The Mountain's Shadow

by Cecilia Dominic

  “Which grown-ups?” I asked. Could we have found Lonna and Gabriel?

  “They brought a man and a woman today. The man has an accent. And the old man was already there.”

  “What old man?”

  “The one in the big house.”

  My eyes filled with tears of sorrow and relief. “Iain, my grandfather—he’s alive.”

  “Alive or not, I don’t think that sitting here waiting for them to come back is going to do us any good.” Iain held out his hand to the boy, who took it.

  He looked up at Iain with wide black eyes. “You talk like the new guy.”

  “Aye.” He thickened his accent a little. “We’re both from Scotland.” The corners of his eyes crinkled, and he smiled. “We’ve got some good werewolf legends in Europe, you know.”

  The boy shook his head. “Mister, this is one.”

  I stifled a laugh and gestured that we should keep moving. We walked as quickly as we could without making too much noise. I imagined, if there were any cooperative werewolves in the rogue lab, they would soon send them after Simon, and it wouldn’t take long for them to sniff up the other bank of the river.

  The trail forked to the right, but we stayed on the river path. I strained my eyes ahead to see if I could make out the bulk of the boathouse and wished I had the wolves’ night vision. To me the forest was all shadows and slivers of silvery light with moonlit outlines of trees and plants. We didn’t see the boathouse until we were almost right on it.

  “There’s someone in there,” Simon whispered as his nose twitched. “A wolf-man. But I don’t know him.”

  We skirted around the edge of the place, and then it occurred to me. Leo. He must have ducked in there after the scream.

  “Leo,” I hissed. I heard something moving around inside.

  “Joanie, are you sure?” Iain asked.

  “No.” I wasn’t sure about anything. But I needed somewhere to put Simon, and fast. It was past eleven, and we still had a good forty-five minutes of hiking straight uphill. The boy might be hardy, but I felt bad about dragging him along with us. He needed a good meal, medical attention and lots of rest.

  The door opened, and Leo came out. He had dark circles under his eyes.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” he asked. “I was about to go back and look for you. I had to get out of there—that scream, it tore up the inside of my head.” Then his eyes fell on the boy.

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Simon Van Doren. He’s one of the boys that went missing from Crystal Pines.”

  “How did you escape?” asked Leo.

  “The black wolf drove me out. When the doctor and the guards were busy with the new people, he showed me a crack in the wall I could fit through.”

  “The black wolf?” My head spun. What—or who—was the black wolf? Why was it following me? Why had it given me this child?

  “They got Gabriel and Lonna,” Iain said.

  “Wait a second.” I fixed Leo with my best “no bullshit” look. “How did you know Simon had ‘escaped’?”

  He ran his hands through his tangled hair, and leaves and pine needles fell out. “We knew that the place was there, the cave of the Gowrow. We couldn’t get close because we didn’t want to be caught. He smells like that place, like chemicals and fear.”

  “Can you keep an eye on him?” I asked. “They’re looking for him. Iain and I have to meet someone at Wolfsbane Manor at midnight.”

  “I guess.” I thought at first he was just being rude, but he just gazed at Simon with searching dark eyes. “Was there a little boy there? About two, with curly blond hair?”

  “Yes, but they don’t do anything to him. He just cries.”

  Leo held out his hand and Simon took it. “Go ahead. I’ll take care of the boy.”

  I should have been happy to have Simon’s care out of my hands, but the way Leo looked at him made me wonder if maybe the boy would be safer with us, particularly with Leo not being so psychologically adept at the animal-human transition. I didn’t have time to worry. Iain gave my arm a tug, and we hiked up the trail. I heard the murmur of voices behind us, Leo’s bass and Simon’s rasping tenor and wondered what they could be plotting. I only hoped they wouldn’t act rashly and give us away before we could figure out who was ultimately responsible for creating that hell in my childhood playground.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We reached the edge of the lawn with five minutes to spare. My heart pounded in my ears, and I bent over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath.

  The house made a dark silhouette against the starred sky. The waning moon lit some of the corners and planes, and it looked like a movie set, two-dimensional with the shadows painted wrong unless you saw it from the right angle. No light shone in any of the windows, and the manor seemed desolate and abandoned. I thought back to returning there that first night with Lonna, how we’d been unsure of what we’d find and how Gabriel had come down the stairs to welcome us. Some Lady of the Manor I turned out to be. Both of them were now held captive by mad scientists who would do God only knew what to them.

  The usual night noises of the last of summer’s crickets, the wind rustling through the trees, and the occasional car on the road below the front gate rushed to fill the sound vacuum left by the water and by Iain’s gasping and my own pounding heart as we climbed the hill. Although all seemed safe, I felt reluctant to step into the open. All my instincts screamed at me to run, that there was danger here—and underneath it all, the half-hope and half-fear that Robert would, after all this, want me back. I had fallen for aspects of him in the wolf-men, Leo’s intensity and Gabriel’s cunning, but now, watching the second hand move around my watch face, I realized they paled in comparison to him, my mentor and best friend. Earlier that day, I’d been ready to toss him aside as a lover and focus on rekindling the professional relationship. Now, in the dark, I felt that familiar longing for his arms as well as his brain. He would know what to do, how to sort this out.

  A twig snapped behind us, and Iain and I crouched behind some blackberry bushes at the woods’ edge. A large black wolf—the black wolf—ambled up the path we had just taken, sniffed at our footsteps, and stepped into the moonlight. Once there, it lifted its nose to the light and closed its eyes, and a fine mist wreathed it. We watched, transfixed, as the wolf shape blurred and resolved into the shape of a man with his face lifted to the moon, his arms outstretched at his side. His body—oh, how my body ached with longing for it. During the month since I’d seen him, he’d become lean, muscular, and more hirsute.

  “Joanie? I know you’re there. I can smell you. Iain, too.” He turned and looked straight at us, so we made our way to the path and to the lawn.

  “Robert? You’re…” I held up my hands.

  “Naked, yes.”

  Tears clogged my throat, and I couldn’t speak, only look at him and let the knowledge of what he had become sink in.

  “You’re a werewolf,” Iain said. “You’ve got it, CLS.”

  “The phenotypic expression, yes.”

  “How?” I choked out.

  “I had hoped you would find that out by now. You must be close.”

  “Did you have a vaccine? A flu shot?”

  “They shot me up with something, but I don’t know what it was. All I know is that I lost a few weeks. When I woke up, I had it. Remember when I was supposedly in Atlanta for the final merger briefings?”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Hippocrates Pharmaceuticals.” He crossed his arms, and I wondered if the chill in the air was getting to him. “They would have done it to you, too, if they’d had the chance. That’s why I had to get you out of there. Oh, Joanie, it hurt so much to lose you.”

  “I thought that’s why you let me go, because you thought it was my fault.”

  He shook his head, but he didn’t hold his arms out so I kept myself from running into them. This certainly was not how I pictured our reconciliation.

  “You we
re there. At the fire.”

  “I was. They set it, but I made sure to distract you so you’d get out of there.” He reached over and brushed a tear off my cheek. I grabbed his hand and held it to my face. “I just didn’t expect you to get caught on the stool. How’s your arm?”

  “The shoulder is fine. The wrist is hurt from other things.”

  “Why did you want to see us?” Iain broke in. “You’re one of them now. What could you possibly want with us?”

  “To give you one last warning.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “What?”

  “You have to work fast to isolate the ingredient in the vaccines that’s causing this. Your grandfather was close to finding out something, but they got him before he could.”

  “Why do we have to work fast?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? They’re trying to kill you so you can’t. And they’ve just gotten a contract for the new bird flu vaccine for the whole nation, not just this area.”

  I caught my breath and heard Iain do so as well. With the media hype about the new pandemic, that would be a very popular vaccine, even more so than the regular flu shots.

  “Why create a problem without a cure?” asked Iain. “Or were they planning to cause an epidemic and then have the only way to treat it?”

  Robert didn’t answer, but I knew it was true. He was stuck with them, but I wasn’t.

  “Listen, Joanie, they’ve already killed Louise.”

  I remembered the terrible night she died and the black wolf outside the kitchen window. “You brought her to the Manor. Why?”

  “I found her by her car. She needed help but was so far off the road, there was no way I could get help to her in time. I thought you might be able to help her, so I changed and explained it to her, and I carried her most of the way there. I couldn’t let you see me because I knew it would frighten you. I didn’t mean to walk by the light near the kitchen.”

  That explained the intense look on her face when she’d told me, “The black wolf knows.” It hadn’t been fear; she was trying to make me understand. Had he told her we’d been lovers?

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why are you warning us and telling us all of this now?”

  “Because they’re on my heels waiting for me to lead them to the van Doren boy. And because…” He shook his head, his turn to be choked. He pulled his hand away. “Because I shouldn’t have. That is, we shouldn’t have.”

  “No, it’s okay, I wanted it to happen. I was happy there, with you. I’ve missed you terribly.”

  “You helped me feel like a young man again, Joanna Fisher. That’s why I kept you around long after you could have gone on to your own lab.”

  “You kept me around after what?”

  “I got a letter before I went to Atlanta. GeniTech was interested in you, but they didn’t want to seem like they were poaching you, so they approached me first and asked about you.”

  I caught my breath. GeniTech was the big dog in the industry. Going to work there would have been the next step to the shining career I’d wanted.

  “I told them that you wouldn’t be interested.” His eyes locked with mine. “I wanted your brain, your body, and your talents, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you having the opportunity I’d wanted for most of my professional career.”

  “You sabotaged me.”

  “I used you, and it’s something I’ll never forgive myself for, especially since I could have spared you from all this.”

  I noticed then how the lines around his mouth had grown deeper, and I felt all of the eighteen years separating us. “But you didn’t. And now we’re here.”

  “I won’t be for much longer. I made sure there’s no one at the house, only the sheriff’s man out front in his car.”

  “Oh, so they’re in on it, too? I should’ve guessed when they took everything after Louise died.”

  “Knowles is taking orders from someone, but I haven’t been able to find out who. Probably Hippocrates.” He reached over to brush my cheek again, but I flinched away.

  “I can’t believe you did that, sabotaged my career for a little fun so you could use me.”

  “Joanie, there’s no time to argue now. Go in there and don’t come out until you have something. I’ll lead them away.”

  I felt my chest tighten with the shame of knowing I had to follow his orders, even now after I knew he’d betrayed me. I wanted to say more, to scream at him or claw his eyes out, or at least his throat so that we’d have matching pain. I’d forgotten how much I hated it when he ordered me around. The mist enveloped him, and the black wolf reappeared and bounded into the woods. I looked after it and bit my lip to keep from crying.

  “Did he really mean it, Iain? That he used me? Did you know about GeniTech?”

  Iain wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Let’s get to work.”

  Armed with my grandfather’s notes and equipment, Iain’s background knowledge and theoretical research, and my experience, we set up in the underground laboratory. First I made sure that all the doors were locked, but we still avoided turning on any lights or giving any other indication that the house was occupied. I didn’t want Sheriff Knowles to turn up and insist that he urgently had to question me. I was surprised to find that Ron wasn’t in the house, but perhaps he’d decided to make himself scarce.

  My grandfather had, through his own research and experience as well as reading my work, isolated a genetic component to the expression of CLS. The Landover Curse, it had been called in our family. In other families, it had been called other things, and some didn’t even have a name for it. I guess that sort of information tended to be swept under the rug when it could get you and your family burned. It was more common, I had found in my research, in families of Germanic and Scandinavian descent, which made sense considering that part of the world had spawned the best werewolf legends. Other cultures might have similar tales, for example, the dolphin-men of the Amazon, and they might carry through as well, but there was something about CLS that made it more common, at least in the U.S. This area, with its Dutch, German and Scandinavian heritages all intermixed, would be the perfect area to find subjects, which is likely why the local kids, and not the newcomers, were the targets.

  “So what can make a genetic trait more likely to express?” I asked Iain after we’d hashed all this out. “This has to be complicated considering all the parts of the transformation, several genes at least.”

  He steepled his fingers and sat back. “Whoever came up with this has to be a genius in the field. They took your heredity and epidemiology work as well as our work in the genes themselves and found a way to make the traits express in a temporary fashion.”

  “Do we know anyone with that capability?”

  He arched an eyebrow at me. “We know several, but the question is who would be unethical enough to do it and to ‘experiment’ on children as well as other victims of the tainted vaccines?”

  “It depends on how much money is involved, I guess. To create a problem so you can monopolize the cure…” I shuddered. “It’s hard to say. Let’s get back to the question of how they tainted the vaccines. What could be in them?”

  “Some sort of chemical? I’m just guessing what could be transmitted trough vaccinations.”

  “Maybe, but what?”

  We once again turned to my grandfather’s notes. He had been working with—surprise!—wolfsbane, also known as aconite, which could either be used as a topical anesthetic or a poison if taken internally or if too much is absorbed through the skin. He was in pursuit of the legendary use, which was to bring on a state of lycanthropy or to banish it. He hoped for the latter. His aim, according to his notes, was to use my research on the causes and spread of the disorder to figure out how wolfsbane may act on the nervous system of the CLS victims.

  “So if he was looking at wolfsbane to prevent the expression of CLS, what could be the cause of it?” I mused.

  “Let’s think of what one finds in vaccinations,” Iain suggeste
d. “Perhaps it’s something that’s already in there or that could be tweaked rather than something that’s introduced that the FDA would be able to trace.”

  “Good call. There’s the active ingredient, which is a dead virus, part of a live virus, a less problematic but similar one…”

  Iain’s eyes unfocused, and I could almost see the calculations going on in his head. “And what do viruses do?”

  “They inject their DNA into a cell and cause it to replicate little viruses.”

  “So what if a virus was to be engineered to do that, but to cause the cell’s DNA to express CLS symptoms if that propensity were there?”

  “As in a viral vector? You know, that makes sense. Instead of using the viral vector to inhibit the patient’s CLS gene expression, it enhances it. CLS is recessive, but with the vector, only one of parents needs to have the gene.”

  “So why kidnap the children?”

  “Because adolescence is when the CLS really takes off along with the expression of secondary sex characteristics, acne, the works. All the victims were pre-adolescents.”

  Everything fell into place then, like a perfectly arranged Tetris grid. I only had two more questions. One was how my grandfather had gotten hold of records from a pediatrician’s office. The second was for Peter Bowman. Why had his son been taken? Sure, the family had the gene, but little Lance was too young to participate in the CLS “field research”. His kidnapping had to have been for other, more sinister purposes.

  “I have some friends at the FDA,” Iain told me and broke me out of my reverie. “I’m going to give them a call first thing in the morning. They’ll probably be very interested in these ideas as well as possible contamination of the vaccines with viral vectors for a genetic disorder.”

  “But what if the viruses are so cleverly engineered that they won’t be able to detect them?”

  He drummed his fingers on the metal tabletop. “I wish there was some way we could get a sample of it. Without it, we don't have any proof, and I’m sure they’ve got clean materials to give to the FDA if requested.”