Trocar sighed and gently held Claire off while he removed a small packet from a hidden pouch in his cape. He waved it under her nose and she collapsed against his shoulder with a happy smile on her face: out cold.
“If you have harmed her . . .” Brant took his eyes off the approaching Loup-Garou to glare at Trocar.
“She will sleep, have pleasant dreams and wake in a few hours, none the wiser.”
“Shit! Look out!” Gillian yelled, pointing in front of them.
Brant slammed on the brakes out of reflex just as the Loup-Garou leaped at the car. Its momentum and power carried it over the vehicle instead of into the windshield. Everyone automatically ducked down as the beast sailed over. There was a heavy thud as it landed on the road behind them.
Gillian’s “Go! Go! Go!!” was completely unnecessary as Brant sat up, shifted and nearly drove his foot through the floorboards, trying to get them out of there. The car jerking and the sound of metal ripping let them know that he still hadn’t been fast enough. He shifted gears anyway and ground the transmission as the car catapulted forward. They narrowly missed a tree as Brant fought the wheel to bring them back onto the road.
A glance in the rearview mirror showed the gigantic prehistoric-looking Wolf dropping what was left of the rear bumper and starting after them. It was chilling, the way the thing picked up speed. Massive shoulder muscles bunched and elongated with each bounding leap—like having a freight train suddenly come to life and decide it didn’t want you on its tracks.
Twenty kilometers per hour, twenty-five, then forty, fifty; the damn thing was keeping pace with them. The entire car had a collective sick feeling in their various stomachs as they watched the slavering beast bounding along. Gillian blanched when she watched the speedometer tick to sixty, then realized that she was looking at kilometers per hour, not miles. Still damn impressive for a mutated Wolf running on asphalt.
Brant gunned it, sparing a quick look in the side mirror to see the thing finally dropping back and disappearing from view as they screeched around a hairpin curve. Maybe they’d find a populated area where they’d be safe. No, that was a bad idea. Too many civilians might get injured or killed if that thing followed them into a village or one of the little farms that dotted the area. Great, now what to do?
“We can’t go into any village,” Gillian stated, echoing his thoughts.
“I am aware of that, Dr. Key,” Brant said, more calmly than he felt.
“Do you think it’s still following us?” Jenna asked. She had turned as far as she could in the cramped backseat and was staring out the rear window.
“Absolutely,” Pavel confirmed. “It has our scent and it was already hunting. It will most assuredly follow us.”
“Dammit, I knew you were going to say that,” Jenna pouted.
“What’s that, up ahead?” Helmut pointed to a large gated estate silhouetted on the crest of a distant hillside over Brant’s shoulder.
“An old fortress of some kind.”
“It looks like it’s inhabited from the lights on the walls and in the upper windows,” Helmut noted.
“Oh right.” Brant realized that Helmut was suggesting it as a temporary shelter. The ancient stone walls of the enclosure appeared to be about fifteen feet in height. The gates were heavy, wrought iron, flush with the ground and locked from the look of things as he skidded the car into the gravel drive.
Frantically pressing the horn, Brant felt panic rising as the unearthly howl-bellow-roar shattered the early morning quiet of the French countryside once more. Everyone collectively turned and looked back down the road. They were situated sideways on the hilly ridge and able to see most of the valley.
With unerring determination the creature was coming. It was closing fast on the vehicle, and no help from the estate was immediately apparent. Powerful legs propelled its huge bulk down the road. It could have easily veered off and come straight up the hillside but it seemed focused on their former path. Whether that was a display of intellect or sheer instinct remained to be seen.
“Get out of the vehicle,” Trocar commanded them.
When no one moved, he opened the door, cradling the unconscious Claire in his arms, and yelled, “Get out!”
Tossing Claire over his shoulder, the tall Elf sprinted to the juncture between wall and gate. A booted foot found enough purchase on the stones while he lifted himself up to the spikes at the top of the iron gate. Catlike, he climbed quickly to the top of the stone wall, lifting Claire off his shoulder and lowering her as close to the ground of the enclosure as he could before letting go. She fell in an untidy heap but was on the inside of the fence.
“Gillyflower, come to me; the rest of you, climb if you want to live.”
They didn’t need a second invitation. His sharp command had them moving already. Pavel picked Gillian up, ignoring her protests, and passed her up to Trocar. The Elf stood her up on the thick wall next to him and reached down as Jenna hobbled to the wall. Pavel practically tossed Helmut up on the opposite side of the massive gate.
Helmut scrabbled for purchase against the stones, his injured arm hampering his effort. A quick boost from Pavel and he was up, on top of the wall. He glanced around; Jenna was safely next to Gillian and Trocar, the women bracing each other as Jenna’s crutches were still in the car. Brant had his gun drawn and was standing in front of the gate. His hands were visibly shaking but he was trying to protect all of them. Too bad he was going to die for his effort.
“Inspector, get up on the wall,” Pavel literally growled at Brant.
“Get on the gate, Pavel.” Brant ignored him and focused on the nightmare loping toward them.
Pavel didn’t give him another chance to argue; he grabbed Brant by the belt and collar and literally tossed him over the spiked gate. The detective landed heavily on the other side, rolling to avoid breaking his ankle. He popped up, gun in hand and furious. Furious until he saw what was occurring just a few feet from him.
There’s a reason Werewolves in the movies are shown with little to no clothing on. It is because when they shift, they will literally rip through the seams of any garment owing to the rapid expansion of body mass. Pavel shifted before their eyes, his clothes falling from him like tattered multicolored leaves.
“Pavel, no!” Gillian yelled too late.
Pavel was six feet three inches tall in Human form. As a shifted blond Wolf, he was Welsh pony-sized and several hundred pounds. The charging Loup-Garou’s bulk was even more pronounced as it hurtled up the long driveway, straight for the Russian Lycanthrope. Nearly a ton of muscle, bone and teeth hit Pavel in the chest at ramming speed.
The impact slammed him into the gates, shattering the lock and swinging one side of them open. Pavel rolled to diffuse the force of the blow, paws scrabbling for purchase, neck straining away from the colossal jaws snapping near his throat. His claws ripped bleeding furrows in the great beast’s neck and shoulders and his own teeth closed on the slavering muzzle, biting deep and crushing bone.
It screamed in fury as Pavel regained his feet, wrenching itself out of his jaws and slamming into him with its shoulder. Pavel staggered and went down again as the huge head whipped around and the thing’s teeth ripped through his shoulder. His roar of pain was drowned out by the creature’s own bellowing howl.
Trocar had leaped off the gate onto the Loup-Garou’s back. Gillian caught the flash of silver in his hand as he drew some kind of Elven stiletto. She was powerless to do anything but watch two of her friends risking their lives. Brant was trying to find a target to fire at, but the fast-moving mass of Loup-Garou, Russian Shifter and Dark Elf gave him no clear target to aim at.
Pavel was limping on three legs, barely keeping his throat and abdomen clear of the clashing jaws. Trocar couldn’t let go long enough to stab at it. He was in serious danger of being crushed as the Loup-Garou bucked and rolled in an attempt to dislodge the obstructive presence on its back. The Elf leaped clear as the beast threw itself backward—a lithe, elegan
t, black-clad form, landing on his feet like a cat. The Loup-Garou scrabbled to right itself as a bleeding and injured Pavel closed in and Trocar charged back into the fray to help.
Brant gave up trying to target anything and fired several shots into the air, hoping to attract the notice of the estate’s occupants. All he succeeded in doing was getting the Loup-Garou’s attention. He watched in horror as the great head rotated from Pavel to himself. The beast apparently objected to sudden, loud explosive noises as it oriented on the source of them: one terrified Scotland Yard detective. It barreled toward him with a speed that literally took everyone’s breath away.
“Gott im Himmel.” Helmut managed a small prayer as the creature crossed the distance to the detective in two titanic bounds.
“Shit.” Gillian was much less elegant but no less heartfelt. This was very, very bad and nothing anyone did would stop Brant from being shredded by the Shifter dialed up to Vegematic.
“Charles!” a female voice suddenly shrieked in a register that only dogs, Lycanthropes and apparently scared-shitless people could hear. Everyone flinched at the noise except the Loup-Garou.
The powerful muscles that had been propelling it forward toward its meal became its worst enemy as it tried to turn in midair. Almost two thousand pounds of snorting, snarling death actually froze midbound for a split second. It managed to perform a twisting maneuver in-flight that was astonishing in execution and speed. There was an audible crack as the creature’s spine literally snapped from the force involved in halting its leap of toothy death toward the Fey detective. The ground trembled as its bulk slammed into the gravel and the Loup-Garou lay still.
The feminine shriek was repeated as a lithe form dressed in lilac silk bolted past everyone to cradle the massive head. It was disconcerting watching the delicate-looking woman with the Jaws of the Abyss propped in her lap.
“Charles, no! You must change!” the dark-haired woman cried in a distinctly accented voice.
The huge form seemed to ripple and shift before their eyes. It wasn’t so much that a male form appeared as it was that the beast literally seemed to melt away from the man’s form. He was apparently Human, dark haired as the woman, and quite naked.
“Well, that’s intriguing,” Jenna observed.
“The fact that he is naked, alive or fully Human?” Gillian wasn’t really asking Jenna, she was making observations of her own as Trocar lifted her off the wall.
What was before her was a Human male. The woman had Fey blood, of that she was certain: the female’s aura was brushing Gillian’s empathy with the peculiar sparkly feeling that only the Fey had. It reminded her of how Trocar, Mirrin and Brant felt. The interesting thing for her was that the man held none of a Shifter’s feel. Pavel and the rest of Cezar’s pack back in Romania, Claire and every other Shifter she’d ever encountered had a particular “feel.” Each species did. Even among the Reborn, every variant had its own touch on her empathy. That this man, who had so recently been a gigantic, bizarre, extinct species of Wolf, now lay before her, completely and wholly Human, was nothing short of phenomenal.
“Pavel,” Gillian said softly, kneeling gingerly by her own injured Lycanthrope, “he doesn’t feel like you or any other Shifter I’ve met.”
Pavel shifted as well, becoming Human with a non-ravaged shoulder as his magic did its work. He was still pale and exhausted from the encounter but was now intact. Trocar stepped up to hand him a travel bag, which the Elf had retrieved from the car.
“Aye, his abilities are the result of a Curse rather than of a virus, as the rest you have met have most likely been,” Pavel told her.
“That would make sense then.” Gillian became thoughtful. “It’s straight magic, rather than a magically oriented virus.”
Helmut came over to sit beside Gillian and Pavel, who was trying surreptitiously to dress in front of them. “The Loup-Garou Curse has been thought to be only legendary . . . until now.
“There have been rumors of Werewolf activity in France for generations, beginning in the late seventeen hundreds, and in Louisiana, but I have never seen any confirmed information on the subject.”
“Perhaps we should ask him, when he regains consciousness,” Trocar suggested, kneeling by the fallen man and his slender companion.
“I have a lot of things I wish to ask him,” Brant groused, dusting himself off and picking up Claire from her crumpled heap on the ground.
“I can answer your questions since you already know my husband’s secret.” The woman spoke in softly dulcet tones.
“Please do,” Gill prompted her to continue.
“Charles . . . my husband, has been victimized by this Curse for several years.” The woman lifted her face to look at Gillian, displaying the astonishing beauty of the Fey. Her hair was blue-black, her skin pearlescent and her eyes a wide lavender, framed by a midnight fringe of thick lashes. Only the deep-grooved bleeding claw marks marring the line of her jaw detracted from her beauty.
“Let me attend to this.” Trocar spoke in his own magical voice as he reached for her face.
She turned stardust-filled lavender eyes to him and nodded, but her hands never stopped stroking her husband’s hair and face. Charles was still out cold but his spine had straightened out with his shift, causing him to turn just enough that his genitals were exposed. Trocar thoughtfully removed a garment of some kind from a fold of his cape and covered the man as best he could before attending to the woman.
After cleaning her wounds and healing them as well as he was able, Trocar scooped the man up in his arms as if he weighed nothing and rose. “Lead on, Fair One, I will follow.”
The delicate-looking woman rose, her gown now stained with saliva and blood, beckoning them to accompany her. “My name is Dahlia . . . Dahlia Chastel.”
Introductions went around as the walking wounded entered the French estate. It was elegant, provincial, a combination of modern convenience and old-world ethnicity. Behind the ornate front doors were a second set of four-inch-thick, reinforced steel doors with a rod and grooves locking mechanism that would keep out a small army or one maddened Loup-Garou. Hidden from the outside, they were visible as the party entered. Gillian was betting they had similar reinforcements at the windows. The small castle was a cleverly disguised bunker to keep its occupants safe.
The room where she instructed Trocar to bring Charles was immense. Ceilings high and covered with intricate paintings of the Elven Courts, golden vermeil was splashed over everything. The walls were painted a clear turquoise and the furniture was ornate and contained shades of coral in the fabrics and patterns. Trocar laid Charles on an large ornate antique couch. Dahlia scooted in and laid her husband’s head on her lap again.
Jenna limped over and sprawled on a chaise longue; Brant followed and deposited Claire on another then took a seat in a high-backed chair nearby. Gillian, Helmut and Pavel arranged themselves on a floral-patterned divan then shuffled over to make room for Trocar, who dragged Gillian under his arm and held her against him. She glared up at him for his audacity.
“I can help heal you further, Petal, if you will merely sit still and let me hold you.”
“Right.”
Crystalline eyebrows rose and Trocar managed such an impossibly innocent expression for a Dark Elf that Gillian had to grin at him. Fine. She’d let him and his magic soothe her aching muscles, just this once.
Dahlia reached for a buzzer installed on a nearby end table. Shortly thereafter an honest-to-Goddess butler appeared. She ordered food and refreshments for all of them in that sweetly magical voice all Fey have then turned back to her unexpected guests.
“I must apologize for my husband’s indiscretion in attacking you. I assure you that he has no control over this Curse and cannot remember anything about the events that occur during his change.”
CHAPTER 10
THEY listened as Dahlia told them about Charles’s family Curse over a French country breakfast. His family was descended from the original Beast of Gavau
don. A distant relative, a former ship’s Captain, was involved in the African slave trade, and he made a colossal mistake by kidnapping the grandson of a very powerful woman. The woman was the Shaman of a tribe whose name had been lost in obscurity.
The slavers butchered half the village, then in full view of the old woman chained the rest to sell into servitude. The Shaman tried to intervene when they clapped irons on her grandson. Charles’s ancestor brutally stabbed her for her trouble. Using her own heart’s blood as a reagent, the dying woman placed a Curse upon the slaver Captain. He would become outwardly what he was inwardly: an unspeakable Beast who would stalk the darkness when the moon shone full. The old woman’s blood gleamed black in the silvery moonlight as she uttered the Curse, her breath misting with her own blood and her eyes upon the moon as she called down the judgment with her final breath.
The Curse would descend upon the man’s ancestors, appearing through the male line once every second generation, from grandfather to grandson; it was unbreakable, uncleansable, unremovable unless the wrong done to the Shaman, her grandson and her people could be righted again.
“Wow,” Gillian remarked, “there really is no way to undo this, is there?”
“No.” Dahlia shook her head, sparkling teardrops falling onto the rich silk of her nightgown. “We have researched, tried to find answers. This started when Charles turned thirty. That was three of your years ago. It has become a nightmare for all of us. We moved to this area in the hope that there was enough open countryside and enough livestock to sate the beast.”
“So, he knows what he is,” Helmut asked gently.
“Yes, he does. He has contemplated suicide more than once over it. I have managed to talk him out of it, but I fear for my husband’s life in more ways than death by his own hand.” Dahlia sounded completely defeated.
Gillian glanced over at Brant, who was listening intently. The British detective exchanged a surprising look of complete understanding with her. While society in general had improved dramatically for both Human and Paramortals, both groups still retained harsh punishments for murder and heinous acts. Britain did not have the death penalty, but France did. Most Shifter factions also retained their own rather gruesome version of capital punishment.
Key to Conspiracy Page 12
