Indigo Moon (36 page)

Around her the forest began to vibrate with another ancient sound, the howl of wolves. Shrill and piercing, excited by the hunt, Isabelle easily picked up their intent. Wolven closed in on all sides until her head hurt with their cries. Luc, too, was affected. Her face creased into a grimace of panic. She clawed harder at Ren’s back, her intention changed. She struggled for freedom, not to fight. Her bid for escape made her even more vicious.

Ren lifted Luc clear off the ground with one last victory howl and flung her across the clearing. Luc landed heavily, close to where Isabelle crouched. For one stunned moment she lay there, winded. Isabelle barely breathed. Their gaze locked for a split second, then, with a wicked wink, Luc was gone. Twigs and dust swirled behind her as she sprinted into the depths of the wood.

The howling clamor changed and began to spiral away, as if magically attached to Luc and her movements. The prey was on the move and messages were flying through the forest. Luc had fled, but the hunt continued hard on her heels.

Isabelle crawled back to lean against a tree. She did not trust her legs to hold her. She shook violently with shock. The growing coldness had marbled her limbs with blue blotches. She sucked in huge gulps of air and blinked back the tears that crowded her eyes now that the danger had passed.

In two steps Ren was beside her. Her damp muzzle sniffed Isabelle’s tear-filled eyes, then her left ear, her neck, and armpit. Ren continued to investigate the valley of her breasts and her navel, her crotch, the back of her knee. Isabelle lay a weary hand on the hunched back of the huge beast nuzzling at her.

“I’m okay, Ren,” she said wearily. “She didn’t hurt me. You got here just in time. Oh God.” Her hand came away slick with blood. Bright red and wet, it mapped out the lines of her palm. She shuffled onto her knees and began to comb apart Ren’s fur with her fingers. Deep punctures and scores studded Ren’s back.

“More scars. She hooked you good. I suppose all she could do was hang on. You gave her one hell of a pounding.” She scratched the fur between Ren’s ears and tweaked them with a gentle tug. “I guess you’re the dominant twin. She’s just the wicked one.”

Ren responded to Isabelle’s touches with a long, ticklish lick along her hand and arm, and then another across her belly that awoke a flock of butterflies inside her. Isabelle was suddenly awkward in her nakedness. She pulled back and rose to her feet. Several yards away Luc’s abandoned clothes lay in a heap. She pulled on the shirt and screwed up her nose at the smell.

“It stinks of her, but it will have to do.” She pulled on the pants, too. The clothes were much too large, but at least she was covered. Ren approached and sniffed at the garments, growling in dissatisfaction.

“I know. You don’t like me smelling of her either. But once I get a shower I promise to burn them. A shower, a meal, and a big, big sleep.” She was suddenly exhausted. Before she could draw another breath, Ren swung her up into her arms and began to make a path through the undergrowth.

“You know where we’re going? I was trying to follow Mouse and Joey. You know that they’re out here somewhere, right?” She got a big lick along her cheekbone right up into her eyebrow, and took it as an affirmative. Ren broke into a smooth run, moving through the forest like liquid. Cradled in her massive arms, all Isabelle could do was cuddle in and feel the safest and happiest she had ever been in her whole life.

*

“I burned them in the fire pit,” Ren said with satisfaction as she raised the bedclothes and slid in alongside Isabelle.

“Couldn’t wait, could you? I barely had them off me.” Isabelle curled around Ren.

“I don’t want her scent in the compound. The Garouls are not very happy with Luc. And I don’t want Joey and Mouse to pick up on it. It’s going to be hard enough explaining all this.”

“We’ll do it together.”

“You’re going home with me?” Ren asked hopefully.

Isabelle hesitated. “I think you should consider Marie’s offer. They’re so young, Ren, and they deserve all the help they can get. A summer in Little Dip sounds like a good deal to me. Plus Marie will send some of her pack up to tend the farm. They can cross-train each other. I think she likes the idea of a northern Garoul base. They’re very acquisitive, this family of yours.”

She could feel Ren tense as she considered the alien idea. Isabelle knew it was asking a lot of her, to bring her pack down to Little Dip while other Garouls ran the farm and hatchery station for her. She could stay on and work at her veterinary business, or take a sabbatical and visit Little Dip for the summer, too. The choice was hers.

“Luc was trying to bring Mouse back here, in her own perverse way,” Ren said. “She must have thought it was a good idea. And for all her faults, Luc was never stupid.”

“I think Luc saw the writing was on the wall for a small pack like yours. You did your best, but none of those kids had a healthy start and the future is very uncertain.” Isabelle was kind but determined. “Claude has promised to train them along with the younger Garouls. It’s a good offer. At least here they’d have a better chance.”

“Where would we have the better chance, Isabelle? Our future is just as uncertain,” Ren asked her. “Wolven mate for life, but I can’t hold you to that. You were stolen, and I’d never stop you if you wanted to leave.”

“Luc infected me, that’s all. She’s nothing more than bacteria. But you loved me and bit me and claimed me. I’m wolven, through and through, there’s no escaping it, and I’m going to be a
great
wolven. I can track butterflies on a breeze.” Isabelle smiled at her boast. “I’m happy in my wolfskin. If wolven mate for life, then I guess I’m in it for the long haul with you.”

Ren snuggled into her. The heat under the bed clothes soared.

“I can’t believe how easily you took to it,” she said. “There’s much to be said for a double infection. Maybe I should bite you again and make you über wolven.” Isabelle slapped her arm playfully. They lay nose-to-nose, and Ren’s gaze burned into Isabelle’s. Little flecks of amber burst upon her iris like stray fireworks in a midnight sky.

“So blue,” Ren murmured. “Your eyes remind me of summer.”

“Aunt Mary always called them cornflower blue. I love my aunt Mary, and she adores you.”

“She doesn’t know I’m a werewolf. That might sway her opinion.”

“She would adore you anyway.
My
pack accepts you, Ren Garoul.”

Ren snorted back a laugh. “Mary adores me because of Atwell.”

“And Hope adores you because of Tadpole. Hope’s pack accepts you, Ren Garoul. See how it works? And if Hope and her den accept you, then the Garouls have to. It’s a chain. Are these people going to be my in-laws?”

Ren rolled onto her back and pulled Isabelle on top of her.

“Maybe. It will take time for me to rest around them. But they came to my aid when I needed to find you, and I’ll always be beholden to Marie for that.” She growled and captured Isabelle’s lips in a playful kiss. Isabelle broke the kiss. One more question hummed at the back of her mind.

“What about Luc? What will happen to her?”

Ren frowned. “That depends on Luc. Marie sent her best trapper after her. She wants her brought back here. After that, I’m not sure what the Garoul council will decide. But I won’t let them kill her. Luc needs to be rehabilitated.”

“She sent a trapper?”

“Yes. Not a tracker, like you will be, or an out-and-out hunter like me. A trapper is all those things, but with a subtle difference. Their job is to bring their quarry back alive. They’re tricky and artful.”

“Rehabilitation. You think that’s possible for Luc?”

“I want it to be. Luc’s been on the wrong side of feral for too long. She’s ill. I want her back in the fold. I suspect she knew she was unwell and that’s why she wanted to return to Little Dip and bring Mouse with her. I think she hoped for a fresh start. I hope Marie’s trapper can catch her in time, and that maybe Marie can help her somehow.”

“Time will tell. Our pack will come to Little Dip to learn and then we will return home to our own valley. We’ll be another Garoul den.”

“Then that’s our way forward. I can do it with you by my side.”

“I’ll always be by your side. I’m your life bond, your mate.” And with that Isabelle rolled into Ren’s arms and kissed her Alpha.

SILVER COLLAR, the fourth book in Gill McKnight’s GAROUL Werewolf series.

Luc squatted beside the crab apple tree watching the lights go out one by one in the single-story farmhouse as the farmer and his wife made their way toward their bedroom. First the kitchen light extinguished, then the living room. The hall light went on and off in less than a minute. Luc waited patiently until only the back bedroom and what she thought might be the bathroom windows glowed yellow in the night.

She sighed and settled in for a little longer. She had to wait until the parents were sound asleep. Her stomach gurgled with hunger. Idly she inserted one curved claw into her wet, bubbling nostril and examined the mucus she withdrew. Clotted, green, and streaked with blood. Not good. Her head felt thick and her left ear buzzed annoyingly. She had some sort of fluid gathering on her eardrum.

Luc glumly poked at the gutted carcass beside her. She hated domestic cat meat; it was stringy and foul tasting. She had slit this one open out of boredom. Good thing she hadn’t gorged on it despite her hunger. Its kidneys were rancid. Surprising, as it was a young cat, no more than a kitten really. She tinkled the little bell on its pink collar. A much-loved pet, in fact.

The last light in the farmhouse went out. Luc blinked in the darkness, her perfect night vision adjusting at once to the pitch dark. Heavy clouds blanked out the stars, and the night sky hung low and foreboding over the fields. This farm grew wheat, hay, and sunflowers. No animal husbandry at all. That was very disappointing. She was on the run, hunted and famished, and she begrudged the farmer his lack of livestock. It would have been so much easier to pick off a calf or pig than go to all this trouble. Her ears flattened and she growled in discontent. She didn’t have enough time to sit around all day, waiting for nightfall as her hunger and weakness and bitterness grew.

Carefully, she crept forward. Her keen hearing picked out the dogs prowling back and forth in their run. There were two of them, young and unsure, and they whimpered in agitation. While they were away with the farmer she had made sure to urinate on their bedding. Now they were locked in with a predator’s scent that cowed them. They would do no more then whine in misery all night.

Luc trod through the family vegetable plot. Her huge paws flattened the leafy heads of beet, rhubarb, and potato. She knew which window she wanted. She had been watching it all evening. The pink curtains were pulled tight. A picture of a pony was stuck on the glass pane, and a butterfly spangle wind-chime hung limp inside the shut window. She needed that window to open just a crack. Enough to let her claws slide in under the sill and force it all the way up.

She lifted the pink collar she’d torn from the cat’s body and tinkled the little bell.
Meow.
She mimicked the dead animal to perfection.
Meow.
She sank to her haunches by the window and waited.

A second later a light went on. The soft, five-watt glimmer of a child’s night lamp. The whole window suffused in a gentle pink glow. Luc smacked her thin leathery lips in satisfaction.

“Tinky? Is that you?” a little girl’s voice called sleepily. “Tinky?”

Luc slid into the shadows to the side of the window. The latch fumbled open.

“Tinky? You’re a naughty kitty. You know you’re not allowed out after dark.”

The hinges squeaked as the window opened. Luc reached out, almost lazily. She knew what to do. A single foreclaw to pierce the throat and rip apart the vocal cords. The rest of her claws would hook her muted victim under the chin, up into her mouth cavity. Then Luc would drag the child out by her face.

The farmer should have kept livestock. He’d learn.

The air thrummed. It whistled and quivered. Luc fell to the ground. Instinct threw her onto her belly.
Thunk!
Wooden splinters fell on her, blasted out of the plank wall by the barbed shaft embedded in it.

Luc scrabbled onto all fours, then lurched forward, running hunched in a crooked path, past the vegetable plot and out into the cover of the orchard. She didn’t have to look back to see a silver arrow glint evilly in the pink bedroom light. She knew it was there. She had heard it whistling toward her heart. All she had to know was run. Run from the hunter on the other end of the crossbow.

Gill McKnight is Irish and moves between Ireland, England, and Greece in a nonstop circuit of work, rest, and play. She loves messing about in boats and has secret fantasies about lavender farming.

With a BA in Art and Design and a Master’s in Art History, it says much about her artistic skill that she now works in IT.

Dying to Live
by Kim Baldwin & Xenia Alexiou. British socialite Zoe Anderson-Howe’s pampered life is abruptly shattered when she’s taken hostage by FARC guerrillas while on a business trip to Bogota, and Elite Operative Fletch must rescue her to complete her own harrowing mission. (978-1-60282-200-9)