. “I’ve never even heard of werehounds.”

“But you have heard of werewolves?”

“Of course.”

“Of course. And now you’ve heard about us. We were always much fewer in number and our makeup is different. We are never fighters from choice.”

“Okay,” she said. “How am I supposed to react to you saying these things? You’re human again now?” Even discussing this felt bizarre.

“I hope to be soon.” For a moment, they stared at each other in silence. “Do I scare you?”

Leigh’s blood drained to her feet. “You don’t scare me. You’ve just got a weird sense of humor.”

Niles jumped up and tore the outer seam of his jeans apart over the left thigh. “What d’you think made that? What does it look like?”

If she could have screamed she probably would have. “You are frightening me now. There. Are you satisfied?”

“No, dammit, I’m not. Look at this and tell me what it is.”

The corner of the room was at Leigh’s back. She had no place to run.

Niles took one step closer and held the destroyed leg of his jeans open.

She made herself look and all the air went out of
her lungs. From the inside to the outside of his heavily muscled thigh stretched big, deep, silvery marks. Old scratches—or gouges.

“What is this, Leigh?”

“A big… animal… scratched you.”

“Exactly the way I told you. I should have died from a wound like that but the big dog made sure I healed fast. That’s one of our skills. We’re not as practiced as werewolves, but we’re good. Now, turn around and don’t turn back until I tell you.”

She did as she was told, and closed her eyes.

Subtle noises, quiet but foreign, came from behind her. Rustling, cracking, a long moan and a series of whines. Leigh wiped sweat from her brow.

Niles poked her between the shoulder blades and she spun around at once.

And looked into the face of a dog almost as tall as she was. Russet in color with a thick, glossy coat, huge feet, alert ears, and eyes that could be black—or very dark blue.

In a vision that was more a flash, she remembered a wolflike dog, russet colored with eyes that seemed dark blue rather than black. That dog had grabbed her, made her climb on his back, and she had held on to his fur while he carried her to safety. He had been enraged, flying across the room, destroying anything in his way. Yes, he had flown with her and she had lost consciousness.

She couldn’t look away from Niles. He stared back, inviting questioning but wary. He was that same hound who had snatched her away from that horrible house. How could she have forgotten about it? It was as if her mind had frozen everything out but now the memories were thawing.

She felt wobbly, and weak.

The dog sat and stared at her, assessing her, her reaction. He tilted his head on one side and she knew she saw real sadness in his eyes.

Leigh began to cry, silently. She leaned on the wall and covered her face. “Can you still talk to me?”

“I think I can.”

She flung herself toward him. “I heard you in my mind.”

“Good. I can’t speak aloud in this form. And I couldn’t mind-track with you if you weren’t a sensitive. You’ve got special gifts, Leigh. I was pretty sure you did. You’re special.”

“Will you ever be human? Just human?”

Part of her longed to touch him but she was afraid. He was a magnificent animal.

“Close, I hope,”
she heard him say. He dropped into a crouch, every line of his body drooping.
“I’m working on it. I never stop working.”

“I can hear you!” She shook convulsively. “What would it take for you to be completely human again?”

“Complete acceptance as I am.”
He stared into her eyes.
“By a woman who will stand beside me and stand up for me. And love me no matter how hard it is sometimes. That woman would go through a lot and some of it could be terrible. Painful even.”

Leigh touched his head lightly, rested her hand on his neck.

He nuzzled her other hand and she put her face, tentatively, into the thick fur on his head.

She began to cry, tears that streamed from stinging eyes.

Then she walked away from him and out into the night.

A
FLASHLIGHT BEAM
came from behind Leigh and illuminated the concrete steps up the bank from Niles’s house. He was following her.

Panicking, filled with fury that she was up to her neck in something she couldn’t change even if she wanted to, she went faster.

“Wait. Put this on.”

Dimly she realized she wasn’t hearing Niles’s voice but still she scrambled, stumbling on the steps, using her hands to grasp the edges of the treads when she lost her grip on the handrail.

“Leigh, stop it. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She couldn’t close her mouth and freezing air scraped down her throat. Her face lost all feeling. Pain clawed at her ears. Sleet and rain drove sideways, pushing at her, trying to drive her back.

“You will fall!”

That was Sean
. She hadn’t heard him speak often but now she recognized the low, penetrating tone.

At the top of the steps she kept running and didn’t stop until she stood at the edge of the bluff in front of Two Chimneys. Buffeted this way and that, she braced her feet apart. Tears froze on her eyelashes.

“Your coat,” Sean said. He took one of her tightly folded arms and stuffed it into a sleeve, then repeated the process on the other side. “Please look at me.”

Leigh shook her head, no, and a sound erupted from her that she didn’t recognize, almost her own howl. The wind tore the noise away but it came again.

Sean put up her hood and fastened the front of the coat. He took big work gloves from his pocket and pushed them on her hands. “Go inside, please.”

“No!” Her teeth chattered uncontrollably. “Do you see it?” She pointed to where streams of color, dark green, purple, ochre, brown, and navy blue streamed out of the water. “Chimney Rocks are under there. That’s where the colors are coming from and I think they do something to me. Niles says I’m something different. I think he’s right. I think it’s something to do with that out there.”

Sean put an arm around her and she didn’t pull away. “I can’t see it,” he said. “But I know it comes from Chimney Rocks and makes the veil that covers this place to separate the two worlds.”

She clutched the front of his shirt. His hair wasn’t tied back and whipped around his head and across her face. “Two worlds? I don’t know what you mean.”

“And it isn’t my place to tell it all. I don’t even know everything yet. But there is the human plane and the so-called paranormal plane. Someone else must explain
how you are different from other humans, what gives you the ability to see the veil. I believe you draw strength from out there.” He pointed to the sea.

Without warning, her knees buckled. Sean held her up. “You must go inside and get warm.”

“I love him!” The words, torn from her, were clear as if a still space had formed in the raging storm.

“I thought you did,” Sean said. “He is lucky. But so are you.”

“Lucky?” She laughed and found the strength to stand alone. “Lucky to love a man who is a dog, a hound?”

“He can give you everything you need. He can protect you from things you know nothing about.”

Pictures, snatches of scenes, flared in her mind. A physically beautiful monster doing unspeakable things to a woman shrouded in white. A car bumping hers from behind, jerking her neck each time.

She heard Jazzy bark and whine. “Poor guy,” she said and lifted him up. She undid enough of her coat to stuff the dog inside. “We’ll warm each other.”

Promptly, Skillywidden landed, almost weightless, on her shoulder and wrapped herself around Leigh’s neck.

“May I get Niles to come?” Sean asked.

“No.”

“But you love him?”

“Yes.”

“He loves you and will never desert you even if you pretend he doesn’t exist.”

Flinging wide one arm, she yelled incoherently into the roiling wind and wet, the ice spicules that pierced her face.

“Come.” Sean pulled, but gently, and he stopped as soon as she resisted.

“I’m not normal, either,” she shouted at him. “There’s something different about me—you just admitted it—and I have to know what it is. I could hear Niles talking in my mind when he was… wasn’t a man.”

“You are blessed with special gifts,” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”

“I can’t go back to the way I was before, can I?”

He shook his head, no. “And once you understand more, you won’t want to.”

“And Niles knows all this?”

“Of course.”

“Has… Was there a spell? I can’t believe I’m talking about these things. Was a spell put on me?”

“That isn’t for me to know. If I have to pick you up to take you inside, I will. Niles has told me I must.”

Trees bent. Branches cracked and moaned. Leigh smelled smoke but saw no fire. And she heard small, rapid footsteps skittering through the forest.

“Niles is talking to you?”

“We’re talking to each other. He isn’t talking to you because he knows how afraid and shocked you are.”

Turning from Sean blindly, Leigh struggled uphill to the cottage. The keys weren’t in her pocket and Niles had made her stop keeping one over the door.

Sean reached past her and opened the door.

In the living room, barely warmer than she had been outside, Leigh faced Sean. “And if I don’t want any of this? Can I change it?”

He looked away. She knew he was silently telling her she couldn’t choose her own path.

“Be patient and you’ll learn everything. Niles will help you. We all will, but Niles most of all.”

“Vampires,” she whispered, moving closer to him. “There are vampires out there. There was one in a house someone took me to… he wanted me.”

“You are not alone with this,” Sean said.

“Yes, I am. No one can live my life for me, or take this away for me.”

Quickly, he threw logs into the fireplace and started a fire. “Only Niles can deal with this. It is his place.”

“Why?”

“Because it is between the two of you. You have been marked for each other.”

S
EAN, OR
B
LUE
as he’d been when Leigh last saw him, had spent the night on her porch. She also thought she had seen a second oversized hound, this one gray and black, blending into the trees at the back of the cottage.

This morning it had still been dark when she had ignored Blue’s agitated pacing and gotten into her car. She had figured out that Sean appeared more often as a werehound than a man because it allowed him to protect her in places where a man would seem strange.