Thunder Moon

by Lori Handeland

  I clung to him so my head didn’t bang drywall. He was rough; I didn’t mind. I’d been on the edge since his finger had first inched from my thigh to my clitoris as I drove through town. He’d been asking for this without words, and now I was, too.

  The slap of flesh against flesh was loud in the silent room. Our breath harsh, our movements harsher, I began to convulse, to clench around him. He plunged into me once and went still.

  “Ian.” I arched, pressing against him, and saw stars behind my closed eyelids.

  “Grace,” he answered. “Look at me.”

  When I did, his were right there, that odd combination of brown, green, and gray. He stared at me with a curious expression, as if seeing me for the very first time.

  “Ah, hell,” he muttered, then pressed his forehead against mine and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  The shift from rough, intense passion to easy, gentle humor confused me. My body still hovered at the edge of orgasm, and I wanted to go there with him.

  “I’ve gone and fallen in love with you.” He rubbed his forehead back and forth, his hair sifting over my cheeks like a waterfall. “Didn’t see that coming.”

  I shoved at his shoulder. “You what?”

  He began to move, slowly, surely, softly—in and out as he rained kisses all over my face. My hands clenched on his shoulders, and I rested my head against the wall, limp, oblivious, forgotten.

  He tensed, pulsing within me, and I began to pulse, too, the sensation seemingly so much deeper now than it had ever been before. As the tremors faded he gathered me close and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 34

  When I came back to myself and heard what he’d said, I punched him in the shoulder. “What is wrong with you? You don’t make a girl come like that and then apologize.”

  I left out the part about him loving me. I wasn’t sure what to say about that.

  He kissed my hair and let me go, gathering my clothes and pressing them into my hands without meeting my eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “They’ll come after you now.”

  I snorted. “Let them try.”

  “They will. To get back at me. Just like they came after her.”

  “We’ve had this talk. I’m not Susan. Whatever comes after me is asking for a very thorough ass kicking. Maybe I should learn how to roundhouse kick.”

  “What?” His forehead creased. “Why?”

  “Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. Jack still can’t dodge Chuck Norris’s roundhouse kick.”

  “Are you okay?”

  I guess that had been kind of random. “Never mind.”

  I hadn’t realized how those jokes had seeped into my head. Maybe I should make Jordan stop. Then again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to start a day in the office without one. What fun would that be?

  “What if they make you evil, too?” Ian drew his shirt over his head.

  I picked up my shoes. “Then you’ll kill me.”

  He dropped his pants. “No!”

  “Yes.” I picked them up and handed them to him. “I’ll understand, and if the worst happens, I’ll want you to.”

  He just shook his head, looking miserable.

  “Let’s make a promise. If I’m stupid enough to get infected with the evil virus, you kill me.” I held out my hand; he stared at it in horror. “And I’ll do the same for you.”

  His eyes lifted; I met them without flinching. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

  “If it comes to that.”

  Instead of shaking my hand, he pulled me into his arms. “Thank you.”

  “God, you’re weird.” My words were muffled against his chest. “Now let me go. I’ve gotta clean up and get to town hall.”

  He held on for a few more seconds, then kissed me—gentle and sweet. My stomach turned over.

  I loved him, too.

  But now was not the time to tell him. He was already wigged-out enough. Later, when we’d killed this thing, had a victory under our belts, then I’d let him know. Then we’d decide what, if anything, we’d do about it.

  I went down the hall to the bathroom, where I washed and got dressed. What would we do about it?

  Could I spend my life with a man who was fighting things that existed merely to kill him and anyone else who got in their path? Eventually Ian’s luck would run out. Could I go into a relationship knowing he’d leave me, just like everyone else I’d loved in my life had left?

  I wanted a family, but I wanted the whole package— husband, kids, a real home. With Ian, I could never have those things in the way that I’d dreamed. But now that I loved him, would having them with anyone else be any closer to that dream?

  I’d always wanted to find a man who stayed, but Ian wouldn’t; he couldn’t.

  Before I left, I went in search of Ian and found him at his desk, already engrossed in my great-grandmother’s papers. I slid my arms around him and kissed his neck. Absently he patted my arm.

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Mmm.”

  Why did I find his distraction cute? Whenever my father ignored me, patted me, murmured nonsense since he wasn’t listening to me, I’d wanted to lash out with words or kick him in the shin. As a child, I often had. Which might just explain why he’d always done his best to avoid me.

  I stepped out of the clinic into the bright sun and heavy heat of a Georgia afternoon. Leaving my pickup where it was, I turned toward town hall and froze at the sight of the wolf on the sidewalk.

  I couldn’t see the cement through her body. The light summer wind ruffled the beast’s fur. The thing appeared pretty corporeal to me. I started to worry that this one was actually a wolf when a pair of tourists walked right through it.

  The wolf growled. The couple paused, frowned, and the woman shivered. “Goose walked over my grave,” she said.

  I knew what that was like.

  They smiled and nodded in my direction but didn’t mention seeing any wolf or hearing the disembodied growling. I waited until they were out of earshot before I asked, “What now?”

  The wolf promptly turned north, ran a few paces, then stopped and waited, tongue lolling.

  “Trouble again?” I glanced at the clinic. “Ian is trouble? Or is trouble coming? Maybe from the north?”

  The animal shimmered and disappeared.

  “I hate messenger wolves.” I scuffed my shoe against the cement. “They’re too damn vague.”

  I continued north to town hall, entering the cavernous confines and heading directly to the basement.

  When we were kids, Claire had always avoided this place. As I descended the dark, dank cement staircase, I understood why. Back then, the lower level had probably been full of cobwebs and mice.

  Someone had cleaned up recently. The only cobwebs occupied a high corner near a ceiling full of old pipes. I listened for the scrambling of rodents, but all I heard was a distant humming.

  This area had once been used for storage and maintenance items, but the old cardboard boxes and rusted filing cabinets had disappeared; the dirty brooms, buckets, and mops had all been replaced with shiny new ones.

  The lighting was new, too. Fluorescent rectangles glowed above the twisting, turning corridors. I followed the hum toward an old storm cellar with access to the street, since town hall served as the tornado shelter for all of downtown Lake Bluff. There I found Claire in what appeared to be a second office. Desk, tables, telephone, fax.

  “What’s the deal?’’ I asked.

  She stopped humming and spun around. “Hey. Joyce and I use this place to get work done when it’s too nuts upstairs.”

  “First time the tornado siren goes off, your secret’s going to be out.”

  “Then we’ll have to move. Too bad, because all the electrical connections are here.”

  “Yeah, bummer,” I said, anxious to get this done and return to Ian. “What was so important I had to come into Dracula’s Dungeon?”

  As soon as I said the words, I
gave a mental cringe. What used to be a joke was now, in the light of Ian’s information about his wife, too real to make fun of.

  “I cleaned down here,” Claire said. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “Yes. Lovely. Nice job. Get to the point.”

  “You certainly got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

  “Being woken up by my deputy with news of another murder tends to does that.”

  “Sorry.” Claire rubbed her forehead. “You’re right. Let me put these away.” She leaned over the table and gathered together the pictures lying there. “I was trying to identify some of these for the show.”

  Claire had decided to put together an exhibition of old photographs Joyce had unearthed in the bowels of town hall. The display would open during the Full Moon Festival next month.

  “There’s one here of your great-grandmother.” She pulled a sheet out of the stack. “She’s really young. Probably younger than we are now.” Claire shoved the photo across the table.

  I’d never seen E-li-si like this. I’d been born long after her hair had grayed and her shoulders had stooped. In this grainy black-and-white image she stood tall, slim, and straight, her dark eyes full of mischief, her full, high cheekbones so much like mine, her lips curved as she smiled into the camera.

  “That’s her, right?” Claire asked.

  “Yes.” I touched my finger to Grandmother’s face.

  Outside, the wolf began to howl, and I snatched my finger back. “Did you hear that?”

  “What? You okay?”

  Why did everyone keep asking me that?

  “Peachy.” I returned my gaze to Grandmother.

  “I don’t know who she’s with.” Claire tapped the photo. “Do you?”

  My phone began to ring, and I held up one hand as I pulled it from my belt, then glanced at the caller ID. Ian.

  “Hold on,” I said to Claire.

  The static was so bad I was surprised I’d even received the call down here. “Grace? Can you hear me?”

  “Barely. What is it?”

  “The sticks. I thought they were meant to keep a witch away.”

  Snap. Crackle. The sound seemed to explode in my brain.

  “The word was ‘spirits,’ ‘‘ he said. “Keep away spirits.”

  “What does that mean? Ghosts?”

  Crrrrraack!

  “Ian?”

  He said something that I couldn’t understand.

  “Say again.”

  While I waited for the line to clear, I moved closer to the table, to Claire and the photo of my great-grandmother and someone else.

  I knew that face.

  I picked up the print, turned it over, but I don’t know what I expected to find on the opposite side. “Where’d you get this?”

  “In one of the old cabinets with all the others.”

  “Is this a trick photo?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A combination of one image and another.”

  “No. Why?”

  The woman in the photo was Adsila. But in this picture my great-grandmother was perhaps twenty-five. Adsila’s grandmother was a baby. Adsila wouldn’t be born yet for over half a century. So how could she be standing next to my great-grandmother in an antique photograph?

  All sorts of things fluttered through my head along with the static still coming from the phone. Time travel. Aliens. Ghosts.

  Then, all the pieces came together. “Ian—”

  “Hold on,” he said at the same time. “There’s someone here.”

  Suddenly I could hear him quite clearly, his footsteps on the bare floor, thumping down the steps, opening the door.

  “Adsila. Hi.”

  “Ian!” I shouted, and Claire jumped. The pile of photos in her hand scattered across the floor.

  “Too late, Grace,” a voice whispered over the phone.

  I dropped everything and ran.

  Chapter 35

  Through the corridors, up the stairs, out the front door, and into the light. Down the street to the clinic, up to the second floor, through every room.

  He was gone, as were my great-grandmother’s papers. How had Adsila managed that so fast?

  I glanced out the window and understood. Where my truck had been was a great big empty. I reached for my cell, but I’d dropped it in the basement, so I went to Ian’s phone, but it was dead.

  “Nice touch, Adsila.” Or should I say “Quatie”?

  Someone pounded up the steps and my hand went to my gun, but it was only Claire. She bent at the waist and tried to catch her breath. I snatched her cell phone out of her hand and dialed Cal.

  “I need everyone on the lookout for my pickup truck,” I said the instant he answered.

  “Stolen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “A young Cherokee woman—five-five or -six, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, long black hair, brown eyes. Her name’s Adsila. She’ll be traveling with Ian.”

  Cal cursed. “I knew he couldn’t be trusted.”

  “She kidnapped him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Get moving.”

  I disconnected, then pocketed Claire’s phone. “I need a car.”

  Without a word, she reached into her khaki slacks and handed me her keys. “Who’s Adsila?”

  “Quatie’s great-great-granddaughter, or at least that’s what she said. But I think she’s Quatie, grown younger through the supernatural means of the Raven Mocker.”

  “And you figured this out how?”

  “The woman next to Grandmother in the picture must be Quatie. They were the only full-blood Cherokee women in town then and now. But I met the person in the photo, and her name’s Adsila.” I started for the stairs and Claire followed. “ ‘Adsila’ means ‘blossom’ in Cherokee.”

  “Makes sense,” Claire said. “The blossom of youth. The sprout from which the flower grows. Clever.”

  “I’ll be sure and tell her so right before I kill her.”

  Claire gave me an uneasy glance, but she didn’t argue. “How did she grow younger?”

  “The legend of the Raven Mocker says the witch steals the lives of the dying, appearing as a crone from the weight of all the years it’s stolen. But our Raven Mocker began to kill young people, who had a lot of time left.”

  “She got younger because she stole more time.”

  “That’s my theory.”

  I remembered when I’d first met Adsila her body reminded me of Katrine’s, then Katrine turned up missing. I had a bad feeling we were going to find her somewhere minus her cold, cold heart.

  “Why did she kidnap Ian?” Claire asked as we exited the clinic and headed at a fast clip toward town hall and her car.

  “We must have tipped her off that we were on to her when we went to talk to Quatie about the sticks.”

  “You went to talk to Quatie about sticks,” Claire repeated. “What a fascinating life you lead.”

  “Crap.” I stopped so fast Claire smacked into me from behind. Several passersby looked at me oddly and skirted around us. “We didn’t suspect Quatie of being the Raven Mocker because she’d placed sharpened sticks at the four corners of her house, which we thought repelled witches. A spell,” I explained at Claire’s frown. “But on the phone just now, Ian said the sticks are meant to repel spirits.”

  “What was Quatie trying to keep away?”

  “The messenger wolf.” I snapped my fingers. “Which kept trying to tell me she was trouble, and I wasn’t getting it.”

  “What’s Quatie going to do with Ian?”

  “I think she’s going to kill him.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t easy getting out of the parking lot without Claire in the passenger seat. The only way to leave her behind was to say, “Oh, Malachi’s here.”

  When she turned, I jumped in her car—actually her dad’s old Ford Focus—locked the doors, and drove off. I’d rather have her mad at me than dead.

  Claire’s pho
ne rang as I left the parking lot. The caller ID read: Town Hall. I ignored it. Claire would only yell at me, and I wasn’t in the mood.

  Though I doubted Quatie would be stupid enough to go back to her cabin, I checked the place anyway. Empty, as I’d expected, with no evidence of two people living there, either. Sure there were two sets of clothing, but since Adsila couldn’t fit into Quatie’s things and vice versa, that was understandable.

  But all the clothes, old woman’s and sweet young thing’s, hung in one closet. Despite there being two bedrooms, only one showed signs of use. There was a single coffee cup, cereal bowl, spoon in the sink, and there wasn’t a suitcase, backpack, or overnight bag to be had. Maybe Quatie had taken it with her, but I doubted it.

  I ransacked the drawers, the garbage, tore every book off every shelf and shook them out, upended knickknacks trying to find some clue to where she’d taken him, but there was nothing.

  I stepped onto the porch and contemplated the sun falling down. I didn’t have much time. She’d stolen Ian in the daylight, but she’d kill him in the dark. I knew it as surely as I knew I’d never get over him.

  But why had she stolen him now? If she knew we were on to her, that we were working together to end her reign of death, why hadn’t she killed us both instead of giving us time to figure out her true identity?

  “Grandmother, where are you when I need you?”

  The wolf didn’t come. The last time I’d seen her, the thing had disappeared. Had she gone away forever? How could I bring her back? I needed Ian, in more ways than one.

  I let my eyes wander the tree line, hoping the wolf would appear; then my gaze caught on the sharpened sticks still buried in the ground at the four corners of the cabin, and the light dawned. Even if she could hear me, she couldn’t come to this place.

  I ran down the steps and into the woods, calling for her, but still she didn’t arrive. I was at a loss until I saw the glimmer of water nearby. I sprinted for it, losing my clothes as I went. By the time I reached the creek, I was naked, so I jumped right in.