by Rebecca York
Resolutely pulling her mind away from that direction, she returned her attention to the bookcase.
He had a large section on mysticism, ancient history, early Christianity, and pagan religions—the biggest portion of which was on the Druids of pre-Roman Britain. He also had not one but three Gaelic-English dictionaries.
And his taste in fiction ranged from Mary Renault and C. S. Lewis to Robert Heinlein and E. B. White.
His fantasy collection was particularly impressive. She smiled when she saw the complete set of Lewis's Narnia books, her first foray into fantasy after a favorite teacher had lent her the first book in the series. Along with the Narnia books were Grimm's Fairy Tales and all sorts of stories of the supernatural—tales of witches, ghosts, vampires, and werewolves.
Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist.
Her hand was drawn to a volume in that section that had obviously been read many times, judging from the condition of the dust jacket. It was called Darker than You Think by a writer named Jack Williamson—a tale of werewolves who preyed on the human race, she gathered from the cover copy.
The grim subject matter brought a tightness to her chest, and she quickly replaced the book in the shelves, lining it up with the volumes on either side so that he wouldn't know she'd taken it down.
When she realized what she was doing, she gave a tiny laugh. What did it matter if he found out she'd been thumbing through the volumes on his shelves? Except perhaps that he'd know she'd been poking through his stuff—after he'd told her to leave.
Well, she'd found out he had eclectic tastes in reading—much broader than her own. After her science fiction and fantasy phase, she'd consumed a lot of literary fiction and poetry in college. But these days her recreational reading was mostly confined to easily accessible fiction. When she came home from the lab, she was too worn out for anything taxing.
In truth, she was worn out now. And the panty hose she'd been wearing all day were starting to bind.
In the trunk of her car were a clean T-shirt and sweatpants that she'd been planning to wear to the gym that evening, although it looked like she wasn't going to manage to get there, again. Despite the extenuating circumstances, she felt a stab of guilt. Going to the gym was supposed to be one of her priorities. Like cooking dinner instead of grabbing something already prepared from Sutton Place Gourmet or Fresh Fields on the way home. Every morning she got up promising that she'd do forty minutes on the weight machines after work. But somehow those sessions got pushed back when she had too much to finish at the lab.
Well, putting the gym clothes on now would make sense, if she was planning to stay. Even for a little while.
Hipping on the porch light, she took a tentative step outside. Immediately she was struck by the quiet and the solitude. There wasn't another house in sight—or even a light winking through the trees. Again she noted that even the traffic sounds from the road were nonexistent up here on Marshall's hill. She could be in the middle of the Maine woods.
Shivering in the evening chill, she hurried through the darkness to retrieve her gym bag, her eyes scanning the woods even as she told herself it was childish to be afraid of the dark. Still, she was back inside in under a minute and locked the door behind her with a firm click.
After changing in the office, she folded up her skirt and blouse, stuffed them in the bag, and headed into the kitchen to see what she could discover for dinner.
The freezer was stocked with steaks and chops. And there were few canned goods. The closest thing she found to fast food was a can of beef and barley soup. Warming that up shouldn't be too difficult, she decided as she eyed the microwave over the stove.
While the soup heated, she tiptoed down the hall and looked in on her patient. He seemed to be resting peacefully, so she didn't go in to pull up the sheet, which had slipped midway down his lean hips.
She also peeked behind the other doors along the hall. Next to the bathroom, there was a room set up as a home office with a desk, computer, and filing cabinet. Behind another door was a rack of barbells and one of those universal home gyms where you could do fifty different strength-training exercises. But she didn't see any aerobic equipment. Maybe Marshall was a runner or a jogger.
Another thing she didn't see was a guest bedroom.
Well, he'd said he was used to being alone. Apparently that meant he didn't encourage overnight company.
As she sat at the kitchen table sipping her soup, she pulled out the small writing tablet she always carried in her purse. She was a researcher, and she'd found she never knew when documentation was going to come in handy.
On a clean page she labeled "Ross Marshall" at the top, she began to write up detailed notes on what had happened so far, editing out the fact that the wound had come from a bullet.
In the middle of her case study, she found herself yawning. Maybe she'd better set a timer to make sure she gave Marshall his next dose of Keflex, she thought as she moved to the couch in the great room.
She knew she should keep her eyes open. But closing them was simply too tempting. And once she'd blocked out the world, she drifted into a light sleep—until a sound from somewhere nearby made her sit bolt upright.
She was still trying to figure out where it had come from when a low groan from the back of the house told her it was Marshall—and that he was in trouble.
He cried out again, the sound more like that of an animal in pain than a man.
Pushing herself up, she went running barefoot down the hall to the bedroom.
Marshall was thrashing around on the bed, the covers on the floor and his body glistening with a sheen of perspiration.
"Ross," she called, crossing to him, then jumping back as his arm flailed, barely missing her leg.
Even semiconscious he was dangerous. Especially semiconscious.
"Ross, don't. It's Megan Sheridan. Remember?"
He didn't respond, and she sat down on the bed so that the flailing arm was trapped between his side and her hip. Leaning over, she pressed her hand to his reddened cheek. As she'd known it would be, his skin was hot and damp. Without a thermometer, she'd guess that his temperature was at least a hundred and five. Much too high.
His head rolled back and forth on the pillow, his dark hair plastered to his forehead.
"It's all right. You're going to be all right. The antibiotics will start working soon."
His eyes were closed. His fingers dug into the bottom sheet. Then his lips moved, shaping syllables she couldn't catch. The words were low, in some foreign language that had nothing in common with English.
At first she couldn't even distinguish the syllables sliding from his lips. Then his tone changed, becoming sharper, more distinct. More urgent.
"Taranis, Epona, Cerridwen," he intoned, then repeated the same phrase and went on to another.
"Gá. Feart. (fleas. Duais. Aithriocht. Go gcumhdaí is dtreoraí na déithe thú."
The low grating tone of his voice and the strange words raised goose bumps on her arms and stirred a deep primal fear in the marrow of her bones. The words were like nothing she had ever heard—a throwback to a time before written history, when the world was a savage place. They sounded like a chant or a prayer—incredibly ancient syllables passed down through the ages without benefit of written language. They roared through her, rooted her to the spot where she sat as surely as if Ross Marshall had reached out and circled her wrist with one of his strong hands.
She stared down at him, unable to take her eyes away. Unable to move or even speak.
The strange, sharp sounds echoed in her brain, rising and falling, distorting her senses so that all she heard now was a ringing in her ears that was below the level of perceived sound. And something was happening to her vision, as well.
For a moment out of time she could no longer clearly discern the man on the bed. His skin seemed to go a shade darker, grayer, the texture changing to something she couldn
't name. And the very shape of his face and of his body wavered dangerously in her vision, turning fluid like a movie image of one familiar object morphing into another.
The rational part of her brain simply wasn't capable of dealing with what she was seeing. But the deep, primitive part responded, a stab of fear like the blade of an ancient dagger piercing through her chest. She wanted to run from him, run for her life. Run for her sanity. But she couldn't move, because she was caught in the grip of some terrible magic spell. It held her—and the man, too. Only he was the one doing it. He was the master magician working the transformation.
There was no way she could articulate what she was feeling. But a sound she hardly recognized welled in her throat. A sound that was part mind-numbing fear, part protest that came from the depths of her soul.
His body stiffened. The outlines snapped back into his familiar male shape. And in the space of a heartbeat, the spell was broken.
She stared down at him, her eyes and her brain telling her that she had only imagined what she thought she saw. Her groggy mind had been playing tricks.
Somehow she had been in the grip of a weird hallucination, as if she were the one with the high fever and he were only a silent witness to the delusions wafting through her mind. Because that was the only way she dared explain to herself what had happened.
His eyes blinked open, focused on her. And a deep shudder went through him.
His lips moved. "No."
"What happened?" she gasped out.
"Nothing."
She waited for him to say more, to admit that he understood what she was talking about, but he only closed his eyes with profound weariness.
Caught in a tide of emotion she couldn't understand, she reached to cup his shoulder. As she did, she was jolted by the terrible heat radiating from his body. God, he was burning up. And she was sitting here like a dummy when the first priority was to bring his fever down. The best thing would be to get him into a cool bath. But she had no illusions about her ability to carry him down the hall. And she was pretty sure he'd gone past the point of being able to make it under his own power.
Instead she dashed to the bathroom, threw open the medicine cabinet, and sighed in relief when she found an almost full bottle of denatured alcohol.
On her way back to the bedroom, she grabbed a washcloth from the linen closet.
Her patient lay very still now, so still that her stomach twisted as she eased onto the bed beside him.
Quickly she poured alcohol onto the washcloth, then began to rub the pungent liquid on his face, his neck, his chest.
He coughed from the strong scent rising toward his nostrils. "Don't," he choked out, turning his head and trying to push her hand away.
It was obvious that the smell bothered him. But she ignored the protest, catching his arm as she had before and wedging it between her body and his. Then she poured more of the alcohol directly on his chest, feeling his strong muscles ripple beneath the cloth and sweeping dark hair first one way and then the other as she tried to cool him down.
He coughed again. "Are you trying to kill me?"
"I'm trying to bring down your fever."
His body jerked, but she held him in place with one hand while she used her other to rub him with the damp cloth.
When he began to shiver, she breathed out a little sigh, relieved that the rapidly evaporating liquid was doing its work.
Reaching down, she pulled the sheet up to his waist, covering him again. When she looked up, his eyes were open, fever bright, their intensity pinning her anew.
"What's wrong with me?" he asked in a low voice that was almost a growl.
"You got shot. The wound is infected. I'm trying to get your temperature down," she told him, repeating earlier exchanges of information.
She watched his expression change as he looked down toward the bandage on his leg. Experimentally he flexed the leg, grimacing from the pain.
"Can you tell me why someone shot you?" she asked.
"I found… one of the graves."
"What grave?"
"Of one of the women Crawford killed." He stopped, blinked. "Not Crawford. Crawford's dead."
She shuddered.
He had been speaking almost to himself. He focused on her again, looking startled, as if he had just realized she was in the room with him. "You can't stay here."
"Somebody has to take care of you."
"Not you."
"You think I don't know what I'm doing?"
He closed his eyes, lay motionless for several moments as though gathering enough energy for a long speech. Still, his next words, when they came, were so low that she had to lean closer to hear him.
"I know you don't. Or you'd have the sense to get out."
The way he questioned her competence had her lifting her chin and glaring down at him—a tough combination to manage, but she did it. "I have a medical degree. I may not have treated a patient in several years, but believe me, I know the right things to do for you."
He made a low, dismissive sound more animal than human. "I'm not talking about your medical degree… You and me. Not good."
"We don't even know each other."
"We know enough."
"I don't understand what you mean."
His eyes snapped open, drilled into her. "Don't lie to me." He dragged in a ragged breath and let it out slowly. "I wasn't going to let this happen. It can't happen." Agony mingled with a sense of purpose in his voice.
She leaned toward him, wanting him to explain. But his eyes took on a shuttered expression. "I called the lab, and they sent you. Jesus!"
She didn't understand what was upsetting him. Didn't understand what he meant.
She might have kept asking questions, but the exchange seemed to have used up all his energy. His eyelids fluttered closed, and the regular rise and fall of his chest told her he had sunk back into sleep. Leaving her with more questions than he had answered.
CHAPTER SIX
« ^ »
ROSS DRIFTED IN and out of sleep, ambushed by nightmares that gripped his fevered imagination, scenes following one another in a jumbled order that made no sense in the way they filtered up from deep within his subconscious.
First he was in the kitchen at home, looking at his hollow-eyed mother, listening to her tell him about his father's latest scrape with the law. She looked so old and tired and worn out from years of living with Vic Marshall that he felt his heart turn over.
"Leave the bastard," he urged.
"Don't call him that. He's your father."
"Leave him."
"Where would I go?"
"You can live with me."
She snorted. "Live with you! He'll come to get me, and one of you will kill the other."
It was an old argument. One he had never won, and his hands squeezed in frustration.
Then he heard the sound of footsteps crossing the floor.
The Big Bad Wolf. Christ, if his father found he'd dared to come here, they were in for a hell of a fight.
Adrenaline surged through his body. Fight or flight, and he was spoiling for a brawl. His mother's pleading eyes stopped him.
He wanted to tell her he was sorry—for the things his father had done and for the grief he'd given her.
Before he could get the words out, the scene shifted abruptly. He was no longer in the house. Now he was a wolf, running through the woods, tree trunks rushing past him. Brambles reaching out to grab at his gray coat. But he kept moving, fleeing the footsteps behind him.
He dared not look to see who was back there. But he knew the pursuer was a blond, blue-eyed woman, her body naked, lithe, sexy, shimmering in the moonlight. Blood pounded in his veins. He wanted her with a strength that bordered on madness, yet he fled from what he wanted most. Because if she caught him, he would turn her into something sad and pitiful, old before her time. Like his mother.
So he kept running, each breath a sharp stab in his lungs, and finally she was no longer behind him. In
stead he was the pursuer, chasing a demon named Crawford through a nighttime landscape thick with trees and rich with the new life of spring.
Energy flowed through his body. He felt the blood pumping in his arteries. Felt his own power.
The breeze riffled his thick coat, his predator's eyes pierced the moonless night, and he drank in the scent of his quarry. The scent of man. The scent of fear.
Crawford, ahead of him in the darkness. Running for his life. Stumbling over a tree root in his terror. Splashing through a stream, hoping to throw his pursuer off the trail.
But there was no shaking the chimera behind him, no escape from the yellow eyes and white fangs of the beast.
Because the wolf was on a sacred mission.
Now, in his dream, a hot fire sluiced through him as he followed the trail that his quarry was helpless to hide. This was no rabbit, no fox, no animal using instinct and cunning in a desperate attempt to escape. This was a man—a man with a gun.
It was a fair contest, Ross told himself as he deliberately closed the distance between them.
Crawford had stopped in a small clearing, gasping for breath, spinning in a circle as he pointed the gun first in one direction, then in another—unable to spot the enemy.
The wolf padded to a halt behind a tree, his body quivering, a low growl gathering in his throat.
Then he sprang.
Crawford fired at the gray shape—once, twice—but Ross dodged the deadly projectiles with canine grace, then leaped for the kill, sinking his fangs into the man's neck, cracking his larynx, gnawing through his carotid artery.
He was a hunter, and blood was a familiar taste in his mouth. Animal blood. But this liquid was different. It gushed over his muzzle and down his throat in a hot torrent, pumping through his brain with a white heat that made him dizzy. Licking his lips, he lifted his head and howled his triumph into the darkness.
In the dream he was human again, feeling a sense of horror sweep over him. Staring down at the chewed remains of his victim, he was struck by a sickening truth: He was no better than the killer he had stalked and slain.
