Laine felt as if she’d smacked into a tree. Shocked, stunned. Then intensely skeptical. But it all made a kind of gut-wrenching sense.
She shot her brother a glare of pure hatred, which he ignored. Innis had known the facts all along. Why couldn’t he have just spat it out?
Because it was all a game to him. She closed her eyes until her anger was under control.
When she opened them, Jaird was contemplating his glass, smiling to himself. Smug bastard.
So much for her childhood fantasies of her mother in a secret marriage to a famous artist, or a rock star, or any other kind of romantic idiocy. Stupid me. If only she had a real dad . . . her own true father who would care for her, love her, protect her . . . But she had something better than a fantasy, she had Martin. A surge of love and gratitude for him rose in her. Martin was the one who had cared for her, loved her, protected her.
She should have seen this coming. She’d asked questions when she was old enough to be curious, but all Mother had given her were vague, unsatisfying references to a “man I met overseas; we were in love, but it was impossible for us to be together . . . ”
Bethea had found Martin Summerhill long before Laine was old enough to notice anything lacking in her life. Martin was Dad, always had been, and mother and daughter had taken his name. Flighty, ethereal Bethea had grabbed hold of the solid young man and sunk deep into him, as if he were a big comfy couch.
Martin was her father, not this wild barefoot seducer who screwed with tourist girls and then abandoned them.
But . . . it was Mother who left him. Ran home to Canada and a new man.
Then, years after Laine’s birth, she’d left her supposedly happy home and met her lover for a tryst. And along came Innis.
Jaird was watching her now, his hooded eyes enigmatic. Bitterly, she examined him. What did they have in common? Hair and eye color, yes. Cheekbones, perhaps. Body shape, thoroughly different. Inconclusive evidence.
She remembered then what he was: a creature of magic, a cabyll ushtey. Innis had said he could answer all her questions.
Would he give her the truth?
“How did it happen? Very simple . . . we took one look at each other. I couldn’t resist her, nor she me. Bethea was beautiful, free and innocent—not innocent of love, but innocent of the world and the dangers she might encounter.”
“You being one of the dangers.”
He looked right at her and said, “Yes, I was.”
He made no attempt at all to soften his declaration. She looked at Innis, who hadn’t moved and didn’t seem to be about to. See, his sly smirk said. Told you he was special.
Jaird crossed one bare foot over the other, letting his legs stretch out. She could see the tendons strung tight under the wiry hairs on his ankles, the yellow lamplight outlining the hard edges of bone under his tanned skin.
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he reminisced. “I made love to her and begged her to stay with me. I begged even harder when she became pregnant with you.” He took a sip from his glass, and shrugged. “She wanted to go home. I tried to . . . induce her to stay. She wouldn’t listen.”
She wouldn’t obey. Laine could read between the lines. This wasn’t just a man who fell in love and got dumped, no matter how gentle and hurt he might appear now. “How did she happen to meet you?”
“Here, in this village.” He gave her a half smile, one side of his generous mouth curling up. “We had a few weeks of happiness.” He sighed and looked mournfully into his whisky.
Laine heard Innis shift in his seat. Was he finding this star-crossed lover business hard to swallow too? “I asked how you met, not where.”
“Hmm. Well, she was singing in the pub. One of her companions had a guitar, and the two of them were making some very nice music, as I recall, and collecting beer money. Though I don’t normally frequent pubs, I was there that night. I fell for her on the spot. She looked like a water sprite, pale and lovely . . . her voice was untrained but superior. My fault all of it happened, though I can’t say I’m sorry now, looking at the two of you.”
Fatuous prick. His words were false, meant only to soothe her.
Laine stood and walked to the unlit fireplace, steadying herself by grasping the mantel with one hand. This was all too much. She didn’t want to believe any of it. Plus, she had to look at Bethea in a whole new light. Singing in a pub, hitching around England with a bunch of pals. Had she ever heard her mother sing? She shook her head. It just didn’t mesh with what the woman was now.
“I’m not ready to accept what you’re saying. Not yet.” She stopped, biting her lip. It was time to change the subject. “I need to know about something that happened earlier today, something I can’t explain. At least not rationally . . . ”
“Ah,” said Jaird calmly. “The Induction. Yes, that would be hard to explain rationally.”
Arren felt the night whip past him, branches slashing, grass tearing at his legs, trying to drag him to a halt. But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—stop. Running was too good to give up.
He hoped he was dreaming, because no human could run this fast. He was galloping through the black and silver night, and nothing was going to stop him. He came to a river and turned, racing alongside its flow through the reeds and grass, feeling the electric shimmer of the water’s power like a big hand stroking his skin. The water lured him like a drug that would addict him after just one taste.
Arren jerked awake, almost losing his balance on the stone bench. The inn’s garden breathed and sang around him, the night air full of the sound of insects and the hollow whisper of leaves in the wind. He sat perfectly still as he regained his sense of where he was. Of who he was. An exhausted idiot, letting himself fall asleep here in the open.
But still human.
The memory of the river’s call was in his skin.
Not that. Never that.
He stood abruptly and shook the remaining shreds of the dream off. Inevitably, his thoughts returned to Laine Summerhill and her cabyll brother.
Where were they, and what were they doing? He looked at the starry sky, saw that at least two hours had passed. His fear for the girl dragged at him the way the grass had dragged at his legs in his dream, but this fear was real. Laine was getting into something much too powerful to handle or even understand, no matter how intelligent and brave she was. A wave of helpless anger made him bare his teeth at the night.
If the boy had taken her to Jaird Fallon, Laine was in peril and wouldn’t even know it.
Laine was sitting cross-legged on a wolfskin rug on the floor of Jaird’s cottage, her unwavering attention upon him so that she barely remembered to breathe. Her back was against the leather chair in which Innis sat. Innis had relaxed under the influence of whisky. She could hear him hum softly. He’d kicked off his shoes and was absently stroking her shoulder with one foot. The contact felt good, her crazy brother sending a message of solidarity.
Jaird’s voice was hypnotic. “As your brother demonstrated, the moon can be induced to draw power from the sun and store it within her sphere. And the cabyll draw power in turn from the moon as she rides the sky. It can be done by day or by night, for the heavens are the same whether the sun shines on this particular part of the world or not.”
“I see,” Laine whispered. And once she let herself jump the great divide between logic and irrationality, she did see. Logic didn’t apply here. But there was a pattern to how the magic worked. She longed for the nerve to ask him to shape-shift right now. Would he do it? She stared at his bare feet, imagining them changing into the sharp black hooves of a stallion. “Do you need the power to . . . to change form?”
“We need it to live, though there are other sources of energy.” He had assumed a gentle, lecturing tone, and she found herself believing everything he said. And why not? No other explanations were forthcoming, were they? She nibbled from a bowl of nuts Innis had ferreted out of Jaird’s grotty kitchen. The salt tasted good on her tongue, and the sweetness of the sherry. Jaird had kept her glass full. Her fingers stroked the thick, lush wolf pelt she sat on.
“What else does a cabyll use?”
Jaird grinned disarmingly. “Well, food, of course. We eat, just as other animals and humans do . . . a vegetarian diet sustains us.” He waved a hand airily. “The inherent strength of the land we sprang from feeds us. Rivers, of course; certain deep-rooted trees . . . ”
“Rivers . . . ” How far dared she challenge him? “I have heard that water is dangerous. That it makes the cabyll savage.”
He frowned and shook his head. “The old, false legends of the kelpie are still alive. It’s a shame, when the truth is so simple and so wonderful . . . we are a peaceful race of beings, Laine, shy to the point of invisibility. We merely seek to live quietly, unobtrusively, among normal humans. You understand?”
Hidden, but hunted. Or were they the hunters? From what Laine had read, such creatures could turn savage in an instant. “It must be hard to remain undetected in this day and age.” She desperately wanted him to do his magic and let her watch. Her stomach tightened as she tried to imagine how it would happen. How the hell had Innis done it?
Jaird laughed harshly. “Hard, these days? You have no idea. But we manage—somehow.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees. His expression had become intense, and his eyes drilled into hers.
“Let me tell you,” he said, “of the far, far past. The origins of what we are.”
Laine shifted, her skin prickling with anticipation. Now they were getting somewhere.
“Many thousands of years ago, the kelpie and the cabyll ushtey lived together alongside the selkie, in the oceans of the world. The shapeshifter folk are called by different names here and there, and in many places have been forgotten or extinct for generations. The seal people, the selkie, became stronger and stronger as humans worshiped and placated them, attempting to avoid ensnarement or death. The kelpie and the cabyll ushtey found themselves driven closer to land, even forced upstream to live in lakes and rivers. Eventually they abandoned the seas altogether. As they migrated higher upstream, their magic changed. It was as if, as they swam away from salt water and into fresh, their blood thinned and shed itself of the old magic. They had to gain a new source of strength, and they had to do it quickly and with stealth, else the humans would find and eradicate them.”
Laine closed her eyes and envisioned a glowing silver network starting where the ocean met the land, spreading slowly upstream as the shapeshifters migrated, month by month, year by year, generation by generation, their very essence seeping into the watershed. Magic like scales and threads drifting in the water behind them as they swam, dragged from their supple bodies and pouring into the water itself. Water was a repository of strength . . . but they grew weaker with distance from the ocean. They needed— “The moon.”
“Very good. The moon was their new source of power. Oh, water still sustained and invigorated them, but those ancient pilgrims learned to Induce the moon to pass on her collected energy when it was required.”
His expression hardened. “The moon exacts her payment, however.”
“What do you mean?”
“She is quixotic, sometimes cruel. She knows her ultimate power and likes to keep her children in thrall. Beware the moon, my child.”
She realized she had to be wary of the velvet pull of his voice. How compelling his words were, his voice, his aura. There was an abyss before Laine and her brother. Innis was already halfway in. Get out, now. She cleared her throat. “Thank you for telling me all this . . . I can barely take it in.”
Beware the moon, and beware this man.
“Innis, I’m exhausted. I think it’s time we left.”
“You do look bagged, poor old dear.” But he took his cue, stuffed his feet back into his shoes and dug out his car keys.
It must be almost midnight; perhaps Jaird Fallon was tired too. Innis had told her that Jaird was a woodsman for an estate in the area. The position would make a good cover for a man who changed into a horse.
Or for a man who liked to capture and kill young women.
Laine did feel exhausted. And giddy, and scared. She wanted very much to learn more, but not now.
At the door, Jaird said, “Good night, my children,” then closed the door quickly behind them. She heard the lock turn. The lights were out before they’d gone twenty feet.
They picked their way through the trees back to Innis’s car. As he started the engine, he asked, “Pretty amazing, eh?” He glanced eagerly at her as he backed, turned and negotiated the dim laneway.
“Amazing isn’t the word . . . scary, maybe.”
“You’ve never been easily frightened. Why now?”
She turned in her seat. They were on the main road now, but Innis was keeping the speed down. “Are you kidding me? He’s like some kind of wild animal, an incredibly intelligent one with a silver tongue. I don’t think his mind works the same way mine does.”
“You mean the way a human’s does.”
“Well . . . yes. I mean, he’s not human, is he? He’s a shapeshifter.”
Innis laughed aloud, a wild, jubilant sound. “Damn right he is. And so am I.” He reached for her hand and squeezed it tight, driving with one hand on the wheel. “And so could you be, Laine.”
She shrank back, feeling trapped. And even more scared. He was almost glowing with glee. He loved all this, but she was starting to wonder if she ever could. It was one thing to imagine wild magic from a safe distance, another to jump right into it.
He dropped her hand and gave her an assessing look. “I’m not pressuring you, nor will he. If you’re afraid of your own birthright, too bad for you. Look, I’m going to drop you off, then meet some friends. You wouldn’t like them.”
More shapeshifters? Holy shit. “Fine with me. I need to sleep on all this.”
They got to the inn and he pulled over, grinding the brakes and screeching to a stop. She hopped out and watched him speed off. Now that she was away from Jaird’s chocolate voice and musky maleness, she could start to think again.
The moon rose from behind a row of trees on the other side of the lane, casting pale light all around, and Laine felt as if she’d got her second wind. The air was fresh and cool, rejuvenated by the rain. And maybe there was something in what Jaird had said. She turned up her face and raised her arms to the brilliant disk above her and basked for a moment. And just for a moment, she felt a tingle like a cascade of energized light washing her skin. Beware the moon . . .
Not interested in sleep any more, she decided to head to the stables instead of bed. Perhaps Petra would again be there, and would spill some beans about just what was going on around here.