Thunder Moon

by Lori Handeland

  “A reflection?”

  “Off a UFO?”

  “Okay.” Stranger things had happened—right here in Lake Bluff.

  Cal laughed at my easy agreement. “Anyone else live in the vicinity that we could talk to? Maybe they saw something.”

  “My great-grandmother had a friend who lived—” I waved in a vague northerly direction. “Although I’m not sure how much she can see or hear anymore.”

  I hadn’t been to visit Quatie in a long time. My great-grandmother had asked me to check on her whenever I was in the area, but I’d had a busy, busy year, considering the werewolves, and I’d forgotten. I needed to remedy that ASAP.

  “Probably not worth going over there,” Cal said.

  “No,” I agreed, making a mental note to stop by another day.

  We got into our cars and reached the highway without getting stuck. Then Cal went one way and I went the other.

  I drove straight for the mayor’s house. Claire Kennedy was not only in charge of this town, but werewolves had nearly killed her, and her husband, Malachi Cartwright, knew more about them than anyone.

  Myself, I’d been skeptical about the supernatural. Even though my great-grandmother had been a medicine woman of incredible power and she’d believed in magic, I’d been tugged in two directions. I’d wanted to be like her; I’d wanted to believe. But I’d also wanted to please my father—hadn’t learned until much later that such a thing was impossible—and he’d been a cop, filled with skepticism, requiring facts. I’d been confused, torn—until last summer when I’d had no choice but to accept the unacceptable.

  I turned the squad car toward Claire’s place, uncaring that it was nearly midnight and she had a new baby. Claire would want to hear about this.

  Before my tires completed twenty revolutions, headlights wavered on the other side of a rise. I was just reaching for the siren when a car came over the hill, took the curve too fast, and skidded across the yellow line. Out of control, it headed straight for me.

  I yanked the wheel to the right, hoping to avoid both a head-on collision and being hit in the driver’s side door. The oncoming car glanced off my bumper, but the combination of speed and slick pavement sent me spinning. I was unable to gain control of the squad before I slammed into the nearest tree. My air bag imploded, smacking me in the face so hard my head snapped back; then everything went black.

  I awoke to the sound of the rain and the distant beat of something that could have been a drum. Maybe thunder.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  I frowned and then groaned as pain exploded across my face and chest. Slowly I opened my eyes. The squad was crumpled against the trunk of a towering oak, my face squished into the air bag. I tasted blood.

  The car wasn’t running. The radio was smashed. I felt for my cell phone, peered blearily at the display, which read: No service.

  I was dizzy, nauseated. A quick glance into the rearview mirror didn’t reveal much, although from the dark splotches on my shadowy face, I just might have broken my nose.

  I released the seat belt and fought my way from the car. Then I stood alone on a deserted, rain-drenched road. The prick who’d hit me had taken off. He was going to be toast when I got hold of him.

  The rain had already drenched me to the skin. I’d removed my slicker when I’d gotten in the car. My head had been too fuzzy to remember to put it back on before I’d climbed out.

  The trees spun. I wanted to sit. Instead, I leaned against the rear bumper and grasped for a coherent thought.

  I was stuck in the mountains with no way to contact anyone. I could walk back to Lake Bluff; I’d probably have to. Just not right now.

  Branches rustled. I blinked the rain from my lashes. Everything was still blurry. I could see my nose swelling up. I was going to have two black eyes. Wouldn’t be the first time. I did have four older brothers.

  Not that they’d beat on me—much—but I’d always tried to keep up with them, and with the lack of supervision that came from a father obsessed with his job and a mother who’d taken off when I was three, I’d often ended up bruised and bloody.

  I’d also ended up tough, able to take care of myself and compartmentalize pain, which were exactly the skills I needed right now.

  “Thanks George, Gerry, Greg, and Gene,” I muttered.

  I’d often wondered if my mother had chosen names that began with G for sentimental reasons or because she hadn’t cared enough to be original. Unless she showed up one day, and I wasn’t holding my breath, I’d never know. My brothers had refused to speak of her, as had my father.

  Had her desertion screwed me up? Sure. Whenever I cared about someone, I knew it was only a matter of time until they left. So far, no one had disappointed me.

  I moved closer to the edge of the trees. Even though I was dizzy, my head ached, and I wasn’t sure just how “with it” I was, those trees were bugging me. They weren’t swaying with the wind, as I’d first thought, but shaking as if something was coming.

  I drew my gun. Would I even be able to hit anything in my condition? Would a lead bullet do me any good tonight? Why hadn’t I given in to my own unease and started loading all my weapons with the specially made silver bullets I’d ordered last summer? I was the boss here. No one would say anything.

  To my face.

  I spread my feet, clasped the weapon with two hands, trying to steady it. Whatever was coming was big.

  I heard again that weird rumble—not thunder, not drums, maybe the wind, I wasn’t sure. Then a shadowy figure appeared between the pines. Too tall to be a wolf, too thin to be a bear—my mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders or I’d have recognized a man even before he popped out of the forest and stopped dead, staring at my gun.

  “Usually takes people a day or two before they want to shoot me,” he said.

  His accent was odd—not Southern, not Northern, but something in between. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but he was several inches taller than me, with wide shoulders tapering to a lanky build. His hair was long, dark, and as soaked as mine.

  I tightened my fingers on the grip as the world wavered. “What... what are you—?”

  I’d meant to ask what he was doing out in the rain, but suddenly everything shimmered, whirled, and my entire body jarred as my knees hit the pavement.

  “Hey,” the guy said, hurrying forward. “You’re hurt.”

  “What was your first clue?” I asked, and then I passed out again.

  I wasn’t unconscious long, or at least I didn’t think so. The storm still raged; the stranger rested on his heels next to me. His fingers flitted over my face, my neck, then pressed just below my ear.

  I slapped him. “Watch it.”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  He hesitated, as if he wasn’t quite sure I was kidding, or maybe he just didn’t find me funny. So few people did.

  I still couldn’t see his face. The moon remained hidden by the clouds, and we were hell and gone from any streetlights. I lay on grass instead of pavement. The guy had had the good sense to drag me out of the road. If he’d wanted me dead, he could have left me there.

  And why would he want me dead? As he’d said, it usually took people a few days to wish for that.

  His hand fell away from my neck, and chilled from the deluge, I missed its warmth. Rain dripped from his head onto my own.

  “You’ll live,” he said.

  “Goody.”

  He sat back on his heels. “What happened?”

  “Idiot driving too fast. Came over the hill, skidded into me; then I hit that tree and kabam—air-bag face.”

  He laughed, or maybe he coughed, I wasn’t sure which. “I don’t think you broke your nose, though you should probably have X-rays just to be sure.”

  “Why? Can anything be done about a broken nose?”

  “Depends how broken it is. You probably don’t want a permanent bump or a crook in the middle.”

  I
could care less how I looked. I’d been told a hundred and one times I was beautiful and exotic. What I wanted to be was average, normal, loved, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  “Since you lost consciousness for a minute,” he continued, “you’re probably concussed.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Because?”

  “I’ve got brothers.”

  “Ah, then you know the drill.”

  I did, if I could only remember, which, come to think of it, was a symptom of a concussion.

  He must have seen my confusion, because he kept talking. “If you start to throw up, get to a doctor. Have someone wake you once in the night.”

  I snorted, which made my head and nose scream. The only someone at my place was me. Not that I’d be getting any sleep tonight anyway.

  “Ice for your face,” he finished.

  The wind picked up and slapped a hank of his hair across his eyes. He lifted a hand and shoved it back. A stray shaft of moonlight sparked off his ring. I couldn’t tell if the circlet was silver or gold.

  He turned his head as if he’d heard something and a single, thin braid swung free, tangled with a feather of some kind. In the slight gray light his profile revealed a sharp blade of a nose and a slash of cheekbones any model would kill for.

  This guy was as Indian as I was.

  Had he walked out of the past? Was he a ghost? An immortal? How hard had I hit my head?

  “Let me help you stand,” he said.

  I wanted to lie there a while longer, but a flash of red and blue lit the sky, and beneath me the ground vibrated with the roll of tires approaching from the direction he’d been staring. How had he sensed the car before I had?

  I managed to gain my feet. My rescuer let me go, and I was pleased when I didn’t fall down.

  The squad came over the hill. I lifted an arm, but Cal was already pulling over in front of my mangled vehicle.

  He jumped out, ran over. “You okay, Grace?”

  “So he says.” I waved my hand toward the stranger.

  Cal’s face creased. “So who says?”

  I turned to ask the man’s name, but no one was there.

  Chapter 3

  “You’re starting to worry me,” Cal said.

  “I’m starting to worry myself.”

  I strode to the edge of the trees. Too much grass to distinguish any footprints. I found small areas of indentation, but with the rain they could have been from anything.

  First the disappearing wolf and then the disappearing man. Were they connected?

  “Yeah.”

  “Grace?”

  Talking to myself again. People who lived alone often did. I should probably stop, but I doubted I could.

  “Never mind,” I said. “How’d you find me?”

  “Nine-one-one call from a cell. Probably the guy who hit you.”

  “Jerk,” I muttered, although I was grateful someone had called. “I guess you’ll have to take me home.”

  “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “There’s blood all over you!”

  “Which is why I want to change my uniform before I go back out.”

  “You’re not going back out. Not tonight.”

  “You seem to be under the impression that you’re the boss of me,” I said.

  Cal’s lips tightened, but when he spoke his voice was nothing but calm. Talk about the patience of a saint. “You can’t drive around, especially in this mess, when you’re dizzy. At least take the rest of the night off.” He jerked a thumb toward my ruined vehicle. “You’re going to have a hard time getting that thing to run anyway.”

  “I have a car of my own, Cal.”

  He mumbled something that I probably didn’t want to hear. Cal was just trying to look after me, but I wasn’t very good at being looked after.

  “Take me home,” I ordered.

  The short drive to my house was accomplished in silence. When I tried to get out of the car, my head ached so badly my stomach rolled.

  “You win. I’ll go to bed, but call me if anything serious happens.”

  From his somewhat sarcastic salute, there was nothing Cal would consider serious enough to wake me for tonight.

  I hesitated. My father had rarely delegated authority. If he were here now he’d sneer and call me a girl. In my family, the ultimate insult.

  “You need help getting inside?” Cal asked.

  “Not since the mayor and I split a box of cheap wine when we were sixteen and I puked for three days.”

  “You two must have been a real treat.”

  “Oh yeah, we were swell.”

  I made it to the porch, then lifted my hand as Cal turned his car and went back to work.

  I was mud splattered, blood spattered; my uniform had been soaked and partially dried so many times it was stiff and uncomfortable. My hair had come loose from its braid and slapped against my neck like wiry hanks of hay.

  A long, hot shower eased the stiffness, the mud, and the blood from my body and face. I took a bag of ice to bed. It wasn’t the first time.

  I set my alarm for 3:00 a.m., happy that I woke easily when it rang. The ice bag was water. I tossed it to the floor and went back to sleep.

  I dreamed of lightning and of birds trapped in a glass box so that the beat of their terrified wings sounded like distant thunder. My eyes snapped open as I realized what that odd sound had been in the woods last night.

  “The wings of a really big bird.” I shook my head and was rewarded with a dull ache behind my puffy eyes.

  I was more concussed than I thought. I’d heard the wind, maybe thunder. There was no bird big enough to create the sound that had seemed to make the earth, the trees, the very air shudder.

  Of course there weren’t any wolves in Georgia, either, but last summer we’d had some. We might have some again, considering what I’d seen in the storm.

  I climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to see Claire.

  Most nights it took me a while to fall asleep. As a result, I often overslept and had to race to work, hair still wet after I’d drunk a single cup of coffee in the shower.

  This morning, dawn had just spilled over the horizon as I drove my dad’s faded red pickup down Center Street. A bread truck was parked outside the Good Eatin’ Cafe. The open sign sprang to life in the Center Perk as I went by. The coffee shop specialized in the fancy lattes and teas popular in big cities—over the summer we earned a good portion of our income off the tourists—but the Perk also sold good old-fashioned java in a go-cup to appease the locals, like me.

  A moving van idled in front of what used to be a doll shop, until eighteen months ago when the owner died. The store had been empty ever since. I made a mental note to see who’d bought the place and then welcome him or her to the neighborhood.

  Claire owned the largest house in Lake Bluff. Not that she’d planned to, but when her dad—the former mayor—had died, he’d left her not only the family homestead but also his job.

  Claire had never wanted to be the mayor. She’d wanted to be a news anchor, and she’d run off to Atlanta to do it. There she’d discovered that the talent and brains that had made her hot shit in Lake Bluff only made her average, or less, in the big city. She’d wound up a producer instead, and she hadn’t liked it.

  She did like being the mayor, and she was a good one. Much to her own, and pretty much everyone else’s, surprise.

  I was just glad to have her back. Claire and I had been pals since our mothers had left. Hers to Heaven, mine to Lord only knew where. Our fathers had been friends, too—the mayor and the sheriff—and they’d thrown us together often, leaving one or another of my brothers in charge. Claire and I had survived. Then, as now, we’d depended on each other.

  I parked in front of the white rambling two-story near the end of Center Street. Claire walked to work every day, as her father had before her. In a town of just under five thousand, nothing was very far aw
ay.

  The door opened before I knocked.

  “Who hit you?” Claire demanded. “And what did you say to make them?”

  Her hands were clenched into fists, and she appeared ready to take on anyone who’d dared touch me. Not that she wouldn’t get her ass kicked. Claire was a girl in the true sense of the word—soft, round, with the fire red hair, moon-pale skin, and clear blue eyes of her Scotch-Irish ancestors.

  “Why do you think I said something?”

  “Because you always do?”

  “Not this time. My face had an intimate encounter with an air bag.”

  Her fingers unfurled. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. But the squad car doesn’t look half as good as I do.”

  She lifted a brow. “Lucky we can afford another.”

  Since Claire had taken over, the town treasury had done a complete about-face. Not only had our last Full Moon Festival been a huge success, despite the werewolves, but she’d also figured out a lot of other ways to bring tourists to town the whole year through, instead of only during that single week in August.

  “There’s something I have to talk to you about.”

  Claire waved me inside and headed for the kitchen. “Coffee?”

  “God, yes.”

  I glanced around for Oprah, the cat—named during Claire’s talk-show-host phase—before I remembered that she’d developed an instant adoration for the baby and rarely left his side.

  Whenever Noah slept in his crib, Oprah lay beneath it. If he fell asleep anywhere in the house, she stayed right next to him, and if anyone came in the room, she set up a squalling that would wake the dead yet never seemed to wake the baby. Oprah was the next best thing to a watchdog Claire could find.

  “Where are the guys?” I asked.

  “Still sleeping, thank God.”

  Claire had married Malachi Cartwright early last fall. Their son, Noah, had been born in May, which meant Claire was getting far too little sleep. Luckily, Mal took care of the baby during the day so she could take care of Lake Bluff.

  Mal was an oddity here, and not just because he was a househusband. He had come to town with his band of traveling Gypsies to entertain at the festival. After a whole lot of spooky stuff had gone on, he’d stayed behind when the rest of his people left.