Gavin didn’t dare rub his forehead, or lift a hand. The claws pushing against his fingers stung like a son of a bitch. Despite the cover of the porch, the moon still ruled him, and any respite was temporary.
The only other time he had repeatedly shifted back and forth from one shape to another on the same night was right after the attack that had left him hurting.
It was the wolf’s turn, and they both knew it.
“It sounds crazy,” Skylar said, coming no closer to him than the base of the steps. “And I can’t explain it to you or even to myself in a way that makes sense. I have to be here, not in town. I have to help you find whatever is out there.”
She waved a hand at the hillside. “It’s as though my entire existence depends on this.”
“Depends on what, exactly?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a feeling. A gut feeling that something isn’t right, and that I can find out what that is if I try.”
“And you think you’ll find an answer on the mountain tonight?”
“Yes.”
Gavin let a beat of silence pass while he studied her.
“You’ll do no such thing,” he admonished gruffly, pushing off the wall and fisting his aching hands. His chest was throbbing. Facial muscles tingled wickedly as if they, too, might betray him, shift out of order if necessary, if he didn’t get with the program and stay there.
“Help me do this,” Skylar said. “Let me go with you.”
“I can’t allow that.”
“Why not?”
“I’m responsible for what could happen to you.”
“It’s a wolf, Gavin, and I have a flashlight and a gun if you think those things would allow us to find the sucker.”
Gavin’s throat seized, warning him that he had precious little time to debate this with Skylar and not that many words left. The fact remained that he couldn’t lead her, escort her or follow Skylar up the blasted hill. He couldn’t take two steps off this porch with her watching.
“Please listen,” he began. He had nowhere to go now except to a very bad place. If Skylar started for that path, he’d have no choice but to reveal himself to her. He was out of options and would protect her with his life, no matter what shape he was in. Hell, she might faint if she saw him, and that would be that.
No, he amended right after the thought. Skylar wouldn’t faint. She had probably never given in to a weakness like that. Not you, my fierce lover.
“I can’t take you up there, Skylar.” He willed her to accept what he was saying and back down, just this once.
“Then you won’t go, either?” she countered.
“It’s my search, my fight. Not yours.”
Zeroing in on something in his tone, she took a step forward.
“I’ve read about your family,” he said, hoping to deter her from approaching by using the personal information he’d discovered earlier that day. Hoping she would storm off again and let him be.
“I know you’ve had your share of issues, Skylar, and that your mother wasn’t the only Donovan to spend time at Fairview.”
He watched her hands and arms go rigid, and he hated hurting her. Skylar’s pretty face was set and surrounded by clouds of shiny golden wheat-colored hair that he wanted to run through his fingers. Her lips were bloodless.
“I know you were there also,” he continued, coughing to get that out, hanging on to his human shape with the sheerest thread of willpower. Between the moonlight and the woman across from him, his emotions were in upheaval. “And I know you’re studying to be a psychiatrist like your father.”
“After spending time in the loony-bin to see how the other half live, you mean?” she said.
“How long was it, Skylar? How long were you there, in that Fairview place?” He eased back on the gruffness with that question, and it cost him. Spasms cramped up his throat.
“Didn’t your internet search divulge that information?” she challenged.
“I didn’t pursue an answer. I thought…”
“One week.” Her face was expressionless. “I was there for a week when I was six years old because I wanted to see my mother and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
So, your stubbornness isn’t anything new, he thought.
“What did you do?” Gavin took an involuntary step toward her, absorbing the pain of his burning thighs and shins that came with his new proximity to the open sky.
“I broke in,” she said in an emotionless tone. “Sneaked in, actually, right under their noses, when visiting my dad. Then I tried to let her out.”
His brow furrowed as he pictured that. “You tried to get your mother out of the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“When you were only six?”
She didn’t bother to answer that question, realizing it was a rhetorical outburst on his part.
“Wouldn’t that be impossible?” he asked, battling to speak through the tightness in his throat. “And why would you be able to stay there at all? Why would they allow you to stay?”
“They couldn’t stop me, Gavin. They couldn’t get me out, once I’d gotten in. She kept me. Somehow my mother sensed I was near and she fought at the right time to get out of her room. When she found me, she kept me with her, threatening to hurt me if anyone came close with the intention of taking me away.”
“Are you saying that no one managed to help you get away from her?”
“After the first round of coaxing and threats and drugged darts, they didn’t even try. By then, I suppose she’d built up a tolerance to the drugs. Not wanting to see harm come to me if they pushed too hard, the staff waited out the standoff.”
Gavin ran a hand through his hair, fighting off shivers severe enough to visibly move muscle. The moon called but he couldn’t respond. Not yet.
“No one would leave a little girl in a situation like that,” he said. “They could have shot her with something. Helped you.”
She smiled wanly. “I thought of that long afterward. But I believe it became a test. She behaved with me there, as long as they left us alone. I was a calming factor that made her more or less amenable to her daily regimen, such as it was.”
“How did you escape?” Gavin’s forward momentum took him to the top of the steps.
“She finally let me go.”
“And then what?”
“She died.”
“Did they…?”
“I don’t know if they accidentally had a hand in that.”
Gavin closed his eyes, unwilling to imagine the story that Skylar had just told. Or that her father had allowed it.
“I’m so sorry.” He shook his head.
“I’m not sorry. It was my goal, and I achieved it. My sisters never saw her there, never knew her. They couldn’t even conjure up her face.”
“And you can?”
“Yes. I can. I remember her eyes.”
His voice no longer sounded anything like him, yet Gavin went on talking. “What about your father and the part he played in this unusual scenario?”
Though the rigidity of Skylar’s lean frame hadn’t relaxed, she answered him. “I don’t remember much about his actions, and I can hardly picture him there. My mother didn’t want him near us. He and I never spoke about it afterward, and went on as though my time at Fairview never happened. But I do realize that it had to have been his decision to allow me to stay as long as I did. That for my own safety and hers, he temporarily caved to my mother’s threats.”
“You don’t hold that against him?” Gavin couldn’t help but ask.
“Not for one day.”
This woman knew nothing of revenge or retribution, then, and Gavin envied her that innocence. She was here to pack her father’s things and to find out why he died, without any thought to that other time in her life.
“That was personal information, and not in the news,” she said. “How did you access it?”
“I’m tied in to a few special archives.”
She fell quiet.
He had started to sweat, the result of his ongoing fight with the moon.
“Skylar, what was wrong with your mother?”
The slow, sad smile that lifted her pale lips as she answered him gave nothing of her feelings away.
“I once heard my father describe her condition as a form of lunacy, but of course that didn’t really explain anything. Right after she released me, Dad said my mother’s sick mind made her believe she was a…” She swallowed and finished the statement. “A wolf.”
The word, and the way she said it, made Gavin bow his head in disgust. Then he wondered if he might be imagining this conversation because out of all the women in the world he could have been attracted to, it turned out to be the daughter of a woman who thought she was a damn werewolf.
Lunacy. Christ! That was an old term applied to sick people who, it was believed, were strangely affected by the moon and in very specific ways. He had looked that term up, as well as all the others he could find relating to the effects of the moon on human beings.
“That’s why you thought your father might be chasing wolves,” he proposed, looking closely at Skylar. “To conduct more experiments?”
“If that was his plan, he never mentioned it to me or to any of my sisters. The sad fact is that none of us have been close to him for some time. He distanced himself from his family years ago, preferring to spend time at the hospital and here, alone.”
“What about that partner you mentioned? The one who identified him after the accident?” he pressed. “Was that person at Fairview when you were?”
She shook her head.
His hands were rising as if he’d reach for her despite his own pressing problem. Screw the wolf. To hell with the moon. He hurt for Skylar. He ached for what had happened to her and for what she’d been through. Yet she seemed just as courageous now as she must have been as that six-year-old kid.
He couldn’t touch her, didn’t dare get closer to her. Skylar didn’t need to experience another inexplicable example of madness from someone close.
“It’s not just a wolf out there,” he said before thinking about the effect of his statement, or how it might sound to the woman he craved more than the moonlight.
She continued to stare back at him.
Tired of having her call ignored, the moon sent a beam of brilliant light that reached the tips of his boots. His toes tingled, and his shoulders rolled on their own, without any conscious thought on his part to ease the icy needles stabbing him between his shoulder blades.
Have to go. He had to get off this porch and away from Skylar. He was no good for her. She had escaped from that past only to hook up with another goddamn lunatic. How was that for irony?
Gathering himself, Gavin jumped forward, knocking Skylar toward the railing, bending over her and hearing her breath whoosh out. With his face inches from hers and the rest of him already starting to change, he whispered, “Stay here. I’m begging you.”
In a single fluid bound, he turned and bolted for the cover of the trees.
Chapter 20
Skylar pushed off the railing and stood up, convincing herself that it didn’t matter if Gavin knew about her childhood and the things she’d never told anyone about her mother.
If a lover with the potential for madness in her genes didn’t turn him on, well, she’d get over it, and get over him.
She would have thought more of Gavin Harris than that, though…and also that after confessing to him that she never took no for an answer, he’d believe that she would stay away from that hillside tonight.
There was a mystery to be unraveled in these hills, its allure strong enough for her to discount the danger. Getting out there, though, was hard. She felt ill. Her body seemed heavy. Her stomach growled again, protesting the lack of food.
Groping for the wall, she stood up straighter. Still winded from the surprise of Gavin’s closeness, she managed to haul herself up the first step, and then she turned to look at the path leading into the trees.
Gavin must have gone that way.
Only an idiot wouldn’t get that he didn’t want her to follow.
Stay here. I’m begging you, he’d said.
Yet it seemed to her that he was too adamant about keeping her away from that path, and that he might be hiding something, rather than just wanting to keep her safe.
What didn’t he want her to see?
Steadied by a couple deep breaths, Skylar climbed the rest of the steps to the front door and looked inside. The gun was on the table where she’d left it. Going in, she picked it up and retraced her steps to the porch.
“Am I certifiable to believe that if I find that wolf, I’ll know what Dad was after and what went down?”
Who will answer that question if I can’t?
Steeling herself, and with the gun in her hand, Skylar jogged toward the path, hampered by what felt like a two-ton weight on her shoulders and a slight drag in her suddenly aching left leg.
*
Gavin let his anger rip through a series of growls as his second transformation of the night happened in record time. The shift completed as he hurled himself up the steep, tree-clad slope.
Only a slight hesitation at having to leave Skylar behind marred his stride.
Small nocturnal animals darted out of his way, recognizing the threat. Night birds protested from the tree tops. Somewhere to his right a pair of owls hooted. All this activity showed that the beast he sought wasn’t yet in this area, though it wouldn’t have gone far. This was its territory, just as it was Gavin’s. They both seemed to return sooner or later to the familiarity of home ground.
He reached the granite outcrop without becoming short of breath, and he scrambled to the top of the old stone pile. From there he looked out over the trees below, thinking he saw lights winking near the base of the mountain.
He could not afford to concentrate on those lights.
On top of his granite perch, he roared, waited, dropped to a crouch. No responding roar came.
The monster had not found its way to Skylar’s cabin, as he’d feared, though Skylar wasn’t safe from its reach.
Skylar.
His heart thudded in response to thinking her name.
Look what obstacles you have risen above to become the woman you are today. But I can’t help you find what you seek. Look at me. You crave the love of a dark-haired man, not what I have become.
A sudden sound brought him to attention. It wasn’t close, but the birds had stopped chirping.
He leaped from the rock, landed in a crouch with a hand in the dirt and his head lifted.
About time you showed up, beast, he thought, rising slowly.
*
Skylar stumbled again, not sure what was wrong with her legs. This time she went down, falling to her knees, tripped up by a rock or something else unseen. Her hands and knees stung when they hit the hard ground.
She stayed there a moment, cursing her clumsiness and looking around. The path beside her was lit from above by a potent shaft of moonlight resembling a searchlight. The ground was visible in front of her for five or six feet, but as she breathed in the smell of her surroundings, that ground began to undulate in waves similar to a desert mirage.
Before she could get up, a wave of vertigo hit her. The trees and everything else nearby began to spin as if caught in a cyclone, though not one single leaf fell. Uttering an oath, Skylar didn’t make it to her feet.
Hers weren’t the only sounds, she realized, taking those night noises as a sign that no evil predators roamed nearby waiting to chew off one of her limbs. There was no other choice but to wait the dizziness out.
The gun was no longer in her hand. She must have dropped it when she fell, and the weapon was difficult to see in the dark. Also, her left foot was bare. She’d lost a shoe, and wouldn’t get very far without it.
Don’t panic. This will pass.
Problem was, the dizziness didn’t fade. The vertigo stubbornly messed with her equilibrium, and made her
stomach tighten.
“Damn.”
She muttered another stream of choice four-letter oaths that went from bad to worse as a sudden piercing pain between her shoulder blades nearly stretched her flat out in the dirt. Closing her eyes made the world turn faster and tied her stomach into knots. Her forehead dampened from the strain of maintaining her composure as more pain seared behind her eyes.
Her heart beat fast from the shock of the fall and her inability to get up. The thump of her pulse filled her head and her chest, sounding like the drum section in a large brass band.
Soon other body parts caught the beat, drumming, hammering loudly. Her guts heaved up in protest. Her muscles quivered.
Uncontrolled body twitches turned into quakes. Quakes became shudders strong enough to tip her sideways. Having nothing to hang on to, she dug her fingers into the dirt.
She wasn’t sure if any illness could strike this fast and this hard without any kind of warning. But the ridiculous dizziness seemed as though it was going to hang on and overtake her here, alone, on the mountain. Her body was betraying her big-time, and just when she needed to get on with her search.
Though impossible to fathom, the pain from her shoulders spread to her back and arms. Nerve fibers caught fire. She couldn’t lift her head.
Her hands felt oddly tight and strangely hot. She pulled them from the ground and shook her head in denial. She was hallucinating. Her fingernails weren’t really growing and sharpening into points.
Those aren’t my hands.
Those hands had claws.
She had to shut her eyes as the fire of fever flashed through her and her stomach again turned over.
What’s happening?
She heard a voice, a deep male voice, speaking from somewhere close by as if addressing her silent question.
“Give in,” he instructed, his voice a lifeline in a turbulent sea of pain. “Stay calm. As calm as possible. Fighting increases the pain and slows down the process.”
Process? What process?
Heaven help me!
“Skylar. Trust me,” the familiar velvety voice continued. “And may the devil take me now if I’ve done this to you.”
Seduced by the Moon Page 15
