Ghost Moon (20 page)

The traitor was dead. That potential crisis was behind him. A small blip no longer on his radar screen.

His men were in top fighting form. And everything was back on track for Operation Eagle’s Flight.

He could get it rolling tomorrow, if he wanted. But he preferred to wait for a more symbolic date. A new date in the American consciousness that would become as important in the history books as 9/11.

He passed the recreation hall, where the men were watchinga baseball game on a wide-screen television.

He didn’t deny them leisure time activities, although he preferred the wrestling matches and boxing tournaments he staged for them, where they could blow off steam.

But he had strict rules about what they could do here. No drinking. No smoking. No gambling. No chewing gum.

Any man caught breaking those rules would be up for public punishment. And any guy caught jerking off would be stripped naked and have his ass flayed with a whip.

SOMETIME
later, Quinn woke with a start. Her hand moved to the side of the bed where Caleb had been sleeping. The sheets were still warm, but he wasn’t there.

She glanced at the clock. It was early in the morning. Two o’clock. Sitting up, she cursed herself for drifting off. In the darkness, she listened intently, trying to figure out where he was. Had he gotten up to go to the bathroom? Or could he be in the kitchen looking for something to eat?

When she didn’t hear sounds from either of those places, she climbed out of bed and hurried down the hall. The light was on, and she saw him. He was naked, standing beside the front door. He stood very tall and straight. His muscles tense.

And she knew in that moment that he’d been doing the same thing to her that she had been doing to him. He’d made tender love to her with a purpose. He’d been trying to make her drop her guard—so he could slip out of the house and change to wolf form.

She had thought she had convinced him to stay here through the night. But he was going out—to hunt. And not for deer. He had been focused on revenge for too long. Now that he had the means, he was going to seek out the werewolf he thought was his enemy. Tonight.

If only she had one of those cell phone things! But she didn’t.

It flashed through her mind that she could run back to Logan’s and warn him. But even as the thought formed, she knew it would never work. She didn’t even know what directionto go—not from here. And once Caleb changed to wolf form, she had no chance of catching him.

Either he didn’t know she was there, or he didn’t think she could do anything to stop him. Decisively, he stepped out into the darkness and closed the door behind him.

With no time to think, without any real plan, she charged down the hall and threw the door open.

In the light from the doorway, she saw Caleb standing a few yards from the house, his face turned away from her and his hands at his sides.

He was saying something. And the hairs on the back of her neck rose as she recognized the words.

She couldn’t understand them. But she knew what they were. Because she had heard Logan outside saying the same thing, and he had explained their purpose. It was the ancient chant the Marshall men used to change from man to wolf.

“
Taranis, Epona, Cerridwen,
” Caleb intoned, then repeatedthe same phrase and went on to another.

“
Ga. Feart. Cleas. Duais. Aithriocht. Go gcumhdai is dtreorai na deithe thu.
”

“No!” She charged toward him. “No. Don’t do it.”

He turned toward her, his face suffused with shock, but he didn’t stop the chant.

Pushing off from the porch, she threw herself at him. Maybe because he couldn’t believe she would attack him, she was able to knock him to the ground. With no thought for her own safety, she followed him down, wrapping her arms and legs around his body.

“Get off me,” he growled.

“No. Stop it. You don’t know what you’re doing,” she panted.

“Yes, I do.”

“Caleb, stop.”

“The woman does not make the rules. The man does.”

“Not in this century.”

“Let me go.”

“Stay here. Please. Come back inside, and we can talk. You can’t go after the Marshalls. You don’t understand how things are now.”

He didn’t answer, but he changed tactics. When he stopped struggling, she knew that he had decided she couldn’t hang on to a wolf. What was he going to do, bite her with his animal jaws?

He gave her a long burning look. Then he turned his head away, and began to chant again.

“
Taranis, Epona, Cerridwen.
” She heard him say it again, then go on to the second phrase, just the way she had heard Logan do it.

“
Ga. Feart. Cleas. Duais. Aithriocht. Go gcumhdai is dtreorai na deithe thu.
”

“Caleb, I can’t let you do this.”

Desperate to keep him from his awful purpose, she clamped her grip on him, bracing herself for the worst, preparedto hold on to him as he changed from wolf to man.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
.

His voice became frantic as he said the first phrase again, but still nothing changed.

“Christ!”

With a burst of strength, he fought her off, rolling to his side and rocking back and forth. “Christ,” he repeated again, his voice sounding lost and broken.

Alarm shot through her as she took in the horror on his face. “Caleb, what’s wrong?”

“What the hell do you think is wrong? It doesn’t work! I can’t change.”

“But you did it when you were a ghost. I saw you running through the woods.”

“Yes. I changed when I was a ghost. When I was still me. But this goddamn body won’t do it.”

She stared at him, comprehension dawning. Thinking aloud, she said, “You can’t do it because the man who died wasn’t a werewolf.”

But Caleb wasn’t listening to her now. He was too wrapped up in his private pain. Throwing his head back, he raised his face to the sky and a long low howl escaped from his lips.

A wolf’s howl, from a man.

Then he pushed himself to his feet and looked toward the forest.

“Caleb, don’t go. Let me help you.”

He made a snarling sound. “You can’t help me. Nobody can help me.”

Without waiting for an answer, he raced away.

“Caleb. Stop. Caleb.” She might as well have been calling to the wind to stop rustling the leaves in the trees.

CALEB
ran into the night, ignoring the woman calling his name. He needed to outrun the agony and the fear and the sorrow, even when he knew there was no escape.

He wasn’t even sure what he’d intended when he’d tried to change. Maybe he’d just been going to have a look at the descendant of the bastard who’d killed him. Or maybe he would have taken care of the guy. He didn’t know.

When a rock stabbed into his foot, he winced, but he didn’t slacken his pace. He was a werewolf. That was his heritage. His hard-won right.

Since he had fought through the pain of his first change, he had transformed from man to wolf whenever he wanted. He had hunted as a wolf. Eaten his kill as a wolf. Fought as a wolf. Gloried in his secret strength.

In a terrible moment of recognition, all that had been ripped away from him.

He was like a man who had both arms lopped off. A man who couldn’t unzip his pants to piss. Or feed himself. Only this was worse, because arms were only part of a man. Takingaway the wolf had stripped away everything that he was and everything that he could be.

He thought he had found his life mate. Years before the traditional time of mating, but true nonetheless. Now his feelings for Quinn were only a cruel joke on both of them.

He laughed, the sound echoing through the chill of the early morning.

Quinn couldn’t be a werewolf’s mate because he was only the dried husk of what he should be.

He had been a ghost, and he had taken the body of a man who had just died. He had felt reborn. And he had started making plans.

He had taken a chance—and lost everything.

He kept running, trying to escape from his utter and completedespair. But as he ran, he began to feel dizzy. Sick. And another suspicion began to creep into his mind. He had tried to make the change and something had happened. Not just his lack of success. Something more.

Nausea clogged his throat. He stopped running and bent over, heaving up the food he had eaten earlier. When he moved on again, he began to shake. He was limping now, his foot throbbing from the place where the rock had dug into his flesh, and he cursed the man who had such tender feet that he couldn’t even walk through the woods without shoes.

The shaking grew worse, and finally he could go no farther.He sank to the ground, propping his back against the trunk of a tree, his body alternately too hot and then too cold.

His head began to pound. And when he tried to hold on to any thought, it skittered away from him.

Wrapping his arms around his shoulders, he struggled to cling to consciousness. But it was a losing battle.

QUINN
crashed through the underbrush, looking for Caleb. But he had disappeared into the forest, and there was no way she could find him. When she scratched her ribs on a bramble,she realized that she was running naked through the woods at night.

She stopped, panting. She wanted to call his name again, but that would probably drive him farther from her. This was his territory. Not hers. And she was going to get lost in the dark.

Turning around, she was relieved to see light in the distance.Hoping it was from the lodge, she started walking back.

As she plodded along, she knew that she was in over her head. She needed help. And there was only one place where she could go.

To Logan. But she didn’t even know where his house was in relationship to this place.

Cautiously, she approached the building and was relieved to see that no cars had pulled up in the meantime. With a littlesigh, she climbed the steps and walked inside. Caleb had said they would leave this place the way they had found it. But there was no time to clean it up now.

She ran back to the bedroom where they’d slept, picked up her clothes from the floor and pulled them on. Then she started opening drawers. In another one of the bedrooms, she found a cache of coins, which she stuffed into a fanny pack she also found.

It flashed through her mind that she should wipe all the surfaces they had touched. She remembered from a show she’d seen on television that you could find people through their fingerprints. Hers weren’t on file anywhere. But what about the man whose body Caleb had inherited?

She didn’t know, but she was going to have to take a chance because she didn’t have time to deal with something she couldn’t even see.

Instead, she grabbed the T-shirt Caleb had worn and stuffed it into the fanny pack. Then she walked out and closed the door.

Shoulders slumped, she trotted down the narrow road that led to the house. When she came to a wider road, she didn’t know which way to go. So she turned right, sticking to the gravel strip at the edge of the blacktop. A car passed her, and honked, making her jump. She remembered that you were supposed to walk facing oncoming traffic, so she crossed the paved surface.

At least she was used to traveling long distances on foot. She had gone two or three miles when she came to a small community. It had a convenience store that wasn’t open yet. But a telephone stand was outside. She hurried up to it and put in the right amount of change, then called Logan’s number.

Rinna answered.

"Quinn, where are you? What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. But I don’t know where I am.”

“Did you get kidnapped? What?”

Logan took the phone away from his wife. “Are you all right?” he repeated.

“Yes.” She gulped. “But I need your help.”

Cars were starting to pass the store, and she knew that the world was waking up. And every moment she left Caleb alone in the woods was a moment when something terrible could happen to him.

“Tell me where you are.”

She ordered herself not to panic, then pulled on the phone cord so that she could look at the store. There was no address number, but she spotted a small sign on the sliding glass door of the store. “I’m at a little store. It says it’s operated by James Pendelton in Henderson, Maryland.

“Okay. That’s not too far. We’ll be there soon.”

“Don’t bring Zarah or Rinna.”

“Why not?” he asked, his voice sharp.

“It could be dangerous.”

“I guess you’ll explain that when we get there.”

“Who is coming with you?”

“My cousin, Ross.”

“Okay.”

After she hung up, she sat down at the picnic table on a grassy strip beside the store and lowered her head to her hands. Then a car passed, and she decided that would make her too conspicuous. In fact, maybe sitting in the open wasn’t a good idea. So she walked to a patch of woods and stood leaning against a tree as she waited for Logan.

When his SUV pulled up in the parking lot, she breathed out a small sigh and ran over.

Logan rolled down his window. “Get in.”

She climbed into the backseat, looking neither at Logan nor Ross, and shut the door.

“This is the second time you’ve had us worried sick,” Logansaid.

“I’m sorry.”

Logan pulled the car to the side of the parking lot and cut the engine. “What happened?”

Both men turned to look at her as she struggled to organizeher story. So much had happened that it seemed a long time ago when Caleb had last summoned her.

“The ghost called to me. He told me he needed help. I ran back to the place . . . I guess where his grave is, and he told me two men had come and buried another man alive. They had left their shovel, and I dug the man up. But he died.” She hitched in a breath and let it out before telling the next part. “Caleb got into his body.”