A madness had come over Kieran then. He had discovered a way out of the compound, waited with animal cunning, pretending abject defeat. Until one day he had turned on Arnoux, blind with rage too long suppressed, and escaped with nothing but hatred—of the man who ruled him, and of himself.
He wandered. Place to place, trying to forget, learning to survive in a world he barely remembered. Towns where no one knew him or of his affliction; people who accepted without asking questions, bound by a brotherhood of hopelessness.
Sometimes there would be someone he could reach out to. Like Lori. For a short time he would find companionship in sorrow and loneliness. For a while he would remember something gentler, something good, the boy who had known love and was capable of giving. But it always ended. And then the running once more, before he revealed his inner evil to the world.
No home. No people. Until he returned to the place where it had begun, to the burial site of parents he hardly remembered. There Arnoux had found him. There Arnoux had shown him the body of an innocent girl.
The blood. The blood, the taste and smell of it—the horror. Shifting, shifting back into the wolf, who would not remember. Because he was guilty, evil and guilty and cursed.
“No!”‘
Memory splintered like shards of ice. Kieran’s vision cleared.
“You remember,” Arnoux said.
Kieran felt nothing. “You offered an exchange,” he said flatly. “My life for hers. Let her go, and I won’t try to escape.”
Arnoux weighed Kieran’s sincerity for a long, aching moment. Abruptly he lifted his rifle and jerked his head at Alexandra.
“Go,” he commanded.
Alexandra scrambled to the side on hands and knees and jumped to her feet. She stood there, breathing fast and hard, the stubborn set of her jaw and the light in her eyes defying Arnoux with silent courage.
“Go!” Kieran repeated savagely. “I won’t have your blood on my hands!”
Her expression revealed nothing as she began to back away. Kieran knew she would never run. But he still had a chance to throw Arnoux off balance, to do whatever was necessary to insure her safety. His own no longer mattered.
Kieran stepped forward until only a foot separated him from the business end of Arnoux’s rifle. “Now you have me, Arnoux. Finish it.”
A strange look passed over Arnoux’s face. “Once I… cared for you, boy, in spite of your evil,” he said softly. “Once you called me Father.”
“Never,” Kieran croaked. “You were never a father to me. You were my tormentor.”
“For your salvation,” Arnoux said. “It was necessary.”
Kieran turned his head from the bizarre mingling of contempt and sadness and hatred in Arnoux’s eyes. He caught a subtle flash of motion in the woods behind him.
Not Alexandra; she had worked her way to a point a few yards behind Arnoux. A whiff of scent came to him, and he knew it was Gévaudan.
“I know Miss Warrington is behind me,” Arnoux said. “Foolish.” He sighed. “It is a great sadness to me that she must die when I’m finished with you.”
Kieran almost leaped. The rifle’s muzzle swung up. “Your bestial emotion was always your undoing, my son. I follow reason. And reason tells me that you have almost certainly defiled Miss Warrington beyond any redemption.”
Kieran snarled. “And you call me evil?”
Arnoux was unmoved. “How could she, a human woman, give herself to you?” His thin lip lifted in a grimace. “But she did, didn’t she? She may even now be carrying your seed, and that I can’t permit.”
“Run, Alexandra!” Kieran begged, meeting her eyes across the chasm of space that yawned between them. But she only looked at him with a deep and infinite sadness.
“Her loyalty is almost admirable,” Arnoux said. “She’ll stay here to watch you die, and then—”
“No!” Kieran roared. He lunged at Arnoux. Light flashed on the barrel of the rifle as the dark eye of death aimed at Kieran’s heart and then just as swiftly swung to a point just beyond his shoulder. Someone screamed a harsh battle cry that ended in a grunt of pain. Alexandra exploded into a run, barreling into Arnoux from behind. He batted Alexandra aside as if she were an insect. Kieran ripped the rifle from Arnoux’s grip and tossed it into the brush.