Moon Shadows

by Nora Roberts

  “Well, I could hardly—”

  “No, you could hardly.” He nodded, and his face was set. “But I can. It’s time you let Dr. Gabe take a swing.”

  SHE was terrified. Not for herself; she’d long since become immune to fear for herself. But for him. What if the tranquilizer only appeared to work, or wore off while he was still in the cage with her?

  They’d argued over it, over every objection she had. But the sun was setting, she was in the cage, and he was coolly loading the tranquilizer. “Use a double dose,” she told him.

  “Who’s the doctor here, Blondie? You ever tranquilized a werewolf?”

  “Have you?” she shot back.

  “Nope, but I’ve done my share of dogs. Horses. Cats. Cows. Pigs. All manner of reptiles, including a python. Why in the name of all that’s holy and right would anyone want a python for a pet?”

  “A lycan’s not a pet, or a damn farm animal. Up the dose, Gabe. Please.”

  He looked over at her, and his face went tight with worry. “It’s starting,” he said, softly.

  Did he think she had to be told? Did he think she couldn’t feel? It was burning through her, fever bright, scorching her bone and blood. He would look at her with pity now? In minutes she’d be strong enough to tear him to pieces, to rip out his throat and drink his blood. And he dared feel sorry for her?

  Come closer. Yes, closer. She would take him, not for the kill, but for the change. That’s what she wanted, wanted most, deep in the belly of what lived in her. Deep in what she was she wanted him. Like her.

  To mate madly.

  “No! Oh God, no!” Hands clamped on the bars, she reared back, twisted with pain and terrible desire. She heard herself shouting, until the words became snarls.

  He had to wait, wait until the change was complete. And made himself watch it—heart thudding, hands trembling. He heard her begging him not to come near her, not to unlock the cage, until her words became thick and garbled. Until they weren’t words at all.

  And she was it. The thing that paced the cage, claws clicking on concrete, fangs gleaming in the hard lights. This time it didn’t throw itself against the bars, but watched him, with a calculating patience in those mad eyes.

  He stepped closer, as close as he dared, with Amico at his side, growling low. “Sorry, baby,” Gabe mumbled and fired the dart.

  It struck the lycan low on the right side. It went wild then, leaping, spinning as it tried to reach the source of the sting. As its movements became sluggish, Gabe walked over to pick up a sterilized syringe for taking blood, and another filled with the serum he’d helped Simone mix that afternoon. He gathered other vials, a scalpel, a stethoscope, then noted the time.

  On the floor of the cage, the lycan lay unconscious. Just another patient, Gabe told himself as he approached the door. Using the combinations Simone had given him, he opened each lock. Sweat was pooling at the base of his spine as he eased the door open.

  He took its pulse. Its fur was soft, silky, like her hair. He listened to its heart rate. Strong and steady. Recording it all for the tape. He took the blood next, automatically pinching a fold of skin before sliding the needle in. He watched its face—fierce and strangely beautiful—and when he saw no reaction, breathed a little easier.

  Briskly now, he took skin samples, hair samples. He measured its length, and wished fleetingly he’d thought of a scale to get its weight. But he wasn’t certain he would’ve been able to lift the dead weight of a full-grown female lycan onto a scale in any case.

  He injected the serum, and because he loved her, stroked his hand, once, down the length of its body.

  “Maybe you’ll sleep through the rest. Give you a little peace.” Rising, he stepped back, closed the cage. Locked it. He took his samples to the worktable, prepared slides.

  For an hour he studied them, made notes, and entertained theories.

  When he glanced back at the cage, it hadn’t moved. It should be coming around by now, he thought. He couldn’t have been that far off in the dose, in his gauge of its weight. He thought of the serum, and had a moment’s panic that Simone had added something to the formula while he’d been upstairs.

  He was at the cage door again, his hands on the first lock, when he checked himself. It was breathing, he could see that. He’d wait another thirty minutes, then if he had to go in, he’d take the tranquilizer gun with him.

  He turned away again, hesitated.

  It was Amico’s ringing bark that had him spinning.

  It moved like lightning. From prone to crouch to leap, all in one blurry move of speed and power. He saw its eyes, bright, alert. Yellow rimmed in red. He stumbled back. The claws that speared through the bars raked his biceps before he fell and rolled out of reach.

  Barks, snarls, growls, bounced off the walls as he lay panting, his hand gripped on the wound. In the cage, it rose on its hind legs, spread out on the bars, and howled in rage.

  “HOW could you be so careless?”

  Because she was on a tear, Gabe sat while Simone removed the bandage and examined the wound he’d already treated. She’d smelled his blood, and the antiseptic, before she’d been out of the cage at sunup.

  “I wasn’t careless.” Nearly was, he thought as he remembered that he’d nearly unlocked the cage. “And it’s far from the first scratch I’ve had in the line of duty. You should’ve seen the chunk this toy poodle took out of me my first year in practice.”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “Who’s joking?” He shoved up his other sleeve, pointed to the mark just under his elbow. “Look at that scar. Little son of a bitch had teeth like a shark.”

  “You turned your back on me.”

  “It.” He’d decided it was best all around to make that distinction clear. “Yes, I did. My mistake. But between Amico, and my own catlike reflexes, all I got was a couple of scratches.”

  “Gouges.”

  “Semantics. Either way, no permanent damage, right?”

  It was a question, and one she was sure he’d wrestled with for hours. Alone. “No. It takes a bite. Teeth into flesh, saliva and blood. This will hurt.” She examined the wounds—four long gashes—and decided she couldn’t doctor it any better than he had. Foolish of her to think otherwise. “It’ll probably scar.”

  “Just add it to my collection.”

  “It could have been much, much worse.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “No, you’re not. And that’s my fault.” She turned away, going to the kitchen door to fling it open. Autumn mists made the trees look as though they were floating in a low-riding river. Winter, she thought, creeping closer.

  “I wouldn’t have killed you. I knew, from the minute I saw you, I knew what . . . and I should’ve told you. What’s in me is primal. And blood—to hunt and feed—isn’t the only primal need. I wouldn’t have killed you,” she repeated, and turned back to him. “I would have changed you. I would have made you like me. I wanted that.”

  He rose himself, walked to the stove for more coffee. She could see she’d shaken him, given him something to consider that hadn’t crossed his mind. “You think telling me that is going to have me heading out the door?”

  “No. You have feelings for me, and you’re invested in this now. But you can’t trust me.”

  “Right on one and two, wrong on three.” He set the mug down with an impatient snap. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, what you cope with every hour of every day. It’s beyond imagining. I’ve watched you, I’ve watched the tapes, and I’m looking at you right now wondering if I have half the guts you do. Primal, you said. It’s primal, and its instincts are to survive, to feed, to mate. It’s not to blame for that, and neither are you.”

  “I should’ve told you.”

  “You just did. Things are moving fast between us,” he said before she could speak. “But the fact is we haven’t been in this situation very long. This very intense and strange situation. I haven’t told you I once had a one-night stand w
ith a woman for no other reason than she was there. Actually, it didn’t qualify as a night, just a couple hours of serious banging. I didn’t care about her, forgot her name the next morning. It was primal. Going to hold it against me?”

  “Men are pigs. Everyone knows that.” She stepped to him. “I’ve never loved anyone before. I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “We’ll figure it out along the way.” He leaned down to brush his lips with hers, then sank in, held on when her arms came around him hard. “We’ll figure it all out. We’ve got four weeks before the next full moon. Let’s see where it takes us.”

  Hope hurt, but how could she tell him?

  “I’ve got to get back to my place, clean up, get to work.” He kissed her again before easing away. “But I’ll be back, right after office hours. I’ll bring pizza.”

  “Pizza’s good.”

  “And we’ll get started on some serious figuring out.”

  Chapter 9

  SHE hadn’t known what it would be like to have someone in her life. Someone to share with—the little things, the huge ones. To have someone who made her laugh or think, who shrugged off her bad moods or slapped her back with moods of his own, was all a kind of miracle.

  She’d told him once she hadn’t been happy since she’d stood in the mountains of Italy and watched the sun set. He’d just smiled in that slow, pleased way of his, and told her they’d go back, to that exact spot one day.

  He brought the puppy, a rambunctious bundle of fur and energy he named Butch. Initially Amico was too dignified and territorial to acknowledge the presence of another dog, much less a scrambling puppy. But within a week, he was romping and playing with the pup as if Butch was his personal pet.

  Normal, Simone thought, all so normal with dinner on the stove and dogs in the yard. Nights making lazy love, or desperate love. Conversations over wine with music on the stereo. Candles she’d made herself flickering while they danced, and a low fire in the hearth while the October wind moaned at the windows like a lonely woman.

  Normal, if you forgot the hours they spent working in the lab, in a room with a cell and the smell of wild animal in the air that nothing could quite disguise.

  If she ignored the dreams that began to chase her as the moon waxed toward full.

  She saw a raven one morning, sleek and black, pecking away at the seeds in her feeder. The sky was painfully blue overhead, and though the trees were long past their peak, some leaves clung stubbornly on, so they flamed in the sun. It was beautiful, the sort of scene that deserved to be captured by lens or canvas. The bold colors of those last dying leaves against the pure and harsh blue of the sky.

  But she watched the raven, glossy black wings, and when she felt what was in her stir, as greedy as the bird, she knew the past weeks of work had made no difference.

  “You change with the moon,” Gabe said as he prepared another sample on a slide. “Which has some logic. Body chemistry, tides, the lunar cycle. But that doesn’t explain why you have these sensations, the heightened senses and so forth outside the three-day cycle.”

  “It’s always there. It’s part of me, in the blood.”

  “In the blood,” he agreed. “An infection, and one that, so far, resists the cell-cell interactions that produce antibodies. We’ve gone—or you had before I came along—a long way toward identifying that infection. A mutant form of rabies.”

  “That’s too simple a term.”

  He could hear the fatigue, the discouragement in her voice. “Sometimes simple is best. This infection has altered your blood chemistry, your DNA. And when you change, that chemistry, that DNA is altered again—slightly, subtly, but when we put the samples side by side, scanning the incredibly cool electron micrograph, the change is apparent.”

  “Not that earth-shattering. The DNA is more distinctly canine when I’m in lycan form.”

  “Think, Simone, don’t react. Think.” He picked up a mug, taking it for his coffee, and drank down her herbal tea. “Ugh,” was his opinion before he put it down, and grabbed the other mug.

  “Any change in DNA is earth-shattering. It should be frigging impossible. But yours changes every month. And look here.” Sipping his coffee, he went to the computer to bring up an analysis. “Look what happens when we dose the blood with the antidote. The cells mutate again. They’re not just fighting off the antibiotic, they’re morphing, just enough to make it useless. What we have to do is fool them.”

  “How?”

  He reached over to stroke her hair. “Working on it.”

  But she was following him. “If the cells thought they were being attacked by one thing, and reacted—or tried to react—then a secondary antidote could be administered. Sort of like catching them in the cross fire.”

  “That’s the idea. We need to find two, not one.”

  “It’s a good idea.” She liked the way his hand ran casually over her butt when she stood. “I’ve tried something similar before, mixing a mild sedative in with antibiotics. Valerian and skullcap, wolfsbane—”

  “No wolfsbane,” he interrupted. “No poisons.”

  Scowling, she gulped down tea. “I know what I’m doing with herbs.”

  “No question about it.” To keep her off balance, he yanked her onto his lap. “God, you smell good. You always do, then there’s that skin. Relax a minute. What herbs do you take to relax?”

  She struggled not to sigh. “Chamomile’s good. Lavender.”

  “How about for an aphrodisiac?”

  “Fenugreek.”

  He laughed so hard he nearly dumped her on the floor. “You’re making that up.”

  “What do you think I’ve been putting in your coffee every morning?”

  With another laugh, he squeezed his arms around her. “Well, keep it up. That way we’ll never be a bored old married couple.”

  She jumped away as if he’d jabbed her with a poker. “Married? What are you talking about?”

  He stayed where he was, that same easy smile on his face. “Didn’t I ask you yet? Where’s my to-do list?” He patted his pockets.

  “I can’t get married, Gabe. It’s not possible for me.”

  “Sure it is. We fly to Vegas, find a tacky chapel—a personal fantasy of mine—and do it while an Elvis impersonator sings “Love Me Tender” off-key.”

  “No.”

  “All right, scratch the Elvis impersonator, but I insist on the tacky chapel. A boy can’t give up all his dreams.”

  “I can’t marry you, anyone. I can’t even consider it as long as I’m like this.”

  “Try a little optimism, Simone. We’re going to find the cure. Whether it takes a month, a year, ten years. While we’re looking, I want a life with you. I want to live here with you, and say things like, oh yeah, my wife has that great shop a couple blocks from here.”

  Her heart stuttered in her chest. “It could take ten years. It could take twenty.”

  “And if it does, we’ll have our lives, we’ll live them and for three nights a month, we’ll adjust them.”

  “I can’t have children. Well, I don’t know if I can’t,” she said before he could respond. “But I couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk passing on what’s in me to a child. Blood to blood.”

  He sat back, and she could see he hadn’t thought of it, not yet. “Okay, you’re right. There’s adoption.”

  “Oh, think, Gabriel! How do you explain to a child that Mom’s got to go lock herself in a cage now, so she doesn’t kill anyone. How could you chance the possibility that something could go wrong, some slip, and I’d hurt an innocent child?”

  “I think there might be ways to manage all that, but I understand what you’re saying. There are a lot of happy couples, Simone, who can’t have children, or choose not to.”

  “Gabe.” Her voice, her heart, her eyes softened as she moved to him, touched his cheek. “You’ve got kids and white picket fence all over you. I can’t give you that, and I won’t put you in a position where you’re unable to have them.”


  “There’s something you’re not factoring in, and it’s starting to piss me off.” He shoved to his feet, took her arms under the elbows and brought her up sharply to her toes. “I love you. Love means you stick when things are hard, when they’re weird, when they’re sad, when they’re painful. I’m with you; get used to it. You’re scared of marriage, fine.”

  “I’m not scared, it’s—”

  “I’ll talk you into it eventually.” He jerked her forward so their bodies bumped, so his mouth clamped over hers and muffled her curse. “I can wait.”

  “You’re living in a fantasy world.”

  “I’m sleeping with a werewolf, what do you expect?”

  She wouldn’t smile. She wouldn’t laugh. “Try this. Just how would you introduce me to your family? Your mother?”

  “I’d say: Mom, this is Simone, the woman I love. Isn’t she beautiful? Smart, too, and enterprising. Damn good cook. I’d skip the part about you being a—ha ha—animal in bed, because moms don’t need to know everything. What else? Oh yeah. She speaks Italian and has a great dog. Three nights a month, she isn’t fit to live with, but other than that she’s perfect.”

  “I may be the lycan,” she said after a moment, “but you’re the lunatic.”

  “We’re all victims of the moonlight.” The computer alarm pinged. “Time for your next dose.”

  He walked over to pick up a vial and fresh syringe. Saying nothing, Simone rolled up her sleeve. There was no mark from the morning injection. The tiny puncture had closed less than a minute after the shot.

  He banded her arm, flicked the vein. “No, don’t look at the needle, look at me. I told you it hurts less.”

  “It doesn’t hurt when you do it.”

  He smiled as he slid the needle under her skin. “Just take a minute. I love your eyes, have I told you that? The way the gold flecks over the green, like little spots of sunlight. When we make love, when I’m inside you, the green gets deeper, the gold brighter. I’m going to spend my life making your eyes change, Simone.”