The Mountain's Shadow

by Cecilia Dominic

“Wow,” Lonna murmured. “Someone spent a lot of time in here decorating.”

  “I think he had one of the local artists do them.”

  We walked across the hall into the room that had once been my brother’s. The jewel-toned colors were more compatible with the tastes of little boys. The walls were painted cream, but instead of carousel horses, the top border was of vines and tree branches the clever artist had intertwined with berries and pinecones so it was impossible to tell where the pattern started or repeated.

  “This is incredible.” Lonna was wide-eyed. The furniture, all of darkly stained wood, had brass fixtures. The bed was situated on the wall to the left facing the two windows that looked over the front lawn. No balcony. In between the windows was a large painting of a mother wolf with two cubs reclining in the brush.

  “Your brother’s room?”

  “Yes.” Andrew had loved wolves—the larger, gray kind—so my grandfather had decorated his room to be forest-like. Andrew had never seen it.

  A heaviness hit my eyelids, and I bade goodnight to Lonna. I could see fresh towels in the bathroom off my room to the left, but I decided to wait until the morning to take a shower. I washed my face, brushed my teeth and crawled into the larger bed, grateful for the extra space. Part of me had been dreading sleeping in a twin bed again. My head hit the pillow, and I was asleep.

  At three o’clock I was wide awake. Sure, I felt like someone had hit me over the head with a wine bottle, but something had awakened me, and for once it wasn’t the usual nightmare. Although at that time of night, it seemed like bad dreams couldn’t be too far away. No, it had to be something else, something external. I listened and discerned voices coming from outside. For a moment, I dismissed it as the usual hubbub outside my apartment, but then I jerked fully awake. I was at my grandfather’s manor in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. The only people in the house were me, Lonna and the butler.

  I put on my robe and slippers and tiptoed down the hall and stairs. My feet remembered the location of the creaky boards and avoided them. Instead of going through the front door, I crept through the kitchen and out the side door to the small kitchen garden.

  The almost full moon illuminated the lawn and surrounding trees with weird shadows. I paused and crouched behind a hedge and tried to still the beating of my heart so my ears could pick up the voices again.

  “Let Ronan make the kill,” one of them, a female argued. The voice sounded familiar. I peeked through the shrubs and saw a pack of wolves too large to be Arkansas red wolves or coyotes. Two of them, the largest and smallest, were black, and they were accompanied by a silver wolf and a golden one. They circled a deer, the animal’s eyes wide with fear at having been driven out into the open and surrounded by predators.

  “He’s messy.”

  “He’s young,” another replied.

  Talking wolves? Am I dreaming? I shut my eyes and opened them after a few seconds. Nope, still there.

  “I don’t know, guys. We shouldn’t be here.”

  “The old man always let us hunt here. Why should now be different?”

  “His granddaughter—”

  “Is a flat-chested, elf-faced ivory-tower academic who won’t even know we’ve been here.” It was the female’s voice again. “If you’re careful, Ronan.”

  The golden wolf lunged at the deer but misjudged its angle, and two of the others leapt aside as the animal crashed through their circle, hooves flying.

  “We’ve got to figure out how real wolves do this,” panted the silver one as they took chase.

  Real wolves? I shook my head. It was too incredible. What were these things? And what did my grandfather have to do with them?

  I waited five or ten minutes to make sure they wouldn’t come back and staggered to my feet, my head still reeling from what I’d just witnessed. Especially the last comment by the gray wolf. If they weren’t real wolves, what were they?

  “Amazing night, isn’t it?”

  The voice shocked me, and I wheeled around. For a moment, it sounded like my grandfather, and I was transported back in time to my childhood as he and I stood on the balcony and found constellations. I was never good at it, my brain already bent to the reality of math and science rather than fanciful creatures in the stars.

  A flicker of flame and then the smoldering ash of the end of a cigarette brought me back to the present. I coughed.

  “Thought I’d light up while you thought about your answer.”

  Leonard Bowman stood there, leaves stuck to his sweater and jeans. The light of his cigarette and the moon flickered in his dark eyes.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same question.”

  “It’s my grandfather’s house.”

  No answer, just a long stream of smoke.

  “It’s my house,” I finally said. The words felt awkward on my tongue, and I became aware I was standing in my nightshirt and boxers in a flimsy robe on a cool night. I shivered.

  “So your lawyer says.”

  I tried my best imitation of a Gabriel shrug. Leonard smiled and dropped the cigarette, which extinguished with a hiss in the dew-damp grass.

  “So do you always lurk in the bushes of your own house?”

  My cheeks burned with the flush that crept up my neck. “Not always. Sometimes I lurk in the trees.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you, then.” A smile flickered across his lips, but his eyes remained serious. “You never know what might be in the woods around here.”

  Why am I putting up with this stupid questioning? I took a deep breath. Because he might know about the talking wolves. “As long as it speaks, I can handle it,” I snapped.

  A sharp pain stabbed through my wrist and up to my elbow, and I looked down to see it in his grip. “What did you say?” he growled.

  I tried to jerk away, but it was as if my wrist was caught in a steel trap. “Let go,” I hissed.

  “What did you hear?” The pain clouded my awareness, a bright throbbing focus as fingers found tendons and squeezed the pain up through my bicep and to my shoulder and collarbone. My knees buckled, and then I was bowled over by something large and covered in flannel.

  The pain eased, and I found myself curled in the fetal position on the lawn as two men wrestled not far from me. It was Leonard and Gabriel.

  “Get off of me, you overgrown poodle,” Leonard grunted.

  “Take your filthy hide somewhere else, Lothan!” Gabriel was on top of him, hands around his throat. Both men bared teeth in a feral way, and my heart beat in staccato. Gabriel had tossed his flannel robe aside and wore only his white T-shirt and boxers. He had the arms of a basketball player—lean and muscular. Leonard was built more like a football player, all knotted muscle, but neither man had an ounce of fat on him. I knew I should run, but my fascination held me rooted to the spot.

  “I believe the Lady of the Manor would like you to leave,” Gabriel snarled.

  “I’m sure she would.”

  Gabriel sprang away, and Leonard got up and slowly brushed his clothes off.

  “Until later, milady.” That last word was an insult, I knew, but I was just happy to see him walk away. The shadows of the trees swallowed him, and I turned to Gabriel, who still managed to look the distinguished butler in spite of disheveled hair and grass stains on his T-shirt.

  “Let’s get some ice on that wrist,” he said. “Even so, it will probably leave a nasty bruise.”

  He let me lead the way inside, and I sat on the couch in the study as he fixed an ice pack out of some towels and a zip-top bag of ice.

  “Thanks.” Somehow sitting on the couch was soothing, a bit of normality in an otherwise bizarre night. The ice pack stung, but it quieted the throbbing.

  “I wouldn’t be too terribly upset with Loth—Leonard,” Gabriel told me as he set down a cup of herbal tea and a bottle of honey.

  “Why? He hurt me, and he knew exactly how to do it.”

  “He was not
entirely in control of his actions.”

  “What?”

  “How much honey?”

  “A teaspoon. But what do you mean, he wasn’t entirely in control of his actions?”

  “He was in a state where his impulse control was still impaired.”

  “Why?” But part of me knew the answer, and it was in a place I wasn’t ready to go yet.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  The frustration finally kicked in. “Gabriel, sit.”

  He surprised me by sitting in the armchair, but he did not settle in.

  “Look, it’s obvious you know what’s going on better than I do. Can we just chat like two normal people and forget you’re the butler for a little bit?”

  “I can try.” He eyed me warily. I think he was surprised he had been so obedient.

  “Okay, let’s back up. How did you know what was going on out there?”

  “I heard you cry out.”

  “I never cried out.”

  Another shrug.

  “I wasn’t supposed to see them, was I? And don’t you dare shrug.”

  He sighed instead. “In time, you would have been introduced properly to them. But no, your grandfather wanted you to be sheltered at first.”

  “So you drugged me?”

  “It obviously didn’t work.”

  “Obviously. Why did he want to shelter me?”

  “He knew how your mind works. He felt that, after the fire, you may not be ready to see what your mind would classify as impossible.”

  “But now he’s dead, and I’m in the middle of something I need to be able to understand.”

  “You may be able to understand it better than anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your research.”

  “My research?” I felt the cold sweat at the back of my neck and closed my eyes. Glowing eyes in a black face. Fangs. I shook my head to clear the images of the last night at the lab. “What does my research have to do with all this?”

  “CLS.” He rose from the chair. “Excuse me a moment. I have something for you.”

  I sipped the tea, which may have been drugged, but at that point I didn’t care. Before I had been let go from Cabal Industries, I had been studying a pattern of breakouts of Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome, a new psychological disorder of impulsivity. With the help of a historian, I had been tracing family trees and gathering family medical histories on the victims. The raw data was in the lab, and I had been running analyses that night to see if there were any patterns in the variables.

  Gabriel returned with a box streaked with smoke but still intact. He set it on the coffee table by my tea.

  “What are those?”

  “Some of the records you were working with.”

  “How did you get them?”

  “A friend. I cannot say any more.”

  I cradled my left wrist against my chest and leaned over to the box. It smelled of smoke.

  “Did any of the others…” I couldn’t believe anything had made it through the fire. The image of the lab as it had been the day after, all my data smoldering ash, flashed through my mind. For some reason, whatever had been entered in the computer hadn’t been backed up yet, so I had lost all of it. Or at least I thought I had.

  “This was the only one that survived.”

  I could barely make out the filing code on the side of the box. It was the most recent batch of Arkansas and Tennessee files, copies of medical records from pediatricians’ offices.

  “It was still on a hand truck in the hallway. My assistant hadn’t entered the data yet.”

  “Do you feel like looking at it?”

  I put my head in my hands to stop the wave of dizziness and the memories that rode it. “Not tonight. Do you have any painkillers in that magical box of pills?”

  “I may. Something that will dull the pain but not upset your stomach?”

  “Perfect.”

  He returned with a little orange pharmacy bottle and spilled out a pill. “This should help.”

  “Thanks.”

  When I rolled over the next morning, I wasn’t so sure I should’ve accepted the second pill from Gabriel. The first one must have dulled my judgment. What was I thinking, accepting medication from a stranger, especially one who had drugged me against my will?

  The clock said ten o’clock. Drat, I was going to miss Louise.

  “Ready, sleepyhead?” Lonna poked her head around the door, which I’d left ajar. If it hadn’t been for the grass stains on my feet, I would’ve thought the whole talking-wolf thing had been a dream. Actually, I was hoping the butler thing wasn’t a dream, aside from the whole illegal sharing of prescriptions. The sheets needed washing.

  “Gimme a few.” I brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face, then grabbed a T-shirt, jeans, and flannel overshirt out of my suitcase. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t help but smirk at the resemblance to the first-year graduate student I’d been seven years before down to the “what have I gotten myself into?” look. A purple-black bruise spread almost all the way around my throbbing wrist. No watch for me today.

  Damn. What had I gotten myself into?

  Chapter Five

  “Breakfast, Doctor Fisher?” Gabriel set a bed tray on the gold-colored brass and glass table at the foot of the bed. “You dressed quickly.”

  He showed none of the disheveled look of the previous night. Instead of a butler’s suit, he wore khaki pants and a crisp white Oxford shirt. I approved of the look. Anything more would be too formal for every day.

  “How’s the wrist?”

  “Sore. Bruised.”

  He held out his hand, and I extended my left wrist. He held it like a fragile glass, and I appreciated his cool, gentle fingers.

  “Nothing broken, just bruised,” was his assessment. “Good thing we got ice on it right away.”

  “Damn, girl, what happened?” Lonna walked into the room. She sniffed the air. “I smell bacon.”

  “Which I’m sure you’ve already had copious amounts of,” I teased.

  I made the quick decision not to tell her about the talking wolves or Leo. It would make me sound nuts, and I didn’t want to test my own credibility in the eyes of my friend, who thought I was close to going off the deep end anyway.

  “I had a wacky dream and bruised my wrist on the night table.”

  She looked at it more closely. “What were you dreaming?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Just bruised,” Gabriel repeated. “I shall set your breakfast on the table downstairs, Doctor Fisher.”

  “Actually, I promised to meet someone for breakfast this morning,” I told him. The clock said ten fifteen. I didn’t want to miss Louise.

  “Should I expect you for lunch?”

  Lonna shook her head. “Dinner, probably.”

  “Around seven, then?”

  “That will be fine.”

  As we wound our way down the mountain in the Jeep, Lonna asked me, “So, what’s up with you and the butler?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was looking at more than your wrist. And he’s a cutie. Got that Sean Connery accent going on.”

  “Nothing.”

  “It just seemed like you and he had some secret.”

  I leaned over and put my right hand on her shoulder. “He’s not going to take over your job of protecting me, if that’s what you’re worried about. As if I need another guardian angel.”

  Lonna didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Just tell me if it’s too much. I’ll go back to Little Rock.”

  “Yeah, right you will.”

  But from the line between her perfectly arched brows and the slight pout to her lips, I could tell she was worried.

  “I need you here. At least until we know whether this Gabriel guy is legit.” I didn’t tell her the foundation of my suspicions.

  The line cleared. “Good. Then I’ll drop you off at the diner, and I’ll go see the charming
Peter Bowman.”

  “Good luck. You may be the one who needs protecting.”

  “I’ve not met a man yet I needed protecting from. Usually it’s the other way around.”

  “You’ve been lucky.” As much as I tried not to think about Robert, there were times like now when I really missed our conversations.

  “You’ve got that look again.”

  “Will you just keep your eyes on the road?”

  “And snappish. You were thinking about Robert.”

  Luckily we had reached the diner, and I didn’t have to say exactly what my thoughts had been.

  Instead of being greeted by Louise, I was ignored by a teenage boy with acne across his cheeks. He wiped the counter with sullen slowness.

  “Where’s Louise?” I asked him. I sat down and picked up a laminated menu. A sticky brown coffee ring obscured the weekly list of blue-plate specials.

  The boy didn’t even look up. “Dunno. Got the call to come in this morning because the old lady didn’t show up or call or anything.”

  “Oh.” My heart fell. Louise had been the only one who had spoken with my grandfather and knew what he intended. Besides Gabriel, whom I still didn’t quite trust, but even he hadn’t been completely informed.

  The bell above the door jangled, and Sheriff Bud Knowles strode in. In spite of my disappointment over Louise, I had to hide a smile. He had the air of an old Western sheriff walking into the saloon as he scanned the counter and booths for troublemakers. The change jingling in his pockets could have been spurs.

  “Coffee, Terrence Junior.”

  The poor kid fumbled the pad he’d held poised to take my order and scrambled to pour the sheriff a cup of coffee.

  “Mornin’ Doctor Fisher,” he said and tipped his hat. I hoped he mistook my smile as friendly rather than mocking. Could he not see how ridiculous he was?

  “Mornin’, Sheriff. How’s your day going?”

  “Well, aside from Miz Louise’s disappearing.” He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen anything strange on your way into town, would you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hear anything last night?”

  My cheeks warmed, and I hoped he didn’t see the flush that must have been there. “Nope. Slept straight through.”