A human male. Early twenties. His genuine grief ran deep. There was anger toward his father, confusion, and guilt that he had arrived too late. Something deep in Raven responded to his overwhelming need. He was huddled against a broad tree trunk, down low near the timberline. His knees were drawn up, his face buried in his hands.
Raven deliberately made a sound as she approached. The man lifted a tear-streaked face, his eyes wide with shock as he spotted her. He began to scramble to his feet.
“Please don’t get up,” Raven said quietly, her voice as soft as the night itself. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I couldn’t sleep and came out walking. Would you prefer me to leave?”
Rudy Romanov found himself staring in awe at a dream figure that seemed to materialize out of the mist. She was like nothing he had ever seen before, as shrouded in mystery as the dark forest itself. Words caught in his throat. Had his grief conjured her up? He could almost believe the ridiculous, superstitious tales his father had told him. Tales of vampires and women of the darkness, sirens luring men to their doom.
The man was staring at her as if she were a ghost. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured gently and turned to leave him.
“No! Don’t go.” His English was heavily accented. “For a minute, coming out of the mist like that, you hardly looked real.”
Aware that she had little on beneath the long cape, Raven drew it closer around her. “Are you all right? Can I call someone for you? The priest, perhaps? Your family?”
“There is no one, not anymore. I’m Rudy Romanov. You must have heard the news about my parents.”
An unholy vision burst in her head. She saw wolves boiling from the forest, red eyes gleaming fiercely, a huge black wolf leading the pack and bearing straight down on Hans Romanov. From the young man’s head, she picked up the memory of his mother, Heidi, lying on her bed, her husband’s fingers around her throat. For one awful moment she couldn’t breathe. What this man had suffered! Both parents taken from him in a matter of hours. His fanatical father had murdered his mother.
“I’ve been ill; this is my first time out in days.” She moved closer to him beneath the outstretched limbs of the trees. She couldn’t very well tell him the truth—that she had been involved in the entire horrendous affair.
To Rudy, she seemed a beautiful angel sent to console him. Rudy longed to touch her skin to see if it was really as soft as it appeared in the moonlight. Her voice was a gentle whisper, sexy, soothing, reaching into his mind to calm and heal. He cleared his throat. “My father murdered my mother a couple of nights ago. If only I had come home sooner. My mother called me, telling me some nonsense about him murdering a woman. He had delusions of vampires preying on people in the village. My father had always been superstitious, but I never thought he would go completely crazy. Mother said he and a group of fanatics were hunting vampires and marking prominent members of the community for murder. I thought he was just talking big, like he always did.” He glanced down at his hands. “I should have listened to her, but she admitted that no one else seemed to know of the murder. I assumed he’d lied about killing a woman, that it wasn’t the truth. Hell, maybe it wasn’t, but he was nuts. He strangled my mother. She died with her rosary in her hands.”
Rudy wiped his eyes with trembling fingers. Somehow, he had no idea how, his mystery lady was in his mind, providing warmth and understanding. The illusion was so real his body stirred to life, and he became acutely aware that they were very much alone. Unbidden, the thought came to him that no one knew she was with him. The thought was disturbingly exciting in the midst of his grief. “I stayed one more day at the university to take a test I thought was really important. I didn’t really believe my father would kill someone, least of all a woman. My mother was a midwife. She brought so many lives into the world, helped so many people. I told her I was on my way home and I’d take care of things. She wanted to go to the priest, but I talked her out of it.”