“I’m not a PR consultant.” But her mind was clearly working along those lines already. Was she really considering staying on here to work? She had stories commissioned back home, but in truth she could continue her work almost anywhere. “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about it properly.”
Billy nodded, and didn’t press the matter.
They came to a gap between two rocky outcrops, and then the rough track dropped down to an area of bare rock by a lake. A loch, Jenny corrected herself. “Loch Ellen?” she asked.
“Aye,” said Billy.
The light now was that steely light of sun breaking through storm-clouds, casting the landscape in sepia tones. The loch here was open, exposed to the elements, but a short distance to the right the forest extended down the hill to the water.
Following Billy’s lead, she climbed down from the Land Rover. He pointed and, almost obscured by a kink in the shore, she saw a mound emerging from the water. “That’s where the beavers stay, their lodge,” he said. “It’s been in use for three years, now. They’ve not been successful at breeding yet, but I think this might be the year. We have ospreys, too. A pair have a nest over on the north side of the loch. Slavonian grebes, too. Mr Carr does everything he can to manage the habitat to favor the wildlife.”
She felt the first heavy drops of rain, then.
Billy peered up at the sky, then put an arm across Jenny’s shoulders and steered her along a path that led into the trees.
There was a small stone building in a clearing here, constructed on the bank of the loch, narrow windows looking out over the water. Billy pulled at the heavy wooden door and ushered Jenny inside.
The place was dark, lit only by the narrow windows. Pulling the door shut again, Billy struck a match and lit a lantern that hung by the door. She saw him smiling now. “Welcome to the Loch Ellen bothy,” he said, then went on to explain, “Do you have hiking shelters in the States? We have bothies throughout the Highlands. Simple stone buildings on the hills for hikers to use. It’s an honor thing: leave the place as you found it, replace any fuel you’ve used, or candles, or firewood. Take your waste away with you. That kind of thing.”
As he finished speaking there was a sudden loud hammering of rain against the door and windows.
Jenny turned and went across to the windows that looked out over the loch. In less than a minute the conditions had changed dramatically, from that stark sunlight to this. Rain came down in rods, hammering the loch’s surface up into a misty spray, cutting visibility down to only a few tens of yards. She couldn’t see the beaver lodge now, or the far shore, or even the trees just along the bank. Just patterns of gray, as the rain tore down.
She wrapped her arms around herself in a vain attempt to suppress a shudder at the sudden chill.
“It’s fine,” said Billy, still standing by the door. “It’ll pass in a minute.”
“There’s really no wolves?” Jenny said. It was a tactic that worked surprisingly often: the random return to a previous line of questioning – throw your subject off guard and sometimes they reveal more.
But Billy was consistent. He just smiled and shook his head. “No. No wolves, other than the ones we just visited.”
Jenny shrugged. “What about the attack on Carr?” she asked. “When he was a boy. Could that have been a wolf?”
“Your remnant population theory?” asked Billy. “No. I know what I saw.”
“So does he.”
“He was a lad. Barely twelve years old.”
“And you were all of, what, sixteen?”
“Almost.” Then: “He was damaged. Psychologically. Not a reliable witness.”
At first Jenny took that to mean that the young Carr had been damaged by the experience, that he must have been in a state of shock, but there was something in Billy’s expression just then. Something more.
“‘Damaged’?”
Billy looked away. Then, head lowered, he peered up at her, and said, “The way Carr tells it, that night was the first time we met. It makes for a tidy wee story, you know? But it’s a small place. The Carrs were regular visitors, everybody knew them. I’d already met them a few times before that night. Let’s just say you’re not the only one with father issues.”
“Carr’s father was violent?”
Billy looked away again, affecting to peer out of the window at the weather. “Nobody missed the man when he was gone,” he said, after a time. “Not least Jonathan Carr.”
She wished he would just spell it out, but she knew from her own experience that it was the most painful things that were skirted around most, best approached from a tangent.
“He beat his son?” she asked, knowing he was implying more.
A slight shake of the head. Then: “He had a thing for boys. Like I say, nobody missed him. The bastard had it coming.”
Boys.
Not just Jonathan Carr, then?
Billy must have guessed where her thoughts had headed. He met her look now. “He didn’t,” he said. “He tried. Like he tried with most of the local lads. All that front of his. The stalking and shooting and fishing. Aye, he enjoyed all that stuff, but what better way for a rich man to get a lad on his own than to hire him as a ghillie for the day? He hired me one time to take him up onto the hills stalking the deer. I left him in no doubt what would happen if he ever tried again.”
Jenny nodded, turned back to the window, the loch. The rain was finer now, drifts of misty drops blowing across the loch. She’d never thought there might be a time when she’d be grateful that her father was “just” a violent man.
“It’s clearing,” said Billy now.
It was. Only a scattering of rain splashes on the water now. She could see the trees, see the far bank of the loch, the hills rising beyond. As she looked, shafts of sunlight picked out rainbow-like shimmers in the air over the loch. She’d never seen anything like it.
“Come on,” said Billy. “Let’s take a look at the lodge.”
18
As the last few drops of rain fell, the heady scent of pine needles and fresh rain filled the air. Little drifts of steam clung to the moss-covered ground as sunlight broke through the cloud-cover. Somewhere over the loch a bird cried, but the fringe of trees blocked Jenny’s view.
“Don’t you just love it?” asked Billy.
Jenny picked her steps carefully, fearful of stumbling or slipping. There was something about Billy’s enthusiasm for the place that was infectious, heady as the fresh scents in the air after the downpour. Always the city girl, she had to admit that she was falling in love with this rugged, rich landscape. “It’s cool,” she said, opting for the safety of understatement.
Billy glanced across at her, that wry grin on his face again. With Billy, it was a weird thing of moments. Most of the time things were easy between them; sometimes they were tense. But then... a moment. A glance, a smile, a comment. A moment like that one last night when she’d been so close to kissing him.
Those moments came from nowhere, with no real explanation. They just were.
The path brought them to a little inlet, the edge of the water fringed by a sliver of pebble beach. To the right, a tongue of land topped with ancient pine trees projected into the loch, and there, protected by that promontory, Jenny saw the mound again: the beaver lodge. Close to, it was bigger than she’d first thought, an untidy island of mud and sticks perhaps fifteen feet across.
“We won’t see any now,” said Billy softly, leaning in close so she could hear. “They’re usually about their business at night. Best chance of seeing them is dawn and dusk. They’ve been about a wee bit more in daylight recently, though, which is what makes us think they may have kits this year.”
“You should let people see.” Even this, just a pile of sticks in the water, was special, somehow. Primeval. What better way to demonstrate that Carr’s reintroduced wildlife was a natural part of this place?
He was looking at her.
Just standing there, his express
ion unreadable, watching her.
“What?”
His hand came up, fingers touching her face with surprising gentleness. “You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice still soft, low.
She tore her look away from his. He was talking nonsense. She was plain, a little on the curvy side of her optimal weight, a city girl out of her element. She was not beautiful.
“I mean it.”
She glanced up again. Those dark eyes had a power sometimes.
She pulled her head away from his touch.
“Stop this,” she muttered. Just stop.
“You know I’m head over heels for you, don’t you?”
Stop.
She turned away from him, stared out across the water. There were birds there, out where the water became choppy. Why wasn’t he telling her what the birds were, and what a good job the estate was doing of preserving their habitat?
“For years I’ve traveled the world looking for... I don’t know... looking for mystery. Looking for magic, for things that were other to the accepted norm. You know what I mean?”
Had he come up closer behind her, or was he just talking louder?
“I never thought I’d find... you. I’ve never felt like this before. It scares me.”
She glanced back. He was close. He could easily wrap his arms around her. “You sound like you’ve swallowed a book of chat-up lines,” she said.
“It’s the truth.”
She shook her head. “You must have been in love,” she said. How old was he? Three years older than Carr? That would put him in his early thirties. “There must have been girls. Lovers. Wives.” She laughed at that, but he stayed silent. When she looked back, there was something in his expression that stopped her in her tracks. “What... nobody? Flings. One-night stands. Surely?”
A slight shake of the head.
“We... I... No: nobody. I’ve never known anything like this before. I don’t know how to handle it, what to do.”
She genuinely didn’t know what to make of that. “You’ve been saving yourself?”
He nodded. “I...” He faltered, then started again. “We don’t do all that. It has to be for life. A soul-mate.”
Her brain seemed to have gone onto a go-slow. It was a struggle to process what he was saying. We don’t do all that. And had he just described her as his soul-mate? Nobody had ever used that term on her before. She was simultaneously flattered, and more than a little creeped out by the intensity of it all. And now she remembered how he had become on that last day in Maldon: similarly intense, professing his love.
Just. Too. Much.
And... what had he meant by “we”?
“You said you traveled the world looking for magic,” she said, her brain still stuck in the mud. “What kind of magic?”
She thought he wasn’t going to answer, and a part of her hoped that would be the case. She peered out over the water. The birds had gone. It was just the two of them.
“Others like me,” he said. “My kind.”
We.
“Werewolves.”
She wasn’t hearing this. She wasn’t equipped to hear something like this.
All the stories she’d followed, the cases she’d looked into. None of that compared to being this up and close with... to use his own terminology... with werewolf psychosis. A drift away from reality. A state of mind. The belief that you’re something you’re not.
Out here in the middle of nowhere. Alone with a man who believed he was a werewolf.
If she’d been creeped out by his professions of love, then this was a whole new level of weird.
She turned, saw the look of sudden hope on his face, then dashed it against the rocks by sidestepping him, ducking around him, striding away along the narrow path that led through the trees.
She couldn’t believe she’d come so close to kissing him – not just the night before, but just now, too. When a guy tells you you’re beautiful, that he’s head over heels for you... When there’s an undeniable connection with him...
She didn’t think he was following, but didn’t want him to see her looking back to check, so she dipped her head down and kept walking.
Werewolves. Did he really believe that? Was the reason he understood the psychosis so well that he suffered from it himself? She had to believe that, because the alternative was that he was playing some kind of cruel joke.
He had looked genuinely confused. Puzzled by the strength of his feelings.
She’d seen what could happen to people who suffered from such delusions. She’d been at the trial of Jackson Taylor.
She allowed herself to glance back, saw him standing where she’d left him, a lost look on his face.
The trees thickened here, and when she looked again she couldn’t see him. She tried not to let that alarm her.
Seconds later, she was stepping out into the open area where they’d left the Land Rover. The rocks here were slick and slippery from the downpour.
She stopped, looked all about.
Parallel ruts in the heather marked the almost invisible trail back away from the loch, up through the gap between rocky outcrops, and then on down the hill to the lab building. How far had they driven to get here? It had taken maybe fifteen minutes, but all of it in the Land Rover’s lowest gears at barely walking pace.
She started to walk again.
It had been a mistake ever to come here. How much of her own money had she spent on flights alone? And what kind of a story was she going to end up with? Another madman who thinks he’s a werewolf. An eccentric millionaire who’s just... spending his money.
She didn’t need all this. Any of it. And she certainly didn’t need to fly halfway round the world to find it.
The walking wasn’t easy, as she moved from slippery, loose rocks to the springy, tangled carpet of heather. The Land Rover had been racing over the moor to get here by comparison.
Madness.
All of it, churning round and round her head.
She came to the gap between the rocks, and saw the moor sloping gently away before her.
She would still be walking at dusk, at this rate.
She started to walk again.
A short time later she heard the rumble of a diesel engine, steadily getting louder behind her.
She refused to look back, even when the Land Rover was right behind her.
They carried on like that for a time, Jenny walking head down, the Land Rover trailing on her heels. Then she heard a voice, Billy calling above the noise of the engine: “I’m sorry. You hear me? I’m sorry. I’m being a dick again. Saying stupid stuff.”
She looked back, and saw him hanging onto the wheel with one hand with his upper body mostly out of the open window. Now he was talking rubbish. Before, at least there had been conviction in his words, but now he was just trying to fob her off, trying to calm her so she would get in the car instead of stubbornly trekking over the moor.
“Will you at least take a lift back down to the castle?”
She walked.
“I’ll say nothing. Just hop in, would you?”
She caught her foot in a tangle of heather one more time, stopped, turned. Then stepped aside as the Land Rover drew up and came to a halt beside her.
She waited, made him lean over and push the door open. Climbed in, sat with her arms folded tightly across her chest. Had she really just climbed into the passenger seat beside a madman?
And was she really, all of a sudden, entertaining the thought that, “Was it... Are you part of Lilian Lee’s program? Did she do something to you?” Was the Canadian scientist’s work on cellular transformation really far more advanced than anyone had admitted?
The Land Rover rumbled forward over the heather.
“No,” said Billy. “Dr Lee’s work is only at the theory and test-tube stage. Cellular therianthropy isn’t an invention, it’s been around forever. It’s a natural phenomenon. Dr Lee didn’t invent it, she discovered it. But she hasn’t learnt how to make it work yet.”
He stole a brief glance across at Jenny, then looked ahead again. “I’m the real thing. A natural shifter. As far as I know, the last of my kind. I’ve traveled the world hoping to be wrong, but time after time the stories turn out to be false. All I ever wanted was to find companionship in others like me, and I ended up falling in love.”
Another stolen look.
Jenny didn’t understand what was in her head. Billy’s words were utter madness, but equally utterly heartfelt. He meant everything he said. He believed it.
That he was a werewolf, the last of his kind.
And that he was in love with Jenny.
She didn’t know what she felt, what the rush of reactions meant.
There really was nothing that could prepare you for something like this.
“Prove it,” she said now. “Do something. Change.”
“It’s not easy,” he said. “It hurts so much you never want to go through it again. Every time, it’s like giving birth to a new, adult you. And then... you’ve changed. Everything becomes so much simpler. You’re free. Other. But you would never choose to repeat that process. Until it comes upon you again. It’s usually at dusk or at night, when everything seems more raw, closer to nature.”
“At full moon?” Why was she even humoring him?
“Maybe the moon makes it all seem stronger, but that’s all it is. Not cause and effect, just one element that’s become legend. The shifting... you can’t just flip a switch. I can’t sit here and change for you at will. Which is probably just as well. I’d never be able to drive.” He tried to force a laugh at that, but it was a strained sound.
They came to the sharp drop down to the main trail by the lab building, and Billy concentrated on controlling the descent with gears and brakes. When they reached level ground, he didn’t appear to want to speak any more, as if the transition from wild land to at least semi-civilization had stifled something in him.
Jenny stayed silent, too, trying to let the swirl of thoughts in her head become calm.
She didn’t believe a word of what Billy had told her. But she was the only one in the car who felt that way.
Last Alpha: A Highland shifter romance Page 9
