The Mountain's Shadow

by Cecilia Dominic

  “Twice.” A hysterical giggle escaped.

  “Most women, most people, would be crying puddles on the floor.”

  At his words, a tear escaped from each eye, but I refused to let him see me cry again. “I’m not most people.”

  “No,” he said and tilted my face up with his index finger. “You’re stronger than anyone gives you credit for.”

  His echoing Lonna’s words on the first day of this horrible adventure made the lump in my throat grow to a burning coal, but still I struggled to keep the tears in check. His lips on mine, soft and questioning, brought me back to the present, and I opened to him. I felt the hardening in his pants between us, and my pelvis seemed to press into it on its own. He groaned and tightened his fingers in my hair and on my butt, trapping me to him.

  He’s just been off the hunt, the rational, scientific part of me said. He could be dangerous. Remember your wrist.

  Shut up, I told it. I’m not threatening him.

  But again, he pulled away and walked across the room.

  “Okay, now I feel like melting into an emotional puddle on the floor,” I said, crossing my arms so I wouldn’t shiver with the sudden absence of his warmth. “What the hell was that? Why won’t you finish what you start?”

  “It’s my brain,” he said with a heavy sigh. He sat on the recliner and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know if wanting you is me or if it’s the wolf instinct trying to protect you and claim you.”

  The image of him dragging me off somewhere and... Not now, brain! “Why do you need to claim me? It’s not like there’s a bunch of suitors vying for my hand.”

  He shook his head. “Do you remember where I was all night until the explosion in the clearing?”

  “Tracking the black wolf.”

  “And do you know where I tracked him?”

  “No. How could I possibly know that?”

  “Joanie,” he said, his tone serious. “The black wolf followed every one of your moves from the police station to the Italian restaurant to your chase after Lonna.”

  “Wait a second. If you knew we were following Lonna, why didn’t you help?”

  “Because I felt the black wolf was a threat, and...” He sighed again. “My brain wouldn’t let me leave it until it warned you away from the explosion at sunrise.”

  This time I couldn’t suppress the shiver, and I sat on the sofa. It warned me twice, but what does it want?

  Iain walked into the room and stretched. “There, now, much better. Oh, good, you’re back.” He stopped and looked at us more closely. “Did I interrupt something?”

  “No.” I stood and looked out the window to the east. “We don’t have time to be fooling around, anyway.”

  “Right,” Leo said, but I thought I heard a trace of regret in his tone. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. “So what’s the plan now?”

  “She’s not saying.” Iain’s lips twitched, and I could tell he was amused. “But I have a suspicion.”

  “We’re not going back to Crystal Pines?”

  “Nope.”

  We piled in the car, Iain in the passenger side and Leo in the back. When I turned on I-40 toward Memphis, Iain smiled. That was the other thing I liked about Iain: his mind worked very similarly to mine. He held up his cell phone in a query.

  “Go for it.”

  I didn’t read the text he sent, but I knew that it said something to the effect of, Doctor Robert Cannon, be prepared for visitors. Tell us where to meet you.

  Iain and Leo snored in harmony by the time we crossed the river into downtown Memphis. Not that I blamed them. It was a long, flat, boring road, and none of us had slept much. Adrenaline—and the breakfast burritos we’d stopped off for—kept me going.

  I rehearsed what I would say to Robert in my head. Now that I knew he’d only fired me because he’d been forced to, it gave me hope that we may be able to get something back. I was surprised that my thoughts turned to the research partnership rather than the romantic one, but it seemed indecent to remember the episodes on the office sofa with one of my colleagues in the car.

  Before I could follow that train of thought, a semi passed us, its horn blaring, and the noise startled the guys awake.

  “What in the hell?” asked Iain. Leo just blinked sleepily in the backseat.

  “Just a lorry,” I said, using the British term for large truck. “Did you come up with any good inspirations while you dozed?”

  “Not a one.” Iain checked his cell phone. “Oh, bugger!”

  “What?”

  “Robert texted me back. He said he’s out of town on business.”

  “He’s not here?” Frustration and relief warred in my chest at the delayed confrontation and possible reconciliation.

  “That’s not all. He said that he’d like to meet you at your manor this evening at midnight.”

  “Oh, crap. That means we have to turn around and drive all the way back.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Leo. “He’s out of town on business but can meet us in Crystal Pines? Where is he?”

  “Didn’t say,” replied Iain, “but you have a point. I think that we’ll find more from our Doctor Cannon than we expected.”

  I spotted an exit, but I had to think fast. This one or the next one? The impetus of seeing Robert again made up my mind for me. Without worrying about my turn signal, I swerved into the next lane and on to the exit ramp.

  The blast of a horn startled me, and an out-of-control tractor trailer swerved into the lane where I had just been, crashed, and burst into flame on the other side of the bridge.

  “Son of a…” I looked at the plume of black smoke and pressed my foot to the gas, running the red light to get away on the access road as fast as I could. I couldn’t get the image of what my car could have looked like out of my mind. If I hadn’t taken the exit, I would have been trapped by the bridge supports, and we would have been crushed.

  “Should we try to help him?” asked Iain as he twisted around to get a better look.

  “Are you nuts? He was after us.” Instead of left to get back on the interstate, I turned right and headed into town, hoping that amidst the smoke, no one had seen us. I wiped my trembling hands one at a time on my jeans to make sure they wouldn’t slip off the steering wheel, and I was grateful for that rest stop a half hour before.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s the trailer part of the truck that burst into flame, not the cab.”

  “She’s right,” said Leo. “I watched it. I took an oath to help people, but I’m not itching to go back. They tried to squash us.”

  We darted through quiet neighborhoods, careful not to drive too fast or attract attention. My tag was still for Shelby County, Tennessee, so no one would have reason to notice us.

  “Are we going back to Crystal Pines?”

  “Yes, but we’re taking back ways. I’m going to use the I-55 bridge, not the I-40 one to get back into Arkansas, and then we’re staying off the highway. Hopefully they think they did us in back there. It’ll take them a while to figure out they didn’t.”

  “How did they know we were here? Did you see anyone follow us out of town?”

  Another shot of adrenaline hit my heart, and I slowed the car. “Good question.” I thought for a moment. “Robert may have set us up. Or someone’s cell phone is tapped, and they can intercept messages. Turn your phone off.”

  Iain did as I suggested, and I turned mine off as well. Leo didn’t have one. I pulled into a small road between two new neighborhoods and stopped the car in the shade of an oak tree.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need to think for a moment.” I spotted the manila folder from Galbraith and opened it. Inside, we found a sheaf of papers in my grandfather’s handwriting. Iain looked over my shoulder.

  “Joanie, this is—”

  “Just what I had asked him for.”

  “We have to get back. This work is incredible.”

  I put my hand on
Iain’s arm, which trembled with excitement. “That is just what they were hoping we’d do. And I bet we’d have found a nasty surprise when we got there.”

  Comprehension dawned on his features. “Galbraith set us up yesterday.”

  “And again today. I bet they have Lonna and Gabriel, too.”

  “How do they know how to find us?”

  “It may be the cell phones, or I bet there’s a GPS in the car or on the car. The bomb squad could have planted it while Galbraith was talking to us.”

  “So they’ll know that we weren’t killed by the tractor trailer.” He licked his lips and looked out the window.

  “We need to find the GPS and hide it here.”

  “Why here?”

  “This is Robert’s neighborhood. They’ll think we’re headed to his house.”

  We searched the car, lifted seat cushions, and emptied the glove compartment. We emptied the trunk, checked under the spare tire, and lowered the backseat in case it was nestled in the space under the bottom of the seat. Finally, with a flashlight, we saw it: a black box with a blinking red light magnetically attached to the underside of the car.

  “So it wasn’t the phones.” Iain reached for it, but I stayed his hand.

  “Think about the explosives,” I said. “What if it’s designed to trigger something if the magnetic seal is broken?”

  He looked at me as though he was trying to decide whether I was crazy paranoid or very shrewd, but he didn’t move. “What do we do?”

  “Get our stuff, walk around the corner, and rent a car. How much cash do you have?”

  “Barely any. I didn’t have time to change much.”

  “Leo?”

  “Used all mine this morning.”

  I checked my bag. Inside, a strange envelope peeked out, and I recognized it as the one Galbraith had left me for expenses. I had stuck it in a drawer in the night table in my bedroom. I opened it, and several hundred dollar bills fell out. I hadn’t packed it, but I didn’t have time to worry about who had.

  “This should cover it.”

  “No one’s going to rent a car to you without a credit card,” Leo pointed out. “And what do you want to bet that all of ours are being tracked?”

  Iain pulled out his wallet and flipped through his cards. “Not this one.”

  “What is it?” It looked like a regular Visa card to me.

  “This is my university faculty ‘emergency’ card. My chair gave it to me when he heard I was coming in case I needed some cash quick.” He smiled. “I have a tendency to get into sticky situations. It goes back to the university, not to me, so it’s unlikely that it’s being tracked, particularly since the account is overseas.”

  “I think this qualifies as an emergency.”

  Within half an hour, we were on our way on the back roads to Crystal Pines.

  Our trip proceeded without incident, but it occurred to me that they might be watching the roads around Crystal Pines. Whoever “They” were. Minions of Hippocrates Pharmaceuticals, most likely. I had a feeling that Galbraith was in on it, too. I had fixated on Peter Bowman as my enemy, and he may well be, but I had focused on the wrong lawyer.

  I pulled the car over and parked it behind some trees about a mile beyond the gatehouse. We hadn’t come across another car for miles, and although I couldn’t see too far back from the road, I didn’t think anyone had spotted us. However, darkness was falling, and I didn’t want to be caught by surprise by another vehicle.

  “What now?” asked Iain.

  I got out and slung my backpack—manila folder and money envelope safely inside—over my shoulders. He stood up and stretched. It had been a long, twisty ride, and he looked a little green. Leo, exhausted from running the entire night before, had slept on and off.

  “Try not to hurl. Gads, Iain, I had no idea you were such a wimp.”

  “I had no idea you were such a feared and reviled human being to attract so much trouble.”

  “You haven’t talked to my mother lately. For all I know, she might be in on it, too.”

  No smile, not even a twitch. “Let me guess, we get to walk now?”

  “My grandfather and I used to know every inch of this mountain and the ones near it. The trails were old hunting trails, and I bet they’re still in good shape.” I gazed into the dark woods and tried to appear like it would be a pleasant hike, but my mind turned to the unknown that might lurk around every bend, specifically the creature that made those awful screams.

  “I can guide you,” Leo offered. “Just let me change.” He ducked behind a tree and emerged in canine form.

  “I don’t know that I’ll ever be used to that,” Iain said. “So you don’t think we’ll be targets in a hunter’s scope?”

  “Nope, it’s not deer season yet, and Leo will be able to smell anything that might try to surprise us.” We set off through the woods and found a trail that wound down the side of the mountain.

  “Shouldn’t we be going up?”

  “Will you hush? And no, we’re headed for the river. I want to approach the house from the back side.”

  Wolf-Leo bobbed his head and darted on. He stayed a few feet in front of us. A waning moon lit our way, and I found my way to the river. We had to go off trail for the last hundred yards or so because the trail led up the mountain again. Iain didn’t say anything, just watched where he stepped and occasionally shot me a look questioning how much of a madwoman I must be and whether he would be better off on his own. I couldn’t blame him—until a week ago, I had been the same, an industry-employed scientist who, at heart, held on to the attitudes of an academician who expected others to do all the dirty work for her. Trudging through the woods at night wouldn’t have been my idea of fun, either. I would have sent some poor trainee or graduate student to do it. But now the fresh air soothed my lungs and only the sounds of our crunched footsteps on the gravel bank, the whispering breeze, and the murmuring river disturbed the quiet. The thoughts of my old, comfortable lab and even the beautiful, shiny one at Wolfsbane Manor made me feel stifled.

  We continued to walk upstream, and the sound of the water took on an echo such that it drowned out other noises. Leo stopped, his nose to the air. I held my hand up to Iain, who moved closer and bent his ear to my mouth.

  “Something’s not right,” I told him. “Let’s move back into the brush. Try to be as quiet as you can.”

  We stepped off the riverbank and into the woods, where we eschewed the path paralleling the river for the pine needles and undergrowth. We continued to move along and found, as I had heard, a split in the river. The main river continued north toward the edge of Wolfsbane Manor land, and part of it had been diverted toward the west, where formerly only a small canyon with a trickling stream and a few caves had been.

  I beckoned for him to come closer again, but as he bent, a scream split the air—the horrible, tormented noise that I had heard before. He straightened up, his eyes wide, and I reached up and clapped a hand over his mouth before he could exclaim anything in the silence that followed. Wolf-Leo took off like a shot, and the shadows swallowed him. If the noise was painful to human ears, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it sounded like to his super-sensitive canine ones. The sound had made my hair stand on end, if for no other reason than it was very close, closer than I had heard it before. And this time, something about it triggered a sense of familiarity and overwhelming sorrow.

  “Are we near the mouth of hell?” Iain whispered in my ear.

  “We may very well be.” Tales of the Gowrow, who lived in caves and ate anything that wandered too close, came back to me. People had seen strange things in these hills.

  I heard something else then, a splash. I beckoned for Iain to follow me, and we crept toward the river, where we could barely see a small head bobbing in the current. It seemed to try to swim toward the bank, but every time it got close, an eddy would sweep it back to the center of the river.

  “It’s a child,” Iain said.

  “Quick!” I grab
bed a branch, and we ran to the edge of the river. Iain held on to my left arm above the wrist as I reached the other one out with the branch and steadied myself in the cold water. I braced myself but didn’t expect the tug at the branch as the child caught on to it. I stumbled, regained my footing, and held on with all my strength as Iain pulled us both to shore.

  The child, a boy of about twelve, looked at us as though he thought we might be ghosts. His eyes widened in fear, and his lips worked as he decided whether to say something or to scream. I placed my hand over his mouth and held a finger to my lips. He glanced over his shoulder, and we crept into the bush again as two figures emerged from the woods on the other side of the bank. One of them wore a white lab coat, the other one a dark suit. Both men scanned the river.

  “Simon,” the lab-coated one called out. “Simon, there’s no use running. If you don’t have your treatment, you may die!”

  I held the boy tight, my arms wrapped around his shivering frame. I couldn’t tell whether he shivered from the cold water or trembled with fear. The other man talked into a radio, and with a nod, he and the one in the lab coat headed down the opposite bank calling and looking at the river.

  Simon… A child in early adolescence who appeared in the middle of the woods on a dark night chased by a man in a lab coat. Could this be one of the lost children of Piney Mountain?

  “Simon Van Doren?” I whispered in his ear. The boy nodded but didn’t take his eyes off the two men until they disappeared around a bend in the river.

  “Iain,” I said in as low a voice as I could and still be heard above the water, “this is one of the missing boys.”

  Simon turned to me. “You’re not one of them?”

  “No, I’m here to help you.”

  “Then you have to help the rest.”

  “The rest of who?”

  “The other boys. And the grown-ups. They hurt us. They put things in needles, and it makes us scream.” Indeed, his voice sounded hoarse, and it wasn’t because he was whispering. The scream we’d just heard still lingered in my ears, and I could imagine that such a horrible noise being forced out of a small throat would cause some damage.