Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 (33 page)

“What was that for?” He gingerly touched a finger to his tongue.

I swallowed his blood and folded my arms over my chest. The rain mingled with the tears on my cheeks. “Henry is out here, Max. I felt him watching me.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “Stop obsessing about him.”

“I would if he would quit stalking me.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

I told him about Henry watching me that morning as I did yoga. He listened, but his expression remained skeptical. The rain let up, and, holding hands, we dashed back to the mansion. He dropped my hand once we got in sight of the windows, though, and the cold wind seeped into my bones.

Saraya and another dark-skinned servant with similar bone structure met us at the door with big bath towels warm like they’d been tumbled in the dryer. Max didn’t meet my eyes.

“Saraya, did someone arrive while we were away?”

“Yes, Doctor Max. Master Henry is here. He and Master Carrigan are in the library.”

Max’s eyebrows shot up. “Henry? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Doctor. Master Carrigan would like for you to join them as soon as you are dried off and comfortable. He said for Miss Marconi to wait in her room until she is summoned for dinner.”

Of course.

The time on the clock said four-thirty when I got back to my room, and after a quick, hot shower, I put on a long black skirt and sleeveless gold top with a dipping modern neckline I couldn’t imagine Deirdre wearing. I found a coin necklace that seemed to match.

I lay down on the bed to see if my rumbling stomach would settle. Just knowing Henry was in the house made me uneasy, but the crashing of the waves, particularly insistent since the storm had frothed them up, lulled me to sleep.

This time I found myself in a small, dark room with a single torch on the wall. A sarcophagus stood in the middle with about three feet on any side. The only other light in the room came from two oval-shaped light spots at face height on one of the shorter walls.

Deirdre, glowing slightly and somewhat transparent, sat on the box and trailed her fingers over it.

“Where am I?” I asked.

She looked up and motioned for me to be quiet. “I never liked that outfit,” she said so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her. “I always felt it made me look like the mainland harlots my father complained about.”

“Where are we?”

“My tomb.” She gestured around us. “My dear brother’s last gift to me, making sure I could never leave my family in death as I had tried to in life.”

“What do you mean?”

She stood and beckoned me to follow her to the glowing ovals. “Look.”

I put my eyes to them and found I looked through the portrait as I had before. Maximilian stood to one side of the room, his expression carefully neutral. Carrigan sat in his armchair, and Henry on the couch.

That’s right, I never found out what’s beside the library.

“Does your father know?”

“No.” She stood so closely her cold breath tickled my ear. “Henry never told him, as far as I know. He thinks I was buried at sea, just as I had died.”

Something cold and slimy pressed into my back, and fear danced through my stomach. “What are you doing?”

“I am rejoining the land of the living,” she murmured. I tried to go back to my body, but my spirit was paralyzed, and I couldn’t move.

“You’re the first woman Maximilian has had feelings for,” she said. “I’ve heard him talk about you, and his words are cold and clinical, but I know my Max, and his tone betrays him. I knew your curiosity would get the better of you, and you would come to my tomb in a form I could capture.”

The cold spread from my spine in icicle fingers along my ribs and squeezed my lungs like a suffocating corset. I gripped the inside of the frame, trying to force the sensation out or escape, but it didn’t work. Henry looked up at the portrait and raised his glass.

“To my dear sister Deirdre,” he said interrupting whatever Max had been saying. “You know, it still feels like she’s alive somehow. I’d bring her back if I could.”

“Oh?” Max asked and studied his whiskey.

“It’s one of the benefits of loosening the restrictions on blood magic. If you were man enough to.”

The color drained from Max’s face. “Henry, what did you do?”

“Nothing recently, Maximilian. Your fiancée was a determined woman. I just promised to help her win you no matter what happened.”

Hot anger flooded through me from my heart outward, and Wolf-Lonna snarled,
“Occupied, bitch!”

I collapsed on the floor and tried to catch my breath before remembering that as a projection, I didn’t necessarily need it. In the half-light, a dark shape tussled with the glowing Deirdre, who tried to cover her face and throat. A thin wail came from her, and I heard footsteps stomp through the library to the portrait.

“Henry, you will explain immediately,” Carrigan said.

“I plead the fifth, dear Father. You’ve forbidden me to use blood magic.”

“Don’t refer to that revolutionary documentation as justification. Deirdre?”

The pain in his voice struck me in my lower abdomen.
He’s a jerk, but he did love his daughter.

“Henry, what did you do?” Max asked again.

“Only ensured Deirdre would be able to come back if given the opportunity.”

A knife ripped through the canvas, and I stepped back and out of the way. Another tearing sound brought my attention back to Wolf-Lonna, whose outline glowed red. She had torn Deirdre’s throat out. Blood flooded my mouth, and I woke and barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting it and the rest of what I’d eaten that day. I looked up to see Wolf-Lonna, a petite black wolf, looking at me with a lupine grin.

She looked into my eyes, and I saw Henry and Carrigan standing over the tomb. The lid was open, and Deirdre’s body was preserved except for one thing: her missing throat.

“That injury was done by someone else,”
Wolf-Lonna said, and I came back to myself.

“What the hell happened down there? And why can I see you now?”

Before she could answer, a key turned in the lock, and she disappeared.

“Lonna?” Max’s tone was tinged with panic.

“In here,” I moaned. I couldn’t stand, so he found me on the bathroom floor.

“Are you all right?” He knelt beside me and did the electric running his hands over me thing. I batted them away.

“Your bitch of an ex-fiancée tried to kill me and take over my body,” I said. “That is not okay.”

He helped me stand and brought me back to the bed. He cleaned my face with a washcloth, and I was horrified—and embarrassed—to see it come away with blood.

“Let me clean up,” I said and stood, but he stopped me.

“It’s fine. I’m a doctor, remember? I’ve seen worse.”

“Then why are your hands trembling?”

He smiled and caressed my cheek, which made tears come to my eyes. “Because I was afraid it was your blood.”

My stomach turned, and again, I barely made it. He didn’t follow me, and I was grateful he allowed me to spare my dignity. I did clean up before I came back out, and I ditched the clothes for the white robe that had been hung on the back of the door.

“I’m not normally so squeamish,” I said and sat beside him on the bed. I trembled, and he pulled me to him.

“You’re not normally fighting for your soul, either,” he told me. “I don’t know what you might have heard, but that’s why blood magic is forbidden. It takes away the freedom of choice.”

“Like bringing people to an island and experimenting on them doesn’t?”

“They always have the ability to escape, although it may be difficult. Once your soul is lost, that’s it.”

I pulled away. “Is that how Carrigan justifies it? News flash—as we discussed, islands are damned hard to get off of.”

He sighed. “Look, I don’t know how you did it, but you managed to defeat the spell. Did you have help?”

“No, it was just me and my soul.” I heard the thump of a tail on the floor, but she was still invisible.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said.

“Well, if you don’t know it already, I’m not going to.” I crossed my arms. “So there. I heard that from you enough.”

“Which again, I don’t remember.”

“Not my fault.” I stood and walked to the balcony. “Admit it. I was right about Henry being here.”

“Yes, and that puts you in even greater danger. He drew your blood while you were unconscious, and I cannot guarantee he will be ethical in its use. Carrigan’s experiments are only beginning. Tomorrow they will force you to change with a combination of your blood, other chemicals, and blood magic. He will then be able to cause you to change and control you while you are a werewolf.”

“I will not consent.”

“Consent isn’t part of this anymore.” He stood behind me. “You need to escape. I’ll help you. Tonight.”

I turned back to him. “You said before you wouldn’t until you had all the information. What changed your mind?”

The answer came in a voice that didn’t belong to Max. “You did, my dear.” Carrigan stood at the door, Henry behind him. “Maximilian, I’m disappointed. I never took you for a traitor.”

“And I never took you for a sneak.”

“How did they sneak up on you, Max?” I asked. “You sensed Henry when he arrived. I saw it.”

He shook his head, his expression panicked.

“The same way he slipped away to have a tryst with you this afternoon,” Henry said. “Our Doctor Fortuna is a sneaky one himself.”

I glared at him, and the light caught something at his neck: a small vial with ruby-colored liquid.
He was able to mask his and Carrigan’s approach because he has Max’s blood.

Wolf-Lonna became visible and growled at them. Henry took out a gun and aimed it at Max, as did Carrigan.

“You can attack, wolf lady, but you can only get one of us at a time. Someone will get a shot off, and that will be it for your lover.”

“Your cooperation, Miss Marconi,” Carrigan said. “Remember our terms. I could fix it so you never see Maximilian again.”

“Fine,” I said. Wolf-Lonna disappeared, and she returned to my head. She wasn’t happy.

“We’ll figure something out. If I can break through their spells and change, then it will be three on two, or whoever else they’ve got here.”

“You could break through and change, but you don’t want to,”
she complained.

“I can’t! I tried this morning, and it didn’t work.”

“Because you don’t want to face all that goes with it.”

They took Max away at gunpoint, and I stomped my foot after I heard the key turn in the lock.

I walked out on to the balcony. The bottom edge of the big pink sun kissed the ocean waves at the horizon and spread its glow like blood on the water. I squinted at the sea, wondering if my friend the hammerhead was out there.
Why didn’t they just shoot me? If the end goal is to take me apart to figure out an anti-aging product, they could have easily done so by now, especially after Max betrayed them.
I drummed my fingers on the railing and looked down at the sand below, wondering if it would break my fall if I jumped. It was a good twenty feet to the sand below, and I couldn’t help but think that trying to escape that way wouldn’t end well.

I can’t get far on a broken leg,
I decided.
Let me see if there’s another way down.
When I approached the side of the balcony, a harsh buzzing filled my ears, and my knees grew weak. A trellis clung to the side of the house—yes, I cringed at the cliché—but my muscles grew too weak for me to reach it. The door to my suite opened, and I turned to see Henry in the room.

“What do you want?” I looked over my shoulder.

He walked out on the balcony. “I came to ask what you want for dinner. You’re not invited to the table after that trick.”

I arched an eyebrow. “I doubt that’s all you’re here for.” I bit my tongue. It sounded like I was propositioning him. I pulled my robe tighter and crossed my arms.

His round features would have looked harmless on any other guy, but his eyes had a cold, feral tint—like the shark’s but with more cunning and less curiosity.

“You’re quite the mystery, Miss Marconi.” He brushed a finger down my shoulder. Whereas Max’s touch gave me pleasurable tingles, his left a trail of cold in his wake and the feeling a snake had just slithered over my skin, even through the robe.

“I’ll ask again, Henry. What do you want? If it’s to take my dinner order, I’m not hungry.”

“The role of the broken-hearted mistress doesn’t suit you, my dear.” He leaned in close, and his cold breath across my face made unpleasant goose bumps rise on my arms.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked and backed away. “It’s the blood magic, isn’t it? You’re paying the price.”

“Not that it’s done me a lot of good,” he said and followed me. “I’ve been waiting five years to bring Deirdre back, and you were the perfect vessel.”

“I’m not anyone’s vessel, Henry.” I allowed my tone to betray my disgust.