He laughed without humor. “To learn how he might be redeemed. How he might be forced to expel the beast. I gave my life to that purpose. It was as if a madness gripped me, but I thought it was the will of heaven. So I persevered.”
Alex couldn’t quite keep the quiver from her voice. “What did you do to him?”
“I knew I needed solitude to carry out his salvation. I built a compound of my land, a place to keep him from all outside influence and from harming innocents. There I began his education. I became as a father to him. I taught him how he must deny the beast. When he faltered, I taught him the necessity of discipline. I forced him to accept the evil in himself that must be purged.”
The evil. A part of Kieran had always believed there was something terribly wrong with himself. Now she knew. Now she understood.
“And yet I failed,” Arnoux said heavily. “Even when he learned to control the changing, he lost all will when he weakened with emotion and reverted to his true nature. But even in his weakness he retained the God-cursed abilities of his kind. When he had become a man, he deceived me and escaped.”
“When?” she asked hoarsely.
“It was 1985. I tracked him for a time, but I knew it was fruitless. Eventually I knew he would come back. To me. I was all he had, all he had known for six years.”
Six years. Six years of imprisonment. No wonder he feared walls and craved freedom. No wonder he’d driven such memories from his mind. What “discipline” had Arnoux used on him? What had he made Kieran believe of himself?
“Five years ago he did return,” Arnoux said. He looked at Alexandra. “But he came with rage, to confront me. And in his rage he hunted down and slaughtered an innocent, an Indian girl who fell in his path.”
An Indian girl. Julie’s cousin. Alex forced herself to keep breathing. Arnoux had been there as well.
He sighed. “I confronted him with proof of his evil, the mangled body like those of my parents. But he gave himself over to the beast. Five more years he ran as a wolf, far to the north. I waited, and again he returned, as he always must. And he came to you.” He looked at her. “Why?”
“I found him,” she said. “As a wolf, poisoned, in the woods. After that he trusted me.”
Arnoux’s mouth set in a grim line. “Vermin,” he grunted. He shifted his hands on the wheel. “I didn’t know what his five years as a beast had done to him. I watched you both, and waited for the right time to act. I had learned so well how to wait. But in the end I delayed too long. He killed, and ran, and killed again.
“I was the one that let him loose on the world. My life’s purpose now is to see that Kieran kills no more.”
She wanted to scream at him, to tell him that Kieran was no killer, to rant and rail against the man who had warped Kieran’s life. But she choked back the intemperate, possibly deadly words, and only nodded in sham agreement.
In silence they drove on. They reached Lovell after ten; only a few streetlamps lit the narrow main street. Just another small town, like Merritt, surrounded by woods that climbed up the steep slopes of the Canadian Rockies. Alex licked her lips and looked out the window for any source of help. A few inebriated men emerged from a bar and staggered down the street, arm in arm; the rest of the town had gone to sleep.
“What now?” she asked.
Arnoux drove through the town and out of it, following a potholed single-lane road that dwindled to dirt and gravel and then to frozen earth, virgin snow, and untamed wilderness.
He turned off into the woods and circled around, stopping the truck in a sheltered place well beyond the reach of any light from Lovell.
“We’ll wait here until morning,” he said. “And then we’ll prepare our trap.” He stared at her, as if weighing again the risk of trusting her. “You said he wanted you, Miss Alex. His sense of smell is remarkably keen, as you must know. If he is here, he’ll find you sooner or later. I will disguise my own scent and watch while you lure him in.”