“Kaleb turned into quite the playboy,” she added with an air of humor.
“Right,” he laughed. “You could say he socialized too much. Maybe that was his way of connecting with the mortals we’d always been forbidden to get too close to. I’m not sure what Dean’s story is in that regard. He’s always been soft spoken and has kept to himself.”
“Hmm,” she murmured, considering the history.
Their conversation gently died out. The breeze picked up, refreshing Rachel exactly as she’d hoped it would. Dusk began filling the sky and she stole a few last, lingering glances at the view before it could be swallowed in darkness.
“We should head back,” she suggested, but Conor stepped in front of her and took hold of the guardrail on either side of her.
“In a minute,” he countered in a smooth, deep voice, as he closed in, the length of his body pressing against hers.
He leaned in and she smiled until their lips touched. Pursing her lips, she kissed him. Her arms found their way around his muscular shoulders and she felt deeply that this was her man. Hers. She’d found him and she didn’t want to ever let him go.
As their kissing eased away, she ran her palms down the firm wall of his chest and looked up at him, searching his light eyes. Maybe she was trying to see the wolf within him, or maybe it was the man she suspected she was falling in love with that she was looking for. Both were inside, and it occurred to her that she’d never seen his other form. She’d never seen Conor as a wolf.
“Would you show me?”
“Show you what?”
“You,” she breathed softly, “as a wolf.”
Conor narrowed his eyes and it felt like he was peering into her soul as he sized her up.
“You want to see me shift?”
“Don’t tell me you’re shy,” she teased.
He laughed and assured her, “I’m definitely not shy.”
She urged him back and he released the railing so that she could look him up and down. “What happens to your clothes when you transform? Are they shredded?”
“Like the incredible hulk? Not quite,” he told her.
“Because I have no problem with you stripping down first in order to avoid destroying them,” she was quick to tell him.
“Oh, is that right?” he flirted, stepping in to give her a kiss. “Clothes become a part of you,” he explained. “It’s some stroke of magic. They’re there when I shift back as well.”
“Then you have no excuse,” she said as she playfully shoved him away. “I’m waiting.”
He let out a breathy laugh that looked modest and finally agreed, “Okay.”
Rachel felt her voice hitch in her throat, excited or rather thrilled that he was about to reveal his transformation. It had to be highly personal, or so it seemed. Like showing part if not all of your soul.
Conor stepped further and further away and without warning, collapsed faster than the blink of an eye into a tremendous, gray wolf. It scrambled her mind, how fast it had happened. She could barely process it, but even more so than that, she was thrown by just how large Conor was as a wolf. He looked the size of a bear and she felt instantly intimidated, though he wasn’t snarling or baring his fangs.
The gray wolf stared at her.
It had the same light eyes. Human eyes. Conor’s.
Slowly. Very slowly, and without making any sudden movements, she neared the wolf and extended her hand very cautiously until her open palm was met with the coarse fur of the wolf’s head.
It was mind-bending. She knew it was Conor. She’d seen him shift with her own two eyes, and yet logic or perhaps instinct kept warning her that this wild animal could lash out and bite her at any moment.
But that couldn’t be true. Conor hadn’t disappeared. She knew he would never harm her. He would never attack, and yet it was as though her mind couldn’t let go of the dangerous sight her eyes were seeing.
He was incredible. Werewolves weren’t only the stuff of folklore. They weren’t fairytale, as she’d always assumed growing up. They were real, and Rachel knew, right then and there, that she’d fallen in love with one.
As she stroked the wolf’s head and its long snout, those human eyes drifted shut as though her very touch was so soothing that it was enchanting the great beast into a sleepy, relaxed state. He licked her palm and she gave him a few, tousling pats to its scruff of thick, bushy fur then rubbed its chest. Like a friendly dog, the wolf flopped onto its side, offering her its belly for a proper scratched and she kneeled down to do just that.
When the wolf leapt up again, all hesitation and fear had left her and she stayed kneeling, looking up at its impressive height.
Then, just as fantastically fast as he’d become a wolf, Conor shifted back into his human form, dressed in his tee-shirt, jeans, and hiking boots as he had been before.
“Incredible,” she breathed.
“It’s a good party trick,” he joshed as he wrapped his arm around her and they headed back down the mountain.
But Rachel knew it was so much more than that and as the forest of trees rose up all around them, the dusk sky darkening with night, she found herself wondering if she would like to become a werewolf as well and live a very long life with Conor Quinn.
Chapter Thirteen
CONOR
The very next morning, after seeing to it that Rachel arrived to the police station in the heart of the Fist on time, Conor joined his brothers at Quinn Security as Wyoming swelled with summertime heat. Every window in the state-of-the-art cabin was open so that the fresh air of Yellowstone could breeze inside, though Conor would’ve preferred they crank up the AC and let technology do what nature simply couldn’t at this point. Keep their offices cool.
Kaleb had brought Professor Gaylor Geer III with him that morning. The elderly man was enthralled to be in the company of werewolves and didn’t shy away from examining each of them closely, which Shane in particular didn’t appreciate. He tried to wave the professor away as one would a pesky gnat, but Gaylord was undeterred and wouldn’t keep his boney fingers to himself as he poked and prodded and marveled how “human” Shane appeared.
“Seriously, Kaleb,” Shane warned his brother when the professor pressed a stethoscope to the military-trained man’s chest—where Gaylord had produced a stethoscope, no one had been able to figure out. “Would you?”
“Alright, Professor,” said Kaleb as he took hold of the elderly man’s shoulders and ushered him away from the fiercest Quinn. “That’s enough for now.”
“Exceptional,” Gaylord mused to himself as he padded over to Kaleb’s desk—he’d completely taken it over without a single stroke of shame—and began noting his findings in the leather-bound notebook he seemed to be carrying around everywhere. “Simply remarkable,” he murmured, Kaleb sighing and rolling his eyes.
“Stay put until we’re finished meeting,” Kaleb ordered though the professor was so engulfed in his notes that he was oblivious.
Troy announced to his brothers, “Conference room,” and they all piled in.
Conor sat next to Shane and Dean as they filled the chairs around the oval table. Troy stood at the head and Kaleb sat across from him. With Harry Marple secured behind bars, Adelaide had insisted she wouldn’t need Dean’s protection, which freed him up for the meeting. An arrest was assumed to be pending and for Adelaide’s sake, everyone hoped that Harry would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“With Harry in custody,” Troy began, “we can focus on Dante Alighieri and his next move. Has anyone’s amethyst reacted?”
The brothers exchanged glanced, everyone shaking their heads.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Dean argued. “We have to assume Dante’s army is only increasing in size and yet none of our crystals are heating up.”
“I agree,” said Troy. “But nevertheless, let me know if they do.”
“I think we need to keep a close watch on the sheriff,” Conor stated, which immediately interested Shane. “He’s bee
n acting strangely.”
“He’s been sick,” Shane defended. “He’s in the hospital as we speak.”
“The question is why did he get sick?” Conor asserted. “If I put myself in Dante’s shoes and I want control of the town, getting the sheriff in my corner would be one smart way to do it.”
“I spend a lot of time with Rick,” Shane reminded him. “I would be the first to alert you all if I thought Rick posed any kind of danger.”
Conor knew getting tangled in a heated debate with the sheriff’s soon-to-be son-in-law wouldn’t be productive and it was certainly ironic that Rick’s greatest critic had overnight become his advocate, but Conor decided to leave it alone.
“We know, thanks to the Delilah Dane suicide, that Larry Hardcastle and Ronnie McDowell were definitely among Dante’s damned. Kaleb’s on Gaylord for the time being, and I think we can all assume that even though Rachel is probably resisting Conor—” Everyone but Conor chuckled. “That Conor is tied up staying on her, so Shane, I’d like you to keep close watch on Hardcastle and Dean I’d like you to stay on Ronnie. Be discrete, of course. We’re aiming to trail one or both of them back to wherever Dante is hiding out.”
“Got it,” Shane agreed and Dean nodded.
“For any of you who don’t know,” Troy went on. “Rachel Clancy knows just about everything.”
Shane and Kaleb looked concerned, but Conor knew that neither of them had a leg to stand on in terms of complaining. They’d each been guilty of revealing the truth of the Quinn pack to their one true mates long before Whitney and Lucy had become that.
“We have no choice at this point except to trust her,” he reminded them all. “But the fact of the matter is that like all of us, Rachel has been focused and committed to bringing Dante down. Anything she’s discovered about us and our pack has only been in the wake of that investigation.”
Conor added, looking at Shane, “An investigation that the sheriff has ordered to her drop.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shane challenged.
“I think you know exactly what it means,” he returned hotly.
“Enough,” Troy barked. “Let’s keep on the issue at hand. The police might assume that Harry Marple is responsible for his son, Jake’s, murder as well as the fire, and I’ll be honest, I’m inclined to believe that myself. But given that Dante has been at the helm of most every crime that’s taken place in the Fist, we would be wise to bear in mind he could’ve controlled Harry into committing those crimes as well.”
“Then should I stay on Adelaide?” Dean questioned.
“No, I’d like you on Ronnie McDowell,” he maintained.
Before Troy could delve deeper into the meeting, Gaylord burst through the doors, panting in sheer excitement and clutching a horde of loose papers and two reference books in his bony arms.
Kaleb, whose job it was to wrangle the professor, rolled his eyes and rose from his chair.
“Colton Barnes!” Gaylord exclaimed, which was interesting enough to Kaleb that he didn’t usher the professor out of the conference room. “I believe I’ve found reference to the man within the carefully worded folklore of one of my predecessors’ anthologies.”
Troy furrowed his brow at the old man, but Conor encouraged, “Go on, Professor.”
“This tale,” he said, spilling his mess of papers onto the oval table and spreading a very thick hardcover book open that seemed to dwarf him, “seems to shed light.”
Troy, if interested in the information, wasn’t especially patient about it. He barked, “Hurry up.”
“Yes, yes,” agreed the professor before summarizing the passages for them all. “A farmer by the name of Barnard—different last name, but this is typical of folklore, mind you—was anything but. A dark man who lived as a reclusive emerged into the Fist when he was beholden to the girl who the town regarded as ‘living by the spirit of the wolf’—”
“Sasha?” Conor asked.
“That was my feeling,” Gaylord agreed.
“Theirs was a tumultuous affair, but Barnard tamed her by ‘power of his miraculous light’.” Gaylord paused for emphasis then repeated, “Miraculous light. The passages go on to describe this Barnard character as being the light of Devil’s Fist and illuminating the dark nights. You see, its author was working very hard to keep these descriptions symbolic and metaphorical but—”
“They were literal,” Kaleb supplied, suddenly understanding the connection. “Oh, God,” he breathed.
Conor, catching on as well, asked almost under his breath, “Colton Barnes was…”
“An Astral God?” Kaleb asked when Conor had drifted into a puzzled, mind-bending murmur. “Oh, God!” Kaleb exclaimed, putting it all together. “Lucy is a descendent of Barnes?”
“Relax,” Troy said. “You aren’t related to your one true mate.”
Kaleb let out a rocky breath, but Conor could tell it was still far too close for comfort.
“This explains,” Dean interjected, “why Dante wiped out Lucy’s parents, though, doesn’t it? Think about it, in his own twisted logic, though they were his blood, his own father being the same Astral being as them, gave them the same powers he possessed. They would’ve been his only threat.”
“So he eliminated them,” Troy supplied. “It definitely explains Dante’s powers. He has all the strength of a werewolf and Astral God combined.”
“As does Lucy,” Kaleb proudly reminded him.
“We need a hell of a lot more Lucys if we’re going to defeat Dante,” Dean commented.
It brought a crooked grin to Kaleb’s otherwise disturbed expression and he promised, “Trust me, we’re working on it.”
“Professor,” Troy said, “I want you to keep digging through that folklore. Find out if there’s any way to overpower and defeat the Barnards of the world, okay?”
“Yes, Sir,” Gaylord happily agreed, but instead of gathering up his papers and books, he pulled out a chair and slid his big, bright eyes from werewolf to werewolf around the table.
“Now, Professor,” Troy barked and Gaylord jumped, let out a nervous chuckle, and hustled out of the conference room with his research to do just that.
Dean smiled and said, “I have to say, the old man is growing on me.”
***
At about the time the brothers’ meeting was wrapping up at Quinn Security, hours away from the Fist, Sheriff Rick Abernathy was struggling to dress himself in his hospital room in Jackson Hole.
He felt like he’d been run over by a truck.
Every muscle in his body was stiff and sore. His bones felt soft, his head woolly, but his fever had broken. With the help of several nurses, a hell of a lot of Tylenol, and one ice bath, his temperature had finally lowered to normal during the wee hours of that morning. After resting for a number of hours under observation—none of the nurses or doctors had been able to pinpoint an infection and his bloodwork revealed no bacterial or viral assaults to his immune system—he’d finally been permitted to be discharged.
Sitting on the edge of the bed—pulling his slacks on had been exhausting—he buttoned his shirt and snugged his sheriff’s hat onto his head. Took a deep breath. He knew he hadn’t caught a bug. His fever had been the result of one thing and one thing only. The darkness that Dante had infected him with.
It killed him that his little girl had seen him like this. He knew he’d been mumbling madness when he’d been in the throes of the height of his delirium. Thinking hard, he couldn’t even recall what he might have said, but hoped it revealed nothing of what his dark lord had done to him.
As he left the hospital room, the only sickness he felt was twisting in his stomach and purely emotional. He almost didn’t want to return to Devil’s Fist. But he knew that he couldn’t run away from his problems. His problems were growing deep inside of him and there would be no escape.
“How’re you feeling, Daddy?” Whitney asked as she took protective hold of his arm the moment he emerged from his hospital room.
His voice felt raw and gravelly, but he managed, “A little tired, but otherwise just fine, darling.”
“You don’t have to be all big and tough for me, Daddy,” she sweetly reminded him. “You had me very scared.”
“It was just a fever.”
“Fevers shouldn’t get so high,” she reminded him. “I can’t believe you thought to go into the station yesterday. I’m putting you on strict bedrest until you’ve been well for days,” she informed him.
“Honey, with an open murder case and an arson case, I can’t lie around at home,” he protested.
“You can, Daddy, and you will,” she insisted as they walked to the front desk where Rick signed some papers and produced his insurance card.
It wasn’t long before they were walking through the parking lot and climbing into Whitney’s car.
During the long drive home, Whitney concentrated on navigating the highway and Rick tried not to be a backseat driver, but the Wyoming highways were cluttered with out-of-towners who kept driving all crazy.
When the highway traffic cleared out after about thirty miles, Whitney seemed to relax some. She loosened her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, which gave him some semblance of relief as well, but the conversation she initiated caused him to clamp up worse than he had when the barrage of zigzagging drivers had weaved around their car like a pack of wild animals.
“Daddy? You mentioned, when your fever was very high, that you were worried for your soul?”
Rick said nothing.
“Rachel mentioned it to me and I questioned her until I heard you say it yourself in the hospital.”
“Well, honey, my fever had gotten very high.”
“But you didn’t say you were worried for your health,” she argued. “You specifically said your soul.”
It wasn’t a question so he didn’t provide an answer.
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