The Wolf of Haskell Hall

by Colleen Shannon

  In this four-legged, powerful beast, such hunger was terrifying.

  The joy of the past night became a melancholy dirge leading to her own doom.

  She could deny the truth no longer. Ian Griffith’s eyes had that strange glow, he walked so soundlessly and had such acute senses because he was as cursed as the legend said.

  He was the Wolf of Haskell Hall.

  But her knowledge came too late. Fate looked her in the eye out of those amber depths. It reverberated up the length of her spine as that low snarl came again.

  Tears came to Lil’s eyes as she stared at him. Death peered back at her, but still, she could not look away. For behind that savage hunger that smote her like a blow, she saw confusion. Hesitation. Every powerful muscle was tensed to spring, but for some reason, he didn’t.

  If she had been faced with this challenge even a few hours ago, she would have failed to meet it. But the Ian Griffith who’d showed her such tenderness last night lurked still somewhere in that sinew and muscle. The wolf smelled more keenly, so he knew, too, the scent of their lovemaking clinging to the sheets..

  Letting the covers drop, Lil raised to her knees in the bed. “Ian, please. I cannot bear it if you leave me like this. Remember? Last night? Think. I know you can still think. I see it in your eyes.”

  Those unblinking eyes did indeed remain fixed on her, but the snarl that showed his fangs was even more vicious. He padded closer. One step. Two. Then he stopped, every hair on his body bristling. The growl that came this time was savage with hunger. The wolf howled, long, low and rough.

  The prelude to an attack.

  It took every fiber of strength she possessed for Lil to remain still, but she knew enough of wolves to realize that the worst thing she could do was run.

  Besides, he blocked the door.

  There was nowhere to go but outside the window, down a sheer drop of forty feet to the ground. Lil tried again, tears streaming down her face. “Ian, you can break the curse. All you have to do is resist. Please, if not for me, then for yourself. You can break the curse if you try.”

  A trembling began in those powerful muscles, and the snarl faded. The wolf cocked its head from side to side, as if it tried to listen with ears that heard but did not understand.

  A tremulous smile of belief, of total trust, stretched her lips, and though she did not know it, it was very similar to the one she wore when she took him inside her body. “See? I wouldn’t make much of a meal, anyway.”

  Hope shimmered in the room, fragile yet ineluctable.

  Hope brighter than the moonlight, clearer than the day. It scattered the shadows, leaving no room for curses or things of the night.

  Green eyes steadily held amber. For one beating instant of Lil’s heart, Ian Griffith appeared in the wolf’s eyes.

  Then the howl came outside again, so close now that it seemed the other wolf must be in the courtyard.

  Lil’s bravery fled as she realized two things: There was more than one wolf. And she was the target of both of them.

  The amber eyes changed. Humanity faded back to wildness. The lupine version of the indomitable male tensed to spring.

  Crying out in fear, Lil scrambled for the far corner of the bed.

  The tower door burst open, and Jeremy’s voice came, sharp with fear, “Mistress? Be ye here?”

  “Yes, Jeremy, help!” Lil screamed as the wolf leaped.

  In one spring, he was on the bed, fangs bared, snarling savagely as he snapped at her throat.

  She only had one recourse, and she took it. She slipped between the edge of the bed and the wall, barely squeezing into the gap. The wolf clawed savagely at the wall, ripping the bed covers, but the bed was high, and his claws flailed just above her head.

  Jeremy’s hobnailed bootsteps ran across the tower. With a last frustrated snarl, the wolf sprang off the bed. Immediately Lil raised up so she could see.

  The images would be branded forever on her brain.

  She saw Jeremy running inside with his shotgun at the ready.

  She saw the wolf limned against the moon that smiled bold and brassy through the clearing clouds. Dawn lurked on the horizon, but the pink glow of redemption came too late.

  For Lil. And for Ian.

  Lil saw the look on Jeremy’s face as he leveled the fire arm. Forgetful of her nakedness, Lil stood, held out her hands and cried, “No!”

  The retort of the weapon drowned out her plea.

  She saw blood appear on the wolf’s neck, but much of the shot spent into the wall behind him. And then he was leaping through the heavy window. For an instant, he was poetry in motion, front feet raised as he bounded over the sill, every instinct in that powerful body poised for flight.

  Glass shattered. A terrible moment of nothing, and then a heavy weight hit the ground outside and ran off. From the sounds of it, Ian was scarcely wounded.

  Lil sank down upon the bed, so enervated with relief that Ian had not been badly hurt that it took a moment for the other people crowding into the doorway to impinge upon her awareness. It was the shocked murmurs that drew her first.

  Her own lady’s maid stared at her with huge eyes.

  Lil looked down and saw her own nakedness. She pulled the shredded sheets up, but they were little cover.

  And less protection from the condemning eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was not in Lil’s nature to shrink from anything, but the terrible ending to such a glorious beginning left her numb. Afraid. And alone. Lil grabbed up a pillow, but it, too, was tattered from the wolf’s–Ian’s–sharp claws.

  Suddenly, under the condemning eyes of the servants she’d begun to consider friends, she felt again the outsider. A coarse American with neither right to nor regard for the estates held at such cost by all the women before her. Women who’d died to safeguard this legacy.

  A legacy she’d squandered for a few hours of pleasure….

  The brisk voice was a salve to Lil’s wounded dignity.

  “Out! Leave Miss Haskell to compose herself.” Shelly moved her tall form between Lil and the other servants’ scandalized gazes.

  Jeremy scowled between Lil’s tattered decency and Shelly. “And that blasted wolf? If we go look for it now–”

  “Too late,” Shelly responded cooly. “It will be long gone.” Equally cooly, Shelly watched Lil’s sigh of relief. Lil knew she should be shamed at her own gladness that Ian had gotten away after he’d tried to kill her, but some feelings went beyond shame. However, she also knew from the look on Shelly’s face that she was due a little homily on the subject.

  Glancing between Lil and Shelly, Mrs. McCavity tied her robe tightly about her stout waist and shooed the other gawking servants out of the doorway, closing the bedroom door as she went.

  The silence weighed heavily upon Lil, for there was someone still present whom she found it even harder to face than Shelly. Never had it been so difficult to meet Jeremy’s eyes. The disappointment in that gaze that had always been so steady and so loving was almost more than she could bear. But Lil swallowed back her tears and said huskily, “Haven’t you ever done something wrong just because you couldn’t resist?”

  Jeremy opened his mouth to retort, closed it abruptly and nodded instead. “Aye. But a bottle’s embrace and the embrace of a man more demon than human be two different things.”

  “Have you never known the term ‘demon rum?’” Shelly inquired. “Or mayhap hypocrite is more familiar to a man of your sort.”

  “I’d as lief listen to a magpie as a woman o’ yer sort,” Jeremy growled, turning on Shelly.

  “Then proceed into the moors to look for one. And on the way out, leave your judgment to St. Peter and the day of rapture.”

  “Hmph! That be the kettle calling the pot black. Ye might as well wear a black robe and a white wig, yer bloody honor.”

  Lil glanced between the pair. If she’d been a bit less emotionally bruised, she might have been amused at their byplay. She was beginning to suspect that
, beneath his bluster, Jeremy was attracted to the redoubtable Miss Holmes. He bedded sluts, but had only ever been in love with one woman that she knew of, and that had been a spinster school teacher.

  Shelly, however, apparently felt no such ambivalence. “Would that it were so, so I could clap you in irons and toss away the key just so I didn‘t have to listen to your yammering.”

  “Yammering, is it?”

  Shelly flung the door open and pointed an imperious finger. “Out!”

  Jeremy’s mouth opened and closed, but he turned on his heel and cradled his shotgun to his side, muttering, “Aye, better a den of howling wolves than a screeching harpy.”

  He exited. Shelly slammed the door.

  Immediately, Lil hopped out of bed and shrugged into her robe. Feeling a bit stronger, she ignored the strange ache in her lower quarters–and the even more painful one in her heart–and faced Shelly. “Get it over with.”

  Shelly’s stern lips softened into a quirk. “There’s obviously no need. Your own conscience is loud enough, I warrant.”

  Lil’s eyes darkened to forest green as she considered that. “No, Shelly. I am so shameless that I do not even feel regret. It was the most intimate, bonding experience of my life. Even knowing what he is….I do not know if I could resist him the next time.”

  “That’s the curse talking, my dear.” When Lil merely stared bleakly into the distance, Shelly grew brisk. “But at the moment, we’ve other things to worry about. Such as…what will we do to quell the gossip?”

  Weak-kneed, Lil sank back onto the bed. “I didn’t think of that.” The tart agreement in Shelly’s face almost made Lil laugh. “I assure you, I do still have a brain.”

  “Perhaps, when Ian Griffith is not in the vicinity.”

  How could Lil take affront, when Shelly only spoke the truth?

  “Now,” Shelly continued, “our answer to the inevitable rumors shall be that you were chased by a wolf through the house, into the tower. In fighting him off, your clothes were shredded, and only Jeremy’s intervention saved your life.”

  “No one will believe that poppycock.”

  “But they won’t dare disagree with it, either. At least not to your face. It is not so very far from the truth, after all, which is always the best sort of a lie. More importantly, it will replace one sensational story with a more sensational one. All of Cornwall is agog over the Wolf of Haskell Hall, and they will, if you’ll excuse the term, lap it up.”

  As Shelly obviously intended, this won a watery laugh from Lil. “Levity? From the redoubtable Miss Holmes? I’m shocked.”

  “Good, in your condition you shan’t have to brace yourself. Has it occurred to you that, now the servants know Ian is also a werewolf, he will not dare show his face around here again?”

  Shock coursed through Lil despite the warning. Why had she not thought of that? “But…I cannot allow that. He loves the Hall, and it’s partly his home, too. No one saw him but Jeremy, and if I ask him to keep it to himself–”

  “And how do we explain that great hole in the window and the wolf tracks outside?”

  “We shall erase the tracks and set the carpenter to fixing the window.” Lil stuck her feet in her slippers and hurried through the suite of rooms that was beginning to lighten as dawn teased the horizon into a blush. The moon….it would soon be gone.

  And so would Ian. If she didn’t find him fast, he’d flee.

  “Miss Haskell,” Shelly called, but Lil was already out the door.

  As Lil ran down the tower stairs, she knew that when Ian awoke to his manly form again, he’d be ashamed. Maybe he wouldn’t remember attacking her, but he’d certainly know that his last memory was falling asleep cradling her in his arms. And the man who’d made love with such tender control must have a visceral attraction to her as deep as her own for him. He’d want to shield her from himself, just as he’d tried to restrain his own baser urges by tying himself up.

  Why had she avoided that truth? Who else could have tied him, and why? The answer was both simple and devastating.

  She’d refused all whispering remnants of conscience, decency, even sheer self preservation for one reason: she’d wanted to make love with him. Wanted it like earth needs rain, or hummingbird needs nectar.

  That certainty, as troubling as it was, suddenly gave her strength. Mayhap there was a mysterious bond of blood between them, exactly as the curse foretold. But the joy they’d shared last night was a beautiful thing with all the principles of light.

  Revealing. Rejuvenating. Bright. And everyone knew that creatures of the night scurried away from light.

  Thirty minutes later, fully dressed and carrying a broom, Lil ignored the butler’s disapproving stare and ran outside. Methodically, she swept the wolf’s large prints away, through the gravel, past the dirt bordering the fields, onto the pasture. She knew several stable hands watched her curiously, but she ignored them, sweeping, back and forth, until her arms ached.

  The symbolism of the movement was, well, sweepingly apparent. With every stroke, she wiped out the past and left a clean slate that could only be trod anew. Those steps would fall where she and Ian put them.

  When she reached the edge of the moors, she stopped. The sun beamed down on her happily, as if in sympathy with her earlier thoughts, its brightness chasing the sultry moon back to her den of iniquity. Not a cloud lurked in the brilliant blue sky above.

  Still, the sight of that limitless waste, brown flat lands raised only by mountains in the far distance, frightened her. Odd that she found the moors both so forbidding and so appealing, all at once.

  There, the gypsy had borne her child alone.

  There, the legacy of that forbidden union wandered, a solitary man again.

  There, the last heiress of the Hall would have to go to find him.

  There, Delilah Haskell Trent would face her own fears–or be overcome by them. Handing the broom to a startled groom, Lil ran back to the house. A bath. She had to have a bath. Maybe then she’d feel strong enough to do this. For the moment, she was only afraid….

  Bathed in the healing power of the sunlight, Ian Griffith awoke to himself by slow degrees. For a moment, he reveled, as always, in the feel of the soft moss upon his bare skin. He moved his arms and legs from side to side, realizing next that he was nude. Why was he naked on the moors? True, he often came to the moors with a woman, but he usually dressed and walked her home after their appetites were slaked.

  Appetites…it was then Ian saw the redness on his hands. He sat up, his head spinning as he realized two things: one, this was his special place, and there was only one woman he’d ever wanted to bring here, the one woman it was disastrous for him to need. Two, he’d apparently broken that rule, for there was someone else here with him.

  The girl. Lying unnaturally still in a pool of blood. She had claw marks from head to toe, her clothes were in tatters, and her torso….Ian turned away and gagged. Her hair was so muddy and tangled with leaves that he couldn’t tell its color, but from the one glance, he didn’t think it was Delilah.

  He vomited, but nothing came up but phlegm. It had no red tinge. How long would a raw heart stay in a man’s intestines?

  Man. Ian tried to laugh bitterly, but only another gag came out. When the dry heaves finally stopped, he forced himself to turn the girl over. Her face was muddy, too, but now he saw black hair, and terror in the open, staring eyes that he’d so recently admired. Only because Delilah watched.

  It was the bar maid from the village. He’d dallied with her on several occasions, but he’d never invited her here. Had she come looking for him? Or had he dragged her to his haven while he was….not himself?

  Shakily, avoiding looking at the girl’s gaping rib cage, he got to his feet and carefully inspected the area. This little slice of heaven, where wild flowers grew in profusion, and the pristine waterfall tumbled over a rocky embankment into a spring-fed pool shielded by rocks, would never again be peaceful for him.

  His personal
paradise was protected on all sides by bogs.

  One way in, and one way out.

  So far as he knew, he was the only one who could follow that path. Which meant….Bile rose in his stomach again, but he forced it back, shakily following his own wolf tracks to that narrow stretch of earth between the quicksand.

  He saw no evidence of dragging, but faint signs of small footprints. And his own heavy wolf prints, blurred and repeated, as if he’d paced back and forth. Heaviest there by the stream, almost as if he’d leaped from that rock up above the pool at the base.

  The woman must have walked here. Perhaps she surprised him drinking in the stream, or….he searched his hazy recollection, but those memories were as dim under the murk of despair as all the other times. He didn’t remember killing the woman, much less eating her heart, but he didn’t remember the first time he transitioned, either.

  Still, the taste of that last heiress must have been sweet, for his hunger was growing uncontrollable. Bending to the stream, he splashed water on his face and hands, watching blood dye the water red. The color faded to pink as water gurgled and sped on its merry way. Then the blood was gone, part of the earth again, as all living things would one day be.

  He stared at his clean but slashed hands. The girl must have fought back with all her strength, clawing him. And he would have clawed back. He wondered why he saw no skin beneath his fingernails. He clenched those powerful hands, stood and turned away, pulling out the spare clothes he kept shielded under a rock. Her blood was gone, but forever would it stain his soul.

  With each full moon, he became less man, more animal. Each occurrence pushed him closer to a precipice. He felt caught in a nightmare of his own design. With his last strength, he hung in the balance between light and darkness, life and death. The plunge that would rob him of his last claims to manhood was inevitable. Yet, still he fought it with every ounce of his dwindling being, clawing desperately toward the light so close yet so far away.