Lycanthropy Files Box Set

Chapter 4

4

“Is there a timer?” Lonna asked.

“I don’t know.” I was glad I didn’t have to go upstairs in the dark, but I was wary of the house itself. It seemed to have a mind of its own.

“Well, I guess we’ll find out.” She rolled to a stop in the drive between the fountain and the front steps. “This place was built for parties,” she commented as I hopped down from the passenger seat.

“That’s the funny thing about it. I don’t remember him ever having any.”

“You said there was a ballroom?”

“Yep.” I turned the key in the lock. “It’s in the back on the lower level.”

“That’s strange.”

We walked into the empty foyer. “Everything about this is strange. Did you move our suitcases?”

“No, I left them right here.”

“Bon soir, mademoiselles.” A hearty male voice greeted us from the top of the stairs, and I jumped. When he passed into a shadow, he looked like Galbraith, but the light revealed someone younger and with a lot more personality.

“Who are you and what are you doing in my grandfather’s house?”

“My name is Gabriel, and I am your butler.”

“Butler?”

“Lawrence Galbraith didn’t tell you?”

“He left that bit out.”

Gabriel shrugged, his tailored suit coat moving perfectly across his broad shoulders. I guessed him to be about forty with a wild mane of light brown hair and a twinkle in his eye. He seemed to have more of a sense of humor than most butlers—at least the ones I’d seen on television.

“I only flew in from vacation this afternoon. Otherwise, I would have met you on your arrival.”

Lonna and I looked at each other, and he seemed to take our surprise as hesitation.

“Would you like my references?”

He handed me an envelope, and I gave it to Lonna. She slit it open with one long thumbnail and pulled the papers out. Gabriel lounged against the end of the banister, his arms crossed.

“It looks in order,” she said. “According to this, he was contracted by your grandfather six months ago.”

“Do you know when he’ll be home?” Gabriel asked.

I looked up from the papers. “Never. He’s dead.” Saying it finally drove the words home, and I felt my knees go weak. Until then, it had felt like he was just away somewhere and would return soon, and I would hear his confident step in the front hall before bolting down the stairs to meet him. A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I reached out with numb fingers to grab on to some sort of support. In an instant, Gabriel was there, his hand under my elbow, and helped me into the sitting room, where a fire blazed merrily.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Doctor Fisher. He was a very kind man.”

“When was the last time you spoke with Galbraith?” asked Lonna.

Gabriel shrugged again, his favorite gesture, I was to learn. “A month ago, perhaps two. He only wanted to confirm I was happy with the position and to let me know he’d renewed my green card. He told me there was no need to worry about anything and I was to arrive today.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to make a phone call.” Lonna went into the kitchen.

“Your grandfather spoke very highly of you,” Gabriel said. He walked to the bar, which faced the fireplace on the inside wall of the room, and began to sort through bottles. “I went into the wine cellar and found some of the reds he said you favored.”

“How…” All this was making my head spin. I took a deep breath and began again. “I haven’t seen my grandfather since I was a teenager. How could he know what I drink?”

“Ask your friend.” Gabriel inclined his head in the direction of the kitchen.

“My grandfather hired a private eye?”

Another shrug. “Perhaps. Or maybe he knew one of your colleagues.”

“If he did, why didn’t he tell me?”

“He was a smart, enigmatic man. He had his secrets.”

I recognized the evasion and decided on a different strategy. “How did you know him?”

“I did some work for him in Europe. He liked me and invited me over.”

“Your accent isn’t quite British?”

“Scottish.” He glanced back at me with a grin.

“I should’ve recognized it.”

“It’s become a bit muddled, I fear. I had to fake an English accent for a while to gain entry into the butler academy.”

I couldn’t help it—I giggled. He handed me a glass of Australian shiraz on a tray. I sipped it and studied him. He gazed into the fire, apparently lost for a moment in memory.

“Well, he’s legit,” Lonna said as she came through the door. She took the glass of wine he offered from the same silver tray.

“How do you know?”

“Called Galbraith. The poor man was asleep. I also checked with the National Registry of Domestic Help, and they were kind enough to verify that yes, he is a real butler with impeccable history.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle.”

“This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.” I yawned.

“Are you ready to retire?” asked Gabriel.

“I think so.” I rose with my half-finished glass of wine and headed toward the kitchen to put it in the sink. That was odd; I’d never been unable to finish a glass of wine before, but I was so exhausted I didn’t care. Maybe it was the half-bottle I’d had with dinner.

“I’ll take that, Doctor Fisher.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“I made up the bed in your old room and put your friend across the hall. Miss…”

“Marconi. Lonna Marconi.”

“Thanks.” I placed the glass on the tray. “I’m glad we didn’t have to go upstairs in the dark.”

Lonna and I climbed the stairs together. The first rooms were guest rooms. Mine was at the very end of the hall on the left. Fresh flowers stood in a vase on the bedside table, which was covered in a lacy cloth. My grandfather had decorated the room for a young girl, and it hadn’t changed since my first visit twenty-something years before except the twin bed had been replaced by a queen-sized one. Stenciled pastel carousel horses careened across the top of the cream-colored walls. Each horse was different and at a different place on its pole to mimic the motion of the carousel. I picked out my favorites—a blue unicorn above the bed and a green stallion with peach-colored mane, tail and hooves over one of the French windows that opened onto the upper back balcony.

“Wow,” Lonna murmured. “Someone spent a lot of time in here decorating.”

“I think he had one of the local artists do them.”

We walked across the hall into the room that had once been my brother’s. The jewel-toned colors were more compatible with the tastes of little boys. The walls were painted cream, but instead of carousel horses, the top border was of vines and tree branches the clever artist had intertwined with berries and pinecones so it was impossible to tell where the pattern started or repeated.

“This is incredible.” Lonna was wide-eyed. The furniture, all of darkly stained wood, had brass fixtures. The bed was situated on the wall to the left facing the two windows that looked over the front lawn. No balcony. In between the windows was a large painting of a mother wolf with two cubs reclining in the brush.

“Your brother’s room?”

“Yes.” Andrew had loved wolves—the larger, gray kind—so my grandfather had decorated his room to be forest-like. Andrew had never seen it.

A heaviness hit my eyelids, and I bade goodnight to Lonna. I could see fresh towels in the bathroom off my room to the left, but I decided to wait until the morning to take a shower. I washed my face, brushed my teeth and crawled into the larger bed, grateful for the extra space. Part of me had been dreading sleeping in a twin bed again. My head hit the pillow, and I was asleep.

At three o’clock I was wide awake. Sure, I felt like someone had hit me over the head with a wine bottle, but something had awakened me, and for once it wasn’t the usual nightmare. Although at that time of night, bad dreams couldn’t be too far away. No, it had to be something else, something external. I listened and discerned voices coming from outside. For a moment, I dismissed it as the usual hubbub outside my apartment, but then I jerked fully awake. I was at my grandfather’s manor in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. The only people in the house were me, Lonna and the butler.

I put on my robe and slippers and tiptoed down the hall and stairs. My feet remembered the location of the creaky boards and avoided them. Instead of going through the front door, I crept through the kitchen and out the side door to the small kitchen garden.

The almost full moon illuminated the lawn and surrounding trees with weird shadows. I paused and crouched behind a hedge and tried to still the beating of my heart so my ears could pick up the voices again.

“Let Ronan make the kill,” one of them, a female argued. The voice sounded familiar. I peeked through the shrubs and saw a pack of wolves too large to be Arkansas red wolves or coyotes. Two of them, the largest and smallest, were black, and they were accompanied by a silver wolf and a golden one. They circled a deer, the animal’s eyes wide with fear at having been driven out into the open and surrounded by predators.

“He’s messy.”

“He’s young,” another replied.

Talking wolves? Am I dreaming? I shut my eyes and opened them after a few seconds. Nope, still there.

“I don’t know, guys. We shouldn’t be here.”

“The old man always let us hunt here. Why should now be different?”

“His granddaughter—”

“Is a flat-chested, elf-faced ivory-tower academic who won’t even know we’ve been here.” It was the female’s voice again. “If you’re careful, Ronan.”

The golden wolf lunged at the deer but misjudged its angle, and two of the others leapt aside as the animal crashed through their circle, hooves flying.

“We’ve got to figure out how real wolves do this,” panted the silver one as they took chase.

Real wolves? I shook my head. It was too incredible. What were these things? And what did my grandfather have to do with them?

I waited five or ten minutes to make sure they wouldn’t come back and staggered to my feet, my head still reeling from what I’d just witnessed. Especially the last comment by the gray wolf. If they weren’t real wolves, what were they?

“Amazing night, isn’t it?”

The voice shocked me, and I wheeled around. For a moment, it sounded like my grandfather, and I was transported back in time to my childhood as he and I stood on the balcony and found constellations. I was never good at it, my brain already bent to the reality of math and science rather than fanciful creatures in the stars.

A flicker of flame and then the smoldering ash of the end of a cigarette brought me back to the present. I coughed.

“Thought I’d light up while you thought about your answer.”

Leonard Bowman stood there, leaves stuck to his sweater and jeans. The light of his cigarette and the moon flickered in his dark eyes.

“What are you doing here?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same question.”

“It’s my grandfather’s house.”

No answer, just a long stream of smoke.

“It’s my house,” I finally said. The words felt awkward on my tongue, and I became aware I stood there in my nightshirt and boxers in a flimsy robe on a cool night. I shivered.

“So your lawyer says.”

I tried my best imitation of a Gabriel shrug. Leonard smiled and dropped the cigarette, which extinguished with a hiss in the dew-damp grass.

“So do you always lurk in the bushes of your own house?”

My cheeks burned with the flush that crept up my neck. “Not always. Sometimes I lurk in the trees.”

“I’d be careful if I were you, then.” A smile flickered across his lips, but his eyes remained serious. “You never know what might be in the woods around here.”

Why am I putting up with this stupid questioning? I took a deep breath. Because he might know about the talking wolves. “As long as it speaks, I can handle it,” I snapped.

When he moved, the moon flashed in his eyes that looked more yellow than his previous dark brown, and the rumble of a snarl vibrated the air between us. A sharp pain stabbed through my wrist and up to my elbow, and I looked down to see it in his grip. “What did you say?” he growled.

I tried to jerk away, but it was as if my wrist was caught in a steel trap. “Let go,” I hissed.

“What did you hear?” The pain clouded my awareness, a bright throbbing focus as fingers found tendons and squeezed the pain up through my bicep and to my shoulder and collarbone. My knees buckled, and then I was bowled over by something large and covered in flannel.

The pain eased, and I found myself curled in the fetal position on the lawn as two men wrestled not far from me. It was Leonard and Gabriel.

“Get off of me, you overgrown poodle,” Leonard grunted.

“Take your filthy hide somewhere else, Lothan.” Gabriel was on top of him, hands around his throat. Both men grimaced in a feral way, and my heart beat in staccato as teeth and yellow-irised eyes flashed in the silvery light. Gabriel had tossed his flannel robe aside and wore only his white T-shirt and boxers. He had the arms of a basketball player—lean and muscular. Leonard was built more like a football player, all knotted muscle, but neither man had an ounce of fat on him. I knew I should run, but my fascination held me rooted to the spot.

“I believe the Lady of the Manor would like you to leave,” Gabriel snarled.

“I’m sure she would.”

Gabriel sprang away, and Leonard got up and slowly brushed his clothes off.

“Until later, milady.” That last word was an insult, I knew, but I was just happy to see him walk away. The shadows of the trees swallowed him, and I turned to Gabriel, who still managed to look the distinguished butler in spite of disheveled hair and grass stains on his T-shirt.

“Let’s get some ice on that wrist,” he said. “Even so, it will probably leave a nasty bruise.”

He let me lead the way inside, and I sat on the couch in the study as he fixed an ice pack out of some towels and a zip-top bag of ice.

“Thanks.” Somehow sitting on the couch was soothing, a bit of normality in an otherwise bizarre night. The ice pack stung, but it quieted the throbbing.

“I wouldn’t be too terribly upset with Loth—Leonard,” Gabriel told me as he set down a cup of herbal tea and a bottle of honey.

“Why? He hurt me, and he knew exactly how to do it.”

“He was not entirely in control of his actions.”

“What?”

“How much honey?”

“A teaspoon. But what do you mean, he wasn’t entirely in control of his actions?”

“He was in a state of impaired impulse control.”

“Why?” But part of me knew the answer, and it was in a place I wasn’t ready to go yet.

“Can I get you anything else?”

The frustration finally kicked in. “Gabriel, sit.”

He surprised me by sitting in the armchair, but he did not settle in.

“Look, it’s obvious you know what’s going on better than I do. Can we just chat like two normal people and forget you’re the butler for a little bit?”

“I can try.” He eyed me warily. I think he was surprised he had been so obedient.

“Okay, let’s back up. How did you know what was going on out there?”

“I heard you cry out.”

“I never cried out.”

Another shrug.

“I wasn’t supposed to see them, was I? And don’t you dare shrug.”

He sighed instead. “In time, you would have been introduced properly to them. But no, your grandfather wanted you to be sheltered at first.”

“So you drugged me?”

“No, I just picked out the wine with the highest alcohol content in the cellar and hoped it would work. It did.”

“Obviously. Why did he want to shelter me?”

“He knew how your brain works. He felt that, after the fire, you may not be ready to see what your mind would classify as impossible.”

“But now he’s dead, and I’m in the middle of something I need to be able to understand.”

“You may be able to understand it better than anyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your research.”

“My research?” I felt the cold sweat at the back of my neck and closed my eyes. Glowing eyes in a black face. Fangs. I shook my head to clear the images of the last night at the lab. “What does my research have to do with all this?”

“CLS.” He rose from the chair. “Excuse me a moment. I have something for you.”

I sipped the tea, which may have been drugged, but at that point I didn’t care. Before I had been let go from Cabal Industries, I had been studying a pattern of breakouts of Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome, a new psychological disorder of impulsivity. With the help of a historian, I had been tracing family trees and gathering family medical histories on the victims. The raw data was in the lab, and I had been running analyses that night to see if there were any patterns in the variables.

Gabriel returned with a box streaked with smoke but still intact. He set it on the coffee table by my tea.

“What are those?”

“Some of the records you were working with.”

“How did you get them?”

“A friend. I cannot say any more.”

I cradled my left wrist against my chest and leaned over to the box. It smelled of smoke.

“Did any of the others…” I couldn’t believe anything had made it through the fire. The image of the lab as it had been the day after, all my data smoldering ash, flashed through my mind. For some reason, whatever had been entered in the computer hadn’t been backed up yet, so I had lost all of it. Or at least I thought I had.

“This was the only one that survived.”

I could barely make out the filing code on the side of the box. It was the most recent batch of Arkansas and Tennessee files, copies of medical records from pediatricians’ offices.

“It was still on a hand truck in the hallway. My assistant hadn’t entered the data yet.”

“Do you feel like looking at it?”

I put my head in my hands to stop the wave of dizziness and the memories that rode it. “Not tonight. Do you have any painkillers?”

“I may. Something that will dull the pain but not upset your stomach?”

“Perfect.”

He returned with a little orange pharmacy bottle and spilled out a pill. “This should help.”

“Thanks.”

When I rolled over the next morning, I wasn’t so sure I should’ve accepted the pill from Gabriel. The wine must have dulled my judgment. What was I thinking, accepting medication from a stranger, especially one who had deliberately tried to intoxicate me to sleep?

The clock said ten o’clock. Drat, I was going to miss Louise.

“Ready, sleepyhead?” Lonna poked her head around the door, which I’d left ajar. If it hadn’t been for the grass stains on my feet, I would’ve thought the whole talking-wolf thing had been a dream. Actually, I was hoping the butler thing wasn’t a dream, aside from the illegal sharing of prescriptions. The sheets needed washing.

“Gimme a few.” I brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face, then grabbed a T-shirt and jeans out of my suitcase. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t help but smirk at the resemblance to the first-year graduate student I’d been seven years before down to the “what have I gotten myself into?” look. A purple-black bruise spread almost all the way around my throbbing wrist. No watch for me today.

Damn. What had I gotten myself into?