Marked by the Moon (26 page)

His lips quirked. “Probably not.”

Alex didn't say what else she was thinking. That Alana had taken the easy way out; that if Alana had truly loved Julian, she'd have chosen the hard way. As Alex had.

She lifted her hand from his and got up. He scrambled to follow, and she stepped away. She couldn't be near him and not want him.

“A life for a life,” she said. “It's only fair.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I took Alana, but I can give you this.” Her palm skated over the fullness. “Once I have the baby, I'll leave him or her with you. I'll go to Edward. He'll have to do something to make this connection between us go away. If he wants me to be able to work for him without puking all day.”

“Work for him,” Julian repeated.

“There are still werewolves out there that need to be killed. But now I know that there are some who don't. I won't make the same mistake twice.”

“That's—” Julian appeared to be searching for his words. Maybe he
had
hit his head. “The stupidest thing I've ever heard in all of my lifetimes.”

Alex blinked. “I'm sorry?”

“You should be.” He reached out and drew her to him—too fast, they bumped bellies. “You're my mate, Alex.”

“You didn't choose me; you didn't choose this.”

“I did.” He touched her stomach again as if he had to just to make sure it was real. She did that several times a day herself. “I chose to make you like me. For all the wrong reasons, true, and I hope you'll forgive me. I was wrong. If you want to go back to the other world and be cured, I'll understand.”

She laid her hand on top of his. “Why would anyone want to go back once they've found this?”

“It's a miracle,” he said.

“No.” Alex lifted her lips and kissed him; then she knew without a doubt that she was home. “It's magic.”

Their son was born three months later. As soon as Alex held him in her arms, she understood why Julian had said her idea of leaving the child behind had been the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.

“I couldn't have done it,” she said.

“I know,” Julian murmured. Sound asleep, the baby still clutched at his finger.

“I don't think he should be able to do that yet.” Alex leaned down and nuzzled the child's head. He smelled like the first snowfall of the season.

“I think there's going to be a lot of things he does that he isn't supposed to be able to.”

They were treading new ground. As far as they knew, there'd never been a werewolf pregnancy, let alone a child born of two lycanthropes. Alex would have been lying if she said she hadn't spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying if the child would be all right. If it would actually
be
a child at all.

But now that he was here and he was “perfect,” she whispered, all her fears seemed kind of foolish.

Julian had worried about who would take care of the child
on that single night when every inhabitant of Barlowsville ran beneath the moon. Alex had pointed out it wasn't as if the moon snuck up on them. They
knew
when it was coming. A few hours before it did, they would drop the baby off with an entire village of Inuit babysitters.

Julian also worried that Alex would someday feel the need to go out hunting for her father's killer. But the closer she got to her due date, the less she thought about anything but her child.

“Edward will find him,” she said with a shrug.

For a while she'd been concerned that Edward would find her. She hadn't reported back. But neither had any of Edward's other toadies. He'd believe she was as dead as they were, and she'd let him. That part of her life, that other Alex,
was
dead.

Ella and Jorund appeared in the doorway. Ella had proved a huge help with all things baby, and Jorund…he went wherever she was.

The two had recently married, and Jorund now lived in Barlowsville. He'd left George in charge.

The day after he'd come home, Julian had given in to Ella's request to make Jorund a werewolf. Julian could no longer deny the power of true love. It crossed boundaries of age, of race, of species. True love made all things possible. Their child proved that.

“What are you going to name him?” Ella asked.

“Charlie,” Julian said, and tugged his finger from his son's grasp.

In his sleep Charlie frowned; then he opened his tiny, perfect mouth and he—

“Was that a growl?” Alex asked.

Read on for an excerpt from Lori Handeland's next book

 

MOON CURSED

 

Coming in 2011 from St. Martin's Paperbacks

The first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster was by Saint Columba in
AD
565. The most recent occurred just last year.

“There'll be a sighting every year,” Kristin Daniels muttered as she peered at her laptop. “Wouldn't want to screw with a multi-million-dollar tourist industry.”

Unless, of course, you were the host of the public television show
Hoax Hunters
. Kris planned to screw with it a lot.

In fact she planned to end it.

Kris scribbled more notes on her already scribbled-upon yellow legal pad. This was going to be her biggest and best project to date. The debunking of the Loch Ness Monster would not only put
Hoax Hunters
on the national radar—hell, she'd probably get picked up for syndication—but would make her a star.

“Kris?”

She glanced up. Her boss, Theo Murdoch, stood in the doorway of her office. He didn't look happy. Theo rarely did.

Public television was a crapshoot. Sometimes you won; sometimes you lost. But you were always, always on the verge of disaster.

“Hey, Theo,” she said brightly. “I was just planning our premiere show for next year. You're gonna love it and so—”

“
Hoax Hunters
is done.”

Kris realized her mouth was still half open, and shut it. Then she opened it again and began to babble. She did that when she panicked. “For the season, sure. But next year is going to be great. It'll be our year, Theo. You'll see.”

“There is no next year, Kris. You're cancelled.”

“Why?”

“Ratings, kid. You don't have 'em.”

Fury, with a tinge of dread, made Kris snap: “It's not like we were ever going to compete with
Friday Night Smack-down
.”

“And we don't want to.” Theo's thin chest barely moved despite the deep breath he drew. The man was cadaverous, yet he ate like a teenaged truck driver. Were there teenaged truck drivers? “Cable's killing me.”

Or maybe it was just his high stress and two packs a day diet.

In Theo's youth, back when he still had hair, PBS had been the place for the intelligent, discriminating viewer. Now those viewers had eight hundred channels to choose from, and some of those even produced a show or two worth watching.

In the glory days
Planet Earth
would have been a PBS hit. Instead it had played on
The Discovery Channel
. Once
The Tudors
—sans nudity of course—would have been a
Masterpiece Theatre
staple. Now it was
Showtime
's version of MTV history.

“Who would have thought that public radio would do better than us?” Theo mumbled.

To everyone's amazement, NPR was rocking, even as PBS sank like a stone.

“Not me,” Kris agreed. And too bad, too. Not that she could ever have done
Hoax Hunters
for the radio even if she
had
possessed a crystal ball. The show's strength lay in the visual revelation that what so many believed the truth was in fact a lie.

Hoax Hunters
, which Kris had originally called
Hoax Haters,
had come about after a tipsy night with her best friend and roommate Lola Kablonsky. Kris had always loathed liars—she had her reasons—and she'd been very good at spotting them. One could say she had a sixth sense, if a sixth sense weren't as much of a lie as all the rest.

Why not make your obsession with truth and lies into a show?
Lola had asked.

And full of margaritas and a haunting ambition, Kris had thought:
Why not?

She'd used her savings to fund a pilot, and she'd gotten that pilot onto the screen through sheer guts and brutal determination. She wasn't going to let something as erratic as ratings get her down.

“I'll make the show anyway,” she said.

Theo's smile was sad. “It won't help. The powers that be were never very enthusiastic. I doubt they'd put you back on the air no matter what hoax you hunted.”

Kris powered down her laptop and began to pack her things. “Who said I'd let them?”

 

“Scotland,” Lola said. “Does anyone really go to Scotland on purpose?”

Kris tossed a few more sweaters into her suitcase. “Just me.”

September was cold in the Highlands, or so she'd heard. Not that she wasn't used to the cold. She was from Chicago. Cold moved in about October and hung around until
June. There'd even been a few July days when the breeze off the lake was reminiscent of the chill that drifted out of her freezer when she went searching for double chocolate brownie yogurt in the middle of the night.

“Are you sure, Kris?” Worry tightened Lola's voice. “You'll be all alone over there.”

Alone.
Kris gave a mental eye roll.
Horrors!
Like that would be anything new.

Her mother had died, still promising she wouldn't, when Kris was fifteen. Her brother had left for college when she was seventeen, swearing he'd visit often. If “often” was once the following year and then never again, he hadn't been lying. Her father hung around until she turned eighteen. Then he'd taken a job in China—no lie. He hadn't been back either.

So Kris was used to alone, and she could take care of herself. “I'll be fine.” She zipped her suitcase.

“I'd go with you—”

Kris snorted. Lola in Scotland? That would be like taking Paris Hilton to…well, Scotland. Kris could probably shoot a documentary about it. The film would no doubt receive better ratings that
Hoax Hunters
.

And wasn't that depressing?

“Aren't you getting ready for the season?” Kris asked.

Lola was a ballet dancer, and she looked like one. Tall and slim, with graceful arms and never-ending legs, her long, black, straight hair would fall to the middle of her well-defined back if she ever wore it down. However, Lola believed that that style made her already oval face appear too oval. As if that could happen.

Kris wasn't bland and average, unless she stood next to Lola. She also wasn't a washed-out, freckle-nosed, frizzy-headed blond unless compared with Lola's porcelain complexion and smooth ebony locks. The only thing they had in
common were their brown eyes. However, Lola's were pale, with flecks of gold and green, while Kris's were just brown, the shade of mud she'd been told by a man who'd said he was a poet.

The two of them were still friends because Lola was as beautiful inside as out, as honest as a politician was not, and she loved Kris nearly as much as Kris loved her. In all her life, Kris had never trusted anyone the way she trusted Lola Kablonsky.

Lola set her long-fingered, smooth, graceful hand on Kris's arm. “If you needed me, I'd go. Screw the season.”

Kris blinked back the sudden sting in her eyes. “Thanks.”

The two had met while living in the same cheap apartment building—Kris attending Loyola University and Lola attending ballet classes on the way to her present stint with the Joffrey Ballet. On the basis of a few good conversations, and a shared desire to get the hell out of their crappy abode, the two had found a better one and become roommates.

Casual observers might think that Kris and Lola would fight like cats in a bag when shoved into a residence the size of Lady Gaga's walk-in closet. Instead they'd remained roomies ever since, earning the nickname the Spinal Sisters—because they were together so much they had to be attached at the spine.

Kris hugged Lola; Lola hugged back, but she clung. Lola had been raised in a large, loud, loving, pushy Polish family. Combine that with her appearance, and Lola had probably never been alone for five minutes in her entire life. A good thing since she didn't like it.

Kris felt guilty for leaving her, but she didn't have a choice. She couldn't start over again with another show. She believed in
Hoax Hunters.

She also believed that the Loch Ness Monster was ripe for debunking, and she was just the woman to do it.

Kris gathered the backpack that contained her laptop, video camera, and purse. “I'll be fine,” she assured her friend for the second time. “It's not like I'm going to Iraq or Columbia or even the Congo. It's Scotland. What could happen?”

 

Though it felt like a week, Kris arrived in Drumnadrochit, on the west shore of Loch Ness, a day later.

She'd been able to fly directly from Chicago to Heathrow; however, unlike the rest of the people on the plane, she hadn't been able to sleep. Instead, she'd read the books she'd picked up on both Scotland and Loch Ness.

Loch Ness was pretty interesting, even without the monster. The lake was actually a three-hundred-million-year-old crack in the earth's surface. Because of its extreme depth—nearly eight hundred feet—the loch contained more fresh water than all the other lakes in Britain and Wales combined, and never froze over, even during the coldest of Highland winters.

Since there had been over four thousand reported sightings of Nessie, which no doubt fueled the forty million dollars attributed to her by the Scottish tourism industry, it wasn't going to be easy to debunk this myth. Kris certainly wasn't going to get any help from the locals.

By the time London loomed below, Kris's eyes burned from too much reading and not enough sleeping. However, she couldn't drag her gaze from the view. She wished she had the money to tour the Tower and Buckingham Palace; she'd always dreamed of walking the same streets as Shakespeare. But she was traveling on her own dime, and she had precious few of them.

The city sped by the window of the bus taking her to Gatwick Airport where she boarded a flight to Inverness. A few hours later, she got her first glimpse of a fairly industrialized city. Why Kris had thought Inverness would be full of castles, she had no idea. According to her guidebook, it had nearly sixty thousand people and less than half a dozen castles. Still she was disappointed. Quaint would play very well on film.

She got what she was hoping for on the road south. The countryside was quaint squared, as was Drumnadrochit. White buildings backed by rolling green hills, the place should have been on a postcard—hell, it probably was—along with the long, gray expanse of Loch Ness.

The village was also tourist central, with a wealth of Nessie museums, shops and tours by both land and sea. Kris would check them out eventually. They'd make another excellent backdrop for her show. The charm of the town would highlight the archaic myth, illuminating how backward was a belief in fairy tales. The excessive glitter of tourism would underline why the locals still pretended to believe.

Kris had once adored fairy tales, listening avidly as her mother read them to her and her brother. In those tales, bad things happened, but eventually, everything worked out.

In real life, not so much.

Her driver, an elderly, stoic Scott who'd said nothing beyond an extremely low-voiced, “Aye,” when she'd asked if he often drove to Drumnadrochit, continued through town without stopping. For an instant Kris became uneasy. What if the man had decided to take her into the countryside, bash her on the head, and toss her into the loch, making off with her laptop, video camera, and anything else she might possess? Sure, Lola would miss her eventually, but by then Kris would be monster bait.

A hysterical bubble of laughter caught in her throat. She didn't believe in monsters—unless they were human.

She lifted her gaze to the rear-view mirror and caught the driver watching her. He looked like anyone's favorite grampa—blue-eyed, red-cheeked, innocent.

And wasn't that what everyone said about the local serial killer?

The vehicle jolted to a stop, and Kris nearly tumbled off the shiny leather seat and onto the floor. Before she recovered, her driver leaped out, opened her door, and moved to retrieve her bag from the trunk.

Kris peered through the window. They'd arrived at Lakeside Cottage, which, while not exactly
lake
side was damn close. Kris would have to cross the road to reach the loch, but she'd be able to see it from the house. The village of Drumnadrochit lay out of sight around a bend in the road.

“Idiot.” Kris blew her bangs upward in a huff. “No one's going to bash you over the head. This isn't the south side of Chicago.”

She stepped out of the car, then stood frozen like Dorothy opening the door on a new and colorful world. The grass was a river of green, the trees several shades darker against mountains the hue of the ocean at dawn. The air was chilly, but it smelled like fresh water and—

“Biscuit?”

A short, cherubic woman, with fluffy white hair and emerald eyes stood in the doorway of the cottage. For an instant Kris thought she was a Munchkin. She certainly had the voice for it.

“I made a batch of Empires to welcome ye.” She held out a platter full of what appeared to be iced shortbread rounds topped with a cherry.

Since Kris hadn't eaten since the flight to Heathrow, she
took one, despite her belief that a biscuit should only be served warm, dripping with butter and honey.

At the first bite, her mouth watered painfully. Crisp and sweet—was that jelly in the middle?—she couldn't remember eating anything so fabulous in a very long time.

“It's a cookie,” she managed after she swallowed the first and reached for a second.

The woman smiled, the expression causing her cheeks to round like apples beneath her sparkling eyes. “Call it whatever ye like, dearie.” She lifted the platter. “Then take another.”

Kris had to listen very hard to distinguish the English beneath the heavy brogue. She felt as if she were hearing everything through a time warp, one that allowed the meaning of the words to penetrate several seconds after they were said. She hoped that the longer she stayed, the easier it would get.

“Thanks.” Kris took two cookies in each hand. “I'm Kris Daniels.”