Wolfe's Lady (6 page)

When she asked him to tell her, over their next lunch period, Darien shook his head.

“I will tell you, my Stella-star, but I don’t want to talk about it now.”

More than a little piqued, she sighed.

“So, when will you tell me?”

His topaz eyes darkened almost to onyx as he looked across the table at her, face sad.

“I will tell you next week, after the full moon.”

“Why then?” She wondered just what the full moon could have to do with his secret. Bits of folklore she learned in her studies niggled but she could not focus to think about them now.

Darien shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter now. I don’t even want to think about it.”

Stella started to protest and then didn’t. She could wait and anyway, the weekend was coming. They could spend long days together, maybe the nights as well.

Or, so she thought, right up until Friday.

****

“Darien, would you like to do something tonight?” Stella asked, confident that he would. After all, they loved each other and no matter what his secret might be, she knew it would be nothing she could not handle. She had visions of a romantic dinner at an old inn she had heard about but he shook his head before she could tell him about it.

“Stella, my star, tonight is impossible. I can’t see you at all this weekend, not until Monday.”

His tone was mild, even contrite, but the words stung like gravel tossed against a window with force. Her hurt feelings gave her courage to fight back.

“Why? Why do I have to wait until Monday?”

Darien’s sad eyes pierced her heart.

“Star-of-my-heart, you must. I will tell you then, if I can.”

“Have I offended you?”

He looked shocked. “Of course you have not, Stella.”

“Did I do something gross or gauche?”

“You did nothing of the kind.”

“I don’t understand.” She did not. To her, his behavior was incomprehensible. “Are you ill?”

Darien looked as if he could be, his eyes were dull and his face paler than normal. He acted restless and strange. Her question hit him like a shot and he rubbed a hand over his face.

“I don’t feel well, that is true. I never do, really, when the moon is full. Stella, please. I promise that I will see you Monday, maybe even Sunday evening after the full moon wanes. Right now, though, I must go, my dear.”

He would have gone then but she could not let him go without saying something more.

“Wait, Darien.”

He had turned as if to go but now hesitated, face turned toward her with his eyes veiled and haunted.

“What is it?” he sighed, his impatience to be gone evident in his hurry and in his constant nervous movements, the twitch of his feet and the twisting of his fingers.

“I don’t like secrets.”
There,
she thought, she said it and it was out. She loathed secrets because holding back important information derailed her last relationship and had damaged others in the past. Alex, her ex-boyfriend, who kept both an addiction to alcohol and his second lover from her eroded any desire to keep secrets, large or small. Secrets, she thought, had an eerie way of growing until they became too massive to hide any longer and then exploded, shattering worlds and hearts.

“Dearest Stella, neither do I but for now, this one must remain.” He sounded weary but she pressed him anyway.

“Why?”

He exhaled with force, enough that she thought she might have succeeded in making him angry too.

“If I could say, it would not need to be a secret and I shall tell you, all of it, very soon but I can’t now. Please try to understand”

Simple for him to say but not easy to do, Stella thought.

“I can’t,” she said with honesty. “And I won’t. Do you love me?”

His topaz eyes kindled brighter with ire. “Yes, I do. This has nothing to do with whether or not I love you – “

She interrupted him, “It has everything to do with it, Darien.

People who love one another trust each other and they don’t keep secrets. If we are going to have any kind of relationship at all, everything has to be open between us, no dark secrets and nothing held back.”

“Stella.” He spoke her name in such a sad voice that her anger faded a fraction. “I do love you and I believe that you love me. I agree with all of that, but – “

She squelched an urge to stamp her foot with outrage. “But you still don’t plan to tell me why I can’t see you this weekend, do you?”

Darien looked down at her, his expression unreadable.

“I will but not now. Let that be enough.”

Stella shook her head. “I can’t. I have to have trust and that means no secrets. Don’t go like this, Darien.”

He sighed. “I must, my darling star.”

He pushed past her, without a touch or a kiss. Stella stood in the empty hallway, listening as his rapid footfalls descended the stairs, heartsick and afraid.

What, she wondered, remembering his earlier remark, did the full moon have to do with anything?

There must be a significance, Stella thought, and searched her mental library to remember all the folklore and superstitions about the full moon. This was her area of expertise so if there was a link, she should be able to make the connection. There were all the old beliefs about moon madness, the ancient idea that staring at the moon too long could cause insanity. Even today, law enforcement officers and medical personnel often claimed that aberrant behavior skyrocketed when the moon was full so there might be something to the theory.

Lunatic came from the root word luna that meant moon. But Darien wasn’t crazy, although he did act odd. She thought about the Wild Hunt, age-old folk lore from all across Europe, where the dead or the damned hunted souls for the Devil beneath a full moon but rejected it.

That did not fit, either.

Another memory emerged, this one not from her studies or her thesis but from an old movie, black and white, the 1940’s classic,
The
Wolf Man,
where an old gypsy tells the main character, who was bitten by a wolf that, “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night can become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the moon is shining bright.”

All the arcane beliefs she once studied made her nervous now and Stella stopped herself. This was silly. Darien wasn’t a lunatic.

The moon’s power controlled ocean tides and when to plant crops for those that believed it but it couldn’t explain Darien’s strange actions.

More anxious than before, Stella resolved to forget about it, to not think about him or his strange behavior. Always persnickety about who she would date, she knew how to spend Friday night alone and so she vowed she would just go home, watch banal television or read a book. Maybe she would even take a hot bath – she would do anything to keep her mind off Darien and away from the foolish notions she dredged up that related to the full moon.

Come Monday, she thought, he would have some explaining to do.

Uneasy, even a little angry, Stella did not go home after all.

She did not want to inhale the aroma of the roses Darien brought just days before or remember how close, in every way, they had been.

She drove her car, first time all week, out to the edge of town where the fast food restaurants, chain discount, and convenience stores lined the highway business loop and bought a salad. She had little appetite and picked at the greens, eating less than half. After that, she drove around, ending up at the little park Darien had shown her.

On a park bench near the spring, she shivered when the evening wind turned chill but watched the evening sky darken from a pale blue to a rich black. The first stars peeked out, twinkling above and when the moon rose, it was full and magnificent. The huge orb swelled large and seemed to dominate the sky as it came up and Stella wondered again, why Darien said he would tell her his problem or secret after the full moon.

That full moon revived all the old superstitions she thought she had rejected earlier. Although she still did not believe any of them could apply to Darien, she wanted to know what his hang up with the full moon could be. She didn’t want to wait until Monday or listen to some cryptic excuse. Stella steeled herself to go confront him now and ask for the truth. If their love was to endure, he could not keep secrets and she thought she had made that very clear. He would tell her now, tonight, or not at all. Stella marched from the park with the fervor of a warrior queen bent on battle, driving the few blocks to Darien’s house with focus. She wanted to surprise him, give him no warning to prepare for her arrival so she parked on the edge of the road and walked up the drive.

By then, it was full dark but with the rising moon, she could see quite well. As she approached the house, a strange sound caught her attention, an odd sobbing sound that moaned too. It reminded her of wind under the eaves of a house and she wrote it off as nothing.

When she entered the private, overgrown front lawn, she paused in the shadows when she saw Darien. He sat on the grass, hugging himself as if he might be in great physical pain, rocking back and forth. The sound she heard came from his lips and she started forward to help him. He must be ill, she thought, but another sound, this one terrible, made her stop.

The loud cracking noise was like popping knuckles but far louder, the creak of bones grating. As she stared at Darien, his limbs twitched and then, to her disbelief, appeared to grow, elongating as she watched. His face contorted in agony and then his features changed, as his face grew longer, his jaw stretching out into a muzzle.

Stella struggled to assimilate what she saw, but the reality of what was happening did not sink in until she saw the fur that exploded over his skin, moving like a dark fungus over his every inch. Darien, taller than before, limbs longer and stronger, came to his feet, put back his head, and howled at the moon. She hunkered down in the shadows, afraid and sick to her soul as the awful truth ripped her heart apart.

Disbelief warred against the reality of what she saw but even though she shut her eyes and willed the sight to vanish, to be some freak of her imagination, when she opened them nothing changed. The wolf, werewolf, whatever it was, remained. His howls sent frigid frissons down her back and she feared this creature, this thing that shifted from the man she loved into this wild beast. Every scrap of dark folk belief she knew about werewolves and shapeshifters rose in her mind, haunted her like ghosts. Darien, the man she loved, was a werewolf; a creature of legend and late night movies that she didn’t even believe existed until now. Reconciling this nightmare beast with Darien seemed difficult and terror, rank and harsh, gripped her as she remained hidden, watching with horror.

As the reality sunk into her consciousness, her lungs refused to pump air and she could not breathe. Panic compressed her chest and twisted her stomach into a pretzel like knot with such pain that she bent double, still unable to catch a breath. Such black panic seized her, body and spirit, that she thought certain for several moments that the shock would kill her, that she would die from this awful knowledge. Until now, Darien appeared to be ideal for her, matched to her in a way that no other man ever came within light years of touching, but this dark revelation threatened to destroy that and take Stella down with it. In moments, his transformation wiped away her lifelong belief systems, confirmed what she thought to be mere folklore, and threatened her foundations. If she had not been so afraid, so paralyzed with dread that she could not think with any coherence, she would have screamed, screeched loud so that she could vent her anguished agony that everything was not what it had seemed. If she could survive, if any scrap of what she thought she had with Darien could continue, she had to find something to hold fast but there seemed to be nothing solid that she could grasp.

She bit hard on her lip so that she would not cry out or scream, watching as he howled again and then bounded off into the forest, vanishing among the trees. .If he sensed her, even smelled her, she wondered what he would do, if he would attack with the sharp claws or sharper teeth. The very idea made her want to shriek as loudly as he howled. If she did that, however, she might descend into a dark madness where she might be lost forever. When Darien, if she still could call him that after what she witnessed, could no longer be seen or heard, she realized that, with effort, she could breathe again but that nothing would ever be the same as it was before.

Stella wept then, head in her hands, but when her tears ended, she walked up to the porch and into Darien’s house to wait for his return. The long hours stretched ahead, intolerable, but she curled up on the leather sofa in the library and remembered every tiny clue that pointed to this harsh reality. Despite her studies, even the cryptic hints he tossed her direction, there was no way she could have envisioned this. No woman could, she thought, still dazed and in denial. She endured the end of relationships before but never because her significant other became a creature of legend beneath the full moon.

As the hours passed, however, she realized one thing, the one that mattered most of all, unexplainable but undeniable. She loved Darien anyway.

Morning light filtered through the windows when she woke, disoriented and groggy. Then the memory of what she saw plunged over her consciousness like a cement block and she rose, searching the house until she found Darien. He lay on the long couch in the living room, restored to his human form, asleep and snoring. His dirty bare feet looked bruised and cut; blood seeped from some of the small wounds. Darien’s arms weren’t much better, scratched, and scraped. His long hair was matted; pieces of leaves, bits of grass, and bark tangled through it. His hands appeared to be swollen and they, too, had marks of struggle, blisters, and abrasions.