Shadow on the Moon (13 page)

A few minutes later, she gave
Fenris the warm water then handed a steaming cup to the visitor. He took it and
began slurping noisily.

"You can sit down if you
like." She pointed to one of the chairs by the table and he shuffled over
to it. Dana did her best to ignore him while she mopped up the puddles their
entrance had left, then headed for her bed where she curled up with the cider
she'd poured for herself.

After a few laps from his bowl,
Fenris got up and began nervously roaming the room. From his place at the
table, the man stared at her over his cup.

Dana stared back, her skin again a
mass of prickles.

She wondered just how long Morgan
would be.

* *
*

"The woman for the runt,"
Lily said sweetly, gliding around the room, touching this, touching that.
"It's a fair trade, is it not?"

As her slender hand came to rest
upon the shackles bolted to the inside wall, Morgan snarled. She laughed.
"And what are these, dear Morgan? Something to help you resist the
fullness of the moon? Ah, yes, that night will soon be upon us. Then who do you
think will protect the mortal female? Trade her to me now and save yourself the
grief."

"There's nothing to trade,
Lily. I already have my dog." They both knew she couldn't harm Fenris
anyway.

She frowned delicately. "Poor
Jorje was to keep it outside. I must chastise him. Yet he was probably
shivering grievously in the storm. He does despise the indignities of the human
form." Her hand snaked out, stroked Morgan's beard. "You understand
that, don't you? Although, of course, it is the beastly form you despise."

Morgan backed away, repulsed.
 
"Not just the form. I also despise you
for giving it to me."

 
"I am not as bad as you think. Don't I
always spare the children and also keep Jorje from harming them? I am not
completely brutal. You think you hate me, but like us, some day you'll come to
relish the wolf's life and thank me for bestowing it."

"It's been four years since
you tracked me down and I still curse the day we met. Why do you think I'll change?"

She smiled, clearly confident in
her ultimate control. "Some, they say, take a decade or more to adjust. I
shall wait. Time, dear Morgan, we have in abundance."

"I'll see your bones buried in
consecrated ground before I become your mate."

"Sebastian has decreed
it!" Lily snarled. "If you do not obey, he will one day come, to your
everlasting regret. His chastisements, I assure you, are not as gentle as
mine."

Morgan buried one hand in his
shaggy hair. Here he was, again debating with a creature completely immersed in
brutality and artifice.

He turned his head away
indifferently, a blatant snub.

"How dare you insult me?"
she screeched in Lupinese, scraping a threatening foot against the floor.

She darted to his table and swept
aside a gas lamp. It crashed to the floor. Fuel spilled, staining the wood, and
caught fire. Morgan calmly stamped it out, then turned to her. In the dimming
light from the solar fixture on the wall, he saw her stare at him in outrage.
Her silver hair began to bristle and grow. Her fingers, bare beneath the sleeve
of her coat, began to splay. With a powerful leap, she landed in front of his
dresser, picked up a hairbrush and threw it against the wall. It hit with a
sharp smack, then fell to the floor.

"You hopeless fool! That lamp,
this brush, that food you keep on your silly shelves. These mortal
accouterments do not become you! Nor will they preserve your humanity!"

Then she lunged at the shackles on
his inner wall. Growling gutturally and causing a great clatter of chains, she
pulled and yanked, clearly trying to tear them from the wall. But her efforts
were futile. Morgan had installed them to withstand the full power of his wolf
nature, and she could do no more than make them clank.

Frustrated, she turned to his inner
door and pounded on it. "Why have you made yourself this cage?" With
another roar, she charged at the outside exit, clawing at the metal door.
"You've built a fortress, trying to hide from your nature. You fool, you
total, utter fool! I gave you a gift, a precious gift, and you reject it!"

As Morgan wearily witnessed her
melodrama, he found he couldn't tear his gaze away. How easily she alchemized.
No painful spasms. No agonized groans. He despised her with the depth of his
soul, but still felt a terrible stab of envy each time he beheld her effortless
transformation.

She saw his eyes upon her and her
rage disappeared as quickly as it had come. She leaped back to face him.
"I have decided to forgive you, my darling. I see your wistfulness. You
wish to know my secrets."

Her eyes had sunk into the cranny
beneath her emerging brow and were now all pupil and iris. She stared boldly at
him and lifted a silvery hand to draw a single claw down the tender skin of his
exposed neck. Parting her lips to reveal her deadly fangs, she leaned toward
the spot where her claw rested. "Come, darling, let me reveal my secrets
to you." Her honeyed tone somehow managed to give sweetness to the bitter
sounds of the Lupine tongue. "Slaughter this woman and join me in all our
glory. Then you too will know the ease of alchemization. One human kill,
Morgan, is all it takes, then the shape shifts without slicing the mortal form
with pain."

"Get out, Lily." He
deliberately used English, letting her know it was over.

A hum of rage formed deep in her throat.
Her eyes narrowed. With a sudden thrust of her head, she clamped her teeth on
Morgan's throat. They stood stock-still for an instant, Lily's jaw poised open
over his jugular vein.

Her huge head had towered more than
a foot above him while she stood upright, and in mortal form Morgan had no
defense against her. But her attempt to frighten him into alchemization had no
effect. He'd lived as one of her hellish kind long enough to know she would
not, could not, harm him. No werewolf had ever killed another. It was a Lupine
law Lily would never violate.

Nor could she harm Dana as long as
she remained on his land. A werewolf's territory was sacred. But, oh, how she
wanted to. He felt her hate, her desire to destroy him for rejecting her so
cruelly, felt how badly she wanted to deny the only law she lived by.

"Do it!" he growled.
"Put me out of my misery."

He arched his neck, pressing
against her sharp fangs. A tooth pricked his skin; blood trickled down his
neck.

With a distressed whimper, Lily
released her hold and fell back. Her hands flew to cover her mouth, but not
before Morgan saw the scarlet drop staining one fang. His blood. She'd tasted
his blood.

The realization filled her eyes
with horror. She shuddered, and for a heartbeat Morgan pitied her. Like him,
someone had made her what she was. Unlike him, she was too weak to resist her
mutant nature. She even relished it.

Then a shutter fell across her
face, blocking those feelings. Her fangs and claws faded; the hair disappeared;
her brow retreated. When it was done, her eyes were cold and hard. Morgan's
pity, too, had vanished.

"Be warned, Morgan," she
said. "You are mine. I will not let the woman have you."

With that, she straightened her
back with dignity, gathered her Cossack coat around her legs, and stalked out
of Morgan's bedroom.

He closed and bolted the door
against her, against the entire nightmare of his life, for all the good it did,
and stared at it for a long while. Then he walked to his bedside table, which
held a basin. Dipping a cloth into the cool water within, he washed Lily's
blood-mixed saliva off his neck.

If only he could wash away his
curse so easily.

Chapter Eleven

Dana was still keeping vigilance
over the peculiar man at the kitchen table when the woman came bursting through
Morgan's door with blazing eyes and streaming hair. For a brief instant, she
caught a glimpse of Morgan, who looked angrier than she had yet seen him. Then
he slammed the door and bolted it.

"We go, Lily?" asked the
man, who apparently was undaunted by the angry display.

"In a moment, Jorje," she
replied crossly, fixing Dana with a malevolent stare.

With a toss of her long hair, Lily
crouched in front of Dana, leaning forward until their faces were only inches
apart. Dana felt the woman's breath burning her skin, felt the hatred stab at
her psyche, and couldn't fathom what had provoked it.

"Do not think Morgan is yours,
she-whelp. I will be back for him . . . and for you."

"She-whelp?" Dana meant
to issue a scoffing challenge, but her question came out like a whimper. Her
body vibrated with alarm. Weak, uncoordinated muscles hampered her attempts to
put steel in her spine.

"Do not backtalk. And mind
what I say."

Lily turned her face away, then
rose and gestured to Jorje, who sprang from his chair. Amid another icy flurry,
the pair returned to the storm from which they'd come, leaving Dana feeling as
if she'd just tumbled into a rabbit's hole.

She let out a heavy sigh and looked
around. Except for Fenris, who moved restlessly to the door and sniffed
nervously, everything was now as it had been. The stew bubbled on the stove.
The fire danced brightly. If not for the puddles on the floor, no one would
guess Lily and Jorje had even been there.

Dana followed Fenris's lead and
began roaming the cabin, too. She touched the kitchen table, the bed, the door,
feeling almost as if she were re-marking her territory after a violation.

Finally, she gave another sigh and
went to get the mop.

While cleaning up the second
mini-flood of the day, her legs unexpectedly turned to jelly. She wobbled to
the rocking chair and sat down, trying to catch her now erratic breath. What
had she done to earn such animosity? In Dana's admittedly inexpert opinion,
Lily's behavior appeared almost psychotic, which probably explained why she
seemed so frightening.

Unfortunately, the explanation did
nothing to ease Dana's fear. The small room suddenly looked huge and empty.
Silly, she knew. After all, everything was light and warm inside, despite the
sub-zero fingers scraping at the windows. But the chill from the bizarre
couple's unexpected appearance lingered, and she felt it in her bones.

She turned to the fire, rubbed her
hands in front of it. Would she ever be warm again? Or away from this
windswept, storm-battered place? And how had Lily and Jorje forged their way
here? Where had they come from?

Even more frightening was the rapid
healing of Morgan's feet. She'd seen frostbite before. It took days, sometimes
weeks, to heal, with blood-starved skin peeling off in ugly gray sheets. Maybe
she'd blown the damage out of proportion. After all, his feet had been bare
only a short time; but when she'd taken them in her hands, they'd been as white
and cold and hard as ice cubes. Surely there should have been some aftereffect.

Yet when he'd taken off his boots
by the fire and she had seen his feet clearly before he'd hidden them in the
slippers—even the tips of his toes glowed with perfect health.

Strength began returning to Dana's
muscles, but not warmth. Firelight reflected in the small pools of water on the
floor, but she went to the bed, collected a blanket, and took it to the rocker.
She'd just gathered it around her when a groan permeated the room.

She shivered and sank deeper into
the blanket.

How odd could a man's music be?

She laughed bitterly. She'd asked
herself that question often lately, always with the same answer.

How odd? It could drive a person
mad, that's how odd. God, there was no melody, no harmony, and it sounded like
the cries of a doomed soul standing at the gates of hell. She could barely
listen without wanting to scream.

All the rumors about Ebony Canyon
rushed into her mind. It was, some said, a land lost in time and inhabited by
Indians never exposed to society, who performed rituals to conjure up spirits
of old to do their bidding. Supposedly, mutant creatures and evolution
holdovers roamed free in its rugged, unexplored acres. Unspeakable monsters,
invincible specters, bleached bones, lost graves . . .

Her eyes drifted to
The
Lycanthropy Reader
. She stared in ghoulish fascination. The best thing she
could do for her sanity was to stop reading that book. The supernatural forces
and magical powers it described were making her imagination run wild.

She continued staring, drawn like
an addict to an obsession, then trudged hypnotically to the bed and picked up
the book. Wrapping herself in the bedclothes, as if they could protect her, she
opened it.

In creature form, the wer-wolf
is impervious to weather. Neither heat nor cold can pierce its lush coat. For
hours it can lope through temperatures that soon cause mortal man to perish.
Choose your time wisely, brave hunter, choose wisely, lest by the limitations
of your own flesh you become fodder for the beast's insatiable hunger.

Was that how Lily and Jorje had
forded the storm? By shape-shifting? Could these creatures actually exist?

Dana gasped and swept the book off
her lap.

No! She was a scientist, for God's
sake. She lived in a real world with known creatures. With reasonable
explanations that she needed now.

Only Morgan could provide them.

She glanced at his locked door,
then realized she'd so thoroughly blocked out his music she hadn't noticed when
it stopped. The quiet behind that fortification now seemed as ominous as the
music itself. After hesitating a moment, she put down the book and left the
protection of her bed.

Upon reaching Morgan's room, she
rapped tentatively, starting when the noise ricocheted through the still room.