It’s done, then.
He prayed that Skylar was in good hands. He demanded that outcome from the moon. Because the only way to get on with this night was to believe Skylar would survive, and that he would be free to hunt down the creature at the center of their spiraling universe. The monster out here was Gavin’s ground zero.
Raising his face to the moonlight, he breathed it in. He opened his mouth, tasted the light on his tongue, swallowed it down as greedily as if it were Skylar’s breath.
“I surrender.”
With the wind in his face and the light prodding him on, Gavin bolted up the path using all his strength, intending to find the demon whose third generation included the lover he could still feel, phantomlike, in his arms.
*
“Skylar, can you hear me?”
The question sounded very close and soberly demanding, but nothing was wrong with her hearing. In fact, Skylar heard everything—the clock on the mantel, the stranger’s breathing, insects outside, wind in the trees, the drip of a faucet, and louder than all that, the irregular boom of the thunder inside her chest.
She also heard something else with her brand-new, sharply acute awareness: the same mesmerizing call that had plagued her from the beginning, from her first night here. His call. Gavin’s voice…so strong and sexy and persuasively clear, it was the voice of a lover whispering her name while on the verge of physical penetration. Like the gasp of sound Gavin made as he slid into her blistering heat.
Gavin.
She opened her eyes, blinked. A woman’s face filled her field of vision: a light-skinned angular shape punctuated by high cheekbones and large golden-green eyes. Dark coppery hair with a fringe of bangs surrounded the almost too exquisitely perfect features of a woman in her early thirties.
“You’re safe now, for the time being,” this stranger said in a voice Skylar easily placed because she had listened to it on a recording earlier that day.
“It’s Jenna,” that voice said. “I came as soon as I could catch a plane.”
Jenna James. Doctor. PhD. Her father’s partner. The psychiatrist who worked with her dad at Fairview Hospital and seemed much too young in person to have been a colleague of the famous Doctor Donovan’s. This was the female cohort the Donovan siblings had been jealous of for the past few years. Their father’s confidant, and closer to him than his real family.
“Why?” Skylar struggled to ask, her voice gruff, her mouth as dry as sand. “Why are you here?”
“Your sister mentioned being worried about you, and that, in turn, worried me.”
Skylar vaguely remembered Trish mentioning a conversation with Dr. James, though that seemed so long ago.
“How… How did you find me?”
“I’ve been here once before and often spoke to your father by phone when he stayed here.”
“Then you were the only one who did.”
The faint, persistent thrumming in Skylar’s skull threatened to drive her to the medicine cabinet. She reached up to cover her ears, remembering the claws as soon as she lifted her hands. But there were no claws on her hands at the moment. The room didn’t revolve the way the night sky had.
Her dizziness had waned. She didn’t feel quite so sick now, though the shakes continued as did the chills.
“Do you understand what’s happening to you?” Jenna asked seriously, in a tone that demanded an equally serious answer.
“No.”
Gavin had used the word wolf, but that could also have been her imagination, like the claws and everything else going on. Case in point, how could she hear Gavin’s voice now if he wasn’t here? She believed he was calling her name over and over as he placed more distance between them.
How could she explain to anyone else about what she’d seen out there, or thought she’d seen? Especially this woman, who delved into peoples’ minds on a regular basis.
Skylar tried futilely to get up. Dr. James held her down with a firm hand on her shoulder, though there probably was no way Skylar could have managed, anyway. Her limbs just weren’t behaving. She felt boneless and unsteady. The knot in her stomach was the size of a plate.
Her dad’s partner sat on the low table next to the couch, eyeing her levelly. Jenna James’s questions were professional, direct, and got right to the heart of the events that had transpired over the past couple of days.
“Do you realize what your friend is? What he has become?” she asked.
“Do you?” Skylar countered, her voice slightly surer, the ache behind her eyes increasing as she remembered the way Gavin had looked in the moonlight. The Gavin that wasn’t Gavin, with added height, molded muscle, and the constant rumble of deep-seated growls he’d used to ward off danger as he carried her to safety.
Gavin was a werewolf, and her dreams weren’t just dreams. He had leaped right into her reality as if she possessed the power to make that happen. And he had made sure she was safe before rushing back outside for what? To do what? Hunt another wolf? Be what he needed to be?
What kind of danger lurked on that mountain that made Gavin show such concern for her well-being? The stalker they’d avoided last night? His fear over whatever walked under the full moon tonight had been pronounced and contagious.
While she…
No. She wouldn’t think about the claws. If she avoided those kinds of thoughts, maybe they’d go away.
Where are you, Gavin?
“Don’t,” Jenna James instructed coolly. “Don’t call him back. He needs to be away from you tonight. If you care for him, let him go.”
If she cared for him? Hell, she thought of nothing else but him. She was possessed. He’d gotten under her skin.
“There’s something out there with a dark heart,” Skylar explained, clasping her hands and then unclasping them, afraid to look down.
“Yes. I know,” Jenna said.
Skylar looked at her. “How could you possibly be aware of anything happening in this place?”
“I’m in on the secret,” Jenna replied. “A few of us are. And now, so are you.”
Jenna stood up and moved to the windows, checking to make sure all four were closed and covered. Why? Skylar wondered. To stop something from looking in…or to keep her from looking out?
Neither explanation mattered, she supposed. She felt the darkness outside as if some of it had flown in on her wake. Night coated her lungs, producing the rounds of icy chills that arrived without any sign of giving up.
Although four solid walls surrounded her, and Jenna James’s cryptic remarks about secrets and about Gavin resonated in the closed space, Skylar felt moonlight seeping through the roof.
She sat up abruptly and turned to face the door, scared, sensing that moonlight wasn’t the only thing trying to get in, and this other thing was an entity that ate up moonlight as if it were candy.
“What’s happening to me?” Skylar pinned the doctor with a direct gaze that defied the fear building up inside her. “Tell me what you know.”
Chapter 25
When her father’s partner turned from the window, Skylar put a hand to her forehead without worrying if she might see things like claws on her own hands. It was far too late for that.
Jenna James was here. The woman’s pale skin was radiant in the light from the one lamp in the room, as if it glowed from within. Most of her red-brown hair, long, shiny, streaked with gold highlights, was worn pulled back from her face so that every sharp angle on that face was prominent. The problem with Jenna, Skylar realized, was that she looked too alive to be human.
Something else. The psychiatrist’s body pulsed in the dim space as if her skin cocooned something living beneath it. This was also the way Skylar felt, with the knot in her gut continually twisting.
Nothing normal about this.
“What are you?” Skylar asked, firing off that question on the tail of the previous request before the doctor could open her mouth to answer.
Jenna’s smile seemed wan. “I’m Were, Skylar. A woman and a
wolf share this body. Somebody’s worst nightmare, I suppose, if they knew. But most people don’t.”
“I’m guessing my father knew.” Skylar’s teeth still chattered, but she couldn’t clamp them together and talk at the same time, and this was information she needed badly.
“Yes,” Jenna said. “David knew.”
“About you?”
“After a while.”
Skylar thought about the paragraphs in the notebook in the attic. “Did you two have a thing going on?”
Jenna shook her head. “Nothing like that.”
“Then why would he come here to chase wolves when you were right next door?”
“I’m not sure he came here to chase them, Skylar. I think your father might have come here to protect them.”
“Protect them?”
She really didn’t want to be here with Dr. James. She didn’t want to speak about any of this, especially to her father’s confidante. But this woman had known her father well, and she’d seen Gavin. Seen what he was, what Skylar, on some level, even now refused to believe he could be.
Werewolf.
And since this wasn’t a dream and couldn’t be her imagination, facing the details of being fully awake became a necessity.
“A Were,” she said, testing the word, finding it foreign. “Then you’re like Gavin?”
Jenna shook her head. “Your friend and I are enough alike to seem so at first glance.”
“You’ll need to explain that, but first, tell me why the blinds are closed.”
“For your safety. Tonight the moonlight is not your friend, Skylar.”
“What about you? If you go outside, will you change?”
Skylar couldn’t believe she was asking a question like that seriously.
“I can withhold the desire to shift when I want to, after years of practice.”
“Desire?” Skylar latched on to that. “You want to change shape?”
“For me, it’s natural, while ignoring and withholding a shift when the time is right isn’t.”
“But he has to change shape. Gavin has to. He didn’t seem able to control it.”
“Gavin. That’s his name?” Jenna looked to the door he’d exited out of. “Yes. Your friend is new to the trick and has to heed the moon’s call or face the threat of being driven mad by the body’s push to reshape itself.”
Oh, Gavin. It isn’t as if you could have told me. I do understand that, at least.
“Why him? Why mad?” Skylar asked. “How are you different, and what am I? Where do I fit in?”
Jenna’s voice remained calm, though her expression wasn’t truly reassuring. “Your mate was bitten by a werewolf, which made him become what he is. When the virus, passed along through saliva or a mingling of blood, enters the bloodstream, not by choice, but by an act of violence from someone who purposefully passes it on, imagine the surprise of the recipient when the first full moon comes around.”
Jenna came closer. “I was born Were. I wasn’t bitten by anyone. For me, being Were is a genetic pattern passed down from parents also born Were, just as their parents were before them.”
Skylar wanted to throw up. There seemed to be guidelines for becoming a werewolf. There were viruses and people born into families from a secret alternate bloodline.
Why didn’t the damn shivering cease? She was chilled to the bone.
She had to speak, had to know more, yet moving her lips seemed momentarily impossible. Rallying, forcing herself to get a grip, Skylar asked, “How far back can all that passing on of the pattern go?”
“As far back as anyone can count, and then further than that. Before the Flood, and the dawn of civilization.”
Needing to get to the bathroom or outside to be sick in private, Skylar moved her legs at last, finding them rubbery and useless. She wasn’t going to get away from this. Had to face what was happening.
“He didn’t lose his mind. Gavin helped me,” she said, more frightened in the relative safety of the cabin with this werewolf doctor than she had been on the mountain when she fell. This woman put people in monitored rooms if they sounded crazy, yet was it possible that Jenna didn’t hear how nuts she sounded at the moment?
“More,” Skylar said shakily. “Tell me more. How many of you are there?” The question rang with the sound of rising panic.
“More than a few,” Jenna replied. “Quite a lot, in fact. We have to stay vigilant to keep forms of the virus from diluting further as it’s passed on from rogue bite to bite. The world as a whole doesn’t know about us. They can’t know. So we police ourselves as much as we can.”
Skylar doubled over with her hands on her stomach. Her insides were roiling. She spoke without looking up. “Tell me this. What kind of werewolf would bite another person and make them a werewolf? How does that work?”
“Good guys wouldn’t bite. Not for any reason. It’s forbidden.”
Skylar hated the image that sprang to mind. If Gavin became a werewolf because of a bite, he must have come across a bad guy, and now he had to deal with the strange new direction his life had taken.
She remembered how she’d first seen him up close, in the yard, kneeling by the hose, and how she had absurdly looked for signs that he might be a creature like the one in her dreams.
The thought that there could be such things as werewolves made her wonder if it was possible she could have known what Gavin was before meeting him, and if some people possessed wolf radar. Had her father possessed it, or did knowing Dr. James make him aware of the flaws in nature?
What had he written in that journal she’d read?
They didn’t lose their minds.
Gavin had dragged her from the mountain with her safety in mind on two occasions. He did this because he maintained his wits, like Jenna said good guys did. Gavin’s human brain stayed in control while wolfish parts took over his body. And once upon a time, he’d been bitten by somebody or something. The scars on his chest could be tied to his ordeal.
“So, what kind of creature did this to him?” she muttered beneath her breath. Who turned him? Was it the stalker she thought she’d heard following them on the mountain? That thing in the trees Gavin had shielded her from?
Could her father have met that same thing?
Damn it, had her father been bitten? Is that what this was all about?
She looked up to find Jenna sitting beside her. Their eyes met. Skylar’s stomach whirled.
“Was my dad…?”
Jenna shook her head, seeming to understand her unspoken question. “No. He wasn’t one of us.”
Okay. All right. Jenna’s answer brought a little relief.
“If someone…” She drifted off, staring into Jenna’s gold-rimmed eyes before starting again. “If someone were to chase werewolves, it would have to be on a night when the moon is full. How else would anyone recognize a werewolf?”
Jenna held her gaze. “Most Weres require a full moon to shift. All of those possessing diluted blood do.”
Skylar remembered a former breakthrough on that line of thinking, and used it now. “Then Dad couldn’t have been after werewolves when he died, since there was no full moon at the time. I thought…”
Jenna encouraged her to go on in a warm, sympathetic tone. “You thought what?”
“I thought someone pushed him or hurt him on that hillside.”
Would she ever look at this place the same way after tonight? Skylar asked herself. The answer was a resounding no because she was afraid of this night, this room and the next question moving through her mind. So she backtracked, saving that question.
“And,” she said, “your conversation with my sister made you worry about me, why?”
“I’ve been worried about you for a very long time. Your father didn’t want you here. He didn’t want you or your sisters anywhere near this place.”
“He made that quite obvious,” Skylar concurred.
“There was a reason.”
“Protecting wolves? You’re going wit
h that as an excuse?”
Jenna smiled sadly.
“Gavin didn’t bite me,” Skylar said. “Yet you both think I’m facing a change.”
“You are facing a change.”
“Explain to me how that fits in with the rules werewolves have.” Skylar rushed on. “If I go out there again, you’re saying that I’ll shift?”
“Yes. Eventually. You’ll meet that fate in what we call the Blackout phase. It’s the first rewiring phase of a body’s imminent rearrangement. It’s best if you don’t do that tonight without a full understanding of what’s about to take place.”
“Why postpone the inevitable, if that’s true?”
“Because if Gavin didn’t put the wolf in you, we need to know who did, and what that might mean.”
Skylar managed to get to her feet, swayed dramatically and sat back down. Her voice was faint. “You do realize how ridiculous this sounds?”
“I do. But I believe you know the truth already.”
“I don’t know anything.” Skylar glanced longingly at the door, wishing Gavin would come through it. “Why is it called a Blackout?”
“The virus changes the body at every level, takes over, forming new neural pathways and messing with cell structure. It’s a terrible ordeal, Skylar. I won’t lie about that. It causes a loss of consciousness from which some people never awaken.”
“Did that happen to you?”
“Yes. For Weres like me, from a family of Weres, it’s only slightly easier and more like an awakening, a firing up of the process, rather than a complete restructuring.”
Skylar’s stomach tightened again, as if something inside her clenched over this knowledge. “Then he went through it.” She looked at Jenna. “Gavin went through the Blackout.”
“There is no escape clause.”
“And I’m going to go through it, though we don’t know why. What happened to me out there tonight was just the beginning.”
When Jenna nodded, Skylar sensed the woman was hiding something, not willing to tell all.
There was so much more to learn, though. So many questions were in need of answers. The sickness Skylar felt demanded she address the one question nagging at her. The one she couldn’t avoid any longer.
Seduced by the Moon Page 18
