“Kieran, no!” Alexandra lurched up onto her knees, her face flushed and her eyes bright with tears. “Don’t listen to him! He followed us all the way from Merritt just to kill you!”
Kieran didn’t look at her. He thought of Luke Gévaudan, somewhere in the woods behind him. He would come soon, if he wasn’t already here. If Kieran could stall for time…
“Why?” he asked, swallowing back the rage. “Why do you want me dead?”
Arnoux searched his eyes. “You truly don’t remember. I see it in you.” His hard mouth twisted. “My failure with you was great, boy. The evil could not be excised. It even exacted a price from your memory.”
Kieran fought to think, to hold on to the rationality that was his only hope of finding answers. One by one Arnoux gave him clues, keys to unlock his past.
“But you didn’t forget how to kill, did you, boy?” Arnoux continued, his voice bitter. “Was it the face of your own evil that drove you to the beast five years ago, after I showed you the body of the girl you’d slain—as you killed Peter Schaeffer and Lori Carstens?”
“Don’t listen to him, Kieran!” Alexandra cried.
Arnoux never looked away from Kieran. “I held hope for too long because of my own misplaced mercy for the boy you were. I was a father to you.” His voice softened. “I took you in, fed you, cared for you—”
“You’re… not my father,” Kieran choked.
“I was in every way but one. I tried to save you. God knows I tried.”
The memories struggled to emerge, coaxed forth by Arnoux’s low, intense words. But Kieran dared not lose himself to them, even when they were close enough to touch.
“You hunted me,” he said. “All the time when I was with Alexandra—”
“I was watching. Waiting. I knew you’d come back, no matter how far you wandered.” He lowered the rifle, almost as if he believed Kieran had no power to resist him. “And you haven’t changed. Not from the day I took you into my home. But now the killing is over. You have been and will always be a monster, and I must end it.”
Monster. The word lodged in Kieran’s mind, and he staggered as he felt memory smash into him without warning, grinding him down, blurring his vision.
He struggled to keep his feet. Cold green eyes had become the world, the world Arnoux had shaped, and Kieran could no longer see Alexandra or sense her presence.
Only memory remained.
Chapter 19
Kieran remembered.
The long years vanished. He was a child again, and his parents were dead. They had warned him to stay close, but he had left them to find the girl. And when he returned…
Kieran staggered with the pain of it, unbearable pain, the severance of love and belonging. He lay between the wolves, sobbing, lost. And then the man had come.
“I will be your father, boy,” he had said. “I will save you,” And Kieran, dazed and blind with shock, had believed. The man had led him to a place of safety, a place of high walls and isolation.
But there was no safety, no belonging. And the place of high walls was where the lessons had begun.
“You are a monster,” the man had said, the man who called himself Joseph Arnoux. “You must be human.” Kieran had tried to please him. There was no one else but Arnoux in his world—Arnoux’s voice, Arnoux’s eyes. Kieran had fought the powerful instincts that urged him to run as a wolf, had tried to control the shifting, but he had been young and inexperienced.
When he failed to control the beast, he was punished. Arnoux had found the worst punishment of all: to lock Kieran up in darkness, chained, like the animal he was.
Darkness. Isolation. Hell. Reality had been reduced to those simple words, and by another repeated again and again by the man who shaped Kieran s fate: monster. Years passed, and Kieran grew to manhood. There came a time when he could almost control the beast, but emotion had been his undoing. The more he fought that part of himself, the more cunning it became in finding ways to be set free. The time came when anger or fear alone triggered the shifting.