Chasing Shadows

chapter Sixteen

“Lochlan, what’s happened?” I demanded.

“I’d rather not get into it over the phone,” my brother replied grimly. “Just tell Mark to turn around.”

“Damn it, Loch Ness, don’t toy with me—just spit it out!” I growled.

He harrumphed on the other end of the line, then said, “Very well. Recalling how I very nearly reacted to the scent of your most delectable lover, when I heard that Father had brought Evangeline with him on his visit this evening, I decided to stop by and see how much damage had been done—not that I don’t think you could have taken her, especially given that you have Mark’s blood in your system. When I arrived, there was something lying across the driveway. It was Juliette, and she’s not in good shape.”

I gasped in shock, my fear quickly turning to anger. “Give me a second,” I said into the phone, then looked at Mark. “Turn around. Cross the median if you have to.”

Mark cast me a sidelong glance. “What’s going on?” he asked, signaling his intention to cross lanes and then turning sharply to bounce across the grassy strip separating the east- and westbound lanes of I-70.

Several horns honked in protest as we cut into the westbound traffic. “Something’s happened to Juliette,” I said. “Lochlan just said he found her in a heap at the end of our driveway.”

Mark roared in anger, and had I not reached over and grabbed his arm to stop him, I had no doubt he would have put his fist through the window. Hitting the speaker button on my phone, I asked Lochlan to tell us again what he had seen. He said that when he went to turn into my driveway, he had seen a nude body lying across it, and by the color of the hair he knew it was Juliette. She was covered in blood, he said, and so he immediately picked her up and carried her up to the house. He laid her on the porch just long enough to run back for his car to pull it up the drive, so that he could retrieve his keys and be able to open the door (I’d given him and Harry a copy of my house key). I appreciated the thought, I said, but I would not have minded had he felt it necessary to kick the door down.

Juliette was unconscious, he went on to say, and it looked as if she had suffered a great deal. “A beating perhaps. Possibly torture.”

Mark growled again. “I’m gonna kill whoever did this. I swear I’m gonna kill him,” he said vehemently. “Why did they dump her in the driveway? How the hell did they even know where to take her?”

“I suspect, my brother, that whoever injured fair Juliette is behind the barn fire. He or she has likely been watching Saphrona’s place for some time.”

“But why me?” I wondered. “Why would someone target me? I don’t get that at all. And why on Earth would they attack Juliette? She barely knows me.”

“Could this have anything to do with your investigation into Vivian Drake?” Lochlan queried. “Perhaps her source does not wish to be discovered.”

“Oh really—you think?” Mark snapped.

“Look, Lochlan, I’m going to let you go for now,” I said. “You just concentrate on taking care of Juliette. I’ve got to call her parents and let them know she’s been found.”

“Aye. That I will do.”

After hanging up, I dialed the number I’d copied from my house phone’s caller I.D., and Monica Singleton answered on the first ring. I told her what Lochlan had said about finding her in the driveway and that she’d been the victim of some kind of attack, but that my brother was taking care of her until we could get there. She expressed some concern about that, and I assured her that even though he was a vampire, Lochlan would not harm Juliette, reminding her that the two had met more than once already. “He’s actually rather fond of her,” I said. “I’d say he’s near as angry as we are about what’s happened.”

I then cleared my throat, saying, “Ma’am, what are you going to tell your husband? Jules told us that he doesn’t know about you.”

She sighed. “He will by the time we reach your house,” she said solemnly.

I knew that she faced a very difficult task, and I did not envy her. I did, however, feel a little sorry for her—the truth should never have had to come out like this. I wished her luck and then hung up again.

“What were you wishing her luck for?” Mark asked, pulling up the off-ramp just then and rolling through the light, heading back toward town and home.

“Your mother said she was going to tell your father the truth. She probably feels that with what’s happened to your sister, she has no other choice now.”

“Aw, shit,” Mark muttered. “This is just great. He’s got to face the fact that not only was his baby girl beaten and tortured God knows why, but that she’s a freak of nature that can turn into a dog. He’s got to face the fact that she’s not the only one—his wife is a dog, too, and she’s been lying to him for thirty f*ckin’ years.”

“Mark, I’m very sorry this is happening this way,” I said. “I know that she was protecting him—protecting both of you—but if Monica had been honest with him from the start, it wouldn’t be so hard on him.”

“Don’t you think I know that?!” he shouted back at me, then groaned as he ran his free hand down over his face. “Saphrona, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

I took a moment to steady my nerves by looking out the window of the passenger door. “I understand that you are on edge. We’ve all been on edge since Friday—hell, for that matter, I’ve been on edge ever since Wednesday.”

“Wednesday? You mean when we met?”

“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “But really, it was my sister’s visit, conveying my father’s request that I look for Vivian Drake’s source that started it all. She rattled me, and I’m usually unfazed by her particular lunacy. Then I got that phone call from you, and then you turned out to be a dhunphyr, and then your dog turned out to be a shapeshifter and… I wondered just what it was that I had done to deserve all those complications all at once. I wondered if meeting you meant I was being drawn back into the world I had tried so hard to leave behind.

“But then I thought about it, and I realized I had never really left it behind, that I never could leave it all behind. Vampires and the supernatural are a part of my life, a part of who and what I am. I’ve been trying to deny it for so long that I refused to see that there is no denying it. And that’s when I began to wonder if my attempts to do so all these years were what had brought all this down on me.”

I sighed and shrugged, “This life isn’t easy. It’s not safe. Your mother and your sister understand that. I know that they were just trying to protect you and your father, but I can’t help feeling like if you’d both been told the truth a long time ago, you would both have been better prepared to deal with it all.”

Sighing again, I went on. “I don’t know what’s going on now. I don’t know why my barn was torched and my animals killed. I don’t know why whoever did that would attack your sister. I get the feeling it has nothing to do with her, that she was just the thing used—like the barn—to send a message to me. And yes, I know how pretentious and self-centered that sounds. But what other reason could there be?”

“Saphrona, please look at me,” Mark said.

I looked over slowly. “What?”

He reached for my hand. “I am sorry for yelling at you,” he told me. “And you are right, it does seem like this is, at the root, an attack against you. I might not understand all the supernatural stuff, but it seems to me like it’s related. But I wonder if it’s just about you, or does it have something to do with me. Is this a message of some kind to the both of us?”

Mark was turning the truck onto our street at this time, and he pushed down on the accelerator to get us there faster. “I don’t know. It could be,” I said, “but the question again is why? Why come after us? Why make poor Juliette suffer for whatever agenda or grudge they have against us? It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

When Mark turned into the driveway, we noticed that there were dark stains on it where Juliette had lain, and his jaw clenched as he drove over them. Pulling up to the wide parking spot by the house, we came to a stop between Lochlan’s Escalade and a late-model, flash-free Chevy Impala. We climbed out of my truck quickly, and as I rounded the front end, I said to Mark, “No matter what’s going on, right now this is about Juliette, and helping her to get better. And it’s about helping your father cope with all of it.”

He nodded and, taking my hand, led me up the back stoop and into the house.



*****



The first person I saw through the arched doorway between the kitchen and the living room was an older version of Mark. Daniel Singleton was a handsome man, his shoulders broad like Mark’s, his hair short and only sparsely grayed. His expression was wide-eyed as he stared across the room, his arms crossed over his chest defensively, and his head snapped around at our entrance. Daniel took a step toward us and stopped, appearing to recall something that his wife had told him, and his eyes darted between Mark and me.

I leaned close to Mark. “Your father is very nervous right now. I can smell his fear. Be careful with him,” I said in a soft voice.

Mark nodded as we crossed into the living room. I turned to see Monica sitting on the arm of the couch by Juliette’s head, and I noted that she, in turn, was an older version of Juliette—same curly brown hair, same sky blue eyes, same frown lines between her brows. She had a hand resting on Juliette’s forehead, brushing her hair back over and over. Juliette was nude from the waist up—a blanket had been laid over her legs—and Lochlan was cleaning and tending the wounds along her ribcage. Her arms were already bandaged up here and there.

“How is she doing?” Mark asked softly.

“Juliette was badly wounded,” Lochlan replied. “She was beaten up pretty badly, and it looks like she was tortured as well. There are several burns all over her.”

“Has she regained consciousness?” I asked.

There was a pause before my brother answered. “Not yet,” he said at last, and it was then that I saw it: he was pissed, and barely holding his anger in check. I’d known that Loch liked to exchange banter with Juliette and that he found her attractive, but now I was seeing proof that he actually cared about her.

“What about the accelerated healing thing?” Mark asked. “Isn’t that doing its job?”

“Aye, but it’s sluggish,” Loch answered, his accent thickened with anger. “From the scent o’ the blood, whoever did this knew she was a shapeshifter, and they knew of at least one drug what slows the healing of a shifter. Her body’s sodding full of it.”

“Y—you mean there are drugs that stop this?” wondered Daniel, speaking up for the first time since Mark and I had come in.

Monica looked at him. “There are some drugs that can slow our healing process and inhibit the transformation, but only temporarily. And they’re not common knowledge, even among shapeshifters.”

Lochlan finished up his ministrations and pulled the blanket up until Juliette was fully covered. Then he just stayed there, holding her hand.

“Can…can you get it out of her?” Daniel asked.

“Sir, I am afraid that the only way to do that would be to draw out a large quantity of her blood,” Lochlan told him. “I am afraid I do not have the equipment.”

“Then we need to take her to a hospital, where she can be treated by a real doctor!”

I was not surprised that Daniel had exploded. He was on edge and the snap had been inevitable. Lochlan, however, did not rise to the bait. Other than the muscles flexing in his jaw, he did not react to the other man’s accusation.

“Mr. Singleton, my brother is a real doctor, I assure you,” I said slowly, drawing his attention to me. “And as I am sure your wife can tell you, because she is a shapeshifter Juliette cannot be seen at a hospital.”

“Saphrona is right, Dan,” Monica added. “Shapeshifters can’t go to a hospital—they’ll be confused by her vital signs, they’ll want to draw blood and conduct tests. We can’t let that happen because then they’ll just want to conduct more tests, and more tests, trying to figure out what’s going on with her. We can’t let that happen. It’s why I’m a nurse, why there’s always one doctor in a pack.”

“Th—then we will take her home, and you can take care of her there,” Daniel insisted.

“I’m afraid that right now, moving Juliette would be unwise,” Lochlan said.

“You don’t want us to take her because you want to kill her yourself!”

My brother was up and in front of Daniel Singleton in a blur of movement, standing nose to nose with him. “If I wanted Juliette dead, human, she’d be dead—I’d have finished her off when I found her in the driveway, and been gone long before any of you arrived. In fact, I daresay I would not have called my sister to inform her that she was even here, and you’d still be out there, searching, your efforts as futile as your protests are now.”

“Lochlan, that’s my father you’re speaking to,” Mark said, a clear warning in his tone. “Back off.”

Lochlan turned his head to look at Mark. “Do not think, brother, that I will allow this man to besmirch my honor and say nothing in my own defense. You know that I do not kill humans for sustenance, but if his disrespect of me continues, I will be sorely tempted to make an exception.”

Mark’s expression darkened and he took a step toward him. I grabbed his arm to restrain him, saying, “Both of you stop it. All your posturing is not helping Juliette.”

I stepped between Mark and Lochlan, but focused my gaze on Mr. Singleton. “Daniel, sir, I know you are frightened for your daughter. I know that the things your wife told you seem too damn crazy to be real, and you’ve likely contemplated the possibility that she’s out of her mind. Unfortunately, I cannot assure you of that—I can only confirm that what she said is true. There are things in this world that defy explanation and test the boundaries of believability, and your ability to handle the truth that some mythical monsters are just as real as you are.”

“I… I just… I can’t believe it. I can’t! She expects me to believe that she and Juliette can turn into dogs. That vampires are real, and that it was a vampire that killed my Patricia. That they turned my son into some kind of freak who’s never gonna die. I can’t believe it, it’s crazy. You’re all crazy!”

I saw it now, what Juliette had been talking about. Her father was a good man, a strong man in body and spirit, but he just wasn’t capable of handling the truth. The attack on his first wife had left him just a little too unhinged in that regard.

Which meant there really was only one thing left to do.

“Lochlan, scamall a áireamh. Ní dhéanann sé is gá a mheabhrú aon cheann de seo,” I said softly, speaking Gaelic.

My brother looked at me, and then he nodded. Speaking softly in the same ancient language I had used, he drew Daniel’s attention to him, capturing his gaze and holding it, his words in a tone that was low and soothing. Soon Daniel’s eyes went from wide-eyed and frightened to distant and unseeing. I hated to have it done to him, but I felt it was for his own good.

“What the hell did you just do to my father?” Mark demanded.

Lochlan turned to look at him. “He is beguiled. Your father will not remember the last few hours—not what he saw or what he heard.”

“You erased his memory?” Monica asked, incredulous. “Vampires can really do that?”

Lochlan did not reply. He turned around and walked back over to Juliette, kneeling to check her pulse.

“It’s not an erasure, per se,” I answered for him. “The memories are still there, but they’ve been buried deeply in his subconscious. Given his reaction, Mrs. Singleton, I thought it for the best that he not remember.”

She glanced across the room at her husband, who stood seemingly transfixed on something none of us could see. Tears fell silently from her eyes as she nodded. “Somehow, I’ve known all along that Dan just wasn’t strong enough. There are some things that some minds are just incapable of grasping as truth.”

She looked at Mark then. “That doesn’t mean he’s not a good man, of course. A good father. He’s been a marvelous husband, too.”

“Did you imprint on him?” Mark asked, tearing his gaze away from the older version of himself and settling on his stepmother. “Juliette is afraid you didn’t, that you could be forced to leave him if you ever…”

Monica looked fondly down at her daughter and cast an adoring gaze at her husband before looking once again at the son she had raised as her own.

“I love him, Mark. I truly love him,” she said.

“That’s not an answer, Monica.”

She was startled by his use of her given name, and I suspected that he’d never addressed her by it before.

I reached for Mark’s hand. “Mark, it’s the only one that matters right now,” I said. “The only one that ever will.”

He turned to me. “But what if some guy comes along and she suddenly feels the pull of her own pair bond? She will leave my father all alone, and he will be devastated all over again!”

Monica stood and crossed over to us. “I have not left him yet, Mark. The scenario of which you fear will likely never come to pass. I gave up shifting the night you were born, and imprinting is for the young—at least among our kind. The chances of my imprinting now are practically non-existent.”

“But not impossible,” he countered.

Hesitantly, she reached up to cup his cheek in her hand. “Son, it is pointless to spend your time pondering ‘what if.’ I assure you that I am wholly committed to the vows I made to your father when I married him. Nothing is going to change that, or how I feel about him.”

“You should take your husband home, Mrs. Singleton,” Lochlan said over his shoulder. “He is in something of a trance right now, but the effect will wear off and if he wakes here it may well disrupt the memory block.”

“Oh,” she said, turning around and walking over to where her daughter lay motionless and silent. “She…she’ll be alright?”

“I’ll be honest with you—I’d prefer to draw the drugs out, but the only means of doing that right now would be for either Saphrona or myself to drink from her, and I daresay it is not something you wish for,” Lochlan said, looking up as he spoke.

Monica studied his face, looked at Juliette, and then at me. “It can be done without turning her?” she asked.

I nodded. “A vampire can drink without injecting draculin, though it requires a strong will to keep from killing. And it would create a temporary blood bond between Juliette and whichever of us drinks from her.”

She looked down at Lochlan again. “And you think this is the only way?” she asked.

“It is either that, or allowing the drugs to work their way out of her system naturally. But choosing that option means it will take longer for her to heal.”

Monica gave her options a long moment of thought, for which I commended her. She didn’t just take the easy way out, and she could have—instead, she appeared to be weighing the pros and cons of either choice.

In the end, however, she opted for door number one.

“You are a physician,” she said to Lochlan. “You have sworn to do no harm. I am holding you to that oath, vampire.”

She and Lochlan stared at one another, and after a long moment of holding each other’s gaze, my brother nodded slowly.

Leaning down to kiss her daughter’s brow, Monica then straightened and came back over to where Mark and I stood. She stretched on her toes to kiss his cheek, then turned to me and said, “I would very much have liked to meet you under better circumstances.”

I nodded. “When Juliette is well, we’ll have to have you over for dinner. The circumstances then will be much more ideal.”

Monica nodded, then leaned forward to kiss my cheek as well. “Take care of my children for me,” she said softly. Next she moved over to her husband and took his hand. When she started for the back door, he went automatically.

“He’s gonna be alright?” Mark asked when they had gone outside and she had shut the door behind them.

I nodded. “He’ll be fine. He might recall that she had a hard time reaching Juliette, but he won’t remember going out to look for her. I’m sure she’ll think up a plausible explanation for everything.”

He scoffed. “She’s sure had a hell of a lot of practice lying to him. What’s one more?”

“Mark, you saw your father,” I pointed out. “He was not handling the truth well at all. Beguiling him was for his own good. Best that he not remember that Juliette nearly died tonight.”

“Which of us will do it?” Lochlan asked.

I turned and walked over to the couch, kneeling beside him. “Well, the natural choice, I guess, is me, since I don’t produce draculin at all.”

“But will you be able to control yourself enough not to kill her?” Loch returned. “Mark’s the first non-animal you’ve tasted in many years, and we’ve already surmised that your control with him may be related to your bond.”

“Are you saying you think Jules will taste like an animal, and that because of that Saphrona won’t be able to stop?” Mark asked, coming to stand at my side.

I glanced up at him, then back at my brother. “I have no idea what she will taste like, but I am fairly certain that my doing this is less risky than Lochlan doing it.”

Loch studied my expression for a moment and then nodded. He reached under the blanket and gently pulled Juliette’s arm out, passing it over to me. I held her wrist before my mouth in much the same way I did when I drank from Mark.

“Forgive me, sister,” I whispered, then bit down.



*****



When Lochlan smelled that Juliette’s blood was clean, he reached over and grasped her arm tightly enough to cut off the blood flow. When it registered that I was no longer drawing blood through the bite I stopped drinking, and became gradually aware of my surroundings. And when I realized that it was Juliette that I had been feeding from, I all but threw her arm away from me, backing away from the couch on all fours.

“What have I done?” I breathed fearfully.

Mark knelt next to me. “It’s okay, Saphrona. You didn’t lose control of yourself—you were only drinking to get rid of the drugs in her system. Remember?”

I nodded. “Sorry. Sometimes it takes a minute.”

He frowned. “You’ve never reacted this way with me,” he said curiously.

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but you mean more to me than she does,” I replied. “Lochlan, is she okay?”

My brother nodded. “Aye, she is well. And I believe that her body is already healing faster than it was a few minutes ago. You’ve done well, Saphrona.”

He turned to look at me then. “At risk of sounding crude, what did she taste like?”

I frowned. “Are you serious?”

“Come on, dear sister. You cannot blame me for being curious, as you denied me the privilege of aiding her recovery,” Lochlan returned.

“Loch, you’ve also aided in her recovery,” I said scooting forward again. “I’m sure you’re been very diligent in treating her wounds.”

Lochlan looked down at Juliette’s face, which, although still pale, was already getting some of its color back. “Aye, and I won’t lie and say it was not without difficulty to see all that blood and not take a taste of it. But I did not wish to disrespect her that way. She’d already been violated enough.”

I nodded. “Her blood was strong—animalistic. Not as domestic, for lack of a better word, as a cow or a pig, yet not as predatory as a wolf or a bear. And even though I was caught up in the feeding frenzy, I didn’t enjoy feeding on her. The drugs made her blood very bitter.”

“A shame,” Lochlan muttered, then he stood. “Come, sister. Let us get her cleaned up, dressed, and in a bed.”

I stood with him. “I’ll take it from here, Lochlan. You’ve already seen enough of her nudity. Imagine how horrified she’ll be when she finds that out.”

Though he seemed reluctant to acquiesce, Lochlan nodded, and then grinned. “And I simply cannot wait to tease her about it mercilessly,” he said lightly.

“Great,” Mark groaned as I reached underneath his sister’s knees and shoulders and effortlessly lifted her into my arms. He tugged on the blanket to try and cover as much of her as he could. “We’ll never hear the end of this.”

Although I grinned as well, when I looked down I noticed there was blood on the couch. Noting my gaze, Lochlan promised me he would clean it like new. I nodded, and then turned to carry Juliette up the stairs and into the bathroom.

After setting her gently in the tub, I took the blanket off, removed the few bandages Lochlan had put on, and turned on the water, bringing it to just above room temperature. I then took a washcloth out of the linen closet and came back with it, kneeling beside the tub to get it wet and soapy so that I could clean the blood from her face and body. Juliette stirred as I wiped away the blood but did not wake. I noted that her wounds were already healing, the bruises and cuts fading gradually.

When she was clean, I lifted her from the tub and carried her to the spare bedroom, where I was met by Mark. He pulled the blanket down so that I could lay her on the bed, and then turned his gaze away as I reached to pull it back up to her chin.

“Lochlan said he gave her a shot of morphine when he first brought her into the house, because she had some broken bones he had to reset,” Mark said quietly.

“Which means she’s probably in pain right now because I drank it out of her with the other drugs,” I observed.

“He left to go get some more morphine and an I.V. kit. He said she would need it for the next twenty-four hours at least.”

I nodded and then went to retrieve the single chair that was in the room so Mark could sit by the bed with his sister. When I gestured for him to sit he shook his head, telling me to sit down. Then he left the room, returning shortly with the chair that had been in our bedroom. He placed it next to the other one, so we sat down together to keep vigil over Juliette until Lochlan’s return.