This is much better, she said and shook herself out. I don’t feel so clumsy.
A faint whiff of smoke caught my attention, but I couldn’t sense any fire nearby. Then I realized what my grandfather and Gabriel intended.
We have to go.
Where?
Wolfsbane Manor!
And with a thought, we were there.
By the time we arrived, the entire house was engulfed in flame. The orange and yellow glow lit the edges of the trees around the yard, and even the low clouds seemed to reflect the fury of the fire. In my mind’s eye, I could see the ballroom, the paint of the mural curling off from the heat, the boxes of papers catching quickly and helping the hungry flames into the underground laboratory, where chemicals would explode, glass would shatter, and plastic would melt. A lifetime of work gone in a puff of smoke.
Did you know this would happen? Werewolf-Lonna sat on the grass next to me, and I saw the flames reflected in her eyes.
No.
Where are the men?
My heart caught in my throat. I don’t know.
I darted toward the flames, but a large gray wolf blocked my way. This one was also a spirit wolf, and in his eyes, I saw my grandfather’s soul.
Don’t go any closer, he warned me. If you inhale too much smoke, it will kill your physical form as well.
He seemed to be wreathed in smoke, and I knew what he had done, the sacrifice he had made to keep his knowledge out of the hands of those who would abuse it. Still, with my last glimmer of hope, I had to ask, What did you do?
I don’t have much time. There’s something I left for you. It’s in the boathouse in a hidden compartment just above the canoe hooks. It’s hidden well enough the Feds won’t find it. He touched his nose to mine. I will always love you and be proud of you. Remember that. He disappeared.
If I had been in human form, I would have cried. As it was, all I could do was throw my head back and let forth a long, mournful howl. Other voices joined mine, a chorus of grief for my grandfather, the alpha wolf of the Crystal Pines pack. I felt warm bodies crowding in around me and I knew they were there, even Kyra, who had always hated me, and Ron and Matt, who had betrayed me for their own purposes. I saw the future and knew the pack would scatter, but for that night, it was all of us together, howling in grief at the waning moon.
Two Months Later
I sat in Peter Bowman’s old office, where a fresh young partner went through the formalities to make me the heir to my grandfather’s fortune as well as the land on which Wolfsbane Manor had stood. It had been eight weeks and four days, and the process had been held up, first by assertions of insurance fraud, and then by the resulting arson investigation. There hadn’t been evidence of any foul play, and the whole thing was ruled as a tragic accident.
The fire had been caused by a short in the electrical system, the insurance report said. The house was such a shambles even the arson investigator had a difficult time pinpointing the cause. There had been a spark near a place where the gas line had cracked, and the whole system had gone up in flames. Along with it went the house. My grandfather, ostensibly exhausted from his ordeal, had slept through the alarms and had died of smoke inhalation in his bed before his body had burned to a pile of charred remains. They used dental records to identify him.
My mother sat in the other desk chair, petite like myself, but with iron-gray hair and a mouth perpetually twisted into a sneer. Her bitterness at losing my grandfather’s fortune to me was almost palpable. He had left her enough to live on very comfortably for the rest of her life, but he knew her innate selfishness would never allow her to be satisfied. She signed the necessary papers and left without saying a word.
“Your grandfather was a smart man,” the lawyer said. “This will is ironclad.”
“So was his.” I signed the last page with a heavy heart. That meant the final papers were drawn up, so he handed me over to the banker, who had come all the way from Memphis to help transfer the money and the accounts to my name. I walked out of the office with more money than I could have ever imagined, but more bereft of family and friends than I had ever been.
Denial that the body in the house had actually been my grandfather’s gave way to anger at him for sacrificing himself, and now grief. It would be a long time to acceptance. I hadn’t even been to what was left of the Manor since it all happened. The nice, perky Crystal Pines real estate lady had been very helpful in finding me a new house. “It’s on the cul-de-sac and very quiet.” It turned out to have been Peter Bowman’s, who had skipped town with his family the day after the raid on the lab in the woods. They had taken what they could carry and left most of the furniture, which had been sold with the house. I still sold off most of the stuff in the office and decorated it so it looked like my grandfather’s. My possessions had finally arrived from Memphis the day after the fire, and I rented storage space for it until I could put it in my new home.
Ron had disappeared as well just after the Bowman family had left. I later found out he had gone down to Little Rock and was trying to convince UAMS to re-admit him to his residency program as well as to win the heart of the charming Lisa Temmerson. Iain, meanwhile, had flown to Washington, D.C., to act as a consultant and expert witness for the FDA’s suit against Hippocrates-Cabal. Leo had gone after Peter, and I hadn’t heard from him since. I sometimes wished we could talk about it, what had happened, and I wondered if the aconite lozenges would help with his mood swings, but there was no whisper on the wind.
And what of Gabriel? I knew he wasn’t dead—he had been beside me in body on the night of the fire, and I could sense his spirit was still alive somewhere. But he had been a wanderer and would probably never settle down. He’d come hoping I could finish my grandfather’s work. Now I could be of no use to him. It sounds crazy to say it, but his betrayal hurt almost as much as Robert’s. They had both shown me a world beyond what I could have imagined.
I had never found out what happened between him and Lonna the morning after we left them, and I honestly didn’t want to know. Lonna and I still saw each other occasionally. My grandfather had left me the recipe for the aconite lozenges as well as my brother’s and my letters in the boathouse, and it’s how we managed our symptoms. We would occasionally hunt together; the trust just wasn’t there anymore. I felt like a hypocrite for being so hard on her about Peter when I’d still lusted after Robert. She would never admit it, but she resented me for having brought her into a situation where she was compromised on every level. That it was partially her fault for being overconfident was something she’d never admit.
So I was alone, the rich heiress in a small town in the Ozarks in Arkansas. I pondered it on the way back to my new house filled with furnishings that still felt like they belonged to other people. I reminded myself it could be worse, and maybe I needed to be alone for a while. But when I turned the curve to the cul-de-sac, I saw someone sitting on my front porch steps. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of the wavy dark hair, the intense black eyes, and the muscular body in blue jeans and a black leather jacket.
“Leo?”