"I thought so, too." He smiled at her in a tender way. I glanced between them, wondering who she was, and why they seemed to know each other. Why had he brought me here to see a strange old lady?
Ryan stooped down and embraced her, instantly becoming lost in her swathe of black shawls. She patted his back, then pushed him away. "That's enough sentiment from you. I don't want your lady friend to get the wrong idea."
He snorted, and she threw back her head and laughed. She turned to me, picking up my hand and holding it between hers. "You must be Alex," she said. "Come in, come in. Ryan has told me all about you. I'm Clara. I imagine he's told you nothing about me."
"Absolutely nothing at all," I replied, feeling instantly at ease around the woman.
"That is like him," she laid a hand on my shoulder and led me deeper into the house. It was like no house I'd ever seen before. The dark wood walls were nearly completely obscured by all manner of art and ephemera; beautiful impressionist paintings hung next to postcards from Las Vegas dive bars and framed paintings of happy-looking people in strange costumes. I peeked into a cosy looking living room, and spied a Ryan Raynard original hanging over the fireplace. Dark, antique furniture was crammed into every corner, every surface crammed with candle stubs, crystals, old leather books yellowed with age, and realistic statues of foxes and wolves leaping and howling. I leapt back as a black cat jumped down from a velvet-covered settee and streaked across the hall.
Clara squeezed my shoulder. "Don't mind Clarence. He's always jumpy around strangers. There was a little boy living next door who used to pull his tail, and he's never quite got over it."
"I hope you gave him a stern word, Clara," said Ryan. "We can't have a young lad thinking that sort of behaviour is okay."
"Oh," she smiled, her eyes dancing. "Don't you worry; I gave him more than a word. Come through here – I've set up for you outside. Alex must be starving." Clara led us out a back door. Outside was a wooden porch overlooking a picturesque garden that faded into the dark wood beyond. Fairy lights lined the path to a wooden gazebo entwined in wisteria, beneath which a small table had been set with candles and silverware for two. Champagne chilled in a silver bucket on one side of the table. On the other, steam poured from beneath a silver dish, warmed with the flame of a small candle placed underneath.
"This is beautiful," I whispered. My stomach rumbled loudly. Clara was right – I was starving.
"I thought you'd like it," Ryan replied. He pulled out a seat, and gestured for me to sit. I did so, gingerly, not wanting to upset the delicate tablecloth and posy of flowers beside my place.
"Tonight's menu is a watercress salad, followed by coq au vin in a red wine reduction," said Clara. "And bitter chocolate torte for dessert. Ryan, do stop fussing and sit down. I'll pour the champagne. Those big, clumsy paws of yours can't be trusted not to spill."
"Wait, Ryan, this isn't right. Clara is your friend. She can't serve us out here like a … like a servant."
"This was her idea," Ryan said. "I came to Clara because I haven't taken a woman out in a very long time, and she's the closest thing to a woman I know."
"Ryan!" But his cruel words only made Clara laugh. She cupped her hand on my shoulder and waved my protests away.
"In my day, I cooked at the finest kitchens in London, Paris, New York … It does this old heart proud to see Ryan here with a beautiful young thing like yourself."
"Clara, please come sit with us," I begged.
"Nonsense. You two make yourselves at home and I'll fetch the first course." She bustled away, singing under her breath as she disappeared into the house.
I leaned over the table and whispered to Ryan. "Is Clara a shifter, too?"
He shook his head, laughing. "No, and if she were, she'd have such keen hearing she'd be able to listen to you talk about her even when you're whispering. Clara is a witch. She comes from a long line of witches that have had a close tie with Crookshollow. She's very special to me, as you'll find out, and I don't get out to see her nearly enough. Sometimes, when you're used to being alone, even the idea of visiting people who are truly dear to you seems too much."
"You haven't seen her in ages, and you made her slave away in the kitchen, cooking us coq au vin!"
"I made the food in Clara's kitchen, while she bustled around me, adding two pints of cooking sherry to everything and trying to steal all the chocolate." He raised his glass. "Let us toast."
"What are we toasting?"
"To you, Alex – the beautiful, charming, infuriating lady who wandered into my mansion, and my life." Ryan held up his glass. Feeling my face grow hot, I raised my own, touching the glass to his. I would never normally fall for such blatant flattery, but Ryan made it sound both utterly sincere and extremely sexy.
Clara brought out the salads. We both dug in. As soon as the first leaf was on my tongue, I realised how famished I was. I wolfed down my salad with hardly a word, stopping only to lubricate my mouth with wine.
"Ryan?" I asked, setting down my knife and fork as soon as I was done. "If you are happy being a recluse, why did you decide to have an exhibition? Why now?"
He put down his fork, and sighed. "I wondered when you'd ask that."
"It just strikes me as strange, that’s all."
"There's more to this story than you know, Alex, but I didn't want to hit you with all of it last night. You might have heard some stories about my father? How he found some witches in the forest, and they cursed him into leaving the manor abandoned while he fled to the Scottish highlands?"
I nodded.
He turned to Clara, who had arrived with the main course. "Meet the witch he found in the forest that night."
"It isn't like the stories say," Clara said, as she cleared away my empty bowl, and placed a delicious smelling chicken breast in front of me, piled high with mushrooms and drizzled in a glorious red wine sauce. "We became lovers, but Alistair was consumed by his torn feelings. He came from a long line of vulpines who believed in the importance of keeping the bloodlines pure. Men in the Raynard family only mated with other pureblood vixens, ensuring their line continued untainted by ordinary human genes. Taking up with someone like me, who did not have any shifter heritage … it was an insult to his entire family, and they let him know it. But, he was a man of violent passions, and as much as it tore him up inside, he couldn't stay away from me."
Clara smiled, and she suddenly appeared decades younger – her beauty immobile, made even more luminous by the wisdom of her years. I knew then that theirs had been a great love, for what man could have found her in the forest and not been utterly mesmerised by her?
"We were as careful as we could be, but still I fell pregnant. Alistair's father told him on no uncertain terms that if I had the child, Alistair would be disinherited. Alistair said he did not care. They were out hunting in the forest, and they got into a bitter fight. His father bit Alistair on the neck, accidentally opening a vein and killing him."
She paused then, her eyes searching the heavens, lost in the memories of her love. I stared at Ryan, watching his expression as this story unfolded. His grandfather had killed his father, over him? What a horrible thing. What had it done to him growing up to know that? And how was Ryan not like the other mutts?
"Without Alistair, I didn't know what to do," she said. "I was young, and pregnant, and very, very afraid. I knew the Raynard clan would try to kill me before I gave birth to my cub, for they did not want a mutt or a human child to inherit Raynard Hall. My parents had disowned me when they found out I was pregnant out of wedlock. I had no one to turn to, and I did what any young girl pregnant with a shapeshifter's baby would do – I ran away to London and fell in with a bad crowd."
I laughed. "Of course. That's probably what I would've done."
"I did the best I could, working in kitchens in the city and staying with friends until I could afford my own place. I built a network of people who helped me and who nurtured Ryan's creativity – he spent his childhood hanging out wi
th musicians and artists and other radicals. I taught him to control his shifts, and sometimes I took him to Hyde Park and let him run free." She patted Ryan's hair. "Piece by piece, I built a life for us – it wasn't the life he would have had in Raynard Hall, but it was a life full of colour and unique people.
"Even though I had no contact with the shifter community, I knew Ryan was special." Clara smiled at her son. "He wasn't the kind of mutt Alistair had talked about with such distaste. But then, he wasn't wholly human, either. It seems my own magical lineage might have passed down a unique range of genes, but I don't know for certain. For whatever reason, Ryan has all the powers and abilities of a full-blooded vulpine.
"When Ryan hit puberty, his vulpine genes started to work in overdrive. Imagine your typical angry teenage boy, and add a fatherless household and some feral fox genetics, and you have the wild, surly son I did my best to care for. It had become evident to me that Ryan hated the city. He craved the forests, the trees, the rivers. He wanted to roam, and he wanted to hunt. My city life was holding him back."
Clara left then, returning to the kitchen. We both picked at our meals in silence while I digested everything she'd said. I met Ryan's eyes, wanting to ask him all sorts of questions about his father and his life in London, but my words caught in my throat. Finally, I said. "So what happened next?"
"I ran away," he said. "I'm ashamed of it now, but at the time, I felt I had no choice. I packed up my paints and a change of clothes and hitch-hiked across England. Eventually, I ended up in Belfast. There are great tracts of wilderness near the city, where I would retreat for days at a time. I met other shifters there, some friends, some not. I started to learn about this other side of me, the side I had to hide when I lived in London with Clara.
"And the more I learned about the shifter world, the more I craved a territory of my own. In Ireland, I was always an outsider, always a subordinate to the established clans there. Clara wrote to me from London, telling me my grandfather had died recently, and if I wanted to, it would be safe for me to return to Crookshollow. Raynard Hall was officially mine."
Clara came out, and set down a slice of torte on a beautiful china plate in front of each of us. I grabbed her arm as she turned to leave.
"Please stay and enjoy dessert with us," I said. "I want to hear all about your life in Crookshollow."
Ryan pulled over an embroidered ottoman, and Clara begrudgingly sat herself down. Ryan pushed his torte toward her, then got up to go to the kitchen to cut himself a slice.
Clara watched me as I finished off the last of my chicken. "Ryan tells me you're a Fauntelroy," she said.
I nodded, my mouth full of buttery mushrooms. "I didn't know about my connection to the vulpine world until yesterday."
"I knew your mother," she said. "She was a woman of singular kindness and wit. From what Ryan tells me, you've inherited many of her traits. I was so sorry to hear she died."
"Yeah, me too." My parents had been killed in a car accident five years earlier. It was a hit and run, and they'd never found the culprit.
"I liked you the moment you walked in my door," she said, taking Ryan's champagne glass from the table and draining it in one gulp. "And I'm picky about people. So is he. If Ryan has chosen you, he must think you're truly something special."
"I'm told there's not much choice in the matter, for either of us," I said.
She waved her hand. "Oh, that old ‘fated to be together’ line? Vulpines have been telling themselves that nonsense for thousands of years. Personally, I don't believe it. Sure, they can sniff out potential mates who have the best chance of giving them pure shifting offspring, but the clans are so in-bred now that it's all just a genetic pic'n'mix, when it comes right down to it. No, the real magic isn't in finding the one you're destined to be with, it's in forging the bond that two people make together, that enables them to endure when one of them becomes another creature."
Ryan returned then with a slice of torte for himself, and another bottle of champagne, which he poured into our waiting glasses. I dug in to my torte, the delicious chocolate ganache running over my tongue, as I gestured for him to continue his story.
"When I returned to Crookshollow, I tried to convince Clara to move into Raynard Hall with me, but she wasn't having it. She knew me too well – even in that huge house, her presence would be too cloying, too close for me. But she did move back to the village, to be near to me. I spent the first couple of years here repairing the damage the decades of neglect had done to my ancestral home. I also refurnished my own suite of rooms to get rid of the moose heads and mahogany and create something more conducive to making art. Finally, I could establish my own territory, and work in complete solitude, and I could be close to Clara, to protect her. At night, I roamed the forest, and little by little I fought off the other vulpine clans that had ensconced themselves in the Raynard territory and reclaimed Crookshollow as my own. As the years went by, my life in the forest, and my art, became my driving force, and so I took myself out of the world, becoming more and more like my father, letting my fox side control me. Until you came along."
Ryan paused. He reached across the table and clasped Clara's hand, meeting her eyes. The love that flowed between them was fierce, primal, bound by bonds of blood. He would do anything to protect her. This was a side of Ryan I'd never seen before, the side of him that was utterly human.
"So what has changed now? Why the exhibition?"
"Over the last few months there has been an influx of new shifters into Crookshollow forest," Ryan said. "Not just foxes, but wolves and birds and badgers and deer and all types of shifters. They're responsible for all those animal maulings and attacks. Most are mutts, like Marcus, but I don't think they're doing this on their own. You mentioned a name last night – Isengrim. That is the name of a powerful lycanthrope, a wolf-shifter."
"A werewolf?"
Ryan shook his head. "Werewolves are creatures of mythology, but they are based on the lycanthrope, one of the most ancient and powerful shifter species. Wolves and lycanthropes were once common in Britain, but they became too bold, decimating livestock and desecrating burial sites, digging up the bodies. The species were completely eradicated by the 19th century.
"Isengrim is a rogue lycanthrope. He left his clan in the Black Forest and came to England as a stowaway on a fishing boat a few years ago. He has some dangerous ideas about the place of shifters in the world, and he's been moving up and down the country, gathering followers. He's stirred up the mutt population with dangerous thoughts, bringing chaos and disorder to the delicate shifter dynamic. He wants shifters to rise up, to not only make themselves known to humans, but to take over control of the country. A few weeks ago, I saw him in the forest, and ever since more and more mutts and rogue shifters have entered the forest, dancing dangerously close to the edge of my territory. As an old magical area, and an important part of shifter lore, Crookshollow is an ideal place to launch his attack. The clan who holds this area could theoretically command all the shifters in Britain. And that's what I believe Isengrim plans to do. He has a lot of supporters, even in some of the old, powerful clans – dangerous shifters who want free license to hurt humans, who they believe to be inferior.
"All that's standing in their way is me, and my old territorial claims on the village and the surrounding forest. They can't just kill me – they have to get me to hand over my rights, but because I have nothing and no one in my life they care about – they have no idea Clara is here – they have no leverage. Edgar and the other ravens have been watching my home for weeks, waiting for a chink in my armour to reveal itself. Effectively, they have me trapped here – if I leave Crookshollow to search for help, they would step in and claim my land in my absence. So I did the only thing I know how to do … I painted. In my paintings are messages – to shifter clans I know in Ireland, in Germany, in the Americas. These messages call them here to help me, to help me put this unrest down before it turns to bloodshed."
"You had to get
your paintings in front of the world, so the shifters could see what was happening in Crookshollow." I breathed.
"Exactly. But now the situation is even more dire. Because now they know you are here, they suddenly have leverage against me. That's why I have to protect you, and why this exhibition has to go ahead, no matter the cost."
"But this doesn't make any sense. Why did Marcus break in to my house to look for the ring?”
"He wanted to scare you into leaving Crookshollow, into staying away from me. Otherwise, he has to kill me to claim you, and that would incur the wrath of Isengrim. But if you leave my territory, you are free for him to claim as his own. He gets what he wants, and Isengrim gets my territory. If the shifters take you and try to use you against me, then he doesn't have a hope, for they will most likely kill you. And more than he is loyal to Isengrim and his fellow mutts, Marcus wants a mate to redeem his bloodline."
Panic was beginning to rise up within me once again. "If it's so dangerous, if these shifters are just lying in wait to grab me, why are we sitting out here, where anyone can see us? Why are we eating dinner and touring the art gallery like nothing is wrong?"
"Clara has powerful protective spells around this place. They wouldn't dare come here, and they won't be able to sense either of us through her barriers. They don't know where we are. The gallery is part of my territory, and they won't attack there in daylight, not until they are ready. It's relatively safe, while you're with me. Do you see now, Alex, that the exhibition must go ahead."
I glanced up. The moon had risen high in the sky, tinging the sky with an ethereal blue glow. I stared into Ryan's eyes and saw the moon reflected there – flecks of blueish light against those deep-brown orbs.
"I don't want to stay at my flat tonight," I said, shivering as the cold night air touched my bare arms.
Clara reached across and squeezed my hand. "You've learned so much tonight that you must digest," she said. "Ryan, take Alex back to Raynard Hall. She needs a nice bubble bath, and maybe another glass of wine."
Crookshollow foxes box set: The complete fox shapeshifter romance series Page 7