Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella Page 8

  “Nice place,” Leo commented to Lisa. He remembered a few more details than Ron but wasn’t sure how their conversation went, only that she made a comment about her mother and left in tears. The rest of the memory spun out in slow motion as he watched his cousin’s career crash and burn.

  “What did you say to her?” Ron glared at Leo.

  “Nothing.” Leo, hurt and surprised, became defensive. “She’s still upset about her mother.”

  “I’m going to find her. No reason for you to make her cry.”

  “I didn’t make her cry.” Leo grabbed Ron’s arm. “What has gotten into you?”

  “Nothing. I wouldn’t have brought you along if I’d known you’d be hitting on Fred’s daughter.”

  “I’m not hitting on her.”

  Ron jerked his arm out of Leo’s grasp. “You’re going to take advantage of her, and I’m not going to let you.”

  By this time, their voices were raised so the other residents could hear them, and the hum of conversation halted.

  “Ron, calm down.”

  But Ron, drunk on the combination of the CLS virus coursing through his veins, alcohol, and the innocent beauty of a young woman, didn’t heed him. He balled his hands into fists.

  Somehow they ended up in the kitchen with the psychologist, who had been trying to get Leo’s attention.

  Ron’s pupils dilated and contracted, and his breaths came in ragged gasps. “I think he needs to go to the hospital,” murmured the psychologist. “And I think you need to go, too.”

  “Why?” Leo’s head spun and spots swam in front of his eyes. He certainly felt like crap. “I’ve only got the flu.”

  “I think he’s got something more.” The young man’s intense gaze anchored Leo’s. “I think he has CLS.”

  “What?” Leo vaguely remembered something in his pediatrics class, but he couldn’t pull it into conscious thought. He leaned on the kitchen table for support, and the painful spot where the edge bit into his palm became his center of focus.

  “Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome. He’s displaying the classic symptoms. The adult version.”

  “CLS?”

  “Too fast, too fast,” Ron moaned. At that moment, Lisa walked in. Leo, hyper-aware of her, and he shot a nervous glance at Ron.

  “My father wants to know if everything’s okay.”

  “I think you’d better go, Lisa.” There was steel in the psychologist’s voice, and she took a step back, her eyes wide.

  “Is he okay?” She pointed to Ron, then looked at Leo. “You’re a doctor, too. Can’t you do something for him?”

  “Not right now,” Leo said with a sigh. “The best I can do is get him home. Please thank your father for a lovely evening.”

  Lisa smiled, and her left cheek dimpled. “I will. Would you like my number?”

  “No!” Ron lunged at Leo, who jumped out of the way. Ron missed and tumbled into Lisa, and they ended up on the floor. Ron pressed his lips on hers and mumbled through the kiss, “No, won’t let him take you, won’t let him have you! Mine.”

  Lisa screamed.

  Before the psychologist and Leo could pull Ron off the girl, her father and the other residents ran into the kitchen. The male residents managed to get Ron into Leo’s car, but it took all four of them plus Leo and two male significant others. By that time, Ron was delirious, ranting about women and the moon and the sweet, hot blood in her kiss. Leo took him to the hospital, where he stayed under observation in the psych ward. The ER doctor took one look at Leo and confined him too, just in case it was something catching. Both cousins were put under respiratory contagion restriction, and all Leo could remember about that week was people in “space suits” coming to check on him.

  All Ron could remember was a sense of burning shame as he recalled making a fool of himself in front of his residency director and his beautiful daughter.

  I sat there, the wineglass forgotten in my hand, after the cousins told their story and tried to make sense of what it could mean. One of the frustrating things about research is finding data contradictory to your hypotheses.

  People weren’t supposed to be diagnosed with CLS as adults.

  CLS sufferers weren’t supposed to turn into werewolves and go hunting on one’s lawn at night, and they certainly weren’t supposed to sit in one’s den and tell you about embarrassing dinner parties while sipping their beers.

  “So you lost your residency position?” I asked.

  Ron hung his head. “They allowed me to resign. For medical reasons.”

  “And you, Leo?”

  “I stuck around for another month, but it was too hard.” His black eyes flashed under heavy brows. “The impulses got to the point where I had a hard time controlling them around patients, especially female patients.”

  “So we came up here,” Ron added. “Peter took us in. I got a job in town as a waiter. Leo helps around the house.”

  “It’s big enough, and Marguerite’s no housekeeper.”

  “No, she’s a French princess.”

  “With a cad for a husband,” I added.

  Instead of jumping to the defense of their benefactor or agreeing with me, Ron and Leo sat in awkward silence.

  “They may agree, but they won’t bite the hand that feeds them,” Gabriel pointed out.

  “Better that than living as a servant for pay,” Leo snarled. “Lab rat.”

  “Charles wished it.”

  Again, my grandfather’s name.

  “Do you guys know what happened to him?” I asked.

  Ron shook his head, but it was Leo who spoke. “We know as much as the sheriff. I can show you where they found his canoe.”

  “Really?” The thought of being out in the woods with no telling what was watching me sent a shiver down my spine, but I didn’t want to show them I was frightened.

  Ron leaned forward. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “Maybe you’ll see something we missed,” Leo added.

  “You looked?” I pictured the animals circling the canoe, sniffing the blood, and this time, I shuddered.

  “He was good to us,” Leo said. “He let us hunt here, and he would have us over for dinner when we were bored with Peter’s domestic drama.”

  “But if you’d rather not go, we understand,” Ron broke in. “I can see you’re a city girl.”

  “I was running through these woods before Crystal Pines was even dreamt of.” I met his eyes in a challenge. “Take me to the crime scene.”

  “Aye, there was a crime,” Gabriel murmured. “We just don’t know what, exactly, it was.”

  Leo and Ron led the way down the steep path to the river. Wolfsbane Manor stood at the crest of the hill. On one side, the estate sloped gently toward the subdivision. On the other, the much steeper grade prevented development without major blasting. My grandfather had built a boathouse on the river when I was little, and in it he kept his kayaks and canoe. It kept him from having to haul them down the path, although he was in good-enough shape to do so.

  We could have driven the long way around back through town, but Ron and Leo assured me the trail would be quicker. As we walked along, I remembered skipping down this path with my grandfather, who never admonished me to hurry up, slow down, or do all those other things the adults in my life lived to fuss at me for doing or not doing. He let me go at my own pace, slower with my little legs, and we would explore the woods together. He had infinite patience with my questions about bugs or leaves or clouds. From what Galbraith had told me, he later enjoyed reading my own answers to the puzzles of what CLS is and where it comes from. At that moment, past and present merged, and it was almost as though I could turn around and see him, his craggy face bent in a smile he only showed to me.

  “Never be afraid to ask questions, Joanna,” he told me. “Just realize some of them take more work to answer than others.”

  We walked in silence through the dappled sunlight, and I searched for anything that might be familiar. Kids notice all ki
nds of things: rocks, trees, logs. Everything had changed. And nothing had. Instead of being dumped off for the summer by my mother so she could jet off to Europe with the other doctors’ ex-wives for Parisian shopping trips and get her nails done by the pool without a kid underfoot, I had been dumped by my boss and fled out here for lack of anything else to do. Rather than missing Andy—which I still did, but he was more a shadow of the past than a real person to me now—I ached for my grandfather’s calm and wisdom. I especially wanted to ask him about his studies, how close he’d gotten to a cure, and how we could get it to the people who needed it like Leo, Ron and the others. And why he had never told me of his interest. That hurt most of all, I admitted to myself.

  But you were the one to cut off contact with him, the little guilt voice told me.

  I didn’t cut it off. It faded away. But I knew the voice was right. Maybe he had waited for me to contact him again, or maybe we were both so busy with our work that reestablishing contact became a task for some undetermined “later,” a time that would never come now.

  The path leveled out, and we had to be careful not to trip in the grooves that mountain water runoff had created in the soil. I could hear the river more clearly now and knew we must be close to the boathouse. I rubbed a tear off my cheek before the guys could see it.

  “We know he started out here,” Leo said as he held a tree branch aside. The boathouse, a ramshackle wooden box with a tin roof, stood over a calm spot out of the way of the main flow of the river. The only way in was to use a rope that hung on the outside to open the garage-door-type mechanism.

  The boathouse still held two kayaks, both molded and with chipping orange plastic. Their oars dangled on fraying rope beside their shelves. I noticed someone had put the canoe back, and it looked like it had been recently painted. The shiny metal oar sat in the seat where someone had tossed it after they brought it back.

  “That’s all they found?” I asked.

  “That and some clothes,” Ron replied. “It had rained, so any footprints had been washed away.”

  “And scents,” added Leo.

  “It wasn’t like him to go out if the weather was going to be bad,” I said. “Let’s go to where the canoe was found.”

  We closed the boathouse back up. Sure, it wasn’t exactly secure, but no one had ever bothered it before.

  We walked along the bank of the river, where the path had been partially eaten away by the landscape’s natural shifting as well as trees that had been uprooted. We sometimes had to climb over or under logs and jump over puddles. My legs ached by the time we reached a spot about a mile downstream from the boathouse. I had tried to keep up a regular exercise regimen while at Cabal, but the past four weeks of self-pity and isolation had taken their toll on my muscle tone. The two men showed no sign the trip was anything but a nice afternoon stroll.

  “It was about here. They found the canoe wedged against that rock.” Leo pointed to a large, pitted, dark gray boulder that jutted into the river on the other bank. “The clothes were farther downstream on this side.”

  “The theory was that whoever did this had tried to push the canoe off so it would float downstream, but it got stuck,” Ron added. “Why anyone would want to harm Charles is beyond me. Did you know him well, Joanie?”

  “No. I wish I had known him better.” I wish he had told me we were working on the same problem.

  We circled the spot in wider and wider arcs until we found ourselves at the edge of the woods. I sat on a log, looked around, and tried to see it as my grandfather would have. The guys continued to search, and I wished for a moment that I could see the world through their eyes and noses.

  My mind drifted back to lunch at Tabitha’s. I couldn’t understand how Ron worked in a restaurant with his extra sharp senses. The trash cans must torture him. I shook my head. That train of thought wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I doubted Ron wanted me to try to empathize with him. His resentment kept him going. Leo had what? His nephew?

  I brought my mind back to the present. I studied each tree and shrub and took in the texture of the bark, the spread of the branches. The water rippled and ruffled against the riverbank, and I noticed a tree that tipped out—a drunken sailor looking for a quick drink of water, my grandfather would have said. Its roots pulled from the bank, and tan mud clung to them. Lichens had sprouted along the trunk. Fairy steps.

  I smiled and walked over to the tree. Grandfather had always loved to turn our walks in the woods into a magical journey, and when I was here year after year, we’d visit old haunts with whimsical names like Fairyland and Smurf Hollow. I could imagine the lithe sprites tiptoeing up the stairs and pausing in the hollow that gaped toward the sky. The jagged edges of the branches had pulled away like large wooden spikes, and something green and silver winked at me from inside. I checked for snakes and biting insects, then reached for it. It took a moment to work my fingers down into the hollow and tease out the pendant on a tarnished chain. A silver cat with emerald eyes sparkled in the sunlight.

  “Miskha?” I whispered.

  7

  The silver and emerald cat charm lay heavy in my hand, but I didn’t know if its weight came from the metal itself or the memories it carried. I couldn’t help but remember the first time I’d seen it—also during a time of loss and grief.

  Grandfather and I had gone walking in town one Sunday morning. I was still dressed in black, the dress Mother had gotten me for Andy’s funeral, and even though it had a full skirt—my favorite kind to twirl in—I wasn’t feeling up for a good twirl or laugh. Grandfather had been very patient with me that summer as though he knew what it had been like to lose my twin brother and to be the non-favorite child who survived. I didn’t know, but my parents were working through divorce proceedings while I played in the Ozarks, and my grandfather had a sense things may even be worse when I got back.

  “You’re walking slow today, Joanna,” he said.

  “These shoes pinch.”

  “The way you’re walking reminds me of a cat. They always pad on their toes, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And if you’re lucky, they wink at you.”

  “Cats don’t wink.” I had read all about cats and knew their facial expressions weren’t the same as people’s.

  “That’s what the books say, but they never asked a cat.”

  “How would you ask a cat?” The thought of talking felines tugged me away from my sorrow for a moment.

  “Sometimes you just need to sit down with them and let them tell you in their own time.”

  “Cats don’t talk.”

  “They usually don’t want to. They find people dull and boring.”

  I smiled. I tended to find people dull and boring too. Books were much better companions.

  “Now look at this little lady.” We stopped at a jewelry store window. The shop was closed, but in one of the display cases, a silver cat charm with slanted oval emerald eyes winked at us in flashes of green light. “Would you say she doesn’t wink?”

  “I guess not.”

  “When the store is open on Tuesday, I’ll come back and get her, and you can keep her here.”

  “Why can’t I take her home?”

  His brows bent as he pondered how to tell a nine-year-old her mother would always try to take away whatever she valued. “Because she’s an Ozark cat,” he explained. “She’ll get lonely in the city. She needs to be up here where there are red wolves and other wild things.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she told me. But she’d be happy to be your friend and protector while you’re here.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  The following Tuesday, Mishka the silver cat came home, and whenever I visited, she would always be there around my neck on a silver chain. I hadn’t seen her in years.

  “Hello, Mishka,” I said. The emeralds winked back. Other than being a little tarnished, she looked the same, like she’d been polished just before being left outside.

&
nbsp; “What did you find, Joanie?” Ron came over.

  I stuffed the charm in my pocket. “Nothing.” I knew this was a message from my grandfather, and I didn’t want to talk about it until I could figure out what it meant.

  “Still nothing.” Ron’s scowl reminded me of my grandfather’s. “Happy now?”

  “Yes, thank you. I have a much better idea of what happened.”

  I guess.

  Lonna returned just before we sat down to dinner. While Gabriel cooked, I asked the guys about anything they could remember about Charles Landover and if he’d ever mentioned a family curse or his research on it. They repeated conversations, and we analyzed them until nothing made sense anymore. I had the feeling there was something they weren’t telling me, but I couldn’t tease it out of them. Occasionally Leo’s gaze would catch mine, and our eyes would lock for a moment longer than necessary. Ron always looked away immediately. I figured he must still feel shame over his behavior when he came down with CLS and wondered if I should apologize for having him talk about it.

  A timid knock on the front door broke our concentration. There was Lonna, and I didn’t need to have a werewolf’s nose to tell what she’d been up to.

  “Sir Peter’s peter strikes again,” Ron said. “I guess he won’t be making any more babies with Marguerite tonight.”

  Lonna shot a scared look into the den and raced up the stairs to her bedroom.

  “Don’t be too long,” I called up after her. “Dinner’s about ready.”