The Mountain's Shadow

by Cecilia Dominic

  My mind had been slammed by the possibility of werewolves, but now it seemed there might be some sort of rogue wizard or shaman, with enough of the genetic predisposition toward lycanthropy to inflict it on others.

  “But all that is neither here nor there,” she said. “Now we both have this problem.”

  “We’ll get through it. And my grandfather and I will find a cure.”

  “God, Joanie. I wish I had never come up here.”

  I went to touch her arm, but she flinched away from me.

  “I should never have come up here,” she said again. “Now I have some weird disease that’s going to make me turn into some awful creature once a month.”

  “Maybe the aconite will work for you, too. We can always try it.”

  “Even so, it’s going to mean a day off from work out of every twenty-eight to handle not having slept. It’s going to mean strange stories I’ll have to tell my lovers. Can you imagine?” She raised her tear-stained face to me. “‘No, honey, I can’t go out tonight. No, I can’t tell you why. Oh, and don’t call me tomorrow, either, I’ll be asleep all day.’ This is going to ruin my career and my love life.”

  “You’ll handle it. I’ll handle it. You can have some of my money to make up what you won’t earn.”

  “It’s not your money. Your grandfather is still alive, remember? That leaves you with nothing again.”

  My heart plummeted to my stomach, and I swallowed around the acid in my throat. She’s right, and I don't even feel like I know my grandfather anymore. “I’ve lost my career and contracted CLS, too.”

  “But you won’t be alone in it. I will.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Thanks, but I’m just still so pissed, and Peter’s gone, and it’s just too much for me to deal with.”

  “I’ll leave you alone, then, if it’s what you want.”

  “Yes.” For the first time in our long friendship, her eyes grew cold, and she turned her back on me. “That’s exactly what I want.”

  “Okay, then.” I walked out of the room as slowly as I could, but she made no indication she wanted me to stop. I closed the door behind me, and when it clicked shut, I heard her sob. With a heavy heart, I went downstairs.

  I found Grandfather and Gabriel poring over the blueprints as well as the electrical and gas-line schematics of the house, which they had laid out on the long dining room table.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked. My grandfather put a hand to his lips and made a crawling motion with his hand. I understood—they didn’t know if, while the house was empty, Knowles and his goons had come in and bugged the place. That explained his comments by the front door.

  They wrote notes to each other, but all my grandfather would say to me was, “Shouldn’t you find the car you rented in Memphis and return it? You should bring Lonna with you. It sounds like she’s ready to go home. You can take my car, and she can drive the rental.”

  “I’ll ask her if she wants to go. I think her car is still down at her apartment anyway from when Gabriel drove it.”

  Lonna agreed to follow me down to Little Rock in the rental car. I found a place I could return it there. After a quick shower and change, I was ready as well.

  “Bye, honey,” my grandfather said as he kissed me on the cheek. “We’ll see you when you get back.” In my ear, he whispered, “Spend the night with Lonna at her apartment. She may need you.” He pressed a small packet into my hand—two homemade capsules. “You may need each other. And remember, I’m so very proud of you.”

  I bit my lip to keep from crying. “She’s so upset right now she wants nothing to do with me.” I pointed to the packet. “And how do you know these will work on her?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s worth a try. Give her time, honey, she’ll come around. Emotions are always unstable soon after the first change. And she was given the formula that made them scream in agony and forced them to change.”

  I shook my head, angry at myself for not realizing they’d been there long enough to be experimented on. I wondered how Gabriel was recovering, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “You need to be gentle with yourself, too.” My grandfather enveloped me in a hug and squeezed me tight. He’d showered, and the clean soap smell in combination with the crispness of his cotton shirt stayed in my nostrils and brought back happy memories.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Be careful.”

  I didn’t know what he and Gabriel planned, but I knew it couldn’t be good. “You, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  My story began with fire, and it ends with fire. Water might cleanse, but fire transforms. It burns away all the dead matter and leaves exposed the bare essence of the field and the forest. And of my life.

  The newly transformed CLS sufferer—I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a werewolf—goes through fits and starts before settling into the full-moon pattern. Lonna and I both felt the transformation coming on as we arrived back at her apartment from dropping off the rental car, and we hurried in and locked the door behind us. Then, for good measure, we moved her heavy dining room table against it.

  Lonna doubled over in a cramp and slumped on the floor, panting. I remembered the capsules in my pocket.

  “Here.” I forced her mouth open with shaking fingers and slid one under her tongue. I took one as well and sat on the floor, waiting for it to begin.

  A profound sleepiness overtook me, and darkness closed in on my vision. I felt the sensation again, of shrinking until the essence of my soul was distilled somewhere beneath my heart, between my lungs. Then I caught an exhale and emerged through my open mouth. Lonna was there, both in human body as well as in a transparent version of her werewolf body.

  This is much better, she said and shook herself out. I don’t feel so clumsy.

  A faint whiff of smoke caught my attention, but I couldn’t sense any fire nearby. Then I realized what my grandfather and Gabriel intended.

  We have to go.

  Where?

  Wolfsbane Manor!

  And with a thought, we were there.

  By the time we arrived, the entire house was engulfed in flame. The orange and yellow glow lit the edges of the trees around the yard, and even the low clouds seemed to reflect the fury of the fire. In my mind’s eye, I could see the ballroom, the paint of the mural curling off from the heat, the boxes of papers catching quickly and helping the hungry flames into the underground laboratory, where chemicals would explode, glass would shatter, and plastic would melt. A lifetime of work gone in a puff of smoke.

  Did you know this would happen? Werewolf-Lonna sat on the grass next to me, and I saw the flames reflected in her eyes.

  No.

  Where are the men?

  My heart caught in my throat. I don’t know.

  I darted toward the flames, but a large gray wolf blocked my way. This one was also a spirit wolf, and in his eyes, I saw my grandfather’s soul.

  Don’t go any closer, he warned me. If you inhale too much smoke, it will kill your physical form as well.

  He seemed to be wreathed in smoke, and I knew what he had done, the sacrifice he had made to keep his knowledge out of the hands of those who would abuse it. Still, with my last glimmer of hope, I had to ask, What did you do?

  I don’t have much time. There’s something I left for you. It’s in the boathouse in a hidden compartment just above the canoe hooks. It’s hidden well enough the Feds won’t find it. He touched his nose to mine. I will always love you and be proud of you. Remember that. He disappeared.

  If I had been in human form, I would have cried. As it was, all I could do was throw my head back and let forth a long, mournful howl. Other voices joined mine, a chorus of grief for my grandfather, the alpha wolf of the Crystal Pines pack. I felt warm bodies crowding in around me and I knew they were there, even Kyra, who had always hated me, and Ron and Matt, who had betrayed me for their own purposes. I saw the future and knew the pack would scatter, but f
or that night, it was all of us together, howling in grief at the waning moon.

  Two Months Later

  I sat in Peter Bowman’s old office, where a fresh young partner went through the formalities to make me the heir to my grandfather’s fortune as well as the land on which Wolfsbane Manor had stood. It had been eight weeks and four days, and the process had been held up, first by assertions of insurance fraud, and then by the resulting arson investigation. There hadn’t been evidence of any foul play, and the whole thing was ruled as a tragic accident.

  The fire had been caused by a short in the electrical system, the insurance report said. The house was such a shambles even the arson investigator had a difficult time pinpointing the cause. There had been a spark near a place where the gas line had cracked, and the whole system had gone up in flames. Along with it went the house. My grandfather, ostensibly exhausted from his ordeal, had slept through the alarms and had died of smoke inhalation in his bed before his body had burned to a pile of charred remains. They used dental records to identify him.

  My mother sat in the other desk chair, petite like myself, but with iron-gray hair and a mouth perpetually twisted into a sneer. Her bitterness at losing my grandfather’s fortune to me was almost palpable. He had left her enough to live on very comfortably for the rest of her life, but he knew her innate selfishness would never allow her to be satisfied. She signed the necessary papers and left without saying a word.

  “Your grandfather was a smart man,” the lawyer said. “This will is ironclad.”

  “So was his.” I signed the last page with a heavy heart. That meant the final papers were drawn up, so he handed me over to the banker, who had come all the way from Memphis to help transfer the money and the accounts to my name. I walked out of the office with more money than I could have ever imagined, but more bereft of family and friends than I had ever been.

  Denial that the body in the house had actually been my grandfather’s gave way to anger at him for sacrificing himself, and now grief. It would be a long time to acceptance. I hadn’t even been to what was left of the Manor since it all happened. The nice, perky Crystal Pines real estate lady had been very helpful in finding me a new house. “It’s on the cul-de-sac and very quiet.” It turned out to have been Peter Bowman’s, who had skipped town with his family the day after the raid on the lab in the woods. They had taken what they could carry and left most of the furniture, which had been sold with the house. I still sold off most of the stuff in the office and decorated it so it looked like my grandfather’s. My possessions had finally arrived from Memphis the day after the fire, and I rented storage space for it until I could put it in my new home.

  Ron had disappeared as well just after the Bowman family had left. I later found out he had gone down to Little Rock and was trying to convince UAMS to re-admit him to his residency program as well as to win the heart of the charming Lisa Temmerson. Iain, meanwhile, had flown to Washington, D.C., to act as a consultant and expert witness for the FDA’s suit against Hippocrates-Cabal. Leo had gone after Peter, and I hadn’t heard from him since. I sometimes wished we could talk about it, what had happened, and I wondered if the aconite lozenges would help with his mood swings, but there was no whisper on the wind.

  And what of Gabriel? I knew he wasn’t dead—he had been beside me in body on the night of the fire, and I could sense his spirit was still alive somewhere. But he had been a wanderer and would probably never settle down. He’d come hoping I could finish my grandfather’s work. Now I could be of no use to him. It sounds crazy to say it, but his betrayal hurt almost as much as Robert’s. They had both shown me a world beyond what I could have imagined.

  I had never found out what happened between him and Lonna the morning after we left them, and I honestly didn’t want to know. Lonna and I still saw each other occasionally. My grandfather had left me the recipe for the aconite lozenges as well as my brother’s and my letters in the boathouse, and it’s how we managed our symptoms. We would occasionally hunt together; the trust just wasn’t there anymore. I felt like a hypocrite for being so hard on her about Peter when I’d still lusted after Robert. She would never admit it, but she resented me for having brought her into a situation where she was compromised on every level. That it was partially her fault for being overconfident was something she’d never admit.

  So I was alone, the rich heiress in a small town in the Ozarks in Arkansas. I pondered it on the way back to my new house filled with furnishings that still felt like they belonged to other people. I reminded myself it could be worse, and maybe I needed to be alone for a while. But when I turned the curve to the cul-de-sac, I saw someone sitting on my front porch steps. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of the wavy dark hair, the intense black eyes, and the muscular body in blue jeans and a black leather jacket.

  “Leo?”

  He came and opened the car door for me. “Good afternoon, Doctor Fisher.”

  “Good afternoon, Doctor Bowman. What are you doing here?”

  “I had to disappear for a while—there was something I needed to investigate on my own. But I’m back. They said you live here now.”

  “I can’t go back to the Manor, not yet.” I brushed a tear from my eye. “It’s too soon. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  He looked away and bit his lip.

  I held my hand out to him, and he took it. My hand looked so small in his, but his felt warm in spite of him having waited out in the cold for me.

  “We both loved him,” I said.

  “And we’ll both miss him. I can’t believe I didn’t realize he’d been taken to that place. And Ron…” His voice broke.

  “Ron betrayed you for love.”

  “Right.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I hope it was worth it. Did you hear they’re thinking of starting a CLS specialty at UAMS?”

  “Then he’s ended up in the right place.”

  Leo followed me into the kitchen, where I put on a pot of coffee.

  “No butler?”

  “Nope. Gabriel left after the fire. It wasn’t really my style anyway.”

  A little of the tension seeped out of Leo. “Why live here? Why not rebuild?”

  “I’m not ready yet. I have to feel like it’s the right time.”

  He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “There’s a reason for that. Let’s go up there this evening, at twilight.”

  “Go up to where? The manor ruins?”

  “Yes.”

  Tears stung my eyes, and the kitchen blurred. “Leo, I can’t. I haven’t been up there since they found his body.”

  In a moment, his arms were around me, and I cried into his shoulder. It felt so good just to let it out, to let someone else hold me up for a change, especially when I felt one of his tears plop on the top of my head.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be with you. Have been from the beginning, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You remember how I told Galbraith he didn’t need to bring Gabriel in?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “No, I didn’t hear that part of the conversation, remember?”

  “You heard the end of it. If I couldn’t keep Gabriel away from your grandfather’s estate, I hoped to at least keep him away from mine.”

  “I see.” I put my cheek against the warm leather of his jacket.

  “After I met you, and you were so feisty with Kyra, I couldn’t help but fall for you. And then you never let my wild moods intimidate you. It was like you saw beyond all the CLS stuff. You could say I was your greatest admirer. Still am.”

  The words stung, and I remembered Gabriel had said something similar, but then the recollection of a certain dinner that had been paid for came to mind.

  “Would that perhaps be a secret admirer?” I asked.

  He smiled at me and then tucked my head under his chin, where it fit perfectly. “Not so secret anymore. Shall I show you how much I admire you?”

  I tilted my head back to look at him, and he pressed hi
s lips to mine, his mouth questioning like I might be the one to draw back. Just in case he had any doubt, I threaded my fingers through his thick curls—there's no escaping this time! With nothing standing between us anymore, this kiss was molten and carried with it the excitement of being the most powerful animal running through the forest. I shivered, and he drew me closer.

  “You’re not going to push me away this time, are you?”

  “No words,” he teased and made sure I couldn’t ask any more questions or doubt his intentions.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I whispered the next time we came up for air.

  He grabbed my wrist, the one he had hurt, and tugged me gently to the master bedroom. I’d forgotten for a moment he knew the house. Then he proceeded to show me how he could be both a wild animal and a tender lover, switching between the two as I needed. By the end, as we both came, I knew without a doubt who I wanted my second pack mate to be.

  “Come to the Manor with me tonight,” he whispered as we lay collapsed together.

  I drew away, but he pulled me back to him. “Why?”

  “Charles made me promise I’d bring you when I returned. He knew you’d need time to heal and forgive, but there’s something he wanted me to show you.”

  I sighed. “I could never say no to him.”

  So there I was, at twilight, sharing a thermos of hot chocolate with Leo and trying not to look at the jagged edges of what was left of my childhood sanctuary and my adult legacy. The trees around the edge of the lawn were bare of leaves, and their branches made intricate lacework against the feathery clouds in the sky. The sun set behind the ruins, and the sky turned pink, streaked with orange and purple. The sight took my breath away, and then I saw what Leo dragged me up there for.

  A large gray wolf loped across the lawn from the woods and disappeared into the ruins of the house. I tugged on Leo’s sleeve to let him know I wanted to follow it, but he held his finger up—wait. I waited and watched, and as dusk fell, the wolf emerged again, this time with something in its mouth. It trotted up to us and dropped a key into the grass. It was the old front door key, and miraculously, it hadn’t been melted into oblivion. If anything, it was only a little sooty.