by Rebecca York
He stepped through the door, and they both turned to face him. "Sit with us while Kathryn reads," Lily demanded.
"I'd like that," he said, thinking that they'd have to be a little stricter with his daughter. But not now.
A half-hour later, they'd finally turned off the lights, gone into the master bedroom, and closed the door.
It was a masculine room. He'd swept away any feminine overtones a year ago. And he was glad that no traces of his previous relationship lingered here. He'd already told Kathryn she could redecorate any way she wanted.
"Things are going pretty well," he said.
She nodded.
"You're good for Lily."
"I love her. And Craig. And you. And I feel like Emily and I have come to an understanding. She knows she'll always be the kids' grandma, which is wonderful, since neither one of us has any parents left."
He reached for her with his good arm, holding her close as best he could. "I love you so much. When I first saw you, all I could think about was getting you into bed. Now there's so much more I want with you. Lord, I was lucky to find you."
"It's the same for me."
For long moments, they simply clung to each other, caught up in the joy of being alone.
"So—how soon do you think we can manage a wedding?" he asked in a voice that wasn't quite steady.
"Oh, pretty quickly. If we just have Emily and the kids. And Ross and Megan."
"I want you to have a wedding you'll remember. Something fancy."
"Fancy. Right. Just your style." She thought for a moment. "Well, I've heard about a fancy wedding pavilion down at Disney World. Would that do?"
"You're kidding?"
"No. I think it would be fun. And easy. I'm sure they provide all the trimmings—except that I want to splurge on a dress." She warmed to the idea, adding details. "And if Emily will take the kids off for tours of the theme parks after the ceremony, I think we'll all have a wonderful time. We can rent one of those—what are they called?—tree houses. So we end up with a bedroom door that locks."
"Yeah, a door that locks. That better be in the contract."
She snuggled against him, then raised her head and laughed.
"What?"
"Maybe we should film it, so we show it on a Valentine's Day segment of Oprah. You know—couples telling how they met."
He chuckled. "Yeah, right. A demon brought us together."
"We never did find out his name." The name was important, they had discovered from reading Portal to Another Universe. It was kind of a compulsion, learning all the gory details. The book explained that the magician had to know the demon's name to capture him.
"I just think of him as the SOB," Jack muttered. "He put us through hell."
"Which makes heaven all the sweeter," Kathryn whispered, raising her mouth to his for a long, eager kiss that quickly turned passionate.
Jack looked toward the bed, then back to Kathryn. "I'm sorry you're leaping into the reality of parenthood. But it will be safer if we let the kids settle down for a half-hour first."
"I found that out last night, when Lily stood outside the door, twisting the knob," she answered. "They're curious about us—alone together."
"I know, but things will settle down."
They kicked off their shoes and stretched out on the bed in their clothing—touching and talking and making plans for the future until the heat building between them was too great. Kathryn got up and wove her way on shaky legs to the door, where she checked the lock—then returned to Jack.
As he lay on his back, watching her standing over him, slowly starting to unbutton her blouse, he thought that he was the luckiest man in the world.
Turn the page for a preview of
Rebecca York's new novel,
Witching Moon
Coming in October 2003 from Jove
THE LAST GUY who had walked in his shoes was a dead man, Adam Marshall thought as his booted feet sank into the soggy ground of the southern Georgia swamp. But he didn't intend to suffer the same fate. He had advantages that the previous head ranger at Nature's Refuge hadn't possessed.
Still, something was making his skin prickle tonight, Adam silently admitted as he slipped one hand into the pocket of his jeans. Standing very still on the porch of his cabin, he listened to the night sounds around him. The clicking noise of a bullfrog. The buzz of insects. The splash of a predator slipping into the murky waters of the mysterious marshes that the Indians had called Olakompa.
The Indians were long gone, but an aura of other-worldliness remained in this pocket of wetlands, which had managed to withstand the encroachment of civilization. It was a place steeped in superstition, and Adam had heard some pretty wild tales—of people who had been swallowed up by the "trembling earth" and of strange creatures that roamed the backcountry.
In the darkness, he laughed. He'd taken all that with a grain of salt. But maybe he could contribute to the myths while he was here.
This was a very different setting from his previous post in the dry desert country of Big Bend National Park.
He liked the change. Liked the swamp. For now. He never stayed anyplace too long. It didn't matter where he lived, actually. Just so he had the space he needed to roam free.
He looked up and saw the moon filtering through the branches of the willow oaks and cypress trees. It was huge and yellow and full, and he knew there were people who would think that the large orb in the sky had something to do with his unsettled mood. But it wasn't that.
He dragged in a long breath, detecting a scent that was out of place in the sultry air. Nothing he had ever smelled before, he thought, as he walked down the steps, then into the shadows under the oak trees.
Whatever it was had a strange tang, a pull, an edge of danger that he found disturbing. Of course, he was affected by odors as few people were. And by other things most folks took in stride. Coffee, for example, made him sick. And forget liquor.
Later tonight, he'd probably have a cup of herbal tea. By himself, since he was the only staffer who lived in the park—in the cozy cabin thoughtfully provided by Austen Barnette, who owned this three-hundred-acre corner of the swampland, along with a sizable portion of Wayland, Georgia.
Barnette was the big cheese in the area. And he'd gone to the expense and bother of hiring Adam Marshall away from the U.S. Park Service to show he was serious about running Nature's Refuge as a private enterprise. But there was another reason as well. Adam had a reputation for solving problems.
Most recently, at Big Bend, he had shut down a bunch of drug smugglers who had been bringing their cargoes across the, drought-shrunken Rio Grande. He had tracked them to their mountain hideout and scared the shit out of them before turning them over to the border patrol.
He had done a good job, because he always demanded the best from himself as far as his work was concerned. It compensated for the other area of his life where he wasn't quite so effective—personal relationships. But he was damn well going to find out who had killed Ken White, the previous head ranger.
He walked to a spot about a hundred yards from his cabin, a place where he often stopped and contemplated the swamp before going out to prowl the park. It was a good distance from the house, where he was sure nobody would find his clothing.
Standing in the shade of a pine, he sniffed the wind again as his hands went to the front of his shirt. He unbuttoned the garment and dropped it on the ground, then pulled off his shoes and pants, stripping to the buff.
The sultry air felt good on his bare skin, and he stood for a moment, digging his toes into the springy layer of decomposing leaves covering the ground, caught by a push-pull within himself. The man warring with the animal clamoring to run free.
The animal won, as it must. Closing his dark eyes, he called on ancient knowledge, ancient ritual, ancient deities as he gathered his inner strength, steeling himself for familiar pain, even as he said the words that he had learned on his sixteenth birthday—the way his brothers had bef
ore him. As far as he knew, the only Marshall boys still alive were himself and Ross. But he didn't know for sure because he hadn't seen his brother in years.
It was when he prepared to change that his thoughts sometimes turned to Ross, but he didn't let those thoughts break his concentration.
"Taranis, Epona, Cerridwen," he intoned, then repeated the same phrase and went on to another. "Ga. Feart. Cleas. Duais. Aithriocht. Go gcumhdai is dtreorai na deithe thu."
On that night so long ago, the ceremonial words had helped him through the agony of transformation, opened his mind, freed him from the bonds of the human shape. Maybe they were nonsense syllables. He didn't know. Ross had studied the ancient Gaelic language and said he understood what they meant. Adam didn't care about the meaning.
All that mattered was that they blocked some of the blinding pain that always came with transformation.
While the human part of his mind screamed in protest, he felt his jaw elongate, his teeth sharpen, his body contort as muscles and limbs transformed themselves into a different shape that was as familiar to him as his human form.
The first few times he'd done it had been a nightmare of torture and terror. But gradually, he'd learned what to expect, learned to rise above the physical sensations of muscles spasming, bones changing shape, the very structure of his cells mutating from one kind of DNA to another. At least that was how he thought about it, because he didn't understand the science involved. In fact, he was sure modern science would have no explanations for his family heritage.
But the change came upon him nevertheless.
Gray hair formed along his flanks, covering his body in a thick, silver-tipped pelt. The color—the very structure—of his eyes changed as he dropped to all fours. He was no longer a man but an animal far more suited to the natural environment around him.
A wolf. Where no wolves had made their home for decades. But now one had command of Nature's Refuge. It was his. And the night was his.
Once the transformation was complete, a raw, primal joy rippled through him, and he pawed the ground, reveling in the feel of the damp soil under his feet. Then, raising his head, he sucked in a draft of air, his lungs expanding as his nose drank in the rich scents that were suddenly part of the landscape. To his right an alligator had gone very still. And a bear had stopped and raised its head, sensing the presence of a rival.
The large black beast stayed where it was for a moment, then ambled off in the other direction, unwilling to challenge the creature with whom he suddenly shared the swamp.
Adam's lips shaped themselves into a wolfish grin. He wanted to throw back his head and howl at the small victory. But he checked the impulse, because the mind inside his skull still held his human intelligence. And the man understood the need for stealth.
Dragging in a breath, he examined the unfamiliar scent he had picked up. It was nothing that belonged in this natural world. Men had brought something here that was out of place.
The smell was acrid, yet at the same time strangely sweet to his wolf's senses. And it drew him forward.
Still, he moved with caution, setting off in the direction of the odor, feeling the air thicken around him in a strange, unfamiliar way as he padded forward.
Each breath seemed to change his sense of awareness. His mind was usually sharp, but the edges of his thoughts were beginning to blur as though someone had soaked his brain with a bottle of sweet, sticky syrup.
The air stung his eyes now, and he blinked back moisture, then blinked again as he caught his first glimpse of fire.
The flames jolted him out of his lethargy.
Fire! Where no fire should be. Out here in the open—in the middle of the park. The swamp might be wet, but that wouldn't stop a blaze from sweeping through the area, if the flames were hot enough. He'd read as much as he could about the Olakompa in the past few months, and he knew that in the winter of nineteen fifty-five, wildfires had burned eighty percent of the swamp area.
Fires were usually due to lightning igniting the layer of peat buried under some areas of the swamp.
He'd seen no lightning tonight, but it wasn't difficult to imagine a conflagration roaring unchecked through the park. Imagine birds taking flight, animals scattering for safety, the water evaporating in the heat.
His mind fuzzy from the smoke, he kept moving forward, toward the center of the danger. But when he took a second look, he saw that the flames were contained. A bonfire. Deep in the wilderness.
Tall, upright shadows moved around the flames, and in his bleary state, he could make no sense of what he was seeing. Then the wavery images resolved themselves into naked human figures—dancing and gyrating in the glow of the fire.
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 twos 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 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.
Ruth Glick has written more than seventy novels, most of them under the pseudonym Rebecca York. She and her husband live in Columbia, Maryland.
Visit her on her website:
www.rebeccayork.com.