Last Alpha: A Highland shifter romance

by Ruby Fielding

  She wondered then at his lifestyle – how lonely an existence was this? He didn’t seem to have any family around him, and all the online sources suggested he was something of a recluse.

  She hadn’t checked but she would bet that there was no cell signal, and with walls like these even if there was wifi it would be patchy at best. Coming to Craigellen really was like stepping back into the previous century.

  “So what do you do here?” she asked.

  “This is some of the best-preserved ancient habitat in the Highlands,” he said, his eyes lighting up. “We have capercaillies in the forest all about here, pine martens and wildcats, too. Ring ouzels and mountain hares on the hills, ptarmigan and golden eagles higher up. Deer, of course – reds on the top, roe, sika and fallow deer here in the forest.”

  “Midgies.” Jenny leaned forward to scratch at her ankles again. The itches prickled and burned, the oddest of sensations.

  He laughed.

  “Aye, we have our share of midges.”

  “Mom used to call them no-see-ums back home,” she said. “But they were pussies compared to your Scottish ones.”

  “I’ll have Aileen put some lotion in your room,” said Carr.

  She thought then about the contrasts in this complex man’s life. His high tech business world, his – to be blunt – fairly primitive Highland retreat. His very apparent passion for conservation and restoring the ancient landscape.

  “It’s not just preservation, though, is it?” she asked. “It’s reintroduction, too. I hear there’s been some opposition to that?”

  Carr nodded. “A few complaints, yes,” he said. He shrugged. “There always will be, whatever you try to do. But yes, I have some proactive efforts in place. The land has lost a lot of its wildlife over the centuries, mostly hunted out of existence. Wolves, bears, lynx... the list goes on and on.”

  “So what have you set loose so far?”

  He shook his head. “Not ‘set loose’, Miss Layne. There’s far more to it than that. Our efforts are carefully managed reintroductions and we’re not alone in it. Wild boar have been reintroduced to forests throughout the United Kingdom. You let them run free in large enclosures first of all, then let them out into larger fenced-off areas of forest.”

  “So they’re still caged in? You have wild boar here?”

  “It’s a gradual process of acclimatization to freedom,” said Carr. “And yes, boar were the first of our projects.”

  “What else?” She didn’t object when Carr leaned forward to top up her glass.

  “Red squirrels. Beaver.”

  She almost snorted into her drink. She wasn’t a child: she shouldn’t laugh at words like that...

  “We’re working with the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland on a controlled reintroduction of beavers, after the success of their scheme down in Argyll. We have three breeding pairs, two up on Loch Ellen and one on the river. It’s exciting stuff if you have a passion for it.”

  She took another long sip of whisky. Such a long, tiring day, and now she was sitting here in a Scottish laird’s castle hearing about his passion for wild beaver. Not for the first time, she considered it a mistake not to have opted for the airport hotel and a fresh start in the morning.

  “You must have quite a team here?” she said, after taking a moment to gather herself. “Looking after the estate, and all the work you’re doing.”

  “Aye, we do,” said Carr. “There’s Aileen and a couple of lassies from the village who look after the house, and Walters, my estate manager. You dealt with him, I believe?”

  He was the man of few, terse words. She nodded.

  “And then there’s my ghillie, Stewart–” in response to more raised eyebrows Carr explained: “My gamekeeper. Or more, my righthand man. We go back a long way. Then there’s Colquhoun, who looks after the forestry, and Mackinnon, my farm manager. Each of them have their own teams. Then there’s Lilian Lee, who heads up the research team – we’re doing a lot of work on the ecology of reintroduction here. I’ll have someone give you the tour tomorrow.”

  “Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I was right: you have a lot of people working here. How many of them work on your more, well, outré projects?”

  Carr laughed again. He seemed to be enjoying the company, even when he knew exactly what she was doing as she steered the conversation back to where her real interest lay.

  “My biggest sin is I’m a man with an open mind, and the money to throw at some open questions,” he said. “Two years ago I read some research papers from a lab in Vancouver, some work being done on the science behind old legends. The werewolf thing caught my attention, a fascination going back to when I was a boy. Well, their work was running out of funding before it was complete, so I brought Lilian here to keep it going.”

  Jenny knew of the existence of that Vancouver project, but didn’t know it was the same team that had come over here.

  “As I say,” Carr went on, “I have an open mind. Couple that with a boyish imagination and it seemed like a wee bit of fun to fund Lilian’s work. No harm in funding research that the scientific establishment were willing to let die. Lilian’s an eccentric, but her work has lots of potential medical applications, not least in the treatment of cancer. She can explain all that far better than me. I think you’ll like her.”

  Just then, Jenny didn’t know what to make of this all. First he says Lilian’s an eccentric, then assures Jenny she’ll like her. And the talk... what had he really told her tonight? That he was a nice guy who liked to look after the environment. Not much more than she’d already read on a dozen websites. Had she just been given the longest PR runaround?

  Her glass was empty. How many times had he refilled it?

  “I think I need to retire,” she said. The body clock thing was screwing with her: on Eastern Time it was still only early evening but after all the travel and alcohol she was exhausted. “If that’s okay?”

  “Of course.” He pressed something on his cell phone, and said, “That’ll bring Aileen. She’ll show you to your room.” So maybe there was cell coverage, or wifi, here – he was a software millionaire, after all.

  “More tomorrow,” he said, standing and then retreating from the room.

  As Jenny’s look followed him, she saw Aileen waiting patiently at the doorway.

  4

  She was only going to spend the night in a goddamn tower! One of those little ones that started halfway up the castle wall and ended in a conical roof. The room was a full circle, with the inner section squared off to form two straight walls. There was a four-poster bed, a tapestry on one wall, and an assortment of old photographs on the other straight wall. She’d have to ask for the stories behind these old photographs tomorrow. Were they Carr’s family, or former residents of the castle, or perhaps just random room-dressing?

  The curved part of the wall included two sets of tall, narrow windows, with a small table and two chairs positioned to enjoy the view across the gardens to the forest. The floor was of heavy stone slabs, with a rug that repeated the patterns on the tapestry.

  It was like staying in a museum. Or a fairytale. To do this properly she would need to grow her hair long and let it trail out the window in the hope a handsome prince would climb up it. Or something.

  She went to one of the windows and peered out, but all she saw was the reflection of her face and the room behind her. She fumbled at the catch, and eventually managed to open it. Now, she saw stars scattered like sparkling dust across the sky. If she strained she could see the division between sky and forest. She wondered then how high the midgies – or was it midges? Aileen and Carr had pronounced it differently – might fly.

  She shut the window quickly. No more bites tonight, thank you very much. And then she gave a soft laugh at that, remembering Carr’s almost dismissive description of the werewolf project. Was it really just a rich man’s whim?

  From what she recalled of the Vancouver work, Lilian Lee’s team had been looking at
the biophysics of change, the kind of transformations that take place in a butterfly’s chrysalis, or when a lizard’s tail regenerates from a stump. It had been serious scientific work that had become fatally tainted by jokey press stories about comments one of the scientists had made connecting known phenomena like the lizard’s tail regeneration with folklore.

  And that was the trouble with any serious consideration of fringe science: genuine scientific investigation could so readily be destroyed by silly stories by people who thought a lot of it was, really, quite funny.

  People like Jenny Layne...

  She wasn’t being fair on herself, she knew. She’d always argued that the serious aspect of her role was the unpicking of the cranks from the rest: trying to pick out from all the noise anything that was genuinely different.

  She thought then of Jonathan Carr. She’d met few people less like a crank than Carr. He was a successful man, in control of his life. He wasn’t the kind to clutch at fantasy to prop up his own sense of importance. He wasn’t like anyone she’d encountered who suffered from what she now knew to call werewolf psychosis.

  That was a concept she’d picked up a few months back when she’d been drawn into a seriously disturbing story back in her hometown in Connecticut.

  Disturbing because it brought all the kooky, wacky stuff into a far more personal area.

  She’d grown up in Maldon, CT. It was a sleepy town in the sleepiest part of the region of the state appropriately known as the Quiet Corner. The kind of place where all the best childhood memories are made and where, by the time you’re eighteen, you’re more than ready to leave behind for the city lights. Or, at least, Jenny had been, and she had: Boston first, then New York.

  Maldon was probably the last place you would expect to feature in a news story about a gruesome murder. And Jackson Taylor was the last person you’d ever expect to be the killer. The chubby kid who used to sit at the back of class and hit his head on the wall. Cranky, but always harmless. That Jackson Taylor.

  It had been awful watching the story unfold, but it had still only been a distant scar on a bunch of childhood memories until Jackson came up for trial and it turned out his defense was that he was mentally unstable due to delusions that he was a werewolf. That’s when Maldon, CT, came into Jenny’s current remit and all of a sudden people were messaging her for her take on what had happened in her home town.

  That was where she’d first come across the term ‘werewolf psychosis’. One of the guys who’d been hanging around the trial – she wasn’t the only freak who chased this stuff – had fixed her with his dark eyes one day and said, “It’s a psychosis, you know. A drift away from reality.”

  “Hnh?” she’d grunted. She hadn’t noticed him until then, but now that she looked he had a nice smile and, to be blunt, he looked a lot more normal than a lot of the people who were hanging around outside the courtroom. “A what?”

  “Werewolf psychosis,” he said. She couldn’t place the accent at first, thought that maybe he was Irish – real Irish, not Boston Irish – and then she realized it was Scottish and he was talking and she’d not been listening... “...state of mind. The belief that you’re something you’re not, whether it’s to explain the urges you’re feeling, or to rationalize away things you’ve already done.”

  She had nodded. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know already, but he had a nice way of doing it, an almost musical lilt to his voice.

  “You sound like you’re on his defense team,” she’d said, and they both laughed.

  “No, I’m just a werewolf geek. There are so many stories like this, but they always descend into the mundane, don’t you think? Just another sad individual who’s lost his grip on reality.” He held his hand out for her to shake. “I’m Billy, and I know who you are. I’ve read your blog and I’ve seen a few of your pieces on YouTube.”

  Later, she got used to that. The way Billy could flip from charming and relatively normal to freakily intense. That kind of thing wasn’t so unusual in the circles she worked in, after all.

  “There’s nothing mundane about this one for me,” Jenny had said, extracting her hand from a grip that lingered a little too long. “I went to school with Jackson Taylor.”

  §

  Werewolf psychosis. The belief that you’re a shifter, even when all the evidence contradicts that belief. Poor Jackson was just a boy who never grew up. Not in the Peter Pan way, but in the deranged, violent killer way, the kind that would have gone on to kill again if he hadn’t been apprehended in the middle of town with the girl next door’s blood smeared all over his face.

  Now, in her Rapunzel-tower bedroom in the middle of a Scottish forest, Jenny thought of Jonathan Carr and wondered if the obsession he had clearly been trying to brush under the carpet with his self-deprecatory comments earlier was somewhere on the scale from werewolf blogger to Jackson Taylor. Was he suffering from some variant of werewolf psychosis, but this time coupled with the megalomania of the super-rich?

  It was all harmless, she was sure. She couldn’t help that ever since Jackson Taylor she always saw the potential for disaster in what had started out as the harmless pursuit of a bit of wacky science.

  Just then, as if to underline both the seriousness and the surreal nature of where she found herself, a mournful howl cut through the night. Starting low and climbing, the tone wavered before falling again to end in what was almost a growl.

  It was just a dog. A big dog.

  Carr must have dogs, living out here.

  It had sounded nearby.

  She went to the window, but saw only her reflection and that of the room behind her.

  She hugged herself. All of a sudden she didn’t want to open the window, and it wasn’t because of the midges.

  5

  She couldn’t settle. It’s not that she wasn’t tired. More that sudden melancholia that had descended when she’d come to her room and started thinking about Jackson Taylor. And then the dog howling outside, spooking her more than a little. Dog, wolf... whatever. It had all set her tired mind working along lines that led away from sleep.

  She lay there in the darkness, her eyes adjusting until she could make out the outline of the bed’s canopy, the patterns of the tapestry on the wall, the rectangles of picture frames, the shapes of the windows. She listened out for the howl again, but none came. The dog must have settled.

  She thought about Jackson, and how his trial had imposed on her a return to her home town.

  Home is where the heart is.

  Charity begins at home.

  Home sweet home...

  Home was where your doormat of a mother put up with years of abuse from your violent excuse for a father.

  Maldon had been a place for Jenny to get away from as soon as she possibly could, not a place that always drew her back, as home should. Jackson Taylor and his werewolf delusions and awful crime had done nothing to make her think differently of the place.

  She turned onto her side, drawing the bedcovers up around herself. There was definitely something about this old building that sucked the heat out.

  She tried not to think about home. Tried to think about the mundane detail of her journey here, the night at London Heathrow before the connecting flight to Aberdeen.

  She’d expected to watch dawn breaking, but at some point she must have drifted off and when she opened her eyes again bright sunlight was angling in through the narrow windows.

  She checked her cell phone to find it was just past nine. Normally an early riser, her body clock clearly hadn’t adjusted to all the travel and change of time zone. She climbed out of bed and went to a window, clutching a towel to herself that Aileen had set out for her the evening before.

  Blue sky, a few puffs of white cloud. The colors here were strangely intense: the emerald green of the lawns, the deeper green of hedges, their tops sculpted into peacock shapes.

  She wrapped the towel more carefully about herself and left the room, finding her way along to the bath
room she’d been shown. When she came back, a silver tray awaited her on the small table by the windows. A pot of tea, a fine China cup upside down on its saucer, a small jug of milk, a wire rack with triangles of toast, some pots of jelly, marmalade and honey, a butter dish, some blueberries and strawberries and what looked like yogurt.

  She poured the tea, adding a drop of milk that looked thick and creamy. Where was finest Arabica when you needed it?

  She checked her cell, but there was only one wifi network available and she didn’t know how to log on. She didn’t know if she felt liberated or isolated by being so thoroughly offline.

  The tea tasted sweet, even though she’d added no sugar. The creaminess of the milk, perhaps. It was definitely an acquired taste, and not one she’d even borrowed yet, let alone acquired.

  Some time just before ten, she threw on jeans, t-shirt and sweater, and ballet flats and ventured from her fairytale room.

  §

  The castle was a maze of dark passageways with stone floors, wood-paneled walls and high ceilings. Rooms opened off the passageways, the purpose of which Jenny could not work out. There seemed to be so many reception rooms like the one where she had sat with Carr the previous night, but why would a place have so many? There were bedrooms and rooms whose purpose only seemed to be to display old photographs. At least three libraries, full of ancient leather-bound volumes. An office where two young women sat at computers and didn’t even glance up at Jenny as she hovered in the doorway. “I... I’m looking for Mr Carr?” she said, and finally the two peered up. “Or Aileen?” She tried to remember the other names. “Mr Walters? Erm, Stewart?”

  All of a sudden, the larger of the two women broke out into a smile and Jenny wondered why she was so on edge. They were just surprised by her sudden appearance, not hostile. “Mr Carr’s off at the river, I think,” said the woman. “Aileen’s through in the estate office wi’ Dougie.” Then, in response to Jenny’s blank look she pointed back out to the corridor Jenny had just come along and said, “Back that way and then off to the right.”