Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 (9 page)

Gladis Ann enveloped me in a hug. “It’s good to see you, honey. She’s as ornery as ever. You’d never know she was…” She took a deep breath. “You and I have a lot to talk about after—”

The last word caught in her throat. “I know,” I said. “Take me to her, and then we’ll talk. It’s good to see you too, by the way.”

My aunt’s companion, Gladis Ann was the same age as my aunt, but sturdier. She stood almost as tall as me at five-ten, and she outweighed me by a good thirty pounds. As my aunt had gotten frailer in the past few years, Gladis Ann had gotten certified as a nursing assistant and became Aunt Alicia’s caretaker. I’d ended up talking to her more often than to my aunt, who liked to keep her phone conversations to questions about school and money, nice concrete topics. As I did well in school and was good with money, they were usually short phone calls.

Aunt Alicia sat propped up in her bed by pillows and gazed out of the windows at a tulip tree that had decided it was time to bloom even though it was only February. I stopped at the door of the small room and studied her, wondering if that was what my mother would have looked like at that age had she lived. My aunt was eight years my mother’s senior, so she was sixty-eight. Aunt Alicia’s features were more severe than my mother’s had been, but she had aged well with barely a wrinkle on her face and only a few threads of gray in her dark hair, which she still kept knotted in a bun behind her head. Like me, she was tall, although it was difficult to see with her new frail state. Her formerly olive skin had a distinct gray tinge to it, and her lips were pale and lined with blue-white. When she turned to me, I saw the oxygen cannula in her nose.

I forced a smile and entered the room. I ignored the small but familiar stab of insecurity in that moment before she noticed me. When she turned her face to me, fear flickered through her expression, but she relaxed as I got closer, and a small smirk came to her lips.

“Lonna,” she said. “Thank God. I thought you were Julia come to take me to Heaven.” She pulled one of her hands from under the covers and squeezed mine briefly. Her fingertips traced the scratches on my palms, souvenirs from my last run as a wolf. She then gestured to the tulip tree.

“In a few nights, the air will freeze again, and the blossoms will be robbed of their beauty and turn brown. This tree and I, we are ghosts of what’s to come. I tried to spare you the same.” She closed her eyes, and a tear left a wet streak down her right cheek.

“Why me? I’m fine, Auntie.” The lie that I had scratched my hands during a fall stopped at the end of my tongue.

She held a hand up like she’d heard what I was about to say. “I’m dying, Lonna, as you probably know. The time for pretending and polite conversation is past.”

“You asked for me. I came.”

“You were always such a good girl, like your mother. I’m sure she’s in Heaven. I only hope I will follow her, but I couldn’t go until I told you my secret, which may keep me from joining her there.” She turned my palm up and traced the scratches. “Ah, but you may already know. My poor
ragazzina
, it will take more running before your hands are calloused enough that you will no longer feel it. We tried to prevent this for you. Your mother and I—you must have thought we were crazy—but in spite of it all, we failed.”

My heart beat a staccato rhythm in my chest, and I struggled to keep my breathing even. Memories crowded in—not the forbidden ones from the night I changed the first time—but others from my childhood. Games, rhymes, the silly little rituals parents have with their kids, the way Aunt Alicia always looked at me with an almost clinical interest before she warmed to me whenever we visited her… They all took on a sinister meaning.

“What did you fail at? Really, I’m okay,” I insisted, for both her and myself.

She turned her hands palm-up and guided my fingertips over the rough patches on the edges of her palms and the pads of her fingers. My mind struggled to put together what she was telling me— she had Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome like me—and that my own genes had betrayed me in the face of Peter’s magic. But then something else intervened.

“I’m not like that anymore,” I said. “Something happened. I won’t change anymore.” The regret in my voice surprised me, and I blinked back tears.
How is this possible? Is she like me? What does she mean, they tried to prevent it? And why did she wait until now?

“Impossible!” She spat the word at me. “There is no reprieve from this curse.” Then her brows came together. “I had hoped you would be spared. That’s why I kept my distance—words have power, and it was the only way I had to protect you.”

Her words made sense, but they also didn’t. I told myself that was because she was confused, that the heart failure had deprived her brain of oxygen, but I had to keep the conversation going.

“I wish you had told me.” My hands trembled, and heat radiated from my chest to my cheeks. I struggled to keep my tone even, to not betray my shock and confusion. “There was a wizard, and then I got shot with something while I was…changed.” The word wolf hung in the air between us, but if she wasn’t going to say it, I wasn’t either. It would make this insane conversation mean too much. “Now I cannot change.”

I kept my voice low in case an orderly or some other person came by and overheard us. It all still seemed crazy to me, and I’d lived it. No telling what someone else would think.

“But do you have your guardian?”

I closed my eyes and listened to that part of the mind where Wolf-Lonna had been, but it was like scar tissue and lacked sensation. “I cannot reach her.”

She said one of those words in Italian that my parents had always refused to teach me, and I couldn’t help but smile in spite of the lump in my throat that grew with the realization of this new loss. “Your friend Joanie,” she said. “She was studying things that will help it make sense for you.”

“She’s got the same problem,” I said. “She turns with the moon.”

She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not that part—the things that are making it happen, the parts of the soul. If you have lost your other self, you have lost part of your soul, and that is not good.”

“I don’t understand, and I need to.” Desperation tinged my tone, and I clutched the blanket so I would stop trembling. “Please save your strength. You have to hold on a little longer so you can explain all this to me.” I knew I was begging, but I couldn’t help it.

“We are not meant to understand all of it,
ragazzina
, only the parts God wants us to. As for me, I only hope he does not hold me accountable for what I did when I was not in control of my actions.”

“What did you do?” I felt guilty for my resentment and anger. She needed the comforting now. “Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been that bad.”

She shook her head. “That secret, it will come to the grave with me.” She patted my hand. “It was the other I needed you to know. The
Padre Superiore
said one per generation, and you are the only one. I hoped the price would die with me, but he was a strong one.”

“What are you talking about? Who is the
Padre Superiore?
What price?”

“I fear you will meet him without the protection of your companion.” She gripped my hand tightly and looked out of the window. “Ah, now that I have told you, I see your mother. She is as beautiful as the day she married your father,
ragazzina
.”

“What? Where?” I followed her gaze with my own, but all I could see was the room and the tulip tree glowing pink in the courtyard lights outside the window. A breeze made the branches shiver, and an answering chill crept down my neck. Then I felt it again, that sensation of a hand caressing my cheek like the night before.

“All I have is yours,” she gasped, and with one last squeeze, she died. If she had been in the hospital, the medical monitors would have raised the alarm, but here, there was only the sound of the oxygen compressor, which fell silent. Only the clock on the wall persisted in its steady ticking. I studied her face to see if she had gone happily, if she had, indeed, been able to follow my mother to Heaven, but her expression was neutral with no indication one way or the other.
Hopefully seeing Mama was the indicator of what was to come, not a final goodbye.
I closed my eyes to say a prayer for her, and I saw the lines of the interstate, the long eternal road. I struggled to stay awake, but the toll of the early start, intense emotions, and driving all day caught me.

The weight of Gladis Ann’s hand on my shoulder startled me awake. “It’s over,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I should have come to get you. You didn’t get to say goodbye.”

“I will be following her soon enough.”

I looked at her. “Why? Are you ill?”

“Not exactly.” She looked at my aunt and then said with a relieved sigh, “Do not fear,
ragazzina
, she is at peace. Let’s go back to the house, and we can talk more there. The staff here will make the necessary arrangements with the funeral home. She had prepared for everything.”

“Shouldn’t there have been a doctor?” I asked. “To confirm time of death?”

“There was one,” she said. “A nice young man with reddish hair and eyes like the ocean. He just left. She died at midnight.”

The clock said twelve fifteen, so I had only been asleep for a few minutes, but I felt alert with all she had told me and the strange feeling of simultaneously being hollowed out by grief and full of confusion and fear with what I had learned.

She turned and left the room, and I followed her.
This has gone from strange to very strange. Max couldn’t have found me, could he?

The lights flickered in the hallway, and my breath caught. I didn’t see any staff, just Gladis Ann’s broad back ahead of me. All the doors stood closed, and nothing stirred or moved. The plaster walls of the old house seemed to bow and wiggle when my eyes moved away from them, as did the white molding.

“Slow down,” I panted. “Please! You’re leaving me behind.”

“You must hurry,” she said and turned her head, although she kept moving. Her formerly black hair was now streaked with white.

“What’s happening?” The blinking of the lights increased in frequency until it was like we moved under a strobe light.

“We are not the only ones to say goodbye, and I must protect her.”

I followed her outside, but once she passed through the door, she disappeared.

“Gladis Ann?” I asked, but the night had no answer. “Where did you go? Come on, this isn’t funny. Who are you protecting?”

The white columns of the antebellum mansion glowed in the lights, which flickered. I searched every corner of the parking lot, but I didn’t even see my aunt’s large blue Buick, which Gladis Ann had ferried her around in. When I tried to call her number, I got the cheerful message that the number had been disconnected or was no longer in service.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked out loud, hoping someone would answer. No human voices came out of the shadows, but I heard the howl of a wolf, which was joined by others all around.

There are no wolves in Georgia! Are there?
The howls grew louder and closer, interspersed with occasional yips and other noises. I couldn’t tell the direction they came from, only that they seemed to be all around me.

“Gladis Ann, where are you?” I hissed. “Do you hear that?”

A cold breeze made every hair on my arms stand on end, and I finally heard her. “Get in your car and run away,
ragazzina
. That is the
Padre Superiore,
and he will be unhappy to find her already gone.”

My car seemed miles away although it was only twenty feet across the parking lot, and nothing stood between me and it. I darted forward, but a shadow with glowing yellow eyes blocked my way. It moved too quickly for me to get a good look at it, but every time I moved toward my car, it jumped in front of me and snarled. I bared my teeth at it, willing and hoping to change, even to spirit-walk, but nothing happened.

A low chuckle caught my attention, and I looked behind me to see a man in black monk’s robes glaring at me. Although he wore the clothes of a religious man, he had the air of a predator.

“You gave up your gift,
ragazzina,
” he said, and he sneered through the only term of endearment my aunt had ever called me. “It cannot help you now.”

“Why are you hunting me?” I asked. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

“We hunt witches and wizards, and you have the mark of two on you. Plus, your family owes me a debt.”

My palm where Peter had kissed me that first day and my foot where Max had marked me both stabbed me with pain, and I crumpled to the ground. The monk walked toward me, and he cradled his left arm against his chest. The shadows around him thickened and resolved into a pack of wolves that slinked alongside him.

“I accepted neither of these marks willingly,” I told him. “And I know of no debt.”

“It matters not. You were close enough to them for them to have the opportunity, which means you are a weak-willed woman ruled by her passions, especially lust.”

“If you had any idea how long it’s been,” I grumbled.

“This is not the time for your insolence!” He towered over me and bared his teeth. “I will end your life now, and then we will be free.

“Free of what?”

Chapter Eight

 
The pain in my foot subsided, and a warm glow suffused the parking lot. The monk covered his eyes with his right hand and revealed his left hand was not human, but rather a wolf’s paw. The shadows that had been circling me fell back when Max appeared beside me. He wore an immaculately tailored dark blue suit and white Oxford shirt open at the collar, and he carried a flaming torch. The light sparked off his reddish-brown hair.