Wolfe's Lady (7 page)

Tenderness surged in Stella as she cataloged his many minor injuries and although she wanted him to sleep, she had to do something for him. She decided she would wash his battered feet and so she drew a basin of warm water, added a little antiseptic soap, and found a clean washcloth. With very gentle, easy movements, she washed his feet but he woke, despite her efforts not to disturb him.

He blinked at her, and then rubbed his face hard with both hands.

“Stella?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“What are you doing, my star?”

“I am washing your feet. After that, I will clean your other injuries and I will comb all the muck from your hair. How do you feel?”

Darien pondered that, stared at her with bleary, bloodshot eyes and sighed.

“I feel as terrible as I look. So, you know?”

“I know that you are a werewolf, yes.” She kept her voice calm and quiet despite her inner turmoil.

He sat up, swinging his legs out of her reach and groaned.

“I will not deny what you know to be true,” Darien said. “But, how did you find out??”

Stella dropped the sodden washcloth into the basin and met his gaze.

“I saw you change last night under the full moon.”

He shut his eyes and the expression on his face was as bleak as an icy winter night.

“That must have been rather frightening,” he said, after a long silence. “I am sorry you had to witness that. I did intend to tell you, Stella.”

“I know.” He should have done it sooner, she thought, before she found out in such a shocking way. Despite her love, fear remained whenever she thought of him in full wolf form but she tried to hide it, knowing that it would hurt him to know she felt afraid.

“So, what do you think now that you have learned my secret?

Will you run away, my Stella-star?”

He expected that she would; Stella saw that in his face, harsh and ravaged.

She collected her breath to answer without wavering, “I won’t leave. I do love you, Darien, werewolf or not. It scares me, though, and it will take time for me to get adjusted to the idea. Until last night, I thought you were a man, human like me. Now I know that you aren’t but I have to figure out just how to wrap my brain around that.

I think that I can and like I said, I love you but this is hard for me.”

That conclusion, reached in the dark lonesome hours of the long night, came after an inner struggle. Reconciling what she knew of Darien, the man, and the beast she saw transform staggered her soul but she found that, within the werewolf, the man remained. On that small and shaky foundation, she pondered the deepest hidden rooms of her heart to find that despite his affliction, she still found him, as a man, to be handsome, charming, sexy, and so much more.

Only after sifting through her shattered soul had she realized that she could and did love Darien and that she would not leave him. Her hope was that love would carry enough strength so that they could endure until she could accept his status quo, in all facets. Beyond the horror, past her fear, Stella realized for the very first time in her life how very powerful love in its most basic form could be.

He made no sound as he listened to her response but she watched the tears collect in his topaz eyes before they spilled down his cheeks like a heavy rain. She ached for him, felt his pain in herself but she struggled with this reality. If he still loved her too, then she could deal with it but at the moment, but she wasn’t sure quite how she would.

“Stella, you are all I could hope for and more. I never thought I would hear a woman say those sweet words to me ever again and mean them. You do, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

Darien patted the sofa beside him. “But you’re both worried and afraid. I see it in your eyes. Come sit with me. I have much that I must tell you.”

“I am worried and I told you that I’m scared,” she said, struggling to conquer both emotions without success. “The more you tell me, the more maybe I can understand.”

He nodded. “First, do you know how old I am?” Stella thought for a moment.

“Are you twenty-eight?”

He laughed sadly. “I am one hundred and ninety years of age if you count from my actual birthday, April 11, 1830 in a little English village, Eckington. I am, for all purposes, however, twenty-seven for all eternity. Not that it matters, really, but I’ve been in America since just after the Civil War.”

“How did you become a werewolf anyway?” she questioned.

If she could ever understand and try to accept this, she had to know.

“Did it just happen or were you bitten by another werewolf or just a wolf or what?”

“Ah, that,” Darien said, voice steady. “I was out walking on an April evening near the village. I was on my way to visit a young lady who had impressed me with her charms. Just as I passed Dickon’s Woods, a wolf sprang out of the shadows and attacked me.

I fought it, thinking at that time it was indeed a mere wolf and it bit me on the shoulder. I slashed at its face with a small knife I wore on my belt. Then I rushed home and let my mother tend the wound.

Everyone, including me, worried that it might fester. After all, wild animal bites can and this was long before a cure for rabies existed. I healed, though, in good time and thought that everything would be just fine.”

“Was it?” Somehow she didn’t think it could have been.

“Well, no. After my wound healed the first odd thing I noticed was that a neighbor had cuts on his face just where I cut the wolf.”

She had to sort that out for a moment. “So one of your neighbors was a werewolf?”

Darien sighed. “He was, although I didn’t know it. I wondered why Henry Browne would have cuts on his face in the same place. That seemed very strange but I didn’t think about it much.”

“When did you know you were a werewolf?” Saying that word didn’t get any easier for her.

“When the full moon came around, I transformed for the first time. I had felt ill but then when I began changing, I thought I was dying but I did not, just began an unending misery that has lasted more than a hundred years.”

Stella wondered about the young lady he had been on his way to visit and even more about the neighbor so she asked about both, one question at a time.

“Who was she?”

Darien laughed. “Her name was Isabella but I’ve long forgotten any other details.”

“Then what about your neighbor? Did you ever talk to him about what happened?”

With a wry smile, he leaned over and kissed her. “You are a woman of many questions. Yes, I did. I confronted Henry shortly after my first transformation and he admitted that he attacked me. He swore he thought I was a passing traveler, which I never quite believed. You see, he had some interest in Isabella too. He also claimed that if he had not recognized me, I would have been dinner.

He said he stopped when he knew me but I have my doubts.”

“Didn’t you hate him for what he did to you?” Stella asked, conscious that if none of it had happened, that she would not even know Darien, that he would long ago have been buried in an English churchyard.

Darien pondered the question. “I wouldn’t say that I hated him but I did consider trying out the silver bullet theory to see if it worked. I didn’t like the man before the attack so of course I liked him even less after he made me what I am.”

“You thought about killing him?” That surprised her more than she thought it would.

“It was a brief thought. I told him how little I thought of him as either a man or werewolf. Despite that, Henry suggested that we run together, in wolf form, which I would not do. I didn’t want to be his wolf friend. I did not trust him, then or now, just another small reason why I left England. I imagine Henry remains there, miserable as ever.”

“Why did you leave England?” she wondered aloud. “And is your name really Wolfe?”

He laughed but without much mirth. “I left for many reasons including to get away from Henry but the main one was that I could not fool my family forever. I knew that when the years passed and I didn’t age, they would notice and there would be no valid explanation. They had remarked on it by the time I left, many times, and that was only a few years after I became what I am. I left to avoid contact with Henry who would not leave me alone. And yes, love, my true surname is Wolfe. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Her voice came out as no more than a whisper. “So, you will be twenty-seven forever?”

Darien nodded. “Unless my circumstances ever change, yes, I shall.”

She was twenty-three so he was either four years older or seven generations her senior. Her mind could not compute that for a moment and Darien, seeing her consternation, said,

“Werewolves are immortal, my dear. And though I love you, my Stella, more than any woman I have ever known or wanted, we must part.”

That sank into her brain. “No, we cannot! I won’t!”

“Think about it, my sweet star. For now, we are of an age and generation. In twenty years, will people think you are my mother, will they not, my lady? I fear that they will. Moreover, in forty, will you enjoy passing as my grandmother? That is unthinkable. I cannot bear to watch you age, to see that lovely hair turn gray, that smooth skin wrinkle while I remain the same. There is no future for us together and that grieves me. You are my perfect soul mate.”

If she could deal with his disability, the fact that he was a werewolf under the full moon, she could handle a little aging issue.

“I don’t mind.”

Darien sighed. “You will in time. I know it all too well from my own life. In my early years in America, I met and loved a young lady. I thought then that we could adjust to it all but it didn’t work that way. After time passed, just a few short years, she could not bear the fact that she would age and I would not. So she left me, saying goodbye in a letter, telling me all that she couldn’t say to my face.”

Jealousy squirmed like a snake in her belly, another turbulent emotion added to the already volatile mix.

“What was her name?” It didn’t matter but Stella had to know.

“Anna,” Darien said, in a flat voice. “You have no need to be jealous. Although I loved her at the time, what I felt for her was but a patch of what I feel for you. Watching her, however, draw away from me in slow steps, a little more each year, hurt. When we met, we were both twenty-seven. Five years later, I still was – I always will be – the same but she had aged in little ways. She noted it and it would have become more obvious as time passed so we parted.”

“Oh.”

Darien continued. “Beyond the age difference, there is more.

How long will you enjoy dreading the full moon each month, waiting for the horrible night to arrive?”

Instead of answering the question, she asked another,

“Do you change just when the moon is full?”

“Yes. It is an excruciating process and afterward, although I seldom remember any of what I did as a wolf, I am exhausted and ill.

Transforming leaves me feeling as if I have influenza.”

“I’m sorry, Darien. What can I do to make you feel better?”

He shook his head from side to side. “Nothing, darling. Just leave me in my misery.”

“No.” That was one thing Stella could not do. There must be another option, she thought, and searched for some scrap of folklore that might provide some way to reconcile their impossible situation.

“You know that I studied folklore and superstitions during the Dark Ages. Aren’t there ways to reverse your condition or a cure? I seem to remember some old tales and methods. Did you ever try any of them?”

He raised his arm to put around her shoulders, wincing as he did.

“There are stories but I doubt any of them are valid. I tried a few of the simple ones, fasting and kneeling in prayer for days. That offers nothing but slow starvation. That almost killed me in 1860. I returned home, weak and suffering from malnutrition. Another time, soon after I became a werewolf, I asked my brother for his help and we tried something else you may have heard about. He spoke my baptismal name aloud three times and then he struck me on the forehead with the butt of a knife. Nothing happened except that I got a beastly headache. If he had hit me much harder, I might have suffered a concussion.”

“What about rolling in the dew where the wolfsbane grows?”

Stella asked. It sounded more than a little lame and much too simple but it was one of the ideas she dredged up from Medieval folklore.

Darien gave her a rueful smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “That one does not work, either, my dear. I caught a chill from the damp and cold morning air. I am immortal but I can get sick and I did.”

“Isn’t there anything else?” Stella asked. Something from the pages of an old book, so fragile that she had to study it in the library reference room, came to mind. “I remember reading that if a werewolf that has never tasted human blood plunges into free flowing water on the eve of the full moon, he can become human again. Did you ever try that?”

“No, not since that would involve facing both my phobias.”

Darien said. “I would be afraid to try and if it failed anyway, I would be very disappointed.”

Although he sounded hopeless, Stella found a tiny sparkle of hope. If there were a way, then they could find it. Love might be the power that prevailed and if it meant they could find a happy ending to this story, she could help him face his fears.

“It could be worth a try, Darien.”

“Stella, leave it alone, please." His voice thickened with fear and something more.

“I can’t do that. It might be the one way that we could be together. Please, Darien.”

His reluctance suggested more than fear at stake and she wondered. As she reviewed the requirements for that method, she realized she had no idea if he drank blood or killed in wolf form.

Nausea twisted her stomach but she had to frame the question and know the answer, no matter what it might be.

“I cannot visualize that you would do such things, Darien, but I will ask – do you drink human blood or kill when you are in wolf form?”