Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 (10 page)

“Can’t stay out of trouble for one day, can you?” he asked. He slanted his torch toward the monk, who shrank back but watched him with glittering eyes.

“Get that witchfire out of my face, wizard,” he snarled.

“Leave this woman alone. Her battle is not ours.”

“Her family owes me a price. I will collect it, if not now, then later.”

“You know the rules.”

“Aye,” the monk said. “But she does not, and it will be her ruin.” He bared his teeth, and then he and the other wolves dissolved into the shadows.

Max held out his hand, and I took it so he could help me to my feet. The throbbing in my palm ceased with one last little tingle.

“Thank you,” I said. I tried to stand, but my legs wobbled and I couldn’t find my balance. He supported me with one strong arm around my waist.

“Encounters with the
Benandanti
can do that,” he said, “especially when they’re not the nice kind.”

“Are there nice ones?”
 

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Didn’t you know…” He shook his head. “They reveal themselves in their own time.”

“Don’t I know what?” I asked and stepped away from him. “I don’t know anything. This whole world of werewolves and wizards and ghostly monks is new to me. I was just barely getting the hang of the werewolf thing when it was stripped away.”

“As I told you, all you have to do is accept who and what you are, and you’ll get her back.”

A warm tropical breeze stirred around me, and I smelled the ocean. “As you told me in my dream,” I said. “Seriously, what are you? Why do you keep following me?”

He looked around. “Let’s go to your aunt’s home. I suspect we’ll find more answers there.” Then he spoke again, but it sounded like he talked to himself. “My superiors didn’t know just how clueless you would be. Otherwise, they would not have limited my orders to watching.”

We got in the car, and I turned out on to the highway.
 

“What superiors? What are you supposed to be doing?”

He turned to face me. “You do not know what an exquisite, rare creature you are?”

Rather than his words being romantic, they sounded more clinical, like I was a specimen to be put under glass. “Gee, do you say that to all the lady werewolves you meet, or just the ones you can get to appear in your dreams in bikinis?”

He laughed, and I got a glimpse of his very white teeth in the darkness, which seemed determined to swallow up even the minor illumination from the car’s dashboard.

“That wasn’t my dream, but rather a place I created in the Collective Unconscious to have meetings.” He drummed his fingers on his knee. “Someone found it who shouldn’t have, which means I have not been the only one watching you.”

“Okay, that’s even more creepy than being spoken to like I’m a museum piece. What the hell are you talking about, Max? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to dump you out on the side of the road and not look back.”

“Are all our conversations going to end up with you threatening me for answers? At least it’s not evisceration this time.”

I kept my face forward but side-glanced at him. “That depends. Are you going to start giving me some? How did you get here—or to the hospice home—anyway?”

“That one I can tell you. The same way the wizard Peter Bowman came to the house a couple of days ago, which is also how you were out dancing while you were sound asleep.”

“Wait…what?” I was saying that a lot lately. His answers made sense from a vocabulary and grammar perspective, but my mind just wasn’t making the leap. “How could I be in two places at once?”

We turned into the gravel drive that led up to my aunt’s house, a cedar-shingled Victorian, complete with round gables and a wraparound porch. My mother had always said it looked like it couldn’t make up its mind whether to belong to a good witch or a bad one. After my earlier conversation with my late aunt, I suspected there was a good reason for that since she couldn’t seem to figure out if she was good or bad, either.

I stopped the car and squinted my eyes shut so the tears that were fighting to come out wouldn’t.

“You said you weren’t close,” said Max, “but there will still be grief.” He patted my hand. His touch sent warmth up my arm, and the spot where he’d marked my right foot tingled.

“You’re using magic on me,” I told him. “If it’s grief, it needs to be expressed. The only way through it is through it.”

“Yes, but you’re trying not to. It’s only a little spell of warm comfort.”

I yanked my hand away. “Well, stop it. I’ll deal with this on my own.” I opened the door and stood in the chilly air, imagining the house as it had been the few times my parents and I had visited here as a child.

He got out of the car and stretched. His presence grated on my already worn nerves, and I had to will my teeth not to clench.
How dare he use his magic on me? That never ends well.

“Go away,” I told him. “You’re not going to give me any information I can use, and the last thing I need is for you to complicate my life with more magic I didn’t ask for and don’t want.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was only trying to help.”

His apology brought my shoulders down from their tense position by a fraction of an inch. “Why are you here, Max? Seriously, I can handle things on my own.”

“Like the
Padre Superiore
back there?” He snorted. “You’d have been dog food or worse if I hadn’t saved you. He would have driven you to do something stupid that would have ended your life, and then he would have claimed your soul for his pack.”

“Right, I get it. Wolf monks are bad. I’ll look out for myself better next time.” Then I remembered why I had been running in the first place. “Did they get Gladis Ann?”

“No, she’s gone to join your aunt. They only hastened her journey.”

“They killed her?”

He rubbed his temples. “Let’s go inside, and I’ll explain some basics to you. It won’t count as interference if it’s information you should already have.”

“Finally you’re going to do something useful.” I found the spare key in a vase by the front door and let us in. Even though a decade had passed since I’d stayed with her the summer after my parents’ deaths, Aunt Alicia hadn’t changed a thing. I made tea for me and Max on the old gas stove. We sat at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around our mugs since the heater was taking its sweet time to kick in. Finally, the temperature was comfortable enough for us to talk face-to-face and for me to focus on getting some answers.

 
“Okay, talk,” I said. “Start with the basics.”

“Your friend Joanie knows all this,” he told me with a sigh. “She should have taught it to you.”

“Well, she’s been a bit busy, and we weren’t talking much for a while.”

“You do know that each person has a body and a soul, correct?”

“That’s what Sister Appassionata told me, yes.”

“Sister Appassionata, really?” he asked with a grin that sent heat down to my soles. I remembered he’d seen me in a bikini. “What else did she teach you?”

“Okay, focus. Her name referred to the Passion of Christ, obviously, and she would not approve of the bikini you’ve been dressing me in.”

He laughed. “Oh, if it had been my choice, you’d be wearing less in those scenes. You’re the one putting on the suit.”

I fanned the heat from my face. “Fine. Stop flirting and give me some answers or I’ll—”

“There you go again with the threats.” He looked heavenward. “Grant me patience.” He looked at me again, his expression mostly serious, but a smile played around his lips.

“Answers,” I said and poked him in the arm. My fingertip came away very warm, and I rubbed it with my thumb. “You’re burning up! Are you sick?”

“It’s a limitation of this form. I have to fuel it with magic, but the tea helps. Plus, there’s a circle in the basement like the one in the forest, which also gives me energy.”

“Stop distracting me. Okay, body and soul. What’s next?”

“It’s not quite so straightforward.”

“Of course not.”

“The pagans of the Scandinavian countries believed the soul had three parts. The most basic part was the energy that animates the body when it’s alive. Then there was the
hamr
, or human part of the soul, and then the
fylgia
, or the spirit part. Sometimes those stuck around after death until the body decomposed.”

“Ummm, okay. You mentioned the
fylgia
in that dream on the beach, but it still makes no sense to me.” I looked at the kitchen clock, which said 2:30. “It could also be the hour.”

He followed my gaze. “I can’t stay much longer. The
fylgia
can act independently of the other two, but still in accordance with the will of the individual. The Christians turned the idea into the guardian angel. The
hamr
is literally the person’s double, and whatever injury it sustains, so does the body. Sometimes it appears as an animal, sometimes as a double.”

“So is that what you are now? But you’re so real!” I squeezed his wrist and felt the hair, lean muscle, and bone under my fingers.

He nodded. “When my alarm goes off, and it’s time to go to work, I’ll rejoin my body.”

“So how am I in conflict?”

“When you spirit-walk, it’s your
hamr
leaving your body. When you transform fully, you’re joined with it. You still need the guidance of your
fylgia,
or Wolf-Lonna, whom you don’t want to acknowledge because you feel she means you’re crazy. In reality, she is your guide and part of you. You come from a family that has very strong ones.”

He tapped on an envelope on the table. It was addressed to my aunt courtesy of Gladis Ann Cieloa.
Or is that “care of?”
The letters of Gladis Ann’s name glowed, jumped off the page, and rearranged themselves into Alicia Gannadisi. I jumped up, knocking my seat over.

“How is that possible?”

“Your aunt was very powerful, as one who has a strong family legacy often is. She had her guardian. You have yours.”

“So that’s why Gladis Ann left me when the monk-wolves appeared. She was going to protect my aunt’s spirit.”

“She had promised to stay and guide you until you could find your legacy, but your aunt didn’t know you already had.” The muscles of his jaw stood out. “She still shouldn’t have left you at their mercy even if their appearance pulled her to your aunt. She couldn’t take the chance they’d intercept her.”

“From what you said, it sounds like she didn’t have a choice if she thought Aunt Alicia was in danger. I guess she joined her.” I straightened my chair and slumped in it. The table and kitchen grew blurry, but I was too damn tired to tell whether it was from tears or just fatigue. The responsibility of a family legacy I didn’t know I had weighed me down along with the knowledge I was the only one left and had a crazed wolf spirit after my soul.

“Two more questions,” I said around a yawn, “and then you can go back to Little Rock or wherever.”

“Agreed.”

“Why are they after me? The wolf monks? I didn’t do anything to them.”

“The explanation is too long to go into now.”
 

I narrowed my eyes at him but didn’t push the issue. I was too exhausted to stay awake through a long story, especially if he brought all that wacky soul stuff into it. “Okay, so why did you say I’m an ‘exquisite creature?’” I gestured to myself, my wrinkled shirt and jeans, and my mussed hair. “I mean, even on my good days, I’m not really.”

“I would argue with that,” he said and put his hand over mine. The human—or whatever—touch almost made me start genuinely crying, and I resisted the urge to grab his hand, the one thing anchoring me to reality even though his words challenged my conception of myself and my world to its core.

“Stop flirting. Well, don’t stop, but tell me.”

He grinned, his teeth even and straight. “You didn’t get the CLS in the vaccine like the others. It took much less exposure to bring out your natural abilities and legacy—the saliva of a carrier, not even a full werewolf.”

“He’s a wizard, I guess,” I said, thinking of the encounter in the office.
Was that his
hamr?

Max shook his head. “Not a strong enough one to do what he did unless there was something under the surface trying to get out already. In addition to being able to communicate directly with your
fylgia,
you’ve got talents we’re not aware of yet. That’s one of the reasons I was sent to watch you.”

“By whom?”

He shrugged and stood. “I can’t tell you that. We can figure out the rest of this later. I’ll visit tonight.”

I raised my eyebrows and stood next to him. I swayed, and he caught my waist, pulling me to him. “You’re assuming you’re invited,” I said.

“Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

“Now you’re assuming even more. Naughty wizard.” Another huge yawn caught me.

“I’ll put wards around the house so nothing with the intent to harm you can get in while you sleep.” He picked me up, the strength in his lean frame surprising, especially considering I’m not a dainty woman—almost six feet tall with healthy curves.
 

“Wow, you’re strong.” I closed my eyes and leaned against his shoulder. He carried me through the house and up the stairs. “Oh yeah, you’re not really you.”