“What else would I be?” he shot back.
She didn’t bother to educate him on the other possibilities.Instead, she asked her own question. “And when you were alive, what was your name?”
“Caleb Marshall.”
Her breath caught. Marshall. The same last name as Loganand his brothers and cousins. Could that be a coincidence?Or was this one of the werewolves in his family?
That might be true. She had sensed hidden power in this being. Was she sensing a werewolf as well as a man?
Or was he lying to her? Had he picked up the name from her mind? Because he was actually a demon bent on controllingher.
If so, why was he still standing a few yards away?
Her mind supplied an answer. Because he’d changed tactics,and he was trying to get her to drop her guard.
She hated looking for hidden meaning in everything he said. But she couldn’t help herself. She could be in danger. Even if he’d kissed and caressed her, he could turn on her at any moment.
“What are you—besides a ghost?” she asked.
“The guardian of this place.”
“What does that mean?”
“I . . . protect the animals.”
“And how long have you been here?”
CHAPTER THREE
Caleb felt a
rush of frustration as he considered the question. He didn’t know the answer!
For a long time, anger had kept him here. He hadn’t even known what he was angry about. But he knew that he couldn’t let his soul slip into eternity.
Then memories had started coming back to him, little by little.
First he’d recalled the fight. He and Aden had come here—each bent on teaching the other a lesson. They had changed to wolf form and rolled across the forest floor, both of them trying to inflict damage.
In the middle of the battle, Aden had broken the unspoken rules and gone for his throat. He remembered the hot pain. The blood draining out of him. His terrible weakness—and then the darkness where he had clung to some kind of existencethat he couldn’t even describe.
His first memories had been of his own death. Only that. It was like someone had taken a knife and cut a big, gaping hole in his consciousness. Then other recollections came stealing back into his mind. All of them dark.
His mother’s sorrow over the death of a baby girl. The death of his older brother—when he’d first changed from man to wolf. Caleb’s own dread of that first transformation.
Finally, he’d remembered something good—the family celebration after his first transformation, when he’d made it through to the other side. Not long after that, he and his fatherhad started to fight, and he’d known it was time to move out. He’d found a broken-down little house near the woods and made it livable. And when he was home, he prowled the forest at night in wolf form.
The memories had been like a dream—of someone else’s existence. At first he had waited here through endless loneliness,watching the seasons change and the forest creatures live their lives. Then he realized he could make this patch of woods a place where hunters were afraid to venture. He couldn’t speak to them, but he could give them a bad feeling about stopping here—and keep them from shooting the animalsfor sport.
He glanced at the woman’s expectant face, knowing she was waiting for his answer. It was strange to be talking to her. Stranger still to touch her and feel her reaction to him.
That connection made him give her the truth. “I cannot answer you. Time . . . passes. The world changes. I have been here for a long time. I know that much.”
He watched her take that in, watched her come at the question from another angle.
“Do you know what year you died?”
He hadn’t thought about the year in a long time. But it came to him. “1933.”
She nodded, then supplied an answer. “That was seventy-five years ago.”
“Ah.” The number sent emotion sweeping through him. Yes, that was a long time. Longer than most men lived.
How many things had changed in the world? Did they still have bread lines? What about people fleeing the Dust Bowl? Did everybody still listen to the
Jack Benny
show on the radio? Were the New York Yankees still losing to the Washington Senators?
She cut off his silent musings with a question. “How did you end up here?”
He raised one shoulder. “I fought with one of my cousins. He killed me, and he buried me here.”
She winced. “And you’re a werewolf?”
Surprise jolted him. That was something they kept in the family. “How did you know?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “I sensed it.”
“Yes. You have senses that most other people do not possess.”
She nodded, then asked another question. “Why are you still on earth? I mean, why haven’t you . . . gone on?”
He hesitated, wondering how much he should say.
“First, I stayed to avenge my death. Then I saw that I could make this place a haven for the forest creatures.”
She went back to what he had first told her. “The wolf who killed you has to be long dead.”
“Maybe he had sons.”
QUINN
pushed herself to her feet and dusted leaves off her jeans and shirt, facing the spot where Caleb Marshall’s voice came from. Now she thought she saw the dim simulacrum of a man. Was he becoming more solid while she watched?
As she stared at him, she could add details. He was tall— perhaps six feet, with dark eyes and dark hair cut short. His nose was strong. His jaw conveyed stubbornness or maybe aggression. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt, which she had to assume he’d been wearing when he’d been buried.
In 1933 in this universe, men’s clothing hadn’t looked so different than it did now. Or to put it another way, his dress was closer to what men wore here than what they wore in her world. Except for his shoes. They might have been athletic shoes, but they had strange, high tops that disappeared under the legs of his jeans.
She gave herself a mental shake. She shouldn’t be standinghere evaluating Caleb Marshall’s clothing. She had to escapefrom him. For more than one reason.
Taking a step back, she said, “I have to go.”
“Why?”
“A woman’s life depends on my mission,” she answered. As soon as she said it, she was sorry she’d put it that way, since she was talking to a man who had already crossed that boundary.
“A woman from that . . . other place?”
“Yes.”
“So you say.”
“Why would I lie?”
“To get away from me.” He appeared to shift his weight from one foot to the other. “What is the place where you come from?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
When he stood silently staring at her, she answered, “All right. A universe parallel to this one.”
He answered with a harsh laugh. “You expect me to believethat?”
“Being a ghost hasn’t given you more knowledge about the universe? You didn’t . . . go to an astral plane or somethinglike that?”
“Astral plane? What is that?”
She struggled to remember the lessons she’d learned in school. “It’s a place of the mind and spirit—outside the physicalworld. Living people can sometimes go there to meditate.And there are other beings there—spirits.”
He flapped his arm in what looked like exasperation. “No. I have been
here
the whole time. In this forest.”
“And you saw me come . . . out of a cave.”
“Yes. I know you didn’t go in there. But you came out. Then later you went back in and vanished.”
“Yes, I crossed over from my world—and went back there.”
“
This
is the world.”
“There are others. Only a thin . . . wall separates them, if you know how to find it.”
She considered how much to tell him about her friends, Zarah and Griffin. She’d met Zarah when they were both slaves, and the other woman had been sent to spy on Griffin, a powerful council member in Sun Acres.
But everything had changed soon after they’d come to the city. Griffin had ended up freeing them both—and then he’d married Zarah. Now he was under attack by another council member: a man named Baron, who wanted to rule alone.
Griffin was prepared to fight him, but not to put his wife in danger. So he’d had his most talented adepts open a portal from his world to this one, and soon Quinn would bring Zarah through.
Trying to convey her sense of urgency, Quinn spoke from her heart. “The woman I’m helping is with child. Her husbandhas enemies, and he sent me to find a place where she will be safe until the crisis is over.”
“Why you?”
Raising her chin, she said, “I’m her best friend. Both of them trust me to bring her to safety. And they know I have the skill and the courage to do it.”
She waited with her heart pounding, wondering if he would accept that.
Finally, he said, “I hear the truth of that in your voice. And I have seen your courage for myself.”
“Thank you.”
She would have sworn she heard him swallow hard.
“You can go—if you promise to come back and see me again.”
“If I can,” she answered, wondering if she was telling the truth. He had frightened her. Touched her. Stirred something inside her that was better left unstirred. At least with him.
When she started to take a step away, he held her with his gaze. “Tell me your name.”
“Quinn.”
“That’s not a woman’s name. Women have names like Helen or Betty or Doris.”
“Where I come from, my name is fine!”
“All right, Quinn. Go. Before I change my mind.”
HE
was the one who vanished.
One moment she was standing in the forest talking to the ghost of Caleb Marshall. Then he was gone. To his grave?
She shuddered. It was a disturbing notion.
She hated to think of him as a dead man in his grave. And maybe there was a different explanation for where he had come from. If he’d simply flickered into existence, then disappearedfrom the scene just now, maybe he was only “here” when he wanted to be.
She shook her head and backed away from the clearing where they’d been talking, then made a circle around the area, finding her way back to the trail that she had used previously.
There were places like this in her world. But around Sun Acres, much of the land was empty of life and littered with ruined buildings that had been destroyed in wars over a hundredyears ago. And forests near the city had been cut down for wood to heat houses and cook food.
She hadn’t known much about the history of her universe when she’d come to Sun Acres. That wasn’t something they’d taught in school. Maybe because most people were too busy surviving to worry about history.
But Griffin had access to books and journals that ordinary people never saw. He had let her read some of them, and she knew that life had been very different before the turn of the previous century.
The change was precipitated by a man named Eric Carfoli,who had come to a place called Chicago, for a “World’s Fair.” Logan had told her they had had the same fair in his world, only nobody named Carfoli had been there. In
her
world, the man had said he could create psychic powers, and people had flocked to his tent.
And when they emerged, many of them did have abilities that they’d never dreamed of.
Some could read the future. Some could move objects with their minds. Some could look into the private thoughts of other people—or communicate mind to mind over long distances. And some had acquired the ability to change from human to animal form.
They’d been excited about their new talents and eager to use them. But the people without the powers had feared them and killed many of them. And in the end, the two sides had lined up against each other and fought fierce battles.
When the fighting was over, the land was in ruins, the place called the United States of America was destroyed, and the people who were left banded together for protection in walled cities like Sun Acres.
That was how strong men had declared themselves noblesand taken power. And how some previously free people had been forced into slavery. It had also created a world where men had asserted their domination over women.
Quinn broke from a stand of trees and saw a light flickeringahead of her. An electric light. In her world, it would have seemed like magic. You flipped a switch, and the room filled with brightness. You didn’t need oil lamps or candles. Or fireplaces for heat. And you didn’t need slaves with psi powers to run equipment like ovens or water pumps—the way she had done.
This side of the portal was different. In so many ways. There were a few people with psychic abilties, but not enough to be a problem for the rest of the population. And in truth, many people didn’t even believe in those powers. Which was why a family where the men changed to wolf form could keep their secret hidden.
EVERYBODY
has secrets. And his were bigger than most because there was so much at stake, Colonel Jim Bowie thought as he looked out the window of his quarters onto the parade ground of the military compound. Not a standard U.S. Army installation. No, this was Flagstaff Farm, and he had built the facility from scratch—after inheriting the property and a small fortune from his late wife.
God rest her soul. She’d died in a fatal car accident five years ago. An accident he’d arranged, because he’d needed her wealth more than he’d needed a wife.
With her money and his know-how, he was preparing his men for a mission so secret that he hadn’t spoken of it aloud.
He ran a hand over the close-cropped gray hair on his head. Prematurely gray. He was still in his prime. He trained every day along with his troops. He could still climb a thirty-footrope and scramble over an eight-foot barrier almost as fast as his fastest recruit. And he could beat any of them on the firing range. Ordnance had always been his specialty.
Not that he was competing with them. He wouldn’t allow himself or them to see it in those terms. But staying in top physical condition was part of leadership.