“Then—you saw others?”
His voice was low and icily calm. “I will tell you how I came to learn of the werewolf kind, Miss Alex.” Once again he seemed to retreat from her in all but body, reliving some part of his past. “My father was one of the great wolf hunters in Ontario, in those years when they were known to be the vermin they are. Jean-Baptiste Arnoux. His name was legendary.”
A wolf hunter. Alex suppressed a shudder, but Arnoux didn’t notice. “The day it happened,” he continued, “I was only sixteen, hardly more than a boy. My father had taught me to hunt and trap. One day I set out alone to hunt the wolves we had seen days before. They had been very bold, and my father had promised to take their pelts before the week was out.
“My pride was greater than my skill. I came home empty-handed. But in the cabin—in the cabin… “He clenched his fists around the steering wheel so hard that the truck jigged to the side. “I found them dead, my mother and my father. They were torn apart. The cabin was covered in blood. And when I ran out into the snow, wild with grief, I saw their murderer. A naked man, his fingers and mouth running red. As I watched, he shifted his shape. Changed into a wolf black as hell itself.”
Alex closed her eyes. He could be crazy, or the story could be true. She had no way of knowing, no experience.
“I thought I was mad. Grief had addled my senses. But after I buried my parents with my own hands, I studied the tracks around the cabin. Wolf spoor and footprints intermingled. I prayed for guidance. The presence of inhuman evil had made itself known to me as to no other. I had been shown that such creatures existed. I knew I had to find my parents’ killer at any cost.
“I took my father’s inheritance and came to the States to study all the legends and stories of the creatures known as werewolves. I knew their kind had been hunted in Europe. But after years of fruitless search I still had not found what I sought, so I settled in Minnesota, where I could, follow the studies of wolves, and hunt them when I could.”‘
Before she could stop herself, Alex blurted, “But wolf hunting has been illegal in Minnesota since 1973—”
“Yes,” he said simply. “A law made by men who never walked beyond their front doors. But it never stopped me. And my vigilance paid off in the end. Seventeen years ago I finally found my prey. It was sheer chance that I saw them change—a male and female with their young, skulking in the woods as wolves. I followed and observed them, until it was the right time.”
Alex felt true sickness clench at her stomach. “Seventeen years ago,” she repeated. “What year did you find them?”
“Nineteen-seventy-nine. I had waited so long, and the male was black, like the monster that had killed my father and mother. I destroyed him, and his mate, while they ran as wolves. But their offspring, the boy, I could not bring myself to kill.”
“Kieran,” Alex whispered. Memory crystallized, punched through the tissue of years, drawing her back to childhood and a day when wolves had died at the hands of a cold-eyed poacher.
She looked at Arnoux with a new and terrible understanding. It was him. She saw it now, saw the same features she’d seen then, many years aged but marked with the same ruthless purpose. She had seen Kieran’s parents die at his hands.
“Yes,” he said, oblivious. “Yes. It was Kieran. With his sire and dam dead, I should have killed him as well. But he seemed young, almost helpless. Dazed with shock, whatever his kind are capable of feeling. It was a simple matter to get him to come with me. Something moved me, and I thought it was Providence demanding mercy. But now I know it was evil that pushed me to take him in, believing I could make him human.”
And that’s why I never saw Kieran again. Arnoux took him. “Then, in a way, you were studying him too.”