Wilding Nights

by Lee Killough

  If Rikki felt stiff, none showed. Unlike him, too, she obviously still had plenty of energy. It must have been her shadow cutting off the moonlight as she left the room that woke him. That moonlight and the juxtaposition of the bed and doors let him watch her all the way to the rear wall. He lay taking pleasure in the view. Like Allison at the gym, she moved with fluid grace. Moonlight turning her hair and skin molten silver made her look more Elvish than ever.

  Moments later, however, he levered himself up on an elbow. What was she doing? He had assumed she intended to run to the wall and back, but she appeared aimed for a gate in the wall...her stride increasing. In another couple of yards she would hit the gate head-on. It was too tall to jump, twelve feet at least.

  Then...glowing ripples framed her. Zane jerked bolt upright, flooded by that same nameless terror he felt outside Jorge’s and in Ident’s waiting area with Makepeace. But instead of disappearing, the ripples spread out, brightening, and suddenly Rikki disappeared. A giant smoky-grey wolf filled the space, rising to clear the gate in an effortless arc.

  Zane stumbled out of bed and onto the terrace, heart thundering. What the hell? He could not really have seen what he thought he did. It must have been a trick of shadow and moonlight. Except no shadow could explain how Rikki vaulted a twelve-foot gate...and no shadow fell on the rear wall, only moonlight.

  While part of his mind continued denying what he saw and searched for a logical explanation, panic boiled from every cell screaming: Run! He snatched up his trousers from the terrace and jumped into them, not bothering with briefs, just shoved them into a pocket, and scrambled back in to scoop up the rest of his clothes, his handcuffs and gun. Escape came first. Once away from here he could take the time to think about this...sort it out.

  But as he reached for his shirt, he had already begun thinking...overriding the panic. Blue said a giant “police dog” chased Demry. A Hell Hound. What he saw just now came close to that description. Zane eyed the gate. Someone able to clear twelve feet from a lope should have no trouble reaching a second floor window with a little more effort. But she was not the only one showing those heat ripples. Makepeace had, too, and, for an instant, Allison. Standing in front of his painting, Allison looked as though she belonged in the landscape. Her difference from everyone else had struck him from the beginning. How different was she?

  He was, he remembered, alone in the house.

  Carrying his shoes and the rest of his clothes, he left Rikki’s room through the hall door and moved quickly down the hallways opening doors. These all seemed to be bed-sitting rooms like Rikki’s. Hurriedly, he worked his way in the general direction of the front of the house until he reached the entry hall. From there he tried to remember the route Honora took him last night. If only he knew what he was looking for. Keeping his ears tuned for the sound of footsteps or an opening front door, he moved through the rooms. Moonlight filled them. They all seem situated so they had plenty of windows. By that light he studied Honora’s paintings again, feeling the primordial emotions they recorded. The violence.

  Bookshelves caught his eye and drew him like a magnet. Their library, he quickly discovered, was an antiquarian’s dream. Some of the books looked very old. A whole section had French titles. Others he carried to the window where the moonlight let him read copyright dates back to the early 1800's...novels; poetry; old medical texts; memoirs of several Civil War officers, one inscribed to “Alexander Goodnight, who has shown as much bravery at his photography as any soldier on the battlefield.”

  Then he noticed photos sitting on the front of the shelves.

  Zane carried them over to the window, too. The first looked similar to the enlargement and painting of the New Orleans madam in Honora’s studio, but in this one, clearly a very old photograph taken in the medium’s infancy, she shared a velvet couch with a young woman who bore a striking likeness to Honora. The other photograph, in one panel of a triple frame, showed a man in a WWII era flight suit with Marine insignia, standing in front of a Corsair on a tropical island. The middle section of the frame held a letter dated 1943, informing Honora how Lt. Jonah Goodnight’s plane had gone down in the South Pacific and expressing condolences for the loss of her son. The last section of the frame had the glass removed and medals pinned to velvet glued in the frame. But the medals included some from the Civil War and World War I as well as World War II.

  Zane stared at the photograph. Honora had a son who fought in World War II. That supported Kirsten’s claims about her age. Except, even if she had a child while in her teens, he could not have been more than twenty or so at the time of the war. The man in the photo looked fully mature. And why did the medals displayed with his photograph include those from wars he could not possibly have fought in?

  Remembering Morgan Surrette’s box accordion file of photographs, Zane began opening doors in the cabinets below the bookshelves. He found magazines, children’s games, a rack of poker chips and playing cards. Then a locked door.

  Judging by the key hole it was a simple rim lock, probably with one tumbler, operated by a small version of a skeleton key. He pulled out his billfold and picked a credit card. It slid between the door and casing, and moments later he had the door open. Inside sat not just a box of photographs but a shelf of albums. Motherlode!

  As he carried each album to the window, alert for sounds of Allison arriving home or Rikki coming back, he eyed the room for hiding places or an escape route. If they caught him now, he had no alibi to explain himself.

  The first several albums proved to be folios. One held photographs of Civil War camps, with Confederate soldiers sometimes posed and sometimes candid, some smiling, some beaten into exhaustion...and battlefields with bloated carcasses of dead horses and windrows of dead soldiers. All had “Goodnight” stamped on the edge. No doubt the Alexander Goodnight mentioned in the book dedication. Another folio covered World War I. The style of the photographs looked like those of the Civil War. Other folios...of the Depression, World War II, and Korea, had a different style. A different photographer, obviously. The World War II folio included one photograph of a woman dressed in fatigues and a combat helmet, carrying a big press camera. Her grin reminded him of Rikki.

  The next album held family photographs. They started with Elvish girls in a bordello parlor, labeled with familiar last names...Golden, Sweet, Swann, Bliss...then Civil War tintypes. Goosebumps rose on Zane’s back. One of the soldiers pictured looked like the man by the corsair, only younger. The label identified him as “Joseph Goodnight”. Almost all the photographs of him included another young soldier who looked boyish but was identified as “Bianca”. There had been women who dressed as men and joined up, Zane knew. Bianca must have been one of them. But she seemed familiar. After a minute he placed her. She looked strikingly like the woman introduced to him on the patio last night as Beatrice.

  Goosebumps spread out across the rest of his body. Honora’s face stared at him from a family photograph that the high collars and corseted waists placed at the turn of the century. Posing with her were Bianca with an infant in her lap, a woman who looked like a younger version of a woman introduced to him as Isabell, a pre-pubescent girl, and two adult males. One of those looked like Joseph/Jonah.

  He hurried on through the album. The pre-pubescent girl aged through a number of photographs, until she, too, sat with an infant in her lap. “Georgiana and Lennox, 1915.” Lennox could be a family name. Georgiana was now clearly the grinning World War II photographer. But how could she look the same age in 1915 and 1943?

  He tried not to think, just study the photographs. Those of the World War I era included views of the trenches and Paris, with three recurring faces: the Joseph/Jonah one, Bianca/Beatrice –masquerading as male again--and the second adult male in the group photo....identified as “Joshua, Biddy, and Aaron.” They seemed joined at the hip. Every photo of one included the others. Through the twenties and thirties the albums recorded what appeared to be combined hunting/social events, labeled Ha
rvest Gathering, Spring Gathering, summer hunting, winter hunting...with triumphant Elvish men and women skinning and butchering deer and elk, and even American Buffalo. Zane remembered Rikki’s comment about avid hunters in the family. But no rifles appeared in any of the hunting photographs.

  The infant Lennox matured into the spitting image of Councilwoman Lennox Goodnight.

  He felt only numb, no surprise, when photographs from World War II showed the same faces from the Civil War and World War I.

  Allison began appearing in the fourth album as an infant on the lap of Georgiana, but now called “Gina”. The date was 1953.

  Zane’s heart raced. If he believed the labels, Lennox and Allison were sisters...with a mother who had one child in 1915 and another in the fifties. And looked almost the same age in both photographs! Could Allison really be in her forties? She looked barely older than he was.

  He paged on through the album feeling caught in a bizarre dream. Aaron appeared for the last time leaning against an airplane with a jaunty scrawl across the bottom of the snapshot: “Andy of Air America.” A teenage Allison in photos labeled “Summer camp” wore jungle camouflage fatigues and a full military pack, and in one, face paint. From the fifties on, all the family teenagers seemed to attend the same para-military camp. Throughout the albums most family members appeared in military uniform, though except for Bianca/Biddy, only males until WW II. From then on, however, both males and females appeared to serve hitches...with a preference for becoming fighter pilots or going into special services. Allison seemed to be one of the few without military service, just ROTC in college...along with lettering in track and field.

  His blood thundered in his ears. Logic said he had to be looking at photos of successive generations with a strong family resemblance. Look at how much this generation resembled each other. And if the girl beside the New Orleans madam were Honora, she would have to be almost two hundred years old now! But...he found no photographs of each as children. Instead, the children appeared few and far between and those matured, with changes in name, into the faces he saw on the patio last night.

  Then Zane’s breath stuck in his chest as he came to one of the family’s typical mother/infant photos. Allison sat on the verandah edge with a baby on her lap, and the label read: “Allison and Rikki.”

  Rikki was Allison’s daughter?

  His brain hit overload. Through the chaos in his head came one coherent thought: get the hell out!

  Hurriedly he shoved the photo albums back in the cabinet and pulled on his shirt and shoes. Everything else he could carry.

  Reaching the front door, though, Zane saw the security keypad and realized with a plunge of his stomach that opening the door would set off the alarm. He could let it go, of course, and wait for whatever agency responded, but what would he say to them? That he was trying to escape a family whose matron might be two hundred years old...with a great-granddaughter he might have seen change into a wolf? He eyed Rikki’s jacket on the hall bench. Alternatively he could find her swipe card, which would let him open the gate, and run for the Wrangler when the alarm went off. But bolting would alert Rikki and Allison that he had learned something they never intended him to know...that they might kill to keep secret. No, he had to act as if nothing had happened until Rikki let him out.

  And through the French doors at the far end of the entry hall he could see her loping up the pasture.

  After taking steadying breaths, Zane strolled out onto the verandah. He set down his coat and stood waiting, pulse hammering.

  Rikki changed course for the patio. Reaching the verandah, she peered up, eyes searching him. “I thought you were asleep.”

  He made himself meet her gaze steadily. “I was. Then I woke up a couple of minutes ago and found you gone. I thought maybe that was your way of telling me to go home, so I tried to.” To his amazement, his voice sounded normal. “Except...I can’t leave unless you let me out.”

  She stared at him a moment longer, then gave him a languid smile. “That’s right. And I don’t want you leaving just yet.” Reaching up, she caught his belt and tugged him forward down to the patio and across it to the grass, where she slid her arms around him. “You know, running there in the moonlight I just kept thinking about you, and wanting another body cavity probe.”

  As her perfume enveloped him, incredibly, despite his fear, despite guilt at touching Allison’s daughter, desire exploded in him again, drowning all other emotion, crushing resistance.

  Rikki’s smile widened. “Since I don’t think you’re wearing your gun down the front of your pants, I’d say the idea interests you, too.”

  She kissed him hard and deep. Something about her mouth rang alarms, but she had also loosened his trousers, and as they dropped to his ankles, began stroking him. The surge of heat from that drowned all other awareness.

  Her lips left his mouth to work down his jaw, neck, and chest to his belly, making his nerves shout for joy, and when she reached his groin, the jolt of current and raw sensation short-circuited the last vestige of rational thought.

  15.

  Allison’s watch read after four. And nothing had stirred around the Hilst villa since they took up their positions. She thumbed her radio’s mike switch. “It looks like she’s not going anywhere tonight. I still want the house covered but two should be enough to do it now. I’ll stay, of course. Anyone else willing to volunteer?”

  Gary’s voice came back, “Me.”

  Eager beaver Gary. He had joined them and replaced Bob Sweet as soon as the stakeout folded.

  “And me,” Del Kindly said. “Why don’t you go on home? Honora has to leave for the Gathering in a few hours and you ought to look bright-eyed for the media feeding.”

  She considered that. “I’m fine...but I will go pick up my car and stop by home long enough to change clothes. Then I’ll be back.”

  When Gary appeared from between property fences and climbed into his Corvette, Honora headed the Cord toward home.

  16.

  A clock somewhere in the house chimed the half hour as Rikki unlocked the front door. Wrapped in a bathrobe, she followed him outside, and after swiping her card through the gate control slot, leaned into the Wrangler to give him a last lingering kiss and pull a blade of grass from his hair. “Zane, you have to come back, Zane...so we can do this again very, very soon.”

  With the gate sliding closed behind him, he found his hands trembling on the steering wheel. Rather than the post-storm silence he had felt after Allison left the loft, he carried the storm with him. Relief at being away mixed with disbelief, and a cold knot of dread swirled through the heady memory of the taste and scent and feel of Rikki. He needed somewhere quiet and safe to think things through, even though he recoiled from doing so. What he saw at the rear gate and in the albums suggested something impossible, something he dreamed there in Rikki’s bed.

  Yet...when he looked for someone Allison would want to protect in defiance of her sworn duty, who fit better than her daughter? A daughter with experience in car stunts. And away from Rikki, that stupefying perfume clearing from his head, he could remember why her kiss on the patio alarmed him. She had tasted of blood.

  Part of him shied from asking whose blood. The cop in him, though, demanded an answer. Zane headed for the LEC...to see if another body had been found.

  17.

  Allison followed Honor’s Cord up North Parkview. This Deirdre baffled her. She had gone hunting for three nights running but tonight, with the moon even closer to full, she chose not to hunt? It made no sense. Nothing about Deirdre made sense...the tension and severe restraint in her, the almost hysterical retreat at the mention of the Gathering...and the crucifix thing! What was that about?

  Alarm bells cut off the thought. The Sport Wrangler passing her going the other way was Kerr’s! Allison considered turning around and chasing after him. No, better to check around their property first for signs of what he had been up to.

  Climbing out of her car in the courtyar
d, she called to Honora, “Baba, did you see that--”

  She broke off, sniffing. Kerr’s scent lay in the courtyard. So did Rikki’s...and mixed with both, the musky odor of sex.

  She saw Honora sniffing, too, and stared at her in horror. “Rikki’s young and thoughtless but I can’t believe that she would...”

  But when Allison flung the front door open, the same scents eddied in the entry hall. She bellowed, “Rikki!”

  “I’m in the kitchen,” came a distant reply.

  They charged around the verandah and in through the French doors. Rikki stood in front of the stove, a slab of meat sizzling on the grill. The loose belting of her robe showed she wore nothing under it. She smiled at them, aglow with sexual satiation and reeking of Kerr’s scent. “You want me to throw on something for you, too?”

  Honora crossed over and turned off the grill. “I think you’ve heated up enough meat this evening.”

  Rikki’s expression went wary. “Is something wrong?”

  Wrong? Allison exploded. “Have you totally lost your mind! Have your hormones fried your brain! What the hell were you thinking of, bringing him, of all people, here!”

  “What’s the big deal?” Rikki tightened the belt of her robe. “I’ve heard both Beatrice and you used to bring human lovers here, Baba, and Zane didn’t have time to think about anything but me.” She grinned. “Talk about hormones frying brains...you’d have thought he was volke the way my pheromones reeled him in and fired him up! He’s not bad in the endurance department, either.” She stared hard at Allison. “I plan on seeing more of him.”