Her hand flexed in his and he released it, but she twisted her fingers to keep the contact.
“I’m sorry, Kieran,” she whispered. “I didn’t realize then. The wolves—they’d been with you when you were Shadow. I guessed they were your parents. But when you were a boy, I didn’t know you. I think you tried even then to explain that you were Shadow.” Her throat worked. “We heard shots, and found the wolves killed by a poacher. You grieved terribly for them, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t know.”
Her hand in his was all that grounded him. “I don’t remember them. I don’t remember.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “When my parents came to take me home, you’d run away. The next summer I couldn’t find you, not Kieran or Shadow—”
“They were wolves.” He focused on Alexandra, fight ing past one realization to the next. “You called them my parents.”
“I never saw them any other way,” she said slowly. “But they weren’t like any wolves I’ve ever seen. I think they must have been… like you.”
Like him. He groped for some sense of rightness, some image of belonging, of not being alone. But something else lay waiting for him, releasing a flood of poison into his body. Disgust. Loathing. Contempt.
“Beasts,” he said, echoing the Voice. “Animals.”
Alexandra dropped his hand. He backed away from her, baring his teeth.
“What am I?” he demanded. “What am I?”
But he heard the reply in his mind. You know, boy. You are a thing that should never have existed, an affront to nature. You are a monster…
“Monster,” he repeated. It was suddenly dark again; all around him, damp and cold and smelling of things that grow in the absence of light. A place called hell, where the punishment came. “I am… a monster.”
The Voice approved. The beast has corrupted you. You must fight it.
The beast. The wolf was still there—Shadow, a black demon who snarled and lunged at the Voice, defying what tried to destroy it.
You must deny it, boy. It is not too late… Kieran hit the wall hard enough to shake him out of the darkness. He pressed himself there to keep from falling.
“Kieran!” Alexandra said. “What are you saying?”
He thought she must know, that she could hear the Voice that labeled him for what he was. Her eyes were wide and wary; he could smell her unease, sense the quickening of her heartbeat. Wolf instincts that would not be driven out.
Now he recognized why she had reason to fear him. A creature neither man nor beast. A creature never meant to exist, bereft of memory.
Alone.
“Where did you hear that?” Only a slight catch revealed the fear she tried so hard to disguise. She came closer, holding his gaze. “Who told you—what you are?”
Again and again he was driven to the same replies. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” But the Voice was real. Some part of his past, cloaked in shadow.
Alexandra extended her hand and let it fall before her fingers brushed his arm. “Do you know the word werewolf?” she asked.
Kieran shuddered. He knew the word, though it had became familiar again only as she spoke it.
“Yes. A man who… changes into an animal.”
“How do you change? How do you make it happen?”
He tried to answer her questions. He tried to remember how he had done it, change from wolf to man and back again. But all he could see in his mind was a dark fog; all he could feel was nausea and emotions too snarled to unravel.
“Could you do it now?” she asked.
Kieran shook his head sharply. “No. No.” But when he forced himself to calm again and thought of changing, he could see no way to do it. It wasn’t only that he must not—he could not.
He met Alexandra’s gaze. “I can’t make it happen,” he admitted.
She frowned, though not with anger or disgust. “You certainly didn’t need a full moon,” she muttered, turning away to stare at the row of shelves against one wall. Shelves—with books. Memory came to Kieran, the sudden image of a book in his hand, smelling old and mildewed and infinitely precious. Only a single beam of light to read by, a beam of light on which he rode to freedom.