Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 (5 page)

She laughed. “Deal.” She stood and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you came back.”

“Me too.” As a hunter, I knew that the respite from being the prey would be short, and I had to get what I needed here quickly and move on. I only wished I knew how much time I had before they found me. It was only with strong effort that I kept myself from shivering.

I hope you’re still glad tomorrow. I hope I am.

Chapter Four

I hadn’t physically changed since the first time six months before. Then, in a trance, I had opened the front door to my apartment, taken off my clothes, and changed into a wolf with the world watching. Okay, not quite the world. It was pretty late, and my apartment complex was quiet. Since then, I had spirit-walked with the aid of the aconite, which caused me to create an astral projection of my wolf self rather than physically change. Somehow I could still eat what I hunted, and I hoped that wouldn’t translate into bad blood work. Who knew how much wild critters would raise one’s cholesterol? A stupid concern, I know, considering everything else. It’s funny what the mind latches on to.

Now I sat in the living room at Joanie’s and Leo’s house with them, all of us wrapped in sheets, as we waited for the moon to rise and for its light to sing in our blood. We could change without it, but it was easier in its light, which compelled us when it was full. I suppressed the urge to giggle at the sight, like we were at the most boring toga party ever. Joanie caught my eye, and her lips twitched like she thought the same.

The moon rose, its light spilling through the bank of windows.

“It’s time,” Joanie murmured.

My inner wolf stretched and yawned, unfurling to her full spiritual presence.

“We can change?
she asked.
Really change?”

“Yes, just be gentle with me.”
Again I stuffed the urge to laugh. I hadn’t said those words in a really long time.

I gasped when my human spirit shrank. The sensation was that of hurtling down a long hallway, then landing in a warm pool and expanding within it to fill a new shape. The inner wolf and I became one. I heard tendons snapping and bones cracking in new arrangements and suspected I would be sore the next day.

“Not sore. Strong and healthy and whole. We are one.”

“We can’t be one. I am not a wolf.”

But I was. I shook the sheet off and looked around with new eyes. Although my senses were heightened in human form now that I had these new abilities, in wolf form, they were almost painfully acute. The moonlight through the windows had been beautiful and cool—now it sparkled on the floor and every surface with opalescence that made me want to run and yip and bathe in its light. The forest beyond the windows beckoned with a thousand scents and rustlings and scurryings, each one of which begged to be investigated.

A light nip to my shoulder brought me back to myself, and I shifted my weight so I stood evenly on all four paws. Leo, a black wolf, sat and looked at me, his tongue lolling in amusement. Joanie, a petite brown wolf who could probably pass for one of the Arkansas red wolves, had nipped me.
 

“You were quivering like you were ready to explode with the sensations of it all,”
she said telepathically.

“It’s different from when we spirit-walk,”
I responded. “
I feel heavier but more powerful.”

“Do you remember anything of the first time? When Iain and I chased after you?”

“Only that I wanted to get away and be free. And Gabriel…”

A low growl from Leo halted that line of conversation. Not that I blamed him. Gabriel had tried to claim Joanie first.

“Moonlight’s wasting, girls,”
he said but waited for Joanie to lead us out of the house through a—
oh, the shame!
—doggie door in the mud room.

“It was the easiest solution,”
Joanie told me once we were through. I heard the wry smile in her voice.

Once we were fully in the moonlight, the dry brown grass under my paws, I didn’t care that we’d been relegated to the status of mere
canis domesticus
or whatever the hell regular dogs were. I chased after her, nipping at her flank, and she mock-growled at me. We tumbled and tussled before I drew back.

“The baby! I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,”
she reassured me with a canine grin at Leo.
“He’s done worse.”

“And that’s all I need to know.”
I trotted to the edge of the woods and smelled pigeons and squirrels and deer and all manner of things that seemed to taunt me.
“When do we hunt?”
It came out as a vocal whine.

“When Matthew arrives.”
Leo looked around, his ears perked.
“He should have been here by now.”

“Maybe he got delayed by something? Too much traffic on the road, perhaps, or the cubs wanting to come with him?”
The image of the playful pups didn’t dispel the concern in Joanie’s mental voice, and I remembered Matthew saying they never hunted alone anymore.

Leo paced back and forth on the lawn.
“He said he’d be on time.”

A gunshot rang out, and all of us sat up, ears swiveling back and forth.

“What the hell was that?”
I asked.
“Okay, I know what it was, but what was it?”
Human logical processes weren’t exactly working well, but they knew what I meant.

“Danger!”
Joanie yelled in her mental voice, and we scrambled for the house, but another gunshot and a puff of wet dirt and grass in front of Leo, who had the lead, sent us toward the woods.

“Son of a fucking bitch!”

If I hadn’t been so panicked, I would have been shocked by Joanie’s language. She’d promised me she thought in expletives, but I’d heard very few from her.

“It’s a fine line between thought and speech in this form,”
she said.
“We have to hide so we can change back.”

“But we’ll be naked!”

Leo scoffed.
“I’ve got no problem with that.”

“You wouldn’t.”
Joanie didn’t sound amused.
“Stop thinking like humans. Get off the path.”

We did as she said, but we weren’t exactly quiet. There were no more gunshots, so we laid low in a hollow behind a downed tree trunk, panting.

The breeze came from behind us and didn’t give us any good clues as to what was going on up ahead. I heard Joanie curse mentally again and Leo calming her down, but I’d sensed something that made my knees—all four of them—turn to gelatin: the smell of fuchsia on the breeze.

“Guys… Guys! We’ve been lured into a trap.”

“How do you know?”
Joanie looked around, her ears alert.

“I can smell him, the fuchsia wizard.”

“Where?”
Leo started to rumble, but Joanie knocked into him.

“Behind us.”
I stood and ignored Joanie’s growl to get the hell down and stop being an idiot. I bared my teeth.
“It’s one thing to hunt me at my apartment; it’s another to follow me here. How dare he?”

“Go ahead if you like, but we’re staying here,”
Leo said.
“I won’t let you endanger Joanie and our cub.”

I shot a look over my shoulder at him.
“Your cub? You mean your child. Remember who and what you are.”

“You do the same,”
he said.

“I am a human, but I’ll use what I have. He’s after me. I’ll lead him away, and you two get to a safe place.”

“The boathouse,”
Joanie said.
“We can get in and defend ourselves if we need to. There are guns hidden in there, and clothes.”

“Go,”
I told them.
“Keep yourselves safe. I’m sorry for bringing this on you.”

“Maybe it will help us with our other puzzles,”
Joanie, ever the scientist, said.
“But Lonna, be careful!”

“I will.”
I crept away, keeping low to the ground. I knew that humans would be unable to sense half of what I could as a wolf, so I suspected I’d be able to surprise whoever it was. I circled the scent, moving downwind so it would be strong enough for me to pinpoint its exact location. I couldn’t say with certainty, but I suspected it followed me and only me. Finally, it stopped, and I did as well, curious.

The sounds of the night chorused in my ears, and I panicked, sure I’d lost it. Then I smelled a fire and heard human breathing. I snuck closer until flickering light cast strange shadows in the trees and on me.

It stopped and made a campfire?
This didn’t compute with either the wolf or the human parts of my brain.

“It did,”
an unfamiliar voice said in my brain.

I growled, then, careful to keep any thoughts of my two companions out of my mind, but I was too late.

“They’re safe. They’re not after them, only you.”

“Your pronouns confuse me, sir. Who are they? Who are you?”

“And who are
you?” The mental tone held amusement.
“Come here in the circle of my fire and change so you’re out of their reach.”

“I’ll be naked.”

“I have clothes for you.”

I slunk closer until I could see the speaker. It was a man who sat close to a fire. The flames gleamed in the blond highlights in his reddish brown hair, and I recognized him from the doctor’s office. Now he wore slightly tinted lenses, and I could barely see his eyes behind their smoky panes.

“Doctor Fortuna?”

He stood and bowed in my direction.
“Maximilian Fortuna at your service. Call me Max.”

“Son of a fucking bitch… Sorry.”

He laughed, the lines around his sea-blue eyes crinkling.
“Not to worry, milady. I’ll forgive your harsh language due to my having surprised you so rudely. Won’t you come have a bite?”
He gestured to two rabbits on the ground.
“I can roast them if you’d prefer.”

“No!”
my inner wolf cried as my human side said,
“Yes.”

“You seem to have some conflict,” he observed, speaking out loud but quietly. His lilting accent came into his physical voice more than his mental one. “You seem to not know who or what you are.”

At that point, my nose was twitching from the scent of the blood on the ground. He took one of the rabbits, skinned it with expert motions, and placed it over the fire on a simple spit made of three sticks. The fat sizzled as it hit the coals. He put the other rabbit, skin still on, beside the fire and stepped back. I lunged for it, but I pulled back just before biting it, my jaws snapping at air.

“Food, food, FOOD!”
my inner wolf wailed, then piteously,
“I’m hungry.”

“Down,”
I commanded her. Wary of weapons, I watched him. He fanned the smoke from the cooking rabbit toward me, and I inhaled, my mouth watering. Everything smelled more intensely when I was in wolf form. A whine escaped my throat.

“You are still very much of two minds,” he observed. “Very interesting.” His eyes flashed yellow in the firelight, and I drew back, growling. Then I remembered something important: I was in the form of one of the most powerful predators on the planet, and he was unarmed and human, as far as I could tell. I snarled and stepped closer.

“Why are you playing with me? Why did you follow me?”

He held his hands in front of him. “I am unarmed. Do no harm to me, and none shall come to you.”

“Answer my questions.”
I stopped my advance but continued to growl low in my throat.

“Stop making all that noise. Do you want us to be discovered?”

“Says the guy who built a fire in the middle of the freaking woods.”
I forced my throat to stay silent, but I kept my teeth bared.
“I’m giving you one more chance to answer my questions, or I’m giving my wolf self full permission to rip your head off.”

 
“There is no danger of discovery from the light in this circle, which was here long before your Crystal Pines subdivision and even before the little village known as Piney Mountain,” he said so quietly I doubt I would have been able to hear him if I’d been human. “I can harness the power of the woods without losing too much of my own, but sound is not my realm, so I am unable to manipulate it.”

Indeed, he seemed to gather the firelight around him, and the trees around the circle were invisible even to my wolf’s sharp eyes. I remembered how the lights had popped and sparked with him—or was it him?—near. The rabbit on the spit sent sizzling drippings into the fire again, and I jumped.

“Look, I have a robe if you would like to change. I promise I won’t peek.”

“Why would I give up my only advantage?”

“Trust me, Ms. Marconi, that’s not your only advantage.” He gave me a look that said he was aware of my human form and its assets.
 

“That doesn’t make me feel better. Again answers or throat ripping and evisceration. I’m keeping it simple for you.”

“I’ve been assigned to watch you because you’re in danger.” He sat cross-legged so we were eye to eye, a very vulnerable position for him since he wouldn’t be able to get up quickly and run, and I was in easy lunging distance of his assets. “You can trust me because I’m trying to protect you.”