Changeling Moon

by Dani Harper

“Not until he first ran into her, but yes. It’s why he targeted her.”

  “Makes a weird kind of sense—I mean, he was practically prehistoric himself. No one’s run across one of the theriona for centuries. But Jessie’s been on the phone for three days with your folks over in Scotland, and they’ve been researching Zoey’s family tree. Seems like some of the right names are on it, going all the way back to Celtic times in Wales and beyond. Apparently Tallyson is just an Anglicized version of Taliesin.”

  Taliesin. Holy-o-shit. Connor’s mind boggled as the pieces fell into place. The Welsh bard had been a known shapeshifter, and rumored to be a descendant of Merlin himself.

  “Jessie figures Zoey had a recessive gene and the Changeling bite just activated it, the way it activates dormant genes in humans.”

  Suddenly Connor remembered the night he’d found Zoey and the strange, brief vision he’d had, the silvery images of animals, many animals, that had burst through his mind and vanished. He’d dismissed the experience, thinking that his farsight had been affected by his fatigue. He should have known better. . . .

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” asked Culley.

  That I’m a complete idiot. “Not a clue, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “It means that the silver wouldn’t have helped, bro. If Helfren hadn’t messed with your silver nitrate and you’d given it to Zoey just like you planned, it still wouldn’t have helped. Jessie says nothing would have changed the outcome once the theriona gene had been activated.”

  Well, hell. Connor took a long breath. Then another. He hadn’t realized how heavy that particular bundle of guilt had been. He’d been so certain he’d failed Zoey. He’d still failed her in some ways—he hadn’t been there when she Changed, and he’d promised her she wouldn’t be alone. He sighed. At least he’d dealt with Bernie. At least he’d done that much for her. She was free of her sire and out of danger. Mostly. “Why is she still a lion? Is she stuck?”

  “Jessie told her not to Change back yet.”

  Alarm seized his heart. “She’s not hurt, is she?”

  “No. Not hurt at all, just tired out.” Culley squirmed a little. Actually squirmed. Connor narrowed his eyes at his brother until he capitulated. “Okay, okay. Don’t tell Jessie I told you. Zoey was pretty drained when we brought her here. She’s okay but she needs to rest up for a while and recharge her batteries before she resumes her human form. She Changed twice out there, trying to get to you.”

  “Twice!” Connor struggled to rise up on his elbows, but instantly a massive golden shape pinned his shoulders to the bed with paws the size of his face. The mountain lion pressed its broad nose to his and he could see Zoey’s amber eyes glaring at him.

  “Is she growling at me?” Connor was incredulous.

  “She’s definitely not purring, bro. You’re under very strict orders not to move.”

  The big cat withdrew and curled up beside Connor, all in one fluid motion that barely sent a vibration through the bed. The fierce, bright eyes remained open, watching him. Warning him.

  “You’re worried about Zoey, but she just needs rest. You’re the one that was injured. You were in pretty rough shape when we dragged your butt in here, you know.” Culley ticked things off on his fingers. “Punctured lung, five broken ribs, punctured liver, dislocated shoulder. Not to mention you were bleeding bad from a variety of war wounds. Lowen stayed here for the first three days, nursing you around the clock. Changelings heal fast, but he was plenty worried. We all were.”

  “Just how long have I been here?”

  “Five days, nine hours, forty-three minutes and”—Culley checked his watch—“Twenty-nine seconds. Not like I’m counting or anything.”

  Connor closed his eyes. “Sorry.”

  “You probably will be. Jessie’s pretty pissed that you took on Bernie by yourself. She’s just waiting for you to heal up so she can put your ass in a sling. I’m thinking I might help her, although I have to say you did a damn fine job.”

  “Apparently I wasn’t by myself,” said Connor, and he patted one of the enormous paws beside him. “I’ve got terrific backup.” To his surprise, the lion leapt gracefully from the bed and padded away on silent feet, flicking the end of its tail as it left the room.

  Culley whistled softly. “Looks like me and Jessie will have to get in line. Zoey’s been worried sick about you. You know, she might have been able to Change by now but she hasn’t been resting like she’s supposed to because she watches over you constantly. Jessie says her energy levels won’t be high enough until tomorrow or the next day at least.”

  Connor sighed. “I guess I have a helluva lot of making up to do. Do me a favor, bro?”

  “Do I have to?” he teased. “I mean, you’re not on your deathbed now, so technically—”

  “Culley.”

  “Fine. What do you need?”

  “Great grandmother’s ring. Our folks have it.” He had the satisfaction of seeing his brother’s eyes goggle, then Culley gave him a broad grin and two thumbs up.

  “Now that’s making up in style. I’ll call Mom right away.” He headed for the door, then caught himself and came back. “There are a few other things you should know. We cleaned up the farm for you, buried the animals.”

  Connor closed his eyes, saw again the slaughtered creatures scattered as far as the eye could see. He didn’t even know how many animals there had been—he’d lost track long ago. But he had known them all. “I don’t know how to thank you for that. It had to have been a tough job. And Jim?”

  “When you’re up and around, we’ll have a service for him. I, ah, I took the liberty of getting a permit to bury him in our family cemetery on the farm.”

  “We don’t have a family cemetery. They don’t even allow such things anymore.”

  “They don’t allow new ones. They have to allow preexisting ones.”

  Connor’s eyebrows went up. “I’m scared to ask what you did.”

  “Suffice it to say that Devlin and I took care of it. All it took was a little finesse with the computer to create a few old records.”

  There was an understatement, Connor thought. Culley was to computers what Da Vinci was to canvas. There was very little he couldn’t do.

  “After that, we fenced off an area out in the northeast corner under the crabapple trees, mowed it and spiffed it up a little. It’s pretty there. And it’s close to where we buried the animals. They were sort of his family, so I thought Jim would like it.”

  “I think he would too. I like it. Thanks.”

  “There’s a little bit of good news as well. We found a few of the animals still alive. That Appaloosa of yours that opens gates—”

  “Charlie? Charlie’s alive?”

  “Alive and kicking. He had three other horses with him when he showed up in the driveway yesterday. They must have high-tailed it out of here when Bernie showed up. Five goats were eating the flowers on the porch this morning when I got up. And then this ginormous shaggy dog nearly took Devlin’s head off when he went up into the loft for some hay. She’s got a bunch of puppies hidden up there, all safe and sound.”

  Connor couldn’t speak for a long moment. There was a lump the size of a tennis ball in his throat. Zoey’s going to have her puppy after all.

  “Which brings me to the bad news. Something else turned up alive that’s not nearly so cute.” Culley sat on the bed then, shaking his head. “We found Helfren under the porch. He’d been bleeding bad, but the clay earth must have helped to stop it.”

  No. He couldn’t even make his mouth form the word, but his face must have said it because Culley nodded.

  “Bernie had chewed on him pretty good. Don’t know why he didn’t kill him, but we’ve got problems now. More than a day had passed between the time he was attacked and the time we found him.”

  It wasn’t hard to do the math. Connor knew that no amount of silver nitrate would do Tad Helfren any good if it wasn’t administered within twelve hours of bei
ng bitten. “The full moon?”

  “Eight days.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Twilight had just given way to full dark when the moon cleared the horizon. Only two days shy of being full, it glowed like a frozen pearl just above the coulees, reflected in the wide glittering river in the valley below Elk Point. A cool wind stirred the needles of the tall spruce that surrounded the rocky plateau, swirled bits of dry grass between the flat-topped boulders that formed a natural ring there.

  Zoey leaned back against Connor, glad to be sitting on one of those rocks now. The heat of the day had been captured in it, and it radiated warmth almost as pleasantly as Connor did. She wondered if she would develop a higher body temperature now that she too was a Changeling. Not tonight, apparently. A sudden gust of wind had her pulling her jacket around her tightly and crowding even closer to Connor.

  Connor was as quiet as the rock he sat on, contemplative, as was most of the Pack. Even Culley’s face was uncharacteristically sober. The issue at hand was serious, and the boulders of the sacred circle were covered with Changelings from the entire region. Some were wolves, most were in their human form. She recognized many of them. And knew that all of them were deeply concerned.

  Wolves, real wolves, were not a protected species outside of national parks. Bernie had not only terrorized the people who lived here, he had resurrected the old stories from Dunvegan’s distant past. From the post office to the coffee shop to the hardware store, werewolves surfaced in every conversation sooner or later. Often with a laugh. Sometimes, with a quick glance over the shoulder.

  “It’s going to be a long time, years maybe, before things settle down again,” said Jessie. She sat cross-legged on the ground by the fire in the center of the circle. But there was an unmistakable aura of power about her and the flames turned her mahogany skin to gold. “We have no way of setting fears to rest, no way to explain the deaths of Jim Neely and Al Menzie, and no way of letting people know that the killer is gone.”

  “I heard that you found the location of Bernie’s body. Why don’t we dig it up and turn it over to the cops?” said Geoff Lassiter. “There are so damn many hunters out there right now that it’s not safe for my family to Change on our own land.”

  “Devlin? Will you address that?” Jessie asked.

  Culley’s twin nodded and explained. “Usually, the testing of DNA won’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. Over the past couple of years, Connor and I have taken samples of hair from different members of the Pack in their wolfen form, and sent it out to different labs. So far it’s always come back as pure wolf and nothing else. But that may not last. For one, the testing is getting better all the time. And two—Bernie was different, something wasn’t right about him. Every instinct I have says this is a bad, bad idea.”

  Lassiter persisted. “The bastard’s still going to have two toes missing on one foot, still likely to have bits of Jim Neely’s shirt in his claws or even in his stomach. There’s some positive ID without ever having to look at DNA.”

  “Once we give over the carcass, we have no control over what tests will be done. Samples of the body are likely to be sent to many different governmental departments as well as top researchers at universities,” said Devlin. “Why? For one thing, the wolf is unusual because of its size alone—biologists will be interested in learning if it’s a new subspecies or just a big hybrid. But mostly, it’s because wolf attacks are so rare that everyone will be wondering what was wrong with this animal, why it acted in such a way. They’ll be looking for disease, for injury, for aberrations of any kind, including genetic anomalies. And they might find something we didn’t expect.”

  “They sure as hell will,” declared Connor. “He didn’t even resemble a wolf at the end. He’d mutated into a monster, thanks to all the energy and power he absorbed from killing human beings. We don’t dare hand the authorities something like that. Because in addition to the woods being full of hunters, they’ll be full of biologists searching for a brand-new species of predator. Not to mention it’ll attract every cryptozoologist on the planet.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the only one that saw him,” said Jeannie Rousseau. “Maybe you were already punch drunk from the fight. Kudos to you for killing the old bastard but you took a hell of a beating, Macleod. Maybe your memory’s not accurate?”

  Culley stood up then. He walked over to Jessie and flipped open a cell phone, called up an image and showed her.

  The Pack leader was rarely surprised but Jessie’s eyes widened as she took the phone and studied the photo. “Are you saying this is Bernard Gervais?”

  “It is. This was taken by a human survivor of the attack at Connor’s place.”

  “Helfren?”

  He nodded.

  Jessie glanced over to where Tad Helfren was sitting propped against a rock between two wolves. “You’re very cool under pressure, mister. My hat’s off to you.” The man simply shrugged and looked away.

  She handed the cell phone back to Culley. “Has that photo gotten out?”

  Culley shook his head. “The guy tried to send it to his newspaper, but the battery was too low. I powered it up, retrieved the e-mail he’d composed and trashed it.” There was a faint moan and a muttered curse from Helfren’s direction. “I canceled the phone’s service too and did a little tweaking. The phone’s just a handy way to display photos now—it can’t do anything else, not even download to a computer.”

  “Well done. Show this to Lassiter first. Then pass it around. I want every member of the Pack to see it. After that, destroy it.”

  “Happily.”

  Jessie sat for several minutes in silence as the photo was shown. Finally it was Zoey’s turn to see it. She reached for the phone but Connor intercepted it.

  “Let me hold it for you. God knows what you’ll see if you touch it.”

  He was right. Now that she’d finally figured out that she was a touch-telepath, she had to be careful what objects she picked up. Laying a finger on the phone might plunge her into a vision of the entire Gervais versus Helfren scene. Of course, her errant talent might decide to award her the vision anyway, but there was little she could do about that—or wanted to. Jessie had been right. Zoey felt whole now that she had finally accepted her abilities. “Thanks for the intervention,” she said and leaned in to look at the photo. For a few moments she couldn’t say anything, only stare at the horrific image. Finally she found her voice. “Connor, it doesn’t even look like a wolf. It doesn’t look like anything on this planet. You fought this thing by yourself ?”

  “If I say yes, are you going to yell at me again?”

  “Probably. Only because it scares me so much that I might have lost you.”

  He cuddled her close and kissed the top of her head. “Then I think we’re even because it scared the hell out of me that you Changed by yourself. So maybe we should just let it go. Agreed?”

  “Deal.” She grinned at him and Connor passed the cell back to Culley, who was rolling his eyes. He went to the center of the circle and bashed the cell phone with a rock until all that was left were tiny fragments of plastic.

  Jessie spoke again. “As you already know, it’s going to be dangerous to Change, dangerous to run as a wolf for a very long time. Many real wolves have already been shot. Some of you have brought us news of traps being set.”

  René Ghostkeeper voiced a question that many were thinking. “Will the Pack be disbanded then?”

  There was a flurry of murmurs as Jessie shook her head. “I know that some of you are already making preparations to disperse, and it’s your choice. However, I won’t disband the Pack just yet. Bill and I will stay on here for a few years more until everyone has found new territory.”

  It came as no surprise to Zoey. Culley had been talking about moving to Alaska eventually. Others were planning to leave right away. Fitzpatrick had applied for a transfer. The LaLonde and McIntyre families had already put their homes and businesses up for sale.

  “It seems so
unfair that everyone is being forced to start over, all because of the actions of one,” she whispered to Connor.

  He pulled her closer. “None of us can stay here forever, little falcon. Twenty years, maybe thirty at most and then it’s time for any Changeling to make plans to move on.”

  “Because you live so long?” She was still trying to wrap her head around that little tidbit. At first she hadn’t believed how old Connor said he was. It didn’t seem possible. But then, considering she was sitting around a campfire with enough werewolves to make up a couple of pro football teams, who was she to say what was possible?

  “And that we don’t age at the same rate as humans. I’ve already been practicing here in Dunvegan for about fifteen years or so. A few more and someone may start to notice that I don’t look any different from when I first started.”

  Zoey shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a legitimate issue anymore. These days, more and more guys are dyeing their hair, getting plastic surgery and so forth. I saw it a lot in the city, especially in the corporate types.” She grinned. “The townsfolk will just think you’re incredibly vain.”

  “If that’s all they think, I’ll be happy. Maybe the current youth trend means I have a little more time before people get suspicious. But someday, we’ll still have to leave Dunvegan, at least for a few decades.”

  “We? You mean I’ll look too young to keep my cushy editor’s chair?” Zoey had decided to stay on at the newspaper. It was hard to believe she’d once worried that her publisher might find out about her psychic abilities and fire her. Ted would likely have a heart attack if he knew what she could do now!

  Connor nuzzled her hair. “You look too young for that already. I always thought editors were crusty middle-aged types with glasses and a comb-over.”

  “You’ve been reading way too many comic books.” She sighed inwardly and hoped they wouldn’t be forced to leave Dunvegan too soon. She had been starting to feel at home. But then, what was home, really, but being with the people you loved? She was with Connor, and she would be at home wherever he was. Still, the idea of the Pack dispersing seemed terribly wrong and she rose to her feet. Waited until Jessie spotted her and nodded permission to speak.