Lycanthropy Files Box Set

Chapter 6

6

The caffeine and sugar from the chocolate pie and latté buzzed happily through my bloodstream as I rode up the mountain in the back of Ron’s compact car. Lonna still had the car keys with her, so I left a note on her Jeep, and the guys brought me home. Leo had originally offered me the front seat, but I was the shortest, so it made sense for me to take the back. After about ten minutes, the guys seemed to forget I was there.

The situation made me think back to graduate school. Most of my friends had been men, and I’d learned to fade into the background and listen to them tease. The differences between the thought processes and communication styles of men and women had always fascinated me. Now I had to learn a whole new vocabulary—that of the werewolves.

Leo and Ron bantered about women of their past, but when they slipped into a debate about a certain reconstructive surgical procedure in the most recent issue of JAMA, I became bored and watched the world out the window.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve used the road to get up here,” Ron commented as we pulled up to the gate, which was closed. Lonna had the remote, too, so I hopped out and pushed the buzzer.

“Wolfsbane Manor.” Gabriel’s clipped accent came through with some static. “State your business.”

“It’s me, Gabriel, and I have guests.”

“Very good, Madam.”

I hopped back in the car as the gate swung open. Ron maneuvered the car up the long drive to the circle in front of the house. Gabriel had cleaned out and turned on the fountain, and the water droplets sparkled in the sunlight. For a moment, all felt right with the world, but then Ron’s comment about not having used the road to approach the manor jolted me back to the present sticky situation.

“How long have you been coming up here?” I asked.

“Months.” Gabriel appeared in the door, which opened without a creak. He’d been busy.

“Gabriel,” Ron said with no trace of his former joviality.

“Ronald. Good to see you again.”

But it obviously wasn’t.

Leo frowned. “Gabriel? When did you get back in town?”

“Yesterday. Apparently you don’t remember our conversation last night.”

“What conversation is that?”

“The one during which I taught you a lesson about threatening ladies.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You were fresh off the hunt.”

Now I was the one rubbing my temples. It seemed impossible the violent, angry Leo of the night before could be the same affable chap who had just bought me lunch. The conflict had slipped my mind even though my wrist throbbed when I moved it in the wrong direction, and most directions were wrong. It seemed like everywhere I turned today there would be some sort of surprise waiting. I just didn’t want to end up with a fight on my hands, but Leo didn’t look like he wanted one. His frown was of concentration and frustration.

“Would you care for a drink?” Gabriel asked.

“I’d love one,” Ron replied and bounded up the stairs.

“I need one,” Leo added and followed. Gabriel held the door open for them but moved to block me.

“A moment, Madam,” he said.

“Okay.”

“The drinks are on the bar in the den,” he called over his shoulder, then shut the door.

“What is it?”

“As you can tell, there is some, ah, tension between us.”

“No shit.” I crossed my arms and tried to look as stern as I could even though I barely reached his shoulder. “Tell me why?”

“We were part of the same pack. There was a falling out. I became a solitary hunter.”

Gabriel’s revelation jolted me.

“You’re one of them, too?” I whispered.

He looked at his feet. “I thought you might have guessed after last night. My case was from childhood. Your grandfather had hired me for research, and as domestic help as a cover-up.”

“So why are you still here?”

He inclined his head toward the inside of the house. “The same reason they are, I suspect. I know of your research. And you need the help around here. It’s a big house.”

“Fine, you can stay.” I put a finger on his chest and tried to look intimidating. “But no more funny stuff. At the first sign of something suspicious, you’re out of here. Got it?”

Gabriel nodded solemnly. “Yes, Madam.”

“Why was my grandfather interested in werewolves?” I asked. “Don’t tell me he was one, too.”

“He had the lycanthropic energy about him, and he understood the condition, but I never saw him change. He told me he was working on a cure, and I became a willing subject. It was soon after that he disappeared.”

“What do you know about that?”

“The same facts you do: he went on an ill-fated canoe trip. I was out of town working out immigration issues, so I wasn’t here.”

“Do you think they had something to do with it?” I glanced toward the windows to the den.

“Perhaps we should question these two and see what we can learn.”

“Sure, why not? Although… You haven’t put anything in the drinks, have you?”

He smiled, and wrinkles appeared around his eyes. I realized he had seen and done a lot more than he’d let on, and I mentally added about five years to his estimated age. “No, Madam. I am counting on the truth being in the bottle, as they say.”

We entered the den. Ron and Leo sat on the sofa and sipped beers.

“Done with your conference?” Leo asked.

“Yes, he was just filling me in.”

“Must’ve been quite a fill-in. Ron’s already on his second beer.”

Gabriel took the first bottle—which Ron had put on the sea chest without a coaster—into the kitchen. I poured a glass of white wine from the bottle that chilled in the ice bucket along with the beers.

“So you guys are doctors?”

“Were doctors.” Ron waved his beer in a dismissive gesture. “We could be saving lives, but we’re stuck here, in the middle of the backside of nowhere.”

“Doctor Fisher doesn’t need to hear a reprise of this old conversation,” Gabriel came in with a plate of assorted cheeses and crackers. “She has some questions for you.”

As much as I appreciated his interrupting the rant, I resented him taking the lead just as Lonna had earlier. Did I really seem so incapable of gathering my own information?

I took a deep breath. “Ron, when were you diagnosed with CLS?”

The lycanthrope in question sat back and sipped his beer. “I don’t remember exactly when I was diagnosed, but I knew when I had it.”

Leo sat forward and laced his fingers over his bottle, his head down. Dark brown curls obscured his face. “The night of Temmerson’s dinner.”

Ron looked sick to his stomach. “The chief surgeon Alfred Temmerson had us residents over to his house. I didn’t have a date, so I brought Leo.”

I listened, fascinated. I had never heard the story told from the first-person adult’s perspective.

Leo had been out sick that day, as he mistook the early signs of CLS infection for the flu, which he assumed he acquired from the flu shot he’d gotten earlier that week. Ron also wasn’t feeling great, so the cousins decided to go to Fred Temmerson’s dinner together in case Ron needed Leo as moral support and chauffeur. When the cousins arrived, they were greeted by the very attractive Lisa Temmerson, who was home from college and helping her father host the dinner. Her mother had died from breast cancer the year before. The moon was waxing, only a day away from full, and as it rose, Ron and Leo felt its charm—and those of the young Lisa.

Lisa took their coats and told the young men to loosen their ties.

“We’re being casual here tonight,” she told them with a wink of her green eyes. Ron felt a pang of jealousy, and for an irrational moment, wanted to punch Leo. He shook the feeling off and accepted the glass of red wine another resident offered him.

By this point, both Ron and Leo felt as though they were floating in a dream with events happening in illogical sequences. Dinner—catered barbecue—was served from the kitchen, and the residents ate on paper plates on their laps and pretended not to wonder who would screw up first. Lisa struck up a conversation with Leo, who was quite glad to entertain the pretty girl, particularly as he was the only non-surgeon physician there. The other surgery residents had brought girlfriends, boyfriends or spouses—none of whom had doctorates in anything with the exception of a psychologist who dated one of the female surgery residents.

“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 kinds 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.