by Rebecca York
He shook his head, trying to clear away the fog that seemed to swirl up from the sweet, enticing smoke. For a moment he questioned his own sanity.
He’d heard people describe hallucinations that came from drug trips, heard some pretty strange stuff. Had his mind conjured up these images? Against his will, the circle of fire and the gyrating figures drew him, and he padded forward once more, although caution made his steps slow. He had come upon many strange things in his thirty years of living, but never a scene like this.
He blinked, but nothing changed. The naked men and women were still there, chanting words he didn’t understand, dancing around the fire, sometimes alone, sometimes touching and swaying erotically together, sometimes falling to the ground in two- and threesomes—grappling in a sexual frenzy.
The thick, drugging smoke held him in its power, compelling his eyes to fix on the images before him, making the wolf hairs along his back bristle.
Getting high was deliberately outside his experience. He had never tried so much as a joint, although he had been at parties where people had been smoking them. But just the passive smoke had made him sick, and he’d always bailed out, which meant that he was ill-equipped to deal with mind-altering substances. Street drugs were poison to the wolf part of him. He was pretty sure that even some legal drugs could bend his mind so far out of shape that he would never be able to cram it back into his skull.
But the poison smoke had a stranglehold on his senses and on his mind. He was powerless to back away, powerless to stop breathing the choking stuff.
He took a step forward and then another, his eyes focused on the figures dancing in the moonlight. The smoke obscured their features. The smoke and the slashes of red, blue, and yellow paint both the men and women had used to decorate their faces and their bodies. He licked his long pink tongue over his lips and teeth, his eyes focused on sweaty bodies and pumping limbs, his own actions no longer under the control of his brain. Recklessly, he dragged in a deep breath of the tainted air. The fumes obscured the raw scent of the dancers’ arousal. But he didn’t need scent to understand their frenzy.
He watched a naked man, his cock jutting straight out from his body, reach for a woman’s breasts, watched her thrust herself boldly into his hands, watched another woman join them in their sexual play, the three of them dancing and cavorting in unholy delight, the firelight flickering on their sweat-slick bodies.
His gaze cutting through the group of gamboling figures, he kept his heated focus on the threesome. He saw them swaying together, saw them fall to the ground, writhing with an urgency that took his breath away.
His own sexual experience was pretty extensive. But he’d never participated in anything beyond one man/one woman coupling. And some part of his mind was scandalized by the uninhibited orgy. Yet the urge to join the gang-shag was stronger than the shock. He felt as though his skin were cutting off his breath, restraining him like a straitjacket.
He had to escape the wolf. And in his mind, in a kind of desperate rush, the ancient chant came to him, and he reversed the process that had turned him from man to wolf.
“Taranis, Epona, Cerridwen,” he silently chanted, the words slurring in his brain.
“Ga. Feart. Cleas. Duais. Aithriocht. Go gcumhdai is dtreorai na deithe thu.”
His consciousness was so full of the sweet, sticky smoke that he could barely focus on the syllables that were so much a part of him that he could utter them in his sleep.
But they did their work, and his muscles spasmed as he changed back to human form, the pain greater than any he remembered since his teens.
He stood in the shadows, his breath coming in jagged gulps, his eyes blinking in the flickering light, his hand clawing at the bark of a tree to keep himself upright when his knees threatened to give way. The sudden urgent sounds from the campfire twenty yards away snapped his mind into some kind of hazy focus.
“There! Over there,” a man’s voice shouted.
“Someone’s watching.”
“Get him.”
“Kill him!”
“Before he rats us out.”
The orgy-goers might have stripped off their clothing in the swamp, but they hadn’t abandoned the protections of the modern world.
A shot rang out. A bullet whizzed past Adam’s head.
Without conscious thought, he turned and ran for his life, heading for the depths of the swamp where either safety or death awaited him.
CHAPTER
TWO
ADAM RAN FOR his life as another shot flashed by, too close for comfort. In some part of his mind, he knew a bullet in the brain would be a kindness, because these people were capable of tearing him limb from limb with their bare hands.
So he ran headlong through the untamed landscape, heedless of anything besides the sounds of the mob behind him.
Nothing mattered except escape. The pungent smell of peat, the sound of insects buzzing in the night, the muck under his feet were a jumbled mixture of sensations.
He might have been running on all fours or on two feet. He didn’t know which. He only understood on a deep, instinctive level that staying alive depended on flight. Perhaps he was hallucinating now, but he felt the mob’s hot breath on the back of his neck, heard the air hissing in and out of their lungs. He felt hands clawing at him and slipping off his sweat-slick body. Or perhaps that was only the indifferent branches of bramble bushes tearing at his naked flesh.
He splashed through ankle-deep mud, then broke through into water up to his waist as a layer of peat gave way beneath his weight.
Somehow he scrambled to higher ground, where sticky earth sucked at his bare feet.
In the darkness the sounds of pursuit diminished behind him, but still he kept up his frantic flight, his path lighted only by the silvery rays of the full moon.
He ran until he was exhausted, ran until he could run no more. Sinking to his knees, he swayed uncertainly, his hand coming to rest against the trunk of a tree.
As he tried to steady himself, the sickness at the back of his throat welled up in a great wave of nausea.
He leaned forward, retching up the food that remained in his stomach from dinner. The sickness exhausted him, and he rolled to his side, curling into a ball.
Perhaps God had mercy on him that night, because no predators found him as he sank into unconsciousness.
ADAM woke in the gray light of early dawn, to the sound of birds chirping in the trees.
For terrifying heartbeats, he didn’t know where he was or even who he was. His head felt like a thousand coal miners were working away inside his skull with pickaxes, destroying brain cells as they went. When he tried to move any muscle in his body, the agony increased, so he lay very still, struggling to ride above the pain the way he did when he changed from wolf to man and back again.
Wolf to man.
The fundamental reality of his existence was his secret life as a wolf. Yet somehow he had forgotten all about that as he lay on the damp ground.
Jesus! He was in bad shape.
He closed his eyes, trying to will himself back to normal, although he couldn’t exactly say what normal was. He felt as though he were hanging on to sanity by his fingernails.
Wild, disturbing images swirled into his mind. Some came back to him with his wolf’s vision. Some were the perceptions of a man.
He saw flickering fire. Smelled a strange acrid smoke that was as sweet as it was pungent.
He squeezed his eyes more tightly shut, feeling the pounding of his heart as his fingers clenched and unclenched in the soft soil where he lay.
Had it all been a dream? A very vivid dream? Brought on by the hallucinogenic smoke?
He took a cautious sniff of the cool morning air. He didn’t smell anything strange now. But that proved nothing.
To ground himself, he focused on the sensations of his body. It wasn’t just his head that hurt. He ached in a wide variety of places. One spot in particular stung like hell. Opening his eyes, he looked down
at the long red scratches that marred the flesh over his ribs. He’d been torn by brambles on his headlong dash through the swamp.
He didn’t remember much of that. But he’d heard bullets whiz past his head. And he’d felt the primal anger of the men and women chasing him.
He was thinking about Ken White when he managed to climb to his feet. Ken White, the guy who’d held this job before him, had been found dead out here with a bullet in his brain.
Adam had smugly told himself that he wasn’t going to end up that way. Now he contemplated his narrow escape.
He looked back toward the deep swamp, thinking he needed to find the campfire where he’d seen the drug and sex party. But not now. Not when he was naked and vulnerable and covered with grunge. First he was going home to shower, tend his wounds, and dress.
He raised his head, squinting in the early morning sunlight as he got his bearings. He had a good sense of direction, but he was swaying on his feet when he set out for his little cabin. His jaw rigid, he kept moving—hurrying now, wondering what he’d say if the staff found him wandering around naked.
Or if they found the place where he’d left his clothes, he thought, as he picked up his pace and angled toward the spot where he’d undressed.
Although he still wasn’t back to normal, his brain was starting to work a little better. In his mind he contemplated the men and women he’d come upon the night before. He didn’t know who the hell they were. And finding out was going to be a problem. His wolf’s nose wouldn’t be able to identify them when he encountered them again.
The smoke had drugged him, fogged his sense of smell and clouded his vision. The body paint had finished the job of hiding the party-goers’ features.
A couple of the women had been blondes. At least one of them had been a real blonde he remembered. And the same woman had had big breasts that had bobbed up and down as she’d danced in the flickering light.
He gave a short bark of a laugh. Apparently he’d focused on breasts and female pubic hair. He couldn’t recall the details of any cocks he’d seen. But that wasn’t really surprising, given his sexual orientation.
He grimaced, thinking that what he knew about the orgy-goers was pitifully small. All his adult life he’d relied on his wolf senses. But now he was as deaf and blind as if he’d been thrown into a witches’ cauldron.
TURNING from the water-stained sink, Sara Weston peered at her image in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, thinking that her rumpled old green pants and faded brown shirt made a kind of fashion statement. They were the perfect outfit for a tramp through the swamp.
She swiped a hand through her blond hair, backed away from the mirror, and walked toward the kitchen of her little rented house, hoping that she might be able to choke down some apricot yogurt for breakfast.
She’d spent most of the night huddled in her bed, sleep an impossibility as she listened to the unfamiliar sounds of the Olakompa. Animals splashing through standing water. Buzzing insects. The occasional passing of a car down the narrow road where her rented house was located.
Along with the sounds came something else. Something she couldn’t identify that had drifted toward her on the night air like tainted mist. A mixture of old nightmares and new ones. When she’d finally fallen asleep, she’d dreamed of this house. Not as it was now. The paint on the walls was a darker shade. The furnishings were shabbier. And she’d seen a woman drifting through the rooms, a woman who had turned and held out her hand in invitation. To what? Sara didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.
She shook her head, denying her dreams. Her two nights in the motel where she’d stayed when she’d first arrived in Wayland had been bad enough. This house on the edge of the Olakompa was worse.
The air was different here. Thicker. Enfolding her in an unwelcome embrace that made her feel as though someone had pressed a malicious hand over her nose and mouth.
She tried to banish the unwanted image. But it wouldn’t go away. She had always had uncanny judgments. She’d sense that a place or a person was good or bad. And usually those perceptions would turn out to be valid.
It was just one of the things that made her feel different from other people. Different in a way she had never wanted to explore too deeply.
So she kept a lid on the fanciful side of her nature. In her personal life. And her professional life, too.
When she’d been a teenager, she’d had a hard time deciding what she’d wanted to do with her life. She’d been attracted to art. And her high school teachers had encouraged her in that area. She’d been good. Too good, maybe. Because when she’d looked at her drawings and paintings, she’d thought they’d revealed too much about her inner self. And that had made her feel exposed.
So she’d backed away from creative expression. In college she’d taken a lot of science courses. Science was steady and down-to-earth. You dealt with facts and information and numbers. And the numbers didn’t give away anything about the person writing them down.
Science had taught her to be measured and methodical. To study each new environment carefully. Before she’d come to Wayland, she’d read about the town. The early residents had raised cotton and tobacco. Then peanuts had become the major cash crop in the area. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a weaving factory had provided a lot of employment—until the jobs had gone to countries like Mexico and China where labor costs were lower.
Now tourism was an important part of the economy thanks to Nature’s Refuge and the nearby national park that drew visitors to southern Georgia’s unique and beautiful Olakompa Swamp.
Many of the same tourists who came to the parks also visited the cute little stores and restaurants along the four block commercial stretch that was now called Historic Downtown Wayland. In fact, the town was getting a reputation for the number and quality of its antique and secondhand shops. As well as the discount mall out near the interstate.
On the surface, Wayland had a good deal of charm—if you didn’t poke too closely into the pockets of poverty that she’d seen in some of the outlying areas.
She’d done her homework. And now she would do the job that she’d contracted to do—a research project for Granville Pharmaceuticals. They wanted to find out if any of the plants native to the area had commercial medicinal value. And they’d hired her to conduct a six-month study of the local flora.
This morning, she supposed she should be opening the boxes of lab equipment that had arrived from UPS yesterday afternoon. But she needed to get out of the little house.
So she climbed into the secondhand Toyota, Miss Hester, that Mom had given her when she’d gone off to college in Chapel Hill. Almost eight years later, she was still driving the old rattletrap.
Mom had wanted her to get something better before she headed for Georgia. She’d protested that Miss Hester was just fine.
As she drove, she scanned the highway for the Nature’s Refuge access road she’d been instructed to look for, then slowed when she saw the turnoff. Not the paved public drive that led to the front entrance, but the gravel track that skirted the edge of the vast swampland property.
The directions were very precise, and here it was.
Behind her on Route 177 a pickup truck honked, and she jumped, then watched the driver wave his fist in anger as he pulled around her and barreled down the blacktop. He probably was thinking, “stupid woman driver.”
Goody for him. Turning off the highway, she came to a stop, peering uncertainly up the road, wishing that this job offer hadn’t been so tempting.
Too bad none of the dozens of applications for tenure track teaching had panned out. Apparently, the market for newly minted Ph.D. botanists was depressed.
“Don’t worry dear; something will turn up,” Mom had said, with that eternal optimism of hers. “You’ve always loved plants. I know you can do something with your special skills.”
Sara smiled to herself. Right, she loved plants. Loved growing them. Loved knowing their names and t
heir uses. But more than that, she’d worked long and hard to earn an advanced degree in botany, which now hadn’t seemed worth the effort considering the costs involved.
When she realized her hands were clamped around the steering wheel, she unclenched them. With a sigh, she took her foot off the brake. The car drifted slowly forward as though it had a mind of its own and had somehow acquired information she didn’t possess.
Something just out of her grasp.
With a shake of her head, she pressed down on the accelerator, fighting a sense of disquiet as she felt the shadows of giant trees close in on either side of the car.
Really, if you looked at this place objectively, it was beautiful, more beautiful than she’d imagined.
A low area full of water, cattails, duckweed, and water hyacinths ran along the side of the road. In the shallows a blue heron moved slowly away from her, poking its head below the surface, then lifting it gracefully again, and she stopped for a moment to watch its progress. She smiled as she saw a small brown lizard hop onto a floating leaf. There were eleven kinds of lizards in the swamp, and she guessed she was going to see a lot of them while she was here.
Starting up again, she drove a few more yards to a wooden barrier. On a nearby long-leaf pine was a large No Trespassing sign.
She’d been told to expect the gate. Carefully, she looked around, probing the shadows under the trees before grabbing her knapsack and climbing out.
It was early, but she could feel heat rising from the marshy land on either side of the desolate road as she walked toward the barrier.
Still, when a cloud drifted across the sun, she felt a sudden chill. Shaking it off, she walked to the padlocked chain that secured the gate and opened the lock.
With the bar out of the way, she returned to her car and drove through, then swung the wooden pole back into place and snapped the lock closed, thinking that escape was now impossible.
ADAM regarded his haggard face in the bathroom mirror. He looked like he’d been shot out of a cannon and missed the net.