Bound By Moonlight

Chapter 2

The next morning broke with an unseasonable chill that had the folk of Windmere complaining of early winter and bad luck. Liana wrapped herself in her warmest cloak and stepped out to tend the small herb garden at the rear of the cottage, although she found it difficult to concentrate on the usual chores of watering and weeding. Her dreams had been so vivid that she could still smell the pine needles and wet earth, still taste the ghostly zip of cool air sweeping across her face as she bounded through moonlit woods.

Millicent stood in the doorway, a mist of steam surrounding the cup of tea in her hands. "You were agitated last night," she said, sitting down on the wood bench Liana’s uncle had made years earlier. "Sleep-talking."

Liana's fingers stilled on the sage plant she had been examining. "What did I say?"

"Nothing that made sense. Just. sounds. Like you were trying to talk to someone, but in no language I was familiar with." Millicent's brow furrowed into a frown of concern. "It was like your mother. In fact, exactly like your mother, in the weeks before the time she met your father."

The touch produced a second shiver on Liana that had nothing to do with the cold. She rose up, brushing her hands against her coat, and backed around to confront her aunt head-on. "You said yesterday that Mother's dreams were over when she met Father. Did she ever tell you why?"

Millicent sat quietly for a very long time, her gaze fixed on the distant tree line. Her voice was reluctant and husky when she finally did speak, as if the words were being pulled out of her by force. "She said she'd found her other half. That the dreams had been calling her to something or someone and that once she met him, the calling stopped."

"But they died when I was nearly two," Liana spoke in a whisper. "If they were so perfect, so meant for one another, how did they die in a carriage accident on a road they shouldn't have even been on?"

It was something that had haunted Liana for years, although she'd only ever had the courage to say it aloud to herself. The cover story was simple enough that her parents were traveling to visit some relatives when their carriage overturned in a storm. But there had been inconsistencies that had always bothered her. They had no relations in the direction they were traveling. The storm had been a sudden and singular one, which happened on only one road. And maybe most puzzling of all, their bodies were never found, even with a thorough search.

Millicent set her tea cup down on the table with hands that trembled ever so slightly. "Some questions shouldn't be asked, Liana. Some truths are more harmful than lies."

Liana was not even able to attempt a response when the clip-clop of horses could be heard riding up the lane to their cottage. The women both turned to see a rider approaching a tall stranger from the marketplace again, mounted on a horse so black it seemed to engulf the morning light. He rode with the easy confidence of one who was bred to the saddle, and Liana could feel even from a distance the power of his eyes.

"Company expected?" Millicent asked, though her tone conveyed she already knew the answer.

"No," Liana whispered thinly, her mouth parched. "I don't know who he is."

But even while she spoke, a part of her considered otherwise. There was something so familiar in the way he moved, the angle of his shoulders, the deliberate slowness with which he dismounted from his horse and approached their garden gate. As he removed his riding gloves, she caught herself staring at his hands which were long-fingered, muscular, scarred with tiny indentations that spoke of a life far more dangerous than anything within Windmere's gates.

"Miss Rivers?" His voice was low and had a hint of accent that she could not quite place. "I'm Kael Thorn. Could I have a word with you?"

Millicent leapt to her feet, positioning herself between Liana and the stranger. "What about?" she said, not disposed to be welcoming. "We don't know you, Mr. Thorn, and Liana don't get strange men."

Kael's light-colored eyes darted toward Millicent, and Liana noticed something pass between them with a nod of acknowledgment, a warning perhaps. When he spoke again, his voice was one of carefulness that hadn't been there before.

"I'm a representative for a research group interested in genealogical research. Specifically, we are researching certain bloodlines which may have begun within this region. Miss Rivers' last name is found in some very old records."

It wasn't. Liana knew it as certainly as she could sense when storms were coming or that her herbs had passed the peak of potency. Whatever Kael Thorn wanted from her, it wasn't about family records.

"What kind of records?" she found herself asking, stepping around her aunt over the grasping hand on her forearm.

Kael's gaze snapped to laser focus on her, and she felt that strange recognition from the marketplace that her body understood him even when her mind insisted they'd never met. "Old parish records, land grants, family trees going back several centuries. Your maternal lineage, in specific."

"My mother's people died out generations ago," Liana answered cautiously. "Nothing exciting there."

"Are you certain?" Kael moved closer to the gate, and Liana got a whiff that made her dizzy from pine and leather and something wild that reminded her of her dreams. "Sometimes families will do just about anything to hide their histories. Sometimes for very good reasons."

Millicent made a sound that might have been a repressed gasp. "I think you should be on your way, Mr. Thorn. Liana has some work to attend to, and we don't appreciate strangers calling on us inquiring about dead relatives."

Yet Kael's eyes did not leave Liana's face. "Have you had dreams, Miss Rivers? Dreams of running in the woods, silver moonlight, voices calling you in languages you cannot comprehend?"

The globe revolved on its side. Liana leaned against the gate to the garden, her knuckles white with tension against weathered wood. "How could you possibly…"

"Because I've had them too," he said quietly. "Dreams of a woman with dark hair and green eyes, running beside me through moonlit woods. Dreams that started three months ago and grew stronger every evening since."

Millicent stepped forward quickly. "That's all right. I don't know what kind of game you are playing, but…"

Her words were broken by a sound out of the woods, a howling wail that seemed to emanate from all directions at once. It was answered, then another, until the morning air was filled with a chorus of wild voices that thudded in Liana's heart with equal amounts of fear and longing.

Kael's whole body tightened, his head jerking toward the noise with feral sensitivity. When he turned back to Liana, his pale eyes were brimming with a sense of urgency they hadn't contained before.

"You have to come with me," he told her, his voice strained with suppressed panic. "Now. They've found you."

"Who's found me?" Liana snapped, though a part of her already knew she didn't wish to hear the answer.

"The rogues," Kael said, already walking toward his horse. "They've been tracking your trail for weeks, and now they're close enough to attack. If you stay here, you'll be dead by sundown."

Millicent grasped Liana's arm. "Don't listen to him. He's clearly mad, talking about smells and rogues and…"

Another howl, closer this time, cut through her protest. This one was different and angry, more ferocious than the previous one. It was followed by several others, and Liana realized with growing horror that they were being surrounded.

"What are they?" she gasped.

Kael swung aboard his horse in flowing ease. "Werewolves," he stated briefly. "And unless you would prefer to find out precisely what they desire with you, I think you'd best decide quickly whether you believe me or them."

As if responding to his words, something large and black stirred between the trees at the edge of the meadow. And another, and another, until Liana could see at least six enormous shapes standing like statues in the dark. Even from far away, she could see the glint of hunter's eyes and the occasional flash of white teeth.

"This is impossible," Millicent breathed. "Werewolves are myths, legends"

"Tell them that," Kael snarled, extending his hand towards Liana. "Choose now. Come with me and survive, or stay here and find out first-hand just how realistic legend can be."

Liana looked at the white face of her aunt, at the creatures gathering in the woods, at the strange man whose very presence made her world burn. Every rational part of her mind screamed that this was madness, that she must dash into the cottage and bang the door shut and pretend that all of this wasn't true.

But the half of her who had envisioned wolves and the moon and wild freedom understood. This was what she'd waited for, what her mother had wished for before her. This was the solution to the questions she never dared to utter.

She accepted Kael's outstretched hand.

The moment their skin touched, the world exploded into sensation. Heat flowed through her arm and along the rest of her body, accompanied by a wave of pictures and sensation that did not belong to her. She saw forests older than man, felt exhilaration running on four legs instead of two, and heard the pack bonds calling that eluded human understanding. And beneath it all, a realization so profound it had left her in a haze that this man, this stranger, was in some way the other half of herself.

Kael swept her up behind him with strength bordering on divine, and she had barely encircled her arms around his waist when he pushed his horse into a gallop. They rode away from the cottage as the beasts of the forest howled their fury at being thwarted in their chase.

As they galloped, Liana caught sight of Millicent in the garden, her hand pressed to her mouth in shock. But there was something else in her aunt's expression that was not surprise, exactly, but resignation, as if she'd been expecting this for years.

"Will she be okay?" Liana shouted above the thud of the horses' hooves.

"They don't care about her," Kael shouted back. "It's you they're after. It's always been you."

They rode hard for hours, it seemed, on trails that grew increasingly wild and wooded. The cultivated land of Windmere lay behind them where older landscapes reasserted themselves and thick woodlands where the trees grew nearly touching one another so that noon seemed like twilight, streams that ran silver-clear over stones smoothed by centuries of travel, meadows dotted with wildflowers that glowed with an inner radiance.

At last, Kael drew back their pace as they rode towards what seemed like a wall of mountain stone. But as they drew closer, Liana realized it was an illusion and the rock face being a seam split by a small canyon nearly impossible to see until you were standing right over it.

"Where are we?" she asked as they entered the canyon.

"Somewhere safe," Kael replied. "Somewhere that they can't follow, not without being invited."

The walls of the canyon rose up on either side of them, inscribed with symbols that looked both ancient and somehow familiar. Some looked like letters, though in no script Liana was used to. Others were plainly pictographs, wolves racing across full moons, humans that seemed to twist and shift as she looked at them, complex patterns that hurt her eyes to look at directly.

They emerged from the canyon into a hidden valley that took Liana's breath away. It was as if they entered a different world, one in which the very air glowed with magic and the rock itself hummed with energy. Buildings that were as if they sprouted from living stone curled around groves of trees so high that they seemed to sweep the sky. Gardens teemed with flowers she had never previously encountered, their petals shifting from silver to indigo to hues that lacked names.

And there were people, throughout. Men and women who moved with the same predatory grace she'd witnessed in Kael, children whose laughter held a wild kernel that reminded her of wolf song, elders whose eyes held depths of knowledge that seemed to tell of centuries rather than decades.

"Welcome to the lands of the Shadowclaw Pack," Kael said with a comment as he helped her off the horse. "Welcome home, Liana Rivers."

But even as she was full of wonder at the impossible beauty of this hidden world, Liana couldn't shake the feeling that she'd just passed through a door from which she couldn't return. Behind them, the canyon funneled away like a sentinel, and she knew that however it turned out to be, her tranquil life as a healer in Windmere was over forever.

The only question now was what would take its place and if she would even live long enough to find out.