Seduced by the Moon

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “Yep. I’m making tea and about to go through more of Dad’s things.”

  “Find anything interesting yet?”

  Hell… Now she was keeping things from her sister, the way their father had kept things from them. This made her uneasy, and it was unfair. Yet she felt the secrecy was necessary if she hoped to keep Trish off her back for a while longer.

  “Just the gun I’ve already mentioned. Dad really didn’t have many personal items stockpiled. Mostly clothes, trinkets, a few small trunks, kitchen items, several paintings by local artists and some really strong whiskey.”

  Trish laughed. “I take it you tried this whiskey.”

  “I did and couldn’t choke it down. Guess I’m not Irish enough for that degree of sensory attack.”

  “That may turn out to be a good thing, Skye. Sure you don’t need help or want company? I’ve finished with my case and wouldn’t mind a break.”

  “This isn’t a task for two, Trish. But I do have a question. Have you ever been here, to this cabin?”

  “Nope. I’m pretty sure none of us knew exactly where it was located until Dad’s partner at the hospital told us the address. Dad seemed to confide in Dr. James quite a bit. Too bad he didn’t do the same with us.”

  Trish took a drink of something, swallowed and spoke again. “Well, that’s water under the bridge, isn’t it? I spoke to Dad’s partner last night and voiced my concern about you being MIA. She asked if I’d like her to fly out to meet with you and help with Dad’s things, and she urged me to say hello to you when you eventually turned up. She’d like to see Dad’s cabin and offered to take it off our hands if we sell.”

  “Great. But really, Trish, this shouldn’t take me much longer. I might be home next week, and I’ll say hello to Dr. James then. Believe it or not, I’m actually starting to enjoy the scenery and fresh air.”

  “Truly? How odd for a city slicker,” Trish mocked. “By the way, is there anything you’d like me to do here? Take care of your mail? Return some of those gifts before you get back, so you don’t have to?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take care of all that later.”

  “Skye, you sound…”

  “What?”

  “Better. You sound better. So okay. I’m just offering to be available.”

  “And I adore you for that. I really do. Later, then?”

  “Later. And please don’t scare me again,” Trish said before disconnecting.

  Setting the phone down, tired of withholding the emotion rolling through her, Skylar headed for the attic, where she’d search those trunks for her father’s missing paperwork— paperwork she sincerely hoped wouldn’t be there. Especially papers having to do with wolves and keeping living things locked up in cages—sort of like what went on in her father’s mental asylum at Fairview, with its comfortably padded cells.

  Ah, well, Skylar thought, climbing the narrow stairs to the attic. This is real. No dream. So what were you doing here, Dad?

  *

  Gavin drove faster than he should have, unwilling to slow down, pressed by the speed of his thoughts. Skylar was behaving strangely. She said she’d heard him call to her at night. What did she mean by that?

  If she heard sounds made by the demon in the hills, it meant that the beast had been close to this area for some time, and that he’d been right in guessing it was close.

  This whole scene was getting stranger by the minute. Skylar’s talk of dreams made no sense, and staying with her hadn’t been an option. After seeing that awful room at Tom’s and being surrounded by silver this close to the full moon, his nerves were jumpy. Now, he added worry to the mix—worry that Skylar might put her life at risk by going after the wolf she thought her father might have been chasing. Worry that she might find Gavin Harris instead, in his other, less appealing incarnation.

  He didn’t see how he could go on with his search when he also had to carefully watch Skylar and keep her safe. Skylar Donovan was causing him to rearrange his agenda. She alone had seen his scars, his battle wounds, evidence of his tryst with death. And yet she hadn’t found them ugly. Her touch had been unexpectedly tender.

  There should have been no scars at all. If the white lines on his chest hadn’t disappeared after two years, they likely never would.

  He had been branded with the mark of the werewolf. And he still felt the heat of Skylar’s touch. Her warmth helped to lessen the old aches. If he closed his eyes, he could almost feel her with him now.

  Emotions swirled inside him, casting for a place to land when he remembered how badly Skylar had needed him the previous night without being coy or afraid to show it. With her help, he had prevailed over his fear of the wolf inside him. In loving her, he had successfully compartmentalized his wolfishness.

  He had loved Skylar Donovan to within an inch of her life. After their athletic give-and-take, was it any wonder he craved her now, or what he might give for a rematch?

  He glanced up at the sky. Only hours remained before sundown, and his hunger for Skylar left him torn. If he lost this opportunity to find the big bad wolf and return the favor of a fight, everyone in these mountains would be in danger for another month or more. Only when a full moon rode the sky could he find the added strength he gained by merging with his wolf. By uniting with his wolf, he’d be able to continue tracking the beast.

  And if he lost Skylar in the meantime…

  If she were to be harmed…

  The human half of him would wither and die.

  He stopped the car so abruptly the brakes squealed. Above the sound, the pounding of his heart was audible.

  Gavin weighed his options as if he actually had some. Skylar was important to him, but ridding the world of a fanged demon with the ability to create more like it had to take precedence.

  Whichever way he looked at this, the woman he had first seen half-naked on her porch was going to be a pain in his backside and get in the way, either intruding physically or in his thoughts.

  His hands were, at that very moment, itching to turn the wheel and head back to her. The impulse was nearly as strong as his imminent transformation.

  The only way he could see to break the spell he was under would be to present himself to Skylar after dark, coated in fur, and send her running home to Florida. And if he did so, how many people would come after him then, knowing who and what he had become?

  Having found the room behind Tom’s house, the sheriffs would be on the lookout for anything off base and out of the ordinary.

  He was stuck.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror, he thought he could almost see that furred-up hell demon’s bloody mouth smiling.

  *

  There were four trunks in the attic. Since she had already been through the first one, which had produced the gun, Skylar moved on to trunk number two, pressed tight against the back wall.

  Standing up in this cramped space wasn’t doable, so she crouched on her knees. Light came in through one small window near the eaves, and there was a bulb on a wire overhead.

  This trunk by the wall, like all the other trunks, was locked. But the locks weren’t going to stop her. She’d opened the first one by applying leverage with a metal garden stake.

  “Lock-picking is now officially added to the résumé,” she muttered as she stuck the metal stake between the two posts of the small padlock and twisted with all her might.

  This one didn’t break. Undeterred, she backtracked downstairs, determined to see this task through as quickly as possible. She picked up the gun, already familiar with its dark, cold weight.

  In the attic, she carefully aimed at the lock and squeezed the trigger, unconcerned about the potential damage to the trunk.

  The blast echoed loudly in the small space, kicking her back a step. The lock was shattered by a specialized silver bullet that might have cost a hefty sum and was a big reminder of the need to see what other kind of secrets this trunk held.

  It took both of her hands to open the lid. The trunk was fi
lled to the brim with papers and the kind of notebooks her father often scribbled in.

  “Bingo.”

  Psychiatrists were predisposed to write down everything, in detail, and she’d been counting on this, though she found touching the notebooks difficult. She worried as much about what the notebooks might hold as what they might not.

  “Please,” she said aloud over the ringing in both ears. “Don’t let any of this prove his guilt.”

  Minutes passed before she gathered enough courage to begin. Reaching for the notebook on top, she opened it to the first page.

  Chapter 16

  Gavin found cell phone service on the high point in the road, and pulled over. He cut the engine, thinking it safer to keep his research on Skylar’s father to himself for the moment, rather than using the computers at any of the ranger substations strung across the area.

  He planned to find out everything he could on Dr. Donovan, and why the man’s daughter had confirmed Gavin’s fears that her late father’s activities could have had something to do with werewolves.

  Unfortunately, there were a lot of Donovans with the word doctor in front of their names when he searched, and he didn’t know Skylar’s dad’s first name. He focused on their home state and hospital facilities housing mental wards.

  There were too damn many of those, too. He’d have to narrow the search field.

  He typed Skylar Donovan and Florida into the browser, sure her name wasn’t a common one, and sat back to study the screen when the information came up. He’d never asked Skylar anything about herself, other than her relationship to her father and that blasted cabin, and he regretted that now.

  But—

  “Holy hell,” he whispered as he began to read what filled the screen.

  *

  What struck Skylar about the first few notebooks was the rather disturbing fact that her father had chronicled the lives of several people in the area, here in Colorado, as if they’d been his patients.

  The details her father had put on paper dug deep into other peoples’ lives. It was possible he acted as doctor here, too, and helped the locals with their problems. Maybe that was a good thing and the data he collected helped him to recall the sessions.

  She didn’t recognize any of the names. The symptoms seemed to cover a wide range. Where were these people? Who were they? She’d seen only a few cabins and homes scattered here and there along the route to town, and Gavin told her most of those people had been gone for a while. She skimmed pages as well for the word wolf without finding it. She read faster and faster, her stomach feeling queasy, as if some part of her knew what had to be here and what was coming.

  Dad…she wanted to shout.

  Could a man who liked to plant flowers possess the ability to chain any living thing to the walls in a secret room? Could the same man who kissed his kids good-night have hidden a dark, sadistic streak?

  Final question, Skylar promised herself.

  If she was the most like her father out of all of his daughters and was currently in school studying to be a psychiatrist, like him, wasn’t she the perfect candidate to understand her father’s potential dark side that might have included a belief in werewolves?

  She reached for another notebook, opened it and stared at a line scribbled in red ink:

  They don’t lose their minds. Not completely.

  Skylar rocked back on her knees, a strange sense of premonition streaking through her. She forced herself to read on.

  I don’t know if there might be more than one of them. But the world cannot be trusted to know of their existence. No one else should be deceived, as I was, when the outcome of that deception remains unclear.

  She is my responsibility.

  I do what I can, but she is angry, and I’m tired.

  The goal is safety…at all costs.

  Skylar turned the page, found only one other paragraph.

  Imprinting remains and the connections seem to change the body at a cellular level. It’s as if one soul readjusts its perceptions to include another as part of itself, and each soul leaves a mark on the other. Is this to last forever?

  Frantically, Skylar flipped to another page. Was her father writing about the clutches of madness?

  Possibly criminals and people already on a downward slide could take advantage of the added strength and inflict real harm on others. Those are the ones the world has to watch for.

  There was nothing else. No explanation for those cryptic statements. Skylar tore through several more notebooks and the contents of an unlocked trunk with no luck. There was nothing like the first few paragraphs, which read like a personal confession but didn’t actually clarify anything.

  More of them?

  The world can’t know of their existence?

  Imprinting?

  What the hell did any of that mean, and how had her father been deceived?

  Was he writing about an obsession with a patient, or his obsession with…a wolf?

  It was too much. And too little. Skylar put her head in her hands and stared at the floor, knowing that her knees wouldn’t support her for much longer and that she needed rest almost as much as she needed answers.

  Judging by the light from outside filtering into the attic, she could tell that not too many hours had gone by. Returning downstairs meant imagining Gavin with his shirt open, his bareness vivid enough in her memory to be permanently etched there.

  She went down the ladder, feeling confused, trying to gather her strength. She looked at the front door, wondering if people could imprint, and bond forever.

  Gavin Harris wanted her and wished to keep her safe, but they’d glossed over the dream issue and how he’d managed to step out of those dreams in order to knock at her door.

  Chance? Fate? Did precognition actually work through dreams and random passages in notebooks? She’d been afraid to push for an explanation from Gavin, and her father, who would have known about dreams, was no longer able to help.

  Placing the gun back on the table, Skylar went to the window to take in the view, picturing Gavin out there after dark, chasing a wolf bent on attacking humans. If she whispered his name, would Gavin hear her and realize that she needed to find out about the wolf as much as he did? Maybe more?

  Would that wolf’s body show evidence of having been trapped in a cage? Tortured? Were the articles in that building used for some other purpose?

  Had her father been guarding something?

  She leaned heavily against the wall, thinking.

  She could go to the motel, as Gavin suggested, and get far enough from the cabin to allow herself some peace of mind without thoughts of moons or cages. Gavin would know where to find her. Possibly he would come to her later and they…

  They could…

  “Obsessed,” she said aloud to put an end to the thought of what they’d do together. “Obsessed by a dream and a ranger.”

  In reality, Gavin was doing his job. The forensic people working on that room behind Tom’s house would exonerate her father. Surely other people collected silver bullets for a reason that had nothing to do with killing.

  Skylar moved back to the table and picked up her phone. She skimmed through her contacts for her father’s partner. Dr. Jenna James. She moved a finger toward the button to place the call but didn’t touch it. What would she say to her dad’s long-time acquaintance, the person he’d worked beside on a daily basis and spent more time with than he spent with his family?

  What kind of message would her call for help send to another psychiatrist?

  Pressing the phone to her cheek, Skylar could see through the window that the yard seemed completely normal. Flowers still bloomed in raised beds. Walkways were lined with mulch. Her father had taken the time to garden and keep up this cabin.

  Actually, she thought now, maybe I do need help. Self-diagnosis wasn’t an art form. She’d make that call to Dr. James, just not quite yet.

  In the meantime, she’d keep the tarnish from her father’s legacy by pu
tting the word werewolf to rest. She’d hope for Gavin to find the wolf he sought and take care of it tonight, once and for all. She would call for a ride and go back to town in search of the sheriff’s office, to see what else they might have found at Tom’s place.

  She took a deep breath.

  Hoisting the phone, and after glancing again at the gun her father had more than likely kept around just for protection and nothing weirder than that, Skylar placed the dreaded call to Florida—to Fairview Hospital, her dad’s former place of business—praying that Dr. Jenna James wouldn’t pick up on her personal line.

  *

  “You booked him?” Gavin asked at the station.

  “We’ve brought Tom in for an interview,” Jim Delaney, the sheriff on duty, replied with bureaucratic discretion.

  “Can I speak with him, Jim?”

  “Professionally, or on a personal matter?”

  “Personal.”

  “He’s in room two.”

  “Is he a suspect for placing any of that stuff in the building behind his house?”

  “It is his house, Harris.”

  Gavin held up both hands. “We’ve all known him for years.”

  “Yep. He’s a fixture around here. So we’ll let him go after one more round.”

  “Okay,” Gavin said, relieved. “I just need a couple minutes.”

  “Be my guest. Professional courtesy, right?”

  “I appreciate the leeway here, Jim.”

  Gavin found room two and nodded to the officer sitting in a chair outside the door. “Permission granted,” he said. The officer nodded.

  Tom sat behind a table, looking tired. Gavin sat opposite him. “Hey, Tom. Anything I can get you?”

  “A free pass out of here would be nice,” Tom replied.

  “I’m sure you’ll be out of here soon. They need to cross all the t’s before opening the door.”

  Tom sat back, his face a mass of weary lines. “What kind of a person would create a place like that?”

  “I’m not here to ask you about it. You’re probably tired of addressing that issue, so you can relax. I’d like to talk about something else.”